Good Will Come From the Sea

by Christos Ikonomou

  Now I remember, I was going to tell you about the Germans.

  On Clean Monday a couple of our guys took their families down to the harbor to eat at Marika’s place. A bunch of Germans are sitting at the next table over, and at some point one of them gets up, piss drunk, and starts snapping pictures. What’s up, chief, our guys say, what’s there to take pictures of? You’ve never seen people eating before? So that douchebag of a German turns to them and you know what he says? I’m taking pictures of you, he says, because over at our table we ordered two salads and a couple of beers for all of us, and you guys are eating like the world is ending, and you’re eating with our money. You can guess how the rest of the story goes. Our crew had all had a little too much to drink, so they grabbed the German and the rest of his group and practically left them for dead. If the cops hadn’t shown up in droves, they’d still be at it. You’ve never seen anything like it. And those asswipe cops arrested our guys, wanted to lock them up. So all of us Athenians head down to the station and tell the chief of police, you’d better watch what you do, or we’ll tear down these walls and you can use this place as a beach bar instead of a jail. In the end they let them go, but those asshole rats got everyone all riled up again, saying we’re ruining the island’s reputation and sending the tourists away. See what I mean? Instead of doing something about those fuckers who come here and chase us around all day with cameras like we’re Mao Mao in the jungle, those bastards just join in the chase.

  Slaves to the system, that’s what they are. Cowards.

  Foreigners.

  That’s what they call us.

  Foreigners.

  Foreigners, outsiders, refubees. Not refugees, refubees – their little joke down here on the island, like the ones who came in swarms from Asia Minor back in ’22.

  There’s one good thing about all of you descending on us, an old-timer rat once said to Tasos. Thanks to you, we remembered words we’d gone and forgotten.

  They call us foreigners. They call us Athenians, too. Even those of us from Piraeus. Not to mention everyone from Larissa and Thessaloniki and Patras – it doesn’t matter where you’re from, to them we’re all Athenians. And the whole neighborhood from the church of Saint Marina down to the Pits, they call it Little Athens. It doesn’t matter where we’re actually from, to them we’re all Athenians. Athenians, refubees, foreigners.

  Foreigners.

  Us, foreigners.

  OK, I know, I got carried away again. But it just gums up the works, throws your mind for a loop, like a gear off its track.

  * * *

  It was the kind of day you think doesn’t even exist anymore. I don’t know what kind of Easter you guys had up there, but here it was one of those days you think you’ll never see again, as if they carted them off along with everything else. You stare at the blue of the sky and feel like crying because you were born with arms instead of wings. Or imagine being able to push a button and explode into a thousand pieces, tiny slivers, and the bits could float off in all directions, up to the peak of Mount War and far out to sea, scattering for whole kilometers, over lakes and streams, orchards, olive groves and vineyards and outcroppings of rock, grazing grounds and forests and slopes covered with scree, over plains, bridges, mills, chapels and monasteries, over lighthouses, harbors, fishing boats, boatyards, over bushes and trees, junipers, myrtles, pine trees, carob trees, oaks, spruce, plane trees, cedars, fir trees, willow trees, beech trees, walnuts and chestnuts – to explode into a thousand pieces, to float off in all directions, because trapped in your tiny body, how could you ever really feel the world? That’s the kind of day Easter was here. Even the women calmed down as we climbed up to the Refuge. Twice they wanted to stop and pick flowers and I remember watching them run with the children at the side of the road, laughing and shouting, how their faces shone in the sunlight, how the breeze rustled their hair, how they pulled their skirts up above their knees so they wouldn’t get caught on the underbrush, how they straightened the bra straps on their shoulders, how they hugged the children in their arms, how they decorated the girls’ hair with daisies and poppies as red as blood, how they looked at us with eyes the color of soil after a rain – I remember us watching and saying that women are the gears that make the Earth turn, and then we said how scary it all was, how scary to struggle to build a life for yourself all over again from the beginning, trying to banish the greatest of all fears, which isn’t the fear of death but the fear of life, the fear of living, the fear of living a life in fear, the fear of life that makes us die a little bit every day.

