It’s a great comfort. It’s a great comfort to know that someone is awake out there in the street. And if you open your eyes and your ears you’ll see and hear things you never notice during the day, in the yellow light of day. As if objects change with the hours. As if night has some secret plan, some magical power that can alter things and make them seem less wild less harsh – can offer some drop of comfort to the heart of a frightened person. As if god hasn’t abandoned the world entirely but decided to exist only at night. If you open your eyes and ears you’ll see and hear. The sudden swipe of the hand, the tsaf, the flame from the match lighting the cigarette. The smoke rising yellow from Mao’s mouth and scattering like frozen breath in the darkness. The tip of the cigarette glowing on and off like a firefly. The cat stretching on Mao’s lap so his fingers can get at all the best places. You’ll hear the tinkling of the bell and Mao’s voice murmuring who knows what. You’ll hear the sound of his bottle coming to rest on the steps beside him. The thud of his heels as he paces up and down the street.
A comfort. It’s a great comfort to know someone in the neighborhood is staying up at night. Of course the whole neighborhood feels sorry for Mao but at the same time since things happened the way they did it’s good that we have someone watching over us at night – even if that isn’t his purpose. There are about a hundred families living around here. And things have gotten pretty rough. Drugs in the school. Purse snatchers. Thieves. Down near Agios Nikolas three houses got broken into in a single week. One guy and his wife went to pick their kid up from school and when they got home there were three guys with knives in the house, there in broad daylight. Even the Pakistanis are out of control. The Pakistanis. Who never even used to meet your eye. Now they roam through the streets at night like gangs. The other day they grabbed a kid off his bike and took him down to the field by the church of Osia Xeni and hurt him bad. A little kid just ten years old.
Things have gotten pretty rough recently.
But we’re okay.
Around here we’re calmer at night.
Because we’ve got Mao.
• • •
In the evening the sky darkens and at around nine a quiet rain starts to fall that seeps all the way down to your bones. Just now we heard on the television about what happened last night on Kondyli Street. Two thugs went into a corner store and knifed a girl working there who was seven months pregnant. Kondyli is just a stone’s throw from here but we heard it first from the television. And it got us all worked up again. The admiral blames the police for everything. Vayios who works in construction driving a backhoe and has a cop for a brother blames the politicians: the leftists hate the police and gutted the force as soon as they could and the guys on the right sat and watched because they’re afraid of the left. Michalis says if we had a drop of dignity, if we were real men and not just useless bystanders we’d do what Mao does instead of sitting in front of the television and crying over our fate.
That’s what men do, says Michalis. Take the situation into their own hands. We’re just chickenshit.
He gets up and turns off the television and lights some candles and brings a bottle of tsipouro and some dried chick peas and raisins. We sit in the dark and look out the window. No matter how bad the fear and rage get you can’t help but give yourself over for a while to the sweetness of the rain. You listen to the tap tap tap of the raindrops on the windowsill and they seem to be dripping straight into your heart. And for a little while you forget your troubles. You forget what happened on Kondyli Street and forget that this is the first time it’s rained since October and who knows when it will rain again. You listen to the rain and let yourself forget. And if you crack the window open and put your head out and take a deep breath you can smell the wet earth and the scent of the bitter orange trees and the breeze that has a strange acrid smell to it again tonight. And if you look up you’ll see the rain falling yellow around the streetlight and if you look even higher you’ll see the clouds which have turned a dark yellow as if they’ve traveled over some burning land to get here.
It’s after eleven when Mao comes out of the building sits on the steps and sets his bottle and cigarettes down beside him. It’s tsikoudia says Michalis who’s seen Mao coming out of the Cretan’s shop lots of times over on Tsaldaris Street. Then Mao grabs the cat who’s sunk her claws into his shoulder and holds her in his arms and starts to pet her. He looks at the road glistening with rainwater and every so often looks up at the falling rain and the raindrops that are as yellow as an old man’s nicotine-drenched beard. And Vayios who’s lived here the longest tells us yet again how Mao’s grandfather Stavros the ship’s captain had a thing for cats too. One day someone brought him a fluffy white cat named Nabila but he was pretty old by then maybe eighty and his hearing wasn’t great and he called it Mantila. He was crazy about that cat, never let it out of his sight. One day a few years before he died that cat disappeared. So he goes out into the street in his pajamas with his cane and starts calling Mantila Mantila Mantila. And a neighbor hears him and thinks well the old man must have lost it or had a stroke or something, and she grabs a kitchen towel and goes down into the street and says, here you go barba-Stavros I brought you a kerchief. Now let’s go back inside so you don’t get hit by a truck or who knows what. And the old man is all upset because he thinks she’s making fun of him so he raises his cane and almost finishes the poor woman off. Beats her like you wouldn’t believe. They had a heck of a time calming him down, he had one foot in the grave but his blood still boiled. The old bugger. Vicious to the last. The older generation said he’d killed plenty of people during the civil war.
