Good Will Come From the Sea

by Christos Ikonomou

  Good will come from the sea, Tasos said.

  Shut up, man, I said. I mean, didn’t you hear?

  What?

  Good broke down, they took it in for repairs. It’s going to be a while before they can get it up and running. At least a hundred years, they say.

  He looked at me for a minute and then started to laugh, one hand over his mouth, as if he could hide from me. Then, I remember, he stretched his hands out in front of him and looked at them and said, if Christ really was a carpenter, I bet his hands were as covered in marks and scars as mine. Just think how strange it must have been for him to perform all those miracles with hands like that. For him to heal the blind, the paralyzed, lepers, touching them with swollen, crooked fingers. I wish I could do that. Even if I’m no Christ. Or even a carpenter.

  Then, out of the blue, he grabbed me around the shoulders and hugged me, and I remember thinking, poor Tasos, what kind of Christ would you be with that face, those teeth, but I didn’t say anything, I just let him hug me and then pushed him away and said, what are you feeling me up for, I’m not blind or paralyzed, nothing to heal here.

  I know, he said. It’s just the drink. Whenever I drink I can’t keep my mouth shut.

  But he wouldn’t let me go. He held my arm and leaned his head on my shoulder and wouldn’t let me go. I looked out the corner of my eye at his face, which shone in the sun, red, bloated, covered in scars, and then I turned away, looked out at sea.

  I know, he said. But if I were Christ, you’d be John, isn’t that right? You’d be my beloved disciple, my John. Because I know you love me more than the others. I love you more than them and you love me more, too. Isn’t that right? It is, I know it is.

  I don’t remember what happened after that. I mean, I remember, but I don’t want to talk about it. That’s enough.

  No, man, I don’t want to. I don’t feel like it.

  Enough.

  That’s my right, isn’t it?

  * * *

  I think about it a lot. About hatred, I mean, and fear. I think about it and wonder which comes first. Is hatred born out of fear, or is fear born of hatred? And I wonder what will happen to us, what tomorrow will bring, where all this is headed. I wonder what kind of country we’ll be living in, us and those who come after us. A country that will exist because it hates and fears? A country that will exist in order to hate and fear? And I want to believe in something. I need something to believe in, you know? Something, someone to believe in. I need to believe in some new Christ, even if I know he doesn’t exist, even if I know he’ll never descend to earth, never be born, or crucified, or resurrected. To know that something doesn’t exist and to believe in it anyhow – that, I think, is the only salvation left to us. Because if you believe in something that doesn’t exist, maybe – who knows, maybe – one day the thing you believe in will appear.

  * * *

  It must have been around five when they showed up. The Ikariot and Draou up front, the other three in the bed of the truck – we’d never seen them before, and we never saw them after that, either. We were surprised, to tell the truth – what were Xellinakis’s goons doing up here on Easter – but we never imagined what was about to happen. You might ask, if we had, what would that have changed, what could we have done? I don’t know. Things might have been different. Maybe if we’d guessed from the beginning what they had in mind, things might have unfolded differently. Maybe, I don’t know.

  They passed right by us and went and settled in under the shelter. Right off the bat the smoke started drifting our way. They were plastered, even worse than us. And the speakers in the truck were screeching full blast, fiddles and dari dari and all that island crap.

  Dari dari dari dari, the gulls are fucking on the seashore, Tasos shouted.

  He was ready for a fight, but Magda held him back. She pulled him aside, shook him by the arm. He didn’t pay any mind.

  That asshole, he kept saying. The coward, the bully, what a disgrace of a human. On a holiday like this he sends his punks to spoil our fun. He can’t just leave us alone, fuck him and his whole family, fuck them all. The fucking disgrace.

  We went over, too, to try and calm him down – fuck it, we said, they’ll get bored, they’ll leave.

  To make a long story short, we set up shop under the trees and pretended nothing was going on. The women brought out the sweets and lit the camp stoves to make coffee. Then they came over to take the rest of our wine away, but we sent them packing.

  Sitting there under the trees, someone said something about how much he hurts for this country. I don’t remember who it was – we were all plastered, twelve sheets to the wind – but he said, I feel this country beating like a heart inside me. It’s like having two hearts. And someone else said that he wanted to fall asleep, into a deep, heavy sleep and wake up years later, after all this was over. And someone else said maybe if something really bad were to happen, like a big earthquake, maybe they’d take pity on us and let us live. If there was a big earthquake and lots of people died, maybe they would finally say, look at those poor Greeks and the terrible thing that happened to them. They might take pity on us, might let us off the hook, let us live. That’s the kind of stuff they were saying. The kind of talk you find at the bottom of a bottle. Women’s talk. It’s true. If you talk and talk and talk, sooner or later you end up talking like a woman. I turned to look at Tasos, but he was looking in the other direction, at the rats who had settled in under the shelter and were shouting and laughing as if they had the whole place to themselves.