  There was a whole caravan of us, forty or so, including the women and children. We and Tasos made seven, then another seven or so with Balsamos and Tremo, Psis and Chryssa, Minas and Yota and the twins. Salamander was there with his daughter Kassia, he still hadn’t lost his hair at that point, and Lazaros whose son disappeared after Tasos, and Harmless’s widow who has that screwy son in the wheelchair. Rita came, too, the one who opened a pet shop in town last year, and this year built a cemetery for dogs and cats up in Drakiana where all the weirdos go to bury their Irma or Psipsina or Goofy and put photographs on the graves and oil lamps and crosses and even erect headstones, I love you, Ruby, I miss you, sweetheart, Daddy and Mommy will remember you forever – they even bury ducks and turtles and rabbits up there, and Rita gets mad when we tell her she should build a cemetery just for rats, you’ll rake it in hand over fist, we say, there are people who can’t afford to bury their mothers and fathers and those assholes go and put up marble graves for their cats and guard dogs, fuck their stinking rat town, fuck the whole place. Elvis came, and Midis, the one they call TNT because he blew off his right hand with dynamite, and Stathis the security guard at the asylum, and that blow job Elina with her man – we weren’t sure he’d fit in the cave what with all those horns sprouting from his head. The Kombos brothers came, Tomis and that guy Zack, the cripple, and crazy Charonis, who runs a water taxi and in the summer takes tourists out for moonlit rides on his boat, the Archangel Michael, and sings them bits of the Erotokritos with his lute, and tells them stories in three languages about goblins and dragons and nymphs – it’s a regular startup, you wouldn’t believe how inventive we foreigners are in opening businesses, trying to make ends meet, I mean, just imagine, an oar, a lute, and dearest Aretousa, have you heard the unhappy tidings? At the very last minute, we convinced old Gougouis to come, a guy in his seventies whose grandkids kicked him out of the house this winter so they could turn it into a bed and breakfast, and Popeye, too, who was stuck under the ruins for two days after the big earthquake on Parnitha and the terror of that time made his eyes bulge out – and when we started getting earthquakes here, too, he dug out an old German helmet of his grandfather’s he’d kept from the Occupation, and ever since he wears that thing day and night, just in case the ceiling comes crashing down on his head. There were some newcomers, too – a few couples with no children, the kid from Larissa and the blond girl who both work for that Corleone Theodorakis’s cleaning service, Manos who takes care of the plastic frames at the greenhouses and whose wife left him later on, and Ariadne, the constable’s widow pushing her baby in the carriage.

  All the Athenians came, all the foreigners.

  Most of them hadn’t ever gone up to the Refuge before, some had never been in a cave in their lives. And that ended up not being their first time, either, because as soon as we got there, the women dug their heels in for good. Some of the men, too. Tasos and Tremo and some others had gone up at dawn to set up the generators and spits and get the fires going. We’d planned on gathering in the cave, in the wide, flat clearing to the right as you enter. That’s where we’d set up our picnic, we’d eat there, and drink, and get the celebration going. In the cave. We’d set out lanterns and light fires and when we started dancing our shadows would dance with us, we’d become a hundred, two hundred souls, as if each of us had two shadows. In our drunkenness we’d believe we were an enormous
crowd, and take courage in our numbers. We need to practice, we’d say, try it out, get used to it as best we can, because the kingdom of caves is at hand, the time is coming when we’ll actually have to go back to living in caves. And then we would gather the bones from the lamb we’d eaten and place them in a dark corner, deep in the cave, so that at some point, centuries later, the people living here then might find them, if there are still people on the planet. By that time maybe they’ll have invented some very advanced systems that will tell them we came up to the Refuge that Easter Sunday, at this particular time, we stayed this long, we were this many altogether, this many women, men, and children, we ate this many lambs and this many goats, who knows, maybe they’ll be so advanced they’ll even be able to see us and hear us, to resurrect our shadows and the echo of our voices, to resurrect the sound of women crying and children laughing, because let’s not kid ourselves, some bit of each of us lingers forever in this world, that’s why every place on earth is full of the shadows and voices and laughter and crying of the dead, except most of us can’t see any of that, or hear it, either, because that’s how it should be, that’s how the living should be, blind and deaf to the dead, otherwise how could you go on living, you’d go crazy, which is why I think maybe we shouldn’t hide those bones after all, because I don’t want to think about whether a day will come when the living will be able to see and hear the dead through their laptops and cell phones, Christ himself said it best, let the dead bury the dead, and Christ said that God isn’t the God of the dead but the God of the living, though I guess if it’s going to happen, it’ll happen whether or not we leave any bones to be found, and who are we to decide what the future will bring, what people will be like in fifty or a hundred years, though I still think if the living were less concerned with the dead and more concerned about the people who haven’t yet been born, the world might be a better place, or might become a better place, but then again who knows – that’s the kind of crazy shit Tasos was spouting, hours later, when we’d drunk the ten-liter cask to the dregs and opened the barrel of strong red wine that Midis brought.

  But I’ve gotten ahead of myself, I lost track again.