The kid will end up just like his grandfather, Vayios says. Mark my words, Vayios is never wrong. That’s how all commies are. Assholes every one.
Commie or not he’s a better man than us, says Michalis. You know there are people who won’t go to bed until they see Mao come and sit out on those steps? There are people who stay up every night until they see him coming outside. I’ve heard with my own ears plenty of folk say that they sleep easier at night since Mao started keeping watch. Not just one or two. Lots.
The admiral gets up and goes over to the window. He’s a retired navy man, that’s why we call him the admiral. Even his wife calls him that. Sometimes when we’re out late at Satanas’s place she calls on the phone and doesn’t ask for Dimitris or even Pavlakos. She asks for the admiral. Is the admiral there? she says.
He wipes the windowpane with his hand and looks out. He’s gotten so thin lately, his clothes are swimming on him. And now in the half-dark his face is as yellow as the leaves on the mulberry tree in winter. The other day he told Vayios that ever since he had to retire he doesn’t even recognize himself. He’s withered away. It’s not right for them to retire men so young, he said. Vayios swore. The rest of us are being ground down by our fucking jobs, you jerk, and you’ve got it tough just sitting around, huh? Get lost, you good-for-nothing. You spoiled asshole. Things got pretty ugly between the two of them that day.
Just think about it a minute, Michalis says. We’re about a hundred families around here, right? Some aren’t on speaking terms and others wouldn’t even recognize one another in the street. Even in this building there are people I only see on Christmas and Easter. And yet each night we’re all on tenterhooks to see whether Mao will go out onto those steps or not. Just the other afternoon my mother had her incense out and was going through the house waving it around and at some point I see her going onto the balcony and waving that thing down toward the street. What are you blessing out there mom I ask. The cats? No she says it’s for Mao. So god will be good to that young man who protects us at night. You see what I mean? And just think, she hasn’t spoken to Mao’s mother in years. But it’s a comfort to know that someone is sitting up while you’re sleeping. A great comfort. It’s a big thing to be able to sleep easily at night. And I’ll tell you something else. If there were a Mao in every neighborhood in this city we’d all be better off. Don’t laugh. If
there were a Mao in every neighborhood keeping watch at night the world would be a better place. I’d bet on it. Don’t laugh. That’s what real democracy is. When poor people don’t wait for the rich to come and save them but take the situation into their own hands. Because that’s how the trouble starts: with us thinking that the rich will ever help the poor. It just doesn’t happen. We live in two separate worlds. They’re over there and we’re over here. We have to take the situation into our own hands. And that’s exactly what Mao’s doing. What do you think man’s greatest enemy is? Death? Money? Not at all. It’s fear. That’s our worst enemy. Fear. Fear.
Something’s happening, says the admiral. It’s that Mirafiori again. Something’s up.
We crowd in front of the window to watch. The yellow Mirafiori is coming down the street with its headlights off and its exhaust pipe growling. The cat lying in Mao’s arms lifts her head. When it gets close to Mao the car slows down. Mao stands up and the driver steps on the gas and skids away. Mao runs out into the middle of the road and looks at the car which is all the way down turning left onto Cyprus Street. Then he sits back down. He waits. He looks around. He leans forward and seems to be whispering something into the cat’s ear and the cat is listening with her tail up in the air and slightly bent like a question mark. Then Mao takes a swig from the bottle and lights a cigarette and when he exhales the smoke rises out from inside of him thick and yellow as if he’d smoked the whole cigarette in one go.