  Then someone – not someone, the kid from Larissa who works for Theodorakis with the blond girl – said, look over there. We looked and saw an upside-down triangle in the sky. The sun had gone behind the clouds and the light was making an upside-down triangle that rose up as far as the eye could see. And we all said we’d never seen anything like it before, it was the first time we’d seen the sunlight making an upside-down triangle in the sky, and someone said, it’s a bad sign. But Tasos said, no, look again, look, it’s not a triangle, it’s a victory sign – we’re going to win, he said, and made the victory sign, and then, I remember, Kostis came running over and wrapped his fingers around Tasos’s and said, Dad, your fingers look like rabbit’s ears, and he squeezed Tasos’s fingers in his little fist as if he were holding a rabbit by the ears, and I remember – I remember everything – I remember Tasos’s eyes, I remember how he smiled, lips together so his teeth wouldn’t show, I remember how he looked at the kid’s fingers gripping his, how the victory sign disappeared into the kid’s fist, and now you’re asking me to tell you about things that can’t be said, things it isn’t right to talk about – and I can’t do that, it’s like you’re asking me to tell you what color hatred is, or the face of a person who feels hate gnawing at his guts like the rat in that Chinese torture, when they strap a metal basin to your belly, upside-down with a rat trapped inside, and then light coals on top of the basin and the whole thing heats up and the rat inside goes nuts and starts to gnaw at your flesh trying to find a way out. Hatred. Hate. A rat in your guts.

  After that, when Kostis went back to play ball with the other kids, Tasos jumped up and fired the pistol into the air, looking straight at the rats who were sitting under the shelter. And then that rotting carcass of an Ikariot stood up slowly and heavily and went over and opened the door of the truck and pulled out his rifle and fired into the air, too, and we heard buckshot falling like rice on the leaves of the trees above our heads. Magda ran over and grabbed Tasos and made him sit down. He did as she asked, but he wouldn’t hand over the gun.

  OK, he said to her. That was the last time. I’m telling you, it’s fine.

  * * *

  We stared out at the sea. I remember us staring silently at the sea, remember wondering in my drunken haze how such a crowd of people could stay so silent for so long. Then Tasos said his piece about good coming from the sea because th
e sea has no memory, water doesn’t remember. And I remember him saying that we need to be like water, too, and blot out all the old stuff, forget the old stuff and make a new beginning. He said we have to forget that what united us for all those years was money – stolen or honest, it doesn’t matter – and that what unites us now is the fact that we no longer have that money. We have to forget all that and find something new to bring us together, he said. I remember him saying that this was his greatest dream and his greatest anxiety – to find something other than money that could unite us. Because he was sure that evil’s greatest victory was in convincing us, in managing to make us all believe that we came into the world to look after only ourselves. Evil triumphs when we all try to make something of ourselves, rather than do something important beyond ourselves. And trying to make something of ourselves, looking out only for ourselves, is the great gift we give, each day, all of us, to the people who want to control our fate. We want to be like them because they’ve convinced us that we’re how they’d like us to be – weak, insignificant, inferior. They succeeded in making us see ourselves through their eyes, instead of through our own. They convinced us that their way is the only way.

  I may be wrong, though, Tasos said. I don’t know. Sometimes I lose my faith, too, I really do. There are moments when I wonder, when I think that in order for us to rebuild this country all over again from scratch, we first have to rebuild ourselves from scratch, too. Moments when I think that in order for us to find something new to unite us, we first have to go our separate ways. How did that one guy put it? Every so often we have to lose our minds in order to come to our senses. So I wonder if maybe we first have to stop being what we are so that later we can become what we want to be. So we can all get out of here, escape, all of us, and scatter all over the world. To become what the Jews used to be, to become the Jews of the twenty-first century, of the new millennium. Didn’t Christ say it, too? You first have to lose your soul in order to save it. That’s how it is with us, too. In order for us to be saved, we first have to be lost. In order to save Greece, to save our country, first we have to lose it.

