The Scapegoat (22 page)

The General took his leave, certain that he would be seeing the young man again, in a higher position, very soon. And sure enough, within the year Tasos Georgiou was promoted to editor. By the time he became editor-in-chief, the General was only a name.

The Gris trial occupied the interest of journalists for far longer than it was front-page news. For many years, whenever a reporter wanted to try his hand at a difficult case, he would open the file on Gris. Every so often new evidence came to light. The journalists were primarily interested in intrigues and conspiracies. They went looking for abuses of political power, secret agreements, contradictory evidence. Lawyers sifted through the proceedings, pointing out gaps and contradictions.

Those who believed in the rule of law, particularly those who liked to think the police force does its job, were exasperated by these jeremiads. The case was closed. Anyone still trying to unearth evidence wasn’t to be trusted.

Ach
, said the people in the neighborhood, who fed on others’ misery.
It destroyed his mother, she couldn’t bear it
. The old goats who’d shunned the family all those years only remembered Evgnosia after the fact. The poor thing, shut up in the nuthouse, an unmarried girl. They sat by the fire with their needlework, pouring out expressions of compassion and warmth. Her misfortune kept their conversations going for years.

As for Violeta,
she became a lawyer, just think of it. Running back and forth to the courthouse all day long, how could she take care of a husband, she must have ended up an old maid
.

The family house was boarded up after Evgnosia was taken away. The paint on the shutters flaked from the rain, the garden ran riot, weeds sprang up everywhere. Eventually it was rented by an accomplished seamstress. She opened the curtains to let in the sunlight, held rows of pins in her mouth, kneeled on the floor to take in hems. There was a table beside her sewing machine covered with a tablecloth of starched finery, embroidered with flowers and edged with lace. Whenever a customer commented on it, she would say that she’d found it in the house when she came, along with a bunch of old things, torn clothes and unused scraps of fabric. She washed it with green soap, scrubbed it for hours, and in the end the handiwork shone through. It was tarnished by a faint shadow, an old stain that had seeped into the fabric. There, under the box with her spools of thread. She couldn’t bear to let such a fine piece of work go unused. So she set the box over it, to hide the flaw.

An old woman who’d lived in the neighborhood her whole life told the seamstress that the tablecloth had been part of Kyra-Maria’s dowry. The rest of the women nodded their heads, and said Kyra-Maria’s laundry had always been sparkling white, all the neighbors used to remark on it, and the linens so orderly on the line, clean white nightgowns and underwear tucked away on the back lines where it wouldn’t be seen. She had unmarried girls at home and took care
. Perhaps that’s why the gypsies stole her
laundry, it was too clean, and the embroidery too fine
, added one woman who still remembered the event.

Ever since disaster had struck the family, everyone had only good things to say about them. An old woman with white hair remembered the day of the funeral. Manolis had been in prison only a year and they brought him to give his mother a last kiss. The house was full of neighbors, still there from the vigil the night before. The coffin was on the table in the living room, and the older women crossed themselves and raised the icon to their eyes. They’d been reading prayers all night—someone had brought a Bible and they flipped to random pages, it didn’t matter, they were all holy words, anything would suit the occasion. The two girls sat on either side. Their eyes were dry; they had run out of tears.

Outside it was pouring rain, a true storm. Water came in through the cracks and the walls ran with damp, droplets licking the whitewash. They had put out rags at the front door, but no matter how much people wiped their feet the mud still stuck, covering the floor.

Manolis came in.

His hands were tied with rope. That detail struck them, and they talked about it later in their homes. There was a dull look in his eye, like the bottom of the sea in the afternoon. His eyes were snuffed candles and his skin was pale, since now he lived locked up in basement cells. The widows bit their lips. They knew he’d adored his mother, and worried he might die on the spot and be left on their hands.

Manolis leaned over the coffin as if it were the hull of a boat. People later said the police had gotten him drunk before he came, Tzitzilis had made sure he wouldn’t know what was happening and wouldn’t feel a thing. Manolis never cried a tear.

