— Sir, why don’t you ask your son to sacrifice himself? To have his name go down in history as a benefactor of the nation? My family has already paid a high enough price. I lost a brother in the war. My mother can’t bear to lose another child.
Look at the little half-pint, thought the policeman who had been assigned to guard Gris, the same policeman who had lost the bet over how long he would last. The Minister let loose for a while and then stormed out, slamming the door behind him, and Tzitzilis vowed to punish the prisoner’s audacity.
The interrogation methods of the head of the Security Police were infamous in the city. He made prisoners stand for hours on end, deprived them of sleep and water, beat them, hung them upside-down, applied electroshock to their genitals, administered his own special concoction (no one dared mention opium), injections (of calcium, they said), promises, lies, curses, and kicks.
Tzitzilis never imagined that it would require his entire arsenal to bring Gris to his knees. The little lizard seemed like a sensitive type, a man who did the right thing, a pen-pusher with family obligations that strangled any dreams or desires of his own. A widowed mother and two unmarried sisters could unman a chieftain, much less a reporter. Tzitzilis gave him two days at most. The policeman in charge of Gris was the first to bet on the boss — and two days later had already lost.
Tzitzilis promised the prisoner a passport and a ticket to Argentina, as the guys at the Ministry had advised him to. They wanted to close the case as soon as possible, to get their hands on the proper confessions and signatures, to shut the journalists up. To put an end to the rumors once and for all.
Gris smoked a carton of eighty-eight Matsaggou-Stoukas cigarettes a day, equivalent to four normal packs. In other words, this little lizard had balls, though you wouldn’t guess it from looking at him. So Tzitzilis decided to add hashish to the prisoner’s cigarettes; after all, a little relaxation wouldn’t do poor Manolis any harm, and it might even loosen his tongue.
Tzitzilis served him a coffee spiked with his special cognac, banking on the fact that the man wasn’t used to narcotics. He let him light a cigarette, too, one of the ones he himself had rolled. Then he sat back to watch the show.
Gris was confused at being treated so well. He smoked his cigarette, drank his coffee, and suddenly felt his brakes fail. It was as if someone had reached a hand straight into his soul, as if he’d stepped into nothingness, as if the springs that kept his thoughts and emotions in place had all unsprung at once.
— I was just wondering, Manolis, if you might be a communist, Tzitzilis said as soon as he thought the prisoner was sufficiently dazed.
Manolis couldn’t control his tongue, and his mind was stuck like a cart in mud. His limbs seemed to have been poured into the chair. Words seemed impossible — where to find them, how to pronounce them. He wasn’t a communist, and didn’t side with the others, either. All he wanted was to be left in peace, to not be bothered, to do his job well, to provide for his family, to make his mother proud. He certainly didn’t believe that an idea would save the world. He didn’t even believe that God could save him, so why would he put his faith in human beings?
His body abandoned him. All he wanted was to sleep. After so much torture, a man becomes sentimental.
Terrifying in his despair. That was Gris.
An egoistic individualist, those in the Party would say. In Greece, where everything was a performance, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. There couldn’t be smoke without a fire, most people thought. Surely the reporter had sullied his nest somehow. Besides, there was indisputable evidence, witnesses, signatures. Lawyers came and went behind steel doors, attempting various agreements and plea bargains. They knew what they had to do, but their consciences weren’t convinced. That made things more difficult.
Some claimed that the district attorney assigned to the case had gone to visit Gris’s lawyer, a young man by the name of Dinopoulos, at his home, an unprecedented move for someone in his position. Rumor had it that the lawyer managed to bargain the sentence down. He would keep his mouth shut, he promised, about the irregularities in the proceedings, if in return they would rule out the death penalty. The district attorney weighed Dinopoulos’s intentions, trying to decide whether he could take him at his word. The two men quickly reached an agreement, with a few sentences and a slap on the back.
A few years in prison wasn’t the end of the world, the district attorney apparently hinted. And it was a holy cause, the fate of the nation hung in the balance. My job, he said in conclusion, is to take responsibility for my decisions. He didn’t want to give too much ground, but he took care to calm the young, untried lawyer — who, moreover, was a member of the party in power, and therefore someone to work with rather than against. Dinopoulos swallowed his doubts. He’d avoided the worst, he told his conscience. What it came down to was, he’d saved an innocent man from the firing squad.
A few days later the young lawyer went out to walk through the city. Salonica was divided into semi-autonomous regions: the city below Tsimiski, the city above Egnatia, the city beyond Venizelou. Urban zones whose borders were nowhere demarcated and yet were sharply cut, separated by lines of fire. Residents knew where those secret dividing lines were; they moved with ease to and from their burrows, and took care on foreign turf. Dinopoulos hugged the exterior walls of Agia Sophia, great is her grace, but decided not to cross the threshold of the church itself. An agnostic from the cradle, he wouldn’t let his current difficulties defeat him. Besides, his back was covered: his mother and wife regularly lit candles at the church, so the family already had representatives before the icons.
On his walk he tried to consider the situation from a practical angle. Greece, since its formation as a modern state, had been a nation of useless, dreamer politicians who gambled away the fate of the Greek people. The country had from the start been overrun with outcasts of all sorts, worthless upstarts and coattail-riders. Why should he be the one to pay the damages, to snatch the chestnuts out of the fire? He would stand as tall as he could; he would make sure the proper formalities were observed; he would protect Gris from the worst. He had drawn a line in the sand. If he quit now — a thought that had passed through his mind the previous night — they would crush the accused man entirely. The least of all evils, wasn’t that the mature and judicious approach to take?
It was certainly what Evthalia would have advised, if he’d had an opportunity to discuss the case with her. He saw her every so often in the neighborhood. She reminded him of the girl in that famous painting, her beauty all corners, hidden miracles in her cheekbones — what a pity he’d never be able to tell her. She just would have given him a sardonic look and walked off, ponytail swinging in rebuke. She had been admitted to the literature department at the university, and still wore girlish ankle socks. She didn’t hesitate to correct his quotations of Cicero whenever he tried in vain to impress her. She respected the proper order of words in a sentence. His mother didn’t like her, though; in her opinion, Evthalia was an obstinate girl who talked too much and couldn’t even boil water, much less cook a proper meal.
If the lawyer’s mother and the student found themselves side by side at the grocer’s, the younger woman never ceded her place as she should have. His mother complained that the girl had no manners, she was a wild creature. And since he had no desire to argue with his mother, he’d made up his mind not to bring any unpleasantness down on his head for Evthalia’s sake.