Expecting the Barbarians
J. Quinn Brisben
Stavros could see the two young men across the street standing under the street light by the parking lot. They were elaborately combing their hair and talking softly to each other. They were alert, watchful, obviously with some serious purpose in mind. Any competent cop could have spotted them immediately, asked them what they were doing in that neighborhood so late at night, accepted their explanation genially, then stayed until they moved on.
A squad car would be by in five or ten minutes. This was a prosperous arterial shopping street, two blocks from a major intersection. One block to the east, across the street from the bank, Kostakis kept his lunch room open all night. Cops liked to stop there for a cup of coffee. They liked to stop at Stavros’ restaurant, too, but he had closed as usual at midnight. He had been less than a year in this neighborhood, but he knew most of the cops in the district and could greet them without having to squint at their name tags.
In five or ten minutes a squad car would come by, probably from the west. Stavros would see it, get outside quickly and lock the door to his restaurant, which was already dark except for the light over the cash register, go down the street with the canvas bag full of the night’s receipts, drop it in the night depository at the bank, then get into his car around the corner and drive home before there was any trouble. Even if the squad did not stop it would effectively neutralize the young men.
He felt the grip of the gun which he kept under the cash register. He had no faith in it. Last month Kim, who owned the Korean place one block west, had been jumped in his own parking lot. He had a good safe in his place and went to the bank in the day time, so he had no money on him. But he did have a gun. The muggers took it away from him and almost beat him to death with it. A week later the hoodlums had been caught shortly after they had used the gun to kill a liquor store owner over on Clark. Kim told Stavros that he felt deeply dishonored by that and would never carry a gun again. A gun is no good in the hands of a civilized person against fast-handed barbarians who do not care whether they live or die.
It was a hot night in late September. Stavros had turned off the air conditioning when the last customer had left and helped everyone clean the place up and get ready for the next day. He had unaccountably felt like being alone for a while and had sent his employees home a little early. He had stacked the chairs on the tables and swept the place out himself. He remembered the knowing, sad look Gus had given him that night as he went out the door.
Gus was his oldest waiter, a shuffling man with bristling grey hair who drank far too much and who had once owned his own restaurant. Gus could see that there was never a line of people waiting to be seated, that half the tables were empty even at the busiest time of the evening. There was money in the till every night, but it was not enough to meet all the expenses. It would depend on Stavros’ agility in fending off creditors and other suppliers how long he could hang on, but the place was inevitably going broke.
The location was not bad, although the place had no parking lot and customers had to use the commercial lot across the street. There were a dozen restaurants along the four blocks of the street that were the commercial heart of the neighborhood, and most of them made money. It was a popular area for young people to come in the evening, and the many offices in the area assured a big lunch business as well. Stavros had no liquor license, but patrons were allowed to bring their own bottle, and a healthy symbiotic relationship had developed with the liquor store next door.
The trouble was that Stavros had a place that was in no way distinctive. He did not stay open all night and attract a big breakfast trade like Kostakis across from the bank. He had no bar. He did not offer belly dancers or other ethnic entertainment like three of the other neighborhood places. His menu was long, with a full range or Greek and American specialties, but there was nothing on it that was really out of the ordinary. He had been told many times that he should specialize, specialize in gyros of big Greek salads, even specialize in cheeseburgers with olives on them, anything that would make his place stand out in the area.
The long menu meant extra supplies, waste in the kitchen, delays in service. It was the same menu that Stavros had had in the old place on Halsted, the same menu that he had kept for twenty-five years, one that was difficult to maintain with today’s high labor costs.
The decor was wrong, too. There were the same blown-up photographs of Greek tourist sites in half the other places in the area, the same crossed Greek and American flags, nothing to distinguish it form any other moderately priced Greek restaurant. Stavros did not even have a faded photograph of his native village, as most of the other proprietors had. His native village had been a street of dumbbell tenements on the near west side of Chicago which had been bulldozed below the depths of the lowest foundations to make an expressway when he was fifteen years old. Stavros did not know if anyone had preserved pictures of that street; certainly he had not.
