The Scapegoat (4 page)

—All the other schools are having sit-ins, Evelina had told the principal in her usual blasé tone a few days prior to the faculty meeting. They’re all making fun of us, she said.

—Calling you wusses, huh? the principal asked, trying to show off his knowledge of student slang.

—Something like that, Evelina muttered. How could she possibly repeat the long list of obscenities that students from nearby schools were showering on them? New compound words, neologisms, unspeakably imaginative inventions accompanied by gestures, bumping and grinding, moaning and the sounds of sudden ejaculation. The principal was totally out of touch if he thought
wuss
was the worst the inner-city crowd could think up.

—At any rate, Evelina said, we thought we could organize a one-day event.

—Or maybe two days, said Minas, who was also there, shoving her in the ribs.

—Or two days, Evelina said, without much enthusiasm.

—That way, we’ll miss two days of classes, but with your permission, Minas added with utter sincerity, having decided to show his cards in hopes of getting this tedious conversation over with as soon as possible. The students will be happy to have achieved their main goal, the parents will be happy because a two-day event about the crisis sounds more educational than a sit-in. And we’ll all be glad the school won’t suffer any damage, he
said, wrapping up his speech in complete satisfaction with how it had gone.

What Minas didn’t realize (perhaps because he was a boy at the height of a raging adolescence), though Evelina did (perhaps because she was a girl with experience as the class attendance-taker), was that complete sincerity isn’t always a rhetorical advantage, but on the contrary can be a political disadvantage—political in the wider sense of the word, Evelina would hasten to clarify. And while Evelina, as student council president, had been certain the principal’s assent would be enough, they were now told they’d need to present their proposal before the entire faculty and put it to a vote.

Outside the office Evelina swore up and down, furious that she’d have to miss her cram school classes that Wednesday. Minas joked that they’d been issued a rare invitation from the administration to see the teachers in their natural habitat, fighting at a faculty meeting. He leaned over and whispered in her ear, laughed, then pursed his lips and blew a playful puff of air at her bangs. Evelina smoothed her hair with her fingers, annoyed. It had taken her half an hour to straighten it that morning. She started to say something, but decided against it. No matter what she said, she would still miss the explanation of the supine at her cram school. Nothing could make up for those lost hours of study.

Minas was watching an inchworm dance. As small as his fingernail, a sort of dirty color, with an agile tail that turned this way and that like a periscope. It was doing an acrobatics routine on a leaf, dangling from the green edge and bouncing as if on a trampoline. It looked like it was having fun.

—Well? What did the principal say? a first-year named Spiros came over and asked Minas. He was one of those kids who wander around during recess, desperate for someone to talk to.

—We’ll see, Minas said, letting the ambiguity hang in the air and turning back to his inchworm.

Spiros, a bony runt in glasses who never knew where to put his hands, didn’t budge. Better to be seen with Minas than alone.

That year Spiros had dared to sign up for the student council elections, he’d even drafted a list of proposals and passed out copies during assembly. Minas vaguely recalled something about a robotics workshop and a film club. He’d heard how the girls had giggled. But Spiros, unfazed, climbed up onto the stage where everyone could see him.

—I know I’m not much to look at, he began. I even have a limp, he added, pointing at one of his feet. Then, without any warning, he pulled up that leg of his sweat pants. It was all metal up to the knee.

—He’s a fool, Evelina remarked. But Minas clapped.

From that day on, whenever Spiros caught sight of Minas in the schoolyard, he came over and stuck to him like a burr. Evelina wouldn’t let it rest.
I saw you with your best friend again
, she’d tease, but Minas paid no attention.

—Well? the kid said, trying to play it cool. What do you think of our teachers?

—They’re a life form, too, Minas answered, then turned back to his inchworm.

CHRIST TAUGHT AND DIED
WHAT ARE OUR TEACHERS WAITING FOR?

