Good Will Come From the Sea Read online

  Copyright © Christos Ikonomou, 2014

  English language copyright © Karen Emmerich, 2019

  Original title:

  Published by agreement with the Ersilia Literary Agency, Greece

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Oikonomou, Chråestos, 1970- author. | Emmerich, Karen, translator.

  Good will come from the sea / Christos Ikonomou; translated from Greek by Karen Emmerich.

  Description: First Archipelago Books edition. | Brooklyn, NY : Archipelago Books, 2019.

  LCCN 2018029482 | ISBN 9781939810212 (pbk.)

  LCSH: Oikonomou, Chråestos, 1970—Translations into English.

  LCC PA5638.25.I37 A2 2019 | DDC 889.3/4–dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029482

  Archipelago Books

  232 3rd Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  Cover art: Louise Bourgeois

  Archipelago is grateful for the Onassis Foundation USA’s generous support of the author tour.

  This book was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Archipelago Books also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Nimick Forbesway Foundation, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

  Ebook ISBN 9781939810229

  v5.4

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  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  I’ll Swallow Your Dreams

  Kill the German

  Good Will Come From the Sea

  Kites in July

  I’ll Swallow Your Dreams

  I’ll tell you how it happened. How it happened and how it should’ve happened. About the blood that was spilled and the blood that should’ve been spilled. I remember everything, I remember it all. And what I remember is even more than what actually happened.

  They’d warned him three times. Not once or twice, three times. Tasos, you prick, this won’t end well, you’ll see what we have in store for you. Tasoulis, we’re going to torch your house, nothing will grow in your fields but ash. We’ll slit your kids’ throats, fuck your wife up the ass. The third time, they tied him to the hood of his truck and ran him through the car wash. Soap, brushes, industrial dryers, the whole works. He was in the hospital for a week, broken teeth, his body flayed by the brushes and chemicals. Like Manolios in Christ Recrucified, just the sight of him turned your stomach. That’s when Magda lost her shit and took the kids and ran off to Athens. And she told Tasos that if he did any of what he was planning – because he’d made up his mind to go to the cops and call the stations and plaster it all over the internet – that if he did any of that he’d never see her again, or the kids either. And Tasos said OK, but he still wouldn’t let sleeping dogs lie. He kept on running around, making a stink, driving us all up the wall.

  The whole island knew Xellinakis was behind it. But no one breathed a word, not us and not the rats, either. Not even later on. No one said a word. Who in their right mind would speak up? It’s a regular mafia down here, not that shit you see on TV. Henchmen, guys packing heat, a whole parade of Corleones. You talk, you’re done. You raise your head, they blow it off. The only reason I’m telling you now is that it’s late at night and no one’s listening and the wind just whisks my words away. Otherwise I’d keep my mouth shut, too.

  And what was it all for? Nothing, nothing at all. Solidarity groups, consumer networks, cutting out the middleman. Poor Tasos. He had all these dreams, for us to build our own cooperative, to start a farmer’s market, to help people, to make things happen that Greece had never seen before, without bosses, without party hardliners, shadiness, or crooked deals. The poor bastard. What a naïve piece of work. From the moment he set foot on the island he started making a stink, trying to organize us and the rats, too. And what did he accomplish? Nothing. A big fat zero. The darkness just swallowed him up. For what? For nothing. For a bunch of scallions and two kilos of tomatoes, as the saying goes. For nothing at all.

