Tears of Steel

By Jacques G. Greco

Haunted by the faded ghost of an unforgiving father that he is unable to forget and the tender shadow of a girl’s smile that he can barely remember, he fills his career-driven life with self-indulgent distractions to escape his pain: travel, adventure and, most notably, beautiful women. Yet, he cannot escape her.
Each time her spectral image appears he breaks off whatever current relationship he is involved in, mercilessly shredding to pieces the hearts of innumerable women along the way.
Many times he comes to the brink of placing her somewhere at the outer limits of his memory, but he never manages to. And the lingering face continues to torment him. That is until he feels the frozen kiss of death approaching in the moments before a nearly fatal crash.
Behind a bloodstained dashboard, the shadow of her smile appears once more, and gradually his memory returns home. She was the only woman he ever loved but he lost her in a fatal car accident. She had promised to always be by his side, to return even from death in order to be with him. Will she keep her promise? Is it only a dream? And yet, dreams sometimes come true.
A beautiful tale of fathers, friendship, love and loss, romance and hate, professional success and personal disaster, all encompassed by the twilight of a captivating mystery, “Tears of Steel” offers profound insights into our most personal relationships and our deepest emotions.
Incredible and fascinating; one man’s quest for happiness, filled with profound discourse revealing timeless truths that too frequently remain hidden to us all.
“Tears of Steel” may not change your life, just the way you live it and by so doing you may be able to remember who you were before you were told who you should be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9789609277853

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Index

1 The Green Ogre

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

Of all the trials and tribulations from my childhood that left their mark on my soul, by far the most dreadful was the anguish brought on by the green Ogre. Even the double occupation of Greece by the Axis forces during the Second World War, the Great Famine of 1941-42, and the civil war that erupted after Greece's liberation in 1944 did not taint my childhood memories — and subsequently my entire life — as deeply as this monster’s vile and venomous poison.

This loathsome thing took up residence in our home when I was still a very young boy. It hid in the coal stacks of our dark cellar and would come out now and again, leaving behind it a foul stench and toxic malevolence as it slithered vociferously around the rooms of our home one by one before retreating once again to the cellar with the coal stacks.

I had three friends back then. The first — by far my best friend throughout my childhood years — was my dog, Wolf. Wolf was an enormous black German Sheppard and he and I were inseparable. There was no one in the world who understood me as well as my friend Wolf; whenever I wanted to talk, Wolf would dutifully listen, leaning his head first to one side then the other, without judgment and without conditions.

My second childhood friend was a man named Alfredo. Alfredo was a chubby fellow, always well-dressed in his sparkling Italian soldier’s uniform, with colorful feathers tucked into the band of his wide military hat which always sat perched a little skewed on his round, gentle face. He was a happy-go-lucky man, and whenever he came strolling down our street, his customary morning stroll invariably taking him in front of our house, more often than not, he would be whistling a cheery tune. Routinely he would stop and, after a quick, surreptitious survey of the street from left to right, would call me over and would take a small packet wrapped in newspaper from his jacket pocket. He would hand it to me with a wink, a small smile spreading across his friendly features. I would grab the packet greedily and run to the protection of my house, fearful that the bigger children who patrolled the neighborhood might steal the packet and the hard, delicious chocolate within. Besides the chocolate, Alfredo taught me how to say grazie, and every time I said it, he would respond with a good-humored prego. That, as far as I can recall, made up our entire conversation.

My third friend, a tall, hulking soldier who had recently run into some trouble with his squadron, was a man named Fritzl. He was from a mysterious place my uncle called Austria. I didn’t know exactly where this Austria was but I imagined it to be one of the many small villages scattered on the other side of our island. Fritzl stayed by himself in the basement of the house across the street from ours; a house sequestered and occupied by German soldiers. There were bars on the windows of his basement room and he was never allowed out. My uncle told me he was imprisoned for being a ‘communist’. This was another thing I did not understand but, unable to ascertain a satisfactory answer from the adults, I decided to put my young mind to work and concluded that being a ‘communist’ was similar to having lice, or whooping cough, or tuberculosis or any of the other myriad horrible illnesses that pestered the children of the island during those difficult times and kept them quarantined inside for weeks on end.