He paid no attention to what his sisters said, just stared straight into the coffin at his mother, who smelled of soap. Evgnosia had insisted on bathing her corpse with a clean towel.
Violeta was wracked with grief, incapable of helping. In the end Evgnosia got out the tin basin, the one her mother used to fill with sand where she’d plant candles for the dead on the Day of Lights. She found the grave clothes Kyra-Maria had chosen ahead of time,
This is what I want to be buried in
, she’d said, and wrapped them up in the shroud. It’s what her mother had done before her, Evgnosia’s grandmother from Trabzon whom neither of the girls had ever met. The women of their family never left loose threads to their children.

Evgnosia turned the house upside-down but couldn’t find Kyra-Maria’s wedding ring anywhere. The girls never realized it had been sold. Lawyers cost money, even the most compassionate have expenses of their own. And then there were bribes to be paid to clerks and various intermediaries for some document or a few minutes of visiting time. That’s how mothers were in those days, particularly refugee mothers, Pontic women who had come to the country with nothing but their souls in their mouths. They held their families in their fists. Whatever needed to be done, they did it themselves.

Kyra-Maria was buried in a cheap box, they had no money for a better one. Nails poked out of the sides and the unfinished wood was rough to the touch. It didn’t matter, it would do the job. There were fresh flowers from the garden, roses their mother had planted with her own hands, red and so sweet that the smell of them in the living room almost made you faint. There were chrysanthemums and daisies, too, that the neighbor women brought from their yards—especially those who had spoken badly of her in the past. And it was they who supported the girls in their trouble. They knocked on the door every day, brought food, whatever each of them had cooked for her family. They found excuses: wanting Evgnosia to try a new recipe, or celebrating a name day or holiday.

After her mother’s death Evgnosia quickly let things run to seed. She would visit the grave each morning and evening to
polish the marble with a clean cloth, and yet the house gathered dust and grime. At first in the corners and under the beds, though the whole floor had shone while their mother was alive. Then everywhere. The elder daughter simply withered away. She lived on water, prayers, and a handful of crumbs a day.

Violeta returned each afternoon to a cold house. Her last name now carried a stigma, there wasn’t a person left who didn’t know whose sister she was. She heard them whispering behind her back. Her pride became a suit of armor—but when she got home and took it off, she would collapse in a heap.

For a while she kept setting the table as their mother had taught them, with a tablecloth, a jug of water, forks and knives laid out on the napkins. But Evgnosia no longer sat with her to eat. And so bit by bit the tablecloth was forgotten, the napkins went unwashed, old food stuck to the fabric; Violeta didn’t have the patience to scrub at the stains. Soon enough she just came home and ate bread and cheese in bed, not even bothering to shake the crumbs from the sheets.

Evgnosia was spirited off
, the old women in the neighborhood said.
An evil shadow stood at her side, she was touched by the angel of death
. Eventually she stopped talking: no matter how hard Violeta tried to insist, not a word would cross her sister’s lips. She wasted away from crying and lack of food. The neighborhood women still knocked on the door, but Evgnosia no longer got up to answer. She spent her days in a chair. She no longer even went to the cemetery. She just sat and stared at the flaking whitewash on the wall, and combed her hair, not with a proper comb, but with an ivory hair clip. She wore the same nightgown day and night. She stopped washing.

Violeta tried to feed her. Gently at first, and then not so gently anymore. She stirred the soup with a spoon, told stories to coax her older sister. Once, tired of sweeping up fallen hair, she tried to take the clip away and Evgnosia bit her hand, hard enough that it bled. Violeta had been raised with caresses. Her family scolded
her, even punished her, but no one had ever raised a hand against her. They suckled her
on milk and honey
, as her mother used to sing as a lullaby.

