‘Shall we be going?’ I said to Adriani, while inside I asked myself why, it would be just as miserable at home.
‘Just a bit longer. The fresh air is good for you.’
‘I meant in case Fanis comes …’
‘Don’t expect him today. From what I recall, he’s on duty.’
It wasn’t that I was anxious to see the doctor, but quite simply I get on well with my daughter’s boyfriend, Fanis Ouzounidis. My relationship with Fanis was in inverse proportion to the course of the Athens Stock Exchange. Whereas it reached a peak and then began to fall, our relationship first reached a low and then began to climb. I’d met him as the cardiologist on duty when I had ended up one night at the General Infirmary with acute ischaemia. I immediately liked him because he was always smiling and full of wisecracks. Until I discovered that he was seeing my daughter and I was furious. In the end, for Katerina’s sake, I reconciled myself more with the idea that he was her boyfriend than with him personally. I felt that he had betrayed my confidence, and when you have come up through the Police Force, the idea of betrayal clings to you like a leech. It was in intensive care that I first felt close to him, and that had nothing to do with medicine. He’d pop in at around twelve, just before lunch, and always with a smile on his face. And every time, he called me something different. From ‘And how are we today, Inspector’ to ‘How’s my future father-in-law, then’ and the ironically intoned ‘Dad!’ This was repeated three or four times a day, and also at night, when he was on duty, and it was combined with discreet questions about how I was getting on, whether I needed anything. I found out about this indirectly, from the nurses, who every so often came out with things like ‘We have to take good care of you, otherwise we’ll have Doctor Ouzounidis after us.’
Things began to turn sour from the moment that they took me out of intensive care. That same day, Adriani moved into my room on a twenty-four basis and began to take charge of everything. Partly the fact that I was a police officer who had been wounded on duty and partly the relationship between my daughter and Fanis meant that the doctors thought they had to give a daily report to her on the course of my recovery, on the medicines that they were administering to me and on the minor problems I faced from the effects of the operation. From the third day, she would stay in the visiting room and strike up a conversation with the doctors on every matter you could think of. If I were to dare venture an opinion of my own, for example, that I was in pain or that I felt the wound tugging, she would cut me short at once. ‘Leave it to me, Costas. You don’t know about these things.’ The doctors kept their anger in check because of Fanis, I was too weak to react, while the nurses hated her but didn’t dare to show it. In the end, it was Katerina who got up the courage to talk to her. Adriani burst out sobbing. ‘All right, Katerina,’ she said through her tears, ‘if I’m not the right person to take care of my husband, then hire a private nurse and I’ll go home.’ Her sobbing took the wind out of Katerina’s sails and sealed my fate as a hostage.
‘It’s chilly, put your cardigan on.’ She took the cardigan that she had knitted for me out of her bag and handed it to me.
‘I don’t need it, I’m not cold.’
‘You are cold, Costas dear, I know what I’m talking about.’
The cat got up from its place, stretched and jumped lightly down to the ground. It cast one last look at me, then it turned and went off with its tail erect, like a patrol car aerial.
I have no relationship at all with animals, neither a friendly nor an unfriendly one. But that cat’s arrogance got on my nerves.
I took the cardigan and put it on.
Fanis proved Adriani wrong. He showed up at around seven, just as I was reading the evening newspaper. This was another novelty of my post-hospital life: in the past it was dictionaries that monopolised my reading interests. Now I had moved on to newspapers, as an antidote for my boredom. I started with the morning paper, brought to me by Adriani, then I thumbed through my dictionaries; when I go out for my afternoon stroll, I buy the evening paper and read once again, in carbon copy, the morning news and, finally, I hear the same news for a third time on television just in case I’ve missed anything. The doctors kept talking of post-operative side effects, but they were nothing compared to the side effects of convalescence: unbearable boredom and inactivity to the point of paralysis.
Fanis found me reading the minor pieces on the finance pages with the absorption of an autistic. I was still wearing the cardigan that Adriani had had me wear in the park, not because I was feeling cold, but because I had reached such a state of apathy that I could no longer distinguish cold and heat. I was quite capable of going to bed wearing the cardigan if Adriani didn’t take it off me.
Fanis stood before me and smiled.
‘Are you up for a drive?’
‘How come you’re not on duty?’ I asked him, lifting my eyes from the newspaper.
‘I swapped with a colleague. It suited him to do his shift today.’
I put down the newspaper and got to my feet.
‘Just don’t be late for dinner!’ Adriani shouted from the kitchen. ‘Costas has to eat at nine.’
‘Why, what will to happen to him if he eats at ten?’ asked Fanis with a laugh.
Adriani appeared from the kitchen. ‘Fanis, you’re the doctor. Do you think it’s good for him to sleep on a full stomach while he’s convalescing?’
‘Yes, but you’re the one cooking for him. Even if he eats at midnight, he’ll still sleep like a baby.’
‘Let’s be off, it’s getting late,’ I said to Fanis, because I saw she was about to counter him with all her quack remedies and I’d end up missing my outing.
In the past, whenever she saw Fanis, she’d leave whatever she was doing in order to be sociable. Now she opened the door for him and then disappeared into the kitchen. In general, she didn’t look kindly on anyone coming to the house because she thought that it took me away from her complete control. With Fanis, she was reserved and a little suspicious because he was a doctor and she didn’t know what it might come to.
‘Why are you wearing a cardigan? Are you feeling cold?’ Fanis asked me.
‘No.’
‘Take it off, it’s warm outside and it’ll make you sweat.’
I took it off. My wife tells me to wear it, my doctor tells me to take it off, I just obey.
‘Let’s go along the coast road and get a bit of sea air,’ Fanis said, turning from Hymettou Avenue into Vouliagmenis Avenue.
The traffic was light and no one was in a rush. Since the airport was moved to Spata, Vouliagmenis Avenue is not so busy. Fanis drove down Alimou Avenue and turned into Poseidonos Avenue. Crowds of people were squashed into the four feet in front of the stone wall overlooking the sea. The rest of the pavement had been taken over by various Indians, Pakistanis, Egyptians and Sudanese, who had spread out tablecloths and were selling women’s handbags, wallets, euro converters, purses for the new euro coins, binoculars, watches, alarm clocks and plastic flowers. They themselves were squatting next to the tablecloths and chatting to each other, given that the passers-by didn’t seem to care a fig for their merchandise.
It was June. The really hot days hadn’t arrived yet and I could feel the breeze from the Saronic Gulf on my face. There were many people still in the sea or playing rackets on the beach, while some of those fake sailboats that keep sinking and then righting themselves were skidding back and forth in the bay of Faliron. I shut my eyes and emptied my mind of the thought of chicken with noodle soup that made me feel sick, of two months more of autism in the form of convalescence, of the cat that would be waiting for me the following evening in the usual place in the park … I tried to think of something else, but I could find nothing.
‘You have to get yourself out of that vicious circle of convalescence.’
Fanis’s voice woke me up and I opened my eyes. We had left Kalamaki behind and were heading towards Elliniko. Fanis went on talking, with his eyes fixed on the road.
‘You know how at first we were always at loggerheads. You had me down as a cold and conceited young doctor and I saw you as a crabby old copper, who thought I had seduced his daughter. Well, I still preferred you even like that to the sop you are now.’
In his attempt to bring me to my senses, Fanis had become distracted and had to swerve suddenly to avoid bumping into the back of a Ford cabriolet with a couple inside. The driver had spiked hair, like almost everyone
