“But if you’re honest,” I said, “how…”
“I am!” she said, slapping the table again. “One thing I’ll tell you. If I say something, my word is a contract. I’m a pure Greek. I’m not a bastard! I’m not PASOK. And I’m not the devil’s!”
“Why are you saying this?” I asked, confused about her reference to the political party, which was by then fighting for survival after signing on to the first bailout agreement.
“Because you’re writing it down. This is what I know to tell. I’m a real Greek. I’m not going to change. Do you understand?”
I really liked this woman, even though I wasn’t sure I understood her. It would have been futile to try to extract logic from everything she said. With the cryptic baptism line, she had more or less told me in her way what she thought I needed to know. She had the mannerisms and patois of a disappearing generation of Greek ladies, despite the fact that she wasn’t wearing black, as most elderly widows do. I asked her about this, and she said she had never liked her husband.
At one point, I gathered the courage to ask her if she could see me.
“I see you well,” she replied, before going on to complain about her eye troubles and other various ailments, including anxiety and depression, for which she took ten daily medications. Though I am no medical professional, I wondered if that number of medications was too much for her. Some Greek doctors tended to greatly over-prescribe expensive drugs because they were routinely bribed by suppliers to do so. On the year of my visit to Zakynthos, Greece spent more money on pharmaceuticals as a percent of GDP than all other industrialized countries. The finances of the country’s largest social security fund, which footed a lot of the bill for this excess, suffered greatly as a result. The grandmother claimed that her anxiety resulted from the trauma of having endured an armed robbery one night. But for someone traumatized by such an incident, she seemed to derive a great deal of pleasure from telling me the story. She was indeed a very skilled storyteller, even employing the use of props. As she began to narrate the story, she got up from the table, walked over to the drawers, and removed a knife with a six-inch curved blade. She walked over to me, bringing the knife within two feet of my neck.
“Um, be careful,” I said.
“Is he afraid?” the old lady said to her granddaughter.
“He’s afraid.”
“You can live, man,” said the old woman, backing away slightly. Standing next to me with the knife in her hand, she then told the story of the break-in as if we were gathered around a campfire.
“I was sleeping inside. I saw the door open and I saw a black glove. I saw a child with a black hood. And he came inside with the knife.”
“That knife?” I asked.
“It was this knife. My knife.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “He said, ‘I will slaughter you.’ ”
She then raised her voice: “ ‘I say, ‘Leave me alone, you can slaughter me tomorrow!’ ”
Back to a hush: “ ‘Don’t breathe a word,’ he says.”
In her usual voice: “ ‘Didn’t I see you when you came inside? I didn’t say anything, and now you’re putting that knife up to me like you’re going to slaughter me like a goat!’
“ ‘Do what I’m telling you. The money. Bring the money,’ ” she whispered, impersonating the robber. Two more hooded men came inside, she explained. One of them went to cover her head with a hood.
“ ‘Go to hell!’ I said.”
At this point in her narration, she started chuckling.
“They pick up the mattress with me on it, and I started laughing. And they say, ‘You’re laughing, eh?’ ‘No, my child,’ I say, ‘I’m not laughing. What, are we going to the theater to see a movie? It’s just us here.’ ”
The thieves took 800 euros and the gold rings she had hidden under the mattress, and also the gold ring on her finger, she said. They went to the refrigerator and took a freshly slaughtered rabbit and a piece of halvah. They warned her, she said, not to call the police.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to take you to the police. Why? Because I feel sorry for you. I don’t want the police hitting you. I’m a mother, too. And I have kids. And I wouldn’t want that. I swear to you.’ ”
The old lady, I thought, had uncanny poise. Not many people try to pacify robbers by befriending them. She went on.
