The Stolen Life of a Cheerful Man

By Dimitris Politis

The Stolen Life of a Cheerful Man explores the contentious yet universal themes of intolerance and understanding, discrimination and acceptance, violence and forgiveness. Dimitris Politis plunges boldly into the reality of contemporary Ireland, but from his own Greek perspective, creating an extraordinary mirror between the two countries, where glittering Aegean waves are crowned by Atlanic rainbows. The reader is drawn into the story through its exciting twists and turns, interlinked throughout by a fast cinematographic pace. An excellent contemporary example of black fiction with a subtle and delicate deepening of sentiments, feelings, and beliefs rooted in human nature, the novel voices a loud protest against social and historical stereotypes and is a stern warning of how intolerance and ignorance can lead to disaster. In todays world, where countless countries are mired in financial crisis and where many forget the importance of tolerance and acceptance of their fellow human begins, the author cleverly reminds us that difference and diversity are universally present, shaping our world. This unique novel prompts us to remember that we are all born different and grow up differently, making each of us special in our own way, whatever our circumstances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496983640

Dimitris Politis

Dimitris Politis was born in Athens, Greece, spent his formative years on the Aegean island of Tinos, and later studied Economics in Greece and Classics and Literature in Ireland. He has lived in Greece, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Italy, Luxembourg and Belgium. An author of articles and reviews on international working conditions and occupational health and safety, he has also published several short stores. His first novel, The Stolen Life of a Cheerful Man, was published in Greek in 2012. His second novel in Greek The Next Stop will be published in 2014. He currently lives in Brussels, Belgium from where he travels frequently to his homes in Tinos and Ireland.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

22 December 2003, Monday, 7.12 p.m.

New York, United States

43724.png

There are moments in life when, in a quite unexpected place and time, we stumble upon a complete stranger who reminds us of someone we know – a long-lost friend, a distant family member, a familiar face from our past. It could happen while we are standing in a packed bus, whizzing through the drab anonymous suburbs of some big city, when a stranger stops next to us: a pale, middle-aged woman with dishevelled hair, wearing a grimy raincoat, weighed down by dozens of overstuffed plastic bags. Ready to pounce on the first available seat, she keeps peering inquisitively around her with intense suspicion of everyone and everything. One would swear that she looks exactly like the peerless Madame Violeta, the surly concierge of our childhood residence.

The experience can be repeated, somewhere distant and exotic at the far end of the earth, among the noisy stalls of a stuffy, packed theatre. Just as the lights are dimming for the evening performance, a single woman of a certain age, in her finest frills and steeped in perfume, rushes in to occupy the last vacant seat next to us. Amazingly, she is the spitting image of Miss Thanou, the plump, good-natured spinster from the unripe green days of our adolescence several decades ago. The lady who, squeezed into tight clothes, revealed unwittingly her succulent curves to the delight of her male students’ eyes, while vainly trying her utmost to perform the duties of a professor of music. And we, in our turn, repaid her generously by putting her through hoops every single day. The wild but still innocent environment of the upper sixth was a hardly tropical, but no less unpredictable and dangerous, jungle. Especially for those with the bad luck to be included among our beleaguered teachers.

Just so, some years back, one snowy evening in New York, among the brilliantly lit Manhattan shop-window displays, I came across a young man, the exact duplicate of Alkis. Alkis was my best pal: my closest friend in my childhood, my student years, and my youth. A small black-and-white photo of my first class of junior school, framed in fine silver, is still mirrored in the polished surface of the black grand piano in the foyer of our family home. It has stood there for years, proudly commemorating that deep and lasting friendship.

I don’t remember when it was taken. It must have been before some student parade on a national holiday. We’re both wearing white shorts, little white shirts, and matching dark-blue pullovers. We’re standing hand in hand with cheeky smiles as we look into the lens. Just behind us stands Christos, the third of our group, frowning and serious.

