Petros Markaris’ “The Lights Are Going Out in Athens”, translated from the German:

Alongside Parliament, with its seven political parties, we have another, parallel system in Greece, one with four parties: the four blocs into which our society has splintered in the wake of 18 months of financial crisis. The continued worsening of the crisis and the struggle for everyday survival has not brought these groups closer. On the contrary, they have become more and more estranged from one another. Coalitions are being formed between these factions but trench warfare has set in as well.

First, there’s the “Profiteers’ Party”. It comprises the businesses that benefited from the patronage system of the last thirty years, in particular construction firms.  They had their heyday in the run up to the Olympic Games of 2004, when the State lavished them with lucrative construction contracts.

But the members of the Profiteers’ Party also include the businesses that supply state agencies with goods, for example, firms that provide medical equipment and pharmaceutical supplies to public hospitals. Greeks are only now beginning to understand the extent to which money was squandered. Until recently the hospitals themselves were responsible for the purchase of pharmaceutical supplies and medical equipment. The Ministry of Health has now centralized the purchase of pharmaceuticals online; given previous expenditures, it made 9,937,480€ available. It now turns out that the drugs cost only 616,505€, or just 6.2% of the previous amount!

Without the new austerity measures it would have been business as usual. It was these profiteers, the construction firms and procurement agents, who cultivated a smoothly functioning alliance with the political party and ministers who were in power at any particular time. Everyone in the state apparatus knew about these interlocking interests and the costs they had for the general public, but no one said anything. Not only because the parties pocketed massive donations but also because the corrupt business sectors financed the MPs’ election campaigns and secured well-paying jobs for members of their families.

One could also call the Profiteers’ Party the “Tax Dodgers’ Party”, because they all—still—evade taxes, most notably self-employed, well-paid professionals such as doctors and lawyers. When a Greek walks in the doctor’s office, the physician tells him, “The visit costs 80€, but if you want a receipt, it will cost 110€.” Most patients thus do without the receipt and save 30€. Good relations with the respective ruling party means that state agencies tolerate the system and quietly look the other way.

The bloc of destitute citizens, on the other hand, keeps growing. Many cannot even scrape together the money to pay their share of the cost of their prescriptions.  So what do they do? They turn to the aid organization “Doctors of the World”, which dispenses certain medicines for free. The two clinics that “Doctors of the World” maintain in Athens were actually intended for destitute immigrants who paddle over from Africa in dinghies. Now a growing number of Greeks are asking for help. On some days there are up to a thousand people standing in line at the “Doctors of the World”, including diabetics who can no longer afford their insulin.

The misery of the immigrants has spread to the Greeks. Six months ago, when I opened my balcony door and looked down on the street, I would see refugees picking through the garbage bins to find something to eat. In the past few weeks there are more and more Greeks as well. They don’t want their hardship to show, so they make their rounds of the dumpsters in the early morning hours, when only a handful of people are on the streets.

The Profiteers and Tax Dodgers have no such cares, of course. They have hardly felt the crisis. Even before the crisis broke out they had transferred their money to bank accounts abroad. In the last 18 months roughly six billion Euros have been lost to Greek banks while banks abroad, in particular Swiss banks, are rubbing their hands with glee.

It is also the Profiteers who, in perfect understanding with the left-wing parties in Parliament, are advocating for a return to the drachma. They are betting that their wealth will increase several fold and they’ll be able to quietly go about buying up a sizable number of state assets. Quite aside from the question of Euro or drachma, the Greek state is obliged to privatize a considerable part of its property.

The third fateful coalition is the one between the Greek government and the farmers, who are also members of the Profiteers’ Party. Ever since Greece joined the European Economic Community (ECC) in 1981 every government has bewailed the lot of the “poor Greek farmers” who deserved a better life. The farmers have long secured for themselves this better life thanks to the agricultural subsidies of the European Union.

The subsidies were indiscriminately and haphazardly given out to the farmers, without any care taken to ensure that the grants in any way corresponded to actual production. Farmers buried their produce, declared false figures and collected the money. On top of that, the Greek Agricultural Bank gave them generous loans that have still not been paid back. The farmers’ friends in the ruling parties nonetheless could not be pressured into acting. They needed the agricultural vote. The Greek Agricultural Bank is now bankrupt, but the farmers drive around the villages in their Cherokee Jeeps.

The second of the four parties which Greece has come to comprise could be called the “Party of the Righteous”. I prefer calling them the “Martyrs’ Party”.  This is the party of the owners of small- and middle-sized enterprises and the people who work for them, and freelancers such as taxi drivers and repairmen. They disprove the image many Europeans have of easygoing Greeks who shy away from work. Although the Martyrs’ Party is the largest of the extra-parliamentary blocs, it is too weak to forge coalitions, which is why it is exploited from all sides. The Martyrs have been the hardest hit by the crisis, hence the name.

The hardest blow for the small- and medium-sized enterprises has been the recession. One is met with the bleak sight of empty shops all over Athens, even in the more upscale shopping districts such as Patission Street. Patission, as the Athenians call it, is the oldest of the three long streets that run through the center of Athens and a boulevard of the middle class. I know the street very well, since I live nearby. Patission was always dimly lit, but that didn’t matter, because the shop windows shone so brightly. In these days the street is pitch dark; every second shop has closed down. The few shops that have survived eke out a living with special sales.

Aiolou Street in the city center, a traditional lower-income shopping street, looks even more desolate. There are still some shops open but they’re empty. No customers. Aiolou Streethas become a pedestrian walkway without pedestrians. “How much longer can I hold out?” asks the owner of a small shop for men’s clothing where I’ve bought a pair of socks. “Days go by before a single customer wanders in.” At the same time you think twice before entering a shop because once you’re in, the owner or a shop-clerk will besiege you with how bad things are. The woman with the men’s clothing shop couldn’t hold out: as I was walking along Aiolou Street yesterday, I noticed that her shop, too, had closed.

A friend of my sister’s works in a small construction business that builds single-family homes. The owner has let off the entire personnel, except for her. Who builds a house these days, when there are houses everywhere for sale that no one buys?  My sister’s friend hasn’t been paid for seven months but still she’s lucky. She still has a job.

The worst part for the members of the Martyrs’ Party is despondency. They’ve lost all hope. For them, the crisis holds no perspective for a better future. When you talk with them you get the feeling that they’re just waiting for the end. When a broad part of the population can no longer summon up any confidence in the future, life becomes very depressing. Many apartment buildings in which lower- and middle-income people live no longer turn on the heat. The families don’t have money for the heating oil, or they prefer to save it for something else.

I rarely drive. I have a taxi driver who takes me to the airport and picks me up from the airport. His name is Thodoros. He’s unmarried and lives alone. “What do you think of Lucas Papademos?“ he asked me last week when he picked me up from the airport. I told him I thought Papademos was the right choice to lead the government, because he’s a smart, decent person who is highly respected in both Greece and the European Union. “Yeah well, he’s not going to be bringing me any fares,” my driver answered in resignation. “That would be expecting a bit too much, no”? I replied. “Look,” Thodoros said, “I pay 350€ a week to rent this cab. I work seven days a week, and it’s sometimes not enough even for the rent. Whether Papademos is Prime Minister or somebody else is, my business is shot all the same.”

Greeks used to take taxis a lot because they’re so cheap. You can get to practically anywhere in downtown Athens for 3.20€. A longer ride doesn’t cost more than 6€. Half a year ago you would have waited in vain for an empty taxi at lunchtime. Now everywhere you see long lines of taxis waiting for a fare, not just at midday but in the evenings and on weekends, too.

But things get worse. The recession is not the only source of the Martyrs’ distress. Though their business has gone to ruin, they’ve had to pay up three times: first with the income tax, then with another extra tax on income and finally with a solidarity surtax. Next year they’ll have to pay the solidarity surtax twice. The value added tax was raised twice in the past year.

While tax evaders pay very little if any of these surtaxes and solidarity contributions, simply because they don’t file an income tax return or when they do, conceal the larger part of their income, honest citizens are being squeezed dry.

Private-sector employees and the unemployed also belong to the Martyrs. There are only a few employees left whose salaries or wages are regularly paid. Most get their money in small instalments, with a delay of several months. They live in great need and in even greater fear that their employer may close down at any moment.

Since consumption no longer fuels growth and loans have dried up, many small businesses are going under. They disappear, leaving behind their debts. My brother-in-law, a wholesaler for children’s clothing, sadly told me he encountered three such cases in the last week alone. He is in despair.

You see long lines of the unemployed waiting at the Unemployment Office for their monthly payment order with which the Bank will remit their unemployment benefits. But they can’t be sure the payment will be made at the beginning of the month. Sometimes they need to wait longer for their 416.50€. The number of the unemployed is increasing day by day, and the Labor Ministry is running out of money.

Because the state apparatus, above all the tax authorities, has collapsed, someone in the Finance Ministry came up with the brilliant idea to collect taxes through the electricity bills.  If you fail to pay your taxes, your electricity is turned off. I’ve seen pictures on Greek television of old persons standing in line at the cashier’s desk of the public electricity company to pay the first installment of the tax. I wanted to cry. “The first installment is 250€”, a man in his 60s told the camera. “My pension is 400€ a month. How am I supposed to live out the rest of the month with the 150€ that’s left?” It made me think back to the 60s when I came to Greece. I was met with one of the strangest sights you can imagine: one-story houses in middle-class or working-class neighborhoods with concrete roofs sprouting iron rods. The rods looked ugly but they were a kind of promise: the dream of a second story. The dream of a place on the upper floor for the son or daughter to live. These poor folk had stinted and saved for this all their life. Now they are being made to pay up. In its sham prosperity, a bankrupt political system with its vile system of patronage has destroyed the dignity of ordinary people.

Yet another party is the “Moloch Party”. It recruits its members from the Greek bureaucracy and state enterprises. The party falls into two blocs. The first group is made up of civil servants and officials who work in public agencies and state enterprises. The second are the trade unionists. The Party of the Moloch is the extra-parliamentary arm of every ruling party and the guarantor of the clientele system, because the great majority of its members are party members and party officials.

The system has long history, reaching back to the 1950s, the time after the civil war, when the Nationalists, the victors of the civil war, staffed the entire state apparatus with fellow combatants and adherents of the cause—a reward for their loyalty to nationalist ideals.

Then in 1981, shortly afterGreece’s entry into the EEC, the socialist PASOK party assumed power for the first time, the party that was to raise this practice to a principle. At first the arguments sounded halfway reasonable and found broad acceptance in the population. PASOK argued that after so many years of right-wing dominance the state bureaucracy was hostile to liberal forces, and PASOK could not govern without placing their own people in key positions in the state administration. Except that they didn’t stop at the key positions. Soon the entire state apparatus was in the hands of PASOK party members and their cliques. One of every two party members was rewarded with a position in the public sector.

Every government since has tied itself to these interest groups, right into the first months of the crisis. There was always enough money thanks to subsidies from the European Common Union and later from the EU. When there wasn’t enough money, the holes were plugged with loans. But most of the party members in the public sector never did any work or did only the absolute minimum. A friend of mind, who has a job as an engineer in a state agency, had this to relate: a year ago a new colleague arrived in her department. On his very first day he said to them, “Colleagues, I’m sorry but I’ve forgotten everything I learned at university.” From that day on he never worked a single day, and none of his superiors ever did a thing about it.

