Lambda is for Laothalassa

Nick Papandreou

When we first moved to Greece, my father’s mother, who lived with us, took on the task of improving our Greek. To grow into who we were, my grandmother said, meant learning Greek. She gave us Greek books to read but above all she insisted we learn to write Greek “beautifully.” She was determined, on this at least, not to let her grandchildren get away with the sloppy American writing habits acquired in the California public school system. “An elegant writing style,” she said in her precise formal Greek “is a necessity in today’s world.”

So began the calligraphy lessons. Once a week I sat at her small ebony-colored desk — she always made sure my shoulders were upright and that when I leaned forward I did so without bending my back — and then she would place in front of me some fresh, creamy-smelling sheets of paper, an inkwell, and a stylus with removable nibs. For these occasions she wore not her ornate ruffled blouse and stylish chapeau but some loose equivalent of an older woman’s workclothes: a long gray woolen skirt that reached her ankles with two enormous sets of buttons running its length and a simple white blouse.

We began with the Greek alphabet. She showed me how to ornament each letter with its own particular curlicue and wisp, adding tails, lengthening stalks, thickening stems and thinning curves by twisting and turning the nib of the stylus. I learned to taper downstrokes and add flourishes to upward strokes — descenders and ascenders she called them; she made me concentrate on initial and terminal letters so that I could lend them “grace and freedom,” and she showed me how to connect two letters with a smooth ligature. She corrected me if I didn’t hold the pen properly because it wasn’t enough that the letters look beautiful but that I look good while engaged in the act of writing. If someone should come in while I was writing they should notice the elegant way I held the pen, angled back like a reed bending in the wind, not sticking crassly up in the air like the mast of a ship. She showed me how to dip the nib into ink and turn it slightly so it wouldn’t drip on the creamy white sheet, to check for the watermark on the paper and to imagine a horizontal line running through each word. While she taught me the art of calligraphy she also taught me about each letter’s “soul,” as she put it, its psyche.

I learned that each letter has its own personality. The letter lambda ( λ ) has two legs which dangle beneath the word. A properly drawn lambda is a wonderful thing, a lovely trigonometer; think of lambda like a little man leaning back so that you draw the first leg slightly shorter than the second. Lambda’s embarrassed to be such a beautiful letter which is why we draw its head slightly bowed and why it keeps its hands in its pockets. If you lift lambda by its head and shake it like a bell the sound drops out of it — ul ul ul. I could see myself as a lambda, hands in pockets, head down.

The letter beta (β) was pregnant twelve months of the year; pie (π) was a square block of a letter shaped like a house; only something as solid as that could shelter the equation for the area of the circle, a shape which so intrigued the ancient Greeks. Psi (ψ) was like Poseidon’s trident, clearly a masculine letter, one that could be used to spear fish. Open your mouth for capital omega (Ω) feel it, the large drawn out ooh sound versus its taut breathless brother o-micron that looked like your mouth when you pronounced it. There was the delicate delta (ä) and the cantankerous eta (η). The small gamma (γ) was a scissors while its capitalized version resembled a hangman’s post (Λ). Epsilon (ε) was a very vulnerable letter, a letter to feel sorry for because of its open half-circles but a great addition that any word would be proud to have in its repertoire because epsilon looked so beautiful. Words with too many epsilon’s I felt sorry for because they seemed steeped in vulnerability, like the word eleos which meant mercy. N was a sophisticated letter, naturally written tall, linear and elegant; it stands strong while joining what can never meet — two parallels. Capital theta (Θ) you had nothing to worry about, a self-sufficient letter, a closed circle with a dash in the middle, never lonely. Words with theta’s seemed as independent as a military garrison.

Once I had learned the individual letters I practiced writing sentences by copying selected passages from the Bible. My notebook was soon filled with quotes like “Judgments are prepared for scorners and stripes for the back of fools,” or “A foolish son is the calamity of his father.” She corrected me with admonitions in French. “Ce n’est pas comme ça,” or “Mais non!” After a few weeks of biblical instruction she opened a book of poetry by Cavafy. My task was to copy the poems. While I followed Cavafy’s stanzas she would pause to tell me how polite he had been to her when they had met in Alexandria, a true gentleman who worked in an office of the Bureau of Irrigation Works by day and wrote poetry by night. As I wrote she recited the poem as if in front an audience and when she was done there would be a satisfied stillness in the room that my imagination filled with applause. “They don’t make poets like him anymore,” she would say and shut the book.

She taught me that Greek words might be funny. Fallen leaves make a sousouro, she said, when the wind rushes through them. Politicians who are full of themselves are pompodis. A car that’s falling apart is a saravalaki. Tzitziki is the Greek word for cicada, a word that sounds like the insect’s call. Some words were invented to sound like things. The word laothalassa literally meant a sea of people, an orgiastic multitude. The open alpha’s were like the crash of waves against the shore; in lao the mouth went from the open alpha to the rounded omicron and pronouncing it required disciplined effort, the energy of a crowd itself.

On her dresser, next to the fans which she used on hot days, my grandmother kept three icons of saints and behind that, a crucifix with Christ’s nearly nude body arched in that peculiar pose of pain and deliverance. Pictures of her Polish father hung from the wall, a man with a fierce beard, a monocle and an erect bearing. She told me he fought the Russians in Lithuania, was exiled to Siberia, escaped and joined some old communards in Paris, trained in the Garibaldi school for rebels in Italy before joining the Greeks liberate Ioannina from the Turks in 1871. There was also a large picture of my grandfather and my grandmother when they were young. It was only after weeks had gone by and I had stared at the pictures countless times that I suddenly realized that my grandfather and she had once lived under the same roof, inhabited the same bed and eaten their breakfast together.

“Why don’t you live with Pappou any more?” I asked her one day while copying out “The God Abandons Anthony.”

“We’re divorced,” she replied and then pointed to the next stanza so I couldn’t ask any more. Divorced since 1927 my mother told me, a period which belonged to the paleolithic age for me, a remote world of model T-Fords and women with veils and people who walked too fast — like in the silent movies of that era. So it was with some excitement that I told her that Pappou would be visiting us for lunch one day.

When she heard the news she opened her anthology of poems. Yet rather than start reciting she deposited the book on her lap and from the window of her bedroom stared at slices of bark which hung from the trunks of the birch trees like empty shirt sleeves. After a long silence she began the lesson but for the duration of the hour, hunched over her small desk, she barely paid attention to my writing and didn’t guide me. Free of her vocal correctives and that solid grip over my fingers — though over seventy she sometimes squeezed my fingers so hard against the ink pen that when she lifted her hand the place where my finger touched the pen was red, with a small depression — my writing degenerated into child-like scribbles, losing all traces of the adult-like beauty I thought was mine. My alpha’s were so small the open hole was filled with ink and my gamma’s barely crossed below the line. At some point she lifted her hand and scrutinized my sloppy oeuvre. I expected to hear her cries of “Mais non!” but instead she patted my head absent-mindedly and said it was too hot a day for such hard work. We would continue tomorrow, she said, and stood to gather up the utensils.

The following day when I showed up for my lesson she was sitting on her bed reading a letter. Hanging from the closet handle was a dark blue dress and beneath that were three pairs of shoes. Her open jewelry box held a mass of necklaces, thin and tiny, tangled up with each other. Her hearing aid sat on the writing table so and because she had her back to me, she couldn’t know I had entered the room. When I stood close I saw from over her shoulder the date at the top right corner of the letter. December 6, 1910. The words were larger than hers and swerved sideways, as if written in a rush, but nonetheless preserved the calligraphic principals she had taught me. This was a man’s writing. Though I was tempted to read on I was also embarrassed to cheat. When we played cards I knew it was ridiculously easy to cheat on her, but precisely for that reason I didn’t. I walked in front of her and stood there. When she saw me she immediately brought the letter close to her chest then returned it to a wooden box which held similar letters of super thin onion skin paper. She told me she didn’t remember that we’d put off yesterday’s session for today but soon enough we were bending over her desk. She held my hand with her coarse fingers. Her attention to my efforts was so slight that soon I was drawing alpha’s big as a cat’s head.

“What’s this?” she said, pointing to a cat’s head.

“But you’re leading me,” I replied, “it’s not my fault.” She said nothing. “Yiayia, we can do our lessons afterward.”

“Afterward?”

“After Pappou.”

She stared at me is she hadn’t understood. Then she nodded her head. “Yes, yes. After Pappou.”

*

Saturday morning, the day of my grandfather’s arrival, the house was on the move. Elvira had prepared a large meal of rice, chicken and bechamel sauce. My mother had promised us a double allowance if we cleaned up our rooms by twelve noon. My grandmother’s door was shut all morning and except for the sound of water rushing through the faucet of the washroom, there was nothing to indicate that she had even woken up for the morning. She never took breakfast anyway, but today no one had seen her.

Yet when we heard the rumble of cars outside our home and the small cavalcade of cop cars and motorcycles, her door opened and she stepped outside. She was dressed like she was going to a soiree. A dark veil hid her face and her sleek blue skirt reached down to her ankles. With those fingers whose strength I had come to know well she clutched a small silver purse from which hung beads. She asked me to help her down the stairs and she followed me, placing one hand on my shoulder. I took each step like a kid, with care, joining one foot to the other before venturing down the next step.

When I reached the main floor I saw my grandfather in the hallway. His maroon tie was decorated with white palm fronds that looked sort of like the skeleton of a fish. When he saw me he opened his arms to receive me but then his hands dropped to his sides. A cloud crossed his face, the smile vanished, and he turned instead to greet Lydia, Jason and Hector. My grandmother squeezed my shoulder hard, involuntarily I think, then released me and I heard her steps fading behind me. I ran to my grandfather and let him lift me into the air. When he put me down I raced toward the kitchen but she wasn’t there. I knocked on the bathroom door, once twice, turned the handle but it was locked. She didn’t join us for lunch and nobody said anything when Elvira took her plate away. That brief meeting in the hallway was the last time my grandparents ever saw each other.

*

Our next lesson she asked me to read to her from something called “The Secrets of the Swamp,” by Penelope Delta. Six hundred and forty pages of action-packed story about the exploits of a boy living on the border of Greece and Bulgaria during the war of 1905. Turning to page one I read this:

The sun, setting, reddened the snow-covered peaks of Olympus, goldened the waterholes left by yesterday’s rain in muddy plains which stretched forever, ashen, ugly, deserted.

“Ah yes,” my grandmother said, nodding her head. “Northern Greece.” She wore a woolen vest and was knitting something. While I read I could hear the needles click against each other. Her glasses were perched on her nose so she could look up at me and down at her progress without a problem. She looked more grandmotherly than ever, nothing like the stylish lady she had dressed into for my grandfather. The only thing missing was a rocking chair. I read a few more paragraphs.

“Penelope wanted to write a book in simple Greek,” my grandmother began, “and she did it. We were friends of hers, your grandfather and I.” It seemed hard to believe that anybody could know someone whose name was on the cover of our school book but I didn’t doubt my grandmother in anything. Whatever she said was the truth. “Your grandfather wanted Greek to be understood by all people. He knew the language well, that one did.”

“Like in the letters?”

“Which letters?”

“The ones in your black box.”

“I know you saw me reading them,” she said. I nodded my head guiltily. “Come early tomorrow,” she said.

Next day I found her sitting on her bed, a mass of crinkled onion skin pages around her. Some were folded in half, some were small like from a notepad, others big as two sheets together. Rather than gather them up and stuff them into the box like last time, she asked me to sit on the chair.

“One day,” she said, “you will learn to cherish the shape of words. One day you will write love letters and you will win any woman’s heart with the sheer neatness and power of your writing style.”

She handed me the letter. “The first time I saw your grandfather,” she said, “he was being held by gendarmes, who were taking him to jail. Years later, on one of our anniversaries, he wrote me this.”

Just like today, my Lydia, in 1907, remember, I was being taken in for the inquiry for the student troubles and I saw you on the steps of the Law School, with your white chapeau. We hadn’t yet confessed. I blushed, you blushed, and these bright blushes lit my prison cell. And ever since then I have waited for you, just as I waited — how could I not? — for your letter in jail; what absolute relief to have received even one letter from you. Were you real? Were you false? Inside the prison I asked this question many times without being able to answer it.

The writing was like hers; imaginary horizontal lines that appeared between each neat sentence; the smooth rightward tilt of letters, the curlicues for capitals, the upturned deltas and long tails that dipped beneath the imaginary horizontals.

She showed me a picture of the two of them together. In her eyes there is a sadness as if she knows one day she will be in a bedroom, alone, showing this picture to her grandson.

But she didn’t let me see any more letters. “You’re too young,” was her excuse. A few months later she told me that my calligraphy was passable and that I could practice on my own. We were both sad that I wouldn’t be joining her afternoons. The following year she took my youngest brother under her tutelage and taught him some of the surprises of the Greek alphabet. But once, when we compared notes, I asked him about the sturdy lambdas and the vulnerable epsilons. He thought I was crazy. My grandmother didn’t teach him that part.

*

On a cold day in the suburb of King City, north of Toronto, while kids sharpened their skates and slapped hockey sticks against pucks and snowmobiles roared in the distance, we sat in front of the television and changed channels in the hope of finding news of my grandfather’s funeral. We didn’t know if they were going to show anything. My grandmother had been crossing herself ever since we learned of his death. Her face looked worn but in her eyes rather than sadness I saw a small bright light.

Then, on the six o’clock news, for a full minute, we saw footage of the crowd surrounding the coffin. A close-up showed my mother in a black scarf and sunglasses, my older brother and my sister — they had been given special permission to enter the country — who were being pushed by the crowd practically onto the hearse. Behind the Canadian commentator’s words we could hear a roar and the slogan, “Old Man of Democracy, Rise Up and See Us! Rise Up Old Man!” An aerial shot showed hundreds of thousands walking slowly behind the funeral car. The crowds flooded into the First Cemetery of Athens and were backed up past Hadrian’s Arch, reaching as far as the Greek Parliament. Then the news flash was over and we sat there in silence.

My grandmother spoke first. Even in his last moments, she said, he managed to gather a real laothalassa. Her voice sounded harsh. It was the first hint I got of the real reason behind their separation. Politics. Not that I should have been surprised. She was the one who had told me that politics was the death of the family.

Once he was gone she seemed eager to talk about him. She started to sing songs that he had sung to woo her, usually German songs, but some in French. She told us about Leipzig and Berlin before the first World War and about the first time they held hands behind his father’s church in Patras and how he stole from her a breathless kiss inside the belfry. She told us how my grandfather had carried her through the streets of Chios one night, searching for a doctor, knocking on every door, shouting in the streets, until finally a mid-wife appeared to help with the baby and how my father was born in the middle of a garden, under a fig tree. Every year that went by, she said, every year that she grew older brought her that much closer to her husband.

*

We buried her in the same cemetery as my grandfather, though at quite a distance from each other. Her letters she left to us. For years I couldn’t look at them. But one day as I read them, I recalled that brief moment in our home when their gaze met each other, the day she dressed in case he had changed his mind and wanted to speak to her.

January, 1909

I want to be the wind in your hair, the teardrop of your eye, the breath of your mouth, the smile of your lips, the tip of your tongue. I love you, I will love you, I have loved you.

March, 1910

So what if it was insane to meet on Tuesday next to the church; we quenched our thirst. My hungry lips, my burning heart, cooled. Joy doesn’t walk streets, you must chase after it, beneath the table, before the theater, in the drop of sunlight on your cheek.

When she taught me how to write, when I blew on the creamy sheet to dry the ink and pressed down hard with the blotter she saw my grandfather in his military uniform drying one the words he’d written for her over half a century ago:

August, 1924

From the moment of our parting in the trolley your eyes live inside me, follow me everywhere. I left, my heart is wax, I return to you, my Lydia. I open the window to my office and let in a whirlwind of pain. Let’s close the windows, the door, the voices of the world, let’s be alone, alone. You and I.

