The Scapegoat

by Sophia Nikolaidou

  —Evthalia, Evthalia Mitsikidou.

  The old man was drumming his nails on the arm of his chair. He’d brought the magnifying glass back up to his face and was scrutinizing me again.

  —If you didn’t have that silly ponytail, I never would have made the connection, he said, laughing with a kind of a snort. The devil take me if you’re not Evthalia’s grandson. Your face is like hers, and the way you move your head when you talk. How is Evthalitsa these days? he asked.

  I glanced at the clock on the wall, calculating. The Gris affair could wait. For the old man, Grandma came first.

  —Grandma, do you know Mr. Dinopoulos, Evelina’s grandfather?

  Grandma was frying eggs in margarine. She put them on a plate and poured the extra melted margarine over them, then diced an onion for the salad. She sprinkled it with water and salt to take out the worst of its sting.

  —We were neighbors. We lived across the street from one another, she answered, without pausing in her task.

  —I went to see him yesterday, Evelina took me. About Gris. I told you about my project, right?

  She crumbled feta over the salad with her fingers.

  —He guessed right away that I’m your grandson. He says I look like you. He seemed kind of strange.

  Grandma smiled.

  —Well, he was a very well-respected lawyer in his day. Gris accused lots of people of intrigue, but never Dinopoulos. They had some kind of a friendship, or at least that’s what the newspapers claimed. Dinopoulos used to go and visit him in prison, even after the verdict.

  —What’s he like? As a person, I mean?

  Under different circumstances, Grandma would have put down the olive oil and the oregano. She would have sat me down at the table so we could talk vis-à-vis and face-to-face, as she likes to say. Grandma believes that people shouldn’t talk without looking one another in the eye. I watched the hunch in her back rise and fall nervously. She fished in a jar for olives, took out some spicy pickles and went on decorating the salad.

  —I couldn’t say. I knew him when he was young. People change.

  —Come on, Grandma. You’re always bragging about your infallible instincts with people.

  Grandma wiped her hands on a dish towel and started setting the table. When she answered, she seemed almost out of breath.

  —He’s very bright. Worked like a dog. Was never accused of the slightest irregularity. A family man, with traditional values. Talked a big game, but always followed through.

  She served the food. She had no intention of continuing that conversation. Whatever else she had to say on the subject, she was already saying on the inside.

  —Did you know our grandparents knew one another?

  Evelina shrugged.

  We’ve been hanging out for the past week or so. Her mother apparently considers me a good influence. When we were eight years old, Evelina told her mother, I always have the best conversations with Minas. He’s the smartest kid in our class.

  —Just look at our little grown-ups, her mother said to mine, back then. Mrs. Dinopoulou also told Mom that Evelina was the one who put that valentine in my bag in first grade, the paper heart that said, Minas, will you marry me? on it.

  At some point, though, we sort of stopped having anything to do with one another. Evelina hung out with more popular kids; I didn’t meet her requirements. It bugged her that I always got the better grades, always scored just a few points higher than she did. Last year she finally got what she wanted and calmed down. The fact that she’s in charge of the attendance book this year is proof that she finally beat me. After being runner-up for years, now she’s getting ready to be flag-bearer at the school parade.

  Evelina’s one of those people who needs constant validation. No amount of praise is ever enough. She dopes herself like a race horse. She thinks she knows the truth just because she knows how to pick the right answers on exams. Which isn’t all that great an accomplishment, if you ask me.

  There will always be someone who’s better. Someone is always going to know more. Evelina is a right-answer machine, as long as she’s already learned the answer from one of our textbooks. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard for her to deal with Soukiouroglou—because he’s unpredictable. He asks unexpected questions and accepts bizarre answers, as long as you support your position with evidence. Souk doesn’t test our knowledge, he takes it as a given. What he cares about is how we think. His mind doesn’t work like other people’s, he’s full of incendiary ideas and loves to provoke. The atmosphere in his classroom can get pretty tense. Not everyone can take it, and not everyone is interested in supporting a position. If it’s in the answer key, that’s good enough for them. Souk doesn’t even read answer keys. Which is a big problem if you’re in a hurry to find out the answers.