  The second time, later, after they dragged him over to Apsithia, the whole Athens crowd got on his case, trying to convince him to give it up. We pulled out all the stops to try and bring him to his senses. Three or four guys in ski masks had nabbed him on his way home from the fields, bound his hands and legs, tied a black sack over his head and took him out cruising all night in a motorboat on the lake – by which I mean they were in the motorboat, and they’d tossed Tasos in the water and were dragging him around by a rope. We let loose on him, too, but the stubborn ass wouldn’t listen to anyone. He just swore right back, called us slaves, chicken-hearted cowards. How do you guys stand it? he said. How can you stand watching that son of a bitch Xellinakis pimp out the whole island? How can you stand the fact that we can’t sell our goods where we live, because that asshole comes and takes it all at half price and ships it to Athens and leaves everyone down here buying tomatoes from Holland and potatoes from Egypt? It’s worse than the Middle Ages. Even in the Middle Ages things made more sense. Of course we reminded him that none of us are from here, we’re all outsiders, so if the rats are in bed with Xellinakis, what can we do, we’re just a handful of people, and son of a bitch or no, at the end of the day he’s in charge, that’s how the system works. Whoever rolls around in the corn will get eaten by chickens, as the saying goes – and I don’t mean chickens like us, I mean real chickens. But Tasos wouldn’t budge, didn’t care what we said. Just called us slaves, bootlickers, yes-men. And then he brought out a bag of oranges and flopped it on the ground and said, just read that, get a load of what it says. Xellinakis Fruits Ltd., navel oranges, origin South Africa, warning, rind unsuitable for human consumption, preserved with imazalil and thiabendazole. You see what’s happening? Our oranges are sitting there rotting in their crates, and that bastard is importing oranges from Africa that are drenched in pesticides. And I’ll tell you another thing, too. Okay, say you’re right, that’s how the system works, there are always going to be wolves making millions off your labor and mine, off the sweat of our brows. Say each of us has come into the world to look after ourselves and only ourselves – I don’t believe it, I’ll never believe it, but let’s just say that’s how it is, for the sake of argument. Why shouldn’t we change that, to whatever extent we can? Why should we just give in without a fight? Why shouldn’t we say to Xellinakis, and to everyone like him, listen up, you’ve squeezed so many millions out of this place, now each of you has to start giving ten, twenty, thirty thousand a year so we can build reservoirs, so all that rainwater won’t go wasted. Or, listen up, Niktaris, how much do you charge for that suite with a view of the volcano? A thousand a night? Fine, from now on you’ll put ten percent of your profits every year toward building roads, sidewalks, nursery schools. So we can rebuild the health clinic that got destroyed during the earthquake, and keep a ferry running in winter when the tourist lines shut down, and finish the desalinization plant and the water treatment plant. No ifs ands or buts, that’s how it’s going to be. I mean, why do you think all those Chinese and Russians are willing to pay a thousand a night to stay in that suite? Yo
u think it’s the Jacuzzi or the Greek yogurt at the breakfast bar? No, they fork it over because they step out onto that balcony and the view smacks them right in the face, half the Aegean splayed out on a platter with the volcano there in the middle. Well, if you’re going to exploit the island, the island deserves its share, too. You can’t just pocket it all. So, Kyria Eleonora, if you’re going to sell the sunset at Magou Beach so all those poor suckers will cough up a hundred euros a head to eat farmed sea bream and dentex from Senegal – well, you’ll give this much each year for us to put bins on the streets so Minas doesn’t have to ride around on his mule picking trash off the cobblestones, like we’re stuck in the ’60s. That’s the deal. You’ve stripped this island to the bone all these years, you’ve eaten every last morsel of meat, and now it’s time for you to pay up. It’s time for you to do something for the island. And since you won’t do it on your own, we’ll have to force you. Make no mistake, you’ll pay. The time has come, it’s your turn to pay.

  That’s the sort of stuff he said, the same bullshit you read online by your average blogger in need of a good lay. And each time, first when they stuck a pistol in his mouth, then when they almost drowned him in the lake, and finally when they drove him through the car wash and he came out looking like a leper – he just kept saying the same shit. But later, too, at Christmas, when that sour-assed Magda left him, took the kids and ran off to Athens and almost didn’t come back, he still kept saying the same shit, not even that could knock any sense into him.

  The same old shit, right up to the end.

  And what was it all for? Nothing. Tomatoes from Holland and grouper from Senegal.

  That’s the sort of shit that destroyed Tasos – fucking orange peels, imazalil, and thiabendazole.

  Solidarity and justice, that’s what finally took Tasos. Solidarity and justice – empty words that poor people say, not because they believe in them, but because they’re poor.

  But none of us could have guessed he’d go the way he did.

