The other day on TV they were talking about some guy in America or Canada who got fired and two days later went back to the factory with a load of rifles and pistols and mowed down anyone who got in his way then blew his own brains out and on the t-shirt he was wearing those words were written in big black letters, that exact phrase.
I’m filled with an incredible emptiness.
What an insane thing to say.
• • •
In the bathroom he got his hair wet and slicked it back and carefully covered the shiny spot on the top of his head and put on his hat. It was a light hat of soft black leather but when he put it on and looked in the mirror he felt as if he were wearing a helmet.
He went back into the living room and picked the placard up off the rug and looked at the cardboard which still had nothing written on it and twirled the broomstick in his hand and then put the cap back on the marker and set it down on the coffee table and looked at the walls around him and with his free hand grabbed his hat and pulled it down low over his forehead like a man leaving a place forever, never to return, and –
Enough, he said and went out into the street.
• • •
The clouds had grown bigger and were casting long shadows over the city and from up there on the hill the city lay spread before Yiannis’s eyes like a dirty wrinkled blanket. He headed towards Neapoli walking in the street next to the sidewalk with the placard on his shoulder and as he walked he looked at the ashen sky and remembered a documentary he’d seen a while back on TV about some rich English or Irish guy – he never really figured out where the guy was from, it was late and he was dozing on the sofa – who’d had an asteroid or something named after him. They showed the guy saying how proud and happy he was about that, about them giving his name to an asteroid – I like thinking that even when I die, he said, my name will keep orbiting the universe for years, even centuries. And Yiannis walked with the placard on his shoulder looking at the sky and thinking how strange it would be for them to name an asteroid Petros, if instead of that foreign guy it had been Petros, if it were the name Petros that would orbit for whole centuries through the universe, an asteroid, a small lonesome planet.
What’s wrong with you, he said to himself. You know that could never happen.
Who would give a steelworker’s name to a planet or an asteroid or even a meteorite.
Then he remembered what he’d said to the doctors. Please, do something, save him, please. Do something. What a fool he’d made of himself. Instead of grabbing those assholes by the scruffs of their necks and pummeling them, instead of turning the whole place upside down, he’d sat there and cried and pleaded and scribbled on packs of cigarettes. And the jerks had made a fool of him, too. We’re doing everything we can. It’s a challenge for us just to keep your friend alive, they told him. Sure. A real challenge. Then again why would they show you any respect. Money. That was the real issue. Money. They didn’t think you could come up with the cash. If you’d waved it in their faces they would have done something. They would have found some way to save him. You should have given them twenty-four thousand euros. One for each volt. Twenty-four thousand, sure, you don’t even have twenty-four in your pocket. Worthless fool. Lying coward.
It was unfair, though.
He thought how unfair it was that the only words he had found to say to the doctors seemed to have come straight out of some series on TV. Then it occurred to him that now that he’d started to talk the way people talk on TV he might start to think like them too and that thought terrified him, it froze his heart – and then he stood up tall and gripped the broomstick in his hand and walked faster and consoled himself with the thought that no one on any TV series would ever do what he was doing today.
Then again he couldn’t be sure. Because it’s a proven fact that people on TV have great imaginations.
• • •
He walked down Attaleia to Papadiamantis turned right walked past Philippou and when he got to the corner of Papadiamantis and Palamas he stopped. The entrance to the building site was blocked by a chain-link fence. He looked at the wires hanging overhead and wondered which one had killed Petros, which was the wire with the twenty-four thousand volts. Then he stood with his back to the entrance and held the placard in the air with both arms. He stood between sacks of cement and barrels of lime between stacked crates and steel and piles of bricks. Across from him was a row of apartment buildings that stretched from one corner of the street to the other, an unbreachable rampart. He knew that the contractor, Petros’s boss, lived in one of those buildings, and he held his placard up high so it would show. The street was deserted, there wasn’t a soul on any of the balconies. He held the placard high and waited. Someone would come for sure. Someone would notice him, someone from the neighborhood would come down the street and stop and ask him what was going on why he was standing there holding a broomstick with that piece of cardboard on it and Yiannis would explain to him and the other guy would say yes, he’d heard about the man who’d been electrocuted the other day but he didn’t know he had died and he would shake his head and tell Yiannis to take courage what can you do in this life what can you say that’s how life is and the hardest part is for those who are left behind and he would ask how old Yiannis’s friend had been and if he’d had a wife and kids and siblings and if his mother and father were still alive – and in a half-hour at most the whole neighborhood would have heard that a guy with a hat and a sign was standing in front of the building site and people would come out onto their balconies to see and would speculate and gossip, what kind of weirdo is he maybe a thief or a pederast waiting to swipe some kid? Go inside and call the police.
• • •
He wouldn’t tell them his real name. He would make up some other name, more suited to the circumstance, a nice heroic name.
My name is Achilles. Achilles Palaiologos.
Or Alexander. Or Thrasyvoulos. Alexander the Great Thrasyvoulos Nikiforidis.
