of fear and on the other she was reminding me that it wasn’t my decision alone but that we would make the decision together. ‘And when all’s said and done, you pay a fortune for health insurance. Now that you’ve an opportunity to get back some of what they’ve been taking from you all these years, are you going to pass up the chance?’
She smiled at me triumphantly because she had found the argument that no Greek can counter. Any Greek who doesn’t believe that the state is stealing from him and doesn’t feel the need to get his own back is either mad or a communist.
I had gathered momentum following my historic sortie and was flirting with the idea of cancelling my afternoon appointment with the cat. But, after careful consideration, I decided that there was more to be gained by my avoiding head-on confrontations and resorting to guerrilla warfare.
A quarter of an hour before the designated time for our little outing, I felt her shadow falling over me.
‘Aren’t we going to go for a walk today?’
I lifted my eyes from the dictionary and said with a wry smile: ‘We’ll go, but only if you promise me that tomorrow you’ll make me stuffed vegetables.’
‘I’d be happy to, but maybe they’re too heavy for your stomach just now, Costas.’
‘Not again? I’ve told you a thousand times that I have a bullet wound in my chest not an ulcer in my stomach, but you won’t listen.’
She thought about it for a moment and came up with a compromise to save face. ‘All right, I’ll use less onion so they won’t be too heavy.’
I was pleased with myself that my little scheme had worked and now the cat was sitting opposite me and staring at me with that same arrogant expression that my presence usually provoked. I got up slowly, stretched and went up to it. It was alarmed because my action was in breach of our silent agreement. It sat up in readiness and stared at me anxiously. When it saw that I kept on approaching it nonchalantly, it leapt down smartly from the bench so as to withdraw honorably with its tail in the air instead of being forced into a disorderly retreat. From then on, it would at least be on its toes whenever it saw me and I would be free of its arrogance.
Adriani hadn’t noticed a thing as she was engrossed in the newspapers that I had bought that morning.
‘As if he would commit suicide because of financial problems!’ she suddenly exclaimed.
‘Do you think it improbable?’ I asked, sitting back down beside her.
‘Where’ve you been hiding?’ she replied, as though I had just been repatriated along with the communists from the former Soviet democracies. ‘Even if he was heading for bankruptcy, his company might have lost out but not him. You can bet your life that he had his personal fortune stashed away in Switzerland.’
‘Why Switzerland?’
‘Because it’s not part of the European Union and they can’t check his account.’
I stared at her, dumbfounded. ‘Adriani, old girl,’ I said to her, ‘why don’t you go down to Headquarters and I’ll stay at home and make the stuffed vegetables?’
‘You see what you learn from TV?’ she replied with a triumphant smile. ‘You’re the only one who doesn’t learn anything because you can’t be bothered.’
‘Do they say things like that on TV?’
‘Are you joking? Do you realise what you can hear on the box? It’s a regular university.’
‘One door closes, another opens,’ I thought, remembering one of my favourite songs, and in the end it was the box that won out.
‘Let’s go, it looks like rain,’ said Adriani.
I looked up and, through the trees, saw the sky heavy with black clouds. The first big drops caught up with us at the exit to the park. There was no wind at all and the rain fell perpendicularly, like a barber’s curtain that doesn’t let you see more than ten yards in front of your nose. At the edge of the pavement, we were stopped by a current of water. In less than five minutes, Kononos Street had turned into a tributary of Filolaou Street that had itself become a torrential river.
‘How are we going to get across?’ I asked Adriani. ‘Just look at it.’
She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into the entrance of an apartment block. ‘Wait here, I’ll be back,’ she said and ran off to the supermarket three doors away.
I was wondering whether she had gone to buy a child’s inflatable canoe when I saw her coming out with a handful of empty plastic bags.
‘Lift your leg up,’ she said, slipping one of them over my shoes and fixing it with a rubber band as though wrapping up a frozen chicken. Any resistance on my part was greeted with a ‘Shh, I know what I’m doing!’ and she moved on to the second foot.
‘You’re mad if you think I’m going to dive into that river with plastic bags for flippers,’ I told her.
‘You’re not the only one. Just look around you!’
And she pointed to one woman who was fording the river with plastic bags on her feet and one over her head.
‘Be thankful that I had the good sense to bring an umbrella,’ Adriani boasted.
The situation overcame all my resistance and in a minute we had crossed over, two pusses-in-boots struggling not to be swept away by the current.
In spite of the umbrella and the plastic bags, we were drenched and once home, we changed our clothes and got out the ointments. Meanwhile the rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun and the sky in the west was clear and deep red.
This is the most boring part of the daily routine as I don’t know what to do to pass the time. I somehow manage to get by till midday by dragging breakfast out till ten and then with the help of the papers and my dictionaries. After lunch, I usually lie down for a while. I never sleep, but I shut my eyes and keep them closed for a couple of hours to fool myself into believing that I’m asleep. This is followed by my appointment with the cat. It’s from returning home to the evening news bulletin that there’s a black hole that I can’t find anything to fill. I thumb through the dictionaries for a bit. Then I pick up the paper, but I’ve already read it inside out. There’s always the crossword, but that only makes me even more irritated as I’m completely useless at it. Not to mention that I feel personally offended at not being able to find the right word after so many years delving into dictionaries. At the third attempt, I end up throwing the paper from the bed towards the door or from the sitting room into the hall, depending on where in the house I am. Then the next day at the same time I start again, a real sucker for punishment.
And that was the case then. I was looking at the squares and I felt more like playing at battleships, like at school, because I couldn’t find even one word. After ten minutes, furious with myself, I flung the paper into the hall.
‘Why do you bother racking your brains like that, when you know you can’t do it?’ I heard Adriani’s voice coming from the kitchen. She was the ever-vigilant eye in the house that sees all and misses nothing.
I was comforted by the fact that, because of the downpour, the news bulletin would at least be different from the usual and we’d see rivers, flooded basements and buckets, but my delight exhausted itself after four shots, as the afternoon deluge had lasted barely half an hour. By the time the camera crews had arrived, the rivers running down the streets had dried up. I prepared myself to hear for a third time the same news stories that I had read in both the morning and evening papers, but the bulletin was suddenly interrupted by advertisements.
‘What, now we’ve got to have adverts during the news too?’ said Adriani puzzled. ‘They should be ashamed!’
My first reaction was to get up and walk away. To wait for the adverts to finish just to hear news reports that I already knew was just a bit too much. But then I thought whether I had anything better to do. I didn’t so I sat down again. Extraordinarily, my patience was rewarded because the advertisements were interrupted suddenly and the woman newscaster reappeared on the screen. She was holding a sheet of paper and staring perplexedly into the camera.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen, just a few minutes ago, our channel received an anonymous phone call. A caller announced that he was phoning on behalf of the Philip of Macedon National Greek Front and stated that they
