Then she takes a little silver spoon from the pocket of her old lilac bathrobe and sits up straighter on the bed and wraps the bathrobe tighter and starts to eat the semolina man — chewing slowly in the dark and listening to the darkness growing outside as with sharp tiny bites she slowly eats this most recent of men to have passed through her life through her unguarded borders like a conquering soldier or a hunted migrant.
The Tin Soldier
THEY CAUGHT HIM again today, the fucking idiot, and messed him up real bad. Security guys with ponytails and earrings — two of them held him down while four more pummeled him. By the shipyards in Perama. The workers were having some protest because two guys got killed on a fuel boat so he went down and started shouting slogans and spray-painting shit all over the walls. Who knows what he was shouting and writing. What he thought he was doing down there with the jackhammers and sandblasters. Fucking idiot. I could understand if he were some party hardliner — they stick together and look out for their own, they know the tricks. But no, our little fool marches himself down to every rally and demonstration in town, and I have to run around afterward to hospitals and cops to pick up the pieces. He ditched his job, too, and hasn’t set foot at home in a month. What does he eat, where does he sleep? What does he do for money? Fucking fucking idiot. He’s given us all heart attacks. The bum. The stupid fool.
You stupid jackass, I say to him over the phone. It’s the same shit every time. You never learn. Who do you think you are, you spoiled ass.
Oh brave soldier, he says to me. Oh brave soldier, who can save you from death?
Hans Christian Andersen, he says.
The tin soldier.
Remember?
• • •
So here I am racing down to Perama in the middle of the night to get him out even though last time I swore that was it. I put in a call to the commanding officer and told him who I was. Come and get him, he said, and tell him if he keeps it up he’s going to get what’s coming to him. I told the officer he’d been beaten pretty badly and taken to the hospital. It wasn’t any of ours, sir, he said, those guys are always beating on each other, anarchists commies we can’t keep them straight. What can you say to an asshole like that. I kept my mouth shut, just thank you truly indebted, and then we both hung up.
Kokkinia Keratsini Amfiali I drive with the doors locked and the windows rolled up. I was born and raised in this part of town but when I left I never looked back — even now I’m passing through as fast as I can with my eyes trained on the road — born and raised here but I don’t want to remember, things from the past are old wounds and if you scratch them they start bleeding and get infected and stink. Petros Rallis Street Laodiceia Salamina foot on the gas I run a red light with memories standing like Odysseus’s sirens, one on each corner, winking at me at every light, singing for me to stop. A kiss, a cigarette in the rain, a friend you hugged one drunk late night. My father. He may have worked all his life in Perama on those crummy boats but he knew a thing or two about memories. Memories are like ingrown toenails, he used to say when we were kids. Pain death love everything in life is an ingrown toenail. You can trim them but you can’t pull them out. Not if you want to survive.
My father. Dead at fifty-two from fumes in the hold. My father. Another memory, a nail that grew backwards into the flesh until it was deep and black.
• • •
Kokkinia Keratsini Amfiali foot on the gas because I had another bad dream and knew I’d be running around again and the anxiety’s been eating me up. I dreamed that the two of us were in this place separated by a huge pane of glass and he was standing behind the glass and talking to me but I couldn’t hear what he was saying and he pressed his hands to the pane and was trying to tell me something but I couldn’t hear. I could only see him shouting, could see the smudges from his hands on the glass and I tried to find some gap somewhere where I could get across but I couldn’t find anything. Then he pulled out a can of spray paint and started to write on the glass but I couldn’t read the letters and I shouted that I couldn’t read what he was writing but he couldn’t hear me either so he kept covering the glass with black letters that I couldn’t read and afterward we looked at one another through the glass and he stopped writing stopped speaking and just stared at me hands at his sides eyes dripping with a sorrow I can’t even describe and then I took off my shirt and wrapped it around my hand and started to pound on the glass to break it but it was like pounding a wall and then I saw my shirt turning red and I started to shout — and that’s how I woke up, shouting with my hands clenched into fists pounding the mattress and I started and nearly fell out of bed onto the floor.
Who knows what he was shouting and writing.
That kid is a heart attack. In real life and in my sleep, too.
• • •
Kokkinia Keratsini Amfiali foot full to the floor eyes on the road, and off near Salamina it must be raining, lightning keeps flashing in the sky like uprooted trees and I think how they must have messed him up real bad this time, for him to go on about Hans Christian Anderson and the tin soldier, I’m sure they’ve split him wide open and probably bashed his head, too, and I start shaking like you wouldn’t believe my foot quaking on the gas and the car jumps forward in little leaps like it’s got the hiccups and I think about pulling over onto the shoulder for a minute to try and calm down but I know I’m already late and I’m afraid of what might happen if it gets any later. And then at a stoplight out the corner of my eye I see a lame dog hopping along on the sidewalk and I remember. I remember the day we buried our father, how when we got home he made our mother and me sit on the couch and then put an arm around each of us and said that if dogs can learn to live with only three legs then we’d learn to live with just us three — a kid eleven or twelve years old, a little half-pint, where did he learn to talk like that — and if my mother’s kisses that night had been tears they would have drowned the whole earth, but in the end he was right. In the end we learned to live like a three-legged dog and ever since my mother has always said — take care, she says to me, take care take care take care you poor thing.
Take care of that boy. A dog can live with three legs but not with two.
Take care.
• • •
He’s waiting for me outside the station. From a distance I know it’s him but from close up he’s unrecognizable. His head like an old soldier’s boot, scratched and lumpy and bruised. His forehead is bandaged and his lips are swollen and the sleeve of his shirt is torn all the way up his arm. He gets into the car and sits there quietly, doesn’t say anything doesn’t look at me. I stare at his swollen lips and remember. All I’m good for these days is remembering. I remember years ago when I took him to the dentist and he came out after his appointment and his lips were swollen just like now and I said what happened were you and she kissing the whole time and he couldn’t speak but he smiled and I felt a sorrow and bitterness so strong at the sight of him smiling with those swollen lips and tonight I feel that same sorrow and bitterness seeing him wrapped in bandages with his clothes all torn and I say to myself if I had any guts I’d blow it all sky high — the station the shipyards all of Perama and then Nikaia and Amfiali too, I’d wipe them off the map forever.
I hand him a cigarette — they took his, he says, looking for dope — and we sit in the car and smoke with the windows cracked and it starts to rain and we watch the rain making little rivulets on the windshield and –
Last time, I tell him. It’s done, game over. You hear? Last time.