But the Party of Moloch is split. One part would be more at home in the Martyrs’ Party: the civil servants who weren’t channeled into the public sector via the party but had to take a test to get the job. They are the only public employees who work hard; they sometimes even do the jobs of two or three other colleagues, because they’ve been saddled with the work of party members. They are victims of the system. The other part of the Moloch Party cultivates an old-boy’s network not only with the ruling party but also with the Profiteers’ Party. This large three-party coalition has ruled and tyrannized the country for thirty years.

The widespread plague of tax evasion that has ruined the state’s finances would not have been possible with the collusion of the Tax Offices.  Corrupt officials, however, were generously rewarded for their readiness to collaborate with tax evaders.

Public sector workers bewail the fact that their salaries have been cut by about 30%. But this hasn’t affected everyone in the same way. The victims of the system have indeed lost a third of their real income. But the Profiteers’ coalition partners receive an income on the side that isn’t reported. They make up for what they lose on their official income from their undeclared income.

Trade unionists form a sub-group within the Moloch Party. I often read in German newspapers about general strikes and demonstrations in Greece. When I’m on a book tour in Germany, everyone asks me: why do the Greeks go out on strike so often?

The only general strike that Greece experienced in recent years took place a few weeks ago, when Parliament was passing the new austerity package. In the demonstrations that followed—there are no strikes in Greece without demonstrations, even the tiniest strike doesn’t come off without some kind of rally—more than 140,000 people gathered in front of the Parliament building in Syntagma Square. It was the largest demonstration in years. Even the shopkeepers closed their stores, not because they were afraid of rioting—which often happens—but because they went out on strike as well.

None of the strikes in the past were general strikes; the trade unions just called them that. They were strikes of the over-privileged employees in the public sector. Private-sector employees went to work, as they do every day.

The truth is that the Greek trade unions have no influence over private-sector workers. Their power in the public sector, however, is almost absolute. They can call and enforce a strike whenever they want to. They mobilize about 10,000 demonstrators on average, all of them public-sector employees.

The power of the trade unions has its own history. Andreas Papandreou, the founder of PASOK and its first Prime Minister, ruled the country like a monarch. But like every monarch, he, too, needed a “nobility” to stabilize his power. There were the court nobles, Cabinet members and party bosses who were in close contact with the monarch. Then came the city nobles: the trade unionists and party functionaries in the state bureaucracy and state enterprises. The rural nobles were composed of the officials who dispensed the European Union’s subsidies to the farmers.

All the democratic institutions more or less functioned, but it took just a word from the monarch and a noble could fall into disfavor and lose his position. Conversely, the monarch’s favor endowed the party official or trade unionist with absolute power.

The coalition with the party apparatus greatly enhanced the power of the unions in the public sector. This power is linked to numerous privileges. Nothing happens in the state enterprises without the consent of the unions. Managers in these enterprises don’t dare oppose the unionists. They are afraid of getting into trouble with the relevant ministers and the party apparatus. When conflict breaks out between the union and the management, the minister often steps in and management winds up with the short end of the stick.

The strikes in public agencies and state enterprises, and the demonstrations that are sometimes held on a weekly basis, like the famous Leipzig Monday Demonstrations, are just a last desperate attempt to preserve their privileges or at least save what can be saved.

The Martyrs’ Party bears the consequences. When there’s a demonstration, the center of Athens is often closed off to traffic and the shops close up in fear of rioting. When mass transit workers strike, which happens all the time, the downtown area is empty. Businesses lose the few customers that still can buy something. When the busses and trains are on strike, people must bike or walk to get to work, which can often take an hour or two. But they can’t afford to stay at home; the Martyrs are afraid of losing their jobs.

If you understand how one side is looking out for its own interests at the expense of the other, you can see how little solidarity there is in Greek society. It is the weak who are paying the price of the unions’ battle with the government and its austerity measures.

The fourth and last party in Greek society is the one I’m most worried about: the “Party of the Hopeless”, the  young Greeks who sit at their computers all day, desperately searching the Internet for a job—somewhere in the world. They’re not guest-workers like their grandparents, who left Macedonia and Thrace in the 60s and moved to Germany in search of a job. These young people have a college degree, some even a Ph.D. But they head straight from the studies into the ranks of the unemployed.

I was born in Istanbul and grew up in Athens, where I’ve been living for many years. With my daughter it’s the other way around. She is a native Athenian and now lives in Istanbul. You might call it the repatriation of the second generation. And my daughter isn’t the only one. A stream of young people migrated to Istanbul last year. They show up at the Ecumenical Patriarchate looking for a job and help in finding a place to live.  Youth unemployment has overcome our age-old animosity toward Turkey.

Whether it’s recession or the austerity packages, a haircut or reforms, the crisis will claim at the best the fate of two generations, in a worse case scenario, three generations. Young people are the ones who have lost the most today. We are the ones who will have lost the most tomorrow, because the most dynamic forces in our country will be gone.

The only ones who still come to Greece are people who are even worse off than we are. I buy my newspapers every day at the same corner kiosk. The owner is Albanian. “Just look,” he said to me the day before yesterday when I was picking up my paper. He pointed to an African man not far from us who was poking around in a dumpster. “They should send them all back.”

“Haven’t you forgotten that the Greeks used to call you a filthy Albanian twenty years ago?” I asked him angrily. “Yeah, but that’s over now. My kids go to Greek schools, they speak fluent Greek, you can’t tell them apart any more from the Greek kids,” he said. “Many of us have become Greek citizens. But now I have a problem. Do I emigrate to Albania as a Greek or an Albanian?”

“You want to go back?”

“Well, the kiosk is going alright but it’s not enough for two families. My son is married and without a job. His wife is Greek and she doesn’t want to go to Albania. So I’ll go back with my life and leave the kiosk to my son. If I go back as an Albanian my friends will laugh at me. Because I wanted a better life in Greece ans now I’m coming back flat broke. In their eyes I’m a loser. But if I go back as a Greek, they won’t make fun of me. They’ll say, “You Greeks always looked down on us. We had to wait months for a Greek visa and were treated like crap. And now you’re looking for work in poor Albania.” The kiosk owner isn’t the only one who wants to go back to Albania. Many Albanian families have already left Greece.

In the school parade on October 28th the students of a middle school in Athens showed up up wearing a black bandana tied around their neck. You need to know that October 28th is a national holiday in Greece. It commemorates the Greek victory over the Italian fascists when Mussolini’s forces invaded Greece in 1940.

There was an outcry when the incident with the black bandanas became known. “An affront to the national holiday,” journalists wrote. but the alleged perpetrators were just school kids from Agios Panteleimon, one of the most run down neighborhoods in the city of Athens. Agios Panteleimon has one of the highest jobless rates in Attika.

To get their high school diploma, students in Greece take classes at a so-called prep school, otherwise they have no chance of getting into a university. This is also true for the kids in the middle school in Agios Panteleimon. But many of them have parents who are without a job and can no longer pay the prep school fees. “We didn’t want to cause trouble at the parade. We just wanted to show our protest against the future that’s waiting for us,” said one of the students who were involved.

But there’s the other side of the coin. I was sitting one evening last week in my publisher’s café as a woman in her 40s approached and asked if she could sit down with me. She wanted to talk with me about my crime novel, Expiring Loans, which is also about the Greek people straining under the weight of the financial crisis. At the end my visitor told me “I teach in a middle school in one of the northern suburbs of Athens. Every day I reproach myself for how badly we’ve raised these children.”

“What do you mean,” I asked her.

“I watch these kids every day during the break. They only things they talk about are cars and Armani jeans and Gucci t-shirts. They have no idea of the crisis and what’s awaiting them. They come to school pampered by their parents and then we spoil them more.”

Two schools, two kinds of people – this is Greece. One lives in the poorer neighborhoods, the other in the affluent ones. You see how different these young people are already. The parents in the wealthy suburbs give their children a car when they manage to graduate high school. They can’t bear the thought of their offspring taking the bus to university as normal students do.

A journalist who was at a state unemployment office gathering material for a story was talking to a young man. “Swear you won’t use my name,” he said to her. “My mother doesn’t know I’m here and out of work.”

I was waiting at a bus stop earlier this week. An elderly man pointed to the now-familiar line of taxis. “No one takes taxis any more,” he said. “And there are fewer traffic jams these days. People just drive their cars less, because gas costs too much.”

“ Yes, these are hard times,” I answered.

“You think?”  he replied.  “I grew up in the 40s, a time of great poverty. You know, I went to school barefoot because I had only I one pair of shoes and couldn’t wear them out.”

Quite true, but the post-1981 generation grew up not in a time of true poverty but in a time of false prosperity, and they panic when they think about giving it up. They know as little about poverty as they do about the desert. The young people of today are the children of a generation that was shaped by the so-called Polytechnic uprising in November 1973, when students went on a protest strike against the military dictatorship that was then bloodily suppressed.

The Polytechnic generation has destroyed this country. They wanted to build a new Greece with the jargon of the left and failed. The ones with any integrity have withdrawn to take care of themselves. The others have gone into politics or gotten themselves a lucrative job doing business in the patronage system or landed a well-paying position in the state bureaucracy.

In the beginning of the 80s this leftist jargon was crucial if you wanted to get into politics under the banner of PASOK or land a position in the state bureaucracy.  Anyone without a good grasp of the jargon was part of the old, reactionary system. In the meantime some of these people have become filthy rich. But they still use the same leftist jargon. But it’s become a masquerade.

They were yesterday’s winners. Their children are among today’s losers. And tomorrow the fathers will come to feel their children’s wrath.

Rob Kennedy, Possible Uses of Disorder

The space he had been given was a windowless, high-ceilinged room, one of several century-old unrestored structures built around the courtyard. It was more a stall than a studio. Slabs of plaster had fallen off the wall in places, exposing like an open wound roughly hewn stones of the outer masonry wall.

As I stood in the courtyard I could see a figure moving in the depths of the dimly lit room. Peering into the space I could see that the only light came from the screen of his laptop and a tile of light thrown on the wall from a small projector on the other side of the room. Hunched over his laptop in the dark, his chest of tools set open against one of the walls, he looked a little like a smith in his forge or a shaman in his tent. Except he wanted company.

As I entered the room he got up to greet me. He told his name (Rob Kennedy) and how he had gotten here (he was sponsored by the Transmission Gallery in Glasgow as an artist-in-residence in the Remap 3 contemporary art platform that is taking place in Athens until the end of October) and explained a bit about the project. From what I understood it was an installation in progress that was being shaped by the encounters he had with other artists and visitors while here and by the space he worked in. The installation was slowly incorporating pieces of the immediate environment of his exhibition space—the objects he had found lying around the room and outside in the courtyard—and of the broader city environment.

One piece, a video installation he had brought with him from Scotland, or at least the core of the work: a small projector, a screen and a video loop.  The rest was found here. The projector was set on a folding stool he found in the space, laid on its side with a tile wedged between its legs. The screen was propped up on a precarious arrangement of bathroom tile, butter knife and sheets of printer’s paper, all also found in the space.  On the screen one saw a continuous loop of a short vintage clip showing an old man walking to a city street corner, accompanied by the monotonous repetition of a snippet of a child’s nursery rhyme.

Kennedy describes the project in this way:

Starting from a point that is an arbitrary zero and by way of reciprocal discussion something rudimentary begins to appear. What it gives shape to will be an accumulation of this language as it is translated both on paper or screen and through actions in physical space. This initial impetus will be developed locally according to use and re-use, relying on the contingencies of circumstance to foster a variety of (in)conclusions.

I was intrigued by this idea of re-combining used objects from a familiar environment with the chance finds of a new one, this quite literal idea of translation as moving across. I wonder if the artist was aware that the makeshift base of the installation, the acute precariousness of the support it provides (but for how long) might have a particularly trenchant symbolic significance in a country whose economy is about to implode.

