Sophia Nikolaidou - The Scapegoat

I know what’s wrong. In two months she’ll be eighteen. You can’t be eighteen years old and always do everything right. It can’t last. Grandma says it, too, but Mom gets mad and shuts her up with a look. She thinks it won’t occur to me on my own if I don’t hear it from Grandma.

Souk was on recess duty. He’d heard what happened, but he didn’t run over to offer consolation, or to see Evelina’s puffy eyes from up close. It might have bothered her that he didn’t, but I respect it. Souk doesn’t turn other people’s lives into theater. He talked to her in class, but only to quiz her on something. World War II might not be the best way of making conversation, but Souk doesn’t know how to talk to you when things get personal. He never shows you he cares, doesn’t waste his breath on sweet talk, never reaches out a hand.

Grandma calls it the Socratic method . She considers it the highest pedagogical technique . I call it cornering a person. Instead of just telling you what I want you to know, I ambush you with questions. You try to escape, but you can’t. You can run whichever way you like, but in the end you’ll fall right into my trap.

Souk tried to make the most of the opportunity, though. He talked about conditioned mass behavior , about demagoguery and emotional manipulation , though of course not on a personal level, always in reference to the historical subject matter we were dealing with. And there was more: the cost of choices, on a political and national level , and the upholding — and betrayal — of responsibilities. He who has ears, let him hear .

Souk knows everything about World War II. And he looks at the world through that lens. It’s what Dad calls intellectual autism and Grandma calls embedded knowledge .

Evelina doesn’t care about any of that. All she wants is to get the exams over with. If she could she would take all the subjects in a single day. A soul that’s ready to leave should leave . Grandma says it, too, and she’s usually right.

It’s exactly how I feel about my presentation. Souk reminded me that next week is the last week of the quarter. He handed me a slip of paper with the date and time of my talk. He’s going to put an announcement up on the door of the teachers’ office, too. If I want to invite someone, I should do that now.

In other words, my days are numbered.

If I talk for more than twenty minutes, he’ll cut me off. I have to leave time for questions. Don’t mince words , he advised. And if I want to use PowerPoint, I have to take care of the technical side of things myself. Souk isn’t good with computers. He sometimes uses one of the school laptops in class, but he’s as helpless as Mom. He goes to Athens by way of Tokyo. Speed and adaptability aren’t his forte.

The greatest wisdom is in simplicity , as Grandma says.

Twenty minutes. I don’t know what to say and what to leave out. Souk told me to turn in a typed version, too, with a cover page and list of references, and a blank page for him to write his comments. I asked for last-minute instructions, but he mocked my request.

— That’s the danger with freedom: it’s an abyss. Will you fall in? It’ll depend on you, Georgiou.

Mom and Dad both threatened to show up for my presentation. Grandma was the first to invite herself. She wouldn’t go to visit Dinopoulos at his house, but said she would see him there. The old man listened with his eyes closed as I relayed her message, then let out a little laugh. I’m pretty sure he’s not going to die before he at least talks to Grandma again.

It’s hard to believe, but they’ve got lives, too. Our parents, and our parents’ parents. A biology teacher once said that, one of those low-on-the-totem-pole teachers who get transferred to our school at the last minute, right before classes start. The older teachers treat them pretty badly, and none of them ever sticks around for a second year. Anyhow, the biology teacher was annoyed at us over something, and said:

— You know, your parents have lives. They’re not just parents, they’re a couple, too.

Evelina laughed. The biology teacher had no wedding ring. We used to run into her at bars sometimes. Her hair was always mussed, and she came to school on a bicycle. In the schoolyard it was easy to mistake her for a student. So who was she to talk?

But what she said got me thinking: if my parents are a couple, when precisely do they do it? There are no locked drawers full of condoms at our house. Though they do have a roll of toilet paper hidden under their bed. That might constitute evidence , as Grandma would say.

Evelina said she would take care of my handout.

— You’re already wasting your time on this presentation, so you might as well do the job right, she snipped.

She spent a whole twenty minutes making copies on beige paper she picked out herself, without consulting me, of course. For an exam-obsessed senior with her ambitions, it’s a lot, actually.

Evelina doesn’t need to think, she decides. She knows what she wants and works like a dog to achieve it: a law degree, her name on her grandfather’s office. She’s got a ten-year plan.

She doesn’t get it.

She’s trying to plan her life. Which she’ll live once everything is in order. When she’ll have free time.

She just doesn’t get it.

Life doesn’t sign contracts. It doesn’t make treaties. You’ll never get back the blood you spit. And you can’t store it up in some piggy-bank, either.

What you end up with is a big fat nothing.

Zero, zip, zilch.

As for me, the dribbling, the passes, the excuses, the procrastination, it’s all over. It’s time for me to face the music.

THROUGH OTHER EYES

The news wasn’t good.

— The worst is yet to come, Evthalia prophesied when Teta told her what had been going on. Things at the newspaper had been bad for months. Tasos was having insomnia, his acid reflux had flared up, and his palpitations, and the shouting in the shower. No matter how you looked at it, the situation was fucked.

There was no way he could avoid firing people, it was now clear. As for voluntary redundancy, which once struck him as a professional indecency and an insult to his co-workers, it now seemed like a dream solution, no longer an option.

When Teta pressed him to tell her what was happening, he lashed out.

— What do you want to hear from me, Teta? Don’t you get it? It’s like we’ve got the dead man’s coffin sitting there in the living room. It’s like that every day at work. It’s too much.

And it was. Georgiou had gotten used to winning the war, to calling the shots, to being flexible, when circumstances required. But now his hands were tied behind his back.

— You should resign, his mentor bellowed over the phone. An old-school reporter from the Pleistocene age, he had supported Georgiou more than a few times when the going got tough. Editors-in-chief are chosen for how they’ll respond in a crisis, he continued. They should know how to run a paper, and they should know how to step down, too.

Georgiou hung up the phone in a poisonous mood.

— When you have a child, you’re willing to swallow your pride, Teta murmured. We don’t have the luxury of abandoning good jobs when the world around us is burning.

Tasos wanted to shout that it would be easier for him to support his staffers if Teta had some job of her own that brought in a steady wage. He knew it wasn’t fair, the two of them had made that decision together, having a family means being present, a child doesn’t just grow on its own, like a cactus. At the time it had seemed like a logical decision, one that supported him in his career and soothed his guilty feelings. Now it felt like a noose around his neck, at a time when the foundations of his world were being shaken.