That evening, years later in New York, I came face to face with the stranger who reminded me of Alkis. Impelled by the thrusting crowd swarming around us, we scraped past each other with barely enough space to breathe. For a fraction of a second, I felt the imprint of his warm breath on my face. I was pushing through the brass revolving doors of a dazzling department store on Fifth Avenue as he emerged headlong, burdened with various packages and colourful bags emblazoned with the names of well-known brands. Slender, wrapped in a long camel coat with raised collar, a knitted burgundy scarf wound rather sloppily around round his long neck, he looked amazingly like my childhood friend. He seemed to be in a great hurry. He had exactly the same gangling figure and brisk impatient walk; the same long narrow face with its clear-cut planes, high cheekbones, and pale childish skin; the same insistent, searching, and rather supercilious glance; the same wild chestnut locks which fell in tumbled curls around his wide forehead; the same slightly sneering smile decorating his lips; and the same austere black eyes that could pierce right through you.

On innumerable occasions, acquaintances and friends automatically rejected him from their company after the first and only meeting, entirely because of that look. A single glance was enough to instantly unnerve you. The look was probing, arrogant, and sarcastic at the same time, and, combined with his normal slight ironic smile, it delivered silent, continual, and ruthless criticism of everyone and everything about him.

I paused for a moment, turning my head to glance discreetly at my friend’s lookalike. Just then, he turned towards me, and our eyes met. His gaze skewered me to that corner amid the colourful lights, the gift-wrapped parcels, and the cheery human multitude pulsating with life. Suddenly everything stopped dead, as though thunderstruck. I stood there like a pillar of salt, stony in the cold, light snow. Unwillingly, my mind began to race with breakneck speed into the dark labyrinth of the past. Dark paths and remote corners of memory, regardless of years of agonising effort to forget and bury them deep, emerged into the light. They took form and became flesh and blood before my eyes. Living pictures unfolded before me, one after another, slow, relentless, and tormenting. Planted at the same spot, frozen by the bitter cold and memory, I wondered once again why such things happened. There, just when I thought I could escape, when I thought that the dark chapters of the past had closed decisively, when I thought that the infected wounds of the past had healed over, I discovered, yet again, that none of that was so. A chance meeting with a total stranger was enough to prove it.

Standing ramrod straight on trembling feet, I wondered how it all could possibly have come about. Indeed, if I had really lived through those events of which the encounter with this young man on Fifth Avenue had reminded me, how could I have gone on normally afterwards? Had I really been continuing with my own life, or had I stolen and was living someone else’s life? Sunk in those black thoughts, I remained stupefied, standing by the door. For endless seconds, I lost all connection with my surroundings, unaware of what was happening around me, as impatient shoppers pushed by left and right.

My only reaction at that moment was to deliberately turn my head in the opposite direction, almost with revulsion, in order to avoid glancing at the young stranger. I pretended, I must confess without much success, that I was gawping at a Santa Claus who stood a little aside from the onrushing crowd. In a ragged costume and grubby false beard, he was loudly singing out-of-tune Christmas carols to the accompaniment of a rickety bell. In front of him, a rusty tin pot solicited the Christmas spirit – and the coins – of the passers-by, for the benefit of the homeless of the city and the Salvation Army.

Before I could recover my wits and dare to look towards him again, the hurrying stranger vanished into the snow, the lights, and the bustling crowd, perhaps to continue his Christmas shopping in the festive streets and avenues of the illuminated city throbbing with vivid holiday colours, life, and endless motion.

CHAPTER 1

25 August 1999, Wednesday, 6.30 p.m.

Athens, Greece

43730.png

The scorching August sun had slowly begun to sink, exhausted, towards the western mountains of Aigaleo, having mercilessly pounded the turbulent Greek capital for one more day. It was late afternoon in the spacious courtyard behind the old two-storey house in the northern suburbs of Athens. The afternoon breeze, picking up a little strength now and then, was vainly trying to cool the warm marble tiles of the courtyard. It brought in its wake the sweet odour of the overripe figs hanging from the aged trees which, for decades, had shaded one of the corners of the garden with their fluffy foliage. Trees and plants in the garden, seared by the pitiless rays of the noonday sun, rustled in the hot afternoon breeze while the polluted megalopolis struggled to breathe in the air of the August furnace.

As the sun kept completing its daily route to retreat into its western hideaway, the sky was lingeringly losing its intense blue. The bright colours of the day slowly faded, giving way to soft pale greys. The west was painted deep red. The surroundings were flooded with the voices of children playing and running blithely about the neighbouring terraces and gardens. The first lights had started to come on. The drone of TVs poured out from verandas and open windows at full blast, creating a clamorous backdrop to the summer twilight. The atmosphere was gradually changing, filling with scents. The heavy perfume, which had begun to seep from the night flowers and gardenias, mingled with the redolence of the frying courgettes which would soon grace the neighbours’ evening meal.