Most of all, Stavros knew, the trouble was in himself. Old Lianos in the next block had a place even more ordinary and faded than his, yet it was always crowded. Lianos hugged every customer who came in, regardless of age or sex, remembered the names of hundreds of them, overlaid his walls with autographed pictures of minor celebrities who had had a wonderful time there, did a huge wedding and anniversary trade. Stavros was not like this. He was a small man with a nondescript moustache who preferred to stand quietly behind the cash register or move quickly and anonymously among the tables and through the back door to see that the cooks and dish washers were on the job.
The whole restaurant had taken on his air of anonymity. The best customers were the cops. Stavros gave them free cups of his competently made but not outstanding coffee, but so did every restaurant in the neighborhood, and they did not come for that. They went to Kostakis or Lianos for free food. They came to Stavros for anonymity.
Several times a night, one or sometimes two cops would come in with someone else and go immediately to one of the booths in the back which could not be seen from the street. Sometimes the cops would leave before the someone else, and the someone else would ask to leave by way of the kitchen. These were stoolies, of course, small-time burglars and muggers, pimps and dope dealers, whores and shoplifters.
On these occasions the cops insisted on paying for meals both for the stoolies and for themselves. The cops had a special fund for that. Sometimes a bottle of wine or hard liquor was included in the deal, even some cash. Stavros supposed that dope was sometimes part of the deal, too, but he never saw any change hands. He would have been shocked if he had. The cops knew he had a respectable trade. There were rules for the use of premises such as his which were well understood even if they were never written down.
The cops used Stavros’ place and made sure he was never bothered by little things like hassles over the status of immigrant dish washers and waiters. They protected him from bad drunks, although they were not nearly so many here as in the old place on Halsted. That was near Skid Row, or what was left of it now that the big office buildings were spreading west of the river. Many of the bad drunks were crazy or so drunk that they were long past caring, and they would wander into Stavros’ place for its warmth and chairs. A wave at a passing squad or a call to the district station would get them removed quickly and discreetly.
Stavros was glad that there were fewer drunks this far north. They disgusted him; he did not understand how they could let themselves go like that. He was a fastidious man himself, not only because his business demanded a high standard of cleanliness and order but also because it pleased him to be that way.
The young men were still standing under the light, smoking cigarettes and calmly surveying the scene. Their jeans were skin-tight, but they were carrying jackets which possibly concealed guns.
On Halsted the drunks had been an irritation but not a real threat. He had not really wanted to move from there, had been forced to do so in fact. Business had been declining there for years, even before old Pappas, his father-in-law, died. Most of the residential neighborhood, which had provided the main support for the place, had been torn up by the building of the expressway and the big university campus. Only the row of restaurants along Halsted was left. Most of the patrons were not Greeks anymore. Pappas, though, had retained the loyalty of a lot of old-timers. Some of them would drive in twenty miles or more from the suburbs to drink coffee with Pappas and discuss the events of the day. Pappas was the kind of man whose judgement they respected.
One by one the old timers died off. Their sons and grandsons did not replace them. Then Pappas died. Stavros was advised to move the place then. Pappas had two sons. One of them was a lawyer with a lit of political connections. The other was buying McDonalds franchises back in the 1950’s and had become very rich. Both of them were nearly a generation older than Stavros. They told him that the old neighborhood was dead, that he had better move north and west where a lot of the old restaurants were relocating. Stavros had ignored them.
He had hung on for another five years. The Agnopoulos brothers had a popular place next door to his and wanted to expand. They offered Stavros a lot of money to vacate his lease on the old building. Stavros refused. The next day a Rolls Royce drove up and parked by a fire plug in front of the little restaurant. No cop in his right mind would ticket such a car. It was the most famous car in the Chicago Greek community. It belonged to Papadapoulos.
Papadapoulos ran all the gambling in the community and in quite a few other communities as well. He was a big in the Outfit as you could get without being an Italian. The ward committeeman, who represented the Outfit in all their dealings with local government, was his special friend. Stavros bought all his insurance from this ward committeeman and had all his table cloths and napkins washed by the ward committeeman’s laundry because people who did not make these arrangements got into more trouble than it was worth. This had been true in the neighborhood since before Stavros had been born.
