Michaliz! Don’t mez the ize, man!
And Michalis would stop in his tracks and raise a fist in the air and intone the finest line of poetry he knew:
Ize cream youz cream we all zcream for ize cream.
We all laughed, but Ziyad didn’t think it was funny. He would shake his finger and warn us.
If Kyrioz Giorgkoz come back you be the onez zcreaming.
And Michalis unfazed would answer again in poetry, lines by Michalis Ganas:
Poor Yiorgos
if only you could turn over
to see the other half of the world.
• • •
An unforgettable twentieth of January. We were loading up some orders for Piraeus. The day was so fine you could drink it from a glass. The Halcyon days. Of course now the whole year is one long Halcyon day, you can’t even tell the difference. We were running behind because the Scot had gotten blocked up again. That’s the name Michalis gave our biggest ice machine, not just because the brand was called Scotsman but also because when it got stuck it would only make half the ice it had been programmed to make. As stingy as a Scot, in other words.
I was struggling with the machine trying to get it going again. Ziyad had gone to put some money in the bank — he never trusted us with jobs like that. Michalis was stretched out in the shade reading a magazine he’d brought from home. He had a notebook open on his lap, too, and was scribbling something. I was about to start shouting when suddenly he let out a cry and leapt to his feet.
Come look at this.
I went over and he showed me the magazine. It was a special issue about the slogans written on walls from the time of the German occupation up to today. He pointed to a black and white photograph. On a wall was written: Michael Ramos 19 years old address 11 Nemesis Street I will be executed 8-9-44. And beneath, in capital letters: LONG LIVE THE FATHERLAND.
Michael, I said. Same name.
Look at the caption. Read the caption, man.
I read it.
Last words of a young man sentenced to death written on the walls of the Gestapo’s basement cells on Merlin Street. A message with no recipient, written in the heat of the moment and therefore subjective, today it offers a cool, unprejudiced witness regarding the postmodern subjects of History.
Well, I said. Isn’t that nice. Happy things. Now come and help with the Scot because al-Fatah will be back soon and we’ll have him to deal with.
Michalis went over to the machine. I followed him. He bent down and took one of the few pieces of ice the Scot had spat out and held it in his hand. He squeezed it tightly until a trickle of water came out from between his fingers. Suddenly his face was bright red.
I don’t understand, he said. What does it mean, a slogan written in the heat of the moment? He was nineteen years old. They were going to kill him at any minute. I mean, how was he supposed to be writing? Without a care in the world? Cool as a cucumber? And all that shit about unprejudiced witnesses and the postmodern subjects of history. What kind of person could write a thing like that? How can they be so. Just so. It’s true, time is the worst healer. Time hardens people.
He hesitated for a minute and then said:
I want to swear. If you only knew how much I want to swear. But I can’t. I can’t even talk about it, you know? And since I can’t say what I’m feeling I’m afraid I’ll stop having those feelings. That they’ll be lost. It’s the silence that really scares me. It’s inhuman. How much silence can a person carry inside?
He looked at me as if he were expecting an answer.
He opened his fist. The ice had melted.
It’s your own heat of the moment now, I said. Come on, forget it. There’s no making sense of things like that.
I felt his eyes burning my cheek. But he didn’t say anything.
We stood with our arms crossed in front of the Scot. Now you could hear a strange, drawn-out hum like something in there was trying to get out.
I went inside and brought out a bottle of Johnny Walker from the holidays that I’d squirreled away. I filled two glasses. I scooped up a plastic cup of ice and every so often we’d toss another piece into our glass. We drank in silence, without clinking or saying cheers.
The sky was so blue it blinded you. The breeze smelled of the sea and french fries. What a beautiful day, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I thought about what Michalis had said. If you don’t say what you’re feeling at some point you stop feeling it. I thought about what it would be like to write I will be executed on a wall. What it’s like to eat onions and bread day in and day out. To suckle on the juice of the onion and have the juice of the onion be blood. What it’s like to work and save and dream and have those dreams melt like ice, as if there were special hands that existed in this world just for that — to hold the dreams of poor people and squeeze them until they melted like ice. But I didn’t say anything.
Say something in Spanish, I told Michalis. I feel like laughing.
He took a piece of ice from his glass and held it in his palm and stretched out his arm.
With no recipient. No recipient back then and no recipient now.
That’s not Spanish. I want to hear Spanish, man, get it? I want to hear corathon and theboya and muchas cosas. That’s what I want to hear today.
The ice was melting in his palm. We watched the water seeping drip by drip between his fingers until it melted entirely, vanished. Michalis kept on holding his fist stretched out. His hair glinted gold in the sun. I saw him clenching his teeth. His jaw quaked.
Then there was a sound. The Scot suddenly came unblocked and the ice fell jangling into the bin like coins out of a slot machine.
The bin overflowed, the ice cubes started to drop onto the cement.
With no recipient, Michalis said.
The ice cubes kept falling.
We let them fall — we didn’t even care.
Mi corathon. Mi corathon una naranha helada.
We drank and watched the ice fall onto the cement.
My heart. My heart a frozen orange.
Heaped on the cement, the ice cubes had already started to melt.
Something Will Happen, You’ll See
ANOTHER NOTIFICATION came today from the bank. It says it’s a final notification and that next week they’ll take “actions permitted by law.” They’ve called several times too but Niki never picks up. She set the letter on the coffee table in the living room. When Aris came home from work he saw it but didn’t say anything. He didn’t even touch it. He just stood and looked at it with eyes glazed from lack of sleep. Unshaven, in need of a haircut, his sideburns as long as a werewolf’s. Then he took off his shoes and went into the bedroom and collapsed fully dressed onto the bed and pulled the sheet up over his head.