Lying lazily on an old wooden chaise, I had closed my eyes, enjoying with all my senses the end of the day and the slight hints of coolness brought by the first evening hours.

Hmm … such moments make the Greek summer unique, I thought, and raised myself slightly, leaning over to stroke Hercules. He, as though fully sharing my thoughts, looked me straight in the eye, languidly wagged his bushy cinnamon tail, and with slow, lethargic movements, lay down comfortably on the warm marble tile at my feet.

Just opposite, my mother, reclining at her ease on another chaise, leafed through a magazine.

You know, I’m thinking of enrolling in a post-graduate course in information science and European documentation at Trinity College when I go back to Dublin next week, I told her. It would be good for my career at the European Research Institute.

She lowered her paper to her lap and gazed at me affectionately with her turquoise glance from behind her plain, old-fashioned spectacles.

Another degree? Why do you want more degrees, my boy? Find a nice girl and get married so we can have a grandchild. It’s high time! she replied, and then, hastily changing her manner and tone of voice, rushed to conclude with a sigh, but I know that’s never likely to happen! Slightly annoyed and embarrassed, she raised her magazine in front of her face.

Hercules had spread out, his muzzle resting on my bare feet. I felt his hot uneven breath scorching my ankle. He went on pleading uninterruptedly for my attention with his fully devoted brown doggy eyes.

I rewarded him with an approving look for a bit and then turned towards my mother without speaking. What could I tell her anyway? We both knew she was quite right. For me, a scene involving family and children was unrealistic.

* * *

My homosexuality had revealed itself early on. As a small child, I started looking with a different eye at other boys, not at the little girls around me. It was confirmed later on when, as a teenager, I developed sexual urges and wet dreams. Their contents never included women. I was an only child, protected by the calm, prosperous safety of a typical bourgeois Athenian family. I’d never shown any signs of effeminacy in my behaviour or predilections. Although I could characterise myself as a shy, gentle, polite, and sensitive boy, I had spent my childhood in the sixties and seventies wandering freely in the quiet, safe streets of the central Kypseli district, which bore no similarity to what it is today. I spent endless hours playing happily in the freshly asphalted quiet streets of the time, showing a special bent for stone-throwing contests, football, and athletic competitions with the neighbourhood boys. Early on, I had an overwhelming fascination with big trucks. Who knows why? Maybe because of their hugeness to the eyes of a tot. The rusty dust trucks of the city, which passed twice a week clearing our neighbourhood of trash, were my darlings.

Deep inside, I still treasure early memories of one of my favourite games of my early childhood years: me standing up in my pyjamas, jumping joyfully on a blue velvet sofa in our lounge, which in my unlimited child’s imagination had been transformed into a huge refuse truck. I’d demand that the others throw me cushions, which my fancy converted into rubbish bags filling up my velvet truck. Although the prospect of their child becoming a happy dustman did not sit too well with my parents, they did find the whole business immensely funny and humoured me whenever I asked them to play. When all the cushions in the lounge were piled one on top of the other on the sofa, they dashed willingly to the bedrooms to bring new reserves of pillows to toss me. And finally, when they could find no more pillows, we ended up all together, dissolved in laughter, on the blue sofa in a pillow fight. I was about four or five.

Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that, contrary to common beliefs about people like me, I was never bothered about girls’ toys or dolls. They didn’t particularly attract me. Such stereotypes abounded in our days about everyone and everything – labels instantly applied with incredible ease and indescribable superficiality. My personal experience taught me that being homosexual does not automatically equate with being womanish, that is, thinking and acting like a woman or wishing to be a woman. I’d say just the opposite. I have always felt entirely a man; it’s simply that the objects of my affections are other men. I vividly remember special feelings and preferences for the same sex from a very young age, almost from when I developed memory. With simple childish logic, it never crossed my mind that it was anything unusual or that it should disturb me especially.