Papadapoulos was delighted to see his old friend Stavros again. He recalled the many pleasant times he had had in this places when old Pappas had been alive, a grand old man, a credit to the community, one who understood that Greeks had to stand together. He inquired after the health of Stavros’ beautiful wife Helena, reminding him that he, Papadapoulos, had been a guest at their wedding. He also inquired after the health of their two lovely daughters, perhaps, how time flies, soon to be brides themselves. How sad that we must grow old and the world change, but that was the way things were. Meanwhile the young men who had come in with Papadapoulos were sitting impassively, looking at the plate-glass window in the front of the restaurant and at other fragile things.
Stavros understood. He had understood that day in the 1950’s when a less polite man had told his mother that they must move out of the apartment on Union that was the only home he could remember. There was no way that a person could hold out against power like that. The longer you tried to resist the more it cost you. Soon he vacated the lease for twenty percent less than the Agnopoulos brothers originally offered him. The brothers made no profit on this. The twenty percent went to a lawyer who was a friend of Stavros’ brother-in-law, to Papadapoulos, and to the ward committeeman. Compared to predators like those, the two young men under the street light were a minor threat indeed.
None of the remaining old-timers had followed Stavros to the new place. Now, besides the cops and their associates, his trade consisted of transients and, on weekends, the overflow from the more popular restaurants on the street. There were also a few regulars, loners mostly.
One was a man in a shabby suit and frayed necktie who looked vaguely academic. He was maybe forty-five, the same age as Stavros. Every day he came in at precisely six o’clock with a bottle of the cheapest retsina from the liquor store and a book, usually one dealing with European history. It was seldom the same book two days in a row. He would prop the book in front of him, open the wine himself with a corkscrew on a Boy Scout knife, then order a small salad, a cup of egg lemon soup, and lamb with rice, never varying his order in the slightest way. He would read and eat in an abstracted fashion, frequently spilling food on his shirt. When he had finished with the lamb, he would continue to refill his glass until the bottle was empty, then order a piece of baklava and a cup of coffee. After that was consumed he would go, always leaving a tip of exactly ten percent of the bill.
Once he tried to engage Stavros in conversation. He was reading a biography of the twentieth century Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk, and he asked Stavros something about the expulsion of the Greeks from Asia Minor in the early 1920’s. Stavros knew a good deal about it, for his mother had told him many stories of her perilous odyssey as a girl from Smyrna to Chicago. However, he did not want to talk about it with his customer. The man was not a Greek. All he knew about it was what he learned from books. Stavros had a strong dislike for people who knew Greek things only from books.
A long time ago he had been a great reader himself. He was always the best student in his class in the Orthodox parochial school, winning scholarships so that his mother never had to pay tuition. He had gone to a respectable all-boys technical high school and had won a good scholarship to the University of Wisconsin. In so far as he had an ambition, he had wanted to be an engineer, a builder of roads and bridges. He liked the clean flow of interstate highways which were being built then. He liked the bronzed and muscular crews who worked on them in the summertime. They reminded him of workers in vineyards and olive groves in a land that he had never seen. He was glad that nothing less than the clean lines and mathematical coherence of the new roads had replaced the heart of the old neighborhood.
It took him more than two years in Madison to realize the mistake that he had made. He liked most of his classes there and did well in them, although he did have a hard time with a graduate student who graded the compositions in his required freshman english class. Stavros wrote grammatically and clearly on all the topics on which he was asked to write, but he found it difficult to care about the writings he was asked to analyze and criticize. The graduate student complained repeatedly that Stavros’ writing lacked feeling and imagination.
Finally, told to describe a vivid memory, he wrote about the block on which he had grown up, the smells of the little grocery stores and restaurants, the social clubs and the bars, the incense in the dark old church, home of the booming bass voice of Father Chrysotomos. The graduate student read that one aloud to the small section of the huge class that was his personal charge. Knowing that he had cinched a grade in English which would not greatly lower his overall high average in he important subjects, Stavros relaxed and talked in class about his background.
One of the students who heard him do this was Shirley. She was part of a group who were doing an off-campus production of “Medea.” She took Stavros to a rehearsal, and the director decided to scrap all their work so far and rethink the play with the help of an authentic Greek. Stavros did not really know classic Greek, but he had studied the classics in school and could translate the sounds of the original and puzzle out the meaning fairly well. The theater group thought his talents were wonderful.