But I am even more fascinated by how the story he tells in his space is being shaped in its telling, how the conversations he has with others and the objects he finds in the city will find a place in the installation and by their very incorporation into the project, change it. Kennedy’s installations are both recursive and outward-reaching, self-referential and open to new encounters and the “contingencies of circumstance”.

I envy him his residency though I’m not good at living out of a suitcase for a long period of time. Some people can. Jörg does it half the days of the year. And my friend Joanna says she wouldn’t even need the suitcase. She swears that if she were rich enough she’d spend her time travelling around the world, from city to city—without a suitcase. She’d board the airplane with her purse, having arranged beforehand with the hotel concierge—being filthy rich she’d only stay at the kind of hotel which would have a concierge who could serve as your personal shopper—to have bought her the  clothes and toiletries she’d need for her stay in the city. She’d be a traveler-in-residence. Like Kennedy’s installations, she would acquire, use and then divest herself of the objects of local use—subject, of course, to the contingencies of circumstances.

“Wouldn’t you miss your things?” I asked her, thinking of her 8-room flat in Brussels, or perhaps more of myself. I wouldn’t be able to reach such an extreme state of dispossession. I can strip down the excess in my flat but at least for now there’s a threshold of things I need to have around me. I need to be surrounded by my books and music, maybe not all of them, agreed, but some.  A favorite sweater. A pair of fraying jeans that have taken on the shape of my butt and legs like a mold. The things I cook with. These things make up part of my life. Or maybe it’s just that I feel more me when I’m with them.

“Darling, I’d be seeing all these marvelous places and meeting all these extraordinarily interesting people, why would I ever miss a sofa?” she said.

This post originally appeared in somewhat altered form in What’s Left of Nathan. The blog is part of project that documents acts of dispossession: each day an object, or set of objects, is thrown or given away. The text that “accompanies” this act may be  a very short story about the object itself; other times it explores ideas about the place and meaning of things in our lives and homes, the connections between objects, memory and desire.  The photograph to this text comes depicts an earlier (2010) incarnation of the installation on view at the Athens Remap 3.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (www.endurance-junkie.com)

“I want to be writing about the colors of the sea,” Natalie said, “but I keep seeing a man in Spandex running tights.”

We were on the beach resting after our late afternoon swim. The wind had died down and the sea was a shimmering sheet of stained glass in panels of emerald, turquoise and sapphire. It was early September and the stream of the island’s tourists, never many even in high season thanks to the relative inaccessibility of the island and the deliberate scarcity of hotels and rooms to rent, had thinned to a trickle. The inlet was practically deserted, and the handful of others with whom Natalie and I were sharing the beach with could hardly be heard; we all spoke in hushed tones, a reverential counterpoint to the gently lapping of the sea against the pebbles at the shore’s edge and the bleating of goats in the fields behind us.

The man Natalie was talking about was the Prime Minister. He had run in the sideline 10 km split to the Athens 2010 Marathon last October. He had showed up at the starting line in knee-length Spandex running tights, hi-tech sun goggles and a pair of orange Phillips sport headphones that connected to his Apple i-Pod nano. I know they were Phillips headphones because I have a pair just like them. In fact, I also have Spandex running tights. Except that when I put on the gear and go out for a run, no one pays me much notice, even if I look a little ridiculous in the tights. When the Prime Minister goes running in this gear, it is an act of considerable symbolic power. Many people notice.

We had swum at Natalie’s insistence to the islet at the opening of the bay. “I want to see the beach from the sea, from the outside in,” she had said. I would have been content to swim back and forth along the shore, and told her so. “Why would you ever want to do laps in the Aegean?” she asked. It was more a scolding than a question. “You know, that’s exactly something he would do,” she said. She meant the Prime Minister.

I judged the distance to be only a half a kilometer and Natalie is a good swimmer, so she could easily have done it one her own, but my innate cautiousness and an equally ingrained sense of outmoded chivalry dictated that I accompany her. And she was right. From the islet we looked back onto an amphitheater of gentle foothills blanketed in a mauve and silvery green thicket of thistle, sage and lavender. The hills sloped down to a broad swathe of pasture before ending in the allée of sea-pines that stood like sentries at the back of the beach.

Wanting to see it from the other side. Perhaps that’s why she’s a writer and I’m not. That’s why she’s haunted by the man in the Spandex tights. She needs to write about the crisis, to understand it, to give voice to her anger.

“What was he trying to say getting dressed up in his superhero costume for a 10k run?” she said. “A fucking 10k run! So typical. So over the top.”

I don’t know what message the PM wanted to send, but it can’t have been what he intended. (It is too disturbing to think that there wasn’t any intended message or that he didn’t even consider that a message could be sent.)

The gear, which, together with his running shoes, cost the equivalent of the starting salary of an unskilled worker, was the kind worn by competitive athletes and early-adopter fitness buffs with a penchant for technology. There were a couple of reasons you might wear it. You might wear the gear to look the part or impress, though few of us have the butt and gut to pull off Spandex. But most of us wear it for comfort. It is much nicer running 10 km without your balls chafing against a cotton jockstrap and sweat dribbling down and stinging your eyes. And comfort, in turn, might give you an ever so slight competitive edge over the guy next to you when he starts bleeding in the crotch. The edge is mostly psychological, though. The gear cannot correct for more fundamental problems of endurance, gait and flexibility.

In different times one might admire the man in his running gear. Yes, here’s a man of who takes care of himself, a man of determination and self-discipline who doesn’t care what other people think of him. One might think that these qualities are the ones he brings to task of governing the country.

But what most people saw, I think, was a man outfitted in expensive hi-tech gear, awash in the music coming from his playlists on the nano and oblivious to the sounds of the crowd. And most people probably thought, this is how he governs the country. They saw a man who put too great a faith in technical solutions to what is fundamentally a political problem. They saw a man out of touch with what was happening around him, a man who literally does not hear what his people are saying.

If he had been listening, he would have spearheaded a concerted effort to bring even a handful of corrupt officials and politicians to justice. I am not naïve. I know that graft on its own does not explain the massive public debt that Greece has incurred. It does not on its own explain the appalling waste in the public sector and the stifling bureaucracy. And I know that the conviction of a hundred embezzlers and tax-evaders and bribed officials will not right the economy. Yet I also know that the country is seething with rage. I hear the voice of anger every day. I hear it at work, at the gym, on the trolley, at the grocer’s. I hear it from friends who teach at university and the guy I buy flowers from at the farmer’s market. It is impossible not to hear the anger. And it is not just anger at salary cuts and tax hikes, the loss of jobs and the curtailment of pensions. I hear, too, the sound of righteous indignation over the perverse injustices of a tragically dysfunctional economy and the asylum accorded to those who have plundered the wealth of the state.

There is much I do not understand about this country, and perhaps in this way the PM and I are alike. At times I can even see myself in him—his uneasiness with the demonstrativeness and immediacy that seem to characterize Greek public behavior, his awkwardness with the finer points of the language, his embrace of technology and technocracy—though this could all be sheer projection. But unlike him, I do hear the anger.

“Greece is running a marathon of its own. Together we will finish, and quickly, I hope,” he declared at the start of the race.

Yes, the marathon is a test of endurance, a matter of pushing beyond what you thought were your limits, and in this way the metaphor captures some of what the majority of Greeks are now experiencing. But only in part. If the marathon is a struggle, it is a solitary one: even if tens of thousands of other runners are doing the course with you, you are running on your own. Marathon running is not a team sport. Yet it is precisely this sense of committed collective effort for a common purpose that is required if the country is to emerge from this current morass of recession, stifling taxation and unemployment.

Leadership forges such a vision of common purpose not in rhetoric alone but more importantly in acts—including acts of primarily symbolic significance—that can persuade ordinary women and men that all are contributing their fair share to reforming and rebuilding the country. But we do not have this vision. We know that the privileged are not sharing in our sacrifices equally. We have no evidence that corrupt officials are being brought to justice. We see that the public sector remains bloated and inefficient. We witness the announcement of reforms but hear nothing of their implementation.

Technical solutions are needed, of course, the infrastructure and technological equivalents of the runner’s Spandex and hi-tech goggles. Tax evasion and fraud can’t be addressed if IT systems are too antiquated or unsophisticated to mine the databases in ministries and agencies to cross-check assets against income. But the problem is essentially one of political leadership and vision. Without a leadership willing to confront entrenched interests, slash waste from the public sector, responsibly privatize state assets and liberalize the economy, there will be no development.  But will is not in itself sufficient. Any measure that seeks to uproot privilege, any measure that threatens vested interests will be sabotaged further down the line of command and at the front. Reform is bound to fail if will is not accompanied by political savviness, alliance-building, and broad public support.

“Greece is running its marathon,” the Prime Minister. Did he not see the cruel irony of the metaphor? There is no captain on the marathon. We are all on our own.

The metaphor ultimately doesn’t hold. We are not running a marathon. We are, instead, on a long forced march, uprooted from a place that was never ours to begin with, a virtual land of false prosperity and hollow promises, acquired through promissory notes we could never repay, a parallel world to this land of pebble beaches and terraced olive groves, of honest toil and decent people. Under the watchful eyes of our troika guards, we are trudging along a course that leads us to ever more treacherous, ever more barren ground. There is no goal in sight, or if there is one, the line keeps being redrawn, farther and farther away.

Stephen Shore "Main St. and 2nd Ave., Valley City, South Dakota

My mother used to take my brother and me with her when she went grocery shopping, but we never made it through the sliding glass doors. She’d lock us in the car while she shopped. I asked her about this many years later. “The two of you were always fighting. How could I take you into the supermarket?” she said, in a tone that signified it was almost too obvious to bear mentioning.

Nowadays, she would have taken us in with her, however rambunctious we were. It’d be an opportunity to talk about sustainable farming and fair trade and dolphins being mistaken for tuna. Nowadays, she might even get arrested for leaving us locked in the car. Or she’d be too terrified someone might kidnap us, even with the doors locked.

My mother hadn’t been afraid. I imagine she never read or heard of anything like that happening so it never occurred to her that it could happen. But it’s probably more that she simply couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to steal two boys who always seemed to be fighting among themselves. In fact, she couldn’t imagine anyone stealing chidren from a suburban supermarket parking lot.

The Cold War stripped average Americans like my mother and father of the naïveté that had informed their world-view: they now knew the enemy outside the gates, the one that lay on the other side of the “Iron Curtain”, the one that, as my grade-school history teacher told us, had bombs which were engraved with the name of our small town and which they would launch at the first sign of relaxed vigilance. But it wouldn’t be until the next generation—my generation—became parents that the enemy within was identified, the pedophiles and desperate wannabe mothers and de-institutionalized psychotics that lurked in suburban schoolyards and shopping centers. It was then that mothers no longer locked their kids in the car in a suburban supermarket parking lot.

My sister-in-law chauffeurs her daughter everywhere: to soccer games and choir practice and ballet lessons, though the field and the church and the dance studio are all just a short bike ride away. She says you can’t just let a kid bike off alone, it’s too unsafe.  “There were all sorts of sick people out there who prey on kids,” she once said.

I first though my sister-in-law was just over-protective and slightly paranoid. But then I realized that all the parents were chaperoning and chauffeuring their kids around this quintessential American suburb of well-kept lawns, swim clubs and playing fields. It’s ironic. The specter of a society built on the fear of the ever present danger posed by the enemy within, a society in which each person’s movements were watched by the omnipresent eye of the guardian state—the  specter that figured so prominently in Cold War ideology, had, in some small and bizarre way, come to pass. But there was not one eye, but many.