At some point the younger sister recalled that the clip had been their mother’s. In fact, she had been wearing it on the day they fled from the old house, in Trabzon. Its teeth had broken long ago, but their mother kept it in a drawer for years, she couldn’t bear to throw it away. In those days women rarely threw things away, mattresses and pots and pans passed from generation to generation. Who knows what Kyra-Maria was thinking in holding on to that broken comb. She ran a tight ship, took care of her belongings, didn’t waste. She turned old rags into cloth bags for storing hilopites and trahanas. She saved leftover bits of thread in case they came in handy somewhere. Spoiled fruit became compotes and spoon sweets. The lentils Violeta turned her nose up at got passed off on the third day as lentil rice.
We don’t throw anything out
, was the law of the household.

Violeta didn’t want them to take Evgnosia to the asylum. But the older sister stubbornly refused to open her mouth. It was as if someone had sealed it shut with a trowel and mud.

At night, when Evgnosia closed her eyes, Violeta’s stayed open. She felt as if the walls were closing in. There was only one solution, and she knew it. She signed the paper.

Evgnosia was shut up in Lembeti a year after her mother’s death. Manolis, in solitary confinement, never heard the news.

The outside world was far away. If you were to ask him what life was like before the event, he’d have forgotten.

MINAS

Evelina started crying during Latin class. We were doing grammar exercises, which is her forte. A boring subject, just like our teacher. Grandma says classical philologists
know their letters, which is more than you can say for the rest of those backward literature teachers
. So what? Sure, they know all about the optative and the supine, but if they have to talk about something besides the lesson plan, they throw up their hands in despair.

Dad says most teachers haven’t read a book since they were at university. As soon as their diploma is in its frame, they abandon learning altogether. They teach everything and study nothing.
For their kind, that’s not a contradiction
, he says, just to annoy Grandma. And it works.

Grandma is aware of their shortcomings, but she still supports her fellow educators.
Teachers can be ignorant know-it-alls, but they also tackle a challenge no parent dares attempt: to walk into a classroom full of raging adolescents and keep them glued to their seats for forty minutes straight
. Grandma’s claws come out if she thinks someone’s attacking her crew.

At any rate, Evelina was sobbing, actually sobbing. The Latin teacher just nodded.
It’s that time of year
, she said. Every year after Christmas the seniors break down. They suddenly hear time ticking backwards, and the sound of the second hand can drive you crazy if you know you’re not on top of your game. Tears, shouting, nerves, it’s all part of the program, as anyone who teaches the senior class knows.

But Evelina isn’t the type to cry. Not in front of other people, anyway. Nothing even happened, the Latin teacher just told us to write out the abstract supine of
vixit
. It didn’t matter what
the exercise was, she could’ve said “Good morning” and Evelina would have burst into tears. Before she even got a word down on the paper, it was soaked. Her back shook, and you could hear the sobs all the way in the very last row.

That’s where I sit. No one bothers me there, and I can stretch out my legs. I can stare at her bra strap all I want. She wears brightly colored bras, cherry red, or purple with little butterflies. Her skin is the color of a peach, it makes you want to take a bite right out of her. Right there, on the curve of her shoulder.

The girl next to her gave her a hug, and the Latin teacher paused her lesson. She had a speech ready for the situation. Blah blah blah,
composure
. Blah blah blah,
I’m confident you’ll all do well
.

Evelina sniffled, the teacher handed her a tissue and then wrote the future passive infinitive of
vidit
on the board. We had lots to get through and she wasn’t going to waste any more time on nonsense.

During break the other girls crowded around her. Evelina couldn’t explain what had happened. She shook her hair out, lion-style. For the first time, I noticed her foot tapping.
It’s cram school
, she said,
four hours every day, not even a donkey could work that hard, much less a human being
. And those practice exams every Sunday, the alarm clock ringing in her ear, it was too much, all she dreamed of anymore was for the fucking exams to be over so she could sleep. The other girls nodded,
what the fuck
, they all knew exactly what she meant.

I know what’s wrong. In two months she’ll be eighteen. You can’t be eighteen years old and always do everything right. It can’t last. Grandma says it, too, but Mom gets mad and shuts her up with a look. She thinks it won’t occur to me on my own if I don’t hear it from Grandma.