At twenty to eleven he bummed a cigarette off a truck driver and smoked it watching the stars flickering in the sky and said things about his daughter. Vulgar awful things. Things he had never said, things he didn’t know a father could say about his own daughter.
At ten past eleven the ship loosed its moorings and pulled shuddering away from the dock with thick black smoke pouring out of its funnel. He stood there waiting until the lights on the ship were one tiny light way off in the sea. Then he turned to leave and saw something on a bench and went over to see what it was. A Coke with a straw in it and a half-eaten cheese pie. He glanced around and picked up the cheese pie. He smelled it.
Then he wrapped it in the paper and put it in his pocket.
He went out of gate E1 and headed back walking sometimes in the street and sometimes on the sidewalk and as he passed under the bridge he read something scrawled on the wall in black spray paint — kick a nigger and ruin your boot — and saw the lights of a truck coming slowly in his direction and thought about jumping into the middle of the street and standing there and letting the truck run him over so he could put an end to all this once and for all and then he stepped back and pressed his back against the wall of the tunnel and spoke to his body as if his body were a dog and he were its owner and he stayed like that with his back to the wall until the truck passed in front of him and drove off.
Then he thought about the kid. He imagined the kid being given his dead father’s clothes and the kid taking them and stroking them with eyes full of tears and as he stroked them he would feel something hard in there and would stick his hand in the coat pocket and pull out a half-eaten cheese pie. How ridiculous that would be. How ridiculous.
• • •
After midnight he went up Cyprus Street walking on the left-hand sidewalk and when he got to the church of Osia Xeni he looked across and saw light and shadows behind the yellow pane in the door and crossed the street and went inside.
Six or seven women in black and a girl about eleven years old were decorating the bier with flowers. They were standing around the bier choosing flowers one by one from big bunches and cutting off the stems and sticking the flowers in the styrofoam. Daisies. Roses. And other flowers whose names he didn’t know.
They turned and looked when he came in and kept looking as he sat down in a chair and crossed his arms over his chest and smelled the air which smelled like incense and human breath. He raised his eyes without lifting his head and looked at the enormous figure staring down at him from up in the dome and looked at the other figures painted on the walls and the purple ribbons and the icons and the candles burning and melting and bending over in the empty air like tired bodies looking for something to lean against.
Beside the bier was the cross. A big tall cross made of dark wood. Christ had his eyes closed and his head was lolling to the right. Arms bent at the elbows, legs bent at the knees. The nails in his hands dripped blood. A gash in his right side was bleeding, too. He turned his head away and closed his eyes then opened them again and looked back at the crucified figure. How peaceful he was. Peaceful. Calm. Resigned.
He looked once more at the women. He would ask them for money. Of course. He would ask them to give him some money. Five or ten euros each. Whatever you can. So I can feed my child. However much you like. Happy Easter to you all. They couldn’t possibly refuse. Not for me. For my child.
Sir, said the girl. Would you put the crown on our Jesus’s head?
She had come over to him and was standing there staring at him. Eleven or twelve years old. Big eyes, thick lips, blond fuzz on her cheeks. He reached out a hand to touch the fuzz on the girl’s cheeks and the girl looked at his hand and grabbed his thumb and wrapped her hand around it.
It’s too high we can’t reach.
The crown was sitting on a table. He thought it was a crown of flowers but it wasn’t. It was made out of some plant with thorns and in the shadowy light of the chandelier and the candles the crown looked like the skeleton of some strange soiled creature that had died on that table years ago.
He pulled a chair over in front of the cross and picked up the prickly crown as carefully as he could and climbed up on the chair and raised his hands to pass the crown over the top of the cross. The women and the girl were watching him. He turned around and looked at them and smiled.
What would you have done without me, he said. I hope you’ll give me something for my trouble, he said and laughed.
The crown was small and he had to push to get it down over the cross and he could feel the thorns pressing into his palms but it didn’t hurt. He looked into the face of Christ which was at the same height as his. Peaceful. Calm. Resigned.
Sure, he said. Since you know you’ll be resurrected. Death isn’t real, he said. Nothing is real. It’s all just a show.
Evil’s first victory is when it starts speaking your language, he said — and that scared him because he knew he wasn’t capable of thinking or saying a thought like that. He looked at the crucified Christ, looked all around. Who had spoken. Who.
He stumbled on the chair and nearly fell. A woman screamed. He looked down at his hands. They were dotted with small perfectly round balls of blood. As if his hands were two shattered thermometers, thermometers that took the temperature not with mercury but with blood.
He turned and showed his hands to the women.
Look, he said. Look what happened. Now you definitely have to give me something for my trouble.
The women dropped their flowers and scissors and ran for the door. One grabbed her purse which was hanging on the back of a chair and hugged it to her chest as if it were an infant. Another grabbed the girl by the arm and ushered her out the door. They all left without looking back.
Don’t go, he shouted. Wait. Don’t.
He stepped forward into the air and fell to the floor and heard something snap and lay there motionless.
Wait.
Outside the wind was dying down and the clouds were motionless in the sky.
It was early on Good Friday morning.
The kid must have fallen asleep still hungry at the kitchen table.
A lump had caught in the throat of the day.
Any moment now it would start to rain.
Placard and Broomstick
AT DAWN the sky was full of tiny scattered clouds as if there had been some awful explosion up there. Yiannis Englezos looked at himself in the mirror splashed cold water on his face combed his fingers through his hair looked in the mirror again and pinched his cheeks to give them some color. He hadn’t slept in four days for four whole days he hadn’t closed an eye, and now in the darkness of the day and the frigid air of his apartment he felt something inside him getting very small, shrinking and drying up and turning black like a peppercorn.
He was a grocery stocker at the Galaxy Supermarket on Kaisareia Street, the first to open in Nikaia.
Liar, he told the mirror. Cowardly liar.
It was the second-to-last thing he would say that day.
• • •
In the kitchen he put on some coffee and looked out the window. It was the Monday after Easter. Christ had risen twice but outside nothing had changed. Darkness and cold, it looked like it might rain, more like Good Friday than Easter Monday.
He went back into the living room and took up the task he’d left half finished. He pulled sixteen A4-sized cardboard dividers out of some folders and glued them together into pairs, which he spread out on the threadbare carpet to form a rectangle that measured 84 by 59.4 centimeters. He taped the eight double pieces together, turned the whole thing over and taped them again, then grabbed the red broomstick and wiped it down with a cloth, slowly and carefully, like a veteran hunter sitting beside the fireplace late one winter night, cleaning his gun and gazing into the flickering flames and wondering how so many years had passed without him noticing and how he himself had become not hunter but prey.