Since communism was an illness I’d never heard of before, I decided that Fritzl must have caught it in his village back home in Austria. Fritzl’s blonde hair and blue eyes, something rare among the dark-haired swarthy Greek town folk of my experience, fascinated and intrigued me more than the possibility of contracting a rare, and apparently fatal, disease, so I put my fears of catching communism aside and set out to befriend the tall Fritzl. So, one day, I gathered the courage to drag the big wicker chair from our front yard across the road to the barred wooden window and sit with him. Despite the fact that neither of us spoke the others language, our friendship blossomed and it wasn't long before we began spending hours discussing what were, for a young boy, weighty and serious matters but, for him, must have seemed little more than a guiltless respite from his otherwise tortured thoughts.

I came to recognize a deep pain in his liquid blue eyes and sensed suffering in the tone of his foreign words. I imagined that he too could recognize the deep pain in my own eyes and perhaps even sense it in my voice. Had we not become comrades? Did we not understand each other perfectly? We were two men cast out from the world and destined to carry the burden of our secret agony forever. I did not know then how short a time forever can be.

On the days when he seemed particularly sad, I would sneak the French textbooks my mother had kept from her years in the ‘Lycée Français’ over the street to his window, piling them up in the wicker chair and dragging them with effort to Fritzl’s lonely window. I would let him flip through the pages with the pictures and gush out streams of excited narrative whenever there was something I felt enthusiastic about. I'm not sure he understood a word of my descriptions but he listened with an intense interest that I found encouraging.

Later, detecting that these books alone were no longer enough to cheer him up, I brought him a wooden cross which I had stolen from my mother’s storage trunk. It was a very special cross, made of olive wood and hanging on a thin, leather thong. My mother had told me that it had magical powers and could take away all my fears and sorrows any time I touched it. I hoped that it would also help my new companion overcome his own terrors.

And so it was. In the mornings, Alfredo would walk past our house in his lazy, cheerful stride-whistling his pretty tune, sometimes stopping to give me a delicious packet of sweet chocolate, sometimes sharing a funny story that I only partially understood but his gesticulations would always made me laugh.

I would them drag the wicker chair, which was too heavy for me to carry, from our front yard to the barred window of Fritzl’s basement cell across the street. There, I would visit with my friend from the village of Austria who had caught the dreadful ‘communism’ and been imprisoned for it. Uneven white clouds floated past in the pale Lesbian mid-morning sky, while the cicadas, hidden in the creaky, sap-laden almond trees chirped the minutes by and the smells of hyacinth, roses and jasmine infused the shimmering air.

But this idyllic tranquility never lasted long. Each day, as lunchtime approached, a sense of dread would steal over me. My attention would dart from Fritzl and land itself on a point at the end of the dusty street where, at any moment, my father would be appearing on his way home from the bank where he worked. I feared this time of day because, with my father’s arrival, it was a safe bet that, so too, the green Ogre would emerge from its hiding place in the basement of our house. My fear was accordingly strong and it was not unusual for me to wet myself as I laboriously hastened to drag the wicker chair back to our front yard. I knew that I would get a spanking from my mother for this, but the fear of being spanked was nothing compared to the fear I had of the green Ogre.

At some point, and for reasons I never fully understood then, the German soldiers were gone and, with their departure, I also lost my friend Fritzl. The day they left, I went desperately searching for him. I could not believe that Fritzl would have left without as much as a goodbye to me. A quick inspection of the barred window made it evident he was not in his basement room. The front door to the now abandoned house stood wide open and so I decided to check inside. In one of the rooms was a long table loaded with plates of half-eaten food; most of which I had never seen before. In the middle of it was, among other delicacies, the leftovers of a roasted pig and on the floor, next to each chair, it looked and reeked as if people had been vomiting. I suddenly felt disgusted and ran out to the backyard to get some fresh air.

As I stepped into the cool, sweet-smelling air, I saw Fritzl lying lazily on the grass napping in the warmth of the noonday sun and I was happy with the thought that he must finally be recovering from his communism. I made my way through the tall, unkempt grass meaning to wake Fritzl up and inform him as well as I could of the departure of the German soldiers. As I approached him, I slowly came to the terrible realization that my friend from the village of Austria, who had listened to me with such intensity and sorrow in his blue eyes, was not sleeping at all.

Despite the warm sun, his skin was a pale, chalky white against the bleached grass, the only color on his face now was a small, spreading crimson dot splashed in the center of his forehead. In his clenched hand he held the magic wooden cross on a thin, leather thong.