 ***

On June 4, 1964, eighteen months after the end of the Cuban missile crisis, American television aired an episode of the short-lived and creatively daring sci-fi series The Outer Limits. It was called “The Special One”. Written by Oliver Crawford, a Hollywood screenwriter who survived the McCarthy blacklist to write for such shows as Perry Mason and Star Trek, the episode is about a middle-class family whose son is enrolled in a special government-sponsored program for the gifted. One evening a stranger arrives at their New York City apartment. Dressed in the inconspicuous, reassuring Brooks Brothers suit of lawyers, corporate accountants and government functionaries, the stranger announces that he’s “with the government” and has come to provide extra tutoring sessions to their gifted son for a special yet unnamed project. After a brief conversation about the program, during which the parents learn that the doses of radiation to which they had been exposed while themselves employed on a government project was responsible for the mutation that resulted in their son’s unusually high intelligence (“Oh I wouldn’t worry,” says the stranger, “I would be proud”), Mom and Dad send the stranger and their son up to their boy’s bedroom so that the two can become acquainted!

I’m not sure which was more disquieting: the naive faith in the putative good intentions of the State—how can it be wrong if it’s the government?—or the absence of the fear of predators that now seem to be such a mainstay of contemporary life. Of course, the stranger is a predator, an alien on a mission to recruit bright kids to be part of an advance phalanx to prepare the way for the colonization of the planet, arrives at their New York City apartment

The episode, like the series as a whole, encapsulates much of the uneasiness of Cold War America. We sense the fear and fascination surrounding atomic. We can read the post-Sputnik anxiety about “falling behind” in the arms-and-science race: the Washington office that houses the Educational Enrichment Program, a program designed to protect and nurture the brightest young minds (“just like wildlife and other natural resources”) is on the same floor as the Department of Education’s “Industrial Development Division”. But it is the enemy in “The Special One”, the stranger from beyond that has infiltrated to within, that inspires the greatest fear.

Many episodes of the Outer Limits feature a monster—aliens in the shape of crabs or ants, huge pulsating brains and luminous blobs—but the alien in this episode is practically indistinguishable from ordinary Americans, at least until the end when he unbuttons his shirt to reveal a throbbing vulva-like breathing appendage in his thorax. The character does have the slightest of accents, a vaguely English, vaguely elitist accent, stiffly correct but lacking in the idiomatic expressions and rhetorical devices that mark everyday language. The kind of accent someone is trained to acquire. A foreign agent, say. A Soviet foreign agent. An agent with the power to influence the free will of his targets to the point where they would kill (read, sacrifice) themselves at his command.

The father gradually comes to suspect that something is not right with this stranger, who soon starts coming at the oddest hours, often unannounced and never apologetic for the intrusion. Dad becomes concerned that his son is spending more and more time alone in his room with the stranger, sacrificing even baseball in order to devote himself to the “project”, a part of which unbeknownst to the father involves mastering the intricacies of the aliens’ climate-change (!) device. Even before the father sees the alien dematerialize and pass through the apartment walls he’s convinced this is not an American educator.

In the end it is the son who saves his father and the apprentice who bests the master. The climax, played out at night in the boy’s bedroom, is rich in psychological and ideological sub-texts. The only sources of light in the room come from the glow of the alien’s climate device that the boy holds in his hand and from the moonlight at the window, on whose sill the father is perched, struggling to resist the alien’s silent command to jump. Just as his father is about to leap to his death, the boy activates the device to alter generate a cloud of feather-like particles that alters the composition of the air in the room. The alien begins to suffocate and begs for mercy, which the boy naturally grants (this is, after all, is a story of an American hero).

The episode played perfectly on the American angst regarding Soviet expansionism and the toxic ideology they perceived fed it. The Soviets had a plan for world dominion, we were told at school. This was many years after Joseph McCarthy’s infamous speech in which he announced he had the names of 205 members of the Communist Party who were “shaping policy” in the US State Department, a speech which launched an era of scare-mongering, security review boards and blacklists that would costs thousands of persons their jobs, including ironically the screenwriter of this episode. Though McCarthyism had long ended when the episode aired, the vein of anxiety that the Special One taps is not all that different from the one that ran through the anti-communist hysteria of the Second Red Scare.

The alien dematerializes and leaves for his planet, sans climate-changing device, which the boy tells his father he will deliver to the government so that they reproduce in the thousands to repel any future alien attack. The family heads up the stairs for bed. How they can even think of sleep after what they’ve been through that night—a near suicide, a cloud of feathers, and a dematerializing alien—is only part of the marvelous implausibility of the whole episode . But to bed they must. The boy says half-jokingly, “I need my beauty sleep. Tomorrow I have Little League.”

Yes, the boy is once again his ordinary self. He is a hero, but one who rejects his specialness. “You could have been a god,” the alien tells him in a tone that is both accusation and disappointment. But the boy doesn’t want to be a god. He doesn’t want to be special. He wants to play baseball.

***

I didn’t play baseball as a kid. I wanted to. Not desperately, since I knew (or at least was convinced) that I was too uncoordinated. But I wanted to play. There were ways of being special that made you a hero in junior high school and there were ways that made you an outcast. Not playing baseball was one of the ways you didn’t want to be special.

So I wanted to play and was envious of my brother, who did. But I was more envious of the way baseball brought them together. I wished I had a purple uniform like his, the one emblazoned with the logo of the local drugstore. I wished that the local newspaper clippings with the game results that my dad pinned on the corkboard above his workbench had had my name, too, along with my brother’s.

And then there was the other way in which I was special, though I couldn’t give a name to it then. But I understood enough to know that there was something unusual about my feelings for my friend Will. I knew I had to keep it secret. And for the rest of junior and senior high, I did. Though I didn’t make elaborate efforts to “pass”—I didn’t have girlfriends and never talked about girls with the guys on the track team—I was still the careful alien.

It is no accident that the language that the conservative right (and not only the right) employed in their hate campaigns against gay people was often similar to that deployed in their rabid anti-Communism. Both are depicted as infiltrators intent on recruiting the innocent into their ranks.

No one recruited me, of course. I sometimes wish they had. It would have been helpful to have had a guide and tutor. Someone to tell me that I wasn’t special, that there were many other boys who felt just as I did. Someone to show me a world in which a man could love another man and that this love was something beautiful. Something special.

Art Ensemble of Chicago, Nice Guys album cover (ECM)

The first thing I noticed about her was that she wasn’t wearing any shoes. Just a pair of polka-dotted white ankle socks. I was writing in my notebook and glanced at her feet before I looked up at her. “He was right there, didn’t you see him?” she said, pointing to one of the armchairs ranged around a low-lying wooden table three meters or so from where I was sitting. I could see a pair of scuffed low-heeled slingbacks next to one of the chairs.

I was sitting at a small table set against a wall of exposed brick that hosted posters telling the story behind the double espresso I was drinking. It must have been fair-trade coffee because all the peasants were happy. Everything about this place—the pair of hip young barristas poking fun at each other, the oversized latte and toothsome cakes, the customers absorbed in swiping their fingers across the cool sleek surface of their iPads or gently tapping their iPhones, as if engaged in some kind of soothingly rhythmic, meditative prayer, everything spoke of contentment. Especially the music, this characteristic mix of rock-steady reggae, vintage Dylan, bossa nova and country rock. Everything spoke of contentment except this distraught woman.

“He stole my purse!” She had the frightened look of a child who had dozed off during the bus ride home and missed the stop and now had awoken to a strange and dangerous part of the city.

She must have been in her early 50s, but the clothes she was wearing—a short red skirt and sequined blouse that sat uncomfortably on her short plump frame—looked as if they had come from her daughter’s closet. She had her ash-blond hair braided in a pair of tight spiral buns, one of each side of her head like woven earmuffs. I tried to remember where I had seen braids like that before. Old black-and-white stills of Rhine Maidens in some pre-war Ring production perhaps.

I had noticed her earlier, slouched in another of the armchairs in the nook. She had nodded off, her arms wrapped around her laptop as if it were a favorite doll. I had noticed the guy next to her as well, the one who in all likelihood had stolen her handbag, though he hadn’t looked much like a thief, except perhaps for the fact that he was there alone and without something to keep him company.

I suggested we call the police. I said I was willing to provide a description of the man. But she said it was useless. They wouldn’t bother looking for him. “You’ll need to go to the police anyway to report the theft of your identity card, no?” But the only thing she seemed to be worried about was her phone. I realized later that the phone was probably the only thing of value in her bag; she wasn’t the kind of person who’d be carrying credit cards or a lot of cash or indeed an identity card.

I wondered if her nap had been brought on by a sleepless night or the playlist. It was the kind of music you wanted to wrap yourself in and take a nap in, the musical equivalent of a chenille tweed throw blanket. Feel-good comfort music. That doesn’t make it bad music, of course. It’s just not that the kind of music that necessarily demands concentration. Even if sometimes the music can be worth listening carefully to. Even if was never written to be a backdrop to Kaffeeklatsch.

I think it was there that I first heard Marcia Griffths’ moving reggae version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and Madeleine Peyroux’s captivating Billy Holliday-esque “Summer Wind”. I stopped writing or people-watching or texting or whatever I was doing at the moment and actually listened to the music, which wasn’t all that easy. The song kept getting interrupted by the whirr of the blender at work on the row of frappucino orders at the bar below.

The playlist isn’t usually that adventurous, though. It must have to do with the location. Starbucks has its own record label and catalog company, and there must be a team of music connoisseurs and marketing people who put together the playlists that are sent to and then piped into the thousands of retail outlets around the globe, appropriately mixed for the demographics of each outlet. Mix of tourists looking for wifi and locals on a break from shopping and students writing a term paper. The occasional scribbler like myself getting a caffeine jolt before heading off to the gym. And now and then an over-aged red-skirted Rhinemaiden. I imagine Seattle and New Orleans get a more daring playlist than we do here.

I was telling Lena about this the other day over a late supper of roast-pepper omelet, tomato salad, aged Naxos gruyère and an oaked asyrtiko wine from the island of Santorini. It was a bit too earnest a meal to follow the screening of the frothy Hepburn-Grant classic Bringing Up Baby that we had just seen at a neighborhood open-air cinema. But it was the kind of meal you put together at the last moment from whatever’s at hand. Unlike a playlist, there was very little forethought in the makeshift menu. The constraints were few: it had to be fast to fix and couldn’t contain any of the things Lena didn’t eat, like onions or chili or garlic or capers or raisins (it’s actually quite a long list but most of the stuff she doesn’t care for, like salami or pâté, I don’t have in my house anyway). On the other hand the meal did obey some of the cardinal tenets of such list-making: the individual items all had to go together in some hard-to-define but unmistakable way and were put together with a specific audience in mind.

Lena told me about an unusual playlist she once heard in a supermarket It was so intriguing she had followed the trace of sound to a loudspeaker in the dairy section so that she could listen better. It was Sigur Rós. Icelandic post-rock in an Athens supermarket? She made as if she were inspecting the package labels on the packets of butter and slabs of feta in the display case so that the store help wouldn’t mistake her for a crazy woman and ask her to leave. That was the day she bought the yoghurt-butter she still slathers on her morning toast. “I was standing there for fifteen minutes listening to the music. Eventually the butter starting talking to me.”

