It was written all over him that he didn’t like to do this job. It was a hot day and the air conditioner in his car was not turned on. This was not a good sign. He was wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt. His face looked sweaty. It didn’t seem to bother him.
It was going to be a long ride and I wanted to be on his good side; otherwise it was going to make the ride seem longer. I remembered a man I met while waiting for the bus in the winter in upstate New York telling me that wait time appears to be longer if one is upset.
“Do you want me to turn on the air conditioner?’ he asked.
“Do you need it?” I asked.
“I don’t really care much for it. In my country we do without the air conditioner, you know. But over here everywhere you go the air conditioner is working. I cannot sleep with the noise of the air conditioner in my ear buzzing all night.”
“Maybe when we get to the highway you can turn it on, okay?” I said.
“Sure, boss.”
“Where are you from? I asked.
“Greece,” he said.
I paused. Greece was one of those countries whose name I first encountered in the Bible when I was a kid. Back then it didn’t sound like a real country. It sounded like part of heaven. Thinking back, though, it is interesting how much Greece featured in our domestic life in the country of my birth. Our laundry soap, Premier Soap, came from a Greek company called Paterson Zochonis, or PZ in the local parlance. The biggest supermarket in my neighborhood was owned by the Leventis family. We even had a bunch of LP records by the bespectacled Greek singer Nana Mouskouri.
He asked where I was from, and I told him. There was no reaction from him. Either the name did not register or he was distracted. I noticed he complained about every driver ahead of him.
“Look how he just switched lanes.”
“Why is he driving like that? Just crawling.”
“See how he cut into me. See, did you see that?”
I realized that I needed to redirect him, keep him focused. He needed to be a little bit more calm for the journey ahead. Maybe the talk about air conditioning was making him heated.
“One of Nigeria’s best soccer players, Rashidi Yekini, used to play for Olympiacos of Greece,” I said.
“You mean Olympiacos Piraeus?”
“Wow, you must know them really well. See how you called them by their first and last name.”
I expected him to laugh. He didn’t. He pointed at another driver but didn’t curse or yell at them.
“Those were the good old days. That was before they destroyed the economy. No serious footballer will go to play for a Greek team now. Greek teams can’t even afford to buy players from anywhere in Europe.”
“Clubs rise and fall and then rise again. Maybe Greek teams will make a comeback,” I said.
“Greek clubs just keep falling. They are not rising.”
“Wasn’t Dr. Socrates a great player? Remember him? The medical doctor, legendary midfielder who wore a headband and was bearded.”
“Oh, that Socrates?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That Socrates is not from Greece. He is actually from Brazil,” he said.
This seemed like The Mandela Effect moment. I needed to look this up on my phone. I did. He was right. I was wrong.
I had visited Greece a few years back. I still carried warm memories of the food and the people. A lot of stories came back with me from the visit. I remember going to a Greek restaurant on returning to the States and being highly disappointed and saddened that something could go wrong with a Greek salad. I wondered if I could tell him that I had been to Greece. Would he say the Greece I visited was not the Greece he knew?
“I have been to Greece,” I said to him.
“Pardon me?”
“I have visited your country,” I said.
“What did you go to do in Greece?”
He sounded more irritated than curious. More like: why on earth did you go to Greece?
It was kind of difficult to give a straight one-word answer about my mission to Greece. The famous African artist Olu Oguibe invited me to what turned out to be an exhibition of his works about Biafra, a colloquium on war and memory, and a talk on how to build a more peaceful world.
“I went for a conference,” I said.
“What kind of conference?”
I hesitated. He noticed my hesitation and turned to me. I was worried he had taken his eyes off the road.
“Look, I used to be an engineer back in Greece. In fact, I still consider myself an engineer. In my time back home, I attended a lot of conferences.”
“It was a conference on war and peace.”
“In Greece? Surely, Greece is not at war, unless you mean the economic war the politicians have plunged the country into.”