Sexual attraction to the same sex made its appearance in the first difficult years of my adolescence. It found me completely unprepared. At first, it took a while to understand exactly what was happening to me. And when I finally understood, my first reaction was utter panic. I was terrorised in every sense of the word. As a teenager, you try to blend as much as possible into the mass of other adolescents around you so they will accept you. To be completely different, outside the pattern, to stick out like a sore thumb among the others of your age group, is perceived by the teenage brain as being totally catastrophic - devastating. My panic was eventually replaced by recognition that there wasn’t much I could do to change the situation. I decided to try to ignore what was happening to me, to put it out of my mind, to not give it any further significance. The fear and first shock of discovery had made me believe, stupidly, that if I made nothing of my feelings, they would go away on their own, like magic. The pressure at school and from my friends was intolerable. To be different in those days was much worse than it is now. At best, I was a continual target of ruthless catcalls and harassment from my associates and fellow students. At worst, I could, for no reason, find myself hurled into some corner and left flat on the ground, half-stunned and bruised, with a few broken teeth.

To throw dust in their eyes, I tried two or three times to form platonic relationships with some girls of my age. At some point, I stopped having any relationships at all. I decided – simple-mindedly with the pure self-confidence and arrogance of my eighteen years – that that chapter of my life had closed for good. It would no longer concern me. I would just opt to be asexual. So I shut down whatever I could in myself and dedicated myself, undistracted, to my university studies.

Six years later, at age twenty-four, the inevitable occurred: my first sexual encounter with another man – impelled by chance and incontrollable curiosity – materialised in the form of a one-night stand with a stranger. This experience made me aware of one thing: I was more likely to become the next president of the United States than to change my sexual orientation and preferences. I reached the conclusion that it was simply a waste of time and energy not to accept who I was. It was as if I had ceased to fight a war. I decided not to resist any more, to give in to the whole idea. Thus, I settled for living a double life, often a hard, almost schizophrenic, existence. Such an existence still goes on today in the progressive societies, where we live amidst superficial tolerance but face unrelenting social pressures on whatever differentiates us from the majority, pressures which result in people like me being excluded and becoming marginalised simply because we have come into this peculiar world with an even more peculiar genetic makeup.

How can anybody program himself in advance for exactly who to love and who to fall in love with? Aren’t we all different after all? I had asked myself that over and over again, trying somehow to excuse and accept myself any way I could, to close my ears to the mockery, abuse, and insults I had always suffered for no reason, having hurt no one, solely because I was who I was, because I existed. I had been driven numerous times to the same conclusion by such experiences. The English adjective gay, which is now almost universally applied to people like me, with all its implied innuendo, is a total oxymoron, if not dead wrong. The real meaning of that word has to do with being jolly and cheerful, easy and carefree, pleasant, lively, and colourful – meanings with which I could never relate to my personal experience of the life of a gay, no matter how hard I tried.

So, like all the rest of us, I went on with my life, always on guard, keeping this particular part of myself and my experiences and preferences exclusively to myself or to the few others to whom I felt particularly close. Only those who I absolutely trusted knew anything about this part of me. To the rest, I was simply a successful young professional bachelor, prevented until now from having a family and children merely by the exceeding demands of his career and the vicissitudes of life.

That I chose to follow this path does not mean that I was ever a misogynist. There was never any reason to be; I never felt like that. On the contrary, all my life I was lucky enough to connect closely with, to admire and to deeply love with all my heart various women of all sorts and ages, although, I never remember feeling the slightest sexual interest for any of them.

My parents, intelligent, cultivated, and discerning people that they were, must have understood the whole story early on. They had undoubtedly passed through phases of deep and inexpressible anxiety, silent questioning, and tremendous guilt: What did we do wrong? How are we to blame that our boy is like this? Of course, as correct and enlightened parents, their first care and concern was the happiness and the good of their child, not how to impose their own preferences and wishes on his life. So they had sincerely and earnestly thought about, puzzled over, and, most of all, worried about how I would confront the general difficulty of life itself and its tricks, bearing the extra burden of such a defect. Happily, what people would say, or if they themselves would be judged, was of secondary importance to them.

In the end, common sense and their love for their child won out. They resolved with, I believe, considerable difficulty and effort, to quietly accept the situation and turn a blind eye without reproaches, threats, or ineffectual commotion. But they systematically avoided discussing the matter; even I never brought it up. It was the ultimate taboo in the family. After all, in spite of their permissive attitude, I’m sure that it wasn’t something that especially pleased them. I’d say the opposite. Certainly, as for many parents, the fact that their child would not have a family of his own, that they would never be able to hold a grandchild in their arms, that the family name would not be carried on, would have been difficult things to come to terms with.