Receive my soul.

In one letter, when they are no longer living together, he asks her for a divorce. It’s not that he doesn’t love her, he wrote, it’s that their marriage holds him back. Unlike the earlier ones, this one is free of his lazy rightward tilt; instead the words are upright and run across the page at neat right angles, perfectly horizontal, perhaps his most exquisite calligraphic effort. He wrote that his life required exhaustion in battle, whether in victory or in defeat. He was born when a crowd gathered in a square and died when it died. This passion, he said, he could share with nobody. He told her nothing of the famous theater actress who, along with four trunks of clothes and two poodles, would move in with him days after the divorce.

Imagined Countries

by

Nick Papandreou

Athens Greece

As a bilingual hyphenated American writer now living in Greece, I am constantly comparing cultures. I fear I can see only with a double vision. What would they think of this back home, I hear myself saying half the time, when I encounter something extremely Greek. Prime time television Saturday night is mainly taken up with a dance-and-song fest. Singers, actors, politicians, and the emcee get together to drink, eat and dance in front of a live Greek band. On one of the shows, a boy who must be no older than fourteen serves the food, plays the bouzouki and occasionally dances.

My otherwise thoroughly modern Greek girlfriend insisted, when we were breaking up, on taking me to church in the poor area of Elefsina, south of Athens, to meet a special priest who uses the “alternative bible” to exorcise the evil eye that had been cast upon my person and so caused me to leave her. Four or five gypsies hesitated before getting on the brand-new escalator in the shiny new subway, built in time for the 2004 summer Olympics. I realized suddenly they were adults who’d never seen an escalator before. Worried that their feet might get caught in the metal teeth, they way I used to worry when I was a kid, they jumped onto it from a distance, then gathered strength to jump off at the end. Two of them took the stairs, sticking to tradition. None of this activity made the smallest impact on the non-hyphenated Greeks going up and down the escalator, the so-called Greek-Greeks who found nothing of value in the scene.

I am exposed to such Kulture Klashes every day. Let me offer a more literary example. Through Amazon dot com, my gateway to the States, I recently ordered a book by a relatively well-known author named Charles Baxter. When I received the cardboard box, book inside wrapped with inflated plastic, I considered his last name: “Baxter.” A solid sounding name with hints of a hardware-like background and hours spent with the boys swigging beer and watching Monday night football, the equivalent of Wednesday night soccer in Greece. The picture on the backsleeve shows him in the typical American writers’ pose: no suit and tie, no obvious effort to look neat. The picture itself appears as if it was taken by his wife with a cheap throw-away camera. And not surprisingly, when I strained to read the sidebar credit, I found the name Martha Baxter, probably the author’s wife or daughter. Something democratic and low-cost about the backsleeve production, another indication of causal class-free America. Greek books rarely include the author’s picture and when they do there is certainly no photographer’s accreditation.

Baxter’s sleeves are partly rolled up, a beard hides his chin, his hair is uncombed, and behind him, in the distance, you can make out a mountain range. Thoreau would be delighted. Already then, from the very book-cover itself, my generalized notions of America have been reinforced. The author as the loner, somewhere in a log cabin churning out his masterpiece. The Greek male author is more likely to be smoking in a dinky café in the heart of the city, speaking loudly to anyone willing to listen about the awful state of Greek literature and cultivates the raffish bohemian look, you know the one — the tortured artist who is always two days behind on his shave.

Baxter is in many ways a great writer. He is capable of depicting the strange silences and stiff gestures that are part of white American friendship. He has dialogue and inflection down so well that when I read his work I feel like I’ve been transported across the Atlantic. He captures the culture from within the culture, no mean feat, without reference to other cultures. That is why reading him in Greece is such a jolting experience. Though he lives in America, he also “imagines” America.

I read part of Baxter while on the old subway line that runs between Kifissia (the equivalent say of Great Neck, Long Island) and Omonia, (the equivalent of New York’s 42nd Street). My mental space was Baxter’s America; my physical space was as Greek as Greek could be. The old subway line is primarily made up of working class people. A young gypsy boy, no older than eight or nine, entered the car with an instrument called a baglama, which is like a miniature guitar. In a tremendously loud voice he sang that he didn’t have a “dime” for a “souvlaki” or a “joint.” A young man with his right arm missing had hung a sign from his neck saying he was Serbian, a sure drawing card in Greece, and that he’d been injured in the wars in Yugoslavia; a well-dressed woman in her fifties, looking like a high-school marm, sang a Bulgarian folk song. Refugee overload means their cups pretty much stay empty.

Between songs and plaints, I managed to complete a story called Reincarnation. The story ends when a man cries in front of another man at a dinner party among friends. The other man touches one cheek and so has the benefit of actually feeling the tears. Perhaps this is an image of communion or perhaps it is the ultimate act of male bonding. The cause of the crying is not abundantly clear, and for our purposes, not important. The point is not that the man is crying, it is that his friend is sensitive enough to appreciate his pain.

To end a story with a man crying in silence after a dinner party and then for another male to touch his tears, and to hold this up as the defining moment in the story – what literature professors sometimes call the epiphany – is all fine and well and quite moving, in a subtle understated way. But I immediately wonder at the cultural connotations. Would it work for a Greek reader? And more to the point, would it work in a Greek setting where men of all classes hug and kiss and cry during a political rally or a soccer games? Where you can’t say goodbye without kissing each shaveable cheek?

When I arrived at Omonia Square and walked into the sun, surrounded by dozens of Albanians come to buy their local newspapers, it struck me that it was truly strange to be riding the old subway while reading a modern American short-story from a Michigan writer. Reincarnation would be completely untranslatable, not because of the technical difficulties but because of the freight of culture embedded in the story. Unless you had some sense of America, you’d be in trouble. In the States, relationships and particularly the writing about them has been greatly influenced by both the women’s and so-called men’s movement. I think this fine-tuned awareness concerning the politics of relationships is not part of modern Greek consciousness yet, so the subtlety of Baxter’s “male bonding” epiphany would probably be lost on the modern Greek. And even in the States of twenty years ago the meaning of a story about how men reveal intimacy might have been lost. I mean it took us the better part of three decades to go from Midnight Cowboy to Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Cowboys and on one level the two movies are similar. However the first was a cult movie and you probably wouldn’t invite either of the characters into your living room, while the second made it into the heart of middle (and multiplex) America. That’s where the difference can be charted – American society has become far more mature and highly aware of all sorts of prejudice than ever before.

I walked up Panepistimiou Street and made my way to a Ministry where I had an appointment with a bright young lawyer on the fifth floor. Having just read Baxter, my American side had been properly alerted, which meant that I was embarrassingly polite, it meant I didn’t stare at the women, and that I said sorry and excuse me whenever I bumped into someone, and most of all, I let lots and lots of people get in front of me at the red light. This is a generalization but these are the characteristics that represent the countries of my imagination, these are the ideas that which I must work with or against when I construct my fictional worlds – American or Greek.

The Ministry building was new so because of its modernity, when I rode the elevator I was not jolted out of my Americanness. Then I reached Petros’ office. The “coffee-boy,” a short man in his fifties wearing a white short-sleeve shirt, was arguing about last night’s soccer match with Petros. I had barely entered the office when I was asked my opinion about the Olympiakos soccer team. I disappointed them by saying I had none. Not having grown up in Greece I possess none of the cultural markers, though my Greek is fluent even in its slang. I’m like the German spy who when arrested by the GIs can speak English perfectly but doesn’t know who Mickey Mantle is and thinks that the expression “Pleased as Punch” is the term for a satisfying drink. The coffee-boy took my order for a freshly squeezed orange juice and bowed out. Coffee-boy. I don’t think that word exists in English but I just automatically translated it from Greek. (There is something demeaning about it.) I don’t think in the States we have men in their fifties or sixties whose full-time job is to run up and down office floors taking chump orders. We have “delivery boys” who usually quit after a month.

Before getting down to business I knew we would have to spend at least fifteen minutes to half an hour on other topics. Petros informed me that he was the only male on the floor, except for another one who didn’t count because of his particular sexual proclivities. So, he said, the two of us had free reign.

Three of the women in the legal department, he informed me, were “available” but had not yet gone so far as to cheat on their husbands. It would take an outsider from the ministry, someone like me, he implied, for them to yield. A buxom dark-haired woman dressed in an elegant deep blue came in to drop off some papers. We were introduced. She was a lawyer working on human rights. She spoke very proper Greek and seemed to have gone to all the right schools.

As soon as she left the room, Petros went into excruciating detail about what he wanted to do to her sexually, going so far as to demonstrate a certain position on the desk, only partly reminiscent of what Jack Nicholson does to Jessica Lange in The Postman Only Rings Twice. Suddenly, in the middle of these theatrics, the woman returned, saw Petros in a prone position, turned beet red and hurried out of the office without a further word.

My mother’s feminist training kicked in. I was embarrassed. I wanted to apologize because though I was not the instigator, I had certainly not stopped Petros and this made me an accessory to the crime. I told Petros that in the States his behavior would have gotten him fired for overt sexual harassment. It’s not that some men don’t talk like that about women – it’s that in professional circles they’ve learned to be quite careful about it. I told him about the rather strict rules about teacher-student relations when I was a teaching assistant in the economics department at Princeton.

Petros raised his hands into the air like his team had just scored a goal and shouted, “He’s crazy, he’s crazy! Petros the bald is crazy!”

I stared at him. “Why don’t you go tell the woman you’re sorry.”

“Sorry? About what?”

“About.. you know.”

“Aw, c’mon. They like it!”

“Right.”

“Okay,” he said finally, “let’s go together.”

When we entered the woman’s office, Petros said,

“Have we offended you?”

“What?”

“My friend here thinks I’ve offended you.”

“Oh,” she said, turning slightly red.

“Hasn’t he?” I said.

“No,” she said, finally acknowledging what she had seen. “That’s just the way Petros is. Everybody knows it.”

“You see,” Petros said triumphantly. “This is Greece!” I threw up my hands.

My stereotypes had once again been confirmed.

Returning to another Baxter story on my way back up to Kifissia, (the Greek subway serves to carry us forward in this essay) I found relief in the absence of such Petros-like directness in Baxter’s work. What at first had seemed as castrated dialogue between the men and women of Baxter’s universe now struck me as the apogee of civilized discourse.

I discussed the issue of sexual harassment with a friend of mine who, like me, returned recently to Greece. He used to work in a prestigious D.C. law firm. He e-mailed me the following comment: “Let me assure you that the bantering that went on in my law office in D.C. and the discussions male lawyers had among themselves in the privacy of their offices could get much rowdier than the Greek example of Petros that you gave.” But the point is that the male lawyers in my friend’s law firm dared speak rowdily only in private. My dear Petros, however, had no fear about letting the women in on his doings. There was no fear of reprisal. In today’s corporate America you’d probably face a goodly number of sexual harassment lawsuits and the men have become far more careful. In Greece, the first successful sexual harassment lawsuit was won only three years ago by a woman working in a super-market in the port city of Patras. Things are still way behind in that department, I’m afraid.

Put a Greek in an American setting and you get trouble. Louis, A Greek friend of mine who was teaching “poli sci” at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and who had grown up on one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Aegean (he would boast about how many tourists he had bedded per summer starting from the age of fourteen), was taken to court by one of his students on the charge of sexual harassment. (He was so out of sync with the moral police that when I visited to teach one of his classes he entered the classroom holding hands with two of his students…) He had only kissed her on both cheeks, he argued, because it had been her birthday. “That’s what we do in Greece.” She claimed he had ejaculated in his pants when he kissed her and that this implied an attempt at rape. His main line of defense was not one to go over well with the female judge – he had been with many women and she was not attractive enough to merit harassment, certainly not stunning enough to cause such an ejaculation. “Who does she think she is,” he told the female judge, “Marilyn Monroe?” Since there was no Monica-like proof of such exertions on either his pants or hers, the judge sent the case for internal review to the University itself where he was summarily fired. A few months later, the student became his girlfriend. Greek lover loses job, runs the headline, but gets the girl. One more stereotype confirmed – and more grist for my fictional mill.

But lets return to our trip on the old subway. Being early afternoon, the train car, built in Rumania, was relatively empty. (I will leave it up to you to imagine the trip, especially the overground part with the olive trees and old shacks along the way, the sun blazing on the windows, a shepherd grazing sheep next to the new Olympic Stadium). A young boy with black glasses had his face stuck in a book. He got off at my stop. He seemed rather uncoordinated. His books kept slipping from his grip and seemed ready to crash to the ground. I liked him. For one thing, he was actually carrying books. For another he was exceedingly clumsy, and who can resist that? In America we would have called him a “nerd.”

It has often struck me that a further crucial difference between Greece and America is the existence in America of that bearer of maximum awkwardness, the “nerd.” In Greece the nerd is a rather rare species. In any American gathering, especially academia, you can find varying degrees of awkwardness – ranging from full-blown nerd to semi-nerd to total cool to Cary Grant – a man who increased his sophistication by adopting that strange Brahmin-British accent of his. Only in a European gathering of course, will you find a perfect ten: someone, say, like Sean Connery.

(I can’t prove any of the above statistically, of course. Nor is any of what I’m saying footnoted. Not by accident did Montaigne call his pieces of writing “essays” meaning “attempts.”)

The reasons for relative “nerdlessness” in Greece are clear: rarely is anyone left alone long enough to enter his private nerd-like space and lose himself in total dorkiness. That ubiquitous social apparition, “the Group” to which so many teenagers attach themselves provides both solace and serious training in social skills. Teenagers do everything in large groups. In Greece you don’t date, you rarely have to go up to a girl and ask her out, as I had to do when I was sixteen, after planning my opening lines for a month. (In the end I winged it because her obsessively jealous father showed up just as I was retrieving my tickets to a King Crimson concert). This process, painful yet maturing, is taken care of in Greece by the girl’s friends who let your male friends know that she is interested in you, and then you end up sitting next to each other, along with twenty others, in a public space. From then on in, it’s god’s will, mixed with hormones. The group acts as a psychological support cushion for the rest of your life, right up until the final moments, the equivalent of our twelve step programs or one on one therapy. I often think the reason that the suicide rate is so low in Greece is because the potential suicidee is not left alone long enough to write his note… The door bangs in his room – it’s his mom visiting, it’s his friend wondering, it’s his neighbor asking, it’s the “group” demanding… It is inconceivable that two sixteen year olds could live in their own world for half a year a lá Columbine, without speaking to another person except themselves, staring at their Heavy Metal posters all day and dressing up like Satanists before blowing away eleven students in the cafeteria. The extended family, the omnipresent group would notice the signs before they’d painted the first circles around their eyes, before wearing their Clint Eastwood overcoats to school each day. It might be worth mentioning that in Greek there is no word for “privacy.” The closest to privacy in Greek is the word “idiot” which in ancient Greek did not have the modern connotations of dumbness but applied to the citizen who did not actively participate in the City’s affairs. One benefit of privacy is the ability to concentrate for long periods of time and thus to be more creative. I often think that that’s why Greece has two Nobel prize winners in Poetry, Elytis and Seferis, since poems require short periods of isolation and no Nobel prize novelists, since a novel requires longer periods. America on the other hand is full of inventors and writers who can nerd-out as long as they wish. Think of those writing programs where you can hole up in your room and have the food left at your door. The socially-trained Greek wouldn’t last a day and would liken his lot to the imprisoned Count of Monte Cristo. The American craves that pain and turns it into something productive.

I am exaggerating the differences between the two cultures, yes. I am pontificating. I am drawing dangerous caricatures of two separate cultures, yes. The Greece of my imagination, my fictional Greece is low on nerd population and high on socially adept people who tend to be full of life and exude Zorba-like wisdom; the America of my imagination is full of achievers and creative individuals to be sure, but also more important to my literary agenda, awkward moments, embarrassing situations, knotty discussions with members of the socially challenged who are at the top of their class in everything but discussion.