I thought then, as I have many times since, that at least holding that small wooden artifact, he died without fear or distress and that he was now free of whatever had caused the deep pain which we had come to recognize in the other's eyes. One cannot overestimate the value of insignificant things to keep the snake at bay. Saint George slew the great dragon with nothing but a wooden spear after all and a mere crust of bread reminds the faithful of Christ's earthly form. The small things matter.

Grabbing the cross from Fritzl's dead hand, I ran horrified back to the safety of our house. This was my first up-close experience with death. The snake had wrapped itself around my impermanent heart for the first time and the loss of my friend Fritzl had left a deep fracture in my uncomplicated view of the otherwise very complicated world I was living in during these first years of my life. However, I soon learned that death was an inevitable and, in those days, an all too common part of everyday reality.

There was a time shortly afterwards when an odd thing happened that somewhat helped me forget this great loss and my first encounter with the inevitability. On a late autumn evening, when the mild winds were rich with the scent of resin from the groaning conifers that grew at odd angles on the surrounding mountains; my cheerful chocolate-bearing friend, Alfredo, along with some of his Italian companions, came to stay with us. He proceeded to spend the entirety of his time with us hiding in our basement with his colleagues. But by now, I had become used to adults acting in incomprehensible ways and hiding from one another. What truly worried and frightened me was that he no longer whistled his happy tunes or smiled at me in the same joyful way. I was however a little worried that he too might be suffering from a bout of communism, but I didn’t have time to find out because something far more intriguing had happened.

Around this time, my neighbors began talking about the terrible ‘arapades’¹ that were coming to our island. From what I could understand, arapades were dark-skinned dragon-people that spat fire, who liked to cut out the tongues of small children and eat them. I was so horrified that for a long time I kept my mouth shut in case one of them came to our island earlier than expected and, hungry from his journey, decided to snack on my own tongue!

On that day when the dragon-people were due to arrive, endless lines of people came down from the mountains and paraded through the streets leading to the harbor with malicious looks on their careworn faces. These were the mountain men, muscular old farmers and their sons, deeply tanned from years spent laboring in the soil under the hot Mediterranean sun. Next to them marched their valiant women in colorful kerchiefs and faces hewn to a rude yet perfect beauty by the worries of mothers and wives and women and in between this throng raced adolescent boys and girls. Many held pitchforks, mattocks, pickaxes and other frightful weapons and shook these menacingly at the unseen arapades all the while shouting hard, sharp protests and chanting in unison against the dragon-people’s expected arrival².

As they passed in the front of our house, our housemaid Anna came out to join the horde. She sang in her own village dialect about a king that would send us Scobie³. I did not really understand any of this. I was not afraid of Scobie and, despite being afraid of losing my tongue, I was not truly afraid of the dragon-people either. Instead, I was hopeful for what the dragon-people could do for me. A secret prayer rose up from deep within me, a prayer that one of these creatures would come and kill the green ogre that was hiding in our house.

It occurs to me now that throughout my childhood, I had never actually seen the green ogre, so I could not describe what it looked like. Nevertheless, I was positive that the dragon-people, with their magical powers, would be able to see it and slay it. To my disappointment, my prayer was never answered. The green Ogre had, for a short time, gone into deep hiding. I suspected it was because it too, was frightened of the dragon-people; or perhaps it was afraid of catching communism from Alfredo and his Italian friends that were hiding in our basement. Whatever the case might be, the Ogre had vanished and its place was a tense, pregnant waiting that seemed to stretch out over the dark autumn sea and could be seen etched in the faces of the adults around me.

One of Alfredo’s friends, Mr. Antonio, won my trust through his gentleness and politeness. He was a tall, well-spoken man who wore tailored, civilian clothing including a shiny scarf around his neck that was fastened with a real pearl-pin. He told me he'd been an ambassador for Mussolini’s government and, although I did not really understand what that meant, it did not matter to me. The thing that did matter was that Mr. Antonio was the only one of Alfredo’s friends that I could easily communicate with because, like me, he spoke French. I suspected that he understood Greek as well, but, as he never let on, I kept this suspicion to myself.