The slogan appeared sometime on Tuesday night, on the eve of the faculty meeting, according to information the administration gleaned from the inhabitants of neighboring buildings. The man who lived directly across the street called at eight the next morning. For years he’d kindly painted over the graffiti on the outer walls of the school. He didn’t want to be paid, the principal could
barely make him take money to cover the cost of the paint. But recently he’d seemed less eager to help, and at some point he let it slip that he’d been receiving threatening phone calls. The poor man was terrified. He’d just wanted to help out, he wasn’t looking to get mixed up in anything. It proved impossible for them to soothe his fears, and soon enough the outer walls were once again thick with scrawls.

The school board briefly considered the proposal of a parent who was a psychiatrist at an asylum in Stavroupoli and offered to bring a few of the inmates,
non-violent ones, of course
, to return the façade to some semblance of propriety. It sounded feasible, and would have been a cost-effective solution. But what principal wants to tell parents that their children’s school is going to be painted by a bunch of certified lunatics?

And so the slogans blossomed all over the building. The gutters were never cleaned, rainwater ran down the walls, the plaster flaked. And the crazies stayed locked up in their asylum. The only one who’d seen them was Minas, whose father was a journalist and often got him into places that were off-limits for other kids his age. Tasos Georgiou, usually incorruptible almost to a fault, thought it perfectly reasonable to pull whatever strings were necessary to gain his curious son access to such places—so long as Teta never found out. Minas’s father firmly believed that these experiences gave his son an important, if atypical, social education. And when Minas brought up the idea of visiting the Stavroupoli psychiatric hospital, Tasos approved.

So Minas went, and sat in the amphitheater and watched as a group of psychiatrists examined the patients. It seemed to him that each of the patients before them was living inside his own fully formed personal reality, which no one could shake. And not just the patients: the young doctor over to the right had studied in Paris and was wearing the white coat of an expert, but he didn’t seem much better off than the guy they were examining.

Logic, Minas decided as he watched the proceedings, was a
poor tool in the hands of these obstinate people called doctors. Most of them made up their minds first, then looked for evidence. And yet they called that common sense.

As he was leaving he noticed a female inmate in the yard. A nurse was sitting on the next bench over, and never once let the woman out of his sight.
Who knows
, Minas thought,
that woman there might have killed someone
. They hadn’t told him that the violent ones were kept in the basement. They locked them up, drugged them, and never let them out.

Minas’s father was well-respected in his field.
An old-school reporter
, said everyone who worked with him. He was a deeply educated man who impressed them not with the superficial knowledge so many others had but with his steady, purposeful way of thinking, which showed he had devoted years to study. He knew how to guide the younger reporters, he gave clear instructions and sifted through their pitches carefully, choosing only the best.
A good guy, and honest
, is the first thing people said about Tasos Georgiou. At the meetings of the journalists’ union people shut up and listened when he spoke. His opinion counted with friends and enemies alike. He had climbed the ladder to an important administrative position, but he never moved up the hill to Panorama, the suburb where the rich Thessalonians lived. When the publisher who promoted him suggested upgrading his car, since there was no need for the editor-in-chief of a major daily paper to be driving around in an old Citroën, Georgiou spat fire. The publisher didn’t even get to finish her sentence. She’d been planning on offering him a very respectable Saab—this had been just a few years ago, yet in a different era, when money flowed freely—but she didn’t dare continue. The Citroën remained his trademark.

Georgiou was scrupulously fair. And his friends paid the price for it, since he tried to avoid anything that could be interpreted as favoritism. He made sure everyone knew that the paper wasn’t
his personal fiefdom. A man of the street, he knew exactly who to call for the real story.
Just play the fool
, was his advice to the ambitious young staffers who worked under him, and who worshipped the ground he walked on. Playing the fool meant listening to everyone and keeping your mouth shut.
A reporter doesn’t talk
, he counseled them,
that’s for the TV anchors who look nice on the screen but don’t know a thing about actual journalism
.