***

Awkwardness seems to characterize America, the America I’m talking about at least. The Americans that inhabit Baxter’s stories are awkward; I myself feel awkward almost as soon as I land back in the States and drift through customs at Kennedy Airport, reduced to more sorries and excuse me’s than you’ll find in granny’s book on manners.

The last piece in the Baxter collection is called Believers. Here, just at the end, Baxter pulls a no-no. In Believers, a naive mid-western couple visits pre-war Germany and become enthusiastic about the Nazis and embraces the Third Reich. Heartland America and Nazi Germany are suddenly compared.

Why, I asked myself, did an author as good as Baxter need to get away from the accurate portrayal of America that had carried us along so well in his previous stories and take us into the imagined heart of pre-war Germany? (Why did Ron Hansen, another good American writer, feel the urge to write something called Hitler’s niece?)

I think I know why.

I think you know why. Relevance. The pressure of Europe’s tragedies on the American imagination. A need to take on matters beyond a small insular galaxy. A need to contend with historical events that have shaped our world. A need to bring separate worlds together.

But the story fails. It doesn’t convince. It’s a version of the evil-in-the-American-heartland story. Perhaps you need to read it to believe me but let me give an example. Baxter’s piece has as its crowning point a scene where the American heroine, a certain Mrs Jordan, is in Berlin with her husband. She is so overwhelmed by the men in their uniforms that she jumps onto the sideboard of Goebbel’s convertible. Is that possible? The sick head of Hitler’s propaganda machine being accosted by a naïve American? What about all those black-leathered Storm Troopers running along side? Nonetheless she talks to him. The conversation of this fictitious encounter is not recorded. Perhaps Baxter wrote the conversation in one of his drafts and decided to scrap it later on. (I can imagine: “Oh, Mister Goebbels, what an honor. Lots of Germans in Michigan, you know? Maybe we could invite you to the Rotary? What? Drinks? Can I bring my husband? Mahvelous, just mahvelous.”)

So here we have it. The shrewd Baxter mind, the one capable of concocting great stories, illuminating the subtle dealings of men, women and even children, fails to convince. His double vision becomes singular.

The reason is awkwardness. The awkwardness of comparing two completely different worlds and two completely different sensibilities. The awkwardness an American feels in the face of European history, the awkwardness when confronted with individuals whose sense of history defines them as much as its absence defines the American.

It’s not that America does not have its own history; god knows, more history being made by the minute in New York or El Paso than most other places in a decade. But to make a sweeping generalization, it is that Americans in general seem to lack a sense of history or wish to ignore it, perhaps in a ‘we’re still young’ spirit of things. That is not a criticism. In fact, perhaps it is artistic endeavour’s good fortune to always start with a clean slate. I can imagine what would have happened if Walt Disney had been born in Greece and not in Chicago, back in 1901, where his mother, sister and brother encouraged him to keep selling his art, let alone the quality of the McKinley High School. His imaginary Greek parents would discourage him from wasting his time with silly drawings of cats and ducks and remind him that they had starved in World War Two and that he has to grow up and get serious about his life if he wanted to survive…

Yet it is hard not to agree about the lack of a sense of history. The sixties has been trivialized as a drugged free-love sexfest, while many people at that period of time lived urgently. In Greece the urgent times are rarely forgotten (for better and for worse) because they are still close. I am guessing that if you haven’t lived in what we call “urgent” times and sensed that urgency in your veins, if political and historical events haven’t crowded out your individual needs, if, in short, you have grown up in a society where the collective unconscious does not include the sweep of larger all-encompassing events, meaning not only the pressure of current affairs but the images and stories and myths that are handed down from grandparents and parents to children and grandchildren, I don’t think you can imagine a world where, to use a cliché phrase, history is in the making. That’s my contention. Because you can’t acquire a historical consciousness through libraries. That’s why Baxter fails to convince. And I’m not sure Pearl Harbor or the Anthrax scare or the pain of nine eleven will invest future story tellers with a deeper sense of American history.

I have the feeling that such efforts are blocked by a very McCarthyite self censorship, a fear of bringing politics into literature, but that is something else again. Americans fear politics in their literature. It is my sense that every American has been affected by certain unspecifiable effects of McCarthyism. The writer’s subconscious mitigates against placing ideas and those who believe them at the center of a novel. There is something “communistic” about it. Even E.L. Doctorow, who might be considered our top political novelist, seems to trivialize the emphasis on belief and action. In one scene in his acclaimed novel, Ragtime, one of his characters jerks off behind a closet, while secretly watching Emma Goldman, the anarchist who nearly brought down Germany in the early nineteen hundreds, make love with her partner. The focus is on the young man’s “jism” and how it floats in the air. Yet Emma Goldman is the one ultimately killed for her beliefs. White jism versus a bleak “ism.” Tongue-in-cheek yes; American bravado, yes. Convincing no.

The weight of history, past and present, is something the Greek has no way of escaping. It is ever present. It’s no accident that the partisans, those bands of hungry, lice-infested men who lived in the mountains fighting Germans with rags for shoes and the fever of battle and combat in their eyes, chose for their aliases names like Aristotle, Pericles, Agamemnon, Achilleas, and Ulysses. Because of the partisans, these ancient names are now vested with multiple identities and resonate from generation to generation.

This very morning, even as I revise this piece, a radio program interviewed the author of a new book. He had just published his detailed diary about being holed up in a cellar in Athens with his two brothers during the German occupation. Nothing as dramatic as Anne Frank, but powerful nonetheless. The main overriding theme? Hunger, the starvation of children, Biafra, poverty, survival. The essential themes. After hearing that program, it seemed much harder to return to the fictional world of my next book, populated as it is by largely middle-class white Americans who don’t need to worry much about where their next meal will come from.

For the imagination, the weight of history can be oppressive.

Greece’s main military threat today is Turkey. And the stories about Turkey and the Turks have been around for more than five hundred years. This certainly colors the modern Greek consciousness and by extension, the way we imagine Greece when we are in the States.

Last year I visited the Monastery of Saint Loukas in the mountains of Thebes. (The streets unfortunately have names like Oedipus and Sophocles.) A monk at the monastery showed me an emerald-studded crown of deep blue velvet, soft to the touch, worn by a bishop who fought in the liberation war against the Turks. When they caught him, the monk explained to me, they sat him on a sharp stick. For the next two or three days, the executioner “gentled” the stick deeper and deeper. With a simple touch to the man’s arm like this, the monk said and touched my arm lightly, or like this, he said and pushed my head just a little to the right, gravity was given a helping hand. The stick pierced through stomach, intestines, kidneys, very slowly, until penetrating the heart itself.

Stories like these give the Greeks pause. Turkey in particular gives modern Greeks pause: life is not all one big consumer society. Life might end. Turkey lends Greeks a sense of urgency. However, this very urgency affects my imaginings of Greece, I would say, just as its absence – at least until the Muslim fanatics penetrated our world and our consciousness, liberates the way in which I imagine America.

***

My lawyer-friend wonders why I rarely write about the Greece that is modern, the one populated by bright economists, top-notch doctors, stock marketeers, bankers, art auctioneers, computer scientists, biologists, archaeologists, and sophisticated businessmen. In short, the Greece that I sometimes hang out with. He has a point. Why don’t I? Why am I more attracted to writing about the Greek village and to exploring the possibilities of a Greek version of magical realism.

I know why. If I’m going to do a computer programmer, he’s going to work in Seattle or Silicon Valley, not in Athens Greece. The Greece my lawyer-friend is talking about very much resembles the America I knew and abandoned. But even modern Greece is not so modern, or rather it is full of examples that reinforce my stereotypes. I search for stories and anecdotes that fire my imagination and this imagination is not excited by the professional classes – the Greek doctor at the Onassis Hospital performing a delicate operation or the Greek computer scientist working for Microsoft who cleans a program from viruses and bugs.

Ultimately, I suppose I search for elements in this society that seem to reinforce my imaginary Greece, not the one I live in (the newest Starbucks is next to the Byzantine church at the foot of the Acropolis while you can find a MacDonalds near ancient Corinth) but the one just beyond the corner, hiding behind the Cypress trees, the one that is populated by heroes, brigands, shepherds, fishermen and village women who go against the grain, the Greece that is still superstitious and wondrous, closer to its rural roots than America, a Greece where logic is so often upbraided by emotion.

In an old village square on the island of Astipalaia, a local builder built a memorial during the dictatorship (1967-1974). But there are no names and there is no war memorialized. The builder simply used the memorial as an excuse to get government funds. In a country that reveres history, it was not hard to trick the government. There are no dead, there are no names, there was no war. Over thirty years have passed. The local administration is keeping the memorial intact. At some point, the mayor told me, there will be a reason to use it and they will add the names.

A memorial waiting for a memory. Would that happen in America? Somehow, I think not. A mini-mall, a condo, a villa, a parking lot, a pay per view vista of the Aegean – all would be viable cash-producing substitutes.

Since I no longer have the subway to carry the essay along, (we got off with the “nerd”) I will finish on the back of a more traditional beast, the lowly mule.

Fifteen mules were captured by Greek border police a few years ago. The beasts, unaccompanied, carried two thousand kilos of hashish and dozens of machine-guns that the war in Yugoslavia has made so conveniently available all over the Balkans. Smugglers set them loose on the Albanian side and presumably, once the beasts made their way into Greece, they would re-join the family of man and rapidly be relieved of their valuable burden.

Now that the hashish and guns had been confiscated, the problem was what to do with the mules. They were fed, housed, and scraped down – some of the policemen had mules themselves back home and knew how to care for them – but the police station was in no position to run a full-time stable. Brigitte Bardot, former actress turned into animal activist, made a stink about the plight of the donkeys. They were instantly released. (Louis of Amherst told me that when the French made stamps with Bardot’s image on them, the Frenchmen didn’t know which side to lick…)

This small story, completely true, seems so ordinary and yet so Greek. I can hear my friend shouting at me for reinforcing the stereotypes. So be it.

And so also, our short and jumbled ride ends. I have thrown at you what I consider a number of issues which hover in my mind most of the day and night. Memory, history, imagination, awkwardness. How to render fictitious worlds real.

As a writer, I must end with the mules. I can’t leave them. I imagine them on their own. At first they are at a loss and munch on whatever mules munch on. But then one of the policemen gives a strong whack to the first mule and suddenly the whole pack lurches forward.

Like the translation of cultures, the mules move back and forth between borders; sometimes they carry a dangerous load, other times they are completely free of any such freight. At that moment, almost anything goes.

They jog briskly up the jagged mountain range, inhale the fresh air, smell the cypress and pine trees, and then cross the border and return to Albania. A good jog is perhaps the American way of getting your imagination to work; but don’t forget, the mules follow those ancient and trustworthy paths.

Threepenny Review, 2009, Summer Issue

TABLE TALK

On George Papandreou, the elder

Recently I went to purchase a high-tech computer backpack at the new electronics mega-store called PUBLIC, located, appropriately enough, in the heart of Athens, Constitution Square. At the entrance of the large, refurbished nineteenth-century structure, where people sip coffee at a bar perched strategically in front of the store, stands a big bronze plaque:

From this building, on October 18, 1944, George Papandreou, Prime Minister of Greece, gave the Speech of Liberation that marked the end of the German occupation.

At the time he gave that speech—and in fact up until the end of his life—my grandfather lived in a house located in the area of Kastri, a suburb north of Athens. Not being a rich man (for he had been born into poverty), he built his home far from Athens, where in the 1930s real estate was dirt cheap. Back then, there were practically no other homes around. Today it is my sister’s home: my grandfather left it to her, his only granddaughter, as a dowry in his will. The neighborhood is now considered extremely upscale, and builders covet the only remaining pre-war home, with its two acres of untouched pine forest.

Each Saturday of my childhood—once we had returned to Greece from Berkeley, where I was born—our family would have lunch at the house in Kastri. The family seemed fully united, and this particular constellation, consisting of father married to mother, grandfather divorced from grandmother, and us four kids, felt engraved in granite. We were usually served chicken with rice and a bechamel sauce, while my grandfather and my father, who had decided to enter Greek politics and abandon his academic career in Berkeley, discussed the issues of the day. Some time was allotted to us kids, but the high point for me was when lunch was over. That’s when the old man would give us an allowance of a hundred drachmas, worth three dollars and thirty three cents. With this injection, on the return trip I would stop in Kifissia, at a kiosk that still exists forty years later, to buy American comic books. They went for a dollar each, which meant I could and did buy three each Saturday, saving the change for three weeks to buy yet a fourth. I amassed quite a collection in those years, but was not able to bring it with me the night we fled the country in 1968, with my father’s life in danger from the military dictatorship that had just released him from jail. We left with only a small suitcase each: comic book collections were deemed inessential, and on the scale of things, they certainly were.

At those lunches, my grandfather never failed to act the perfect gentleman, and would always offer my mother and sister a rose. He would say with some pride that he himself had planted the rosebush when he first moved in. Some days, he would walk us into the garden so that he could show us the most recent bloom; he’d bend and say, “Smell. This is life.” Here was a man, I later realized, who was in touch with his senses, was always well dressed, always aware of his image, always polishing his voice and his rhetoric, a man who even in exile found ways of loving the places where he found himself.

On the night of the 1967 coup, when most of the politicians were dragged to prison in their underwear, my father included, my grandfather asked the soldiers to do him a favor and give him a moment. If he was going to be arrested, it was going to be in style. As reported to us much later by my father, the old man arrived at the political holding ground (a way-station for the prisons) fully shaved and nicely cologned, and wearing his three-piece suit to boot. Not only that. In full display was the piece de resistance: a rose from his very own rosebush pinned to his lapel.

When he was finally released from prison, my grandfather spent his final days in that Kastri home, under house arrest, before his demise at the age of eighty. Each day, he wore his suit and tie, without fail. He could barely bend down to shine his shoes, but he wanted to look completely unruffled each morning, as if being under house arrest was a temporary condition.

In the spring of 1968, the last spring he would ever enjoy, Kastri dripped with life: the rosebush, the pine trees, the small olive grove. My grandfather wanted to smuggle out a speech to the BBC, which was broadcasting into the country, but he was being watched. He had a recording machine, which the guards had failed to notice, but how was he to use it without being discovered? He decided to play the palaverous cranky old man recalling his past. In front of the soldiers, out in the garden, he would take his walk but now he would talk to himself, sometimes quoting himself from his old speeches, other times coming up with completely new ones. At first they listened in: after all, he was considered a danger. To impress upon them his imbalance, he purposely exaggerated the old flourishes, the intonations, the pauses. Here, in the garden, surrounded by scurrilous but also some respectful soldiers and sergeants who sat beneath the tall pine trees, it didn’t take much to act as if senility had finally come to collect one more soul.

He read the actual speech into a carefully placed microphone in his office. (By then, the soldiers had given up listening in.) As the son of a village priest, he often injected religious anniversaries with political purpose and the Easter of 1968 coincided conveniently with the first anniversary of the coup. His speeches always had a certain biblical style to them, a pithiness and a tendency to aphorism, and it was with these linguistic weapons that he had forged his own unique voice. Greece of Christian Greeks, this speech began, mocking the dictator’s penchant for beginning his own speeches with those very same words. Today, the Greece of Christian Greeks is catholically protestant. Today, though we celebrate the resurrection of Christ, we mourn for the crucifixion of the Greek people.

I recently had occasion to listen to the unedited recording—apparently the BBC filtered out the extraneous sounds when it finally aired the speech. I swear I can hear bits of my own childhood in the background: the sounds of the street, a car in the distance, a lone motorcycle racing up the hills of Kastri, its single lung sputtering with intent. Perhaps it’s only my imagination, but I think I can also distinguish the hoarse cry of the paliatzis, a man who would drive through the neighborhoods on a horse-drawn cart, selling old items collected from abandoned homes.