It was one of the few times in my childhood I could say I was pleased at my mother’s unrelenting insistence that French be the only language spoken at home. Two things were always very important to my mother during my early years and these she imposed upon me with strict, levied execution, often accompanied with a good spanking. These two commandments were to always address my parents in the plural, and to speak only French at home. Not surprisingly, I detested both of these rules. She had embroidered all my sweaters with the name Jacques, and on my school books, she wrote this same francophone version of my name. Even my first passport was issued with this name. As the years passed, I occasionally came to question what name I had truly been baptized under, since Jacques is not a Greek name.

Some evenings, I would go down into the basement holding a tallow candle and bring our guests a small flask of home-made wine and a plate with some food that my mother had cooked for them, usually dried cornbread and beans. Times were tough and food was in short supply, even on the island.

There were times when I would find the once cheerful Mr. Antonio silently crying alone in a corner of our basement. Today, one feels an inexplicable sadness and embarrassment confronted with the sight of a grown man crying but in those days it was all too common; there was much to weep for. Eventually, I found the courage to ask him why he cried in silence and he explained as best he could that he had a child close to my age, a little girl, back home in Italy, whom he had never seen. I felt great a sadness for Mr. Antonio and made a point to pray that, one day, he would reunite with his daughter. I often thought about what it must be like for his little girl to be without her father. I had no way of knowing then that this would not be the last time Antonio's daughter would be a part of my prayers and my life.

One day, as suddenly as the German soldiers that had departed before them, the Italians hiding in our basement were gone. The green Ogre, who had seemed absent for such a while, returned to our home and, once again, took up residence in the dark coal stacks. I never went down there voluntarily again after that. I was determined that, if the green Ogre wanted to torture me, it would have to come out of hiding to do so.

When the civil war broke out, some short time after the departure of our Italian guests, it became an almost a daily occurrence to see a funeral procession pass by our house; the brown, black or white painted wood coffin emblazoned with a raised gold cross on the lid and held high by the shuffling pall-bearers. The crowds of on-lookers spitting on the ground as the coffin passed would swell and sway like waves on the sea and kick up the hot dust.

I came to anticipate the reactions of the adults in my town. If the procession included a town band, then the deceased was undoubtedly a gendarme. The mood of these funerals was one of righteous justice. ‘It served the dead man right for having fought against our noble side.’ If, however, there was no band, I knew there would be a more sympathetic mourning. People would say things like ‘what a pity’ and ‘palikari’⁴. I did not understand what the real difference was between the two types of funerals. After all, dead was dead. But I could always judge what the mood of the day would be based on the type of funeral procession. Frequently, I would hear the adults whispering in hushed, muted voices that the ‘dead one had been killed by his very own brother’. So, not wishing to be imprudent, I added a request for no siblings in my nightly prayers, and, as it turned out, He has, for once, listened to my petitions.

The civil war was a tumultuous and dangerous time in our island town. Many nights I was jolted awake by the sound of echoing gunshots in the streets. The next morning, I and the other older children of the streets around our house would race to find the bloody and bullet-riddled bodies strewn behind crumbling, pock-marked gypsum walls or awkwardly splayed out on the ground as if they had been running when shot and simply dropped. The true face of death is neither ugly nor grand. It is simple and unpretentious and, although I did not know any of these lifeless young men as I had Fritzl, I could not help but feel an ache of sorrow and regret at the passing of yet more souls.

The goal was to find a body before anyone else. If successful, the reward might consist of some remarkable soldier paraphernalia: revolvers, bullets, hand grenades and a host of other interesting toys any six-year-old would consider irresistible. I would run as quickly as my legs would carry me through the muddy streets and ruined houses, in my heart the hope that one day I might strike it rich and find a handgun and, rising to the heroic challenge, use it to kill the green monster. Perhaps it was fate watching out for me, or perhaps my young legs were never able to carry me to these spots where gunfire had been heard the night before in time to find the prize but, whatever the cause, I was never successful in finding a gun or a grenade.

Bullets though fetched a high price with the older boys for they knew how to make firecrackers with the gunpowder. For a single bullet they would give me a bundle of hair from a horse’s tail, the perfect material for making a fishing line. Along with a handgun to kill the green Ogre, I had also hoped to find some dynamite. I had heard that anglers would give you a basket full of fish for just one stick; but that too never materialized!

