Yannis Georgiades was the first student at Bromölla University. Yannis Georgiades was also the last student at Bromölla University. Asked by fellow countrymen, Yannis Georgiades always replied: “I’m a student at Bromölla University. That’s farther away than anybody can imagine. I’m studying to become an engineer. Once I’ve finished, I will revolutionize the waters of Macedonia. In particular, of Anopotamiés.” At which Yannis Georgiades looked slyly at his company. “That’s even farther away than Bromölla.”

Yannis Georgiades never improved the watering system of Macedonia. Much less that of Anopotamiés. A federal reform interfered. And a military coup. Among other things.

Yannis Georgiades was the son of a farmer from Anopotamiés, who was the son of a refugee from Smyrna, who was the son of the only mute caller to prayer of the same city. Yannis Georgiades didn’t know about the last ancestor. Nor did his father, grandfather, or great-grandfather, who incidentally were all called Yannis. But Yannis Georgiades’s paternal grandmother had known him. Secretly, the heart of Despina Georgiades, born Baciricoglou and the daughter of a baker, belonged to Erol Bulut — at least until he turned religious and opted for a life without swine, alcohol, and women (“Greek or otherwise”).

Yannis Georgiades was born Ioannis. That’s what was stated on the passport he always carried with him, also long after the expiration date had passed and he had acquired an ID of a different kind. Since Yannis Georgiades’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all had been named Ioannis, the younger of the two Yannis Georgiadeses alive at any given moment was referred to as “Yannakis” — in order to tell father and son apart. In the Georgiades family, three generations of men had never been alive at the same time. Which solved one problem, but created others.

In Yannis Georgiades’s family, it wasn’t customary for men to be able to read or write. Only by being a student at Bromölla University was Yannis Georgiades different. Yannis Georgiades couldn’t read or write, either.

Later, Yannis Georgiades would say: “It was winter in paradise, and the shoes were of leather and iron. I glided across the ice making long scratches. Suddenly I had acquired wings. Yes, I was a flatfooted angel!” Then Yannis Georgiades would draw a line with his index finger through green grass, brown sand, or, as often was the case later in life, across polished linoleum. “I flew forward, with wings trailing on the ground, straight into the sun!” At this recollection, he’d turn silent and shake his head. “After that, there was no hope for Macedonia. Never had I thought I would fall in love with frozen water. But according to my present opinion, it’s much more interesting than running water. Thus I decided to leave Bromölla University and to become an athletics teacher. That was fortunate.” At this, Yannis Georgiades would knock his knuckles against the closest item of wood at hand. (Once a German tourist had taught him the expression “Holzkopf,” he would knock on his own forehead. Yannis Georgiades appreciated irony, but only of the self-deprecating variety.) Then Yannis Georgiades would continue: “If I had returned home, sooner or later the military would have pinched me. I didn’t wish that to happen. The military pinched mercilessly. And that would have endangered my plans for Anopotamiés.”

Yannis Georgiades would also say, albeit many years earlier: “Once I’ve cracked the mystery of letters, the world will open up itself. Until then, this damn ice will cover everything.” In addition to himself, however, he told this to only one other person. Because, among many other things, Yannis Georgiades was also shy.

The first time Yannis Georgiades appears in the annals of history — at least according to the Encyclopedia of Greeks in Exile, published in twelve volumes, with a series of irregular supplements, by Diaspora Press between 1922 and 1974 — he was dressed in the brown and yellow jersey of Tollarp SC (the one with the hockey sticks crossed on the breast). An article in the local paper, published on February 13, 1968, announced that a certain “Y. Georgiades, the most recent member of Tollarp’s team, and hopefully also its last, kicked off his début yesterday with a goal, sitting on the ice. 1-0? The club’s optimistic new sign-on had hardly posed this question to a grim team mate when a hullabaloo broke out. Gloves were thrown, chin-protection unbuttoned, helmets thudded across the ice. The chaos only ceased when the referee removed the whistle from his mouth long enough to pronounce the goal valid — ‘in contrast to this manner of playing.’ At this he first pointed to Tollarp’s new member, who was still sitting on the ice trying to entangle a skate from the goal net, and then at the penalty box. The ruling was tough but not unfair: ‘Obstruction, unallowed back checking, technical mistakes galore . . .’ The referee could have continued. Yet when he noticed the fury of the home team, he merely added: “Five minutes in the box. Own goals are allowed. 0-1 for Nosaby.’ Which also turned out to be the final result in this in all other respects eventless game.” (The article is quoted by Costas Tsipouris in his index to Supplement XIII, published in Staffanstorp, 1972.)

Hitherto unknown documents, however, show that Yannis Georgiades’s entry into history occurred almost two full years earlier, one Friday in May 1966. On this day, Yannis Georgiades sat in the waiting room of Dr. Manolis F. from nine in the morning ’til five in the afternoon. Having stuck a toothpick in his mouth, Yannis Georgiades patiently leafed back and forth in the same journal for housewives so long that Sister Elsa Hartwig feared the print might wear off. The unknown patient had shown no indication of being in pain or in a hurry when she had asked him whether he had an appointment. On the contrary, Yannis Georgiades had smiled shyly, shifting his toothpick from one corner of the mouth to the other, and turned his head away — and repeated this gesture when Sister Elsa, smiling motherly, had held up a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun around two in the afternoon.
     Not until Dr. Manolis F. had emerged shortly after five, dressed in a white robe with ballpoint pen scratchings above the breast pocket, had Yannis Georgiades become more amenable to interaction. While Sister Elsa made the last entries in the journal, the physician, four fingers stuck between a couple of buttons and his thumb thumping against the coat, addressed the unknown patient directly in Greek. “Ellinas eíse?” When Yannis Georgiades heard the words, he removed the tooth pick and smiled grandly for the first time this May day. “I am student Ioannis Georgiades,” he explained in formal but helpless Swedish, adding with a whisper in his mother tongue: “But you may call me Yannis. I don’t insist on formalities.” In this intimate address lay the secret of Yannis Georgiades’s successes in life, such as they were. It awoke protective instincts, even in Manolis F., who, as a physician, was used to that a stethoscope pressed against the proper place on a body sufficed to still a person’s need for comfort.

That night, Manolis F. brought Yannis Georgiades home. “Company car, eh?” Yannis Georgiades asked, smiling admiringly while hitting his palm against the roof of the green Ford Zodiac. Manolis F. noticed the three dots that his compatriot had tattooed between thumb and index finger, but refrained from asking about their significance. Placing himself on the backseat, Yannis Georgiades explained, “I get car sick easily,” and put a new tooth pick in his mouth. (This fact would cause a tragedy one day — fortunately, that day is still far away, however.) When half an hour later, the men entered the kitchen at Villa Paradise in the village of Balsby, which had been the home of Manolis F.’s family for roughly a month, Yannis Georgiades went straight across the black-and-white tiled floor, to Lily F., who was rinsing salad leaves at the sink: “Mrs. Doctor!” Manolis F’s wife, who only allowed people she didn’t like to refer to her as “Mrs. Doctor,” was not surprised by the unexpected guest. Her husband had changed plans too often for that to happen. One time it might be his colleague, Baron von Reppe, who arrived with inert field-mice or bloody pheasants slung across his shoulder, managing, in the half-hour he stayed, to finish their supply of Madeira. Another time, the village electrician might be standing at the kitchen door in the middle of the night, waiting to be relieved of a bucket full of black, glistening lobsters. (Usually, he was satisfied with a few bills and cold beer.) This was the first time, however, that Manolis F. had brought home a compatriot.
     That he was a compatriot, Lily realized long before Yannis Georgiades had time to introduce himself. It was enough to notice the shiny brown gabardine pants, which went “tone in tone in tone” with the unbuttoned shirt and the worn leather jacket that definitely was the wrong item of clothing for the season; it sufficed to notice the dandruff tossed into in the pomaded hair, the black shades across the cheeks, and the thin golden chain around the neck (on which surely a cross was hanging); it sufficed to feel the strong hand’s weak handshake and to hear the heavy links first shift around the wrist, then hit against a watch which may have been of Soviet manufacture, mounted on a leatherette strap on which two holes seemed to have been torn and the seems had cracked; it sufficed to notice the olive sheen of the skin, to see the toothpick in the corner of the mouth, and to feel the pungent, male sweat — yes, it would suffice with a fraction of all of this for Lily to understand that her unexpected guest was Greek. But it also sufficed to see the helpless confidence of Yannis Georgiades’s eyes. Which was what she did. “Lily, you may call me Lily.”