  We all expected the end to be more manly, more heroic. The kind of thing they’d show afterwards on television and the internet, something that would force those stinking carcasses we call politicians to at least make a statement or two in Parliament. And even now, whenever we go up to the Refuge and look down at the sea from up there, we say he should’ve chosen some other end, more heroic, more manly. We remember all the crazy shit he used to say, about how good would come from the sea, and we say if he’d done something more heroic and manly, maybe people would have heard and risen up. Maybe something would have happened, something would have changed. I don’t know, maybe.

  Fairy tales, you’ll say. But you know what? People need a good fairy tale every now and then. People invented fairy tales and filled them with monsters so they wouldn’t become monsters themselves. Because the truth can turn you into a monster. You have to become a monster if you want to withstand the truth.

  Something more heroic and manly, that’s what we expected of Tasos. We thought he’d be some kind of Samson, who took others with him when he went, who killed more people in dying than he did while he was alive. That’s what we expected. But he betrayed us.

  We thought we had a Samson on our hands, but he turned out a Cobain.

  Such a betrayal.

  Though we all agree that these days, with this country in the gutter, a real man, a hero, isn’t the guy who fights evil, but the guy who learns to live with it.

  * * *

  The women didn’t want to go to the cave. Not to the Refuge, or to any other cave, either. Who ever heard of celebrating Easter in a cave? What are we, cavemen? What if there’s another earthquake and the cave comes crashing down on us? That’s the sort of stuff they said. I mean, Lena just tossed off a few comments at first, and then calmed down pretty fast. But the others were in full revolution mode. Magda most of all, she was convinced that Tasos had put the rest of us up to it, and wouldn’t stop nagging, pecking away at him with her worries. As if she knew. As if she knew what was going to happen. Even if they say you shouldn’t believe in signs. Tasos turned a deaf ear, he’d made up his mind and wasn’t about to back down. And we weren’t, either. Why make such a fuss, we said. It’ll be great. And it’s the guy’s name day, after all, he should get to decide where we celebrate. Besides, the way things are going, sooner or later we’ll all be living in caves again. We might as well get some practice.

  And we weren’t just saying it – we believed it. We believed it, and we still do. All those motherfucking politicians, Greeks and foreigners both, are going to send us back to caveman days. We’ll all be living in caves, with clubs and animal skins.

  We’ll be lucky if we still have fire.

  Besides, most of us hadn’t celebrated Easter on the island before, and we were all hoping to avoid the rats if we could. It’s their custom to celebrate together in the streets and town squares. You know what that means. All year long they stab one another in the back, are at one another’s throats, and on Easter they’re suddenly one big family. Rats. Of course it’s not fair for us to call them that. Not fair to actual rats, I mean – even rats don’t pull shit like that. Take Lazaros, the guy they call the Bow, whose son disappeared not too long after Tasos. He’s one of us, he has a taverna down in Abyssalos and out back he’s got chickens, turkeys, stuff like that. At some point he realized that eggs were going missing from the coop. Must be rats getting in there, he says. And he wracked his brains to figure out how they were stealing eggs without breaking them, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. So one night he stakes the place out to figure out how they do it. And what does he see? One rat sneaks into the chicken coop and grabs an egg with all four feet at once, then rolls onto its back. Then another rat comes in, bites the first by the tail and drags it out of the coop and back to their nest. See? That’s how rats operate in real life. Teamwork. Whereas these guys here are always looking for a chance to screw one another over, and if they ever band together it’s only to screw us, instead.

  But I’m getting off track, I’d set out to say something else.

  There was that whole episode with the baptismal font, too. About a month ago someone stole the font from the church of Saint Yiannis the Warrior, up on the mountain, and they tried to blame it on us. The Athenians took it, they said. The hell we did, we said. What the fuck would we do with a font? Use it as a kiddie pool or something? No, they said, you sold it for the copper. Ten euros per kilo, a hundred-kilo font, that’s a clean thousand in your pockets. Well, we said, if we’re counting to a thousand, your wives and daughters have probably sucked a thousand dicks this year, you can start there. Fuckers, fucking assholes. Neither side pulled any punches that time, and believe me, things got pretty ugly. First they say we’re stealing their jobs, then it’s their fields, now they’ve got us stealing baptismal fucking fonts out of their churches. Hear that, wind? Hear who’s talking a big talk about stealing? Those assholes, who for all those years charmed us into coming to these snake-hole islands, and picked our pockets clean at their hotels and tavernas. All those years they stole from us, and now they despise us. That sucker Tasos was right. All these years we’ve been stealing from Greece and now that the country is ruined we despise it. It’s the same with us. Now that we’re ruined and there’s nothing left for them to steal, they despise us. As if we wanted to leave our homes and come here to the end of God’s earth, like Adam in exile. As if we came from another country, as if we weren’t all Greeks, all one breed.