—Nick Papandreou

Nick Papandreou Threepenny Review, March 2006 I am a writer in a family with an enormous historical archive, a public record that just keeps growing and growing. Sound bites from my father’s and grandfather’s speeches (both prime ministers of Greece) have been quoted and regurgitated to me by the faithful since I was a child, though now I have ended up learning them from the original. This is because I have become the family’s keeper, collecting anecdotes, stories, letters, tapes, pictures, home movies. Anecdote 1: “But old man,” someone said to a villager in Crete during an election campaign, “why vote for Papandreou again? Didn’t you hear him admit that he’s made many mistakes?” The old man smiles. “I’ll vote for him until he stops making them.” Anecdote 2: I am waiting for the bus on a busy street in Athens. A thirty-something working class woman on a moped stops at a red light. When she sees me she does a double take, then removes her helmet. “What can you do, poor soul,” she says, shaking her head in pity. “It’s not your fault all you children are failures. It’s because your father was so great. And there’s nothing you can do about it.” In an Athenian democracy only elected citizens wielded power. In modern Greece power has become an an extended family affair – the children of politicians are democratically voted into power themselves. One person has called it “The Republic of Inheritance” because today the country is run by the offspring of politicians. My older brother did his best to remove the slur of dynastic democracy when the socialist party founded by my father came into his hands just over two years ago. To deter detractors, he brought the matter to a popular vote, open to all Greeks and not just party members. He garnered over a million votes – as solid a blessing as any that he, at least, has full approval to take over where his father left off. I suppose this only reinforces the “Republic of Inheritance,” though George himself campaigns on a theme of meritocracy and equal rights. To make matters worse, things morph into dangerous Gaddafi-like terrain over on this side of the Atlantic — I am the “general secretary” of a shoe-string operation called the Andreas Papandreou Foundation, not to be confused with the near-defunct George Papandreou Foundation (grandfather and older brother’s name) or the more active “Andreas Papandreou Institute for Strategic Studies,” which is the socialist party think tank. My sister Sophia used to live on George Papandreou Street and this geographical conundrum was the reason she received hundreds of other people’s letters who lived up and down the street. Fortunately all four of siblings and my 83 year-old Gloria Steinem-like feminist mother learned early on to take a healthy distance from the cult of personality (key fobs with your father’s image, poems written in his name, people on the street welling up in tears, pictures of yourself on the eight o’clock news, et cetera) and to lead separate lives. I do admit I am sometimes tempted to scrap the high Athenian ideals and yield to elements of the “inheritance.” I dream that if Minnessota born elder brother George comes to power (pollsters predict it could happen in two years), like the hero with the wooden sword I will charge at some controversial problems, perhaps the illegal open air landfill where all of Athens dumps its un-recycled refuse, or the cancerous electric power generating smoke-stacks polluting the town of Megalopolis, or better yet take down the taverns on the beaches of Zakynthos where the endangered Caretta turtles lay their eggs. Why not make that small shift from the Republic of Inheritance to the Country of Nepotism? Using this unethically derived sibling power, why not work towards morally just causes like getting the cops to crack down on the importation of sex slaves from Eastern Europe or proffer citizenships to genocide victims from Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Darfur, and Rwanda… why with brother George in power I’ll get that basketball court next to my apartment re-tarred and the nets fixed. Christ but it’s an odd temptation to have staring at you. The only way to avoid it is to hunker down to the written word, read the Threepenny Review while leaning against a pine tree next to the shores of Spetses, take notes on the texture of the bark and wait for the Hellenic version of The Truman Show to reach its odd conclusion, if ever. (We now have children too…) I recently published a short book on my father’s rhetorical style – his metaphors and similes, the theatrical dialogues he used to liven up his speeches, his use of the first person. I explored the “narrative” he invented to provide his large audience with a coherent political story. This narrative has now become the country’s unofficial history. Snapshot version: Greece- a small country, buffeted by civil war and dictators, initially subservient to the needs of America’s Cold War policy, finally finds its voice, expands the space for democracy, makes lots of noise, finally grows up and joins the ranks of nations. Like so many, I too was swept away by the intensity of his political battle, his jailing, his exile, his charm, the crowds, the speeches, the sheer passion of the thousands who clapped for him. Perhaps I should have been more careful. For too long I was trapped inside pages written by my forefathers. Maybe I still am. However I sit down each day and at least for a few hours I write myself out of their book.

University of Athens library

Friday September 14, 1999

Nicholas Papandreou, Ph.D.

Last year we were honored to hear Amartya Sen discuss Andreas Papandreou’s work at the Memorial Lecture titled The political element in economic development. Professor Sen used this title on purpose, since it was also the title for Andreas’ 1966 Wicksell lectures. I will not examine Andreas Papandreou’s conception of politics, his belief in man’s freedom or his ideas concerning democracy. I would not be able to go beyond anything that Professor Sen has already said, and furthermore, I would certainly not be able to match the good professor’s eloquence and comprehension of the underlying issues. Suffice it to say that it is clear from Professor Sen’s paper that Andreas Papandreou was extremely interested in making economic theory relevant to society and to the functioning of democracy. I would add from my recent research into Andreas’ work that this tendency is clear from early on.

For those of you interested in professor Sen’s paper — which goes far beyond it’s title and analyses some of the most philosophically exciting concepts of our day – copies are available. Furthermore the Andreas Papandreou Foundation will be publishing it in booklet form in time for the next Memorial Lecture, to be given by Joseph Stiglitz, Chief Economist for the World Bank, on November 15^th.

First of all, what kind of an economist was Andreas Papandreou? Most people outside the academic arena, and perhaps many within it, at least all those who are unfamiliar with his academic work, would most probably think Andreas Papandreou was a hard-core Marxist. After all, Andreas was Trotskyite in his teens and later founded and led the Socialist party. Some might have heard of his book Paternalistic Capitalism and this title certainly reinforces the conviction that he was an outsider, a critic of the system. However between his teen years and those of his political leadership there is little indication of any Marxist influence.

His academic work begins squarely within the boundaries of orthodox economics and then only slowly shifts outside it, but never completely. Let me answer the question as to what kind of economist he was. He was an orthodox economist who was not satisfied with orthodox theory and who for that reason wished to improve it. Not to get rid of it. To make it better. To borrow from the world of psychology, he was engaged in a love-hate relationship with the neo-classical model. He wanted the theory to which he was married to be perfect, and though it wasn’t, it was still the best thing around.

Andreas Papandreou arrived in the United States on the eve of World War Two, having completed his first two years in the law school of Athens University. He remained in New York, working at Columbia University’s International House, thinking of continuing an education in law. When it was suggested that it would be more wise to follow economics rather than get an American law degree, a degree which would be of little use to him if he ever returned to his own country, he switched directions. In October of 1941 he arrived at Harvard, where, at the age of 22, on the basis of his two years at law school, he was immediately admitted into the doctoral program.

The economists he was to meet and work with in Cambridge were nothing short of stellar. His professors were people like Joseph Schumpeter, Abba Lerner, and W. J. Crum; students that had either just graduated from Harvard or were still working on their doctorates were people like Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, John Galbraith, James Tobin, James Duesenberry, and Paul Sweezy.¹ Andreas was teaching assistant to James Tobin and Vassily Leontieff and taught both statistics and accounting.

Though I don’t have his Masters thesis, Andreas himself once told me that he wrote a very long masters thesis on Marxist thought and that his professor told him that because it was so long he wouldn’t read it but precisely because it was so long it was worth at least a B and that was the grade he gave him. Andreas Papandreou read his Marxism well and would return to it in later years, but his essential training was in neo-classical economics.

What books did he read? From his library, his footnotes and his Ph.D. thesis, it is clear that highly relevant to his early economic education were the works by Edward Chamberlin who had just published his The Theory of Monopolistic Competition (1939), while extremely relevant to Andreas Papandreou’s thinking was the work of Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932) and Schumpeter’s The Theory of Economic Development (1936). In this context I wish to mention another book by A. R. Burns, The Decline of Competition(1936) and Robert Triffin’s Monopolistic Competition and General Equilibrium Theory (1940). In the year he arrived at Harvard, Schumpeter, one of Andreas’ professors, would publish his magnificent Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. As for the previous generation, influential were Frank Knight and Maurice Dobbs and in particular Lionel Robbins, who had written hisEssay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science in 1935.

From this brief survey of what he was reading at the time, we can see that he was already interested in deviations from the neo-classical model of general equilibrium and perfectly competitive markets. For those of you who aren’t economists, let me briefly say that orthodox economics posits a world of perfectly competitive firms that can’t influence price. Andreas was concerned about a world that deviated from this assumption, a world for example, characterized by large, monopolistic firms.

He received his Ph.D. at the age of 24, in the fall of 1943, under the guidance of professor W. L. Crum. Titled The Location and Scope of the Entrepreneurial Function, it is a highly readable and accessible piece of work running about 350 pages long. Already Andreas is having doubts about the fundamental assumption of micro-economics: he is concerned about the validity of the proposition that the firm is a profit-maximizing agent.

In this work he traces the rise of the modern corporation in order to investigate an issue that occupied many economists at the time: just who exactly controls the modern corporation and what precisely is the role of the entrepreneur in a modern capitalist society.²

After a concise survey of the rise of the corporation from the middle ages onwards, he investigates the separation of ownership from entrepreneurship and looks in some detail at the various relationships between ownership and entrepreneurship that arise through holding companies and interlocking directorships. Rather than a corporation, he proposes the term “poly-corporation”, using the Greek word for the Latinate term multi because firms have now gone beyond the production of single products or participation in single markets. He classifies two hundred of the largest American firms by a novel system which accounts for the various levels of control and using a statistical technique he concludes that, in the majority of cases, at this point in time, entrepreneurship has indeed been separated from ownership, thus contributing empirical proof to the theses advanced by many economic thinkers of the time.

The shift in ownership challenges the validity of the profit-maximizing assumption. Entrepreneurial activity is, in certain cases, pursued for its own sake and thus deviates from the condition of profit-maximization.³ For the purposes of this exposition, whether this is true or not is not the point. The point is that Andreas Papandreou wanted to build his life on a theory that could be validated empirically and not on a castle of sand.

In 1943, fresh with his Ph.D., he joined America’s war effort and volunteered for the US Navy where, after serving as a male nurse at Bethesda hospital for war wounded, he was sent to California where he used the concepts of operational research to determine the optimal timing for fleet repairs.  When he returned to Harvard in 1946 he became an assistant professor (ifigitis) and in the fall of 1947 he went to Minnesota where he became associate professor in theoretical or micro-economics. (Ektaktos kathigitis)

In 1949 he published an article in the American Economic Review titled Market Structure and Monopoly Power. Here he is concerned with the power of large corporations in American society, and in particular with the fact that the legal framework for judging monopolistic behavior has not yet caught up with the new economics. The legal framework, he writes, “lacks the economist’s emphasis on consumer welfare.”⁴ From that article industrial economists coined the term the “Papandreou coefficient” which is an index of firm penetration in the market. The new element that he brought to the traditional measures of monopoly was that he included a firm’s capacity as an indication of its potential to strike back or to make life difficult for competitors by expanding supply and dropping price. He proposed an empirical method for testing his hypothesis.

In the period 1952-55 he received a grant from the Social Science Research Council to study logic and mathematics. In terms of his technical skills, set theory and topology have now come to the fore. At the same time he works as a consultant in the US justice department on anti-trust, a manifestation of his desire to marry theory to practice.

Besides the empirical work on monopolies, he pursues a parallel path of work on high theory. His concern with the relevance of economics is apparent throughout his research in the nineteen fifties. He wishes to test the basic axiom of economics. After all, what good is a theory if the assumptions on which it is constructed are false? He investigates a pillar of neo-classical economics, what is known as the theory of choice, and he does so through direct experimentation with small groups of people – something which has also come back into fashion in recent years. His paper, published in Econometrica in July of 1953, is titled An experimental test of an axiom in the Theory of Choice. Employing a stochastic (Bayesian) model, he shows that the axioms of the theory of choice cannot be rejected. In other words, he confirms one of the fundamental assumptions of neo-classical economics.⁵

This is ironic, for in the next few years he has serious doubts about the validity of the basic assumptions of neo-classical economics. In his 1952 piece, Some basic problems in the theory of the firm ⁶ he expresses reservations concerning the traditional definition of the firm – it needs improvement he says, it does not live up to the standards of theoretical rigor Andreas requires. Rather than examine the question empirically, as he did in his Ph.D. and his first published articles, he analyses the situation from a highly theoretical perspective.

What does he talk about? The neo-classical theory of the firm needs improvement, for one because it does not adequately reflect the actual way firms operate. For another, the theory of the firm as it stands is not general enough to be a real theory.

He wishes to find a universal classification of the firm. Only this will be intellectually satisfying for him. He provides a definition of the firm that encompass both the competitive firm as well as the monopolistic firm and beyond. It is not enough, in Papandreou’s mind, to define a firm by its goal or even its conduct. It is not enough to say that such and such an agent is a profit maximizer. The firm, according to him, should be treated as a specific case of the general phenomena of social organization and must include the internal decision-making process.

Under this classification, the firm becomes a system of communication and coordination, operating under a central authority. This more general definition allows for a firm that is fully competitive, but also allows for firms with large-scale management, firms with interlocking directorships, firms that are vertically integrated or even firms under a socialist system. This latter grouping, the firm under socialism, does not and I would say almost never occupies his time.

Finally, a proper theory of the firm must explain how a firm gets started, the operation of the firm itself, the functions of capital investment, expansion and external financing and how changes in direction, technological innovation and dropping and creating new products are decided upon.

For Andreas Papandreou relevance to the real world was of great concern; at the same time he believed that only a highly sophisticated theory could adequately describe the real world. In this battle between relevance and abstractedness lies an unresolvable “inner” tension which was to haunt him for the duration of his intellectual life. It is the intellectual’s desire for purity, I would say, that does not leave him alone. Again and again he turns to the question of finding a model that is generalizable enough so as to account for all systems – in which the model of perfect competition is more of a subset than the totality itself.

In short, if Papandreou is bothered by the existing approach to economics, if he is concerned about some of its fundamental assumptions, it’s not that he wants to replace or reject it and come up with a completely different paradigm and turn say to Marxism, it is that he wishes it to become a more intellectually powerful tool with greater applicability to explain the world.

One direction for economics to go, he argues as far back as 1950 (Economics and the social sciences, Economic Journal, Vol. LX, No. 240, December 1950) is to utilize the findings of other social sciences.

This procedure calls for a careful inventorying of all the tentatively valid propositions of psychology, anthropology and sociology in an effort to equip economics with the tools necessary to impose restrictions upon the relations among economic variables in order that operationally meaningful hypotheses may be formulated.

Without “reaching out” to use modern parlance, to other fields of knowledge, economics reaches an impasse.

In Economics as a science, published in 1958, he goes beyond the issue of the firm and begins to probe the overall structure of economics itself. Using set theory and logical proofs, using the system of deduction and induction, he attempts to show, among other things, that the science of economics cannot make predictions. Economists like Samuelson and Friedman argued that it’s not so important to worry about the assumptions of the model — as long as it can make predictions. Now along comes Andreas Papandreou and argues, using elegant math, that it cannot in fact do so. If this is true, we are in very shallow water indeed. Not only is economics problematic in its assumptions, but its key claim to fame, that it is at least useful, is also problematic. In this book he also lays the foundations for a more general economic theory, one that allows for greater variety of economic behavior. Perhaps for most it is too advanced. I myself am unable to comprehend its mathematics.⁷

It is not enough for him that a model is internally consistent. Papandreou wants a theory whose basic propositions can be empirically tested and then rejected or accepted. I think that ideally he wishes to see a grand theory that would allow for all states of the world – for example a theory that could take under its wing not only capitalism but also feudalism, mercantilism, perfect competition, and monopolistic competition, or I suppose today, “globalization.” What he’s looking for, it seems to me, is the equivalent of the Unified Field Theory in physics – an overall theory that could account for the shifts in the underlying structure of the world economy.