Shirley, especially, thought he was wonderful. She came from a small town in northern Wisconsin and was in full revolt against the restrictions of her upbringing. Still, there were limits as to how brave a revolt a young woman could make in 1959, even near the Madison campus. A black lover was impossible except for the very daring, a Jewish lover was a bit of a cliche. A shy and previously virginal Greek-American engineering student had just the right touch of exoticism.
When the next school year began they were living on the third floor of an old house near the campus. Shirley had redecorated the place with dark green wallpaper and furnished it mostly with stuffed pillows. Stavros, an only child who had spent a lot of his time with his mother in the kitchen, rather enjoyed doing most of the cooking. There were lots of parties with jugs of cheap wine where everybody brought guitars and sang folk songs. Stavros met a couple of real communists, black people from both Africa and America, and people who did not believe smoking marijuana should be a crime. The scholarship which Stavros had did not cover nearly half of their expanses, but Shirley had a generous allowance from her disapproving family.
In the summers Stavros went back to Chicago to work for a fruit wholesaler in the Haymarket, just as he had done when he was in high school. On the August day that John Kennedy won the presidential nomination Stavros’ mother died without warning of a heart attack. She had worked in Lambrakis’ bakery as usual on that last day. Stavros had no clear memories of his father, who had spent many years in a tuberculosis sanatarium before he had died.
Stavros’ mother’s funeral, held in Father Chrysotomos’ new church several miles from the heart of the old community, was well-attended. Stavros received many offers of financial aid from his mother’s old friends, which he politely refused. He put his mother’s keepsakes and most precious household goods in a trunk which he stored in a warehouse. Before he went back to Wisconsin in September, he cleared out the small apartment where he and his mother had been living. The neighborhood was filling up with Mexicans, and this place had none of the childhood associations of the building in which he had grown up and had been reduced to rubble years before to make a highway.
With Shirley back in Madison, he began to have bad dreams. He was locked inside a trunk and could not get out. He was reading a page of Euripides which would suddenly go blank. He was running up a blind alley in Constantinople with the Turkish cavalry thundering after him. He was trying to stop bulldozers from effacing the last vestiges of the ruins of Troy. The diagrams and mathematical symbols in his textbooks began to seem meaningless. He was uncomfortable in the dark green walled apartment, yet he was afraid to leave it.
Shirley insisted that he see a friend of her who was majoring in psychology. When the friend heard that Stavros’ mother had recently died, he started talking a lot about Oedipus. Stavros had no faith in the man because he had obviously never read the play. Even Shirley began to seem a stranger to him, some Medea-like outlander who would bring disaster on him. She had never had the slightest interest in his engineering studies, and he did not really share her interest in literature or unorthodox lifestyles. This world with its confusion of tongues and its constantly changing rules would never be his world.
Shirley was active in the Kennedy campaign and in October went to a strategy meeting in Milwaukee. Stavros went with her. Shirley suggested that he see the sights while she was conferring. She had heard that there was a new Greek Orthodox church in town designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Stavros found the old Greek Orthodox church and an old priest and poured out his heart to him. The old priest said that Stavros should go home. Stavros was not sure that he had any home to go to. He was advised to seek out his parish priest.
After driving back to Madison, he packed his few personal belongings and caught a bus to Chicago. Shirley thought that it was a bad thing that he was giving up his scholarship, and she still liked him a lot, but she was not really sorry to see him go. She was not equipped to deal with him or his troubles, and she thought she was beginning to outgrow the relationship anyway.
Father Chrysotomos welcomed him like a son and seemed to understand his problems perfectly. The priest had grown children, and there was a spare room where Stavros was welcome to stay as long as he liked. If a person of his education did not mind taking a menial job, Pappas down at the old Smyrna Restaurant on Halsted, a countryman of his late blessed mother, this Pappas needed a waiter, and such a job would keep body and soul together until something better came along.
Pappas liked Stavros from the first. He was absolutely honest and could be trusted to watch the cash register and the other waiters while Pappas discussed the affairs of the world with his many old friends. He had a good eye for meat and fresh vegetables and was an unassertive but shrewd bargainer. Lambrakis remembered his mother fondly and made sure that he got the best of the day’s pastries. Within a few months he was managing the restaurant, a situation which suited old Pappas very well.