That’s the second time tonight, says Michalis. They came by earlier, too.
How many were in the car? I saw two.
Three. There was another in the back seat.
Things are going to get messy for us with those guys, Vayios says as he walks away from the window. Mark my words. Vayios is never wrong.
• • •
The rain has stopped but raindrops are still trickling down the windowpane and through the half-open window you can hear water running in the street next to the sidewalk like a little stream. The admiral searches for music on the radio and finds some old rembetika but a few minutes later we hear the jingle for the communist station and Vayios says get lost you faggots and goes over and turns the dial.
What’s happening?
Nothing.
What’s he doing?
Nothing. Playing with the cat.
What’s her name again? Julius?
Augustus.
Yeah, that’s it. Guys, I told you but you didn’t listen. The kid’s going to end up just like his shithead grandfather. If he lives that long. Which I doubt. I figure he’s gotten mixed up in drugs. All that about his sister and the guys from Korydallos, I’d take it with a grain of salt. Michalis can say what he wants. Did you ever meet a commie you could make any sense of?
I don’t know about you, but I remember seventy-eight like it was yesterday, Michalis says. The first time Logothetis was elected mayor, our first commie mayor, not too long after the junta fell. You remember what happened that night? All the guys from the party gathered outside the church of Osia Xeni and shouted as if there was a war on. I was still in grade school but I remember like it was happening now. I remember our mothers coming out into the street and calling us home and locking us up in our houses and all the neighbors being scared shitless. It’s all over the commies are going to kill us tonight. They’ll break into our houses and slaughter us all. That night we cried until the tears ran dry. You wouldn’t believe how terrified we were. The women cried the kids cried the old ladies had fallen on all fours and were crossing themselves and repenting. Total panic, man. And I remember my father rest his soul and two or three others took kitchen knives and kept watch all night at the door to the building. Panic. And we’re talking about seventy-eight, right? Not the fifties or even sixties. This was seventy-eight.
That’s how it goes, Vayios says. The commies were out of control back then. They thought they were going to turn Kokkinia into another Stalingrad. Now those pests are in Parliament and we pay their salaries on top of it all. It makes me sick. Screw your democracy you fucking frauds. Man, it really makes me sick, those faggots. It makes me sick just looking at them. Especially the ones who sold out and got into the game. Who go around in ties and fancy cars and sit in front of the TV at night with one hand on the remote and the other on their dick dreaming of the revolution. I’ve got the biggest beef with those assholes. Lefties, sure, you know what that means. There’s only one lefty thing on their body, and that’s their left nut. The assholes.
The admiral reaches over grabs the bottle and fills the glasses. His hands are shaking. He drinks his down in one swallow and refills his glass and drains it again.
That’s nothing, he says. In seventy-one with the political situation they sent us over to Norfolk in America to pick up the Nafkratousa. It was a huge ship the biggest in the fleet. You could fit a whole city on that thing. We stayed over there for about two months and it wasn’t easy. Every time we went out things got crazy. I still remember how those black guys went after us. They threw trash down on us from apartment buildings. The war in Vietnam was going strong and when they saw us in uniform they lost it. As if we were to blame for all the slaughter going on over there. We poor fools couldn’t have pointed to Vietnam on a map. One night I remember we ran into a navy guy at a bar an American marine who’d just come back from Vietnam and I remember his hands were wrapped in gauze. We started talking and he told us that one night his unit walked straight into a booby trap and everyone was killed except for him and one or two others. And ever since then he couldn’t get over it he kept chewing his nails all the way down to the flesh. Out of fear, see. That’s why they’d put that gauze on him. And he wasn’t some puny thing, he was a big strong guy two meters tall. I still remember him. We bought him beer and whiskey and he wouldn’t let us leave. He begged us to sneak him onto the ship and take him with us to Greece. Can you believe it, a man two meters tall acting like a little kid. I still remember him. Anyway. It’s all just stories now. But ever since I was a kid I had a thing for America. I always said I would find some way to go and live there forever. And my father rest in peace who’d traveled all over in the navy used to say America isn’t for the likes of us. In Europe people think being poor is a matter of bad luck. In America poverty is shameful. Can you bear to be poor and have to feel ashamed of it too? So just sit tight and don’t dream those kinds of dreams.