“One takes off his hood and says, ‘Auntie, we’re leaving now.’ I say, ‘Go with the blessing of God. God help you to give up this pursuit, because you’ll get yourselves killed. My child, I feel sorry for you, you, so young and gallant. And to get to this point?’ ” According to her, they were drug addicts, worse than toothpicks, trying to score their next dose. The robbers left, and despite her motherly instincts, she called the police. The officer, a tall guy, as she explained it, said, “What should I tell you, Auntie? Me, I’m an officer and a man, and my heart would have stopped.”
Ending her story, the old lady added: “God gave me courage. I wasn’t scared.”
“How did you get the knife back?” I asked, still aware of its proximity to my arteries.
“They left it on the ground outside.”
“Put it back in your drawer,” said the granddaughter.
“If someone comes, I’ll slaughter them,” said the old lady as she walked over to the drawer, and dropped it inside with a crash. “My Demetri,” she added. “If I had my youth, I would have taken a gun and chased them.”
The granddaughter seemed to be getting tired. She had heard the story before. I asked the grandmother a few more questions about the blindness benefit. She would not say overtly if she had paid the doctor a bribe or not to get the benefit, but she did say: “He’s written half of Zakynthos blind! Even the cats!” She then lamented that her benefit had been cut. “I was born poor and I’ll die poor,” the grandmother said. Though retired farmers received low pensions in Greece, and she led a modest lifestyle, I wasn’t sure if I believed her. This woman, after all, had feigned motherly concern even for her robbers, and was collecting a blindness benefit though she could see. Her word, you could say, was not ironclad.
We then talked a bit about “the crisis,” about which she offered this monologue: “Are we Greeks? We’re not Greeks! We’re bastards! Do you see the Germans? They don’t betray their country like we do. They support their own country. We’re the traitors. We’ll make our country into a mess. They’ll take Greece. There will be a war.” We looked at some pictures of family members, many of whom were long dead. We then walked outside, passing the icon of St. Dionysios and into the sunny day. A few chickens wandered through the front yard. We smelled her parsley and mint plants, and said good-bye. As we got in the car to drive away, she said to me, “This is what I am and this is what I offer you.”
—
The next morning, I walked to the public hospital, on top of a hill overlooking the red-tiled roofs of Zakynthos, to see the ophthalmologist. According to local officials, this doctor, Nikolaos Vartzelis, was the only ophthalmologist at the only public hospital on the island, and therefore the only one there with the authority to give medical authorization for the blindness benefit. Inside, the corridors were hot, stuffy, and crowded with patients. I knocked on the ophthalmologist’s office door. The door was half opened by the doctor, who was sitting in his chair. I told him I was a journalist who wanted to talk about the blind. He let me in, and I sat across from him at his desk. He had a thick gray mustache. His hair was combed over to cover his balding crown, and he wore a white lab coat. He held his glasses in his hands, which trembled with nervousness. I felt a bit sorry for him. He clearly wasn’t the only doctor in the country alleged to have done this sort of thing. Why should he become the national poster boy for it?
Of course, that is the essential problem when justice is sorely lacking and laws are rarely enforced. The application of the rouspheti, the handing out of a fakelaki, and other technically illegal practices were so widespread that the system had attained its own
equilibrium, until the crisis started to set things off balance. If you assumed everyone around you had partaken in some sort of hustle, it seemed like an injustice to be singled out for your own. Therefore it was easy to feel, even if you were guilty of wrongdoing, that if you were caught, you were being unfairly victimized. It did not help that accusations of fraud were often interwoven with political rivalries. One had to wonder if perhaps the island’s leftist mayor had something other than, in his words, “the path of justice” on his mind when chasing a scandal that implicated a political rival.
I put my voice recorder down on the table.
“Are we on?” the doctor said.
“Yes.” He, too, began speaking without prompting, as if making a prepared statement for the television news.
“The matter arises from two causes.” The first cause, he explained, was the political rivalry between the ex-prefect and the current mayor, both of whom were “burning” to run for parliament. The second cause, he said, was the Troika. “I know that some years ago a decision had been taken by the government after the Troika’s advice to reexamine benefits within the whole of Greece. Not just the blind benefits. Many, many others. It’s the mutes, the mentally ill. It’s the others who suffer from cancerous tumors. One part of them is the blind.”
