This, he thought, is the most pathetic, most ineffectual protest since the birth of the worker’s movement. Since the birth of the world.
I’m filled with an incredible emptiness.
If only I had written something.
I’m filled with an incredible emptiness.
If I had written some heroic words of mourning someone would have paid attention.
For sure.
But now it’s too late.
• • •
Late at night he lit a cigarette without putting the placard down. Then he inhaled deeply and straightened his back and lifted the placard which was falling apart and held it high and kept on holding it high, with both hands, even as he exhaled and saw the smoke coming thick and yellow from inside his chest and watched it slowly rise under the yellow street light and then disperse in the darkness like the smoke from some pitiful ancient offering that no one even noticed, neither gods nor people who believed in gods.
The Blood of the Onion
I USED TO WORK IN KAMINIA at a factory that made ice. I checked the machines, tossed the ice into sacks, carried the sacks out to the truck. An easy job, ludicrous, a job to be ashamed of. But Michalis, the guy who did the deliveries, saw it differently. He said there were few jobs as difficult as this one. He would grab one of those ice cubes with a hole in the middle — for some reason we called them crooks — and close his palm around it. Within seconds it would begin to melt. In a minute or two it was water. In five it had disappeared.
Isn’t that awful, he would say to me. To make something you know will be gone the very next moment. What an inhuman thing.
Shut up, Mike, I would say. Just stop thinking and work. Then I’d go to haul a few of those ten-kilo sacks we sent out to bars and restaurants. And he would trail after me somber and obedient as always looking at the palm of his hand which was bright red with cold.
Mi corathon, he would say. Mi corathon una naranha helada.
• • •
Ten months on the job and he still hasn’t adjusted. He’s a little off in other parts of his life, too. His folks died in a car accident when he was a kid. He’d been raised by some aunts out in the countryside. Later on he went to Romania to study medicine but came back after the first year — moneywise he couldn’t make it work. He wanted to be a pediatrician and open his own practice. But his biggest dream was Spain. That was his goal, to go there one day and not come back. I’m not from here, he used to say, I’m from Spain. He’d taught himself Spanish from cassette tapes. He always said there was no other language like it. It’s the happiest language in the world, he said, and when I finally get there I’ll talk and laugh all day long. Even at the factory, all day he would toss out those mi corathons and naranha heladas. He didn’t look anything like a Spaniard, though. You’d have thought he was from some northern country. Tall and blond, with green eyes and pale skin.
• • •
They’d hired him to be a driver but he did pretty much anything that came his way — electric stuff, plumbing, fixing the coolant. He learned fast, was quick on the uptake. He was a reader, too. He liked to read poems and used to carry a notebook around to scribble down all his strange thoughts. He saved and dreamed. He wanted to go back to Romania to finish his studies then head to Spain as soon as he was done. He said he’d find a Spanish woman with glossy hair and bright white teeth and they would travel the whole country together. They would go to where Don Quixote was from to see the windmills and the vineyards that stretched on as far as the eye could see. They would go down to the shores of the Guadalquivir and up to the Sierra Nevadas and to all those towns that Michalis had only seen on the map but whose names sounded so promising, Badajoz Almendralejo Villafranca de los Campaneros. Dreams. Dreams. For people like us dreams are like ice cubes — sooner or later they melt. But I never said anything.
Sometimes just to pass the time I’d ask him to tell me some poems. He knew lots of them, not just Greek but foreign ones, too. Of course he liked the Spanish ones best. There was one guy in particular, Miguel Hernández, whose name he said with a lisp, Hernándeth. He was crazy about that guy. He even had a photograph of him in his wallet, and knew his poems inside out, could say them by heart. Hernández had died young, when he was thirty or so. Most of his poems he’d written on toilet paper when he was in jail. He would tear the toilet paper into tiny pieces and write his poems on those little scraps. He was a communist and had fought in the civil war. After the war he was sentenced to death but he didn’t live long enough to be executed, tuberculosis finished him off first. Michalis’s favorite poem was Lullaby of the Onion. Apparently Hernández wrote it after he got a letter in prison from his wife where she wrote that she and their child — they had a baby boy eight months old — were living on nothing but onions and bread. They had nothing to eat except onions and bread. Onions and bread, that’s how poor they were.
I don’t know if all that was true or if Michalis just pulled it out of his head. But I can remember like it’s happening now, him carrying sacks to the truck murmuring in his sad sing-song voice:
En la cuna del hambre
mi niño estaba.
Con sangre de cebolla
se amamantaba.
Mike, man, what’s the guy trying to say, I asked the first time I heard it. What’s all that cuna and staba about?
Michalis put the sack down and grabbed a piece of ice and held it in the palm of his hand and squeezed it tightly and as the ice melted, he told me that the poet was talking about his son — his niño — who was lying in the crib of hunger and nursing on the blood of the onion. Sangre de theboya means the blood of the onion, Michalis told me and as he said it his eyes were shining and you’d have thought he was on the verge of tears, as if it were his son lying in that crib, his son nursing on that strange blood.
Sangre de theboya. The blood of the onion.
Thpaniards, I told him. You’re all crathy, every thingle one.
• • •
Lullaby of the Onion — that was Michalis’s favorite poem. But I liked a different one, which Hernández wrote for his friend Ramon who died very young and very suddenly, so suddenly the poem said it was like a flash of lightning. I didn’t know any Spanish or anything about poetry either. But I’d heard it so many times I’d learned a few lines by heart. I liked the part where Miguel said he wanted to dig up the earth with his teeth, to tear the whole earth apart so he could find his friend’s bones and kiss them.
Quiero escarbar la tierra con los dientes
quiero apartar la tierra parte a parte
I liked the last lines, too. When Miguel tells the dead Ramon that one day they’ll meet again and they’ll have so much to say to one another.
Que tenemos que hablar de muchas cosas
compañero del alma, compañero
I liked that poem even though it was long and I couldn’t remember most of the lines. I liked the sound of the words, their rhythm. I liked how Michalis said them. No pretense, just simply and sadly, the way you might read something you’d written a long time ago in some old notebook, a promise of undying love or friendship, some big statement you’d written about the future.
We have so many things to say
comrade of my soul comrade
• • •
It was January. Work was a bust. The boss had gone off again. He was a gambling addict like you’ve never seen, all the casinos from here to tomorrow knew his name. Parnitha Loutraki Thessaloniki you never knew where he’d be. He left a Palestinian in charge of the place while he was gone, Ziyad, who liked to play the tough guy. A shifty bastard who never smiled and had deep-sunk eyes and something threatening in the way he moved. He didn’t have much give or take with anyone, kept us all at arm’s length. Me in particular, there were plenty of times when I’d caught him looking at me like I was an Israeli soldier or something. Mark my words, I’d tell the others, things are going to get ugly with that guy. One day he’s going to walk in here with dynamite strapped to his chest and blow us all sky high. Michalis saw things differently. He said that when he looked at Ziyad he saw the desert in his eyes. What desert, Mike? They have a desert over there? Of course they do — a huge one. He was sure that Ziyad had lived for years in the desert, and that’s why he had that mysterious look in his eyes. Just look at him, he would say to me. Can’t you see the guy isn’t used to living among walls and machines? Don’t you see how his eyes are searching for a little space to stretch out in? What could I say. I didn’t see any desert in Ziyad’s eyes, or any camels either. But there was one thing I saw: every time Michalis grabbed a piece of ice and let it melt in his palm Ziyad’s eyes would flash with anger.