Good Will Come From the Sea

by Christos Ikonomou

  That’s when Tasos jumped to his feet and ran to the shelter and stood in front of the rats and pointed the gun at the Ikariot’s head. I remember it perfectly, I remember as if it were happening now, I remember it all, the things that happened and the things that didn’t and the things that should have happened. And then the Ikariot stood up slowly from his bench and raised both hands to straighten the bandana he was wearing on his head and walked right past Tasos, who kept the gun trained on him, following his steps with the gun, and opened the door of the truck and pulled out the rifle, loaded it and went and stood in front of Tasos with the rifle in one hand as if it were toy gun from Carnival, aiming straight at Tasos’s head.

  Each of them was aiming at the other’s head.

  How much time passed?

  Each of them was aiming at the other’s head.

  We held Magda back so she wouldn’t go running over. We men held Magda back, and the women gathered the children to one side as they started to cry. Our hearts flopped in our chests like a fish being unhooked and tossed back into the sea. We men thought Tasos would be the first to pull the trigger. It’s true. I said I would tell you everything. We were waiting for that, and wanted it. We wanted to see Tasos pull the trigger, wanted to see the Ikariot’s head explode, burst like a watermelon. Then we would all rush over, all of us, men, women, and children, and we would crush him, tear his body into a thousand pieces. That’s what we wanted, that’s what our hearts longed to see. One rat fewer in the world. One fat rat fewer.

  We didn’t care about what would happen after that.

  Each of them was aiming at the other’s head.

  How much time must have passed?

  Each of them was aiming at the other’s head.

  And then Tasos lowered his arm.

  Put that thing in your pocket, or I’ll shove it up your ass, the Ikariot said.

  His voice was calm, indifferent, almost bored.

  And Tasos obeyed and put the gun in his back pocket and then the Ikariot lowered the rifle and went over and slapped him on the face. Not a punch, a slap. As if Tasos was one of the whores from his titty bar. And the slap wasn’t full of hatred or anger, more like pity, as if he were doing him a favor, as if it was for his own good.

  Now get out of here, fool, he said. Pick up your dick and go.

  And for a moment our hearts flopped in our chests again, because we thought that Tasos would surely pull the gun back out and this time he would pull the trigger. But he didn’t, he didn’t do anything, he didn’t even say a word. He just turned and headed in our direction with his head down, then turned back around again and went and stood at the mouth of the cave. He stood there at the mouth of the cave – a little drop of a man before all that black. He stood and looked at us, his eyes as red as can be, and his face red too, his scars seemed to have swollen and his whole face looked like a mask that someone held up to the fire until it slowly started to melt. He pulled the gun from his pocket and said something that none of us heard, then disappeared into the cave at a run.

  Then the Ikariot turned around, looked at us, stomped his foot on the ground as if trying to chase off a bunch of mutts, and shouted, back up, you foreign bitches! It didn’t make much sense, because none of us had even moved.

  Back up, he shouted. I’ll swallow your dreams. Get the fuck back.

  He whistled to the others, and they all got into the truck and left.

  Then Magda broke away and ran howling toward the cave, but we caught her before she went in, too. She was hitting herself, crying, shouting his name. The other women formed a circle around her, trying to calm her down – don’t be like that, he’s a man, he’s drunk and ashamed, his pride is wounded, he’ll get over it. Calm down, remember the kids, don’t go doing anything crazy. As soon as he sobers up, he’ll come out and everything will be fine. Calm down, listen, think of the kids. It was just a bad moment, it’ll pass.

  Time passed, night fell, and most of our crowd left with their wives and children. Two or three of us stayed behind with Magda to wait. Every so often we’d venture into the cave with our flashlights, calling out Tasos’s name, but nothing. By then Magda was exhausted, had shrunk into a corner and was talking to herself. Good will come from the sea, she kept saying over and over, like a song. Or a dirge, who knows. We lit a fire but no one felt any warmer – the air was freezing, and the drink had worn off, and we were shivering. And we couldn’t even talk. What was there to say? We tried to say something to console her, but she didn’t want to hear any of it – she had already written him off.

  His eyes, she said. That’s how I knew. For a long time now his eyes have been the color of death.

  Have you ever sat around a fire at night with a bunch of silent people? It drives you wild. I mean it. You watch the flickering flames and the shadows transforming the others’ faces into strange masks, and you listen to the sizzling fire and the crackling wood and the wind whistling through the branches of the trees – and soon enough, you start to see and hear other things, things coming alive in the dark that surrounds you, and you feel afraid, a fear that seems to come from a long time ago, from back when people still lived in caves, and it creeps up your back, grabs hold of you, grips you by the shoulders. And then you begin to wonder whether the fire is what brought those things to life in the night, if perhaps it would be better to put the fire out and become one with the dark, to try and fool those things in the dark, to make them believe we’re not any different, we’re just like them, we too are things of the dark, and suddenly you find yourself caught between two fears, between a fear born from fire and a fear born from darkness, and you don’t know what to do, you don’t know which of the two fears is worse, which of those two fears to choose.

