The Scapegoat (15 page)

Evelina spread her bag out on the grass and sat down.

—I wouldn’t recommend that, I warned. Stray dogs shit there.

—How much of a jerk are you?

—Why? Because I’m trying to keep your pants clean?

—Now the thing I’m going to remember about being here is dog shit. What are you doing?

—Bringing you to someplace better.

I put my jacket on a fragment of marble, the one with the rosettes and the piece of gum stuck to the bottom.

—Is this part of a column? An ancient one?

—Probably. Move over so I can sit, too.

Spotlights flooded the place.

—It’s like moonlight, Evelina said. All that’s missing is Byron and the moon-drenched maid.

She leaned her head on my shoulder and launched into the folk song Dokou had started the concert with. She doesn’t have a great voice, and she knows it. Which means she usually doesn’t sing. But she’s got soul. She’s got a fire inside, you can tell. She squeezed her eyes shut and turned up the volume. She was living it. Her forehead glistened. What I was smelling wasn’t her perfume, it was her skin. It made me dizzy.

I bent down and kissed her. Don’t ask why, I don’t know. She turned toward me and stuck in her tongue. Hot saliva and a sweet taste of Evelina and bubble gum.

Somewhere dogs were barking.

—Turns out you’re brand-name, she said.

I didn’t have a ready response, so I just shut up.

I had no choice in the matter. One French kiss and she had me on standby.

Grandpa Dinopoulos, born in 1922, was twenty-six years old during Gris’s trial and is eighty-nine now. He lives in a penthouse apartment on Ermou. From his veranda he can see Agia Sophia if he twists his head. The apartment was bought with his wife’s inheritance. She was younger than him and everyone assumed
she would outlive him, but she set off before him
along the eternal road
, as Grandma Evthalia says.

Statistics suggest that most widowers wither away, but Grandpa Dinopoulos, a widower for the past twenty years, is living proof to the contrary. He wakes up at six every morning, drinks a Greek coffee with lots of sugar, dunks his koulouri in the froth, and sets out on his walk through the apartment. His doctor has forbidden him to walk outside, since he’s unsteady on his feet and sometimes has dizzy spells.

He wears a vest and pocket watch over his pajamas. He does the rounds of the entire apartment three times. Kitchen, living room, dining room, office, bedroom. When he’s done, he goes out onto the balcony to get some sun and feel the breeze on his face.

Now that his wife is dead, Elena, from Georgia, takes care of him. Her legs support the old man and the apartment, too. She’s his nurse, his cleaning lady, his cook. All his relatives worship the ground she walks on.

Grandpa Dinopoulos doesn’t eat much. He spends his mornings reading in his office and pores over the newspaper with a magnifying glass every evening, seated in his favorite armchair. He has opinions about everything and likes to share them with others, though these days he rarely has the opportunity. He’s a walking library and a living museum. He knows everything we read about in books, only he knows it first hand. He has the equanimity of a person who’s lived through a world war, a civil war, and plenty of political changeovers. Nothing phases him. He believes people can withstand pretty much anything.

He hasn’t practiced law in years, but continues to advise his son, who inherited his law practice, along with a Rolodex full of clients. In the beginning his son wasn’t bothered by the father’s interventions, he was glad for the help. But Jesus Christ, he was nearing retirement age himself. It didn’t look good for him to still be accepting advice from his father.

Evelina and her grandfather aren’t on the best of terms. No matter how much her mother sang her praises, it took the old man ten years to reconcile himself to the fact that his law practice would eventually fall into a woman’s hands. Only last year did Grandpa Dinopoulos finally write a card to his granddaughter in a trembling hand congratulating her on coming first in her class, and expressing his wishes that she continue to thrive and prosper and accomplish good works—even if he personally doubted how much a woman could achieve.

Evelina explained all that to me, more or less, when I asked if she would take me to see her grandfather. At first she didn’t want to, he talked too much and it bored her. Besides, there was the principle of the thing, since she thought it irresponsible of Soukiouroglou to assign me a research project so close to the date of the exams that would determine our future.

—What’s his deal, she said, wasting your time on something so pointless?

Evelina is as stubborn as Mom. She thinks her opinion is superior, tries to push her ideas on others, doesn’t listen to anyone. It took me seven text messages and half an hour of close tracking on Facebook to bring her around, and she almost drove me crazy with her LOLs and OMGs in the meantime.

Evelina is like a lion. The lion is king of the desert, and can pretty much do whatever it wants. That’s Evelina. She absolutely never backs down until she gets her way. If you try to stop her she’ll tear you to shreds. I can say under oath: if there’s ever a nuclear disaster and only one human being survives, it’ll be her. Handling her takes skill and subtlety, not brute force. We’re talking hours of conversation and negotiation.

In the end, though, she did arrange a meeting, and even came with me. Elena opened the door. We’d come during the old man’s afternoon walk, and we watched as he dragged his feet through
the rooms, braking at every turn, then gathering speed and racing down the hall.

—Advanced Parkinson’s, Evelina whispered in my ear. It takes a while for the engine to warm up. But when he gets going, there’s no catching him. If he stops, he’ll fall, so he always touches the walls to steady himself, even though it embarrasses him.

The old man was approaching the living room. Elena ran over, wedged her body under his, and eased him into his armchair.

—What a wreck of a human I’ve become, the old man commented.

He had on striped pajamas, mustard and red, like the ones people wear in movies. His big bald head had a strip of hair around the edge, and the veins on his hands bulged. But what I noticed most were his eyes. A person’s eyes don’t age. Mom learned that from one of her documentaries, that the eyes are the only part of the human body that doesn’t age. I checked with Grandma’s, too.

—Well? he said, obviously thrilled at suddenly having an audience.

—Grandpa, this is my friend from school, Minas Georgiou. He’s writing a research paper about Manolis Gris. He wants to ask you some questions.

—I see, said her grandfather.

Evelina kicked my shin.

—Say something, she hissed.

—Mr. Dinopoulos, I’d be interested in interviewing you about the events of the trial. I would want to record our conversation, to make sure I get everything right. Of course you can check the final text. It’s a student paper about the Gris trial. I’ll be presenting it at our school at the end of the quarter. And if you’d like to attend, you would be the guest of honor.

As I spoke, the old man pulled a magnifying glass out of his vest pocket and started examining me through it.

—You remind me of someone, was his response.

Now it was my turn to kick Evelina.

—Grandpa, she coaxed.

—I’d be very interested in recording your opinion of the events, I plowed on. You’re the only person involved in the case who never made a public statement.

—What’s done is done. Water under the bridge, last year’s sour grapes, the old man said, seeming bored.

—That’s not true, as you know better than anyone, I tried to challenge him. What matters is that justice be served.

—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.