  THROUGH OTHER EYES

  —Sir, I read the pages you recommended.

  Minas’s tone was one of mild despair.

  —So, I need to quote others’ opinions and cite my sources properly.

  He didn’t know what else to say.

  —You think that’s enough? Soukiouroglou asked. Just cite some sources and you’re through? That sounds like an easy way out.

  —But, sir, I’m going to discuss the events, too. I’ve been investigating the causal relationships.

  Minas couldn’t remember precisely where he’d heard that phrase, but it seemed to suit the occasion, so he went ahead and tacked it on.

  —Investigating the causal relationships? Where on earth did that come from? Someone less well-disposed might call your language borrowed.

  He gave Minas a look and decided the conversation was worth pursuing.

  Years earlier he had spent a semester of unspeakable loneliness in Bristol. The historians at the university there, or at least the ones he met, were all provocatively postmodern, and avoided mentioning events. They preferred to talk about the narrative construction of history. Some wore moth-eaten sweaters and ragged slacks, but others wore bow ties to class, men of privilege with no need to prove anything to anyone, who considered power dynamics the sole driving force behind history.

  —Historical events arrive to us already interpreted, they’re trickier than we think, he remembered one graduate student saying, a young man with a bowl cut, wire-rimmed glasses, and a healthy dose of self-confidence. The historical continuum has no beginning, middle, or end, he proclaimed. The ideology of periodization is way out of date. It’s time we recognized that. We can’t just divide history into neat slices. History is a construction. Narrative would be the best word for it.

  None of this was entirely foreign to Soukiouroglou, but in Bristol it seemed more appealing. Perhaps it was the unbearable wetness of the place, or the solitude, the fact that he never heard Greek being spoken on the street. He even dreamed in English. It wasn’t something he enjoyed—on the contrary, it was a heavy price to pay.

  He wrote two articles while he was there and took notes for more, but nothing could make up for the nights he spent shut up in the cell of a room they gave him, his gaze trained on the wall. As was natural, he became even more suspicious in the face of what was commonly known as truth. So many of his fundamental certainties had been shaken. And yet deep down, he knew it was all not much more than intellectual gymnastics. He didn’t see the wisdom in radical skepticism.

  On his return to Greece, he was a different person altogether. Fani was the first to notice. Your voice changed, she’d said. It’s deeper, less certain.

  That lesson from his days in Bristol was what he wanted to share with Minas, whose paper he had conceived as an exercise in recognizing that there were multiple versions of reality. A simple statement of the various viewpoints on the case wasn’t what Souk had in mind.

  Souk’s colleagues couldn’t believe how slippery he was, pretending to be some kind of monk and then suddenly showing up in the society column in a tender tête-a-tête with Fani Dokou. The photograph that got published the morning after the concert showed them leaning in towar
d one another. Rumors flew, his colleagues jumped to all kinds of conclusions.

  But the joking and laughter stopped abruptly when Souk walked into the teachers’ office, silent and obviously exhausted. He had sunglasses on and didn’t bother saying hello to anyone. They observed his entrance, exchanging glances and committing his movements to memory, as fodder for later conversations. Souk opened his locker, got out his things, and made photocopies for class. He still hadn’t said a word to anyone by the time he headed down to morning prayer. He never crossed himself during prayer, a stance that had attracted comments of all sorts during the years he’d been working at the school.

  He was in no mood for small talk or smiles. He stood behind the rows of students, alone, entirely alone, with an armful of books shielding his stomach.