It was at the kitchen table at Villa Paradise that Yannis Georgiades, in the evening of May 24, 1966, uttered the words that soon would become winged: “I’m a student at Bromölla University. That’s farther away than anybody might imagine. Especially in Anopotamiés.” Pausing eloquently, Yannis Georgiades helped himself to more schnitzel. A trained eye such as Lily’s easily saw that her guest would have preferred a piece of bread to a knife in his right hand. But at this moment she was busy trying to catch her husband’s eyes and to suppress a laughter. “I’m studying to become an engineer.” Leaning across the table, Yannis Georgiades knifed the last tomato slice in the salad bowl. Once he had put it in his mouth, he declared between swallows: “As soon as I’ve finished my studies, I will revolutionize the waters of Macedonia. Especially of Anopotamiés.”
Yannis Georgiades always described his relationship to his home village with the words: “I could have given my life for her. But she didn’t want it.”

Yannis Georgiades liked to sit with his left elbow propped on the table. For example on this May evening in 1966. When he turned his hand, the thick bracelet slid down his hairy wrist. Then Yannis Georgiades explained: “This watch is all I have left. It’s still in the middle of the day . The former is Russian and means ‘February.’ But Doc is a learned man, so he probably knows that already. The day before, I had left my beloved Anopotamiés. The day after, Salonika, Macedonia, and then Greece. That’s not insignificant. Doc will notice the catastrophe here.” Yannis Georgiades extended his hand. “That’s from the stone with which I stopped time. In order to have something left of Greece, you see. I have sworn not to fix the watch until I see my beloved home village again. When will Doc see his beloved home village again?”

Yannis Georgiades also said: “Russians are so strange. Once I met a Russian at the station in Belgrade who declared that certain of their letters are Greek. Like this one here, for example” — Yannis Georgiades pointed to the with his well-chewed toothpick — “which looks like a man with a very big belly. Or perhaps a globe stuck on a souvlaki stick. Is that supposed to be Greek? I’m just asking, Doc . . .” When Manolis F. didn’t reply, Yannis Georgiades laughed heartily and again shook his head: “Yes, Russians are so strange.” Then he returned his toothpick to his mouth.

Yannis Georgiades could neither read nor write. Maybe we mentioned that already? What we haven’t mentioned yet is that, gradually, he became a very unusual Yannis Georgiades. In contrast to his father and grandfather, Yannis Georgiades and Yannis Georgiades, respectively, eventually, Yannis Georgiades learned to both read and write. (How, is a secret we’ve promised to keep.) As far as Yannis Georgiades’s ancestors are concerned, only deaf and mute Erol Bulut could read and write. The former skill he acquired at the tender age of five, the latter at five-and-a-half — although only Arabic, needless to say, since this was before Atatürk’s reforms. The Latin alphabet, gawky but diligent Erol learned in a few days in the spring of 1864, mainly to be able to write perfumed missives to a certain Despina Baciricoglou. These were burnt by Despina’s mother, Sophia, however, who may have been illiterate, but was far from stupid.
     Which probably is the reason why her daughter’s love proved “as tenacious as a donkey,” as Sophia whispered in the prayers she sent to the Lord Almighty every evening, while her husband, unaware, complained about Turks who only wanted to eat flat bread. (These harangues always ended with the assertion: “But they’re from a different continent, so what do you expect?”) If Despina had gotten to know the true Erol in time — or at least the Erol Bulut who, anything but gawky, wrote to her: “Let me untie your red bow, my love, and fill your bag with the meal of future!” or “My longing is a loaf of bread raising in your hot oven, o beautiful baker’s daughter with cumin on her upper lip!” — it’s not clear whether she would have given herself as enthusiastically as she did one warm night behind a mosque on the outskirts of Smyrna, when only Erol’s purposeful panting could be heard amidst the thunder of thousands of cicadas.
     It is even less certain that Despina, three months later, would have met her friend at a kafeneíon at the other end of the city, declaring, with tears filling her eyes: “O, my love, if you could only understand what I’m telling you!” She bit her lip, reflectively. “Well, I shall speak slowly. Perhaps you’ll understand. After all, there have been greater miracles. It’s like this, my love: as — long — as — we — are — from — different — continents — we — shall — never — belong — to — one — another — don’t — you — understand — that — you — fathomless — one?” She had mouthed the words clearly and cleanly. But when she saw Erol’s gaping mouth and sheepish eyes, Despina lost faith, emptied her cup in one quick gulp, and said with coffee grinds covering her front teeth: “What I mean to say is that we won’t be able to see each other again . . . Phew, I didn’t know this stuff’s so sticky!” Once she had wiped her mouth, she continued: “Get that into your head, for God’s sake. Or Allah’s, if you which. We’re in for different times now.” Removing the last coffee grinds, she stormed out of the establishment without so much as a sideway glance. Erol stared at her inviting hips. Still with his mouth agape.
     But of course, least of all it’s certain that Despina would have given herself as completely to Yannis Georgiades only a week later, having tossed and turned for a whole night, and then coming clean with her mother’s hand resting on her tummy. Yannis Georgiades was an old school mate of Despina’s surprised but not undelighted father, Lefteris Baciricoglou. Both men came from a remote village high up in the mountains of Olympus. Yet in contrast to Yannis Georgiades, Lefteris Baciricoglou understood early that he must leave home if he wished to acquire a wife who didn’t look like his sister. Constantinople turned out to be a city with many dangers, however, especially for fathers with daughters, which is why Lefteris agreed to Despina marrying his childhood friend, despite the fact that he was old enough to be her father. Also, he knew his friend owned a donkey, a rooster, and ten chickens, and in addition was known to be a mortally boring but honest man. When Sophia told him about the “sweet unexpected music” that could be heard, the baker thus chose to trust his wife’s ear, and was even swayed by emotion. “He’s like a brother to me,” he said turning to the gray sky, forgetting, for an instant, why he had left his native village thirty years earlier.
     “Then I shall belong to nobody,” tear-eyed Erol Bulut mused as he read the wedding posters that, a few days later, were put up on the telephone poles that by this time could be found in the Greek part of town. “Only the almighty Allah!” (How a deaf and mute Turk managed to become a caller for prayers is, however, another story, one that takes place on a foreign continent in a different, very complicated century.)

