The Full Catastrophe by James Angelos Read Free Book Online Page B

seeing grandmother had paid the doctor 1,500 euros for the necessary diagnosis. She asked that I say nothing to reveal her or her grandmother’s identity.
    The next morning, I met the woman and her husband at an outdoor café in a square in the middle of town. As we talked over a cup of coffee, it became clear that they were somewhat depressed about the moral condition of the island. The local stories of corruption were apparently not limited to the suspicious number of blindness benefits. The former mayor, a man named Akis Tsagkaropoulos, was accused of soliciting the services of an Albanian immigrant to burn down the municipal building where financial records were stored. (A municipal police officer caught the Albanian with a great deal of gasoline and other flammable liquids before he could set the building ablaze.) Tsagkaropoulos allegedly had an interest in seeing the records destroyed. He had been accused by city council members of using forged documents to take out millions of euros in municipal loans without their prior approval. A fire in the building where records were housed would have erased evidence of the alleged financial irregularities. Tsagkaropoulos, who was an orthopedic surgeon at the local hospital before becoming mayor, was eventually convicted of attempted arson and sentenced to eight years in prison, though he appealed the decision and was released from custody. He later died at age fifty-six of a heart condition, according to Greek media reports, having maintained his innocence in both the arson attempt and alleged improprieties regarding thesuspect loans. “The judgment of people stops with their death,” a local newspaper wrote of his passing.
    After the woman and her husband finished lamenting their island’s politicians, she told me she had some bad news. Her grandmother didn’t want to speak to me after all. “She is very embarrassed and she’s afraid to talk because she knows the doctor,” she said. “The great characteristic of Zakynthos is the hypocrisy. They’re not willing to talk. They don’t want to confront the problems.” I asked if she could call her grandmother again and, taking the phone, I introduced myself as Demetri. That was apparently all that was necessary to change the woman’s mind. An elderly voice with a local dialect replied: “If someone comes and says, I will give you a retirement pay, will you say no? I’m poor and I’m sick. Now they cut it. And they want us to pay it back. But where will I find it?” When I suggested we talk in person, she said: “My Demetri, my door is always open to you.”
    The granddaughter and I got in her car and left immediately. We drove out into the hilly countryside, past olive groves and eucalyptus trees, and pulled up in front of a one-story house. A small, plump woman wearing spotless white sneakers, a plaid robe, and an apron decorated with flower patterns emerged to greet us. We entered the house and in the hallway passed an icon of St. Dionysios of Zakynthos, a sixteenth-century archbishop honored for his extraordinary capacities of forgiveness, having forgiven even his brother’s murderer. We sat at the kitchen table and the grandmother offered me a Greek coffee. She began to talk without my having to ask any questions.
    “If you have a godfather, you get baptized,” she said. “If you don’t have one, you don’t get baptized.” It took me a second to fully comprehend what she meant by this. To be baptized is to be rewarded. To have a godfather make this happen, well, you must sometimes pay. “The
rouspheti
does not cease to be,” she went on. “You give money to get the matters settled.” I should certainlyknow about these things, being a journalist, she added. “If they gave you money, you would write that I was eighteen.”
    “I wouldn’t lie,” I told her, defending my virtue, and then felt foolish for doing so.
    “If they said to you, ‘Take these millions,’ you would put me down as sixteen!”