• • •
Someone would come and ask him about the placard and all the rest. For sure. Maybe some kid or old woman in black who knew a thing or two about death. Or maybe some drunk. Easter Monday was a holiday and on holidays people are different, they soften and open up and care about others about their fellow man.
Someone would come for sure.
Even if only out of pity.
It was Easter Monday, Christ had risen twice.
Someone would come.
And that someone might even bring him a piece of cold lamb to eat, a little wine or a red egg.
• • •
At three a car turned the corner. The man at the wheel slowed down and looked at Yiannis with his mouth hanging open, the way drivers on the highway stare at traffic accidents.
Then he stepped on the gas and left.
• • •
A piece of tape came loose from the cardboard and dangled in the air like a yellow tongue. He turned the placard on its side and stuck the tape back on, pressing it firmly with his thumb. It was shoddy work. If only he’d written something surely someone would have paid attention someone would have stopped out of curiosity to ask him what it was all about. It would have been better than nothing. But he couldn’t write anything. All the things he had inside, everything he was feeling, were like these fish he’d seen once on TV, strange fish that live deep down in a lake in Asia somewhere and when you take them out of the water and the sun hits them they rot right away and dissolve and disappear.
He couldn’t write anything on the cardboard.
There are certain things it’s hard to pull out from inside. Very hard. Impossible.
It’s like asking someone to cry from only one eye.
• • •
At four he saw a woman in the building across the street sneaking peeks at him from behind a curtain. When she saw him looking back at her the woman made a face as if she’d just discovered a stain on the carpet and yanked the curtain closed.
At five he wondered if there’s life
after death and if Petros might be watching him now from somewhere, if he could see him standing there at the entrance to the building site with his hat on and the sign in his hands, and if with the wisdom of the dead Petros could possibly read all the things that Yiannis should have written on the cardboard.
Around five-thirty he thought: Petros died and nothing in the world can change that. Petros died and that won’t change anything in the world. How does a person face that. How.
The most frightening thing isn’t death but memories.
• • •
By evening it had started to rain.
One of the pieces of cardboard fell loose from the others and dropped to the ground and immediately shriveled up and turned black as if some kind of toxic fluid or poison had dripped on it.
He raised his collar and pulled his hat down low on his forehead and walked up and down for a little while to get warm looking at the deserted street, at the houses with lighted windows that seemed to be just as empty as the ones with no lights, looking at the black wires hanging overhead that emitted a constant hum as if they were relaying messages from a strange world to some other world. He circled the block then came back to his spot and stood there stiff as a rod holding the broomstick in both hands.
This, he thought, is the most pathetic, most ineffectual protest since the birth of the worker’s movement. Since the birth of the world.
I’m filled with an incredible emptiness.
If only I had written something.
I’m filled with an incredible emptiness.
If I had written some heroic words of mourning someone would have paid attention.
For sure.
But now it’s too late.
• • •
Late at night he lit a cigarette without putting the placard down. Then he inhaled deeply and straightened his back and lifted the placard which was falling apart and held it high and kept on holding it high, with both hands, even as he exhaled and saw the smoke coming thick and yellow from inside his chest and watched it slowly rise under the yellow street light and then disperse in the darkness like the smoke from some pitiful ancient offering that no one even noticed, neither gods nor people who believed in gods.
The Blood of the Onion
I USED TO WORK IN KAMINIA at a factory that made ice. I checked the machines, tossed the ice into sacks, carried the sacks out to the truck. An easy job, ludicrous, a job to be ashamed of. But Michalis, the guy who did the deliveries, saw it differently. He said there were few jobs as difficult as this one. He would grab one of those ice cubes with a hole in the middle – for some reason we called them crooks – and close his palm around it. Within seconds it would begin to melt. In a minute or two it was water. In five it had disappeared.
Isn’t that awful, he would say to me. To make something you know will be gone the very next moment. What an inhuman thing.
Shut up, Mike, I would say. Just stop thinking and work. Then I’d go to haul a few of those ten-kilo sacks we sent out to bars and restaurants. And he would trail after me somber and obedient as always looking at the palm of his hand which was bright red with cold.
Mi corathon, he would say. Mi corathon una naranha helada.
• • •
Ten months on the job and he still hasn’t adjusted. He’s a little off in other parts of his life, too. His folks died in a car accident when he was a kid. He’d been raised by some aunts out in the countryside. Later on he went to Romania to study medicine but came back after the first year—moneywise he couldn’t make it work. He wanted to be a pediatrician and open his own practice. But his biggest dream was Spain. That was his goal, to go there one day and not come back. I’m not from here, he used to say, I’m from Spain. He’d taught himself Spanish from cassette tapes. He always said there was no other language like it. It’s the happiest language in the world, he said, and when I finally get there I’ll talk and laugh all day long. Even at the factory, all day he would toss out those mi corathons and naranha heladas. He didn’t look anything like a Spaniard, though. You’d have thought he was from some northern country. Tall and blond, with green eyes and pale skin.