He finally arrived at the subject of Zakynthos’s blind. “In some areas these persons are many because these pathologies are family pathologies. For example, there is a village near us—we won’t say the name—where there is a family of five: mother, father, and three children. Of these five, three take the benefit. Because three out of five of them take the benefit, are we going to call it monkey business?” he said. “No,” he said. They got the money for blindness, or as he put it, “They can’t even see the light.”
“But are there seven hundred blind?” I asked.
“No, no, no,” he said quickly. “In comparison with other areas in Greece, we don’t have the most blind people. The issue that has come to publicity is owed 100 percent to a political clash.”
“And you didn’t play a role in this?”
“I’m telling you it’s like a process. When we give a certificate, we sign it, committees sign it. Even if there are a hundred signatures, if there are a thousand signatures, if the prefect doesn’t sign it, no one gets anything.”
“But you signed as well?”
“One of the people who put down a signature was me. But after me, they go to the health department, they go down to the committees, and the final reason, the final decision for someone to get money, I repeat, belongs in each case to the prefect. Without the signature of the prefect, a thousand people could have signed it, and the disabled wouldn’t get any money.”
“Those people who said you took, say a thousand or…”
“Not in any case,” said the doctor, denying ever having accepted bribes in exchange for false blindness diagnoses. “This is maligning. Not in any case. There are cases of some people who don’t have a shoulder to lean on, they didn’t have bread to eat, and maybe there we gave them every leniency.” This was a curious comment. Since only the legally blind are entitled to the benefit, there’s not a lot of room for leniency. “We were lenient, but within the limits of the law,” he added. “The other things that they say, this and that, those are slanders. You should know that Zakynthos is a very beautiful island, it has a lot of good things, but it’s an island of gossips.”
A few months later, as the health ministry’s efforts to publicize its crackdown on the island intensified, the Greek media picked up the story in earnest. Greek television-news talk shows, which are often a cross between Meet the Press and The Jerry Springer Show, invited the deputy health minister, the mayor, the former prefect, the doctor, and various commentators to discuss the scandal. On one popular show, the mayor of Zakynthos said residents of the island, including some who had received a blindness benefit, had thrown yogurt at him—exhibiting good aim—in protest of his reforms. He said he considered the yogurt attack “a medal and an honor,” adding, “I don’t care about the political cost.” The mayor also claimed a priest on the island was one of those fraudulently receiving the blindness benefits.
“That is to say, he was reading the gospel?” commented one guest on the program.
The show’s moderator fumed with anger over the scandal.
“The Troika had to come for us to do such investigations?” he said to the television audience. “It’s an embarrassment. It makes you want to go crazy. It makes you want to say, ‘Good what’s happening to us, good what they’re doing to us,’ those who’ve come from the outside.”
Television pundits and the mayor called for a criminal investigation, with the doctor receiving the most vitriolic criticism. A few months after my visit, the doctor resigned from the hospital. Over the phone, he told me his decision had nothing to do with the “noise” about the blindness scandal. “I was ready to retire,” he said.
—
One afternoon in Zakynthos Town, I went for a walk in the city center, passing jewelry and designer clothing stores and cafés. At the time, there were no boarded up-stores or other signs of economic misery that were increasingly prevalent in Athens. Rather, the town appeared to be pretty well off. The city government may have long been broke, but the people living there seemed to be doing okay. I passed the offices of the island’s religious authorities, located near the mayor’s office, and decided to stop in and see if I could speak with someone about the spiritual state of the island. At the door, a man in a black robe asked me the purpose of my visit. I told him I was writing a story about “the blindness.”