If he had known the meaning of the word, Yannis Georgiades would have considered himself a fatalist. He didn’t. However, when, as a boy, he was tending the family’s only cow in the valley below the village of Anopotamiés — it must be said it was an unusually beautiful day in the fall of 1944 — ten severe men had suddenly appeared, wearing enormous beards, fur caps, and ammunition belts criss-crossing their wide breasts. Mounted on horses, one man asked, “from a place closer to heaven than to earth,” for the name of the barefoot shepherd and where he lived. “Yannakis Georgiades,” Yannis Georgiades replied, who, at this point, was still referred to thusly. “In Anopotamiés, of course. Where else?” “Anopotamiés?” the leader said, spitting as if a swarm of insects had just filled his mouth. “And where is that godforsaken brothel of a village, kolópaido?” Mutely, Yannis Georgiades had pointed up the stony slope — at which another man leaned so much forward that the boy could see his tobacco-stained teeth underneath the mustache jutting out over his lips like a colossal cliff. Testing the blade of his rounded knife with his thumb, he explained that all life balanced on such a thin edge. Then, surprisingly friendly, he asked if the boy had any male relatives. “Only my father,” Yannis Georgiades replied, not thinking. For a hovering moment that Yannis Georgiades would remember for the rest of his life, because the color combination had been a perfect match (black, shiny eyes, black, shiny mustache, black, shiny mane — “tone in tone in tone,” as he would later say), the man’s chin rested against the neck of his horse. Then he raised his head, inserted the knife into its sheath, and declared: “You may thank the tight-holed virgin that we don’t tear out your tongue. Your whore of a mother must have somebody to speak to. But if you tell her that you met us, we won’t remain as sweet hearted.” Laughing hoarsely, he added: “In any event, you may spare that cow of yours the trip back tonight. Scoundrels — all of you!” Pulling their reins, the men disappeared up the hill.
     When the sun had sunk in the salmon haze behind the mountains, Yannis Georgiades returned home with his cattle. He wasn’t certain about what had really been said. Kolópaido was something his father used to call him when he heard the springs of his son’s bed squeak at night. To persuade himself that the men had meant no harm, Yannis Georgiades began to sing to himself: “I’m Yannakis Georgiades and I come from Anopotamiés! I’m YannakisGeorgiades andIcomefrom Anopotamiés. I’mYannakides ancomefromAnopotamiés . . .” Each time he uttered these words, they glided into one another yet some more, until Yannis Georgiades wasn’t certain what he said was true or even that it was language that filled his mouth. “I’mYannakigidesancomefrAnopotamiés . . . I’mYanneugesancomefrAnopotamies . . . Yannidesfranopotamies . . .”
     Having gotten this far in his rambles, Yannis Georgiades began to suspect the partisans had been serious. Since Yannis Georgiades was tired and hungry and no more than six years old, however, he couldn’t understand why his home village was a brothel. Also, he had finished the bread and the piece of halváh his mother had put in a pillowcase. Now, hunger began to squeeze out the fear that had been crowding his belly. Hardly had Anopotamiés come within view, however, when fear regained parts of its former territory. Now Yannis Georgiades could see black fumes trailing indolently into the evening sky, like sick roots. The cow fidgeted and became unruly, so Yannis Georgiades was forced to shove it on with shouts and beat it with his stick. When he entered the village, Yannis Georgiades sensed the smell of sot and could also distinguish the first wailing. At the square in front of the church, his belly was replenished with fear — and, for that matter, every other part of his undernourished body that was still empty. There, Yannis Georgiades found the women sitting on the ground, rocking back and forth — wailing, sniveling, in tears. Several men were resting with their head in their laps, strangely elongated and motionless. In the windows of the only kafeneíon in the village, where the old men used to solve marital problems, land feuds, and other disputes considered too important for solitary inhabitants, fire flickered. “At this sight, the saliva in my mouth dried out,” Yannis Georgiades told Manolis F., sitting at a kitchen table many years later and thousands of miles away.

Manolis F. was the second person to whom Yannis Georgiades had told the story of what had happened in Anopotamiés on a beautiful fall day in 1944. The first was a nameless woman in a hotel room in Salonika, the night before he got on the train to Belgrade and, from there, continued to Munich, Hamburg, and Copenhagen. (Since Yannis Georgiades thought he had bought a ticket for Bromölla, he remained on the train while all other travelers disembarked. The serene smile on his lips revealed a man who knew what he was doing. A few hours later, a railroad worker, who walked by beating a metal stick against the train wheels, informed Yannis Georgiades that he would have to wait for quite a while if he wished to go on to Bromölla. That was a village across the water, wasn’t it? On the other side, no, in Sweden?)
     Yannis Georgiades wanted to confess to the nameless woman at the hotel in Salonika. Probably, he also wanted to impress her. But instead of listening, the woman fumbled for his wrist in the dark, considered the radium green hands of the watch, and proclaimed coolly: “Two-thirty. Either you pay me for listening to your life’s story, or else I’ll leave. Tragedies are not for free.” Five minutes later, Yannis Georgiades lay alone in the dark, agreeing with the woman’s harsh but honest words. Then Yannis Georgiades swore never again to try to explain why he, personally, was responsible for Greek partisans killing seven men in Anopotamiés on an unusually beautiful evening in the fall of 1944, in retribution for the fact that the village elders, having no other choice, had allowed men to join the Germans when they had gone to look for — and had found — the partisans’ weapons cache. Or why he, from this day on, was no longer called Yannakis.

For one entire February morning in 1966, Yannis Georgiades — tired, unshaven, and hungry, but also delighted, almost elated — walked through the city of Salonika. It wasn’t time to get on the train to Belgrade until a quarter past two in the afternoon, and Yannis Georgiades had never been to a big city. That’s why Yannis Georgiades was both sad and delighted. Sad to have left his beloved Anopotamiés, delighted to experience, with his own eyes, the splendid town that had once been called “the green jewel of Macedonia.” (In reality, Yannis Georgiades was doubly delighted, because he was also delighted that he finally knew what the boys back home meant when, closing the fingers on one hand around the index of the other, they pulled back and forth, usually when Eleni Stephanopoulou happened to pass by with her donkey on a string.) But Yannis Georgiades was also anxious and relieved. Anxious because the night with the nameless woman had cost him more than he had expected; relieved because he carried a third-class train ticket and a new visa in his breast pocket, three fingers’ width from his heart. (Actually, Yannis Georgiades was doubly relieved, because save for his mother, during the last half year in the village he had been deprived of everything that made life worth living.)
     Shortly before Yannis Georgiades got up at six o’clock on this February morning, after half an hour’s restless sleep, he decided not to spend any more money. That’s why he now roamed the green city, increasingly hungry and overwhelmed by what he saw. (If visions could sate.) Yannis Georgiades studied the quiet street cleaners, who methodically worked their way along the sidewalks; he heard the shouts of the vegetable vendors; and he saw the shop owners pull up the metal grids to their shops. Yannis Georgiades pondered the pistachio green town busses that rolled out from their depots and the sea blue ones that arrived, dusty, from places as distant as Siderócastro and Dráma. Yannis Georgiades shot soulful glances at the women who rushed to work in tight fitting dresses and high heels; Yannis Georgiades placed two drachmas in the hand of a toothless man who sat in front of a statue covered in pigeon droppings and, with his other hand, pinched the fur of an incomprehensibly shabby dog; Yannis Georgiades studied the last lotto numbers that a tobacconist taped to the inside of a window, cutting a grimace of someone who nearly had won the highest prize; Yannis Georgiades considered whether, despite everything, he should visit one of the barbers and get a proper shave; Yannis Georgiades counted the coins in his pocket and decided to do something else instead in the harbor district; Yannis Georgiades sat down at a table at a tavern, where he emptied the Turkish coffee and the half-filled glass of water left by an earlier guest; Yannis Georgiades ran one hand through his wavy hair when he noticed a woman a few tables farther was looking at him (in his tight gabardine pants, he could feel what the nameless woman had called his “good muscle” swell) . . . Yes, Yannis Georgiades saw and did many things on this February morning in 1964.
     Ten of twelve, Yannis Georgiades sat down on a park bench not far from the city’s famous lighthouse, with his cardboard suitcase on his lap. At the sight of the sea clucking and glittering between two creaking fishing boats and a rusty ship, Yannis Georgiades couldn’t help thinking of everything he was about to leave, perhaps forever. Tears filled his eyes and clenched his throat, the hand holding the plastic handle of the suitcase shivered. Between thumb and index there was now a big Band-Aid. But eventually Yannis Georgiades steadied his heart, because Yannis Georgiades had an idea. Putting down his case on the bench, he walked over to a flowerbed and scraped the red dry dirt with his foot. Soon Yannis Georgiades found a stone of adequate size which he wriggled loose, cleaned, and brought with him. Then Yannis Georgiades filled his lungs with harbor air (diesel oil, rotten fish, salty splashes against the pier), took off his wrist watch, and carefully spread the two straps of leather imitation on the wooden bench. Thereafter, Yannis Georgiades lifted the stone, thought one more time about the last thing his mother had told him before he left, and pressed the pointed side of the stone against the case. When, with a sick sound, the glass cracked and the hands stopped moving, Yannis Georgiades said, as if to reassure himself of a truth set in helpless motion, like a beginning landslide: “I’m Yannis Georgiades and I still come from Anopotamiés.”