Given this very high intellectual standard, it is no wonder that he grew increasingly frustrated with orthodox economics. From they very first he pursued the study of monopolies, a blatant contradiction to the traditional theory of perfect competition.

By the late sixties and early seventies his focus shifts, but only by a few degrees. He is now also concerned with how theories themselves come about.⁸ It is not enough to posit states of the world – a difficult task in itself. It is also of interest to examine the specific social events that lead to the development of certain theories what Andreas calls meta-economics — theory construction.

The emergence of totalitarian states in the thirties, for instance, and the experience of the second world war caused intellectuals, especially those from Europe like Debreu, to propose a theory of the economy where the agents are atomistic and highly individualistic. This emphasis on the individual is a response to the fascist and communist emphasis on collective action which relegates individual needs below the all-powerful but indeterminate “higher good.” Thus, he argues, the post-war economists who more or less determined the neo-classical model emphasized, for historical and political reasons, the atomistic model.⁹

But if this is true, then it means that theory is actually influenced by social events. In what sense can we claim that it is theory and not ideology? Schumpeter, Andreas argued, spent his life arguing that economics was not ideology but objective science. But that shows that the argument for the prosecution was not a trivial one if Schumpeter spent so much time on the side of the defense.

In one of his class lectures, (Michigan lectures, 1973) Andreas talked about Kenneth Arrow, his former colleague who was in the news because he had just been awarded the Nobel prize. ¹⁰He told his Ann Arbor graduate seminar that Arrow was an economist who believed that the traditional frame of reference was enough to solve all problems, even problems that seemed to have no place in the model, such as distribution and inequality of information. (I would add also the problems of increasing returns to scale and externalities.) For Arrow these are concerns that distort the performance of the market but which, not to worry, will be solved in due time. There is no need, therefore, to drop the original theory and work for another one.

In Andreas’ words, Arrow believes that “if we work harder and get more information, develop better theoretical tools, we’ll do better.” Andreas doesn’t buy this at all. Why doesn’t he? Andreas believed that such problems required a re-working of the fundamental assumptions. For example, economists assume a model populated by competitive firms but do not care if the world doesn’t fit that proposition and he argues that most economists have abandoned the effort to test the fundamental hypotheses of economics as a criterion for its relevance.

How was it possible, he wondered in these lectures, to be part of a profession that claimed it could model and represent society mathematically and yet it not only failed to take into account fundamental shifts in the underlying shape of the modern capitalism society but also rejected (in the extreme case of Friedman) the importance of such changes on the fundamental model of perfect competition? Does not history play any role in the field of economics?

It was now time to write his own analysis of the world as he saw it which he did in the book, Paternalistic Capitalism (1972). He wrote it during a difficult but productive time, while in exile in Canada, between making speeches against the Greek junta that had once jailed him, while teaching, running a “liberation movement” and also squeezing in ‘quality’ time for family life. ¹¹

He now fully believed that orthodox interpretations of capitalism were ideologically loaded and wished to propose his own “synthesis” as he called it, a new presentation of capitalism that differed from conventional wisdom. He begins, where else, with the problems that concerned him since his first intellectual engagement with the field of economics thirty years ago, back in 1943.

In the sixty page introduction he returns to his initial concern about the role of the firm in society and agrees with the Galbraithian analysis of the firm as being run by a “technostructure.” Technology has removed control from the owners and placed it in the hands of the industrial managers and technocrats. It is clear from our discussion how prepared Andreas Papandreou was to receive Galbraith’s ideas about the large firms that try to control the market uncertainties by eliminating the market wherever they can – either through buying out firms from which they purchase inputs or through price arrangements or, when possible, through complete control over natural resources.¹²

Baran and Sweezy’s concept of monopolistic capitalism and the role of the military-industrial state also found fertile ground in Andreas’ efforts to come up with his own analysis. He relates the managerial elite to the national security managers and shows that paternalistic capitalism – in short the capitalism as expressed by the workings of the American economy must be aggressively expansive.¹³

Yet having written Paternalistic Capitalism, is Andreas Papandreou happy? I think not. He is too much of an intellectual to be satisfied with a book that “only” describes the way the world works. What he wants, what attracts his mind, is high theory. He wants a serious model of the serious world.

In the introduction to Paternalistic Capitalism he says as much. Yes, it might be true that neo-classical economics, he says, has little to say about the behavior of modern capitalism. Yes it might be true that it is fraught with inconsistencies. But it is also true that so far at least, it’s the best thing we have. We have no other theory that is as logically coherent or as convincing to replace it. His own hypothesis, his Paternalistic Capitalism, is only a partial explanation. This is a brave admission.

This discussion is based on only  partial reading of his works. I come away with the sense that Andreas Papandreou, had he pursued his academic career to its fruition, would have made life very difficult for the pure theory economists. Not only would he have been a constant critic of neo-classical economics, using the tools of topology and calculus to take them on, but he would also have advanced the field of history of science and the epistemology and methodology of economics.

Perhaps his dream of coming up with a model where the fundamental assumptions are more realistic and empirically verifiable would not have been realized, but it would have been interesting to have seen where he would have taken it. But to have gone in that direction would have meant robbing another world from his talents. In the end he chose not only to understand the world but to change it.

Thank You

An Andreas Papandreou Bibliography

Articles

Marketing Structure and Monopoly Power
in the American Economic Review, September 1949.

Economics and the Social Sciences
in the Economic Journal, December 1950.

Types of Empirical Relevance in Modern Economics
in Economia Internazionale, May 1952.

An Experimental Test of an Axiom in the Theory of Choice
in Econometrica, July 1953.

Testing Assumptions Underlying Economic Predictions
in collaboration with O. E. Brownlee in the Business News Notes, University of Minnesota, May 1954.

A Test of a Proposition in the Theory of Choice
in Econometrica, July 1955.

Models, Comparative, Statistics, and Empirical Relevance
in Econometrica, volume 25, number 4, pages 600-601, October 1955.

Concentration and Public Policy
in the Iowa Business Digest, February 1956.

The Economic Effect of Trademarks
in the California Law Review, volume 44, number 3, pages 503-510, July 1956.

Explanation and Prediction in Economics
in Science, April 24, 1959.

Risk
in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1959.

Macroeconomics Models and Economic Policy
in the Archive of Economic and Social Sciences, volume 39, pages 523-552, October-December 1959, Athens.

The American Economy and its Future (in Greek)
in Spoudes, volume 9, pages 1-7, Athens, 1959-60.

Partial Structures of Economic Regulators
in collaboration with A. A. Lazaris in Spoudes, volume 9, pages 1-8, Athens, 1959-60.

The Course of Economic Thought
in Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Economiche e Commerciali, Seventh year (1960), number 4, pages 325-335.

Theory Construction and Empirical Meaning in Economics
in the American Economic Review, May 1963.

Cold-War Blocks and National Independence
in the Review of International Affairs, January 5, 1970.

Some Basic Issues in Development Planning
in The Challenge, under the auspices of the Advisory Committee of Economic Development, Winnipeg, 1971.

Greece: An American Problem
in The Massachusetts Review, pages 655-671, Autumn 1971.

Greece: Neocolonialism and Revolution
in the Monthly Review, volume 24, December 1972.

Planning and Freedom
in the Review of International Affairs, Belgrade, July 1970.

A Tradegy Without a Mask (in Italian)
in Il Ponte, March 1970.

The Multinational Corporation
in The Canadian Forum and The Journal of Finance, volume 28, number 2, May 1972.

The Multinational Corporation
in The American Economist, volume 17, number 2, pages 154-160, autumn 1973.

Multinational Corporations and Empire
in Social Praxis, volume 1, number 2, pages 105-118, 1973.

In Greece as in Cambodia
in the Monthly Review, volume 25, September 1973.

Superpower Dynamics and the Outlook for the Mediterranean
in the Information Paper No. 7. The Middle East: Five Perspectives. Proceedings of AAUG, Berkeley 1972 (published in December 1973).

The Metropolis – Periphery Polarity: A Facet of Imperialism
in Social Praxis, 2 (1-2) pages 7-23, 1974.

Greece: The November Uprising
in the Monthly Review, volume 25, pages 8-21, February 1974.

Marxism: Looking Backward and Forward
in the Monthly Review, volume 26, pages 67-71, June 1974.

Confrontation and Coexistence
in the Monthly Review, volume 29, pages 14-21, April 1978.

Books

An Introduction to Social Science: Personality, Work, Community
in collaboration with A. Naftalin, B. Nelson, M. Sibley and D. Calhoun. Lippincott, 1953 (revised editions: 1957, 1961)

Competition and its Regulation
in collaboration with J. T. Wheeler. Prentice-Hall, 1954.

Economics as a Science
Lippincott, 1958
Greek translation: By A. A. Lazaris, University School of Industry, Piraeus, 1960.

Spanish translation: (La Economica come Siencia) by J. R. Lasuen and M. Xacristan. Ediciones Ariel, 1961.
Italian translation: (L’ Economia come Scienza) by Mario Arcelli. L’ Industria, 1962.

Policy of the Economic Development of Greece (in Greek)
Centre of Economic Research, Athens, 1962. Translated into English.

Basic Principles of the Creation of Models in Macroeconomics (in Greek)
Centre of Economic Research, Athens, 1962.

Introduction to Macroeconomic Models
Centre of Economic Research, Athens, 1962.
Italian translation and comments: (Introduzione ai Modelli Macroeconomici) by C. Lunghini Instituto Nazionale per lo Studio della Congiuntura, 1967.

Democracy and National Rebirth (in Greek)
Fexis, Athens, 1966.

Toward a Totalitarian World?
Swedish translation: (Mot en Totalitar Varld?). Norstedts, Stockholm, 1969.
Norwegian translation: (Mot en Totalitaer Verden?) introduction by Finn Gystavsen, Oslo. Bax Furlag, 1969.
Finnish translation: (Hyvasti Demokratia). Kirjayhtyma, Helsinki, 1969.
Dutch translation: (Naar een Totalitaire Wereld?). Utrecht Antwerpen. A. W. Bruna & Zoon, 1970.

Man’s Freedom
Columbia University Press, New York, 1970.
Greek translation published by Agonas, 1973.

Democracy at Gunpoint: The Greek Front
Doubleday & Co., New York, 1970.
Greek translation published by Karanassi, Athens, 1974.
Translated also into Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and German. Pelican Books (Paperback).

Paternalistic Capitalism
The University of Minnesota Press, Spring 1972
Greek translation: published by Karanassi, Athens, 1974.
Italian translation: (Il Capitalismo Paternalistico). Isedi, Milan, April, 1972.
Spanish translation: (El Capitalismo Paternalista). Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1973.
German translation: (Kritik des Amerikanischen Kapitalismus). Herder & Horder, Frankfurt, 1973
Arabic translation: (Autocratic Capitalism). Al-Talia Publishing Co., Beirut, 1973

Project Selection for National Plans
in collaboration with U. Zohar. Praeger Publishers, New York, 1974.

The Impact Approach to Project Selection
in collaboration with U. Zohar.

The Method of Repercussions in Investment Selection (in Greek)
Praeger Publishers, New York, 1974.

Greece to the Greeks (in Greek)
published by Karanassi, Athens, 1976.

Imperialism and Economic Development (in Greek)
published by Nea Synora, Athens, 1975.

Transition to Socialism
published by Echme, Athens, 1977 (second edition, 1978).

Mediterranean Socialism (in Italian)
(Il Socialismo Mediterraneo). Lerici, Cosenza, 1977.

For a Socialist Society (in Greek)
published by Echme, Athens, 1977 (second edition, 1978).

Contributions to Books

Some Basic Problems in the Theory of the Firm
(A volume in the series “Survey of Contemporary Economics” published by B. F. Haley, Irwin, 1952).

An Experimental Test of Proposition in the Theory of Choice
(Consumer Behavior, New York University Press, 1954).

Linear Planning – A New Instrument of National Decisions (in Greek)
(University School of Industry, Piraeus, Athens, 1960).

Order of the Day for a Policy of Economic Development
(University School of Industry, Piraeus, Athens, 1960).

Policy of the Blocs: Intervention and Freedom of the Institutions
(Les Temps Modernes by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1969).

Introduction to a book by Norodom Sihanouk and M. Burchett
entitled My War with the CIA: Cambodia: Fight for Survival

Social Planning in a Regional Framework
(Social Issues in Regional Policy and Regional Planning, Mouton, 1977).

Essays

A Test of a Stochastic Theory of Choice
University of California, Publications of Economics, volume 16, number 1, pages 1-18, University of California Press, 1957.

Planning for the Appointment of Resources for Economic Development
Centre of Economic Studies, Athens, 1962.

The Political Element in Economic Development
Wicksell Lectures, Stockholm, 1966
Spanish translation: (El Elemento Politico en el Desarollo Economico), published by Depalma, Buenos Aires, 1973.

A New Economic Policy for Greece (in Greek)
Athens, 1965.

Economic Development, Balance of Payments and Policy of Industrialisation (in Greek)
Athens, 1965.

Economic Development – Rhetoric and Reality
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1973.

Growing up in Canada at the height of the Vietnam War I had the chance to be part of a world that will probably never occur again, at least not in this or the next century. I’m not talking about the anti-war rallies in Toronto organized by the Quakers or the radical student groups, nor the protests in front of the American consulate nor even the intensity of the arguments in school with those who believed America was right to bomb Vietnam. I’m talking about being part of something that most people watched on television or only read about in the news: a commune.

I’d met a couple of draft-dodgers while working for Sam Stokes when I was recovering from my accident and once I also bumped into them in the IGA. A small American flag graced the back of one T-shirt and a peace sign the other. Everybody in the store stared at them and didn’t say a word until they left. Mrs. Greunock, the pharmacist, shook her head while her husband laughed and said that it was all right for people not to want to fight in a war half way around the world.

Roncali wanted nothing to do with hippies and communes. “Afraid of war,” he said. “Besides, mothers let their kids watch ‘em pee and fathers walk around naked and let me tell you, a naked man’s an ugly thing.”

“Hippies don’t like the world as it is,” I said. “They want a better world. You got a problem with that?”

“Sure do. I like the world as it is and I’m not afraid of war. Wouldn’t want to change that and you can call me a conservative until Bobby Orr grows old and dies.”

I think Roncali’s attitude reinforced my determination to visit the commune and when we came upon it one day while chasing a Buckeye butterfly behind Nederson’s orchard, we stood and stared in awe, as if we’d suddenly come upon an exotic world, a backwoods Xanadu. Not that there was anything mystical about what we were staring at: There, at the bottom of Hammock Valley, was an old barn with a grain silo and next to it a yellow VW bus with a large red peace sign painted on its side. Long-haired men and women and even a few kids came and went. This was the commune.

Roncali, not one to be intimidated or to reveal awe, said we’d be crazy to venture any closer. As soon as you enter a commune, he told me, they tie you to a chair, put needles inside you and teach you about communism. “They’re what you call proto-anarchists.”

“Proto my dick, Roncali.” Roncali had been sleeping with the dictionary in a valiant effort to improve his chances of also sleeping with Cheryl Sommers, a girl who wore long flowing skirts and used even longer flowing words. Alone, I tramped down Hammock Hill.

The entrance was nothing more than two brightly painted barrels at each side of a dirt path and someone had written WELL on one barrel and COME on the other. A small half-naked child raced in my direction, chased by a long-haired woman who grabbed the child, lifted it high into the air and glanced at me.

Suddenly a man wearing bell-bottom jeans, with long hair, a headband and a T-Shirt with the words AAW Boston Mobe was standing in front of me.