• • •
They’d hired him to be a driver but he did pretty much anything that came his way – electric stuff, plumbing, fixing the coolant. He learned fast, was quick on the uptake. He was a reader, too. He liked to read poems and used to carry a notebook around to scribble down all his strange thoughts. He saved and dreamed. He wanted to go back to Romania to finish his studies then head to Spain as soon as he was done. He said he’d find a Spanish woman with glossy hair and bright white teeth and they would travel the whole country together. They would go to where Don Quixote was from to see the windmills and the vineyards that stretched on as far as the eye could see. They would go down to the shores of the Guadalquivir and up to the Sierra Nevadas and to all those towns that Michalis had only seen on the map but whose names sounded so promising, Badajoz Almendralejo Villafranca de los Campaneros. Dreams. Dreams. For people like us dreams are like ice cubes – sooner or later they melt. But I never said anything.
Sometimes just to pass the time I’d ask him to tell me some poems. He knew lots of them, not just Greek but foreign ones, too. Of course he liked the Spanish ones best. There was one guy in particular, Miguel Hernández, whose name he said with a lisp, Hernándeth. He was crazy about that guy. He even had a photograph of him in his wallet, and knew his poems inside out, could say them by heart. Hernández had died young, when he was thirty or so. Most of his poems he’d written on toilet paper when he was in jail. He would tear the toilet paper into tiny pieces and write his poems on those little scraps. He was a communist and had fought in the civil war. After the war he was sentenced to death but he didn’t live long enough to be executed, tuberculosis finished him off first. Michalis’s favorite poem was Lullaby of the Onion. Apparently Hernández wrote it after he got a letter in prison from his wife where she wrote that she and their child – they had a baby boy eight months old – were living on nothing but onions and bread. They had nothing to eat except onions and bread. Onions and bread, that’s how poor they were.
I don’t know if all that was true or if Michalis just pulled it out of his head. But I can remember like it’s happening now, him carrying sacks to the truck murmuring in his sad sing-song voice:
En la cuna del hambre
mi niño estaba.
Con sangre de cebolla
se amamantaba.
Mike, man, what’s the guy trying to say, I asked the first time I heard it. What’s all that cuna and staba about?
Michalis put the sack down and grabbed a piece of ice and held it in the palm of his hand and squeezed it tightly and as the ice melted, he told me that the poet was talking about his son – his niño – who was lying in the crib of hunger and nursing on the blood of the onion. Sangre de theboya means the blood of the onion, Michalis told me and as he said it his eyes were shining and you’d have thought he was on the verge of tears, as if it were his son lying in that crib, his son nursing on that strange blood.
Sangre de theboya. The blood of the onion.
Thpaniards, I told him. You’re all crathy, every thingle one.
• • •
Lullaby of the Onion – that was Michalis’s favorite poem. But I liked a different one, which Hernández wrote for his friend Ramon who died very young and very suddenly, so suddenly the poem said it was like a flash of lightning. I didn’t know any Spanish or anything about poetry either. But I’d heard it so many times I’d learned a few lines by heart. I liked the part where Miguel said he wanted to dig up the earth with his teeth, to tear the whole earth apart so he could find his friend’s bones and kiss them.
Quiero escarbar la tierra con los dientes
quiero apartar la tierra parte a parte
I liked the last lines, too. When Miguel tells the dead Ramon that one day they’ll meet again and they’ll have so much to say to one another.
Que tenemos que hablar
de muchas cosas
compañero del alma, compañero
I liked that poem even though it was long and I couldn’t remember most of the lines. I liked the sound of the words, their rhythm. I liked how Michalis said them. No pretense, just simply and sadly, the way you might read something you’d written a long time ago in some old notebook, a promise of undying love or friendship, some big statement you’d written about the future.
We have so many things to say
comrade of my soul comrade
• • •
It was January. Work was a bust. The boss had gone off again. He was a gambling addict like you’ve never seen, all the casinos from here to tomorrow knew his name. Parnitha Loutraki Thessaloniki you never knew where he’d be. He left a Palestinian in charge of the place while he was gone, Ziyad, who liked to play the tough guy. A shifty bastard who never smiled and had deep-sunk eyes and something threatening in the way he moved. He didn’t have much give or take with anyone, kept us all at arm’s length. Me in particular, there were plenty of times when I’d caught him looking at me like I was an Israeli soldier or something. Mark my words, I’d tell the others, things are going to get ugly with that guy. One day he’s going to walk in here with dynamite strapped to his chest and blow us all sky high. Michalis saw things differently. He said that when he looked at Ziyad he saw the desert in his eyes. What desert, Mike? They have a desert over there? Of course they do – a huge one. He was sure that Ziyad had lived for years in the desert, and that’s why he had that mysterious look in his eyes. Just look at him, he would say to me. Can’t you see the guy isn’t used to living among walls and machines? Don’t you see how his eyes are searching for a little space to stretch out in? What could I say. I didn’t see any desert in Ziyad’s eyes, or any camels either. But there was one thing I saw: every time Michalis grabbed a piece of ice and let it melt in his palm Ziyad’s eyes would flash with anger.
Michaliz! Don’t mez the ize, man!
And Michalis would stop in his tracks and raise a fist in the air and intone the finest line of poetry he knew:
Something Will Happen, You'll See Page 7