Something Will Happen, You'll See

by Christos Ikonomou

  He started walking down Kondyli again toward the bridge. The wind had picked up. Women in black were walking on the sidewalk leaning into the wind and holding the edges of their coats to keep the wind from blowing them open. He heard church bells ringing in deep, heavy mourning and it struck him as strange because he knew there wasn’t a church around there and for a moment, unconsciously, he stopped and looked up and started to cross himself – then immediately caught himself. He walked on with his head down staring at his boots which were covered with mud and dirt and looked like small black animals that had just emerged into the world from some burrow deep in the ground. He turned right on Antioch Street and then on Grevena and turned right again and looked at the building of the town hall which was tall and grey and he thought how small he would seem if someone looked at him from up there. He stopped in front of the Bank of Greece and took his ATM card out of his wallet and put it in the machine and pressed the buttons and closed his eyes for a few seconds and said something on the inside as if he were a man of faith who prayed every Good Thursday in front of an icon of the crucified Christ and then he opened his eyes and saw on the screen a tiny little person looking at him with hands raised – we’re sorry we can’t complete that transaction – and pulled his card from the machine and put it back in his wallet which was black and empty and then he turned and left.

  He crossed the street and turned onto Tsaldari and held his breath as he walked in front of the kebab stand and turned left and stopped in front of the Galaxy Supermarket and looked at the people shopping or waiting in line to pay and he was suddenly gripped by dizziness and panic because it occurred to him that at ten when he met his daughter the supermarkets would already be closed so where would he buy the pasta and cheese and milk and the Kinder egg for the kid and he looked at the business hours posted in the supermarket window and saw that tonight it was closing at nine and his panic grew and he leaned against a parked car and told himself to calm down, said it three times like a prayer – calm down calm down calm down – then went and stood on the corner of the street where there was a bitter orange tree with no bitter oranges on it and he pulled off a dusty leaf and crushed it between his fingers and smelled his fingers to try and pull himself together but all they smelled like was dust and sweat and fear.

  Then a sudden gust of wind blew and a black garbage bag leapt up from the sidewalk and wrapped itself around his legs and for a moment he froze as if there were a black snake on his legs and then he shook his legs and started to kick at the air to get the bag off and he kicked the air and shook his hands and legs and on the sidewalk across the street an old woman stopped and looked at him and shook her head sadly and crossed herself – Good Thursday evening and a north wind was blowing and the sky was the color of the kid’s eyes who had been sitting for hours now at the kitchen table with his hands together dreaming with open eyes of a table covered with food. And it wasn’t winter, it hadn’t snowed, so he couldn’t even go outside and break off an icicle hanging from the edge of the roof and lick it to trick his hunger into thinking it was being fed. It was spring, and it hadn’t snowed around there in ten years.

  • • •

  Sir, the girl said. Would you put the crown on our Jesus’s head?

  • • •

  When he got to the dock the digital clock on the stern of the ship said ten to nine and when he stubbed out his last cigarette the clock said ten past ten and his daughter was still nowhere to be seen. He stood up from the bench and circled the cars that were waiting in line to board the ship and then weaved between the cars looking at all the drivers and passengers. He scanned the people walking over the gangplank onto the ship and those few people leaning over the railing at the stern, to the right and left of the flagpole, looking down at the other people and at the cars and trucks.

  At twenty-five past ten he asked someone wearing a white shirt with blue letters that read BLUE STAR 2 if he could go up onto the ferry.

  At twenty to eleven he bummed a cigarette off a truck driver and smoked it watching the stars flickering in the sky and said things about his daughter. Vulgar awful things. Things he had never said, things he didn’t know a father could say about his own daughter.

  At ten past eleven the ship loosed its moorings and pulled shuddering away from the dock with thick black smoke pouring out of its funnel. He stood there waiting until the lights on the ship were one tiny light way off in the sea. Then he turned to leave and saw something on a bench and went over to see what it was. A Coke with a straw in it and a half-eaten cheese pie. He glanced around and picked up the cheese pie. He smelled it.

  Then he wrapped it in the paper and put it in his pocket.

  He went out of gate E1 and headed back walking sometimes in the street and sometimes on the sidewalk and as he passed under the bridge he read something scrawled on the wall in black spray paint – kick a nigger and ruin your boot – and saw the lights of a truck coming slowly in his direction and thought about jumping into the middle of the street and standing there and letting the truck run him over so he could put an end to all this once and for all and then he stepped back and pressed his back against the wall of the tunnel and spoke to his body as if his body were a dog and he were its owner and he stayed like that with his back to the wall until the truck passed in front of him and drove off.

  Then he thought about the kid. He imagined the kid being given his dead father’s clothes and the kid taking them and stroking them with eyes full of tears and as he stroked them he would feel something hard in there and would stick his hand in the coat pocket and pull out a half-eaten cheese pie. How ridiculous that would be. How ridiculous.

  • • •

  After midnight he went up Cyprus Street walking on the left-hand sidewalk and when he got to the church of Osia Xeni he looked across and saw light and shadows behind the yellow pane in the door and crossed the street and went inside.