  And then another fear grips you, a bigger one, because you realize how terrifying it is, how terrifying that you’ve begun to react not like a person but like something else, that no person would ever wonder whether light is worse than darkness, whether the fear born of fire is worse than the fear born of darkness. And what scares you most of all is that you don’t know what that other thing is that you’ve started to become – what will come next, what does a person become when he stops being a person, what is there on the other side of human?

  Then you think how, in the end, this is what that poor bastard Tasos was trying to do. He may not have known it, but he was struggling to stay human, to keep on being a person. Not a good person, or a proper person, or a better person, just a person – a person, plain and simple. And he sought to help us keep being people, too, so we wouldn’t become that other thing that wonders whether light is worse than darkness. He disappeared not because of Xellinakis or that asshole Ikariot, or tomatoes or onions or imazalil or thiabendazole or Senegalese sea bream or the suites at Niktaris’s hotel or even justice or solidarity, but because of the light. The light. Because he wanted to stop us before we became that other thing that wonders whether light is worse than darkness.

  Fairy tales, you’ll say, big talk, drunk talk, and you’re probably right. Calm down, you’ll say. Give it a rest, because before you know it you’ll be telling us that Tasos the vegetable guy, who sold cucumbers and tomatoes at the farmer’s market, was some kind of philosopher and revolutionary to boot. Light and darkness, what a load of bull. What do you people know about this kind of thing, anyhow? You’re farmers, security guys, plastic guys from the warehouses, Salamanders, Tomises, Charonises, what do you know about all that? You’re foreigners here, you should stick to speaking foreignish, thinking all your outsider thoughts. Food, work, sleep – and maybe a fresh young thing right off the boat every now and then so you can blow off some steam. That’s all you’re good for. Anything above that is for the people above. That’s what you’ll tell me, and you’d be right. But then again, you don’t know what it’s like to live here. If you knew, if you lived on this island, too, if you were an outsider, you might see things differently. We here are l
ike blind people who weren’t born blind. Like people who can’t see the sun anymore, but know it exists, remember what it’s like, and bit by bit start to hate the sun for still existing when they can’t see it anymore, and then they start to hate the people who can still see the sun, too. And Tasos was the guy struggling to make us blind folk not hate the sun and not hate the people who can still see it. So even though none of us believed the stuff he said, we still wanted to hear him say it. We wanted to know there was someone among us who believed we’re better than what we’ve become. That everything isn’t dead inside of us, that we still carry things inside that we can love, even if we don’t know what they are or what they’ll become, the way a mother loves her child even before it’s born.

  If you lived here, too, if you were a foreigner, an outsider, you might see things differently. Maybe, I don’t know.

  The next morning a whole crowd went up to the Refuge, cops, firemen, volunteers with helmets and ropes. They went about three hundred meters into the cave, until they came to a precipice and stopped because it would have been dangerous, even deadly, for them to go any further. They went back in the next day and the day after that, and shouted and searched all around with their flashlights, and turned up a big fat nothing. In the end they decided that Tasos must have fallen off the ledge, so they gathered up their equipment and left – though no one could explain how he managed to get so deep into the cave when he was walking in the dark with no light, no nothing.

  There was no funeral, of course. Just before school let out for the summer, Magda took the kids and went back to Athens. Meanwhile the whole island heard about what happened with the Ikariot, but no one did anything about it – who would dare speak up? I mean, not even Tasos’s wife said a thing, so why would strangers get involved? A month or so later Elvis disappeared, and then Lazaros’s son, and everyone said bad things come in threes, so now we were done, and bit by bit the whole thing was forgotten.

  There’s nothing else to tell you, we’re through. The end. If you want details, go and ask one of those people who likes talking about blood and brains on the ground and that kind of thing. About tears and dirges and dreams of dead men. But even they would tell you the same thing. How we were all dying for Tasos to pull the trigger that afternoon, to blow the Ikariot’s brains into the air, rather than his own. How we all expected him to give us a proper ending, heroic, manly. And it makes no difference how it actually happened. It doesn’t matter if he blew out his own brains or fell into the hole or got eaten by werewolves in the cave or who knows what else. No difference at all. None, none at all. Betrayal is betrayal.

  A major betrayal.

  And since then we’ve been waiting.

  We still go up to the Refuge every so often and do our thing, just like before. But these days, when night falls, we sit around the fire and look out at the sea as if expecting something, as if waiting for something to happen. And if sometimes someone jumps up in his drunkenness and starts in on some lament, about how and why – why a man like that had to meet such an unjust end, and why we let him run into the cave and why no one ran in after him, why not one of us went in to drag him back out, and how afraid he must have been walking in the darkness all alone, and how he must have waited, whether he got scared at some point and tried to find the way back out, how he must have waited for us to come in and save him, how he must have cried and called our names until he finally lost hope, and why we did it, how could we have done such a thing, what kind of people were we, what kind of people had we become, how had our hearts gotten so hard – and if one of us starts, in his drunkenness, to talk like that we all jump on him and tell him to shut it. We don’t want to talk about the past, we don’t want to look back, only forward. We don’t want to look toward the cave but out to sea, at the open waters. Without talking too much, without tears and laments, without memories.