  Then there was that business with the Germans on Clean Monday. Two summers ago a German TV station came and filmed an hour-long show about us – you can imagine, the Greeks who became migrants in their own country, the Athens of the Aegean, that kind of thing. I don’t know how word got out, but pretty soon there were crowds knocking down our doors, TV stations and newspapers from all over the world, film crews, photographers, reporters, overnight Little Athens where we live looked more like
Cirque Medrano. And then the Chinese started showing up in droves, and those fags drove poor Elvis crazy, because apparently in China it’s good luck to meet someone who survived a shipwreck, and when they learned that Elvis walked away not from one but from three, they went nuts. We’re talking hysterics, you’ve never seen anything like it. There were lines down the street, people waiting for hours just to touch him or ask for his autograph, and all these Chinese girls dressed as brides coming to sit in his lap and swoon and croon and take photographs for good luck. I mean, they even invited him to be the best man at their weddings, we’re talking total insanity. Of course it all suited Elvis just fine, since he could grab an ass every now and then, and he was making good money, too – he’d set up a regular donation box like the ones in church, with a price list, and in the evening, when the show was over, he’d go down to the American’s place and buy a round for everyone and get wasted on tsikoudia. Things went on that way for a year or so, until one evening in May, not long after the business with Tasos, he was down by the lighthouse and ran into two Chinese girls from a cruise ship who were pretty plastered themselves, and who knows what happened, but at some point everyone in the tavernas along the harbor saw them running by half-naked, screaming and crying, and then they saw Elvis speeding off on his motorbike – and that was that. After that night no one ever saw him again, he just disappeared. We searched everywhere, we turned the whole island upside down, but we didn’t even find the motorbike. He vanished into thin air.

  First Tasos, then Elvis, then Lazaros’s kid. How do people just disappear like that, can you tell me? I don’t understand how a person can just disappear.

  It’s scary, isn’t it?

  But that’s not what I meant to say, either. There was something else I had in mind.

  I was talking about the tourists. For two years now we’ve been the hottest show in town. They stop us in the streets, they come uninvited into our yards and homes, film us and photograph us like we’re monkeys at the zoo. We’re even in the guidebooks – and the other day there was another big hullabaloo over in Tourtoura. There’s an old campground down there, it’s been abandoned for years, and last year a bunch of freaks from Athens broke into the place and occupied it. There were maybe thirty of them, and they put a sign up at the gate that says, “No cops, fascists, tourists, or other urban scum.” At first there were a few run-ins with the police, who tried a couple of times to kick them out, because the rats claimed they were coming out at night to steal chickens or take watermelons from the fields, but the kids from Athens had the bright idea of dousing themselves with gasoline and threatening to set themselves on fire, so the cops pussied out and these days they mostly just let them be. We don’t have much to do with them, either – they don’t bother us, we don’t bother them. They just hang out in there, smoking their joints, playing their guitars and their drums, growing their tomatoes, green beans, and hatred for society. That’s what they told Tasos once when he got it into his head to talk to them about Xellinakis, suggested they join forces on the cooperative he wanted to start. We just grow whatever we need for ourselves, and that includes our hatred for your society, they said, and sent him packing. Then the other day there was a huge uproar, because some idiots went over there, Norwegians, Swedes, who knows where they were from, and they scaled the wall and started snapping photographs, and the druggie kids came out with bats and started chasing them around. The rats made a big deal of the whole thing, they say we’re chasing the tourists away when we should really be grateful for all the free publicity they’re giving us all over the world. They brought up that business of Elvis and the Chinese girls and what happened even before that with the Germans and shouted and called us every name you can imagine. Fucking foreigners, they said, screw them and the day they set foot on this island – and they were talking about us, not the tourists.