  When we got up to the Refuge, the women dug in their heels. And fine, they did have a point. There’s no denying it’s a wilderness, with the cliff and the sea down below, the kind of place that could drive a person mad. They had a point, but then again we were all there together that day, in a crowd big enough that there was nothing to be afraid of. And then that crackpot Charonis starts in on his whole routine. Saying there’s a bottomless pit at the very back of the cave and if you get too close it sucks you in and you’re gone, and a few years ago they found some tiny skulls in the cave, the skulls of little kids mounted on stakes, and a few years before that some guys raped a tourist in there and then threw her over the cliff, and if you listen closely, you can hear her at night, crying and howling, and a hunter came up here last year and found a baby abandoned outside the cave, and when he got close, the baby started to laugh, and it seemed to have silver teeth, but it was actually hundreds of tiny black worms pouring out of the baby’s mouth, and one night some guys came up from Tafia to look for old coins, and when they’d gone pretty deep into the cave they saw something thick and red like blood dripping down onto the rocks from above and one went over and touched it and it burned his hands and then they saw a big fire with soldiers sitting in a circle around it wearing tunics and cartridge belts, with long hair and beards, and they were all soaked in blood from head to toe, and the guys from Tafia clawed their way out of the cave and as soon as they got outside they saw that their watches were all broken and each one showed a different time – Charonis the nut job was on a roll, there was no stopping him. And it wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d at least told the stories he tells to the tourists when he takes them out on his moonlit boat rides, stories about the olden days, full of nymphs and princesses and witches with green eyes, instead of stories about the present, stories from last year or the year before or even this year, as if fear had become just another gadget, an iFear that keeps coming out in a new version every time you turn around, endless upgrades, iPhone, iPad, iFear, iFuckYouAll with your cell phones and tablets and ghosts. And the bastard was so convincing that our hair stood on end, as the saying goes. As the saying goes. Anyhow, eventually we settled on a compromise. We wanted to gather in the cave, the women down under the plane trees, and in the end we set up at the mouth of the cave, neither in nor out. But they still couldn’t just enjoy themselves. They kept worrying that the kids might sneak into the cave, or wander out towards the cliff, or climb up the trees. And they kept complaining about how we’d made them come all the way up here to the Refuge on Easter, why couldn’t we have gone to Abyssalos, to Mahaira, to the Agioupes, or at least down to some beach, Magou, Katergo, Pikroneri. Had they all been wiped off the map or something? What were we doing up there in the middle of nowhere, on a holiday like that? Men with families, what business did we have running around in deserted forests and caves?

  They were fixing for a fight, but given what day it was we decided to show our best selves.

  Given the day.

  * * *

  We got wasted off the very first drop. I’d guess we were wasted before we even started to drink. The light. That light was to blame, for sure. So white and clean it made your gaze go black. Even in the shade, at the mouth of the cave or under the plane trees, you felt the sunlight wrap itself around you, creeping over you like a living thing struggling to get inside and banish the darkness within. It couldn’t, of course. And we just laughed. We laughed as we looked at the blackness of the cave and the hollows in the trees gaping around us like black mouths. We laughed and our laughter echoed in the blackness that surrounded us, in the blackness we had inside.

  Tasos pulled his younger kid into his lap.

  Kostis, what sound does a chicken make?

  Kokoko.

  A kitty cat?

  Niaouniaou.

  And a lamb?

  Bzzzzzzzz.

  Get it? He’d heard the electric spit rotating and thought that was the sound a lamb makes – bzzzzzzzz. We laughed. We laughed a lot that day. We pinched Kostis’s cheeks, mussed his hair. How could we have known. Kids. Supposedly so innocent. I don’t buy it. The other day, our kid’s teacher, who’s as bad a cunt-scratcher as you’ll find, asked the class to write something about what food they’d be if they were a food. The kid writes this whole thing about how if he were a food, he’d want to be soup, so poor people and sick people could eat him and get warm. You hear that, wind? Just seven years old, and that’s what he wrote. Of course with everything he sees and hears, what else could he write? So the teacher gave him first prize, bravo, Petrakis, you’re the best in the class. The next day when school lets out, two or three kids from his class start pushing him around, some little rat kids. Petrakis, we’re sick and poor, sit still so we can eat you. And they pinned him down and bit him all over until he was covered with bruises. You hear what the little bastards did? They actually bit him, I swear. In the end they kick him a couple of times and push him into the mud. He comes home soaked in mud and tears, and what do we see? He’s black and blue all over with bite-marks, arms, legs, even his back. At first he couldn’t even speak, he was trembling like a leaf. I took him in my arms and my whole body shook, too, from his shaking. After a while, he told us what happened. You can imagine how the blood rose to my head. I wanted to go and find those brats and tear them limb from limb. But Lena held me back. She was afraid it might make things worse. We’re alone here, she says. We’re alone and there are so many of them. We’re strangers here, who’s going to come to our defense? She was right, of course. The same thoughts have been running through my head day and night ever since we came here. We’re alone, we’re strangers, who will defend us. And worst of all is the sea. Did you ever think you’d hear a thing like that from me? But it’s true. The island is a prison, and the sea is
the bars. If you’re on the mainland and something happens, you just head for the hills, pack up the car and you’re off. But how are you supposed to escape this place? I mean, where can you go? The island is a prison, I’m telling you. For people like us, it’s a prison. It took me a while to learn that lesson. But it’s true. A prison. They knew a thing or two back in the civil war, when they used to send people into exile on the islands, and during the dictatorship, too. And now we’re right back to the same old shit. You’ll say we’ve got democracy now. Sure. Back then they sent people to the islands by force, now we come here on our own. It makes all the difference, right? Right.