Vayios looks at Michalis and then at the admiral.
Man, where does that fit in? he asks. How did we get from old barba-Stavros’s cat to Vietnam? You lost me.
It’s something else I’m getting at, says the admiral. In hindsight sitting here thinking it all over I realize my father sold me a bill of goods. I sure didn’t get very far here, either. Aren’t I poor and ashamed here, too? Thirty-five years on the job and where did I end up? With a family of four living in a tiny hole of an apartment. It took me two years going from politician to politician to find my son a job and now they say they’re already going to let him go. He broke his back carrying spare parts for eight hundred euros a month and now they want to fire him because Mrs. Toyota isn’t doing too well this year. Instead of five hundred million she only made four hundred and ninety. A real blow for the company, you know? So now here I am running around again begging every slimebag I know to find my son another job. You remember me telling you how that guy Panayiotakos found him the job at the spare parts place? We were together in the navy, he was my first mate on the Panther. If you gave him a ship the incompetent fool would run it into the rocks and now there he is in parliament. Anyway. When he found work for the kid I went to his office down by the public theater to thank him. He happened to be wearing a real strong cologne and when we shook hands the smell stayed on my mine. And guys you won’t believe it. It’s been how many years since then and every so often I still catch a whiff of that scent on my hand. I mean for god’s sake. There are times when I can smell my hand and it makes me want to vomit. Like my soul stinks something awful. Right now for instance
. Right now I can smell it.
He brings his hand up to his nose and sniffs it then stretches it out towards Michalis.
See for yourself. See how it smells. How the hell does that happen, can you tell me?
Enough already, says Vayios. Sitting there crying over your lot. Cologne and bullshit. How much was your bonus when you retired? And how much are your checks every month? Do us a favor, man. You’re one to talk, retired at fifty and now you sit around scratching your balls and getting paid for it too. Let’s change the subject because otherwise things are going to get ugly. Michalis, we kicked this bottle. Are you going to bring another or should I leave?
Michalis brings some more tsipouro fills the glasses and sits back down. Vayios leans over and lights his cigarette from a candle and exhales out the corner of his mouth. He takes the cellophane off the pack and crumples it and tosses it into the ashtray glancing sideways at Pavlakos who’s turned his head and is staring out the window.
On the subject of money, says Michalis. Last year when my father died Iraklis came by here one night. You know Iraklis, who lives on the corner. Lakis.
The guy with the beard, you mean. Who has a stall at the market.
That guy. He came pretty late after you guys had left. So he comes over with a flask of whisky and we sit in the bedroom because the women were in here mourning with my mother. So we’re drinking pretty hard and at some point the guy starts crying and talking to me about my father and what a good person he was and how much he loved him and how my father was like a brother to him and stuff like that. And there he is crying and hugging me and I don’t know what to do. At some point he turns to me and asks how much the funeral is going to cost. And I tell him. And he says, listen Michalis since your father was like a brother to me and you guys here aren’t doing so well I want to pay for the funeral. I’ll give you the money. So my soul will be clean as they say. I’ll give you the money. I can see the guy’s blind drunk with tears streaming down his face so I say come on Lakis what’s all this? I mean thanks and all but that’s not how things work. You think I’d let you pay for my own father’s funeral? I couldn’t do that. To make a long story short the guy won’t take no for an answer. And I say to myself this asshole is pulling my chain because I know him well and I know he’s a dirty jew as cheap as they come. But guys, he actually gets up and says wait I’ll be back and in ten minutes he’s back with an envelope full of hundred-euro bills. I’m telling you, it was bursting with hundreds. And he calls my mother in and tells her too and the poor woman is so dazed she starts shouting and crying and bending down to kiss his hands. She actually kissed his hands. Because we’d been doing the rounds asking for loans from cousins and uncles. To make a long story short the next morning I go over to that cheat Kioseoglou and pull out the cash for the coffin and the flowers and all the rest. Then around noon or so Iraklis calls me up and tells me what happened. Listen man, he says, I messed up, that money was my wife’s who had it to pay some bills and the kids’ schools and shit like that. And he keeps crying and saying he’s sorry over and over. And I was frozen there with the receiver in my hand. I almost fainted.
Something Will Happen, You'll See Page 3