He seemed to be scrutinizing me, then he suddenly leaned over and hugged me. He smelled of the outdoors and of tobacco or something. I pulled away, thinking of Roncali’s words. “Nice of you to show up,” he said and let go. He spoke clearly, in a real every day voice. “Name’s Jay.” I liked the accent, open, loose, American. Some long-haired men struggled with a thick tractor axle. “Hey, don’t drop it!” He shook his head. “This here’s the Farm,” he told me, “the den of sin, the harem of loose women, the center of psychedelic ecstasy. Right?” He laughed. At a picnic table next to a small pond, two women and some children were peeling carrots and potatoes. Behind them, a man sat cross-legged with his back against the trunk of a maple tree, hands in the air. “That’s Jonas,” Jay said, following my gaze. “He’s Canadian. Nothing to do with the draft. Joined us last year. Believes in the Baghwama Jiree.”

Indian sounding names didn’t attract me. I’d seen similar types on Yonge Street, head shaved, hands up in the air, chanting mantras, and I always stayed away from them.

“What’s that mean?” I pointed to the words on his T-shirt.

“MOBE? Mobilization. The rest means Artists Against the War.”

“I’m against the war,” I offered.

“Smart kid.”

“I have a friend who isn’t.”

“Wonder what your friend would say if they sent him to Vietnam, with orders to kill.” He pronounced ‘nam’ like ‘lamb.’ In Canada it was more like ‘mom.’ “Cluster bombs, grenades, bombs that spot you from where you last took a piss. Legs flying at your face. Holes in your stomach like the open door of a washing machine.” As he led me to the barn I memorized his words to repeat them to Roncali.

“Where you from? Strange accent.”

I told him I was born in California but, I added, slightly embarrassed, I grew up in Greece and that we now lived around here.

“Far out,” he said and that was that. Not for Jay the endless questioning about one’s past. He tapped the barn’s wood exterior with his knuckles. “Worked on this baby for upwards of a year. It’s our community hotel with thirteen bedrooms. Toilets are of the outdoor variety, if you get my gist.” He pointed to a wooden outhouse at one end, surrounded by bushes.

“Who can join the commune?”

“Anyone,” he said. “Even you.”

A shiver ran down my back.

“Do you share all your belongings?” The wind fluttered the leaves of a large maple.

“Don’t believe everything you hear about us, Alex. Just hang loose and soak it all up.” The pond shimmered in the sun. A woman in cut-off jeans and a halter top washed clothes on one of those washboards I’d only seen in Little House on the Prairie.

We went through a screen door that banged when he let it go and I found myself inside an enormous kitchen. Rafters soared above; ladles, large spoons, mugs, pots, pans, and other kitchen implements hung from a wooden rectangle that itself hung from the rafters with chains and hooks. Three long-haired women sat around a large oak table that could easily sit twenty.

He spoke to the women. They smiled. One had a wide face with cartloads of freckles; another one was thickset, wore shorts and revealed hairy legs and unshaven armpits. The third had long brown hair and such a smooth face that I wanted to reach out and touch the skin. She wore a sleeveless T-shirt and loose baggy pants that ballooned around her thighs.

She stood up, grabbed my shoulders and kissed me hard on each cheek. I squirmed.  “I’m Sintra.”

“I’ll leave you in their hands, Alex,” he said. “Have some lunch. It’s on us.” He banged the screen door when he left.

The woman who’d kissed me, Sintra, told me to sit down. The chairs didn’t match — tall short, skinny and squat, old and new. She ladled out some soup – broccoli – carved a chunk of bread and plied it with thick butter. A girl came in. She couldn’t have been much older than me. She wore jeans that were frayed at the cuffs, Jesus sandals, a red headband that flowed down her back like a pony tail and a loose blouse that reached her knees.

I wasn’t hungry but I ate the soup without taking my eyes off her. The girl was peeling a carrot.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“Alex,” I said. “What’s yours?”

“Melissa.” She had a soft voice and an even softer American accent. Her nose – an item I’d never given much thought to – was perfect. “We all have a philosophy here on the farm. Want to hear mine?”

I nodded.

“There’ll be nobody like you ever again. So make the most of every molecule you’ve got.” She moved away and continued cleaning carrots with a sharp knife. “What’s your philosophy?” The shavings fell neatly into a paper bag at her feet. I could already feel the crunch of carrot in my mouth.

“Mine? I believe in helping others. Like the poor. The sick.”

“Yeah? That’s pretty good. And money?” She offered me a carrot which I chomped into with unnecessary vehemence.

“Money?”

“Do you believe in money?”

The way she scrunched up her face I knew pretty well what she thought of money.

“How can anyone believe in that?”

She sighed. “I thought only people on the farm thought like me. I don’t go to school any more you know. Teachers visit us each morning from Saint Thomas. There’s five of us kids. I learn everything there is to know.”

“Wow! No school?”

“Yeah,” she said, already bored by the subject. She popped a carrot into her mouth and handed me another one. I hated carrots. I took two. She told me about Harold who was presently in a clinic in Aurora, recovering from some unspecified illness. “He once stood in the middle of the field with the vacuum cleaner and shouted at the stars,” she told me. “Woke us all up. He wanted to suck them down and pin them on his wall.”

Jay was her “commune” father but Sintra was her real mother. Jay knew lots of stuff. “Like he told us that the world has just created something called a Unimate. A robot. It’s a welding robot and it looks like a praying mantis. He says it’s the world’s perfect worker. It never tires, never sweats, never complains, and never misses work. And never talks.”

“That’s no good.”

“That’s the stuff the world is making.”

“The world made you,” I blurted out suddenly. She stared at me with her green eyes. She seemed truly surprised.

We sat on these tall wooden stools on the porch while the men went about chopping up some wood. Someone was fussing with the VW. He waved at us. I waved back.

Melissa asked me about school, about other girls her age. She only had one friend and she didn’t see her much cause she lived in The World.

“Do you do drugs?” I asked her.

“Drugs? Me? No way. Not everybody does drugs. The police visit us once a week and check in on everything. Besides, Jay says that we didn’t escape American jail to end up in a Canadian one. Next year he says we’re going to return to normal life. Get full-time jobs. Is your school okay? I’ve been away two years now, ever since we left Massachusetts.”

I stayed for lunch. I was introduced to them all – Sintra, Big John, Merriac, Nathan, Wanda and the others. We ate chicken, chunks of home-made bread, and had strawberries and whipped cream for desert. Harold said some strange prayer against the war in Vietnam.

Melissa gave me a long kiss on the mouth in front of the others, then tucked a small daffodil behind my ear.

“You ever want to come and really soak up the Farm,” Jay told me at the entrance, “you’re welcome. See if this is for you.”

*

I went again the following Saturday, the same day that Harold was released from the clinic. Jay drove him down  from Aurora in the old VW bus and when he arrived everybody was waiting for him. They kissed him, hugged him, mussed up his hair. One of the men, Merriac, who had a beard that covered most of his face and thick hairy arms, gave him a strong hug and Harold squealed like a child. Jay brought him over to me.

“This here’s Alex. Hates the war.”

“That’s the magic ingredient, my man,” he said and shook my hand. His long hair was fine like a girl’s and he looked both old and young at the same time, like those drawings that switch from ugly to beautiful, depending on your perspective. His arms were thin and wiry, lines carved his cheeks and yellow and purple bruises colored the inside of his arms. “You’ll like it here. I’ll make sure of that.” His blue eyes were bright and darted around. “Did I tell you all I baptized the nurse? Two parts saline solution and two parts alcohol.” He laughed.

Sintra led us on a “celebration walk.” This meant we held hands in front of the pond and then followed Teecup the Turtle for about fifty minutes. Teecup walked a total of three hundred yards, around a tree, under a bush, munched grass and looked back at us more than once, turning its ancient head with bored curiosity. This was how we honored Harold’s return.

*

Each weekend I visited the commune and helped with the chores, cleaning up the kitchen which seemed always full of dishes, woodwork, tractor maintenance and in August we got to the corn husking. With Melissa we made a rack for corn on the cob. It was nothing more than a series of spikes that ran along an upright piece of timber and nailed one end of the corn into the spikes. When the rack was full of corn cobs it looked like some huge bumpy yellow cucumber. Some of the men made a concrete walk from the barn to the chicken coop so that when it rained our shoes wouldn’t get weighed down with mud. We also made a device for extracting honey from beeswax, a box with a glass over it and a dripping pan inside. Fill the box with honeycombs, tilt it towards the sun and watch the honey pour through the dripping pan. We made scoops from tin cans, cloth-covered boxes from grocery boxes.

We caught frogs and let them go, listened to Harold read Walt Whitman and Alan Ginzberg. We baptized two stray sheep in the pond: the little one we called Draft Card and the larger one Affidavit. Affidavit nearly drowned. When we tried to catch a porcupine Melissa cut her finger. We spoke to the sky, the trees, the sun, and to each other. During the all-denominational informal prayer sessions, Melissa and I held hands.

It took me two days to come down from LSD. To keep my eyes from wandering and my mind from hallucinating I read the Anarchist’s Cookbook from page to page, including the fine print. Melissa stroked my head and kissed my neck and we did just about everything else there was to do. Melissa had hard breasts, a slim waist and she liked to wrap her legs around me so that when I was on top of her I could barely move. Sintra told us that love-making was part of life on the commune, like collecting eggs and shitting. No, there weren’t multiple partners. Melissa was all mine and I was all hers. After Francine being with Melissa seemed natural, easy, and above all guilt-free.

I grew my hair long, wore head bands and painted peace signs on the hip pockets of my jeans. With Melissa I went to marches against the war in Toronto. We piled into this old VW and bombed down Yonge Street while singing.

Jay was the undisputed leader of the Farm. He practiced martial arts in front of the forest each morning. The muscles of his back jumped like tiny fish when he moved. His movements were so smooth and slow that a deer once stood about five feet away from him, munching on something. Only when he jumped into the air, legs and arms out at forty-five degree angles and shouted some Korean angst-ridding word did the deer race away like live buckshot was vying for a place on its hide.

But if Jay was the mind, Harold was the heart. When Sintra cried he held her in his arms. When Merriac complained that his back hurt, Harold would massage his hairy shoulders through the night. He performed a “love ceremony” for me and Melissa. This meant we stood in the pond one frosty November morning and shivered as the water touched our crotches. We wore these skimpy home-made robes over our naked bodies while he touched our heads and sang something weird and said stuff like “Let their be union and harmony among these two poor souls. Let them forever be joined.” He draped our shoulders with an American flag where instead of the fifty stars were fifty Maple leaves.

One day he’d wear shiny red pants from a circus clown he’d met in Toronto, another day a long purple sari and sometimes even nightgowns. For all his gallivanting, he tried to be useful. For a while he was convinced that pets could be put to productive use. He attached four small soapy sponges to a squirrel’s feet and tried to make it walk on the pile of dirty dishes that collected in the sink each day. The squirrel tried to race away and kept slipping because it’s claws couldn’t dig into anything and it scampered into the bush, never to be seen again. But my favorite was when we tried to make a small tread mill for dogs to walk on and draw water.

“A good-sized dog,” Harold read from some farm manual, “can easily earn his living in an arrangement of this kind.” It was lucky there were no dogs on the farm that expressed an explicit desire to earn their living in such a fashion.

Once though, Harold overdid it. I found him lying unconscious under a tree outside the farm. There was something obscene about the way his T-Shirt rode up his chest, the way his bones showed, even the languid way his hand hovered above the rim of his jeans. I shouted his name. I shook him. Yellow froth came from his mouth. “Harold, are you all right?” My voice seemed muffled by the trees behind us, sucked up by the thick forest. With the tail of my shirt I wiped his sweating face. I pressed two fingers against his neck. The flesh yielded almost too easily, although what did I know about the yield levels of human flesh? I searched for his pulse, daintily at first, afraid to touch a person so intimately – I was barely intimate with my own hum and drum of life, my own heartbeat – and then pushed harder and harder, expecting to sense a movement, some sort of steady rhythm. Nothing. I pressed my fingers somewhere else against his neck and suddenly there it was, a sliver of a beat, like small wings fluttering.

“Wigwam,” I heard him say, “jimjam.” I ran back and got Jay.

When Jay appeared he sat down, put Harold’s head on his lap and started to rub his neck. He told me to massage his bare feet. I rubbed hard, like I was starting a fire through friction alone. Bits of dried skin and dark dirt fell to the earth in tiny black pellets.

Jay worked on Harold’s shoulders and arms, kneading the muscles with his own strong hands.  “Harold’s got a knack for sucking up the bad. This time it was bad LSD. Bad sticks to him like glue. But because he takes it all himself, there’s none left for us. He’s our talisman, our good luck charm. He’s the one that got us over the border, faked out the customs people; he’s the one that knows when it’s time to move to another farm, knows whether a farmer’s a good or a bad person, just one look and he knows, it’s something he does. Without him we’d be long gone. He’s like our father and our mother, Alex, and that’s not commune talk I’m giving you.”

Harold opened his eyes and squinted.

“Jay?” Harold tried to sit up. “Jay, I’m fucked up real bad.”

“Did you have dreams?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you dream of?”

Harold closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“Do I have to?”

“You know it does you good.”

“I was barefoot. You were cutting my hair while I was sitting on a chair, and each separate strand was a different color. The floor glowed with hundreds of bright colors.” His eyes focused on me. “Who are you?”

We helped him to his feet. He staggered to a maple tree, leaned against it and threw up. It sounded like a toilet bowl gargling. After that I stopped with the LSD and the acid and the speed and the meth and just about everything except grass.

*

Roncali continued to refuse to enter the Farm and said I was stupid to be working for free when I could earn three bucks twenty in construction, but finally agreed to join me and Melissa in the afternoons when we would leave the commune and walk into the forests and take notes of the countryside. He too was inspired by Melissa and the both of us called upon all our hard-earned chasing skills to search for rare visitors by which to impress Melissa, to find pale creatures with red blotches hovering in the air, crenellated eyespots on wings, and all nature of Greater and Lesser Fritillaries.

I told Roncali and Melissa that I dreamed of attaching my name to some undiscovered species, if not a butterfly, than at least an unknown type of beetle. Though I knew nothing of Nabokov, I did know that scientists earned fame in this manner. We invented some new species.

Coleoptera Melissus was a beetle that looked like a tank, with yellow stripes and a white mandible whose hind legs, when ground up and sprinkled over hamburger, were known to reduce cholesterol and generally decrease the risk of a heart attack.

Lepidopterus Alexus was a humongous butterfly with orange and blue wings that could carry messages from South America to Kansas and Nevada; it ate small insects but was known to hover about the heads of angelic looking girls like Melissa.

Agrion Maculatum de Roncaliensis was a completely new species of black-winged damsel fly that used to live with the bison in the American west and was thought extinct, until Henry Roncali, after great personal sacrifice, discovered the last known nest in a bush along the Colorado river.

Melissocomai lampyridae was a female firefly with the unique ability to light up a whole room and had been attached to chandeliers and small dimly lit bathrooms during the pioneering days of the West.

Magnificent Roncalius or Saurus Magentis was not an insect but instead a large and useless lizard with rainbow coloring across. It’s strong tongue served like a pogo stick and it bounced at great heights and traveled great distances. It detested females of the human species, and made a honking noise whenever it saw any.

To show off, Roncali and I once caught a large Swallowtail. Roncali gripped its thorax and squeezed hard to produce temporary paralysis. When the butterfly grew still we offered it, palms up, to Melissa.

She shook her head. “Undo what you did,” she whispered. “Take the spell off and let it fly away.”

“It’s too late,” I said. Roncali looked at his catch, embarrassed. He laid the butterfly on a flower and we walked away. Like me, he too was in love with Melissa.

After that we stopped collecting butterflies.

This was the world Melissa and Roncali and I created for each other. We would wander in and out of the woods, sometimes sitting beneath a tree for hours, listening to the sound of some small wood animal rustling along the forest floor; or maybe a squirrel clawing its way up a tree; we would test our abilities to smell, a quality, I believed, that was a must for all wannabe entomologists. I collected leaves from different trees and with my eyes closed, tried to guess their names from their feel. I got Melissa to draw leaves and needles and color them and then drop the simulated leaves into a wastepaper basket. Roncali would pick one out at random and then Melissa and I would guess the species. We grew good enough to distinguish the needles of a balsam fir from those of a grand fir.