Some playlists, like the music in a spinning class, have an almost linear narrative structure, progressing from an undemanding exposition of the theme(s) to follow and then building with rising tension to a climax before easing off in the session’s cool-down denouement. Others are more non-linear, like the gifts of music Nikolas compiles for me; there always seem to be several narratives going on at the same time, and the strands of plot are harder to discern and disentangle, the playlist equivalent of the storylines in Memento or Nashville (well, maybe not that many storylines).

I remember—because I still play it—something he put together for our island vacation last year. He called it A Polish Summer. But if it was summer, then it was the sumptuous yet fading glory of the end of summer, and the music, tender, plaintive and so full of yearning, was hauntingly beautiful. He had included Couperin’s La Sultane with its unusual pairing of bass viols, and Max Richter’s painfully moving On the Nature of Daylight. There was a sarabande from a Bach suite and the canzonetta from Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D, which the composer had intended to dedicate to the violinist and his lover at the time Iosif Kotek (but didn’t for fear of scandal). And Tom Waits’ All the World is Green and works by Wojciech Kilar, whom I didn’t know, though Nikolas told me he had scored Coppola’s Dracula. It was a wondrous gift. A playlist designed by a discerning and knowledgeable listener for an audience of friends.

There are linear and non-liner narrative playlists, and then there are playlists like the ones I hear at Starbucks, playlists that don’t tell any sort of story at all. Playlists that are meant to be as much a part of the décor, identity and ambience of the café as the exposed brick walls and posters of the happy Guatemalan coffee pickers and arm chairs you fall asleep in. Musique d’ameublement, as Satie would have said.

I asked my friend Yannos about these lists are put together. He would know. He was a guitarist and once had a midnight slot on a radio station where he mostly played post-rock music. But he lost his job when the station switched to playlists and ironically was now picking up some extra money putting together playlists for big department stores and other corporate clients. It was his list that Lena had heard that day at the supermarket.

I asked him why the store just didn’t buy Muzak. “More expensive. Besides, studies show people hate it.” He told me about the Pipedown site, a grassroots organization in London dedicated to stamping out music that’s piped music. “Music which no one’s asked to hear and which you can’t escape from. Apparently it was started by this guy who tried to get the London Tube authorities to stop the music at the Piccadilly Circus station. Like most musicians, he hated both playlists and piped in music.

“So do you get specs on what they want played?” I asked.

“Oh, they just give me the demographics and shopper profiles and tell me they want something that will appeal to the client, something upbeat and cool but not too noticeable. Nothing cheesy. No clichés . Nothing too pop. Or edgy, for that matter.”

“So what about the Sigur Rós?”

“I couldn’t help myself. It was all that was left of my show.”

Athanasios Argianas, Song Machine 16 (the length of a strand of your hair of the width of your arms, unfolded...), 2011

Last August Jörg came down with his adorable Scottish boyfriend, Nathan, to join Nikolas and me on the island. They brought along their friend Emil, a tall blond marketing executive from New Zealand who arrived with the tan I wanted to leave the island with and a suitcase that seemed to contain nothing other than size-too-small Abercrombie & Fitch gear and enough après-soleil for a platoon of guys (in the end we all wound up borrowing glugs of providential Emil’s lotions).

None of us knew everyone, and we hadn’t all vacationed together, so I was anxious about how we’d fit. But in the end it was effortless. Part of it was Jörg’s talent for discretely organizing us and remembering we had run out of olives or were headed for the wrong beach given the northerly wind. Part of it was Nathan’s infectious good mood and rapid-fire wit. And then there was Nikolas, who’s such a brilliant conversationalist anyway and impossible not to like and who remained calm in the midst of the minor adversities that befall such vacations, as when I sliced off half my nail with Jörg’s Japanese chef’s-knife while helping prepare dinner and promptly fainted.

Things were arranged effortlessly, including how to cover expenses. We decided for a common till that Emil, who was intrigued by the iconoclasm of being the youngest in the role of “paying” for the rest of us, would manage.

I was embarrassed to tell them about the receipts. I saw myself as a cost-conscious 1960s housewife collecting trading stamps. Cheap. Needy. But in the end it was an opportunity I couldn’t afford to remain unexploited.

I told the non-natives that I had to collect receipts to claim my deductible on this year’s tax return. Receipts from when we’d go to restaurants, or shop at the grocery or refill the tank at the gas station or (especially) when we renewed our stocks of gin and wine at the liquor store. I explained how the measure was introduced as a way for the State, whose tax-collection system is so hopelessly inefficient, antiquated or corrupt that the black market economy is still at 30% of GNP, to oblige citizens to request receipts from the doctors, glaziers, gardeners, house-painters, taxi-drivers and, yes, accountants, and dozens of others who, throughout the year, provide them with services but who never pay a cent of tax on the money receive for doing so. It was diabolical, actually. If you didn’t amass enough receipts to cover your deductible, you lost it and were taxed as if you hadn’t really paid to have you pulled rhomboid treated or your will changed or the roaches annihilated. Not only were you turned into a tax-collector but you were fined if you didn’t do a good job.

Emil and Nathan and Jörg thought it peculiar and vaguely Eastern, this idea of impressing the citizen into doing the work of the government, and they were baffled by the very idea of systematic tax evasion. They were good-natured about it all, and took to the chase of the receipt with the same enthusiasm they evinced in sampling sea urchin salad and rakomelo, the warm cardamom-spiced honey-laced raki we were served at the village’s only bar. They saw it as a bit of game—who could collect the most receipts or the one with the highest or lowest value (Nathan proudly delivered one for a €1.15 can of Coke).

I warned them off from asking the taxi drivers. There were only six on the entire island, and I was afraid word would quickly get around that this quintet of “foreigners” (though only three were from abroad) was asking for receipts, and we’d up the proverbial shit’s creek the next time we called to arrange a ride back from an out-if-the-way beach 15 km from home. It was the same reason I never asked for a receipt from my plumber. You don’t want your guy hemming and hawing on the phone when you’re in the bathroom looking at the literal shit’s creek.

I’m ashamed of not asking. Of the shortsightedness of discounting for a short-term convenience the long-term benefit of an equitable society in which everyone contributes his or her fair share.

I despair at the absence of this sense of civil duty that seems second nature to the English and the Germans, of which a “taxation conscience” is just one facet. We don’t have the conviction here that you pay taxes because that’s the right thing to do. Instead, many see the state as something externally imposed, antagonistic if not hostile force. There’s this sense that the “state”, grossly inefficient and prone to corruption, doesn’t deserve our tax money. As if we are not the state. As if the imperfect state of the schools and hospitals meant you didn’t have to pay for them at all.

Maybe this has to do with a long history of subjugation to an occupying power in which the state was literally foreign. But that was so long ago. It has long ceased being an excuse for the calculus of blind self-interest in which the individual decides which laws to obey and when (a recent and strikingly visual reminder of this being the debacle of the ban on smoking in restaurants, bars and cafés, which was re-introduced, with even stricter regulations but even less enforcement, after the debacle of its initial implementation. The only change the new law brought about was the disappearance of the ubiquitous ashtrays and the appearance in their place of small plastic cups containing a jigger or two of tap water.)

There are exceptions, of course. Like the atenistas, “an open community of citizens” who have taken initiatives to clean up beaches, reclaim parks from neglect and crime, and organize food drives for the homeless. But they remain exceptions.

Perhaps the receipts will make a difference. I noticed that the fishmonger at the farmer’s market now has a portable cash register that issues receipts, which is a step forward, even if he still continues to pawn off his fish-farmed sea bass as wild catch. And all the taxis are outfitted with a machine that generates receipts, even if in nearly all cases—judging from my admittedly minute sample of direct encounters—you need to ask for it.

Without the receipts gathered on our summer stay on the island I probably wouldn’t have been able to fulfill my quota and earn the deductible. And I was one of the more diligent collectors among my friends. I had even kept receipts from Starbuck’s, of all places. But the receipt for a grande latte was worth keeping, considering that receipts for a lot of the bigger-ticket items like airplane and train tickets, all utility bills and anything bought abroad didn’t count toward your total. But even with those restrictions, I seemed to accumulate lots and lots of receipts. Although I was fairly conscientious about emptying my pockets and stashing the day’s haul in a hallway drawer when I got home from work, I’d keep finding slips of paper in all sorts of places—stuck within the pages of a paperback novel, lying at the bottom of my gym bag, crumpled at the back of the vegetable bin in the refrigerator. And of course in the wash. Receipt fuzz, I called it, these miniscule balls of paper that I’d dig out of the pockets of shorts and shirts.

The paper on which the evidence of my transactions with the body economic came in all shapes and sizes, from the flimsy slips from the kiosk, no wider than the breadth of two fingers, to the generous laser-print A4 receipts from the music store, with their watermarked lute-player and elegant Sabon typeface.

Last April I counted out the 1023 receipts I had collected over the course year and stacked them into five separate bundles of more or less similar value, and brought them to my accountant so that he could prepare my tax return (for which service, incidentally, he did not offer to provide a receipt nor, I unhappily admit, did I ask for one, my lame and self-serving justification being that this was a man I definitely wanted on my side in the event of a misunderstanding with the Tax Office.)

I don’t know if before filing the return online he had someone in his office double-check the tallies I had provided on an accompanying Excel worksheet. I doubt it. The firm was savvy and large enough that in the unlikely event I would be called to account for my deductible and he determined I was short on receipts and needed to make up the shortfall, he could easily borrow from the stacks of receipts his other clients had delivered to his office.

The accountant for which my friend Lena worked for was different. A one-man show with an IT-challenged clientele who didn’t even bother totaling the receipts. It was his job, or ratherLena’s, to do it for them.

Lena is not an accountant, or even comfortable with numbers for that matter. The job, which would last only a month or so during the peak tax-filing session, was nonetheless a godsend for Lena, who had been fired from her previous job and had been looking unsuccessfully for a position—almost any position—for three months.

Her job was simple: check that the receipts were valid and tally them up. That’s what she did eight hours a day. Add up receipts.

Lena did more than count, though. She is too bright and curious about the world about her to endure eight hours of mindless routine.Lenaquickly became fascinated with this archive of countless slips of flimsy paper, intrigued by the view if afforded her into the lives of other people.

It was all there in the bundles of receipts that people brought to office, the secrets they delivered up to her without even realizing it. Snippets of papers on which were recorded the details of their daily lives. What the government had not accomplished out of ineptitude or fear of public outcry or the censure of civil rights organization in the country and beyond, namely, the linking of data in registries maintained by organizations as diverse as the health care system, insurance companies, online warehouses and the DMV was, even if in the most primitive and sketchiest of form, already a fact—and lying in Lena’s hand.

At first she was content to simply note what struck her as peculiar. A pair of shoes for more than half of what she’d get paid in the month. A ticket stub for the same performance of the James Taylor Quartet she had been.

Until she ran across a butcher’s receipt for exactly €1. It pricked her curiosity. What could you buy for only a euro in a butcher’s shop? It was just enough for a dieter’s hamburger. Maybe it was a small sausage. She combed through the rest of receipts and discovered that whoever this was bought just one thing once a week from the butcher’s. On its own, meaningless. She herself as a half-hearted vegetarian bought even less meat. But interleaved with the receipts for single shots of Greek coffee, canned sardines, generic washing powder, and the absence of receipts from restaurants and taxicabs and drycleaners, the one-euro receipt was a piece in a puzzle she would put together, a chip in the mosaic of a man who she concluded was either a pensioner on an mercilessly tight budget (the age she guessed from the hypertension medication and interdental brushes listed on his pharmacy receipts) or a notorious skinflint.

Lena began to compose what she called her receipt portraits, character sketches of the persons she encountered only through the traces they left of the things and services they bought.

