Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

— He fell.

And with that the monster with the keys, he pushes Tzim out of the room. The doctor and I only alone.

Tzuli too has red hair. Tzuli too has blue eyes. Before I making her eyes black, before I am killing her.

Slowly, slowly the doctor fixes me up. He is taking my nose and pushing. There is a pain, it is burning in fire but I am not even one breath leaving to escape. I do not move at all.

— You really need a hospital.

That makes me laughing. I am eleven years old when I first coming to Athens and having my nose breaking in a boxing match. There is no hospital for me then and there is no hospital now. Hospitals not belonging to us.

To forget pain I looking up at the icon of the Queen on the wall behind the doctor. She is not beautiful but she is young and she looks like one of them but not with that ugly savage stare. It is this forsaken land that making them beasts. It will make us all beasts. Her skin is white, I’d like to touch her skin, to put my hands on her tits, to make her cunt lick my fingers.

The doctor is noticing my staring at the Queen. Not for him, he doesn’t like her. He talks of my homeland, he starts to say big words I can’t understand, I hear democracy, I think I hear fascism. I think. I don’t know, they are big words and I have no appetite to answer him even if I did understand him. Why is he asking me questions? What does he want from me?

Tzuli too asked me questions. All the time, asking me questions. About the wars, about Greece, about politics. Tzuli is a student and wanting to know everything. In the end, she betray me.

Best not to say a word to no one, that’s the first and best lesson I taking from Greece. Best to not say one damned word.

Tzuli wanting to know everything. And in the end, in court, she tells them everything. How many times I am hitting her, how many times I am kicking her, she tells them everything. She is tasty and she is sweet, she is beautiful and she is good. But in the end she is a betrayer.

I pretending I am mute and I am dumb. I pretending I don’t know one fucking thing about politics.

I can see, that young, sweet doctor, he is not happy in me. What the devil does he want from me?

He is not happy in all of us Greeks in here. There are four of us, we all pretending we are hicks from the mountains. The devils with the keys and the demons with who we share our cages, they don’t want us together. Speak English, you reffo cunt! They don’t want us together and we don’t want to be together. We reminding each of us of what each of us is losing.

None of us answering the doctor’s questions.

Two years and three months. I will go to the desert. Black I will become.

He bandaging me up.

I makes my way to the yard. In the far corner, where there is some soil and garden, there is the old man with his roses, colours I have before never seen. I like the old man, he is timid and he is gentle, he is sweet and he is soft. I have never heard him blaspheme. I go to help planting some more flowers. A thorn pricks my skin and I damn the rose and the garden and the prison and the world. He laughs but then quickly stopping, he looking away. I see that there is fear in his glance.

He doesn’t stare as the beasts do, he stares as the frightened do.

He jumps children, that is his sickness and his fate, that is why they have imprisoned him. All of them hate him, those animals despise him. The murderers and the rapists, the thieves and the forgers, the drunks and the drugged, the dogs with the keys, all of them hit him and bash him and spit him and curse him and rape him, and again and again they bring him just to reaching Death. They make him look at Death, then bring him back. Again and again. That is his life. The beasts say of him, He is the worst, the most ugly and vile thing in here, that there is nothing worse.

I don’t believe it. He is gentle and he is upright. I think those little girls are fortunate to being broken in by a good man, it is no problem if I is a boy fucking a gentleman like him. He is tender and rare is tender. That is why the wild men with those venom stares can’t stand him. It is the tender they hate. They don’t have it, their fathers never have it, not their grandfathers or their grandfathers before them.

Pink and yellow like the sun; white as Tzuli’s skin. There are blue roses here and purple and gold and red. I like working in the soil and the mud and the ground and the dirt with the old man. Silent, our hands and knees graze the flowers and the musk of the petals flies all around us. Everywhere else here stinks foul; here, in this small patch, there is perfume.

— I heard you had an accident, Luigi.

It is Stiv, Stiv and his arsebuddies. A gang of wild beastly glares. I don’t pay him attention. He is pissed off.

With one hand he grabs the flowers, the thorns cut his skin, but he not caring. He tears them from the earth.

One small bit of land, one bit of good in this hell. Even that is too much for him. He is not from family or society, he does not know of welcoming or duty. He is an animal in the wild, he is savage.

Stiv rips apart the flowers. His arsefriends take hold of the old man from behind and Stiv opens the poor old fool’s mouth, the old fool who doesn’t cry out, doesn’t say no, doesn’t say a word, the old fool who suffers this every day, and Stiv fills the old man’s mouth with flowers, with the petals, with the thorns, with the stems and with the dirt. They are laughing. Blood on the lips of the old man, blood like tears running from his mouth.

Stiv to me turns next. He is pulling out the remaining flowers. He is not laughing.

Where are the greens of the meadow, the water from the well?

I wish to sing, to sing so loud that the mountains fall. But there are no mountains here. I cannot find my voice. And it is the old man stopping me. His eyes pleading for me to not do a thing, not say a thing, not make movement. His eyes are terror and helpless and understand all together. The old man is stopping me.

Stiv throws the flowers in my face. With laughing, as always with the most vile of words— dago and reffo and wog and poofter and cunt and fuck and shit and piss —Stiv and his arsebuddies are not here.

Tzim’s cloth is still in my pocket. I clean up the old man, I pull out thorns from his lips and his tongue, pull one from the back of his throat. What a worthless race black Fate has sent me to dwell with. Whatever the old man is doing before, his body now is frail and it is dying. How can they do this to old men? There is nothing of knowledge or respect here, I say into my own mouth, just poofterism, alcohol and violence.

— Spit, I tell him. And he spits in Tzim’s handkerchief.

•

The nights inside here sicken me. The minutes pass like hours and the hours are infernal and eternal. We playing cards, we listening to wireless, but most of all they are evil cursing. The black bastards too, they curse. The Yugoslavs too, that spat-upon and lost race, they are shouting and blaspheming. We Greeks and the Calabrians, we letting out vileness only under our breath. Otherwise, Shut your mouth, you bloody dumb dago . It is the race of the savage glare that create the din of hell. Every second word a foulness, every other a blasphemy.

The old man alone he sits, always alone. If I having real balls I should be sitting with him but it is not worth it. They will give it to me day and night and night and day. He is scratching at his lip, taking off the skin where the thorns is been biting him. The little skins float into his lap like dying petals.

Stiv Gharin gets up from the table of card players and asks the filth with the keys he wants to go to the toilet.