  He had missed Fani. They tried to keep up on the phone, but sometimes things got in the way: concert tours, travel, resounding silences initiated by one or the other or both. But then at some point they would simply pick up the thread again, start right where they’d left off, in the middle of a sentence, telling stories to fill in the gaps. Fani told him about experiences she’d had, things she’d done and seen, while he mostly talked about what he’d been reading. They never intruded on one another’s lives, perhaps out of discreteness, perhaps out of discomfort. Souk also talked on the phone with her son. Nikolas Dokos didn’t know Souk all that well, but the boy clearly had a soft spot for him. He was intrigued by the unlikely combination of the teacher’s austere, almost ascetic personality and the abrupt flights of his thought—his unconventional mind, his biting irony, the way he toppled the walls of established logic, overturning everything. Souk didn’t pretend to be a revolutionary, like most of the musicians Nikolas had grown up around. He never launched into long diatribes against the system, he didn’t try to one-up others by being the most radical person around. He said what he thought, didn’t hold back with his opinions, and didn’t change them to suit the circumstances. When you asked nothing of him, he gave you everything. But if you put a knife to his throat, he’d dig his heels in like a mule.

  Nikolas would accept advice from Souk that he wouldn’t from Fani. Mostly because there was nothing preachy about him: his relentless irony undermined everything. Nikolas told his mother he didn’t find her friend boring, like all the tutors with their fancy degrees whom Fani paid through the nose to teach her child to give the right answers. And while she was happy that Marinos had developed this channel of communication—even at a distance—with her sourpuss of a son, it worried her, too: even she preferred a more conventional approach to the issue of her son’s education.

  So when she saw Nikolas hanging on Marinos’s every word that night after the concert, agreeing with whatever the teacher said, she sent him away. Nikolas went off in a huff. For the thousandth time, his mother was spoiling his fun.

  Fani leaned toward her friend, whom she hadn’t seen in a long time. He was the one she called with unwashed hair, in pajamas and slippers, when Nikolas was driving her up the wall, but also when she had some important job prospect that she wanted to discuss. She was eternally grateful that she’d never shared a bed with him, as she had with most of her friends, artists with high ambitions and low self-awareness. He wasn’t a very physical person, or at least that’s what she used to think, when she was an undergraduate and would watch him in the lecture hall, the graduate student and teaching assistant for the course. He seemed to be wrapped in barbed wire. The other students didn’t like him, called him a leper, or uptight. They made fun of her for talking to him. But Fani liked how Souk kept his distance. He shunned the crowd. Though in the end he paid for it.

  —Why don’t you have a job at the university? she asked abruptly that night after the concert.

  He showed no surprise at the question. It was one Fani often returned to. From the moment his advisor, Asteriou, had retired, Fani wouldn’t let it rest.

  —I’m not cut out for that kind of institution, Souk replied.

  —You’re wasting your life at the school, Fani insisted.

  —Who says?

  —I do. What on earth are you doing there? I mean, I’m sure you’re doing those brats some good, I see how Nikolas is with you. But you’re made for other things.

  —Mmmm, he murmured ironically.

  —You’re a fool, Fani said, starting to get mad. A stubborn fool. The king of fools, the fool to end all fools.

  —For a bard, your prose isn’t half bad, either, he teased.

  Fani tickled him in the ribs. She liked touching him. Sometimes she pinched, or sank her nails into his flesh, or, like now, tested him with a tickle. She liked seeing him pull back in a panic. His body was on alert, it wouldn’t stand for any incursion, even in the form of a caress.

  —I’m not cut out for all that, he repeated. Running around to conferences, padding my c.v., making connections. I’m a solitary researcher.

  —Okay, Lucky Luke.

  Fani clinked her glass against his. After a concert a few drinks helped her relax. But even with alcohol, she could never get to sleep before dawn.

  —You don’t understand, Souk insisted. You think things would be better there.

  —Yes, I do, Fani answered without hesitation.

  He weighed her with his eyes.

  —I’m not going back there, even if they burn me alive.

  —Well, I can’t argue with that, Fani said, and let the subject rest.

