Evelina was standing in front of Agia Sophia. They hadn’t arranged it ahead of time, but they left the house at the same time and looked for one another in the street, to walk over together.
Minas grabbed her cheeks with both hands and gave her a quick kiss. His pants hung below his hips and the laces were loose on his Converse hi-tops.
—Just think about summer vacation, he whispered to her as they walked through the gate.
He reached out a hand and squeezed her hip.
—Pimplimi, she said, quoting the ancient Greek present transitive for fill.
—Gemo and plitho, he quoted back the two possible intransitive versions of that verb, with his usual confidence in his ancient Greek, and they laughed conspiratorially.
Evelina Dinopoulou, Minas Georgiou. They were sent to neighboring rooms.
The exams would be distributed in ten minutes.
The mothers were frantic, the students chewed their pens, trying to concentrate. The whole place buzzed with nerves.
Tasos, meanwhile, watched as the danger marched toward them. At the newspaper and out in the streets, he took the city’s pulse. Anyone with eyes in his head could see. Decisions were being made and those making them were thousands of kilometers away, playing Stratego and Monopoly; they’d set out the pieces and were rolling the dice.
If you looked down Agia Sophia Street toward the water, you would see a snippet of the tranquil sea that hugged the city. It was a bright, beautiful day. Old folks with bypasses were out taking their constitutionals along the waterfront. Others lazed in the sun. Spring was in the air.
On a day like this, living here felt like a privilege, not a prison sentence or a curse.
AND ALL THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
If Greece were a country where silence wasn’t hereditary, like genetic material.
If Gris had a protector.
If Greek politicians had more backbone and the great powers less of a tendency to impose their will.
If money and influence—that is, everything—hadn’t been at stake.
If the past taught us lessons; if there were play, fast forward, and rewind buttons for historical events.
If the answer were single and final.
If passivity in the face of injustice were a crime, and punished as such.
If Georgiou hadn’t given in to common sense.
If Teta had a life and not just a child.
If Dinopoulos aimed for the best case, and didn’t just avoid the lesser of two evils.
If Evthalia’s wishes were commands.
If Soukiouroglou lived his life with his body and not his mind.
Then, perhaps.
“I like my country,” the villager told the CBS correspondent. The statement seemed entirely logical and made no particular impression on the foreigner. He looked across the way at the eternal mountains. Spring was bursting into bloom. It smelled of damp soil and blossoming petals.
A triumphant light.
The American pressed the button.
Click.
He wanted to remember that moment, that place.
A NOTE FROM THE TRANSLATOR
The Scapegoat takes place during two key periods of recent Greek history: the Civil War in the late 1940s and the current financial crisis.
The Greek Civil War (1946–1949) was the final stage of a bitter civil strife that broke out shortly after the Axis occupation (1941–1944). With the support of a full-fledged British military intervention in December 1944, Greek anticommunists ousted left-wing resistance forces from a provisional National Union government. As a consequence, the former resistance fighters faced political persecution and a wave of “white terror” by royalist squads. This situation turned into an open civil war in late 1946: on the one side, the Greek government army, created by royalist officers and other far-right elements, including former Nazi collaborators; and on the other, the Democratic Army of Greece, comprised of former procommunist guerrilla fighters who had meanwhile fled to the mountains. The Greek Civil War was one of the first episodes of the Cold War. After the Truman doctrine was announced in early 1947, the Greek government received financial, military, and political support from the U.S. administration; on the other side, the left-wing guerrillas received a much more reluctant and covert support from the Soviet Union and the neighboring communist states.
In the midst of the civil war, an American journalist for CBS, George Polk (the model for Jack Talas in this book), was killed in circumstances that remain unexplained to this day. Polk was investigating atrocities on both sides, as well as calling the Americans to account for their support of the Greek government. His uncompromising attitude toward the truth has been honored posthumously in the George Polk Award, which is given annually to “intrepid, courageous reporters committed to doing whatever it takes to uncover matters of critical importance to an informed public and the very foundation of democratic society” (from the Polk Award’s website).
After Polk’s death, American diplomats, the military, and journalists placed considerable pressure on the Greeks to close the case. Two members of the Communist Party were accused of the crime, though it was later discovered that one was himself already dead at the time Polk was killed, while the other was not in Greece. The journalist Grigoris Staktopoulos (the model for Manolis Gris) was also accused, quickly tried, and convicted on very thin grounds. He served eleven years of a life sentence, was released in 1960, and died in 1998, having filed a petition in 1977 for the Supreme Court to overturn his conviction, claiming that his confession had been given under torture. His widow filed three more petitions after his death, in 1999, 2002, and 2006, each of which presented new evidence that challenged the prosecution’s case; all three petitions were rejected.
There are other layers of history in The Scapegoat as well. Thessaloniki, the city where the action is set, only became part of the Greek state in 1912, when it passed from Ottoman rule. Ten years later, the failure of an expansionist attempt in Asia Minor brought about 1.5 million Christians, most of them ethnically Greek, to Greece from Anatolia, while some 350,000 Muslims were deported to Turkey. Part of that population exchange involved the survivors of the genocide of Greeks in the Pontus region—among them Staktopoulos’s family. The story Manolis Gris’s mother tells in the novel of her family’s flight to “Salonica” (another name for Thessaloniki, used in this translation to distinguish sections set in the past from sections set in the present) reflects that experience.