Pappas had married twice, the second time when he was nearly fifty. His second bride had been a girl in the teens from the old country. Thus his daughter Helena was nineteen when he was nearly seventy. She had been raised by her mother to accept the old ways and had never questioned them. Pappas thought that it was about time that she got married, just as he thought that it was about time that a younger person took over the more time-consuming chores at the restaurant. Stavros was ideally suited to both purposes. He had no money of course, but he was hard-working, intelligent, polite, and not bad looking at all. Besides, his mother had come from the same town as Pappas, and Pappas believed it was his duty to help such a person.
Stavros could not remember proposing to Helena. He was invited to dinner at the home of Pappas, took Helena to several church socials and to the movies, and after a while it was settled. Helena was no great beauty, but she was good-natured and pleasant to be with. Helena, her mother, and Stavros had all mastered the art of getting along with Pappas, which was to be quietly competent and to let him think he was having his own way in everything. Stavros had no objection to joining such a family and much preferred to marrying Helena and running a restaurant on Halsted to being an engineer in an alien world.
A squad car came slowly up the street from the west. The two young men began strolling east toward their own neighborhood, elaborately paying the squad no attention. Stavros had the day’s receipts in a canvas bag and could have easily made it to the depository and to his car under the unobtrusive police protection. He could have hailed the squad, since most of the police knew him by sight, and they would have detained the men until he was safe. He did not do so. He watched the squad until it was out of sight, then watched the young men walk slowly back to their post under the street light. He could not explain to himself why he had not moved, but he certainly had no intention of doing so just yet.
“Those people were a kind of solution,” he said, then wondered how that phrase had come into his head. It was from some kind of poem, a modern poem, a poem he had not liked. Of course. He had heard it the Sunday afternoon that the Parnassos Society had invited that damned barbarian Peter Isgren to lecture on modern Greek poetry.
The Parnassos Society was one of several Greek cultural organizations of which Stavros was a nominal member. It met once a month in a public room of a small but elegant hotel on the near North Side. Stavros did not ordinarily attend such meetings, for they were quite frankly just a pretext for the young people of the community to get together. He had been especially invited to attend this meeting by his older daughter Anna. He ought to have known that something was up.
He loved Anna dearly, but she had always been troublesome. In the big house on the Northwest Side where he had lived with his wife’s parents, and still lived as the head of the household now that old Pappas was dead, Anna had always been a disruption. Everyone else, his wife, his mother-in-law, who barely spoke english, his younger daughter Maria, himself, had always submitted to the loud rule of the old man, doing what he wanted to, when he wanted to do it. Anna never submitted.
Even when she was five years old she would argue with her grandfather over which television program to watch, arguments which sometimes led to tears and slammed doors on her part but which usually led her to total victory. That Christmas old Pappas gave her a huge television for the play room, one over which she had total control, for she was his darling. This pattern of noisy confrontation followed by lavish gifts continued for the rest of the old man’s life. He died when Anna was fourteen; she was inconsolable for weeks.
Anna had already made it clear that she would take her Greek heritage on her own terms or not at all. When she was twelve she had insisted on being withdrawn from the Orthodox parochial school. When Stavros refused she defied her teachers in such ingenious ways that she was expelled. Stavros was anguished but Father Chrysotomos reassured him.
“The teacher she hated was a bully and a tyrant, totally unworthy of that great profession,” he said. “The school pays so poorly that the principal dare not dismiss even such a wretch. I think Anna showed a fine spirit in defying her and will be better off in a school where teachers are not allowed to be so arbitrary. Anna wants justice, a rare thing in this world but worth struggling for, She is a regular Antigone, that one.”
When she was sixteen, she refused to obey Stavros’ restrictions concerning dating and late hours. He stopped her allowance. She promptly got a job in a restaurant near her high school. He reminded her that she was living in his house. She told him that by the terms of her grandfather’s will it was her grandmother’s house and she would submit to eviction from no one else. He said in despair that he was her legal guardian and that he must turn her over to the juvenile authorities if she continued to disobey him. She told him to do that if he dared but that she would under no circumstances be the last teenager in Chicago to be restricted by silly rules which were inappropriate in the 1980’s.
Stavros listened a long while while Father Chrysotomos again praised Anna’s high spirits before he knew that he must retreat. Anna allowed him to do so with some dignity. Even after things had calmed down, though, she continued to work as a waitress and was reluctant to take any money from her father. Despite her independence of spirit she was as good a student as her father had been, with tastes running strongly to the natural sciences. She won scholarships which enabled her to attend the local branch of the University of Illinois, whose campus covered a large portion of what had been the neighborhood where her father grew up. She wanted to be an obstetrician.