  That’s the sort of thing Tasos was saying, I remember, and I remember his eyes were even redder than before, and then he raised his hand and pointed up toward the sky and said, I’ll miss all this, though, I’ll miss it so much, and most of all I’ll miss the light, where will we ever find light like this again, other places don’t have light like this – and then someone jumped up, it might have been Psis, or Tremo, and shouted, what is all this shit, man, what’s all this bullshit you’ve been selling us about Jews and millennia, what are you, some kind of mason or something? – and then a huge argument broke out, because others jumped in and said it’s all the Jews’ fault, they’re the ones who destroyed Greece, and someone said that the whole mess is all a Jewish plot, for two thousand years they’ve feared and hated the Greeks, and since in all that time they couldn’t destroy us any other way, they finally fixed it so that we’d all be in debt to the banks, which they control, because that’s the only way they could tie us hand and foot and make us their slaves, and someone else said he read on the internet that the only people the Jews are afraid of are the Greeks, since back in the time of Alexander the Great we managed to enslave them not with battles and armies but with our language and culture and philosophy, and those motherfuckers never forgave us for it, those goatherds, those animal thieves. Someone else said that Christ was an agent for the masons, too, and they only backed him because they wanted to destroy ancient Greece, which is exactly what happened in the end. Another guy said it’s the Jews who won’t let us dig for oil all these years, too, we could’ve been one of the richest countries in the world, and another guy said it’s not just oil, we’ve got tons of gold and uranium, his wife’s cousin is in the port police, one of those gull cops, and he said some cagey types started poking around outside Kamenes the other day, and these frogmen combat diver guys went down to the sea floor with special machines and found out it’s covered in gold from the volcano – they said they were scientists, researching the earthquakes, but who believes that, they’re probably agents too. Someone else said that’s why they’ve been trying so hard to destroy us these past few years, those faggot foreigners and our fucking traitor politicians, because Greece has oil and gold and uranium and osmium, which goes for thirteen million dollars a kilo on the open market, and red mercury which sells at twelve million, and they’re using it all to build nuclear weapons and fuel for warheads and space ships, and if you look on the internet you’ll see that there are these ancient books from India where it says the Greeks were the first humans to build space ships and they used red mercury for fuel, and of course the masons and their agents know all that, which is why all these years they’ve kept us under their thumb, fighting among ourselves, because if they let us free, Greece would be a superpower for sure and we’d have them all sucking our balls, Jews, Germans, Americans, everyone – and then two or three of the newcomers jumped in, Manos who works at the greenhouses and a few others, they turned to Stathis who works security at the asylum down in Rigos and said, Stathis, man, why don’t you go down and bring up your net and paddy-wagon to nab these guys, this whole crew is dying for straitjackets, seriously, if jerking off could fuel space ships, Greeks would have gotten to the edge of the universe, maybe beyond. Then a huge argument broke out and everyone started fighting with everyone else, and I turned, I remember, and asked Tasos if he really believed that good would come from the sea – I remember saying, I don’t care what it even means, I don’t know what kind of good it’ll be or how it’ll come from the sea, just tell me if you really believe it, tell me if I should believe it, too, if it’s worth my waiting for, if there’s still hope, if there’s any sense in waiting. And I remember that Tasos said, sure, of course it’s worth waiting for good to come from the sea, because only when you finally realize that there’s no sense in waiting for good to come does it actually start to make sense to wait – and that’s true of everything in life, he said, because life only starts to mean something once you understand that life has no meaning, and then, I remember, I turned and looked at him because it seemed so strange for Tasos to be saying something like that – it seemed like a strange thing to be coming from a grocer, a guy who worked in the fields, who sold cucumbers and tomatoes at the farmer’s market. And I suddenly felt ashamed because I realized he was ashamed that I was looking at him like that, and then he raised his glass and laughed – it’s just the wine, he said, when I drink I talk pretty big, all kinds of fairytale shit.

  I know, I said. It’s fine, I’m the same way.

  Now that you mention it, I said, all of life is a fairytale, a story you tell yourself. That’s what life is. A fairytale you create in your head. A story about the place where you live and the places you used to live. The things you experience every day. The people around you – men, women, children, relatives, friends, neighbors, colleagues, enemies, strangers. The things that happen and those that should happen and those you wish would happen. And then something happens and the story ends and you have to make another story, if you want to keep on living. You have to create another story in this new place where they sent you to live, in a new place with new people. If you want to survive, you struggle to make that story. You struggle to fit new places and people into this new fairytale you’re creating. You have to fight that fight, to struggle for that story. To build a new world, with caves and streams, plane trees, chapels nestled on hills, stony cliffs and sandy vineyards, rowboats, anchors, oars. And in order to create that new world, you first have to create a new self. New eyes, new ears, a new tongue, nose, hands. Because that’s the only way for you to learn new images, new sounds, new smells and tastes. You have to learn the sea and the weather and how the winds blow in winter and summer. You have to learn not to be scared when the sirocco uproots trees and sends stones tumbling, not to be scared by the smell of wild arum or when you hear shearwaters crying in the dark or the wooden
stairs creaking on August nights. You have to learn how to unhook a bluefish without it cutting your fingers and how to kill a moray eel by pouring vinegar on its head. And then, when you’ve finally managed to build your new world, you’ll be gripped by the fear that something will happen and this world, too, will end, and you’ll have to go in search of another, and another, and another. But for how long? How many worlds can fit into one world? How many lives in one life? How many lives does one person need in order to keep living?

  And then I saw Lena leaning over me, shaking me by the shoulders.

  You’re babbling. Do you hear me? You’re babbling again. Pull yourself together, you’re making fools of us. Fuck it, don’t you even care for the kid’s sake? I mean, you could give a shit about me. But the kid?

  * * *

  I wish the day hadn’t ended the way it did. I really do. But each of us has a story to live, and it has to end how it has to end, like it or not.

  So the kids were playing ball and at some point they kicked it over by the shelter and Kostis ran to get it. And that stinking carcass from Ikaria held it there with his foot and wouldn’t give it back. He said something to the kid and laughed and the others laughed, too. And Kostis stood there with his hands together behind his back, twisting his fingers together, head bent as if he were listening to some voice rising from the ground. Magda ran over and grabbed him by the arm and the guy from Ikaria took his foot off the ball and kicked it as far as he could. Magda said something and the guy said something back and all the rats laughed. We weren’t close enough to hear, we never found out what he said, but when Magda turned back around she had two red stains on her cheeks and her mouth was trembling as if she’d kissed a snake.