Yes, whether or not he knew the word, Yannis Georgiades was a fatalist. Because Manolis F. was willing to sit up long after Kyría Doctor, no, Kyría Lily, had gone to bed, not revealing the slightest sign of impatience, and always with a surprisingly wise observation at hand, he thought it almost felt like he was back home in Anopotamiés. The half-filled glasses of retsína, the messy ashtray, the remaining cutlery spread among bread crumbs and oil stains on the table cloth . . . If Yannis Georgiades had dared to close his eyes in order to recall his mother’s snoring and the cow’s frantic bell that November night when their house had begun to slide, for a moment, he might have thought he was lying in his old iron bed at home. This was Greece. But Yannis Georgiades preferred not to remember the landslide his last fall in Anopotamiés, nor the cow that had to be put to rest, nor the Byzantine dealings with the authorities in Salonika concerning a passport and a traveling visa. (“You may count yourself lucky you’re the only child, son. Otherwise we’d send you off to the Bulgarian boarder, on three years’ uniformed vacation.”) Instead, Yannis Georgiades tapped his knuckles against the cracked case of his watch, to see if time nonetheless might have begun again — and to his surprise, he saw the hand measuring seconds move . . . Not far, merely a step, from twenty-one to twenty-two seconds after the minute. “I just moved a little closer to Anopotamiés,” Yannis Georgiades told Manolis F. when the latter, extending a pillow and a blanket, pointed to the sofa in Lily’s newly furnished studio in the basement.

“I still dream my best dreams with a boiler room next to me,” Yannis Georgiades declared many years later, one night in June 1975, as he lay down next to his wife Anita in the basement of a booked-out pension on the outskirts of Zagreb, only a day’s drive from his beloved native village. “When I hear its peaceful snoring, I wish it could continue forever not just in my dream.” Yannis Georgiades’s seven-year old daughter, who was called Jane or Yannoula, depending on the context, and who, almost exactly a year later, would be seriously injured in a car accident, wriggled on the air mattress that chafed against the cold tiled floor. “It smells of piss here, daddy. Can’t we go home?” “And if that’s what we’re doing?” Yannis Georgiades replied smiling in the dark, falling asleep with his good muscle pressed against Anita’s cold thigh.

“Those were my happiest years in exile,” Yannis Georgiades would also declare — this time standing behind the counter of his kafeneíon in Anopotamiés (which actually wasn’t a café as much as a “gafé”). (“Yeah, with a G,” Yannis Georgiades had persevered, chuckling knowingly as the local upholsterer had shaken his head and continued to paint the sign post that the new owner had ordered.) That was a few years later, and again Yannis Georgiades was about to explain to everyone who didn’t want to listen — two men playing távli, a former village teacher who devoted himself to yesterday’s paper, as well as a waiter who skillfully wriggled a piece of baclavá into the mouth of his recalcitrant two-year old, while an amused woman with a speech impediment looked on, smiling, and the two cats Svensson and Bromölla chased each other between scraping chairs — about the wonderful years he had spent in the basement of Villa Paradise. Yannis Georgiades said “years,” but according to the Encyclopedia of Greeks in Exile, it was just a year and a half. Most likely, the plural employed was due to the fact that Yannis Georgiades, like many other Greeks, tended to exaggerate. “(“Never ruin a good story with the truth,” Yannis Georgiades used to tell Anita, as she complained about this trait in not merely her own husband’s character.) Yes, Yannis Georgiades liked to exaggerate. For example, when one of the men playing checkers for a brief moment interrupted the game and mumbled something while he shook the dice with his obscene hand: “You could always write your memoirs, you know . . .” Yannis Georgiades would reply: “And what do you think I’m doing?”

“The boys, Mr. Manolis, and Mrs. Lily! The green grass, the endless garden, and the pond we built — the latter big enough for a whale! The boiler room! The first skates! The alphabet! Yes, the alphabet! Every night, I tapped my knuckles against the case, wondering whether paradise may have started all over.” Yannis Georgiades, quoted in the Encyclopedia of Greeks in Exile, Supplement XIII.

“He knows many things,” Manolis F. told his wife when, early next morning, he returned to their bedroom, carrying a coffee cup filled with water in his hand. “Just not the alphabet.” Manolis F. pressed two Aspirins from the silvery pill chart. “Anyway, we have to ask the store to order better retsína,” he added, both plagued and cheery, putting the pills on his tongue. Emptying the cup so fast that a couple of drops fell on his brown bathrobe where they were immediately soaked up by the terry cloth, he added: “Perhaps he could stay for just a few days?”
     Lily F., who had other things to think about, didn’t reply. She was packing the suitcases which were lying gaping on their bed. Later that same day, for the first time in her life, she would visit the country to which her husband couldn’t return. And anyway, she had no wish to let a homeless Greek have the studio she had spent so many days fixing up. Manolis F. dried his mouth with the back of his hand, extending a couple of shoes to his wife, who placed them like a 6 next to a 9 at the spot where she had planned to put her toiletries. “I could use a little company while you and the boys are gone,” he explained. “The studio will be empty anyway. Yannis will move out as soon as you’re back. And besides,” he nodded toward the window, “I’m sure he could help with the ditches. He claims to know everything about watering.”
     The latter settled the case. The same day as six-month pregnant Lily left for Greece with the two sons (Copenhagen-Athens roundtrip, seven days, 1274 crowns including taxes), Yannis Georgiades moved into the basement. In no time, he was at home in the studio next to the boiler room, becoming indispensable to the F. household, mainly because of his readiness to learn everything he didn’t know. Which wasn’t insignificant. Not even if one didn’t include the proper treatment of a ditch. Or the alphabet.

Yannis Georgiades loved:
     1) Anopotamiés;
     2) to sit barefoot in the grass (“There’s no grass in Anopotamiés. In Anopotamiés, there are only stones, gravel, and the needles of pine trees. A lot of stone and a lot of gravel. A little less pine needles. The last is because of the winters. Landslides in Macedonia are very famous and very dangerous.” Yannis Georgiades pronounced the word very as veri. “Also, grass is a Swedish invention. I love grass, too. And Sweden a little bit. But stones, gravel, and pine needles are easier to love. Perhaps also better. At least if you train barefoot. In order to caress the ball, of course.” Sitting, Yannis Georgiades kicked the soccer ball into the hedge. The two boys, who were sitting barefoot next to him, looked at each other, shaking their heads);
     3) to sleep “next to my snoring mána” (with which Yannis Georgiades meant the boiler on the other side of the wall);
     4) to meditate on the three green dots tattooed on his right hand; as well as
     5) Swedish women, not always blond.
     With one exception, Yannis Georgiades loved the latter only from a distance.

When Yannoula was born, Yannis Georgiades loved Swedish daughters, too. As a matter of fact, Yannis Georgiades loved Yannoula more than grass and furnaces combined, definitely more than Swedish women, and perhaps even more than Anopotamiés. Since Yannoula had green eyes, Yannis Georgiades called his daughter “my Macedonian jewel.” Yannis Georgiades claimed his homesickness vanished if he looked into her eyes. That is why Yannis Georgiades looked his daughter in the eyes many times each day. Every time he said: “They haven’t turned black, have they, mátia mou?”

Yannis Georgiades hated nothing in life. “Everything is as it is, everything will be as it will be. You have to love fate like a little goat.” Or . . . Wait. No. Perhaps Yannis Georgiades hated one thing: that it was so difficult to tell an I apart from a J, a C from a G. Yes, Yannis Georgiades probably hated that it was so difficult to distinguish an I from a J, a C from a G.