She said the receipts shared the indexicality of photographs in the way they captured reality and revealed their subject, however faintly and imperfectly. Taken as a whole the receipts were rich in information. And considering the final destination of the receipts, she added, they were, just like police photographs and street-level closed-circuit TV cameras, an apt example of what Sontag had called bureaucratic cataloguing.

“You know, of course, that nobody in the Ministry of Finance actually checks these receipts. They just dump in the bin when they open the envelope.” I said. “And besides, wasn’t it Sontag who said that the camera always hides more than it discloses?”

I was suspicious. The measure of a person is not the sum of the individual’s purchases. How could she discern character from consumption?

“But you can. Well, at least you can get a better idea of the person than you can from his Facebook page or his dating-site profile. Because the receipts don’t have the problem that a profile does or even photos do sometimes, you know the posing, how the subject will change behavior ever so slightly when they’re aware that a photograph is being taken.

She was talking about Fred. Or the guy she called Fred because of his apparent predilection for Fred Perry clothing. A man she knew only through his receipts but who she was convinced was a much better match for her than the string of guys she had gone out with in the last couple of years.

“What do you actually know about Fred?”

“I know he shops organic and takes care of his teeth and sends flowers now and then. And I know what music he listens to and what books he reads and what wine he drinks.”

“Those are just things,” I insisted. “You know what books he buys but you don’t know how carefully he reads them or if he was anything to say about them when he finishes reading them, if he finishes. You know what wine he drinks but not how he drinks, whether it’s a bottle a night alone at home or at dinner with friends. You know what a marketer wants to know, not a lover does.”

But Lena was a better reader of receipts than I was, or more inventive. She managed to discern all sorts of character traits from her stacks of slips. Fred took care of things; there were repair bills for things most people would ordinarily have thrown away and bought new ones. She saw loyalty in the fact that he frequented the same set of shops, even when a few weren’t in his immediate neighborhood and orderliness by the way he had arranged the receipts according to size, all the small ones in one packet, the large sheets in another.

John Szarkwoski, in his seminal 1967 work The Photographer’s Eye, wrote that “our faith in the truth of a photograph rests on our belief that the lens is impartial, and will draw the subject as it is, neither nobler nor meaner.” Lena’s faith in what these receipts told her about her subjects, their objectivity and lack of posing, their ability to reveal and explain, overlooked her own important hermeneutical role.Lena’s “receipt portraits” were interesting precisely because of her own narrative, the way she wove these strands of data into an image of what we would recognize as a person: an entity of desires, habits, tastes, symptoms, and predilections. On their own the receipts were just a collection of strands of discrete measurements, some of them perhaps richly evocative, but it was Lena who called them into life.

They reminded me of an exhibition of works by Athanasios Argianas that Lena and I had gone to last spring at the Breeder. Long graceful strips of brass lay limp on a construction of thin steel rods set at right angles to one another. They looked like strands from the necklace of a titan queen or the closely guarded hieratic standards of an ancient culture. The strips were etched with odd yet evocative measurements: the width of a coral snake unfolded, the wingspan of a finch, the length of a strand of your hair, of your arms unfolded. These measurements seemed at once arbitrary (but in the end perhaps no more so than the cubit or the span) and highly suggestive. They lay there in the stillness of an empty gallery, waiting to be deployed.

Lena wants to meet Fred. I told her that the image of the man she wanted to meet was one that she herself had largely put together. The receipts, I said, yielded no information on other, and more important, vitals of character: whether he was affectionate or aloof, courageous or fearful, forgiving or resentful, nothing that could provide a measure of decisiveness, goodwill, humility or a dozen other traits.

“But you never know those things in the beginning anyway, do you?” she said.

Girodet de Roucy-Triosson, The Sleep of Endymion (1791)

He was beautiful. And the tragedy was, he didn’t know it. He knew he was smart and that he loved men, but he wasn’t sure of much of anything else. At 18 maybe he didn’t have to.

He never saw the desire in the eyes of the men who cruised him in the parks or the city streets. Never saw their hunger. Never understood his allure. He thought the ease with which he could have sex had to do with the city itself, as if there were some aphrodisiacal vapor wafting over the bay and into the heart of the Castro. There were times he felt he could sense the city’s heartbeat quicken in the early twilight, the hills ever so slightly rise in yearning. Or maybe it was just the fact that there were so many men here.

He had taken a year off before college and hitched here from the East Coast. To see California, he told people when they asked what he was doing in San Francisco. It’s what he told the intake counselor at the halfway house where he crashed when he first arrived. It’s what he told Nate, who also worked at the house and was gay and who gave him a place to stay in his oversize apartment in the Marina, a gift from his father who was a businessman with a chain of fast-food restaurants in Oregon. Actually, if it hadn’t been for Nate’s generosity, he would probably be back in New York by now.

The truth was that he was here because he hadn’t any other place to go. His parents had refused to cash in some of their investments to pay for his freshman tuition at Columbia. There had been a scene, of course, when the acceptance letter came without a scholarship offer but an analysis of the financial statement that his father had filled out and that showed how there was enough money to pay tuition. He would up screaming at his father, something about paternal responsibility, his father muttering something about the stocks being tied up in a mortgage. It was a lie. But he was too confused and hurt and angry to challenge his father. He stomped up to his room in tears. He would never forgive his father. Not just for letting him down but for making him cry. He knew he wouldn’t stay in the house longer than he needed. He left a week after high school graduation.

He was too ashamed to tell anyone about this. Ashamed at his father’s meanness. His lack of interest or concern. But mostly ashamed at his own stupidity for not asking the obvious questions before applying to Ivy League schools, like “how are we going to pay for this?” Even if it was something the parent was supposed to ask.

And here he was, now sitting at a café bar in the Mission. I couldn’t stop looking at him. He was wearing a cycling cap atop his unruly mane of curly dark-brown hair, the haberdashery equivalent of a finger in the dyke. Satiny ringlets of hair streamed from the brim of the cap, pirouetting over his ears and down his neck. He had the start of a beard, denser at the chin but hopelessly spare on his cheeks. His thick eyebrows—he would have to begin trimming them before he even turned forty—crowned the ridge above his pale moss-green eyes.

He had this beguiling mix of grace and vulnerability, but sharpened by a subtle sexual energy that you could see coursed just below the surface. It was physical, this energy, but it wasn’t a matter of his body, which I guess by today’s buffed gym standards was almost ordinary. Or not in the way we think of our bodies nowadays, as something that needs to be worked out, bulked up, toned and ripped. It was just there, his body. He didn’t really pay much attention to it. Or even thought of it as something distinct. He would never be more at ease with his body than now.

He was wearing as salmon-colored t-shirt, the kind you’d pick up in a discount department store, the ones sold three to as packet, with a pocket where men of an earlier generation used to keep their cigarettes. It hung loose on his wiry frame, drooping enough to reveal a tufts of chest hair and a trace of a thin silver chain.

He was sitting with a woman five or ten years his senior. She had a dancer’s carriage and long blond hair that would shift and shimmer as she rotated her torso, like the gossamer cape of a matador-angel. She was his best friend, his guide not just to the city and beyond—she had taken him on trips to Napa Valley and Big Sur and the Russian River—but also to poetry and good food and philosophy and most of all relationships. She was married to a man preparing for the Lutheran ministry, but they never spent much time together the three of them.

He would always have a woman life that in his life, even when he was involved in a relationship with a guy. Gerry, Susan, Liz, Anna, Helen. Maybe he was more than that for the women. He was an adventure for them, but a safe one, a man who wouldn’t threaten their marriage or their sense of priorities even when they made love.

I could see what attracted them to him. He was playful and earnest at the same time. But most of all he was attentive. I noticed how intently he looked into his companion’s eyes, how closely he followed her words, how engaged he was in their conversation, how completely he had tuned out his surroundings to devote himself to her. It was as if she was the most important person in the world, as if there was no other place he wanted to be than at her side. I saw how he wrapped her in the embrace of his presence and affection. I was envious.

I don’t remember how long I sat there looking at him. My coffee had gotten cold. God, he was beautiful. I wanted so desperately to tell him. If he knew, maybe he would be more assertive, less likely to suppress his own needs in his eagerness to please the men who picked him up.

But I knew telling him wouldn’t do any good. He’d think it was just flattery or a come-on. It saddened me that he didn’t know. He’d never know. I felt a rivulet of tears trickle down my cheeks. One drop landed on the photograph I held in my hands. I dabbed it with the cuff of my shirt and slipped it back in the pocket at the back of my notebook. I tried to remember the name of the woman in San Francisco. It began with a J., that much I knew. I couldn’t for the life of me remember the silver chain, though.

**

I was sitting on a chair in his bedroom, watching him as he lay sleeping, sprawled out on the bed in his boxer shorts, the summer sheets tangled in a nest of linen around his feet. I called out his name.

“Nathan?” Louder this time, “Nathan?” I had forgotten how soundly he used to sleep.

“What?!” It took a few seconds for him to grasp what has happening. He sprang up and started calling for help. I knew he’d scream. I knew his heart was pounding harder than it ever had before, harder than during the last 220 meters of the cross-country races he ran in high school, harder than he even thought possible.

“Stop shrieking like a hysterical woman and listen tome.” I said it as calmly and firmly as I could. I knew how submissive he became in the face of male authority. Unless he felt he had nothing to lose. In which case he made a point of fucking up on a grand scale. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

He stopped screaming and moved towards the bay windows.

“Now that’s just silly. You’re on the fourth floor. What are you going to do, jump?”

“Who are you?” he asked. I knew he would. He had to know. “And what the hell are you doing here?”

“Let’s just say I’m someone who knows a lot about you. And that’s because I’m a lot like you. Or rather, a lot like you’ll become. Or maybe exactly like you’ll become.”

“I’m going to call the police,” but he didn’t move. The phone was in the hall, and I was between him and the door to the hall.

“Now that would put a rather abrupt and pedestrian end to what promises to be an extraordinary night. Aren’t you in the least bit curious about me? ” I said.

“What I know is that you’re one sick… pervert! Get out of my house.” he yelled.

“You wanted to say ‘sick motherfucker’, but of course you couldn’t. You never learned to curse. And it’s Nate’s house”

“You know shit about me.” he said, partly in defiance but partly as a gambit to find out if I did.

“Oh, I know you invited two different girls to your 8^th grade dance but really wanted to go with Billy Chance. I know you jerked off in the basement den and worry that masturbation was making you too anti-social.”

He slumped down on the floor. “This is just too weird. This must be an acid flashback.”

“We know you never really did any acid. And that time with Faye didn’t count.”

“Oh yeah? How could I have been climbing the ladder of God if I hadn’t been high?”

“You stopped three rungs short of Enlightenment, don’t you remember?”

“Ok, so I’m having a psychotic episode.” He stretched over to the bedside commode to turn on the lamp.

“No, don’t turn on the light.” I said. “Not yet.”

“Why, do I have some horrible accident and get disfigured or something?” I could see his face relax ever so slightly.

“No, but you’re too young to be confronted with the image of your own mortality. You have a right to believe you’ll never die. At least for now,” I said. “But you should really take better care of your teeth.”

He picked up his shorts off the floor and wriggled into his t-shirt. “You don’t mind, do you? I’m not that comfortable taking to figments of my imagination half-naked.”

“Joke if you want. It’s your time.” I couldn’t hide the disappointment in my voice and didn’t try. I thought he’d be more curious about what awaited him. I thought he’d be able to put aside his usual reserve and ultra-rationalism to just, I don’t know, give in to the moment. And this was one extraordinary moment.