  Grandpa Dinopoulos was walking slowly from the olive tree at one end of the veranda to the mallows at the other and back again. Elena helped ease him into the turn. The weather was lovely, the sun caressed his bald spot and eyes, warmed his pajamas. This brief excursion onto the veranda had lifted his mood. So much so that he was considering asking Elena to read him a few pages from the penal code. It might give her some trouble, but she’d manage, she was diligent and compliant, and her Greek wasn’t bad. He was already daydreaming of the moment when he would sink into his armchair and listen.

  —Could you bring me my binoculars? he asked.

  Elena sat him down in his chair on the veranda. A gorgeous day, the old man thought, closing his eyes.

  How could I have imagined, he wondered. Back when I was so anxious all the time, when I thought work was everything. When I spent my days strategizing. When I confused unimportant things for important ones.

  Grandpa Dinopoulos raised the binoculars to his eyes. On sunny days when he could sit and daydream outside on the balcony, this was his morning entertainment: watching the passersby and his neighbors, the activity on the street and in the apartments across the way, whenever a curtain parted. He turned his gaze to the tables on the sidewalk outside Terkenlis, the sweet shop on the corner. That’s where Elena bought his favorite tsourekia covered in white chocolate. She brought them home still warm in the box, and he liked to touch them with his hands, stick a finger in the frosting and bring it to his mouth. Buying a whole tsoureki for a few fingerfuls of frosting struck Elena as a waste, but then there weren’t many pleasures left to the old man. The manhandled sweet would end up at the Georgian housekeeper’s apartment, where she gave it to her kids and neighbors.

  Grandpa Dinopoulos watched the morning customers at the tables set out on the corner of Agia Sophia Street and Ermou. Middle-aged couples, a few extremely old women, some university students. Evthalia and her girlfriends had taken a spot at the corner table. He recognized her from her knitted suit; she’d always liked bright colors. This one was a roof-tile red that caught the eye, particularly as she was surrounded by her friends’ gray, sky-blue, and salmon-colored jackets. Evthalia was lecturing them, he could tell by the way her head bobbed, and the rest were listening, most likely agreeing.

  Grandpa Dinopoulos put down the binoculars with a sigh. How could he possibly have imagined, over half a century earlier when work was his whole life, that the sight of a suit in roof-tile red would be enough to make his day?

  1948 AND BEYOND

  “WITH EVERYTHING THEY�
�RE DOING, THEY MIGHT MAKE ME HAVE AN OPINION”

  MARGARET TALAS, MOTHER OF JACK TALAS

  Each child is born with its character already in place. Teachers and missionaries like to think they tame souls. What do they know? They’re all men, and most of them childless. They think character is something you can shape, that punishments or encouraging words actually make a difference.

  Bullshit, darling.

  As soon as you take your child in your arms you know. From how it cries and nurses and sleeps. You know how much it’s going to put you through from that very first moment. Jack is a perfect example: he was as stubborn and hardheaded as they come.

  —What a beautiful baby, my mother-in-law crowed. He sleeps like an angel.

  But when he was less than a month old I saw what his anger looked like: face blue from screaming, legs so stiff he looked like a dry branch. He didn’t know how to talk, so he shrieked until we figured out what he wanted. In all the years that followed he didn’t change a bit. If he set his mind on something, we all had to get out of the way.

  My other boy, Mike, wasn’t like that. He went along with whatever his older brother wanted, he didn’t like to fight. They slept in the same room, shared clothes and toys. Mike used to grind his teeth in his sleep, I could hear it at night, and Jack would twist and turn so that in the morning his sheets would be tangled into a ball.

  Jack excelled at everything. He was the best student in his class, and had a shelf full of sports trophies. People loved him, but they were jealous, too. At school and in the neighborhood, Jack’s reputation made things hard for Mike. Everyone compared them. It wasn’t fair, but that’s how people are, darling. Jack just laughed, and Mike learned to grit his teeth and bear it.

  The day Jack told us he was going to be a radio reporter, we were sitting right here on the sofa, listening to the radio, as a matter of fact. I scolded him for not taking off his shoes, but he was in a hurry to tell us what was going to happen—that’s how he said it, since the decision had been made and there was no changing his mind.