On her twentieth birthday she left the house and moved into a small apartment near the campus. She had a roommate. She did not specify the sex of the roommate. Stavros was afraid to ask. She had a small allowance from her grandmother, who was slowly awakening to the independent possibilities of widowhood.
Two months later Anna called him to make sure that he attended the next meeting of the Parnassos Society. The speaker, Peter Isgren, was a young man with long blonde hair and a scraggly beard. He was wearing a suit jacket and a necktie, but he was also wearing faded and patched blue jeans and sneakers.
He began his speech by explaining how he had come to be attracted to Greek poetry of this century. He was of Swedish ancestry and had grown up in Mitchell, South Dakota. When he was in high school he had a job in a lumber yard. The lumber yard was managed by a man named Charalambides who read Greek and who had many books. As the young man explained it, there was not much else to do in Mitchell besides watch the annual change of decorations on their convention hall, the famous Corn Palace, so he had begun to read and speak Greek under the tutelage of his boss. He had done so in the same spirit that another youth might have built hot rods or collected Indian arrowheads.
He had moved on to classic Greek and to Russian and other Slavic languages, but modern Greek had remained his first love. He was now completing a master’s essay on C. P. Cavafy, whom he considered the greatest modern Greek poet. He spent a pleasant hour quoting Cavafy, Kazantzakis, and other modern masters, showing the creative tension which had come from the ambiguity of being placed in a culture that was marginal to and at the same time the deepest root of western civilization. He analyzed extensively the witty and beautiful poem of Cavafy in which the people of Byzantium have their cultural fatigue intensified by the coming of the barbarians, then are frustrated when the barbarians fail to come.
After the lecture Anna introduced him to Peter Isgren. He could tell by the way people fell back when he and Anna approached the man that this whole afternoon had been planned for his benefit. Peter was cordial and flattering, but Stavros was abrupt and cold with him. Later, Anna confirmed his suspicion that she was living with this young man and planned to marry him.
Stavros told her that this was impossible, that the young man had perhaps learned some Greek from books, but he was not a Greek. Anna recited a list of young women of their acquaintance who married non-Greeks. Stavros said all of this had no relevance to his family, which had always been proud to be Greek and would remain so. Anna said that she would marry whom she wished. Stavros said that he had no power to stop her, but that he would not give his blessing and would not attend the wedding.
Father Chrysotomos performed the ceremony, his fee paid by Anna’s grandmother. The affair was simple, as befitted the resources of young people who lived on scholarships and part-time wages at menial jobs. Anna’s mother attended, but her father and younger sister remained at home. He relented enough only to send some baklava to the site of the reception. Anna refused to come to the house without her husband, and Stavros had not seen her since. His wife and daughter were loyal, but life at home had become flat and tasteless.
Now the restaurant was definitely failing, and Stavros would be able to keep it open only for a few more months. His brothers-in-law might help him, but they would do so contemptuously. At the moment he could think of no fate more humiliating than to be an old waiter like Gus or to manage a McDonald’s as an employee of his brother-in-law. His wife and younger daughter would be just as well off living on the vast amount of insurance that the ward committeeman made him buy.
He was sure there would not a squad car coming by for another five minutes. The two young men were waiting across the street. He slipped the gun into his jacket pocket, grasped the canvas bag full of money, and went out the front door, locking it after him. He walked down the street slowly. The young men walked parallel to him across the street.
Perhaps I will shoot one of them before they get me, he thought. Perhaps my death will force the police to give more protection to the merchants in this area.
The young men were staring hard at him. He could hear their footsteps across the empty street. Then there was a pause. The young men had stopped and were conferring with each other. Stavros walked at a steady pace. He was sure they would rush across the street to attack him any second now. His hand slipped into his jacket pocket. He was less than a hundred feet from the bank depository. There was no sound from across the street for almost a minute.
He unlocked the bank depository and put his money in. He could see the young men going into Kostakis’ all-night place across the street. Perhaps they had seen something that he had not seen. Perhaps they had just changed their minds.
Stavros would have to think of something else.
