Niki by Christos Chomenidis

Author:Christos Chomenidis [Chomenidis, Christos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

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the question for Antonis, then, was how to leave the country. He pondered it from every possible angle, until finally rejecting it as impossible.

Even if we managed to obtain fake passports and slip through the police’s fingers at the airport or the harbor, we would be unable to take the Kremos sovereigns with us. Smuggling currency out of the country was severely punished, all the more so if the currency in question was gold. This, however, had not kept many black marketeers from finding safe harbor for their fortunes in Switzerland. There was always the option, of course, of traveling with empty pockets, but what were we to do once at our destination? We would have to start from nothing.

The mere thought of it sent shivers down Antonis’s spine. It took him back to his father, stooping over his cart, picking up condoms and cigarette butts on Syngrou Avenue. It reopened an adolescent wound much deeper than he had thought possible. Antonis could endure anything—prison, exile, torture—except for the feeling of being trapped at the bottom of the pile, a nobody among nobodies, a stranger in a strange language, banished from his Party and his homeland, only to end up the most wretched of wage slaves. What’s more, he was no longer nineteen but forty-two, a man past his prime with early stages of farsightedness. His prospects included coal mining (although he’d be pushing it, at his age), street sweeping, or in the best-case scenario, dishwashing in some seedy dive. No, no matter how much he might protest to the contrary, he just did not have it in him to begin all over again, neither to recalibrate plans for an entirely new future nor to draw strength from the past. He would wither and die, and wouldn’t even leave us a few gold teeth as inheritance. Unlike my grandfather Anestis, his teeth were in excellent condition.

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