In here, in these backwoods of that part of Canada known as King City Ontario, the three of us would walk through unexplored tufts of green, stare at the thick black dirt full of living creatures, buzzing, droning things — giant bumblebees and tiny flies, crawling jumping bouncing beetles. All these seemed miraculously joined to the long-haired, toiling, drug-taking hippies. It was a wonder that these disparate elements coexisted so harmoniously not only in the commune but in my very own soul.

*

The last week of August was also my last week before school. Jay decided that we needed a vacation. He drew up the week’s schedule and we followed it religiously:

• August 20-24: snake dance, karate, self-defense training, learn to float in the pond.
• Saturday, morning of August 26:  workshops on drug problems, underground communication, live free guerrilla theater.
• August 26. Afternoon: Drive to Lake Ontario in the VW bus – meet other like-minded people to sing, BBQ, swim, make love. Sleep in sleeping bags.
• Sunday, August 27, dawn: On the shores of Lake Ontario perform poetry and take part in other religious ceremonies.
• August 27, afternoon: Nomination of Affidavit the sheep for incoming commune president.
• August 28: March on the US Embassy where we will levitate the building and exorcise it of evil spirits.
• Monday night, August 28: Drive back to the Farm. Make corn on the cob and in general engage in a healthy, all-round rumble.

With August gone and the celebrations over, I had to return to school. In class each day I thought of Melissa and how she studied on her own. I tried to come afternoons but the walk was long and I barely had time for my homework. But Saturdays I’d show bright and early and Melissa and I would walk around, hand-in-hand. I would tell her what I was learning and she would tell me what she was reading. We traded books. We read Ayn Rand’s We and Thomas More’s Utopia and every other book on communal societies we could find. That September was one of the coldest on record. Jay forbade chopping down any trees. “Trees are our friends.”

But communes are not meant to be. The police descended on the farm during the week. They didn’t find any drugs but Harold landed in jail because he punched an officer and told them they were “organs totalitarian of the state.” Farmer Eccles, an otherwise peace-loving man, showed up the very same week to tell Jay that rent would henceforth be doubled.

In front of the barn Jay told us that we could put up a fight in the courts and probably hang another year, but that the good folks of Ontario were no longer as tolerant. The winds were a-changin’ he said. Besides, the way things were going, they could barely last another week, let alone a whole winter. The communal pot contained five hundred dollars and thirty eight cents. With fourteen people to feed and Eccles to pay, no matter how many strawberries they sold and how many part-time jobs they picked up, no matter how many supermarkets Big-John bagged for, it just wasn’t going to do it. Kids got sick, he said, men wanted their beer; women had to take hot showers. Last winter they’d nearly frozen to death and which was why they were down to half their original number. It was time, Jay said, for the Big Move. “It’s time, I’m afraid,” Jay said, looking at us, “for the World.”

“Be realistic!” Big-John shouted, “Demand the impossible!”

“Fuck the pigs!” Melissa said and lifted a lean fist to the air. But the rest of us were quiet.

I don’t know why or how a man changes his mind, but he does. Just like that. Jay wanted the commune over and done with. The women hugged themselves. The men hugged themselves. Sintra, Melissa’s mother, looked particularly sad, stiff and silent, a dry puppet leaning against the wall. She told us she’d have to do acid every day now, after this downer. Harold tried to make everybody happy but we could all see how sad he was.

I was surprised that nobody really disagreed. Maybe they all knew they were living in a dream and that dreams cost money. I didn’t know.

After Jay’s speech we built a fire next to the pond and the women brought out the hot-dogs. Big John pushed Harold into the pond and soon Merriac and Nathan joined in. We raced out to break them up and soon all of us were in this huge mudfight, right on the edge of the pond. Melissa took her T-shirt off and everybody stared at her hard nipples. We sat around an enormous bonfire until the sun came up.

Soon everybody had real jobs. Big-John hired himself out to the construction companies that were building roads right through the forest. Sintra found a job in the Newmarket hospital as a cleaning lady. Harold drove groceries until someone complained about his clothes – one day he’d wear a second-hand Tuxedo, another he’d wear his clown outfit. I think it was also his permanently dilated pupils, the sweet smell of hashish that surrounded him and his extreme gentleness that scared the good people of King City. He found some sort of job in Toronto with the Quakers and helped them publish their literature. Melissa wrote articles for this journal called Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.

The ones working in Toronto had to sleep in shelters down-town and like me would show up only on weekends. The commune was falling apart.

Then the President of the United States amnestied all draft dodgers. The whole lot of them moved back to the States.

I kept the little box we’d made for melting honey. I sent my rarest butterfly to Melissa by mail – a Buckeye, in a small frame. Cruel maybe, but beautiful. I wrote to her everyday. She wrote back. This lasted for about six months. Then it was down to one letter a year. Then I lost contact with her.

*

All that and everything else occurred a long time ago. Now I’m pushing forty. Me and Roncali still don’t “believe” in money, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Probably because neither one of us makes enough to believe in it. We’re not vegetarians, we don’t wear our hair long and we don’t do drugs, but once in a while we might, if they come our way, like at a party at someone’s house. When long hair came back into style we were both surprised but didn’t lengthen ours.

I took a degree in science from the University of Toronto and I’m now the King City Secondary biology teacher. I live in an old farmhouse on the other side of town. Sometimes I take students to the old farm – what’s left of it – and we look around for animal life: insects like beetles, dragon flies, spider flies, armadillo-like insects that roll up when you touch them and anything else that crawls. I teach them the names of butterflies. We collect flowers and leaves from trees.

It’s not the same thing of course.

The roof has caved in and two of its sides have been torn down for firewood. On the remaining sides the paint has faded to a greyish red. One student once found a ladle in the dirt and held it up gleefully like it was an archaeological artifact.

One year the students painted peace signs. The sixties were all the rage again. Another year the students painted a MAKE LOVE NOT WAR slogan. Some kid with talent did a decent portrait of Martin Luther King. That was in the mid-eighties when the students had re-discovered Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple and King Crimson and gotten it into their heads that the “sixties” wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

Usually, after our catch-and-tell insect spree I sit them next to the pond and we munch on sandwiches and take in the sun. That’s when I tell them about the things I believe. I tell them about sharing, about love, about nature, about friendship. Once I even told the class about an angel named Melissa.

I tell them about how we all followed a turtle around the place for approximately five hours. They laugh. I tell them about how to separate honey from the wax. About how there was a time when the outside world didn’t exist.

This year a student asked me if I missed the commune. I don’t miss the commune, I told him. It’s gone and over. But I miss the time and space that allowed a commune to exist, do you understand. I miss the world that made the commune, the world that made Melissa and Roncali and me and people like Jay and Harold.

I’m almost always sad when I come back from the outing. My wife, Francine (we met years later and decided to marry) is good to me. She understands – so she says. She’s not too jealous. There are moments that catch me completely unprepared, moments when I miss Melissa so much I have to hide from my wife, I have to leave the house or pretend there’s dust in my eyes.

If I can, I rush to a telephone and call Roncali. He’s easy to find because he’s a high-paid telephone technician for Bell Canada, wears those belts, climbs the poles, drives a van. We don’t say a thing, mind you, we might talk ice hockey scores and weather predictions, Canadian talk, but underneath when I call him up – even it it’s in the middle of the night – well he knows what I’m saying even if I’m not actually saying it.

Sometimes, and this sounds strange, I miss myself – that little inconsequential guy who rubbed someone’s bare feet without a second thought and who decided to be part of a commune — on weekends at least — just because it seemed the greatest thing. I certainly can’t imagine living like that today, just like I can’t imagine myself getting into fights about the Vietnam war or joining a protest. Maybe it’s my age, maybe I’m just coming up with excuses to hang back and lay low, but today’s protests seem overly-organized, as if they’ve been appropriated by professionals. There’s a word I haven’t used in a long time: appropriate, as in to take, to own, to possess.

The graduating class of 1985 bought me a present: two little sheep made of stone. They painted the words Draft Card and Affidavit on their sides. I use them as paperweights and sometimes put them in my palm. Dam but these two foolish stones make me sad.

Only a few days ago I got a letter from Melissa. I didn’t open it for hours, just held it up and stared at it. Finally I tore it open. She’s a nurse in Boston. She’s been married and divorced and married and divorced and has two kids. One of them’s named Alex. After me, she wrote. Sometimes, she says, when she sees kids wearing headbands, pretending to be hippies, or when she sees a protest march in front of City Hall or when they play those shows about the sixties on television she says she feels a deep throbbing pain in her chest and can’t help but cry.

Jay, Harold and Sintra, she wrote, live in Pyramid Lake, Nevada. Harold’s stopped the drugs years ago but he’s still skinny, like Mick Jagger. He works part-time in a gas-station somewhere in Reno and people come to watch him because he’s always wearing something different, like a hat with a dead cobra around the top or a vest made of a grey material that he claims is made from an elephant’s foreskin. He must be pushing sixty. Sintra is a short-order cook in a night-club. Jay works as a camp leader for weekend trekkers.

Maybe one day Roncali and I and Francine will swing by and pick up Melissa and her kids in Boston, then drive down to Nevada. Maybe we’ll do a reunion thing. Get everybody to pow-wow on Pyramid Lake. Chase a turtle. Roast marshmallows.

I’ll unfurl the slightly tattered flag with maple leaves instead of stars, the one I’ve saved all these years in an old chest. I’ll throw it over our shoulders and we’ll huddle in front of a fire.

Harold can take our picture while I hug Melissa and Roncali. After the picture is done I know one thing. I won’t let them go. And then I’ll just keep hugging and hugging and hugging. That’s what I’ll do.

Atalanti’s mother made the mistake of telling her neighbor about its lovely shape and soon the whole village of Vamvaku knew that her daughter’s mop was beautiful and budding and wonderfully small. Add to that a seventeen year old girl with thick hair, black eyes, light skin, and skirts cinched tight to her waist and you had all the makings for war. With no father to defend her (he was kicked in the head by a donkey one cold winter and froze to death) men started showing up at her doorstep like birds at a raisin patch.

Her heavy-set half-uncle whose chest hair sprouted up past his neckline asked for her help in collecting tomatoes, a job that required much bending over while Kyrantzis, the pipe-smoking caravan driver, dropped by to offer her a small Venetian doll and a free ride on his best horse – he would sit behind her for good measure. Keris, the accountant, known for his surly moods and even surlier hands, returned a table knife he’d borrowed what, over two years ago? and while Atalanti’s mother offered him a glass of cold water, kept glancing this way and that in the hope of spying the girl herself.

Atalanti couldn’t stay inside her home nor could her mother protect her at all hours. She kept close to the other women when she went to the well for water and tended the sheep within earshot of her home, and if she did occasionally find herself alone she was alert and ready to race back at the slightest provocation. But like sickness and love, men strike at unlikely moments and in unlikely ways.

One afternoon when the breeze rushed through the bamboo shoots and the afternoon light cascaded over the terraced hills of Erymanthos, Atalanti made her way up to the Church of the Virgin – built on the ruins of the ancient temple of Aphrodite – to collect tinderwood. She chose an olive tree so overgrown it resembled an escaped convict, and, with the help of a small axe, she began to chop away at its tangled fuss of branches, singing in a voice fresh as the dawn:

Sorry dear tree

but some of you’s for me (chop)

sorry dear olive

but you’ll still be solid (chop)

She couldn’t have known that at that very moment, inside the dark musty church, a man with eyebrows thick enough to hold a fistful of pebbles was on his knees before the icon of the Virgin (known as the Pharmakolytria in this part of the Peloponnesus) praying for a wife and a baby boy, not necessarily in that order. “Deliver unto me,” he said, “a shovel, a stick, a shiny white goat-bone, and keep away the mop, the cleaner, the broom and the moan.” Rhyming was endemic to these villages.

Pressing his cheek to the surface of the icon he suddenly saw, through a slit in the stone wall, an axe rise into the sky like god’s command. He rushed out into the wizard sun to find Atalanti on her toes, breasts lifted, a slight redness coloring her cheeks and a tuft of black hair peeking out from below her white scarf.

For her part Atalanti sensed the determined forward thrust to his step and crouched instinctively, held up her axe and suddenly the two of them were circling each other, animals sniffing. Fast as a thought, she assessed his looks: the kindness in his cherry-dark eyes meant that his rough hands would be gentle. When he came close enough to smell – a mixture of earth and sweat and something else – she decided to let go of the axe. To her surprise, he picked it up and attacked the olive tree – whip whap whock the axe flew through the air – and branches piled up around them like tresses at a ball. Inside this circle of silver-green he pressed his lips against hers, wrapped one arm around her waist while with the other he squeezed her breasts. In the gentle flutter of leaves Atalanti thought she could hear the goddess Aphrodite wishing her well.

When she returned home, she sat next to the fireplace, tugged at her disheveled hair and tried to clear away the doubts that now crowded her mind. Finally she told her mother that she’d been “assaulted” by an unknown man, most likely from Kastania, the neighboring village.

Her mother stroked her face, kissed her forehead, asked her gently if she had any bruises and when she saw her daughter was fine told her there was little time to lose: “Metal sticks best when it’s hot.” It was just after nightfall when mother and daughter, Kyrantzis, False Father Joacheim and Dimitri the Sleepwalker rode into the neighboring village of Kastania, horses clopping loudly on the cobblestone.

Between the clanging of bells (Kyrantzis’ job) the explosion of muskets (that would be Joacheim), the barking of the dogs (gratis) and the presence of a tall, lithe girl in a white linen dress with petals of jasmine sprinkled through her hair, the whole village gathered quickly and, truth be told, eagerly. A boy scampered up the large oak tree and from that lofty perch dropped grapes on the mortals below.

Atalanti’s mother put both hands on her hips, looked at the villagers and wondered aloud if a certain man had the philotimo to show up. A murmur went through the crowd. They hoped their fellow villager would do them right. All men over sixteen lined up along the square while Atalanti walked by, an officer inspecting the troops. She passed him twice without indicating it, glad to see his hands tremble. In his pajamas, tousled hair and bleary eyes she wanted to spare him embarrassment, but not completely. Finally, after the third inspection, he took a step forward.

“My name is Isidoro.” His voice was hoarse. “I am the son of Haris and Efterpi. I apologize for my behavior.” He cleared his throat. “I was swayed by this woman’s angelic beauty – what man could resist.” The villagers remained silent. Though they were relieved the man had stepped forward on his own, it was not enough.

Like the streams of Erymanthos that can run only downhill, so was there only one available course for Isidoro to take. “I will be back,” he said, then bowed his head, turned on his heels like a soldier and went home. He hadn’t expected that a single urge, played out in the bright afternoon sun could lead to this, but they had given him no choice. While he was getting dressed, Atalanti’s indefatigable mother took his parents to one side and promised them two hectares of land, three embroidered vests and a year’s supply of eggs. Isidoro returned smelling of lemon cologne, dressed in a baggy black suit and a bright red tie. The villagers applauded, clapped him on the back and even Atalanti, who had had her doubts, now yielded to the joy of the moment.

The ceremonies were performed in the village square by a priest whose protests about the hour and the location were silenced by Isidoro himself. As honorary guests from Vamvaku, Joacheim and Dimitri the sleepwalker were allowed to lead the hymnals, but their voices were so hoarse and cracked that many believed Atalanti’s mother had chosen them as punishment for their native son’s wayward ways. After the wedding the villagers sang this:

Star walks with star

like the sun and the moon

like this bride with her groom

Perhaps because having two powerful women on your side cancels the potency of each – the Virgin Pharmakolytria on the one hand and the Goddess Aphrodite on the other – Atalanti was unable to give birth to a boy, a shovel, only to mops. The first girl was fair-skinned with a long straight nose like her mother’s and a questioning look on her face as if she couldn’t quite make out why so many adults were hovering in the skies above. Her existence was treated as a necessary sin, to commit once and then to move on to better things. Isidoro adopted an expression of knowing sadness and lifted his arms into the air as if to say “what can you do?” and then got down to the pleasurable business of making another one.