“It was a conference about the war in my country. The Biafran war. A genocidal war against the Igbo people.”
“So why in Greece? Why not in Africa or Biafra?” He pronounced it as By-afra.
“It was part of a larger European art event that took place in different venues in Europe,” I said.
“Why are Africans talking about their peace and war in Europe?”
I didn’t know how to wriggle myself out of the conversational rock and hard place. He said he was an engineer. I remembered a movie or was it a book about an immigrant who was an engineer in his country of birth but was working as a lowly construction laborer in America. Every morning, though, he dressed up and pretended to his family that he was working as an engineer. Disguise seems to be the constant cloak of the immigrant.
I recalled something that happened while I was in Athens. I had witnessed an incident at the hotel where I was staying that restored my faith in humanity. I remember that it was forecast to be the hottest day of the year. To make things worse, the garbage collectors were on strike. I already made up my mind to hibernate in my hotel room. It was going to be a day for iced water and cool Greek salad. For some reason at about noon, my internet connection failed so I decided to go down to the hotel lobby and use the hotel’s Wi-Fi and computer. I was browsing the computer lazily when a really old lady who was slightly bent over walked into the hotel lobby. The security man was seeking refuge from the heat and was not at his usual spot by the door. I saw him walk up to the old lady. I thought he was going to ask her to leave, but on the contrary, he spoke with her gently. All the while he was smiling. He left her and soon returned with a chair for her. He motioned for her to sit. He then went to the water dispenser and brought her a cup of iced water.
I watched all of this from a distance. I wondered what would have happened if this scene had transpired in New York City. I suspect the security guard would have yelled at her thusly: Keep it moving, Miss.
I came back to the present moment and decided to bring up what I was sure would be a cute and harmless topic—cats.
“When I was in Athens I saw lots of cats. They were everywhere. They were comfortably interacting with people while also just living in their world.”
“You mean gata?”
“Is that what you call them?”
“Yes.”
“They looked so happy and contented and at ease with humans,” I said.
“There are too many of them,” he said.
“Someone told me that they are supposed to bring good luck.”
“Good luck? Maybe the luck thing is just something they say to tourists. You know, something to make the tourists happy and give them a story to tell, something to remember about their visit.”
“In my country it is believed that if pigeons make your house their home, they bring luck and wealth and riches. As they increase in number, so does the wealth of the host increase.”
“Pigeons are probably better than cats,” he said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Pigeons don’t spread diseases.”
“I didn’t see any sick-looking cats in Athens,” I said.
“The cats spread diseases. They reproduce so much. I don’t think people like them or want them anymore.”
“Well, you know what they say about cats—they have nine lives.”
“I think the ones in my country have more than a dozen lives,” he said.
“Cats also work, you know.”
“What kind of work?”
“They hunt and kill mice and other rodents,” I said.
“Never seen any cat doing any work in all my days in Greece,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Gata spend all their days preening and licking themselves. Why shouldn’t they? They get free food. They get free love. They are snobbish. They get all the attention. They don’t even make eye contact. If you look them in the eye, they look away.”
“Maybe they are bashful,” I said.
“Bashful means what?”
“Means they are shy.”
“Shy? No, not shy. They feel superior. As American people say it—they are entitled.”
“Only Egyptian cats should feel superior?”
“Egyptian?”
“Yes, in ancient Egypt cats were seen as gods.”
“Oh, I don’t know about Egyptian cats. I am talking about gata—Greek cats.”
The cat talk was taking my memory back to my childhood. Cats played a role in my childhood: my grandmother, who lived with us, had cats as her constant companions. I remembered playing with her cats by throwing them up and trying to make them land on their backs. I never succeeded. They always landed on their feet. I don’t recall her having proper names for her cats. I remember that she called them by their praise-names. She had one or another form of panegyric for them:
The Regal One.
The Fearless Lion.
The Owner of the Home.
The Wiley Hunter.
