The Full Catastrophe (5 page)

After the woman and her husband finished lamenting their island’s politicians, she told me she had some bad news. Her grandmother didn’t want to speak to me after all. “She is very embarrassed and she’s afraid to talk because she knows the doctor,” she said. “The great characteristic of Zakynthos is the hypocrisy. They’re not willing to talk. They don’t want to confront the problems.” I asked if she could call her grandmother again and, taking the phone, I introduced myself as Demetri. That was apparently all that was necessary to change the woman’s mind. An elderly voice with a local dialect replied: “If someone comes and says, I will give you a retirement pay, will you say no? I’m poor and I’m sick. Now they cut it. And they want us to pay it back. But where will I find it?” When I suggested we talk in person, she said: “My Demetri, my door is always open to you.”

The granddaughter and I got in her car and left immediately. We drove out into the hilly countryside, past olive groves and eucalyptus trees, and pulled up in front of a one-story house. A small, plump woman wearing spotless white sneakers, a plaid robe, and an apron decorated with flower patterns emerged to greet us. We entered the house and in the hallway passed an icon of St. Dionysios of Zakynthos, a sixteenth-century archbishop honored for his extraordinary capacities of forgiveness, having forgiven even his brother’s murderer. We sat at the kitchen table and the grandmother offered me a Greek coffee. She began to talk without my having to ask any questions.

“If you have a godfather, you get baptized,” she said. “If you don’t have one, you don’t get baptized.” It took me a second to fully comprehend what she meant by this. To be baptized is to be rewarded. To have a godfather make this happen, well, you must sometimes pay. “The
rouspheti
does not cease to be,” she went on. “You give money to get the matters settled.” I should certainly
know about these things, being a journalist, she added. “If they gave you money, you would write that I was eighteen.”

“I wouldn’t lie,” I told her, defending my virtue, and then felt foolish for doing so.

“If they said to you, ‘Take these millions,’ you would put me down as sixteen!” she snapped back. She then made her voice quiet and weary. “Me, my child, I’m an old woman and you are a child. You are educated and I am uneducated. I always understand, though, that the money rules.” She raised her voice again and slapped the table. “Even Jesus himself was betrayed by his disciple, all for money!” She watched me scribbling this in my notebook. “Few people are honest, neither your mother, nor your child. But me, there’s nobody like me. Because I’m honest. You should know well. I don’t like lies.”

“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.