The second daughter, a tsoupi with curly hair and a strange smile, required more drastic measures than merely sighs and hands lifted into the air. Prompted by insults to his manhood, Isidoro retrieved a thick cord from his shop and when he came home, asked Atalanti to show him her bare back.

“Do you really want to scar me?” Atalanti asked as she unbuttoned her shirt and exposed her swollen breasts.

“They’re already talking,” he said by way of explanation, though he couldn’t keep his eyes off her breasts. “If I don’t punish you, they’ll say I’m not trying hard enough for a boy.”

“Yes, but do you yourself want to cause me pain?”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Yeah, I can see your concern,” she said, and spat at his feet.

Staring at the insolent spittle Isidoro seemed to consider his options.

“Whip me, but once and lightly,” Atalanti offered.

She cupped her breasts and turned. Isidoro paced the room, letting the whip drag along the stone floor, then lifted the whip and brought it down as hard as he could, not once but twice and once again, possessed by a sudden fury. Atalanti cried out in surprise, then without wasting another moment picked up the nearest stool and crashed it down on her husband’s back. With tears of rage she wrenched the whip from his hands, lashed him once on his legs and then whipped the kitchen, sending glasses, dishes and all free-standing objects to the floor. Isidoro huddled in a corner, hands up for protection. “What kind of woman have I married?” Atalanti resembled her ancient namesake who defeated all men – save one – in war and sport. When she was done she threw the whip at Isidoro’s feet, the evil coil’s energy spent.

The following day some of the men came to Isidoro’s shop to congratulate him and offer him their solidarity in the difficult task of taming his wife. They’d heard her cries and knew he’d shown little mercy. “Serves her right for giving you two daughters,” Kyrantzis told him. They pressed for details. “I gave her a full course of Ottoman justice,” he said and they laughed and told him he was an okay guy. Isidoro returned home eager to tell Atalanti that he had been redeemed but she refused to talk and sat half-naked on the edge of the bed, holding a baby girl in each arm. Yellow pus oozed down her back.

*

Though she didn’t like her in the least, for her third child Atalanti decided it was time to call in Fat-Mary, the mid-wife. She was one of those women whose features between the ages of twenty-five and fifty remain more or less the same, with only a few extra pleats on her cheeks to show the years. She had brought over thirty babies into this world, seen three mothers die in labor, knew how to cut umbilical cord with her teeth and how to tie it with a twig and sprinkle it with coffee grinds and ashes to stanch the flow.

“Is Isidoro strong?” Fat Mary had to collect the requisite medical information.

“Strong as the night.”

“Is he like a pick, an axe, or a shovel?”

“Anchor, I’d say.” Isidoro’s thing was splayed, Atalanti continued, it dangled to the right when he walked and widened at the top like an anchor so that when he withdrew sometimes it would hurt.

A lovely hurt, I’m sure, Fat-Mary sighed. “And his juices? Are they adequate?” Sometimes Isidoro filled her mop with wads, but other times there was barely a trickle. Fat-Mary nodded.

Armed with the requisite data, the male-birthing project went into full swing. After each monthly cleansing Atalanti drank the fruit of krataiogono, the power pollen, brought a rabbit’s foot between her legs and rubbed her breasts with fresh goat-bones. Once a month Isidoro ate testicles (ram or goat) and frequently sucked on pomegranate, drank boiled snake-horn, and inhaled sneezeweed. He once dipped his erect shovel in rabbit blood. He always lay facing southwards when he was with Atalanti. She ate cumquats for the boy’s intelligence and avoided lettuce so he wouldn’t be airheaded. Besides the herbs, Atalanti prayed to the Virgin of Preklan, the Virgin of Kordasi and the Virgin of Aradia, to St. John of the Castle and to Saint Bodiless the Angel.

When Atalanti was with child again, Isidoro bought her a jade necklace with a fine silver chain. Fat-Mary decorated the bedroom with cyclamen from the woods and hung up the waxen charms of bells and flutes in the bedroom, along with crucifixes and the haemostati, the figurine that stanched excessive blood flow.

Isidoro’s bronzeware shop was busy not only with repairs of broken scythes, bent plows and snapped combs, but with his songs:

The mansion’s pillar will soon arrive;

no need of dowry or of bribe

two balls of gold hang ‘neath each stride.

When the pains came, Fat-Mary gave Atalanti some herbs to speed up the birth. As for the sex of the child, that was now in god’s hands.

“It’s a difficult one,” she said.

“Liberaaation!” Atalanti cried. “Sweet Virgin, I’ll make forty candles for you and bring them on my knees!” Finally, at the exact moment, expert that she was, Fat-Mary reached deep inside and pulled the baby out with shrieking force. She cut the umbilical cord four fingers up from Atalanti’s stomach, rinsed the baby in luke-warm salt-water which had been boiled with myrrh and rosemary, and put the umbilical cord aside to be used as a charm. Instead of bells between the baby’s legs, there was only a rivulet.

Having heard the baby’s cries, Isidoro came charging in from outside. Fat-Mary was swaddling the baby when Atalanti, wits about her, wedged one of the wax charms from the icon ledge between the child’s legs. Through the thick layers of cloth, the baby now had the proper proportions of a proper shovel.

“What is it? What?” Isidoro’s face was red.

“A boy,” Atalanti said, “can’t you see?” She pointed to the bulge beneath the wrappings.

“My Nicholas! I knew it!” He kissed the baby there, kissed Fat-Mary on her forehead, squeezed his wife’s breasts for good luck, then raced off to the coffee-house and bought drinks for all comers.

Fat-Mary fed the baby’s afterbirth to Poko, their sheepdog. When she returned she put her hands on her hips. “Now what?”

“Let him have his moment. I’ll worry about what to do when I have to.”

For two days Isidoro was kind to his wife, two days that proved to Atalanti she had chosen her husband well. But on the third day Douni the shepherd asked Isidoro how large his baby’s shovel was and that very afternoon he insisted on unswaddling the baby to check for himself. Atalanti avoided looking him in the eye and clutched at her necklace. The scars on her back buzzed with pain. She told Isidoro to leave the house while she prepared the baby for him. Then she bolted the door.

“Come to the window, Isidoro,” she shouted. “A miracle has occurred.” She held the baby up, naked, in front of the window. Isidoro saw the rivulet between the baby’s legs.

“What have you done!”

“You loved the baby when you thought it was a boy. It’s still the same baby.”

Isidoro roared and knocked his head against the wall, then like Achilles mourning for the death of his beloved Patroclus, he clawed the ground for soot and dirt, poured it over his head and sullied his face. “I’ve married a witch!” He spat out a pebble which had fallen from his eyebrow into his mouth. Then he started chopping down their oldest olive tree and when the tree was on it side, he shot Poko, his sheepdog, the same one that had eaten the baby’s placenta. He broke down the door and slapped Atalanti hard across the face, sending her to the floor.

“Wait,” she said, eyes flashing, “you can do better than that!” She retrieved the whip from beneath the sink and gave it to him. “Go ahead. Whip me, and then whip the baby. Maybe you can scare the girl out of it.”

He spat, then mounted his horse, rode through the neighboring villages swearing and whipping his animal, and finally took to the hills. For weeks he was nowhere to be seen. One of the shepherds thought they saw him skulking behind Aphrodite’s temple, but wasn’t certain.

Atalanti realized that her plan had backfired. What had possessed her? “Wait until the furies that possess Isidoro depart for another soul,” Fat-Mary suggested, “then show that you are weak and that you need him.”

But one thing Atalanti couldn’t do was pretend to be weak. So she got herself sick by eating mushrooms that made her throw-up and kept her awake at night until she brought on the twin evils of fever and delirium. When Fat-Mary and her mother tried to make her well, she handed them her three babies and showed them the door. If she wanted to get sick, sick she’d get.

One warm summer night when the cicadas gave out their chicka-chicka call and the nightmoths swooped in front of the lights like wild bats and the ghioni birds hooted their lonely call, Atalanti crawled out her bedroom window and fell to the ground like a moth that’s flown close to a fire. She lay there for hours, collecting her strength. When the moon had risen to its zenith she got up, and hunched and bent, dragged herself past old Salaha’s shed, past the stone sheep pens, over the crenellated earth and the tiered land and finally reached the church of the Pharmakolytria in front of which she kneeled. She held her necklace up and squeezed it. “Me for a boy,” she whispered, “next time take me and give my husband a boy.”

She was distracted by a familiar hoarse voice. She turned her head towards the ruins of Aphrodite’s temple and saw Isidoro standing next to the olive tree where they had first met.

“Atalanti,” he whispered, holding up a candle, “why didn’t you come sooner?” He held the candle up to her face. Her lips were chapped, her neckbones looked like they were piercing her skin and her cheeks were carved with thin lines. He kissed the eyes, lips, and neck, then stopped when he saw blood flowing between her fingers.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said, “I promise. Now let go of the necklace.” Only when tears fell from his face and wetted her hands did she release it. He raced away, dipped his shirt in cool stream water, then drained it over her dry lips and dabbed her hot forehead.

They returned home, separating from each other only when they entered the village so she could take her proper place behind him before the curious citizens of Vamvaku who talked about nothing else than Atalanti’s treachery and Isidoro’s revenge. That she was barely able to stand on her feet already gave some of them a measure of satisfaction.

Her cries that day could be heard all the way to the church of the Virgin and beyond. The whip, the men said, he’s taken the whip to her again. Some of the women said those calls to Christ the Savior and God the Pantocrator could only be the result of a stiff olive branch applied liberally to her nether parts, while still others claimed with confidence that Isidoro was doing it the traditional way, using the wide honest hands with which he came into this world.

But we know otherwise. He whipped the wall while she shouted loud as she could, as if in pain. We also know that the fourth child was baptised Aphrodite (the priest protetested that this was not a Christian name) and their last child was named Mary — no protest.

Jimmy made a living renting his stomach to anyone willing to shell out that extra dollar. He’d wait at the BP station off exit thirteen with a sign: “Rent-a-table: $3.00.” Families going for their picnic were his main customers. They’d pick him up, drive to the Pine Barrens and he’d bulk along best as he could, trailing behind, and catch up to them when they decided to stop. He’d make a clearing in the dirt, lie down, then spread a tablecloth he carried in his coat over his mountainous stomach. The family would get out the food, ketchup and mustard, cokes and root beers. Dollar extra for lying longer than the half-hour. He was good for hills with up to forty percent inclines.

Kids sometimes hung cutlery from his ears.

Back from a picnic run, Jimmy strode into the third floor apartment and lay down in front of the sofa, where his buddy Jake was already sitting, waiting to smoke his cigarette. Jake liked to smoke with his feet up, and automatically stretched his legs on Jimmy’s stomach, soon as the two hundred plus pounds went horizontal.

“Jimmy,” Jake said, exhaling two white streams through his nose, “you’re a goddam land whale.” Jimmy didn’t say nothing. Being a whale was the source of both their livelihoods.

Jake finished his cigarette. “Won’t be needing no ottoman for a few.” He got up, went to the toilet and shut the door behind his words.

From a lying position, Jimmy read the Trenton Times. Read it from front to back, ads, classifieds, world weather reports, Afghanistan, Iraq.

“Jimmy?” Jake’s voice sounded strangely pained from inside the bathroom. “I need me a favor.”

“I’m listening.” He was staring at a picture of a little girl with a head wound.

“Forget it,” Jake said. “I changed my mind.”

Jimmy looked up at the ceiling. A few cobwebs were growing in one corner. Somebody would have to do something about that one day.

“Jimmy? Listen. Okay. What I need, what I really need is for someone to scratch my goddam butt, deep like and hard. I got some kind of real honest-to-goodness pain around there.”

Jimmy rose to his elbows. Had he heard right? “That’s downright un-American, Jake.”

“Forget I ever mentioned it!” Jimmy could hear the toilet-paper unwind. “Look, why don’t you go out and get us a six-pack with the money you made off your stomach.”

By the time Jake had washed up – it took a while because the toilet paper felt like thumbtacks against his inflamed skin – Jimmy was back with a case of Buds.

But he wasn’t alone. Next to him stood a short, well-built middle-aged man with Asian eyes and two legs thick as potatoes.

“Who’s this?” Jake asked Jimmy.

“Tran.”

“And? He lost?” The man’s eyes darted from Jimmy to Jake and then to the only bit of furniture in the room, the couch.

“I was asking the guy at the counter if he sold those wooden hands you use to scratch where your hands can’t reach, right? Tran overheard me. Said he scratches backs for a dollar.”

“A dollar?” Jake shook his head. “Some kind of living.”

“One dahla, one back. Two dahla, two back.”

“You tell old Tran just what I want to scratch?” Jake stared hard at his friend.

Jimmy rubbed his stomach the way he did when he was happy. “Nope. Figure you better tell him, since you’re the one directly concerned.”

***

Jimmy lay down. It took a little balancing at first, but he had these sort of indentations in the fatness of his flesh which could hold two bottles at a time, one leaning against the other.  It’s why they always drank in multiples of two.

Beers at the ready, Jake dropped his pants down to his ankles and lay face forward on the couch. The springs creaked. The couch smelled. Jimmy balanced six bottles on his wide stomach. Tran washed his hands in the sink, then got down to work, glancing with curiosity at the man lying in front of the couch, four Buds sticking up. Americans were always surprising you. For this assignment, he’d demanded of the man an increase.  Two dahla.

He started with Jake’s thighs, rubbing them back and forth, dabbing a little oil on the skin, then he worked on Jake’s spine, and finally ran his fingers around the rim, without however going any deeper.

“Goddam it!” This was Jake. “Goddam it! Vietnam you are worth your salt! Now use those silly little manicured nails of yours!”

Tran dug in, hard. Redness everywhere. Looked like some sort of allergy. Looked like a bomb crater inside his thick flesh, all ragged and exploded. Big, thick, well-fed American butt. Tran thought maybe he should have charged him three dollars.

“Can you believe it  Jimmy?” Jake’s voice was slightly muffled because he was talking into the couch. From his vantage point lying with his back on the floor, Jimmy could only see Tran’s thick legs and the back of his arms.

“Believe what.”

“That a Vietnamese would scratch my butt. Maybe in ten years an Iraqi will be scratching yours.”

Tran spoke. “Some places in the world, with a single dollah you can give life to a whole family for five days.”

“I been reading about that recently,” Jimmy said.

“I think maybe with Tran,” Jake said, twisting his face away from the couch, cheek squashing into his eye, “we can like, do business.” Jimmy felt a burp coming. He cupped the bottles, and let go a deep one. They bounced a little. “You listening Jimmy? Tran you listening too? Here’s how it goes. Jimmy gets money for doing his table thing, right? Tran gets money to scratch people in difficult places, and I’ll do the hard part, the public relations. Table And Scratch will be the name of our corporation. Book our customers. Rich customers. Poor customers. Maybe even Arabs. The good ones.”

Jake twisted his head far up as he could.

“You lookin’ like a hungry snake, Jake,” Jimmy said and tried not to laugh at the unintended rhyme. The bottles rattled.

“Yo, Tran! We’ll all be rich as Bill Gates!”

Tran’s eyes were strangely bright.

All three of them were quiet for a few.

When he was done, Tran washed his hands, took two grimy dollars from Jimmy, then walked quickly out of the apartment. Jimmy and Jake polished off the remaining beers, then promptly fell asleep. Jimmy lay on his back, stomach up, holding a bottle in each hand. Jake slept face down on the couch, holding a stray spring so it wouldn’t dig into his ribs.