The novel’s second central narrative, that of high school student Minas Georgiou, takes place in 2010, in the midst of a financial crisis that has also become a deepening social crisis. Social services in Greece—including the public education system—have been gutted in response to conditions set by the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund to loans extended to the Greek government. Minas’s reluctance to attend university can more fully be understood in the context of the bleak unemployment rates and sense of hopelessness facing his generation (in 2010, 33 percent of adults under twenty-five were unemployed; that rate has now reached nearly 60 percent). Many of the chapter titles in the book—“Schools Enlighten Only When They Burn,” “Get Your Hands Off Our Brains,” “Mother, There’s a War On Out There. I’ll Be Late”—are taken from graffiti painted on walls in cities all over Greece in recent years. The sit-in at Minas’s school, meanwhile, echoes the wave of student sit-ins prompted by the murder of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos by a police officer in central Athens in 2008. In the riots that followed Grigoropoulos’s death, Greeks, especially of Minas’s generation, expressed their frustration with the Greek state and the country’s uncertain future.
Perhaps most important are not the details of these historical settings, but the sense of history as a lived present that saturates the novel. In putting the story of Manolis Gris alongside the current crisis in Greece, Nikolaidou implicitly argues that the injustices of the past are still with us, and that scapegoating of all kinds—of political opponent
s, of immigrants, of the youth who will bear the brunt of the current financial crisis, even of Greece itself within the European Union—pervades the current moment.
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thodoros Papaggelis stood by my side from the first draft of this book to the last. I thank him for the words, the thoughts, and the love he has shown me. Edmund Keeley, Yiorgos Anastasiadis, Grigoris Staktopoulos, Yiorgos Kafiris: their books provided fuel for the writing of mine. Dimitris Tompaidis and Tatiana Halidou supplied me with Pontic words. Most of the graffiti I quote as chapter headings comes from buildings along Agios Dimitrios Street, Armenopoulou Street, on the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, on Agia Sophia Street, and on Theogenous Harisi Street. And my students—from the Korais School, the middle and high schools in Kato Poria, the middle schools in Provata, Skouratea, the Pallatidio middle school of Siderokastro, the Music School of Thessaloniki, the Experimental School of the University of Thessaloniki—taught me so much. I thank them all from the bottom of my heart. Eleni Boura is my editor, which is to say my person. I bow before her professional passion.
Sakis Seferas makes my life easier and more fun. Thus, I can write.
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A novel like this one, which involves extensive research on the part of the author, involves just as much on the part of the translator. I thank Sophia Nikolaidou, then, first of all, for giving me cause to delve into moments in Greek history that had been obscure to me—and to revisit the streets and alleyways of Thessaloniki, a city dear to me. I thank her, too, for her generous reading of this translation.
I would also like to thank Evi Haggipavlu for first handing this novel to me so excitedly, for carefully reading over my finished translation, and for the many, many conversations about pedagogy and politics in between; Panayiotis Pantzarelas and Andreas Galanos for always being willing to join an impromptu book club; Dimitris Kousouris for his help with historical details; Amanda Doxtater, Lanie Millar, and Marc Schachter for their truly amazing edits on parts of the book, and for the community of thinkers they have been for me over the past few years; and, as always, David and Helen Emmerich, the most dedicated of editors, whose generosity as parents goes beyond what any child could ever hope for.
READING GROUP GUIDE
1. At the heart of this book is the issue of scapegoating and sacrifice: how is it that individuals and nations end up taking the blame for events that have many complicated causes? Can this ever be justified? The novel explores these questions from numerous perspectives. Were there some you were more sympathetic to than others? Are there any circumstances where convicting an innocent man like Gris could be the right, or best possible, decision, in your opinion?
2. The character of Manolis Gris remains something of a cipher—we learn about him through other characters but never hear from him directly. What do you make of Nikolaidou’s decision to present him in this way?
3. The different female characters of the book have made very different choices when it comes to career and family, and have had very different fates. And, surprisingly, the younger characters are not necessarily more committed to a life outside the home than older characters like Evthalia. What do you think of the choices each individual made, and the results?
4. Minas refuses to consider going to university in part because he’s sick of tests and the effect of testing culture on his education (the pat answers, the hours spent cramming). The value of a college degree in an uncertain economy is a real question for Greek students like Minas, but also for Americans, especially given the cost of higher education. What are your thoughts about an education geared towards tests and a degree? Does it leave students ill-prepared for the real world?
5. One aspect of the book that may be surprising is the student sit-ins at the high school, which are a far more common occurrence in Greece than in American schools. What did you think of the student occupation? Were you skeptical about it, or did it seem like a legitimate form of political protest?
6. In the novel, the charismatic teacher Marinos Soukiouroglou initially seems like a champion of independent thinking and an unconventional approach to education. But that view is challenged when Minas presents his final report on the murder of Jack Talas. How did your understanding of Souk’s character change over the course of the book?
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