In a few days, Yannis Georgiades no longer claimed he was a student at Bromölla University. However, Yannis Georgiades still maintained he would improve the canalization of waters in central Macedonia. “I’m not sure a mere pond will do,” Yannis Georgiades confided to the two boys when they returned from his home country. Pointing to what had once been a ditch, he shook his head. Then, looking up, he added with melancholy determination: “Yes, one day, I shall revolutionize the waters in Anopotamiés.” Later the same day, as the boys tiptoed down to the basement, they found Yannis Georgiades bent over the table. As they came closer, they discovered he had opened the family atlas. In order for pages 144-145 in the Große Europa Autoatlas not to disappear through some thoughtless motion, Yannis Georgiades had put a sneaker across each of the upper corners and a heavy book across the lower part. “Now I know what went wrong. If you don’t teach water how to run, ditches behave like ponds,” Yannis Georgiades sighed. “In Macedonia, too.” Then he added with a sly smile: “But water in Anopotamiés is special. It can run upwards . . .” Drawing arrows along the sides of a thin line that wriggled through territory unknown to the boys, Yannis Georgiades explained: “Here the river ends. And here, veri exactly, Anopotamiés begins. This requires a revolution. Peaceful, naturally. But how?”
     Seemingly at a loss, Yannis Georgiades put aside his pencil. Then he brightened. Now the boys understood that he had only been kidding. (Or as Yannis Georgiades preferred to say: “I was merely sly-dogging.”) “With drills and ditches,” he exclaimed. “Here, here, and here.” Yannis Georgiades pointed. “In Macedonia, mountains are hard and the distance to water long. Even veri long. Therefore we need other tactics than in Balsby, palikária mou. Here and there, water must have time to rest.” Again, he sighed. “But resting places are veri expensive, and dough is lacking . . .” Sad, Yannis Georgiades rubbed his fingers against each other. “Couldn’t you run water down from here?” one of the boys (the older) asked. He pointed. “From Siderókastro?” Yannis Georgiades seemed surprised. “No, no, that’s down here, see?” Running his finger across the lettering, the boy spelled the name of the city. “I meant from up here. From Ano-, Ano- . . .” Pointing, he tried to make his way through the name. (Proper pronunciation: “Anoanopotamiés”.) “That’s enough,” Yannis Georgiades said, surprisingly firm, and shoved the boys aside. As he closed the atlas, he explained: “I need my mána.” That was Yannis Georgiades’s way of saying he wanted to sleep.

Yannis Georgiades owned one book only. This volume, however, which he often placed along the lower part of the spread of northeast Greece, a tiny section of Bulgaria, and an even tinier one of Turkey, he loved as if it were his own flesh and blood. Professor Gavril Avramitis’s Handbook in Hydrology: About the Nobel Art of Watering (Salonika, 1934) was long the only mandatory title on the syllabus for future agrarian engineers at the Technical University in Salonika. Today, the book is considered antiquated, and has been replaced by updated surveys, such as, for example, Athanas Osborn’s study in “fundamental hydrology,” Theory of Water (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1964), which, as is well known, treats the problems of watering from a socio-cultural perspective, too.
     But Yannis Georgiades hardly knew this. He had never read the well-thumbed copy of Avramitis’s study which, when it didn’t serve as a guard post, was kept delicately wrapped in a long-sleeved undershirt in the suitcase underneath his bed. On the other hand, Yannis Georgiades knew every picture in the book by heart, and through the years, thanks to an athletic imagination, he had managed to decipher the legends, thus making the profusion of lines, arrows, and diagrams comprehensible — at least seen from his perhaps somewhat single-minded perspective. Thus, for example, Yannis Georgiades claimed to understand that Professor Avramitis’s treatment of the limited use of ditching might be appropriate, yet it didn’t apply to the river running through the valley below Anopotamiés. In contrast to the learned man in goatee and steel-rimmed glasses, whom four German soldiers had shot in a quarry outside of Salonika in 1942, as he sat with his hands folded over a growing baldness, mute to the very last, Yannis Georgiades assumed that, if only the canalization was conducted with enough pressure, water would run upwards, too. The secret lay in what Yannis Georgiades termed “temporary sources” — his only, though overlooked contribution to hydrology. These holes, drilled into the mountain, would allow the water to recuperate before the next lag upward the steep slope. “If the number of temporary sources is large enough, and the concrete used is imported from the Soviet Union, one day, even the sea might float through Anopotamiés!” Yannis Georgiades explained the same night he took his future wife to an amusement park. “Okey-dokey, I’m exaggerating. Merely as a rivulet,” he added as he aimed a furry tennis ball at a pyramid of tin cans.

A year and a half after Yannis Georgiades had made himself comfortable next to his “snoring mána,” the temperature tumbled well below zero degrees Celsius. It was an early morning in February 1968. Quietly, Yannis Georgiades put on his rubber boots, stuffed his gabardine pants into the high legs, and stuck the garden gloves in one of the pockets of his leather jacket. In the boiler room, he found the better of two shovels, as well as a couple of items he hung around his neck to which we shall return shortly. Squeaking, Yannis Georgiades sneaked up the stairs, into the kitchen. He filled his empty jacket pocket with gingerbread and raisins, drank a few mouthfuls of water from the faucet, and pulled a blue cap over his ears. On the forehead, it said in bright, orange letters: GULF.
     During the next half hour, Yannis Georgiades shoveled a perfectly straight line from the back of the house, past the frozen pond, and all the way down to the lake. Once there, he brushed away the snow that had settled on the family’s sled, sat down, and exhaled a warm, pleasant cloud of air. With the cap having nudged itself to the top of his steaming head, he ate of the provisions, wriggling his stiff toes and admiring the view. Yannis Georgiades had never seen such perfection. White and pristine, Lake Råbelöv spread like a blanket in front of his eyes. On the other side, the big Mount Bal rose in cloud-adorned majesty, brooding over the secret grotto in its interior. Yannis Georgiades found it difficult to believe that the water in the lake still moved underneath the foot-thick lid of snow and ice. But deep down, water was running, with pikes, perches, and roaches shivering in the tiny cardigans that their mothers had knitted — at least if Yannis Georgiades was to believe the two F. boys, who, he had to admit, knew a number of things he didn’t.
     The day before, the three of them had wandered across the ice. Or more accurately: Yannis Georgiades had slided on his rubber boots, while the boys had criss-crossed the polished surface on their skates. Here and there, the ice had creaked, but the boys had assured Yannis Georgiades it wasn’t as dangerous as it sounded. The ice was merely thickening — “sort of from underneath,” the younger of the two had shouted before he had blown a cloud of jagged ice flakes over Yannis Georgiades, his skates stylishly twisted to the side. Then he had tugged Yannis Georgiades’s sleeve and told him there were those who claimed the sound really came from a green-eyed monster, big as a whale, that lived in the caverns of the mountain across the lake and liked to swim underneath the ice. “Nobody has seen it. Except for Johnny Dirt, of course.” (Johnny Dirt was the village eccentric.) A few hundred meter from the public beach, Yannis Georgiades had discovered a figure hunched on a stool. “Johnny Dirt?” Expectantly, he pointed to the motionless shape. “Baron von Reppe,” the older boy declared, adding: “He’s pilking.” As Yannis Georgiades didn’t understand the word, he explained: “Well, fishing, then.” Yannis Georgiades laughed, thinking his leg was being pulled. “Fishing? In the middle of the winter?” “Well, when else?”
     Since Yannis Georgiades refused to believe the boy, he agreed to show him it was perfectly possible to go fishing in the middle of the winter. (“Don’t make me laugh again! The ice is in the way!” “There are drills, you know.”) As they reached baron Adolf von Reppe, Yannis Georgiades could see with his own eyes they were right. Bewildered by the new knowledge, he accepted a mouthful of the “alcoholized” coffee the baron offered him, extending his thermos with a commanding gesture. Then the older of the two boys shouted, “Let’s go!,” and left for the public beach. Behind the frosty reed, a building made of tar paper and cardboard could be discerned. A hundred meter out on the ice, the boy, forming a plow with his skates, stopped, wriggled with his zipper, and began to pee not far from where the stiff reed emerged out of the ice. “Yes!” The other boy skated over to his brother. Yannis Georgiades, who was interested to learn more about Johnny Dirt, followed. When he reached the boys, they were already hunched on their knees. Having placed their mitten-covered hands on each side of a steaming square, they were now trying to peer through the polished surface. Taking turns, they whispered: “Quiet . . .,” “There!,” “No, quiet . . .,” “There!,” “Why can’t you keep quiet?” Then the younger of the two explained that you could see the fish swim past in their cardigans down in the ice-cold water. “Like on television.” If Yannis Georgiades was just quiet enough — now the boy raised his voice — they’d even discover the monster that lived across the lake and, covered by the ice, sometimes visited Johnny Dirt. “Please be quiet!” The older boy shoved his brother so hard that he put one of his mittens in the steaming urine.
     Now, a day later, Yannis Georgiades took off his rubber boots, sticking his feet into the skates he had found in the furnace room. The skates belonged to Manolis F. and were unused. They were also one size too small. Thus Yannis Georgiades had refrained from putting on an extra pair of socks this morning. This meant that his feet were frozen by the time he eased down from the sled — and immediately stumbled. Awkwardly Yannis Georgiades got up; awkwardly he tried to steady himself; awkwardly he ventured, on approximate feet, out on the ice. Yannis Georgiades was convinced a day such as this was the right one for his first skating lesson. Naturally, he fell again after a stride and a half. Naturally, he got up, surprised by how hard he had fallen, and naturally he fell again. In this manner, Yannis Georgiades made his kind of progress. A quarter of an hour later, he realized he had managed to advance twenty meter out on the ice. Fortunately, he also understood it probably would go faster if he removed the protection on the skates. As Yannis Georgiades placed the elongated sheaths of black rubber in his inner pocket, he recognized on what knife-thin edge man balanced. Now, he had twice as many edges on which to balance, yet still it made life no easier.