“Well, if this isn’t an acid flashback or a schizophrenic delusion than it’s really a bummer meeting you if all you remember when you meet me are a couple of embarrassing moments from my adolescence. Tell me, what can I do so that I won’t grow up to be you?”

“Sorry. I just wanted to convince you. And I knew these were the kinds of things you never confided in anyone.”

“Don’t you remember anything nice about me?” he asked.

“Oh, lots and lots of things,” I said.

“Like what?” he said.

“You’re a good friend. You’re loyal and trustworthy. You’ve got principles—“

“—Those are characteristics, for Chrissakes. They could be yours, for all I know. No, I meant, specific things, things I’ve done, things I’ve said. Like the prom dates, but the other way around. Nice. Don’t you remember any?”

I couldn’t, at least not right then and there, on command. Maybe it’s the embarrassing moments that stick out the most.

“I’ve offended you now. Sorry. This isn’t working out like I thought it would.” I said.

“How did you expect it would?”

“I don’t know really. Not like this”

“Fine fucking ghost of Nathan future you are.”

“Now you’re being sarcastic,” I said. “It was never a quality that suited you–”

“—us”

“Ok, us. Sarcasm was always just a defense.”

“Against what?” he asked.

“Oh no.,” I laughed. “You don’t get the answer to that that easily.”

We talked till the early morning. He didn’t ask me the things I thought he would. Whether he’d fall in love. If he’d find a job that fulfilled him. Which cities he’d live in. If he’d be happy. Maybe he really did think this was all a hallucination and didn’t want to put too much store in it. Or maybe he was content with getting to know the man he’d become.

He was charming. Feisty, witty, playful, engaging. In the end, seductive without a trace of artifice.

I wanted to tell him how beautiful he was, but it would have sounded sordid and perverse and seedy, something a much older man of dishonorable intentions would say to an 18-year-old. There was no way I could make it sound right. Nathan would never know how beautiful he was. But when I woke up, in those precious seconds before I opened my eyes and the images and feelings from the dream drained from working memory, I felt, with a certainty that still is with me, that he was fine as he was.

Berenice Abbott, Blossom Restaurant, NY (1935)

I first walked into the seamstress’s shop on the last day of its relatively short business life. It had been there for about three years, just two blocks down from my flat, and though I had passed by hundreds of times I had always been put off by the wooden hand-painted sign in a flowery script announcing “hand-made crafts”. It was only yesterday that I noticed the other sign that said “Alterations” and remembered the cycling jersey with a broken zipper that I was always meaning to get fixed. I dashed back home and fetched it.

It was a miniscule shop, with just enough room for a sewing machine and a small couch, where I could see the seamstress’s daughter lying sprawled with a coloring box and a box of wax crayons.

As I entered the shop the woman carefully extinguished the hand-rolled cigarette she had been smoking, laid it aside, and stood up from her bench to greet me. She was wearing a sleeveless, calf-length summer shift that revealed a small monochrome tattoo on her shoulder. I noticed a sampler on the wall in Romanian with a picture of a country church, but her Greek was almost flawless.

I showed her my jersey and asked about the zipper. Then she told me it was her last day. She was giving up the shop. But she could fix the jersey by the afternoon. “But I’ll have to inconvenience you. I don’t have a zipper that fits.” She gave me the address of a downtown shop that sold yarn and thread and, yes, zippers.

“Why are you closing shop?” I asked, though I knew the answer. Expenses too high, not enough work. Taxes, she told me. “I try to do everything legal. But there are too many expenses. There’s no room for us any more. Soon only the big department stores will do alterations. But only when you buy the clothes. If you lose or gain weight, you’re out of luck”

“But there must be more work now with the crisis. It’s cheaper to fix a dress than buy a new one.”

“Not really. The women can buy a new skirt from the peddlers for the €4 I charge for alterations.” She meant the illegal immigrants who sell cheap Chinese goods on the streets downtown.

“That’s a shame,” I said indignantly.

“Oh, they’re not to blame,” she said. “In a way, I’ve always felt sorry for them. Besides, who knows, I might wind up like them someday.”

**

On my way to the thread shop I passed by a Ministry building. It doesn’t matter which one. It wasn’t one of the main buildings, though, which would have been more heavily guarded and unapproachable. This, on the other hand, was an understated but elegant landmark building from the late 30s in a quiet residential neighborhood. It had one particularly odd feature: a series of tall and narrow low-lying windows on the ground floor that afforded passersby a look into the offices. The view was somewhat obstructed by stacks of bulging dusty dossiers that lay on the cabinets that lined the street side of the offices. The dossiers seemed to be as old as the building. They were the kind you fastened with a ribbon that wound around a clasp on the front flap of the file. But there was enough free space between the piles of files for me to peek into what has happening in the office. Or not happening, as it were. I couldn’t pick out anyone who wasn’t reading the paper or chatting with co-workers or talking on the phone, anyone who was actually doing anything with one of these files. Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe I had espied them during their mid-morning break. I suppose they eventually did do some work. Just to break the monotony.

It made me think of Menios and the small odyssey he experienced when renovating the downtown apartment he had recently bought.

You can’t get much more downtown than where Menios lives. Elsewhere I suppose he’d be hailed as an urban pioneer, part of a vanguard minority regenerating parts of what is now a dying central city. But Menios said he bought the place, a 7^th floor loft in an old apartment building on one of the most congested main streets in the city, because it was a bargain, even after spending an equal amount of money fixing it.

The biggest problems during renovations was how to bring up the sheetrock, new fixtures, pipes and tiles to the loft, and how to carry down the massive amount of rubble from the walls he demolished. Both could be solved by the use of a crane, but that meant re-routing traffic, including all the trolley and bus lines, on the street below. Which technically was possible, even if only between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. on Sunday nights and provided he had the requisite permits from the police and the mass transit authority. After numerous stops to precinct headquarters Menios eventually got the police permit. But he was stuck at the transit authority, which apparently had to draft a plan detailing when and where traffic would be siphoned off to and which power relays had to be shut off to cut power to the trolley lines in front of the building. The transit authority told him it would take about two months to do the study. Menios, who had no intention of waiting two months and who’s an engineer himself who happened to have worked on the extension to the Athens subway, asked them what was so complicated about this study that it would take two months.

“I could do this myself in a day,” he told them, in an obvious undercurrent of exasperation.

“Why don’t you then?” they asked. And that’s how Menios got his permit. The transit authority gave him use of an office and access to a computer and trolley schedules, maps of the electrified lines and power switches, and a template for the study. He finished it in a day. The next day it was signed and that Sunday morning, the crane got to work.

**

The thread shop was located off a downtown square in a narrow, dimly lit stoa. It was wedged into a row of a dozen or so similarly small shops that sold cheap electronics, lottery tickets, cheese pies, discount shoes, and bulk nuts and fruits glacés. None of these places, but especially the thread shop, depended on random passersby for its trade. You had to know what was here in order to find it.

The shop was twice as high as it was wide, like a shoebox turned on its end. And every inch of the surface of this tiny space was lined with shelves on which lay boxes of bobbins and buttons and spools of thread, and carefully arranged pyramids built from skeins of yarn.

The shopkeeper was a short woman whose long black hair and wide eyes brought to mind an Anime heroine. Though dwarfed by the high-ceiling wall of yarn behind her she looked masterfully at ease in her surroundings.

I explained what I was looking for and she dug out a zipper from a box she retrieved from behind the steps of a winding metal staircase that led to a little loft above half the shop, which may have served as yet additional storage space. It looked a bit thick for a cycling jersey and I asked for a thinner one. She found one but protested, “No, this won’t do. It’s for very fine fabric, for evening gowns and the like.”

I asked her how the crisis had affected her business. “Oh, we’ve seen worse”. She meant the junta’s tanks that had rolled by outside the stoa on their way to crush the student uprising at the Polytechnic decades ago. “People still sew and knit, you know. Of course, not because they need to anymore. It’s more of a hobby nowadays. Besides, most people have enough unworn clothes to last a couple of years.”

In the end I thought my tricot was sheer enough to justify the thinner zipper so I took both.“If you wish. I just didn’t want to sell you something you won’t need,” she said. The thick one cost 50 cents, the thin one €1.

She had been right, of course. In the end, the seamstress used the thicker one.

Martin Kippenberg, Metro Net

Natalie was pissed. It wasn’t one of those parties you could be fashionably late for, it was cocktails at the Rector’s. And even if it had been one of those parties, we were beyond what fashion would excuse.

I had gotten us hopelessly lost. In my technological hubris I had ignored the hand-drawn map of directions to the Rector’s house that Natalie had given me as her navigator and insisted instead on pursuing a shortcut I had discovered on my iPhone. But the digital map turned out to be horribly out of date or just wrong. Forty-five minutes after we were supposed to have arrived I had her backing off highway entrance ramps that my map indicated were side access roads,  then pirouetting out of a dead-end that was supposed to lead on to the address we were looking for but instead was severed by a canal.

My intentions were noble—it really would have been much faster going my way… if only the road was there—but that doesn’t count as an excuse. I’d never try out a new dish at a dinner party, why would I use an untested shortcut to get to an important date? Important to Natalie, anyway. It’s so typical of me, really, this drive to do things better than they need to be done, but also this unexamined faith in technology, as if the sheer modernity of the medium—in this case, the sleek screen of a high-tech smart phone—endowed its content with an air of infallibility. How could a Google map be wrong? Or worse, out of date?! Or Christ, mistake a ditch for a cross-street?

I almost shared with Natalie my suspicion that the street maps had been deliberately doctored to frustrate anyone driving who in who didn’t belong. The Rector’s neighborhood was one of those self-contained suburban enclaves of the rich, cut off from the rest of the city save for the one avenue–the  one that figured so prominently on the Rector’s map–that  fed, like the intertubular venules of a kidney, into a network of cul-de-sacs that all seemed to look in on each other. Like other such enclaves it had been built entirely in the last decade, a result of the construction boom occasioned by the access to low-interest money that was available after the country joined the Euro zone.

But I kept my paranoia to myself. Natalie’s temper is legendary. She lacks that inner rheostat of anger that in other people allows for the gradual escalation of annoyance and irritation before its release as rage. Natalie has only two modes of anger: exasperation and fury, and she was hovering at the far end of exasperation at the moment.

In the end we back-tracked the wide arc of detour we had taken and found the main avenue and followed the map to the Rector’s house. It was hidden behind a high stone wall bedecked in a profuse overhanging of carefully tended honeysuckle and jasmine and studded with a trio of security cameras. The house itself, from the outside at least, was architecturally unremarkable but spoke of money, a recently built white cube with generous window space shielded by a brise-soleil. It reminded me of a fortress. Or a Berlin office building.

What the house lacked in ornament on the outside was more than compensated by the rococo opulence of the interior, of which Natalie and I had only the briefest of looks—enough to ascertain that the contents of the dining room alone must have been worth more than my entire apartment—as we were escorted upstairs to a spacious veranda by the help, a bit too briskly I thought, as if we were too untrustworthy to be left to wander through the rooms below and amid the 19^th-century oils that hung on their walls.

After the obligatory greeting of the host, Natalie and I shuffled across the highly polished deep-green granite floor and made our way for the bar, which was set up on a sheet of glass over the Jacuzzi. It felt as if we were gliding along an iced pond of algae. The young man tending the bar poured us each a modest measure of a drinkable Merlot, which we quickly dispatched and proffered our glass for a refill. Just to make sure there’d be no misunderstandings as the evening wore on.