I was introduced to the general vicar, Panagiotis Kapodistrias, who also wore a long black robe and had a graying beard. On his office wall hung a framed image of Jesus lying dead at the foot of the cross, pierced by two spears. I sat down across from the vicar at his desk, and he offered me a piece of baklava from “Constantinople,” as Greeks refer to Istanbul, where he’d recently visited the Ecumenical Patriarch, the spiritual head of Orthodox Christianity. As we spoke about the quality of the baklava, a Polish woman entered the office and asked for money. She had three children, she said, and couldn’t find work. She had made twenty-three euros a day over the summer unloading trucks, a job, she said, “only a man should have done.”
“I don’t ever see you in church,” the vicar said.
“I do go,” she replied.
“I’m not going to give you a lot,” the vicar told her. He filled out a little slip of paper for her, noting the size of the donation—fifty euros—which she could exchange for cash in another office.
“That’s a lot,” said the Polish woman. “I can live on that for two or three days.” She left the office, bowing toward the vicar. “Go with Jesus,” she said.
I turned on my recorder and he, like the others I interviewed, began unprompted.
“Greece, as we all know, is undergoing a crisis. The crisis appears to be economic and political, but deep down, it’s ethical.” Then he proceeded to blame the ethical problems on foreigners, in particular tourists. Zakynthos had an increasingly uneasy relationship with package tourism. In 2008, a group of drunken British tourists conducted an oral sex contest on a Zakynthos beach, outraging locals. Also that year, according to press reports, a Greek woman tried to set a drunken British tourist’s scrotum on fire after he exposed it to several local women at a nightclub. Tourism was a form of neocolonialism that corrupted local souls, according to the vicar. Zakynthos citizens, in the process of catering to the visitors by building inexpensive hotels, had become “the slave of the tourists,” he said. “This is how the crisis has arisen.” To exit it, he added, locals must avoid becoming one with the foreigner and return to what they truly are.
By this point, the cause of the country’s fiscal problems had become a hotly debated subject in Greece. There were many theories for why Greece was in trouble and who was responsible. For the rapidly rising far left, the Greek people were generally blameless vic
tims of inevitably doomed neoliberal policies that were benefiting the big capitalists at the expense of everyone else. For the rising extreme right, Jewish bankers and job-stealing immigrants were to blame. The two mainstream parties blamed each other until, due to a rapid decline in their popularity, they were forced to band together in a coalition in order to maintain power. For many, the Troika was most culpable. So was German chancellor Angela Merkel. Greece was the target of an international plan for economic plunder, many believed. This, however, was the first time I’d heard tourism (albeit quite raunchy tourism), an economic lifeblood for Greece, referred to as the source of the nation’s problems. All these explanations shared one commonality: they laid the blame elsewhere, often on outsiders. The tendency is partly understandable. Greece is a small country that has long been subject to foreign sway, and at the time, it was under the dominion of its foreign creditors. The vicar’s argument and others like it, however, proved alluring to the many Greeks who wished to avoid considering the extent to which they were responsible for their own decline. The vicar’s comments made me wonder what chances Greece had of improving its fate if this was the widespread nature of the self-examination taking place. Before I left his office, the vicar signed a book he had written on the theology of environmental protection and gave it to me. I briefly opened it to the introduction, which began: “Whether we want it or not, we are obliged before a common danger to coexist and to cooperate.” I thanked him for the present.
The next day was the feast day of St. Nicholas, and that morning I waited for the ferry departing for the Peloponnese. A stiff wind blew, churning the Ionian waters and sweeping cottony cumulus clouds across the crisp blue sky. In the town center, the modal sound of an Orthodox church service piping through speakers on the domed roof of St. Nicholas Church fluttered in the wind gusts. “Both now and ever and unto the ages of ages,” sang the vicar and other clerics. A recitation of the Lord’s Prayer washed over the city, mingling with the techno beats emanating from the outdoor cafés, where patrons huddled near heat lamps, smoking and sipping coffee. The sermon was about St. Nicholas, and his capacity for “unadulterated” love. On the main square, city workers hung white string lights in the form of a Christmas tree.
The Full Catastrophe Page 5