News was his drug. He could sniff it out like a dog, from a distance. Even in recent years when he’d held senior staff positions, he never stopped reporting. The phone calls started first thing in the morning. His cell phone was always ringing, and he always picked up, because
you just never know
. A newspaper man to the core, he loved the smell of fresh ink, the feel of the paper. He never read the newspapers his wife would flip through at home, because she messed up sections and got the pages out of order. He teased her about it, but he was half serious, too.

But while he seemed affable and approachable when you first met him—
a good kid
, as his mother-in-law would say, and she knew him inside and out—he also didn’t hesitate to show his strength when circumstances called for it. And circumstances mainly called for it during staff meetings at the paper.
The staffers need to know that a steady hand is in charge
, was his motto. He barked at the editors. One well-respected staff writer was even seen crying in the bathroom after an important meeting. Everyone in the business agreed that Georgiou did his job, and did it well.

He had a say in every aspect of the paper, from the front page to the captions. Nothing escaped him, he picked the paper apart, right down to the horoscopes, which he held to the same standard as everything else. If you made some disparaging remark about their insignificance, he would cut you off in mid-phrase. Taken together, these things garnered his subordinates’ respect. He was always there in difficult times, his hand on the rudder; he never left anyone unprotected. He knew who actually
worked and who just sat around scratching his balls. When he gave praise, he did so out loud and in public. If necessary, he made the careless feel like garbage, but always in the privacy of his office.

For years Tasos Georgiou had worked himself to the bone. He got home late, left early. He thought he’d found a way of balancing everything. Then came Minas’s first year of preschool, when Tasos came home one night to find Teta waiting up for him on the sofa. They opened a bottle of wine and Teta announced:

—This morning when I was walking Minas to preschool, he asked me,
Mom, did Dad die?
He wanted to know if you were still alive. He hasn’t seen you in five days.

She set her glass on the table, still untouched.

—You’ve got some choices to make, she warned.

From that day on, Georgiou made a point of spending each Saturday with Minas. He took him to the zoo, to museums, to parks. The three of them would eat together off the good china in the dining room, with a tablecloth. Pork roast, rice molded into little mounds, sautéed carrots, roasted potatoes. The world could start turning backwards, but he still wouldn’t work on a Saturday. He’d promised not to and he kept his word.

He watched as his child grew. A photograph of a gap-toothed Minas on the fridge, dressed as a snowman for the Christmas pageant when he was in first grade. The valentine his mother found in his book bag, written by a classmate, with the question,
Minas, will you marry me?
and a heart with an arrow through it. His report cards, all columns of perfect twenties. DVDs from family vacations. His first concert. All these things he’d accomplished.

Tasos didn’t make a big deal of it, but he believed his son was special. Tall, healthy, handsome. A fresh mind, with secret fixations and unexpected flights of fancy. Minas didn’t have many friends, and often spent whole days and nights in his room. But
that had ceased to worry his father, who now had more important things on his mind. Teta had broken the news: Minas wouldn’t be going to university. He wasn’t interested in continuing his studies. Who would believe it if they heard? Cutting off his nose to spite his parents, is what he’d say if Minas were someone else’s child. But Tasos knew how rough the whole thing was on Teta. Pretty soon she was going to have to admit her son’s failure—and thus her failure, too—to all the other kids’ mothers, whom she hated running into anyway.

The worst part was that they had run out of arguments. You won’t find a job, these days a university degree is what a high school diploma used to be. You’ll be uncultivated, like a raw, unfinished slab of wood. We’ll sell the apartment and you can go to university abroad, wherever you want. Crisis or no crisis, we’ll manage.
How on earth will we manage
, Teta secretly fretted. She watched the news and couldn’t sleep for worry, twenty years of hard work and all they had to show for it was 80,000 euros in the bank. Even if Minas were to agree, that kind of money just wasn’t enough to send their son to school abroad.

At some point the stress got to be too much. She withdrew all the money from the Bank of Greece, flew to Cyprus and deposited it there. The low interest rate stung.
You didn’t bring it here for the interest
, the bank manager shot back. Teta grabbed the bank book and turned on her heel, cutting short all pretense and niceties. When she got back to Athens, she told Minas the money for his studies was safe.