Slowly but safely Yannis Georgiades advanced — walked, mainly on the leather, and slithered. Occasionally, he sat down and wiped, heart pounding, the sweat from his forehead. Even if every new slide made his ankles a bit more sore, even if his head was steaming underneath the cap and his gloves were wet and cold, even if his knees, bottom, and back were soaking wet, Yannis Georgiades experienced a cloud of joy mounting inside him. A hundred-and-fifty meter out on the lake, the bliss threatened to burst his lungs, which is why he got down on his knees. Having recovered, he began to scrape away the snow. Once Yannis Georgiades was satisfied, he unzipped his jacket with stiff fingers. From his inner pocket he retrieved the rubber sheaths, whereafter, calmly and methodically, he scraped until the ice was both smooth and clean. At the same moment as the sun rose, Yannis Georgiades pressed his lips against the frozen water. It was love at first sight.

Later the same morning, the two boys looked out the kitchen window, admiring the straight line that led from a point out on the lake all the way up to the back of their house. The first half of the stretch seemed wobbly and uncertain, as if somebody had crawled or flapped his wings. But the latter stretch was unexpectedly straight, with mounds of snow evenly posted all the way from the stiff reed to the kitchen garden. Probably, they told themselves, the monster in the grotto on the other side of the lake, having chosen the wrong hole from which to emerge, had appeared at their place rather than at Johnny Dirt’s. It had been dark last night and it wasn’t easy to see even if your eyes were a luminous green. Once the younger of the two investigated the sled down by the lake, discovering a piece of ginger bread soaking in the snow, the matter was settled: they had had “a foreign visitor” that night. The older of the boys, who had begun to devour books featuring Alfred Hitchcock and three boy detectives, went looking for his toy rifle and magnifying glass.

Yannis Georgiades often demonstrated his muscles. Between laughing lips and clenched teeth, he wheezed: “I’m no human being. I — am — a — titan!”

One boy: “Why do you always chew on tooth picks?”
     Yannis Georgiades: “ Titans don’t smoke.”
     Another boy: “But sometimes you drink. Is that what titans do, then?”
     Yannis Georgiades: “Sometimes titans are not veri titan, but just sad.”

Yes, Yannis Georgiades did that, too: he drank. It only happened toward the end of his stay at the Villa Paradise, however, and merely when the rest of the family had gone to bed. Retrieving a bottle of retsína from Manolis F’s stash in the furnace room, he would drink straight from the bottle, lying on the sofa in the dark. Between swallows, Yannis Georgiades would listen to the whisperings of the furnace.

After the “years” in the basement of Villa Paradise, Yannis Georgiades moved first to the village of Tollarp, then to the city of Lund. In Tollarp, he spent a few months bottling juice and filling ten-liter buckets with sticky orange marmalade. In Tollarp, Yannis Georgiades also met Anita Hansell, who worked at the local grocery store, but in the evenings studied to become a nurse. When he emerged from the factory at quarter past five in the afternoon, Yannis Georgiades preferred to prowl around the outdoor hockey rink which was on the way to Mrs. Lundström at Villavägen, where he rented a room in the attic. One winter day, Yannis Georgiades mustered enough courage to ask one of the players leaning with bulky arms across the rink whether he could “puck” a little. The result of Bertil Fransson’s kindness is history.
     Less known is perhaps the result of the acquaintance with Anita Hansell. After a couple of weeks’ shy looks — when the flirt had moved from exchanges such as “Would miss have tooth twigs?” “Tooth twigs?” “Well, you know what I mean,” to conversations such as “Would miss have time?” “Time?” “Well, you know what I mean” — Yannis Georgiades stole a ten-liter bucket of marmalade. As he reached the grocery store where Anita worked, he hesitated for a moment, then opened the door — with such resolve that, thrusting back, it hit him in the back and speeded up his entry into the store significantly. Yannis Georgiades stumbled toward Anita with such mysterious conviction that he barely managed to lift the bucket up on the counter before he was forced to grip Anita’s thin shoulders — finally putting a stop to his reckless entry. The ice was broken. With a larger degree of intimacy than Yannis Georgiades had thought himself capable of, he shoved the tooth pick to the side and inquired whether his future wife wished to have dinner with him later that evening. “Marmalade?” As Anita sensed Yannis Georgiades’s strong palms gripping her upper arms, she realized he would probably not let go of her until she had given him a proper answer. “Yes,” she thus continued. “I suppose some day has to be the first.” (Anita gave her mother the marmalade. She no longer had any contact with her stepfather.)

Yannis Georgiades and Anita Hansell became a “couple” with a speed that surprised people even in Tollarp, where circumstances tended to be considered “wrapped and ready” after a trip to the Luna park, followed by visits to the families. Having dated some of the younger men in the village (most of them players in Tollarp IC; thus it cannot be ruled out that the men’s wrath was caused by more than an own goal when the local press had occasion to report, for the first and last time, on “Y. Georgiades”), Anita now experienced something she had never known before: motherliness. The feeling was new but not unpleasant. This was different than being “wrapped” and made “ready” for engagement, wedding, and divorce. Also, she appreciated the sense of control it instilled. She liked not only to be the one to know better, but also, and perhaps more, to be able to demonstrate how to conduct oneself when one did — not like her old boyfriends, who swaggered and shouted, depending on the number of beers, but through tact, concern, refinement. Yet of course, Anita also liked to listen to the stories about the boys in Balsby that Yannis Georgiades told her in his inimitable Swedish. Not to mention the feeling of being “overcome by love” — a phrase by which Anita was referring to the muscular weight she sensed when an untamed man from a remote part of Macedonia moved closer.
     Yannis Georgiades, for his part, liked the at once open and evasive nature of Anita. He liked that she didn’t have any secrets, and he liked that, nonetheless, she seemed to. Yannis Georgiades liked that Anita bit her lower lip before explaining that wooden knives were for butter only, and that, in Sweden, it actually happened that “girls” bought clean underwear for their “boys,” and at times he would do or say something although knowing better, just to see her bite her lip. Yannis Georgiades liked that Anita referred to him as her “Greek,” and he liked being taught Swedish free of charge. Yannis Georgiades liked to polish his “wash board” in Anita’s presence, and he often thought with pride of what their sons would look like (Greeks and titans, all of them). As far as the latter were concerned, however, Yannis Georgiades considered it his “mission” — and in that regard, alas, his hopes would be thwarted.

