Christos Ikonomou - Something Will Happen, You'll See

Sir, said the girl. Would you put the crown on our Jesus’s head?

She had come over to him and was standing there staring at him. Eleven or twelve years old. Big eyes, thick lips, blond fuzz on her cheeks. He reached out a hand to touch the fuzz on the girl’s cheeks and the girl looked at his hand and grabbed his thumb and wrapped her hand around it.

It’s too high we can’t reach.

The crown was sitting on a table. He thought it was a crown of flowers but it wasn’t. It was made out of some plant with thorns and in the shadowy light of the chandelier and the candles the crown looked like the skeleton of some strange soiled creature that had died on that table years ago.

He pulled a chair over in front of the cross and picked up the prickly crown as carefully as he could and climbed up on the chair and raised his hands to pass the crown over the top of the cross. The women and the girl were watching him. He turned around and looked at them and smiled.

What would you have done without me, he said. I hope you’ll give me something for my trouble, he said and laughed.

The crown was small and he had to push to get it down over the cross and he could feel the thorns pressing into his palms but it didn’t hurt. He looked into the face of Christ which was at the same height as his. Peaceful. Calm. Resigned.

Sure, he said. Since you know you’ll be resurrected. Death isn’t real, he said. Nothing is real. It’s all just a show.

Evil’s first victory is when it starts speaking your language, he said — and that scared him because he knew he wasn’t capable of thinking or saying a thought like that. He looked at the crucified Christ, looked all around. Who had spoken. Who.

He stumbled on the chair and nearly fell. A woman screamed. He looked down at his hands. They were dotted with small perfectly round balls of blood. As if his hands were two shattered thermometers, thermometers that took the temperature not with mercury but with blood.

He turned and showed his hands to the women.

Look, he said. Look what happened. Now you definitely have to give me something for my trouble.

The women dropped their flowers and scissors and ran for the door. One grabbed her purse which was hanging on the back of a chair and hugged it to her chest as if it were an infant. Another grabbed the girl by the arm and ushered her out the door. They all left without looking back.

Don’t go, he shouted. Wait. Don’t.

He stepped forward into the air and fell to the floor and heard something snap and lay there motionless.

Wait.

Outside the wind was dying down and the clouds were motionless in the sky.

It was early on Good Friday morning.

The kid must have fallen asleep still hungry at the kitchen table.

A lump had caught in the throat of the day.

Any moment now it would start to rain.

AT DAWN the sky was full of tiny scattered clouds as if there had been some awful explosion up there. Yiannis Englezos looked at himself in the mirror splashed cold water on his face combed his fingers through his hair looked in the mirror again and pinched his cheeks to give them some color. He hadn’t slept in four days for four whole days he hadn’t closed an eye, and now in the darkness of the day and the frigid air of his apartment he felt something inside him getting very small, shrinking and drying up and turning black like a peppercorn.

He was a grocery stocker at the Galaxy Supermarket on Kaisareia Street, the first to open in Nikaia.

Liar, he told the mirror. Cowardly liar.

It was the second-to-last thing he would say that day.

• • •

In the kitchen he put on some coffee and looked out the window. It was the Monday after Easter. Christ had risen twice but outside nothing had changed. Darkness and cold, it looked like it might rain, more like Good Friday than Easter Monday.

He went back into the living room and took up the task he’d left half finished. He pulled sixteen A4-sized cardboard dividers out of some folders and glued them together into pairs, which he spread out on the threadbare carpet to form a rectangle that measured 84 by 59.4 centimeters. He taped the eight double pieces together, turned the whole thing over and taped them again, then grabbed the red broomstick and wiped it down with a cloth, slowly and carefully, like a veteran hunter sitting beside the fireplace late one winter night, cleaning his gun and gazing into the flickering flames and wondering how so many years had passed without him noticing and how he himself had become not hunter but prey.

When he finished with that, he squeezed a long line of glue onto the cardboard then pressed the broomstick into the glue and counted to seventy. He cut four lengths of red string, twenty centimeters each, made eight holes in the cardboard, to the left and right of the broomstick, passed the string through the holes and tied it around the broomstick to strengthen the whole contraption. He looked at his makeshift placard and lit a cigarette. He smoked it down to the filter and each time he inhaled he could feel the smoke chafing his throat — he must have smoked an entire carton over the past four days. He waited a little while then held the stick up high and waved it around to see if the cardboard would hold. It was shoddy work. But with things as they were it was the best he could do. With things as they were he couldn’t wait.

He lit another cigarette and lay down on the carpet with his knees bent in the air. He heard the churchbells start to ring and thought how crazy it was to eat the body of Christ and drink the blood of Christ and as he smoked he looked out at the day that refused to be anything but black that refused to sweeten even a drop.

• • •

On the Thursday before Easter Petros Frangos, his best and only friend, had been killed at a building site on Papadiamantis Street, a stone’s throw from the old cemetery in Nikaia. He was electrocuted. He wasn’t actually killed there because he didn’t die right away. He died two days later, on Good Saturday, in the intensive care unit of a state-run hospital. He was an experienced steelworker, knew his trade, one of the last Greeks in that line of work. And on that day, Good Thursday, the contractor had pressured Petros to stay late and work into the evening — what with Easter and all the state holidays they were falling behind on the job. Petros said fine but it wasn’t fine. He was in a hurry to finish up because that evening they were supposed to leave for Yiannis’s village. They were going to spend Easter together up in the mountains of Epirus. You’re going to take me with you this time, he’d told Yiannis. There’s no way I’m staying down here for another Easter. I want to try it out, he’d said, to see what it’s like because I can’t stay here much longer, man. Things here are getting rough, everyone’s losing it, these days people scare me. You tell me the only thing that makes life worth living is giving yourself to others. But what happens if no one wants to take? What if you don’t find anyone to give yourself to? I’m telling you, the future is in the mountains — that’s the kind of crazy stuff he’d been saying to Yiannis.

Give us the mountains, he said, even if we have to eat stones.

Like what Kolokotronis said during the revolution. Give us Greece even if we have to eat stones.

And then as he was carrying steel reinforcing bars that night one of them brushed up against a high-voltage wire and twenty-four thousand volts shot through Petros and shook his body and tossed him down on the dusty cement as if he were already dead or something that was never alive to begin with.

Not even water, he’d told Yiannis. In two years we won’t even have water to drink. They said it on the news. That’s why I keep telling you, we have to head for the mountains. I can’t stand it here any longer. I’m sick of always being caught unawares. In this city every new day and every new person is another kick in the teeth.