  We sit there silently around the fire and look out at the sea, as if we’re expecting some true hero to come from there one day, some hero who’s not a war hero but a hero for what comes after a war, a hero who’s alive, not dead, a hero who’ll throb not with death but with life, a hero not for the dead but for those who continue to live.

  When you look down at it from above, our island resembles a pair of handcuffs. Uneven handcuffs – one bigger than the other, as if made for someone with one atrophied arm. Little Handcuff and Big Handcuff, Outer Island and Inner Island, Upper Part and Lower Part. Our island is two islands, two handcuffs, and the chain linking the two, which we call the Doors, is a long, narrow strip of land, twelve kilometers from end to end. Each of the two islands has a lake in the middle – Apsithia, or Wormwood, on Big Handcuff, and Little Handcuff has Second Coming. Above Apsithia rises the highest mountain, Polemos, Mount War, from whose peak you can see eleven islands: Ios, Sikinos, Santorini, Milos, Kimolos, Polivos, Sifnos, Syros, Paros, Antiparos, and Naxos. On good days, when the wind blows the hoar-frost from the horizon, you can see even further, to Amorgos and Astipalia, and to the south, eighty miles away, the snows of the Psiloreitis mountain.

  My father says that a day will come, soon, when our island will split right down the middle, where the Doors are now, and become two islands. He’s always saying things like that, ever since he had his stroke. It’s a matter of time, he says. Can it really just be chance that we’ve been having so many earthquakes recently? Or that the sea has started to warm again over in Kamenes? All that happened back in 1956, too, and then the earthquake came and not a stone was left standing. He says half the town collapsed back then, and the sea rose three hundred meters above the shoreline and Meskinia was cut off from the main island and became a rocky little islet. These are signs, he says. Just like back then, it’s the same way now, too. Only now it’ll be worse. Now the end is coming. The real, final end.

  My father. He was always a bit of a character, but since the stroke he’s gone off the rails entirely. He’s only fifty, but he talks like an old woman on death’s door who sees cherubim and visions in the sky. I sit there and feed him a few spoonfuls of soup, as much as he’ll eat, and when he starts in on these things it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis. I can’t object, either, because the least little thing sets him off, he’ll pull the blanket over his head and I have to plead with him for hours to come back out. And then he starts in on the other kind of crazy talk, like the other day after I’d fed him, when he started getting after me to chase the geese out of the room.

  Get those geese out of here, he said. Just shoo the filthy things out, don’t you pity your father at all? What are you, a daughter or a tyrant?

  What could I do, I started waving my arms around in the air as if I were chasing geese away. He hadn’t pulled that trick before, and it caught me off guard – it took me a while to figure out he was talking about the flies buzzing around his soup bowl.

  They’re all signs, my father says. The geese, the earthquakes, the sea temperature rising over by the volcano. And that’s not all. When you see people disappearing into caves and fish coming out onto dry land and paralytics getting up out of their wheelchairs – when you see that sort of thing, you know the end is coming. The real end, the ultimate end, the good end.

  That’s the sort of thing he says, all day, every day. And at night, when he’s tired, he takes my hand and rests it against his cheek, beside his lips, which are crooked and swollen and look like a little omicron that split down the middle and became an omega.

  Don’t leave, he says, his eyes closed. Stay here all night.

  Stay here, so I can feel your sweat.

  Kill the German

  The procession is on its way, the bier of Christ. There go the bells. The procession will be passing by soon, and the old man is still locked in the room with the girl. Chronis pushes his wheelchair over to the window, hoping for some clue as to what’s going on. Nothing. Lights off, curtains drawn. Though today he brought her ups
tairs earlier than usual. Around six, maybe even five-thirty. So something’s up.

  He busts a move with the chair – reverse, half turn to the right, half turn to the left, straight ahead, again to the right – then wheels himself back to the desk. The scorpion has scrambled up onto the tallest rock, in the middle of the tank, and is sitting there utterly still, waiting. Chronis breaks off a lump of bread and dips it in the wine, then works it between his fingers until he’s shaped a tiny little pie, as thin and round as a coin. He lifts the thick, flat stone off the lid of the tank, which is long and narrow, like a miniature ballot box, and drops the coin of bread through the slit in the top. These past few days the scorpion hasn’t been at its best. It only comes out for water, seems to have no appetite at all. It didn’t even touch the spiders, its favorite treat. Chronis was alarmed, though of course he knows the scorpion can survive without eating for weeks, even months. He experimented with various things, even tried throwing night moths into the tank, not to mention an entire lizard, which he spat blood to catch with a net over by the ruins of Drakomanolis’s place. Then yesterday or the day before, out of curiosity, he tossed in a crumb of bread soaked in wine, and soon enough the scorpion crept out from under the broken roof tile and slowly approached the bread. It circled it once, swiped at it a couple of times, then suddenly leapt forward and grabbed the little coin with its pincers and started manically stabbing the bread with its tail, spinning in a circle all the while, stabbing it over and over, as if the bread were a living creature resisting its poison. Then, when the bread was nothing more than crumbs, the scorpion went over to the side of the tank and started to tap on the glass with its tail, as if asking for more. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.