As she praised them, they rubbed themselves against her legs, which she oiled daily with a mixture of essential oils and Robb ointment to stave off rheumatism or arthritis or both.
Interestingly, I enjoyed playing with the cats, though they were a little less carefree with me. When I moved to America, a friend of mine visited, and I remember her handing her grey winter coat for me to hold for her while she took off her shoes. Suddenly, I began sneezing violently. My throat became itchy and my eyes began to water.
“Uh, uh, looks like someone has cat allergies,” she said laughing.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“I just finished cuddling with my cats and I was wearing this same coat.”
“What are cat allergies?”
“The sneezing and all that. That’s cat allergies,” she said.
“But I love cats,” I said.
“They don’t love you,” she said and laughed again.
“My grandmother had cats. I had no cat allergies with them,” I said.
“Maybe you’re only allergic to American cats,” she said, laughing even more hysterically.
I did not want him to think I was ignoring him, but I also did not want to be intrusive. I plunged in, nonetheless.
“Do you miss home?”
“Home?”
“I mean Greece.”
“Sometimes but not always. See, here I am always busy. In Greece I was an engineer but I had no job, so I could not really call myself an engineer—I was like a priest without a parish.”
He found the joke funny, and he laughed.
“What about you—you miss By-afra?”
“Oh, Biafra no longer exists.”
“What do you mean no longer exists?”
“The war ended, and Biafra became a part of Nigeria again. We are all Nigerians now. No victor, no vanquished. We are now one indivisible nation under God,” I said.
My sarcasm was wasted on him. The latter statement was some canard coined by the victors, who ended up sharing the nation’s oil wealth like a private booty.
“Peace is good. Peace is better than war,” he said.
“Peace is good, but justice is better.”
“There is no justice in this life; the afterlife, maybe,” he said.
“See, you’re Greek after all.”
“Why do you say that?”
“What you just said about justice—that is deep and full of wisdom.”
“That is funny. Even a child in elementary school knows there is no justice in this life.”
“Still,” I said.
“People talk about our so-called Greek wisdom all the time. Look, what has all that wisdom done for us?”
“Everybody knows Plato and Aristotle—they are well known all over the world,” I said.
“Greek salad and gyros are also popular and well loved all over the world.”
“See, I can’t match your logic,” I said.
“You are easily defeated,” he said.
“No, not really, but I know a superior argument when I hear one.”
We were nearing my destination, and I wanted to tell him about a book I had read as a kid that had made the Greek island of Corfu an enchanting place in my mind’s eye. It was probably not the first book I read, but it was the first to stick. It was book titled My Family and Other Animals, about an English family that moved to a Greek island.
I could tell what his response was going to be. He would dismiss it as an old work of fiction and probably say the made-up world of the book had nothing to do with the reality of life in the Greece of today.
Just then I remembered another work, probably the saddest portrait of a character I had ever encountered in literature. It was a piece about a tramp who boarded a ship heading to North Africa from Piraeus, and his unravelling from the cruelty, snobbery, and wickedness of his fellow passengers. The title of the piece eluded me at the moment, and I could not think of any bearing it would have on our conversation. Later I would remember the title: The Tramp at Piraeus.
My ride was coming to an end. He turned to me. I noticed a softening in his affect.
“I hope you rate me good,” he said.
“But of course. I enjoyed talking with you.”
“Yes, I enjoyed talking with you, as well.”
He paused as if somewhat embarrassed to share a secret.
“Some people don’t rate me good. I don’t know why,” he said.
“Don’t worry. As soon as I get off, I am going to give you my best rating,” I said.
“Appreciated,” he said.
So, after all the lofty conversation about peace and justice and wars and our cratering world economy and migration, it ultimately came down to this: a few stars—only a few stars—and on those stars rested the foundation of our new world order.
E. C. Osondu is the author of Alien Stories, which won the BOA fiction prize; he has also been awarded the Caine Prize for African Writing and a Pushcart Prize. A professor at Providence College, Rhode Island, he was born in Nigeria.