Every time Yannis Georgiades, smoothly and predatorily, slid his hairy leg across Anita and got ready to shift his weight, she shoved him away, kindly but determinedly, then turned toward the nightstand. Anita liked to be “demanded” by men, in particular by this Greek; that wasn’t it. However, she would not allow it to happen without protection. Anita nursed a secret which she didn’t wish to betray even to Yannis Georgiades: at no cost did she want a baby. There had been unpleasantries when she had been a girl, and Anita was not about to put another Hansell into the world if the child ran the risk of experiencing something similar. Thus, skillfully, she wrapped her Greek’s good muscle, parted her legs, and waited serenely, at peace with a life without offspring. Grudgingly, Yannis Georgiades taught himself to empty his muscle in a small extravasation at the top of the rubber wrapper, to which he soon began to refer as “Mr. Durex.” Every time, he told himself that Swedish women were just the way he had thought: at once prudish and emancipated. Yannis Georgiades couldn’t imagine that Anita would be anything but the latter once they were married.

Yannis Georgiades, oh, Yannis Georgiades . . .

A few years after Yannis Georgiades left the basement in Balsby and the attic in Tollarp, he moved to Lund. Manolis F. had already moved to the city with his family, where he was now employed at the local university. “I know almost nobody in the world, Doc,” Yannis Georgiades said as he tried to explain his decision. “So why wouldn’t I move to where the boys are? Besides, there are three of them now. Perhaps Doc would lend me the oldest? We have a few secrets, you know.”

From a conversation between Yannis Georgiades and the oldest son of Manolis F:
     OLDEST SON OF MANOLIS F: “Where did you get the three dots here?” (Scratches himself between thumb and index.)
     YANNIS Georgiades (sadly): “Harbor of Salonika.”
     OLDEST SON OF MANOLIS F: “What do they mean?”
     YANNIS Georgiades (smiling): “Secret.”
     OLDEST SON OF MANOLIS F: “Secret? But everybody can see them.”
     YANNIS Georgiades (slyly): “Soon no secret.”
     OLDEST SON OF MANOLIS F: “In that case, you could tell me.”
     YANNIS Georgiades (laughing): “Okey-dokey. They are remembrance.”
     OLDEST SON OF MANOLIS F: “Remembrance?”
     YANNIS Georgiades (surprised): “Of course. This is mother. This is cow. And this is me.” (Points. Then, again slyly:) “But you might also say this is Anita. This is Yannis. And this is . . . Well, I said secret.”
     OLDEST SON OF MANOLIS F: “I think I understand.”
     YANNIS Georgiades (quietly): “In that case, the rest is silence.”

At this point, Yannis and Anita Georgiades lived as husband and wife. During the day, Yannis Georgiades took classes at a teachers’ training college; at night, he taught Modern Greek at an evening school. Anita Georgiades worked as a nurse at the local hospital, where she acquired new friends whom she shared more and more rarely with her husband. Since, a few weeks before the moving van left Tollarp, Mr. Durex had become more familiar with Anita Georgiades than she would have liked to, the couple no longer shared the same bed. Or bedroom. Now, many nights passed before Yannis Georgiades again would slide his muscular thigh across his wife. Their daughter slept in a cot next to her mother, which didn’t make things any easier, so eventually the couple agreed to meet once a month on the sofa in the hallway — “to get the itch over with,” as Anita put it.

Yannis Georgiades had experienced many mishaps in his life. Even if sadness deepened in his breast, he didn’t mention his sorrow to his wife or to the only friend he acquired on his own. (The friend was Costas Tsipouris, who taught Manolis F’s sons in “home-language instruction.” Apart from the low grades he gave them, because he was afraid that he would otherwise be considered a “party” in the eyes of the local education authorities, Tsipouris had the unpleasant habit of chewing on his mustache, like a mouse, before giving his lips a quick coat of saliva, solemnly instructing the boys in the difference between completed and uncompleted action in the past.) Instead, Yannis Georgiades devoted all his energies to two things: (1) the sit-ups he performed with military precision early in the morning and late at night, dressed only in his pajamas pants, but no longer in the presence of his wife (who therefore no longer knew that her husband’s washboard was as hard as it had always been); (2) the textbook in Modern Greek on which he was working and to which he hoped that Manolis F. would contribute a preface. (He didn’t.)

Extract from Yannis Georgiades’s First Aid in Modern Greek (35-page handout, ABC Evening School, Lund, 1970):
     “Here is example of how small small word may create big big confusion:
          ‘Do you have time?’
          Échete kairó?
          ‘Time?’
          Kairó?
          ‘Yes, exactly.’
          Naí, amé.
          ‘You must be mistaken. I’m not that kind of girl.’
          Den eímaste sta kalá mas.
     Small tip: when asking Greek girl what time it is, you must always
     say: Échete tin óra? Forget right time at your own expense!”
Despite his sadness, Yannis Georgiades hadn’t lost his sense of irony.

“Why don’t you return to Greece and kill the colonels?” During one of Yannis Georgiades’s increasingly rare visits to Manolis F. and his family, one of the boys tested his biceps. They were sitting in front of the black-and-white television set; across the screen, the latest images from Greece flickered. “Because I leave Anopotamiés. And because mána had wanted me to.” “No, no. It’s ‘Because I left Anopotamiés.’ And ‘Because mummy wanted me to.’” The boy released his grip of Yannis Georgiades’s arm. Having acquired certain grammatical knowledge that the boy lacked, Yannis Georgiades rolled down his sleeve. Then he put an end to this particular part of the conversation: “Perhaps I ought to. Who knows when an action in the past is really completed?”

In Balsby, Yannis Georgiades learned to skate; in Tollarp, he developed his talent; and after the move to Lund, he became downright skilled. This is how: during the “public” hour at the communal skate rink one afternoon in the early 1970s, Yannis Georgiades unhooked one of the heavy goals. Using it as support, he took his first correct slides, while the person who had just polished the ice tried to prevent this unusual walker from cutting into the ice and one of the F. boys was about to perish from shame. In Lund, Yannis Georgiades took his first degree in higher education and became an athletics teacher. In Lund, he bought his first car (a Saab: red and used). And in Lund his beloved daughter Jane, also called Yannoula, was born in March 1968.
     How? the curious reader may ask. Answer: one of the rare nights when Mr. Durex still put in an appearance in the attic in Tollarp, Yannis Georgiades stopped Anita and turned to the night table himself. From the drawer, he took a condom which he had prepared for the occasion by sticking a needle through the extra millimeter of rubber on its oily tip. Once Yannis Georgiades had wrapped his good but increasingly sad muscle, he sent a silent prayer to the Macedonian deity in charge of the future of Macedonians. Then he embarked on what he feared might be his last mission.

On a winter night in 1977, Yannoula Georgiades became car sick. Her father had barely managed to slow down for her to move to the back seat, when he initiated a thoughtless overtaking just outside of Zagreb. They were one day late, and for a brief moment, Yannis Georgiades allowed himself to become what he never became otherwise: restless. The heavily loaded Saab contained all the couples’ earthly possessions, because Yannis Georgiades had decided to investigate whether, despite grammar’s claims to the contrary, there were actions in the past which had not yet been completed. In other words: this winter, Yannis Georgiades seriously contemplated moving back to Anopotamiés. As soon as he had pulled into the left lane, slippery as ice, he was forced to brake violently as a big truck came roaring towards them — and a few seconds later, the Saab slid sideways into a concrete mixer. Yannoula Georgiades was seriously injured. If it hadn’t been for her father’s deft reflexes, honed during hockey games, she would have died.
     After three weeks at the Zagreb general hospital, Yannis Georgiades helped aphasic Yannoula into the backseat of a used Skoda that he had purchased after having sold their undamaged belongings. Instead of continuing to his beloved native village, Yannis Georgiades returned, through snow-covered Europe, to the only place where he knew his daughter could count on qualified help: the university hospital in Lund. As he rolled off the ferry across the sound from Copenhagen a few days later, he decided to make a detour by way of Tollarp. But as Yannis Georgiades knocked at the door of Anita Hansell, who had moved home and taken back her maiden name, his former wife explained that she wanted nothing to do with her daughter. “Your sins have come home to roost,” was all she said between hiccuppy sobs — fortunately not to Yannis Georgiades, but to herself as, later the same evening, she studied her bloated face in the bathroom mirror mottled with spicks of toothpaste.
     Anita’s recalcitrance hurt Yannis Georgiades. Only a week later he left his position as athletics teacher at the high school outside of Lund where, a few months earlier, he had asked for — and been granted — one year’s sabbatical for “a sojourn abroad.” Yannis Georgiades also let the management of a local hockey club know that he was no longer available for playing coach. “My love for ice has been crushed.”