  Six or seven women in black and a girl about eleven years old were decorating the bier with flowers. They were standing around the bier choosing flowers one by one from big bunches and cutting off the stems and sticking the flowers in the styrofoam. Daisies. Roses. And other flowers whose names he didn’t know.

  They turned and looked when he came in and kept looking as he sat down in a chair and crossed his arms over his chest and smelled the air which smelled like incense and human breath. He raised his eyes without lifting his head and looked at the enormous figure staring down at him from up in the dome and looked at the other figures painted on the walls and the purple ribbons and the icons and the candles burning and melting and bending over in the empty air like tired bodies looking for something to lean against.

  Beside the bier was the cross. A big tall cross made of dark wood. Christ had his eyes closed and his head was lolling to the right. Arms bent at the elbows, legs bent at the knees. The nails in his hands dripped blood. A gash in his right side was bleeding, too. He turned his head away and closed his eyes then opened them again and looked back at the crucified figure. How peaceful he was. Peaceful. Calm. Resigned.

  He looked once more at the women. He would ask them for money. Of course. He would ask them to give him some money. Five or ten euros each. Whatever you can. So I can feed my child. However much you like. Happy Easter to you all. They couldn’t possibly refuse. Not for me. For my child.

  Sir, said the girl. Would you put the crown on our Jesus’s head?

  She had come over to him and was standing there staring at him. Eleven or twelve years old. Big eyes, thick lips, blond fuzz on her cheeks. He reached out a hand to touch the fuzz on the girl’s cheeks and the girl looked at his hand and grabbed his thumb and wrapped her hand around it.

  It’s too high we can’t reach.

  The crown was sitting on a table. He thought it was a crown of flowers but it wasn’t. It was made out of some plant with thorns and in the shadowy light of the chandelier and the candles the crown looked like the skeleton of some strange soiled creature that had died on that t
able years ago.

  He pulled a chair over in front of the cross and picked up the prickly crown as carefully as he could and climbed up on the chair and raised his hands to pass the crown over the top of the cross. The women and the girl were watching him. He turned around and looked at them and smiled.

  What would you have done without me, he said. I hope you’ll give me something for my trouble, he said and laughed.

  The crown was small and he had to push to get it down over the cross and he could feel the thorns pressing into his palms but it didn’t hurt. He looked into the face of Christ which was at the same height as his. Peaceful. Calm. Resigned.

  Sure, he said. Since you know you’ll be resurrected. Death isn’t real, he said. Nothing is real. It’s all just a show.

  Evil’s first victory is when it starts speaking your language, he said – and that scared him because he knew he wasn’t capable of thinking or saying a thought like that. He looked at the crucified Christ, looked all around. Who had spoken. Who.

  He stumbled on the chair and nearly fell. A woman screamed. He looked down at his hands. They were dotted with small perfectly round balls of blood. As if his hands were two shattered thermometers, thermometers that took the temperature not with mercury but with blood.

  He turned and showed his hands to the women.

  Look, he said. Look what happened. Now you definitely have to give me something for my trouble.

  The women dropped their flowers and scissors and ran for the door. One grabbed her purse which was hanging on the back of a chair and hugged it to her chest as if it were an infant. Another grabbed the girl by the arm and ushered her out the door. They all left without looking back.

  Don’t go, he shouted. Wait. Don’t.

  He stepped forward into the air and fell to the floor and heard something snap and lay there motionless.

  Wait.

  Outside the wind was dying down and the clouds were motionless in the sky.

  It was early on Good Friday morning.

  The kid must have fallen asleep still hungry at the kitchen table.

  A lump had caught in the throat of the day.

  Any moment now it would start to rain.

  Placard and Broomstick

  AT DAWN the sky was full of tiny scattered clouds as if there had been some awful explosion up there. Yiannis Englezos looked at himself in the mirror splashed cold water on his face combed his fingers through his hair looked in the mirror again and pinched his cheeks to give them some color. He hadn’t slept in four days for four whole days he hadn’t closed an eye, and now in the darkness of the day and the frigid air of his apartment he felt something inside him getting very small, shrinking and drying up and turning black like a peppercorn.

  He was a grocery stocker at the Galaxy Supermarket on Kaisareia Street, the first to open in Nikaia.

  Liar, he told the mirror. Cowardly liar.

  It was the second-to-last thing he would say that day.

  • • •

  In the kitchen he put on some coffee and looked out the window. It was the Monday after Easter. Christ had risen twice but outside nothing had changed. Darkness and cold, it looked like it might rain, more like Good Friday than Easter Monday.

  He went back into the living room and took up the task he’d left half finished. He pulled sixteen A4-sized cardboard dividers out of some folders and glued them together into pairs, which he spread out on the threadbare carpet to form a rectangle that measured 84 by 59.4 centimeters. He taped the eight double pieces together, turned the whole thing over and taped them again, then grabbed the red broomstick and wiped it down with a cloth, slowly and carefully, like a veteran hunter sitting beside the fireplace late one winter night, cleaning his gun and gazing into the flickering flames and wondering how so many years had passed without him noticing and how he himself had become not hunter but prey.