Fishing was a passion of mine. My uncle George had taught me to fish when I was just three years old and from that moment on, I was intensely and deeply enthusiastic about it. Whenever I was able to liberate myself from my mother’s ever-watchful eye, I would rush down to the beach, Wolf obediently trailing at my heels. Together, we would collect small crabs, shrimp and anything edible that we could find. Wolf helping to dig up clams and presenting them to me with obvious pride; his wagging tail, always a dependable and cheerful indication, spraying sand and brine everywhere; eager to get my praise in return for his efforts. I would eat our catch raw right there, with Wolfe sniffing at it disdainfully and deciding such food was not fit for canine consumption. The older boys had warned me, however, never to eat something out of the sea if there was a corpse floating nearby. I obeyed them without question whenever I have seen a ‘floater’.

The biggest discovery I made was when I learned to attach a bent sewing pin to a string of horsetail hair. This was the ideal fishing line for a six-year-old boy who had images of a catch twice his size swimming around in his active imagination.

Predictably, on these days that Wolf and I managed to escape to the beach, a vicious spanking awaited me at the hands of my mother when we returned. But this never deterred me from repeating my beautifully illicit escapes at each and every opportunity available.

Sadly though, I could never escape the lunchtime hour. The fearful green ogre that lurked in the depths and shadows would rise silently during that time. It would sound throughout the house in the form of accusations that my mother would hurl at my father right after we had finished eating lunch and would poison everything that was near it, it's hot, foul breath filling the rooms and my heart with dread. It always started with a roaring din that would slowly transform into spiky nagging, then the cross-examinations and grilling until finally the monster, momentarily spent, collapsed into tears.

Since another of my mother's many rules was that I was not allowed to leave the table until she gave me permission, I was forced to witness these confrontations daily; I felt suffocated by the thick, viscous rage which was worse than any dust cloud left by the covey of hand grenades that frequently fell into the bombed out streets. When my mother would give me permission to leave the table, I would rush my escape followed by the only remaining member of my trio of friend's; to the refuge of the cool, wild and welcoming seashore. On the way, I would talk to Wolf about the green Ogre revealing to him that I did not understand why it had come to dwell in our home. I had a hunch that he understood much more than I did; he always understood my moods.

Those afternoon escapes were always the best for me, as I knew that the green Ogre would be busy all afternoon grinding its teeth and howling at its victim, and that no one would even think about me. I would, stripped naked, swim to the big rock the islanders called Solitude, followed faithfully by my dog.

Solitude was my secret bastion, a stronghold against the world. As I climbed to the top of the citadel and invited my childhood dreams to erase my woes, the atmosphere there charged with the smell of iodine and salt, I would, upon reaching the summit, lie on my back and watch as the clean, white clouds drifted endlessly across an ultramarine sky, sketching out their own ancient stories. Many a time, I let the soft splash of the waves below lull me off to sleep. Inevitably, on these days when I fell asleep, I would awaken hours later and rush home, knowing that the harsh punishment that awaited me would be unbearable. In reprimand for my long absenteeism, my mother would lock me in the dark coal cellar, precisely where the green Ogre had its lair. My mother, knowing my fear of the basement, frequently chose this form of punishment for what she deemed to be my misdeeds, locking me in there for hours on end.

I used to sit against the wall, horrified, with eyes wide open, worried that the monster would appear from behind the coal stacks and devour me whole. Although it never emerged and I never saw its face, for many years afterward, I was unable to even touch coal.

Sometime before finishing elementary school, I learned that the green monster in the coal cellar had a name and that his name was jealousy. I came to realize that, unlike me, my father did not know the monster’s name, as I had never heard him use it. It was clear to me that my mother, on the other hand, was very well acquainted with it. She would demonstrate her knowledge on occasions when she would tenderly put her arms around one of the other children in my age group as we played happily in the yard, making a great show of lavishing attention on them. All the while, she stealthily watched for my reaction, only ceasing her display of adoration when I had been successfully reduced to tears. The Ogre was contented only when it could put an end to any hint of happiness. I did not know at the time the exact reason why I cried. I only knew that it hurt and so I cried. It appeared to me then that she drew enormous amounts of pleasure from my youthful sadness and the graceless, green jealousy that must have flashed from my eyes.

When, some twenty years later, I came to see and hate within myself this very same green monster that was then implanted in the dark cellar of my own heart, I started an intense war against that Ogre myself, but it took me many a year to be free of the acrimony and evict this parasite.

