Green Neon

5 The beginning of a wonderful friendship

Georgios accompanied him home because he wanted to take him to the meeting point with his namesake, the taxi driver - not out of curiosity at all, of course, but out of sheer friendliness. While the two were sitting on the balcony, he suddenly asked:

"Tom, are you a democrat?"

As exciting as Tom had found the last few days with constant political discussion, he had been looking forward to spending a carefree day with a boy who was always cheerful and apparently not in the least interested in politics. And now this.

Tom expressed a comprehensive commitment to the free democratic basic order, a sentence heard from German politicians all the time. That was a bit ironic, which luckily Georgios didn't notice.

An almost insoluble conflict of loyalties raged within the Greek boy. His family were loyal to the king, despite rumors that the king was not entirely innocent of the coup in Greece that he later fell victim to. On the other hand, he would have to agree with his sister Sophia, he said. She took the Democrat position: that power should be exercised by the people, not by a king or by a dictatorship.

Tom felt that the young King Konstantinos (the photo on top of the page) had little to offer politically besides good looks and some athletic achievements, an impression confirmed when in later life he was reborn as a Freiherr and briefly held a few ministerial posts in Germany, a career that, like the first time in Greece, was rather short.

But even the socialist and conservative politicians, who were locked in a permanent feud, had not managed to unite the country since the end of the civil war and enable people to make progress like in the European Economic Community. Their only success was in getting exorbitant payments from the United States, disguised as stationing costs for the Mediterranean fleet, for Greece's unique position as the only Western-oriented country in the Balkans, which covered up the country's dramatically poor economic situation.

To know one's way around this labyrinth, which also contained the ingredients of various communist, nationalist, anarchist and other parties and small groups, Tom's knowledge was not enough. So, for once, he answered as a politician: He expressed a resolute "however". That it was not right to expel the king, but that it was certainly not right to exercise a dictatorship. Georgios was not satisfied with this answer, but they adjourned further discussion.

It was time to leave for the meeting point with Georgios, the taxi driver. Tom scanned the taxi queue across the street. When he asked Yannis how he would recognize his brother's car, since all taxis were after all gray, he only said his brother would recognize him, adding the quip that there was only one person like Tom in Athens.

At that moment the left rear door of the last waiting taxi flew open. A tall boy with wild black curls jumped out, shouted some unintelligible words in Tom's direction and gestured violently for him to run away. Scraps of thought raced through Tom's brain. He cursed his recklessness on the subway: "If only I hadn't hummed Theodorakis!"

Already he saw agents knocking on Yannis' door. Someone must have overheard their conversation. He wished Christina was here and could tell him in which direction he should flee now. He took a few steps backwards, as if to put a little more distance between himself and the gesticulating boy, and was about to run when Georgios grabbed his arm:

"What's wrong with you?"

"That must be Nikos, the taxi driver's son. Something happened. Come on, we have to go!"

Georgios laughed uncontrollably and jumped again with pleasure. He then explained to Tom that the gesture that was used around the world to mean "run away" was the exact opposite in Greece: "Come here!"

"No wonder," thought Tom, "that this country is all haywire. How is that supposed to work when "nä" means "yes" and "run away" means "come here"? The only thing missing is that they nod their heads when they mean no."

He said goodbye to Georgios, who told him that he wanted to come to the beach the next day after all, as he generously explained, so that Tom wouldn't have to go to the sea alone with all the "crazy chickens".

Tom walked to the pedestrian crossing light and waited for it to turn red. Then he darted between the approaching, honking cars, patted himself on the shoulder when he arrived safely on the other side and was proud to have almost become a real Greek on the third day.

On the way from the airport to Piraeus, Stephanos had first scorned every red light with a "Tzzzz" squeezed out between his front teeth and then, of course, run it. He explained to Tom that traffic lights in Greece were only for tourists. The Greek, he added, who was known to be the best driver in the world, was not dependent on such disruptive devices as traffic lights or traffic signs and would therefore simply ignore them.

During his first sprint at the traffic light, which of course was intended primarily to impress his new friends, Tom was relieved to discover that Stephanos was right: Greek drivers accompanied the anarchic to suicidal behavior of other road users with loud noises, but they still put their foot on the brake.

Nikos came running toward him on the polished sidewalk, a lanky six-foot-tall boy who looked like he'd just worked on a construction site in his tattered gray pants and blue cotton shirt. In fact, he had helped Yannis build a garden wall. He ran laughing to Tom, punched him in the chest and said in a deep voice that didn't seem to match his appearance, in almost accent-free German:

"Hey, you gangster! How are you? Already shagged today, or just sang on the subway?"

Tom was used to a harsh tone from his boys' high school:

"Only twice today, but yesterday was good."

Much later, when they were laughing about this scene, Nikos explained to him that after a few weeks of German lessons he had found a few Jerry Cotton booklets and colorful, or rather mostly flesh-colored magazines on the beach, which was the first German literature he used to read night after night. That tracks.

"Welcome to Greece," Nikos beamed at him, hugged him and planted a kiss on each cheek. Tom beamed back. He suddenly had the feeling that he was witnessing the beginning of a wonderful friendship.

***

"I'll sum it up," the secret policeman said to his subordinates. "Our young German friend meets people from the resistance as soon as he is here. And with the son of a royalist submarine commander who retired immediately after the Colonels taking power. He gets to know someone "by accident" on the subway and chats with him for two whole hours. Risks being run over to get away from you and hops into a cab that was just waiting for him. We're staying with him. Who knows where it will take us."

The policeman shook his head. Were the socialists now using underage tourists as couriers?