“I’m sorry I got us lost,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter. We’re here now.”  And it really didn’t seem to matter any more. The tension I had noticed in her body when in the car had loosened and whether from the wine or the soft light of the oversized rice-paper lanterns, her skin had taken on a faint glow, like the sheen of a lemon sorbet as the surface crystals first begin to melt in the warm air of a summer evening. “Besides, I’m the one who should be apologizing for dragging you here, and in a coat and tie. Though you do look good dressed up.”

“Only older men look better dressed up than down.” I said. “But I forgive the slight,” I joked. “So why did you so desperately want to come to this anyway?” I asked. The mood of the party, if you could call it that, was subdued. Conversation was muted, the lighting dim, the drinks small. Perhaps it was the setting or the granite or the forced formality of business attire on one of the hottest days in July, but the party felt a bit like Church without the pews.

“Academic politics. You wouldn’t understand,” she said. “I should mingle. So should you. You might learn something.”

She meant about the crisis. The recession, the debt crisis, the chances of default. The fragile underpinnings of the banking system. She meant the faculty who taught Economics.

It was the eve of Parliament’s vote on the mid-range austerity package that needed to pass to ensure the disbursement of the fifth installment of emergency loans that the troika of the European Central bank, the EU and the International Monetary Fund was to lend to Greece to fend off default. No one was sure what the outcome of the vote would be, and rumors had coursed during the day through blogs and forums and SMS gateways, propagating the wildest of scenarios: default, the return to the drachma, food rationing, a run on the banks, martial law.

Crisis-talk hung about the party like the acrid haze from a not-so-distant forest fire that is still raging. Some were more anxious than others. I suppose it depends on how much you have to lose and how close you think the fire is. How much confidence you have in the firefighters and whether there enough planes, men and skill to extinguish the fire.

Only the Economics faculty didn’t seem very perturbed. Perhaps they were just better grounded in reality than the others and they realized that some kind of selective default was inevitable but that the damage would be limited. Or they had already taken such protective measures as moving their money out of the country. Or like the Rector in his cubed fortress had his wealth invested in so many sources and locations—art, land, apartment buildings and wine (he knew good wine even if he didn’t serve it at cocktail parties)—that he was more or less impermeable to the effects of the country’s default.

I remember Natalie’s disapproval when I told her I had converted my savings into German bonds. As if I were unpatriotic, or worse, a traitor. I told her I had already contributed more than my share to financing an inefficient, bribe-ridden gargantuan public sector and bearing the weight of the hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens who cheat on their taxes, including a good number of the Rector’s neighbors. And, I added, it was an easy charge to level for someone whose assets were all in real estate. But she had a point. If everyone did as I did, the entire banking sector would collapse. Was I a traitor?

There was no way I could justify my action other than on the basis of self-interest, of which I had a good share: I will inherit no money; my parents have died and what money they left was appropriated by one of my brothers. I doubt if the pension I will receive when I retire will be enough to live on. I have no sons or daughters to take care of me. I don’t have a painting to pawn as the Rector does, or a summer house on an island as Natalie does. Shorn of my savings (or their conversion into a new drachma worth one quarter of what they are now), I would be faced with (abject) poverty in my old age.

I wonder to what extent my little treason—little in the grand scheme of things and considering issues of scale—is no less egregious than the acts of tax evasion, graft and bribery that some of my fellow citizens engage in. At least I console myself that I’m not cheating the State.

Had I a shred of confidence in the ability of this or the next government, or the one after that, to actually reform this country and move it forward on some trajectory of development, I might have kept my savings here. But I don’t. The extent of change that is needed is so great and so radical that I despair of its ever being realized. Measures are announced—the liberalization of the labor market, the privatization of state assets (which in total are greater in value than the entire debt of the country), the reduction in the size of the state sector, the removal of barriers to investment and the free exercise of trade—but little, if anything, seems to be put into practice. Laws are passed but not implemented or enforced.

I am reminded of a work by Martin Kippenberger that I saw recently at the Cycladic Museum in The Last Grand Tour, its exhibition of works by foreign artists who spent or spend a good part of their time in Greece. Kippenberger is perhaps more well-known because of his run in with Pope, who called the artist’s sculpture of a crucified frog holding a beer can in his hand “blasphemous” (the Vatican tried to get the Italian museum in which it was exhibited to take down the piece; the Director refused and the show went on, but the Director was eventually fired).

The work on exhibit at the Cycladic came from his Metro-NET series, which was apparently inspired on and began on Syros: the exhibit displays models and photographs of the subway entrance he had built on the island as part of an impossible underground transportation network linking Syros with such places as northern Canada, Leipzig and Kassel (where he later built other “entrances” and “ventilation shafts”).  There in the midst of a sandy clearing ringed by bramble and wild thyme you see the entrance, with its wrought-iron railings and steps leading down into the gated shaft. But of course there’s no tunnel under the earth; it’s a gate to nowhere. Like the state of reforms here. It’s all entrances. It’s all show. No one’s doing the real work to dig out a passageway that will bring us from where we are now to a more efficient, effective, streamlined and, in the end, fairer system. Instead we have the illusion of reform, the mere indication of progress which, like the access roads and thoroughfares on the misleading map on my iPhone, are in reality dead-ends.

Ken Ohara, from the series With

“This doesn’t look like a country in crisis,” my cousin said.

We were walking along the broad cobblestone walkway that skirts the base of the Acropolis on its way down to the cafés in the Thisio, an old Athens neighborhood generously studded with renovated neo-Classical houses. It was shortly before dusk and the cafés, more than a dozen flanking the walkway alone, were all packed. Friends engaged in animated conversation, laughter, a lot of positive energy, as my cousin would say. Not the face of crisis.

She had come with her “travelling companion”, Hannah, to Athens, the last stop on their Grand Tour of Southern Europe. That’s what she called her, her travelling companion, not her lover or roommate or friend, but her travelling companion. I liked that. It sounded very Victorian and very mysterious.

They had the earnestness and innocent exuberance that many young Americans have on their first trip abroad. They delighted in the foreignness of it all, the colorful currency, the electric trolley buses and skinny trams, the kiosks with the afternoon newspapers strung like wash on a line for passersby to stop and read the headlines. It was the first time they were spoken to in a language they didn’t understand, though they made admirable efforts to learn a few phrases of it and when that failed, invented the words they needed on the fly, as when they ordered a souvlaki vegetariana; this isn’t even close to the Greek word and in fact describes something that doesn’t exist, but the kebab-tender got the idea and accommodated them by stuffing a grilled pita with tzatziki, tomatoes and fried potatoes. They took to the idea of the aperitif, another dividing line between the cultures, though I sensed it would be only for the duration of their trip. Above all they were intrigued by the antiquity of the city, the history expressed in the ruins of the temples, theaters and stadiums they visited. My friends here joke that Americans don’t have a history. But of course they do, even if it to a Greek it seems fleeting. What they mean is that Americans don’t have a sense of history as this massive, cumulative, tectonic force that shapes identity and delimits the possible. History for Americans is a matter of pageants and parades, school projects and community plays. It’s something that is studied or re-enacted. It’s not something you come to terms with.

But my cousin wasn’t naïve. She knew crisis. She told me about communities in her home state of Florida, where entire blocks of vacant foreclosed houses had been boarded up, their interiors eviscerated by thieves who strip the copper wire, heating units, even the toilets.

She said hers was the first generation of Americans whose prospects were worse than those that their parents had had when young, the first generation of young Americans who would probably never be able to live in the kind of neighborhood they grew up. She was only partly right. There are certainly places in America where prospects never seemed to get better.

Many Greek youth now finishing university are facing similar diminished prospects, another reason they’re leaving in even greater numbers for graduate study abroad. Seven out of ten young university graduates in Greece want to work abroad. Four out of ten are actually looking for such a position. Of those who leave, few will return. Unemployment in the age group 15-24 is 30%, ten percentage points above the EU average.

But that’s not what my cousin was describing. The future confronting many Greek young people today—underemployment, subsistence salaries, a modest (at the best) style of life—is perhaps not much different than the one their grandparents and great-grandparents were confronted with. It was their parents’ generation that was the exception. Thanks to expansionary fiscal policies, a burgeoning public sector that provided a seemingly never-ending supply of jobs, and prosperity fueled by unprecedented growth in the construction, retail trade and tourism sectors (made possible in no small measure by sudden access to low-interest loans afforded by the country’s entrance in the Euro-zone), a great number of Greek families in the last decade and a half soon had considerably more disposable income than they ever had had. It was wealth for which many beneficiaries of this consumption-primed boom were ill-prepared for. Countless families were thrust into a maelstrom of precipitously increasing consumer expenditure financed by spiraling consumer debt (the country’s banks acted even more irresponsibly in granting this credit, of course; many of us here still remember the banks’ shameless advertising campaigns for eortodania, or ‘vacation loans’). The sad thing is that many still believe that this intoxicating, when not surreal, interregnum of unbridled and, in the long run, unsustainable spending (on both the individual and national level) was not an aberration that eventually would have to be paid for and in the end abandoned but was instead a right.

The government’s harsh austerity program, which ushered in drastic cuts in salaries and sharp increases in taxes and which has occasioned a deep recession and an unemployment level of almost 20%, has curtailed consumer spending. Spending on clothing and shoes especially, but also on gasoline and even groceries is down. Up to 30% of the shops in some areas of the city have closed.

The crisis has many faces. It can wear the face of  fear. And the fear is wholly justified: if you lose your job in this country and can’t find another, and you don’t have family to take care of you, you’ll probably wind up living rough on the street in a year’s time, surviving on the city’s once-a-day free meals. There are more of these faces on the city streets these days. The crisis is read in the faces of anger: not only the  anger occasioned by the loss of a lifestyle that was ultimately unsustainable but also the righteous anger provoked by injustice. A government cannot demand sacrifices from its citizens when the corrupt go unpunished and the burden of taxation falls on those without the means, cunning or brashness to avoid paying their share, but more importantly, when leadership fails to provide a vision of recovery, as this government has.  There is a limit to which prospects can diminish before austerity degrades into hopelessness.

We are not at that point yet, though we may soon be approaching it. Some families are truly suffering.  But for the time being, many are making do. With a little help from friends and more from family. We are making do with less. Greeks have been doing this for centuries, of course, and I think they have a particular gift for doing so. Perhaps they haven’t entirely been uprooted from the culture of their forefathers. Perhaps it is their sense of history

Greek culture—yes, the culture of poverty—has historically embodied the ideal of the Apollonian lito (even when in tension with Dionysian excess) a hard-to-translate term that essentially means that which remains after all that is unnecessary and superfluous has been stripped away, the bare-bones essential. It is sometimes translated asaustere, and indeed, the word for austerity, as in the aforementioned government austerity program, is correctly translated with the substantive, litotita. But ‘austere’ has a trace of a joyless asceticism that is missing from the Greek lito.

What my cousin was seeing was precisely this genius for life lived at its most essential, something as unpretentious yet life-affirming as conversation with friends over an endless cup of coffee in an al fresco café on a summer evening. Even with the scandalously high price of a cup of freddo cappuccino, it’s a budget night out. After all, it’s just one cup and no waiter here would think of making such a crass motion as clearing the table once the coffee’s been drunk as if to signal it’s time for you to leave. Admittedly, many more of the patrons of the cafés now smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and fewer will continue on to dinner out. But the cafés are still packed.

I don’t know what my cousin expected to see. Deserted city squares? The mentality one finds in a state of siege? Mass depression?

What my cousin saw in Thisio is also one of the faces of the crisis. A face that speaks of survival and community. It is a good face to see.