At some point in my early life’s pupillage, a gentle aunt pulled me aside and tried to explain to me what was happening in my family. This was how I came to learn the name of the burning green monster that lived in the coal cellar of my childhood home and heart. Although I did not fully comprehend what the monster’s game was or even how it was that my tears quenched the great thirst that would grip the green Ogre during these engagements, I did finally come to understand that the monster and my mother were somehow a unified team while my father and I were each on teams of our own, separated by a high wall of pride and an inexpressible love.

Occasionally, I was recruited arbitrarily by my mother to join her side. At these times, she would take me roughly in her arms and, from behind my perplexed and teary face, would hiss at my father, Just wait and see… this boy here will punish you severely one day.

These statements would always leave me startled and confused. I could not see any reason I would ever have to penalize my father, much less why the penalty had to be a severe one. The tight, angry embrace of my mother and the heavy spitefulness that rose in the air made me so very uncomfortable that there were many times I felt like vomiting. This did not stop my mother from repeating the same speech time and time again. I felt in those moments like a football, the ones that the older boys made out of old rags wound tight and tied in a ball that they would sometimes let me play with. I reasonably suspected that my father hated me a great deal, if only in advance for the penalty that I would impose on him some day, and so, he pushed me away. I wanted so badly to explain to him that it was not ever my intention to punish him; but I was afraid to approach him.

This proud man never hugged me or told me that he loved me the way I sometimes caught my uncle telling my cousin and this only confirmed my suspicions that he hated me. This naturally prevented me from telling him how I felt. It was then and there I suppose that I began to hold him responsible for all of my life’s failures and despairs. To make matters worse, my mother seized every opportunity she could when we were alone to remind me of my duty to penalize him for all the harm he had inflicted upon her. She would fill my head with stories of his infidelity and heartlessness. This whole situation would have a strange effect on me; an effect that has stayed with me for my entire life.

At times, when the world I knew around me seemed so uncertain and precarious, I felt as though I was the only stable pillar of the family, charged with the responsibility of balancing the relationship between my parents, acting simultaneously as savior and avenger. At other times, I felt as though I was the sole reason for all their problems and therefore, my existence a thorn in their side and of little consequence. I loathed the feeling of being torn in two different directions, the chain that bound their lives together and the wedge that drove them apart. I would try to simply turn my brain off when my mother would speak of such things, allowing my mind to once again escape to the refuge of Solitude, my secret hideaway rock.

On those occasions when she had finished delivering her sermon, I would lie and give her my word that I would certainly not forget to punish my father; simply so I could be free to go down to the shore and climb up to my secret sanctuary where the green monster could not find me. I had no way of knowing back then that, some fifty years later, and long after his death, I would punish my father in an entirely different way than my mother had expected.

…

Those were my first steps on this greenish-blue planet, a prickly path strewn with war, deprivation, murder, fear, death, agony, insecurity and, above all, jealousy. I believed then, as I do now, that all of the innumerable terrible things of this world, hiding in the dark shadows of the snake's evil charms, are siblings of the green monster. They must be. But, in the head of a young, impressionable boy, many unanswered questions still whirled:

I had a father and a mother that gave birth to me that much I knew. I knew that most of the kids in my town also had a father and a mother, and so did my dog Wolf. I knew that all living things around me had a father and mother, but I could not figure out who the parents of the green Ogre were. Who had given life to the fiend and all of its vile siblings? What was the purpose of their existence and where did they come from? If I could locate the parents of the monster, perhaps I would be able to exterminate them before they could give birth to any more horrors. In this way, they would vanish from existence, and no child on earth would ever have to live with the fears that I, and many of my generation, did and still do. Unfortunately, I was unable back then to find answers to my questions.

This is truly a pity. During the last seventy years, I have seen the green devil and his numerous brethren destroy so much! I have seen them sneak into families, crawl into relationships and creep into friendships, poisoning these connections with their noxious breath. I have witnessed parents make a mess of their children’s tender feelings, brothers killing each other and families disbanding. I have seen youngsters unable to climb a rock and those who will never kick a ball because their limbs were stolen by land mines. Hand grenades still fall in many neighbourhoods. All over the world people are still being jailed for their beliefs and families are still being torn apart. And all the while the green Ogre and its horrible relatives proliferate like cockroaches.

But now, I have news for you:

After many years in couple counseling, this insignificant child who was frightened of the green Ogre, has finally managed to locate the parents of this dreaded beast. His father is ‘Egotism’ and his mother ‘Implacability’. Strange names perhaps, but I assure you that they are accurate. These two pretenders do not even have a house