* * *

Really, I thought, looking yet again at Hercules, who was still sprawled lazily on my feet, it would have been so much easier to pretend I was in love with some girl and invent a relationship for the eyes of the world. My green eyes, my presentable appearance, and my polite manners would have allowed me to make female conquests and easily carry on to the rest. So many unfortunate gay males in my position had done so, and men still go on doing it, either to face down different social or family pressures or to satisfy the common inclination to perpetuate the race and produce descendants. Even I had, countless times in the past, stared with some envy at new dads parading about; young lads proudly displaying their newborn chubby offspring, carrying on their shoulders an awesome toddler of a son or a simpering little darling of a daughter. I had learned early on that you can’t have everything; you just can’t have your cake and eat it too. So the idea of having my own children and the joys of paternity had pretty well been erased automatically the moment I consciously chose to follow my path.

Where would I be now? How would my life be if I had resigned myself and succumbed to that choice? I wondered as if I had not attended to my mother’s observations. Those thoughts filled me with melancholy.

The piercing squeal of the cordless phone which my mother carried with near-religious devotion – it was impossible to separate them any time of day – suddenly interrupted my ruminations and brought me abruptly back to reality.

Sometimes a sudden ring of the phone can turn things upside down in a second. We chase after one thing or another all our lives, rush to go ahead and finish everything we think is important, everything we have to do, without bearing in mind that we are nothing more than well-strung marionettes who move mechanically under the ceaseless direction of the skilful hands of the gods of chance, fate, and destiny.

From ancient times, two separate views and philosophies have been in permanent opposition: either our lives are predestined by an unseen superpower or we create our own lives, modifying things ourselves by our choices and our actions. I, like a true Greek, am partly determinist, but I suppose I fall somewhere in between: man can make choices and live his life according to what he chooses and does, but the opportunities he is granted and the corresponding ill fortune and pitfalls in his life are in some way predetermined by some invisible supernal will – a superhuman will with the same perfection and reason evidenced by our universe and its balance and function. So, as a rule, none of us has very much in the way of significant influence on the large or small opportunities, or on the large and small misfortunes, that come our way in our brief passage through life. We can destroy or enhance our lives, exploit our chances or not, and progress accordingly.

Nobody ever expects it, so we are always taken by surprise by the sudden irruptive call which can instantly change our intentions or the course of our lives, disorient us, or completely change our ultimate purpose. Telephone calls can bring happy news and spread immediate joy, laughter, and elation, and even, on some occasions, happiness. With the same ease, the telephone can carry sad news, pain, sorrow, and despair. It seemed that my turn had come to taste the experience of such a call. It came that particular evening in August, violently disrupting the rather calm tenor of my life that summer.

It’s for you, probably from Ireland, said my mother, who had immediately answered the telephone. Somebody’s asking for you, in English, who doesn’t hear too well. Before I could react, with one adroit, almost acrobatic movement, she turned and tossed the receiver with amazing accuracy into my arms. I rewarded her with a smile and a whistle of amazement and approval.

Distantly, broken up, I heard the penetrating voice of Derek on the other end of the line. I understood from the first word that something was wrong. He was speaking unusually slowly, almost syllable by syllable, like a first-grader learning to read, but as he went on, his speech picked up, increasing speed till finally he was gasping. Before I had a chance to express my pleasure and surprise at his unexpected call, his words were pouring out, one on top of the next without a breath between them, leaving me staggered as if by a violent blow, dragging me, like a raging river in full spate, into a whirlpool of bad news.

"Dimos, forgive me for bringing such bad news into your holidays, but I think that it’s time you knew. Rory was found dead three days ago; he was murdered… Someone went to gather peat in the countryside near Longford on Sunday morning and discovered the body by chance. Rory was inside his car, which was burnt and riddled with bullets. The murder must have happened at least twenty-four hours earlier, according to the medical examiner. The police had reported that the body was unrecognisable; it was in terrible shape. The car had been burnt out and was half buried in one of the local bogs. Whoever killed him had set fire to the interior of the car in order to conceal all the evidence and then pitched it into the bog. They must have thought the car would disappear on the