  When he finished with that, he squeezed a long line of glue onto the cardboard then pressed the broomstick into the glue and counted to seventy. He cut four lengths of red string, twenty centimeters each, made eight holes in the cardboard, to the left and right of the broomstick, passed the string through the holes and tied it around the broomstick to strengthen the whole contraption. He looked at his makeshift placard and lit a cigarette. He smoked it down to the filter and each time he inhaled he could feel the smoke chafing his throat – he must have smoked an entire carton over the past four days. He waited a little while then held the stick up high and waved it around to see if the cardboard would hold. It was shoddy work. But with things as they were it was the best he could do. With things as they were he couldn’t wait.

  He lit another cigarette and lay down on the carpet with his knees bent in the air. He heard the churchbells start to ring and thought how crazy it was to eat the body of Christ and drink the blood of Christ and as he smoked he looked out at the day that refused to be anything but black that refused to sweeten even a drop.

  • • •

  On the Thursday before Easter Petros Frangos, his best and only friend, had been killed at a building site on Papadiamantis Street, a stone’s throw from the old cemetery in Nikaia. He was electrocuted. He wasn’t actually killed there because he didn’t die right away. He died two days later, on Good Saturday, in the intensive care unit of a state-run hospital. He was an experienced steelworker, knew his trade, one of the last Greeks in that line of work. And on that day, Good Thursday, the contractor had pressured Petros to stay late and work into the evening – what with Easter and all the state holidays they were falling behind on the job. Petros said fine but it wasn’t fine. He was in a hurry to finish up because that evening they were supposed to leave for Yiannis’s village. They were going to spend Easter together up in the mountains of Epirus. You’re going to take me with you this time, he’d told Yiannis. There’s no way I’m staying down here for another Easter. I want to try it out, he’d said, to see what it’s like because I can’t stay here much longer, man. Things here are getting rough, everyone’s losing it, these days people scare me. You tell me the only thing that makes life worth living is giving yourself to others. But what happens if no one wants to take? What if you don’t find anyone to give yourself to? I’m telling you, the future is in the mountains – that’s the kind of crazy stuff he’d been saying to Yiannis.

  Give us the mountains, he said, even if we have to eat stones.

  Like what Kolokotronis said during the revolution. Give us Greece even if we have to eat stones.

  And then as he was carrying steel reinforcing bars that night one of them brushed up against a high-voltage wire and twenty-four thousand volts shot through Petros and shook his body and tossed him down on the dusty cement as if he were already dead or something that was never alive to begin with.

  Not even water, he’d told Yiannis. In two years we won’t even have water to drink. They said it on the news. That’s why I keep telling you, we have to head for the mountains. I can’t stand it here any longer. I’m sick of always being caught unawares. In this city every new day and every new person is another kick in the teeth.

  Or a cracked reinforcing bar, to say it in my language.

  • • •

  He didn’t die right away. He died on Good Saturday in the intensive care unit of a state-run hospital in Nikaia. Everything inside of him was burnt, the doctors said. The skin had come loose from the bottom of his feet and they looked like shoes with no soles. During those two days they let Yiannis in to see him three or four times and each time he had to put on a mask and gloves and plastic booties over his shoes – a new, warm pair of boots, with solid soles that hadn’t yet been worn down – and each time he stood by the side of the bed he saw Petros’s arm or foot suddenly flail, two or three or four times in a row, and Yiannis’s eyes would fill with tears and to steel his nerves he would repeat words to himself from some old prayers that he had mostly forgotten. But that flailing wasn’t the work of god. It was just the current shaking Petros’s body – that’s how much cur
rent was still in his body.

  At night to keep himself from falling asleep he did arithmetic on cigarette packs. He divided 24,000 by Petros’s age to see how many volts there had been for each year of his friend’s life. He multiplied Petros’s age by 365 and divided that into 24,000 to figure out the volts per day. Then he calculated the hours and the minutes and the seconds. That’s how he spent his nights.

  And when he got tired of numbers he wrote other things.

  Caution! Keep away from the patient! He’s a shocker!

  What’s black and red and jumps in bed? Petros!

  You have a body like an electric eel vai vai vai vai vai dance the tsifteteli.

  Hahahahaha, Yiannis wrote on his cigarette packs.

  Hahahahaha.

  • • •

  Do something, he told the doctors. I don’t have money now but I’ll get some. I swear to you, I’ll get some. If you could just save him. We’ve been together since we were kids. You know how it is. You’ve got friends you’ve known since you were kids, don’t you? Please, I’m begging you. Do something.

  • • •

  He found a thick black marker and kneeled on the rug and wondered what he should write on the cardboard. He wanted to write something that would express unspeakable rage and hatred and love and despair all at once. Or maybe it should be some plain, dry slogan, the kind of thing a political party might say about workplace fatalities, about people who die on the job. Or maybe something like the things they write on the gravestones of people who die in vain, or too young. Something about god and the soul and angels and the afterlife.

  He wondered if he should write something not about Petros but about Yiannis.

  I’m filled with an incredible emptiness.