This may provide a good opportunity to mention a few last things about Yannis Georgiades’s relationship to water, especially in its frozen form. Let’s shake the kaleidoscope one final time and bring it to our mind’s eye. Once the plastic pieces have settled and our eye has gotten used to the foreign pattern, we shall discover a beloved person, dressed in a white shirt and apron the upper part of which has been tugged into the lining of his black pants. He is standing behind a bar counter, with his right hand stuck in his pocket and the left elbow poised on the polished linoleum disk. In his hand, he’s holding a . . . No. Let’s wait with what he’s holding.
     What is it that’s different with this image? It’s not the wavy hair, which may have grayed at the temples, but still suffers from dandruff. It’s not the checkered mustache that adorns the upper lip, nor the toothpick-less lips below it. Having studied the image for a while, we realize it can only be the waist. Yannis Georgiades — for it’s him, it’s our titan who’s standing behind the counter — still has the same hairy underarms, the same bullet-shaped biceps, and the same muscular shoulders he had when we got to know him a brief eternity ago. But he’s also sporting a belly big as a heap of laundry. (It must be years since he forgot it on his washboard.) Now he shifts his weight by placing his feet wider apart, putting his right elbow, too, down on the counter. Perhaps now we may describe what he’s holding in his hand? No, there’s still some time left.
     Let’s mention instead that Yannis Georgiades finally returned to his beloved Anopotamiés. This happened when Yannoula — who just left us to get some napkins — was released from her physiotherapy at Lund University Hospital in April 1979. A month later, Yannis Georgiades helped his daughter on with the seat belt, then OA914 folded out its landing wheels, and prepared for the bouncy touch-down on the outskirts of Salonika. “The crown jewels have returned,” Yannis Georgiades proclaimed smiling, looking his daughter in the eyes. At the airport, they were met by Demos Kouretzis, a cab driver who had been given the lucrative task of driving two Swedes “to some godforsaken hole up in the mountains.” That’s why, at first, he didn’t want to believe that the rotund man with two suitcases in one hand and a girl’s paw in his other really was his customer. But when Yannis Georgiades explained he had come to complete certain actions that had not been completed in the past, Demos Kouretzis realized he wouldn’t be driving two blonds, but just another exile who was returning home in time for what looked to become a landslide for the Socialists in the coming elections.
     And now, surely, we may devote our attention to what Yannis Georgiades is holding in his hand?
     Not so fast. Time doesn’t run quite that speedily. There’s still enough left to recall what Yannis Georgiades told Demos Kouretzis during the four-hour drive up into the mountains, on ever narrowing, ever winding roads. We may mention not only what we’ve described thus far, as conscientiously as the cab driver’s recollection allows us, but also that Yannis Georgiades explained, to the increasingly surprised Kouretzis, that he had returned to give life to his village. At this, Yannis Georgiades, laughing, declared he didn’t intend his good muscle, nor his daughter, despite the fact that Yannoula was carrying her own very special crown jewels — “don’t you, mátia mou?” — and most assuredly would make the boys’ heads spin, of that Mr. Kouretzis could be certain. No, Yannis Georgiades was thinking of something very different. Yannis Georgiades was thinking of the water he planned to lead straight into his beloved home village, so that there would no longer be only stone, gravel, and pine needles in Anopotamiés. “And a couple of toothless yia-yiás . . .” The heavier of the two suitcases in the trunk of Mr. Kouretzis was filled with modern literature concerned with drilling, canalization, and related issues. “But the true miracle is right here,” Yannis Georgiades told the driver, enigmatically tapping his breast.
     Time is running out . . .
     Yes, yes. Let’s just add that what Demos Kouretzis didn’t know was that Yannis Georgiades was carrying a document in the inside pocket of his new jacket which was considerably more valuable than the two Swedish passports for which there was also space. As Yannis Georgiades had prepared his return to his native village during a one-week visit earlier the same year, he had realized he would never be able to live in the ramshackle dwelling his mother had left him. The wall that had disappeared in the landslide of 1963 had been replaced, scantily, with cardboard and plastic sheets which, lately, bad weather had scattered in the adjacent olive groves. The old iron bed in which he had spent so many nights as a boy, he discovered at his neighbor’s, where it did service as rusty bedding for lazy chickens. In a rotting cupboard in the kitchen, Yannis Georgiades discovered a bag which neither chickens nor mice had managed to open, despite repeated attempts. As he opened it, he found a brown envelope that contained a copy of his own textbook in Modern Greek. Folded into the volume, which, as far as he could tell, his mother had never consulted, was a paper clipping from February 1968, on which his name, abbreviated, had been underlined with a ballpoint pen he now remembered Anita had given him. Yannis Georgiades shook his head. If, one day, he’d return, it wouldn’t be to this ruin, where everything that remained of the walls, floor, and roof gave witness of past actions that had been completed long ago. Instead he went to the village square and ordered a glass of retsína in the sticky penumbra of the local kafeneíon. Waving away a couple of flies, drugged by winter sleep, he looked the owner in his watery eyes and asked: “Costas, how much you want for this place?”
     So, that’s enough.
     Soon. Before we conclude, we’d just like to add that Yannis Georgiades bought Costas Skourtos’s café for what he, as a Swede, considered a song and, as a Greek, an entire symphony. Fortunately, the Swedish part of him conducted the negotiations. During the months following Yannis and Yannoula Georgiades’s return to Anopotamiés, the father fixed up the place. In time for the tourist invasion in August — some fifty former inhabitants returning from Athens, another handful arriving in a polished Opel and one in a used Mercedes, from Nürtingen and Hildesheim, respectively — in time for what he preferred to call “the high season,” Yannis Georgiades proudly opened the shutters of his “gafé” equipped with the finest plastic chairs, a new stereo set, and a shining freezer behind the counter. The sign post that the village carpenter had painted with such care announced that the new owner, “Y. Georgiades WITH DAUGHTER,” spoke not only Greek — “vi talar flyttande svenska,” “wir spreschen deutsch,“ and “we speek english, too.” Since then, displayed on a shelf next to the upside-down glasses and bottles, there’s an old wrist watch of Soviet make, a stack of books in hydrology, as well as a couple of volumes that Yannis Georgiades would have done well to consult before he told the carpenter what he wanted him to paint on his signpost.
    And now, finally, it’s time to focus our eyes on what Yannis Georgiades is holding in his hands this date-less day so many years after he returned to his beloved Anopotamiés while Yannoula, smiling, is picking up the sticky piece of baklavá that two-year old Yannakis just spat on the floor. But . . . Wait. As we lift our gaze and allow it wander up along Yannis Georgiades’s left arm, climbing over the thick golden bracelet and an Omega watch, we find that he isn’t holding anything in his hand. His fingers are glitteringly wet, and the ice cube which he just used to illustrate the phenomenon of “incomplete action in the past” has disappeared.

Smiling, Yannis Georgiades dries his hands and pours us a glass of ouzo. “The last thing my mother told me before I left was: ‘Water is not everything in life, Yannis. There are tears, too.’”