Some of them have a set of suitcases packed and ready and have bought a one-way open ticket to Zurich. Others are sticking pins into little wax effigies of Mr. Papaligouras or sending anonymous notes to Mr. Papandreou saying ‘Yankee go home!’
Still others have anchored their yachts off one of the Ionian islands with enough fuel on board for a quick dash across the Adriatic.
I myself have given a great deal of thought to what I would do if I woke up one day to hear the ‘Internationale’ blaring from the radio and discover that the only newspapers on sale were the Rizospastis and the Athens News.
To flee the country would be out of the question. Where would I go? Switzerland is too dull for words. Italy is just as likely to go communist as Greece and all that rich food in France would kill me within six months. In England, the immigration officer who looks at me suspiciously when I say I am only staying two weeks would certainly never let me in if I said I was intending to stay for good. In America, I would either get mugged in a hotel elevator, get caught in the crossfire between police and bank robbers or get kidnapped by some Symbionese lunatic and kept in a closet for six months with no Patty Hearst to keep me company either.
So I think the best thing for me to do would be to stay put and make the best of it.
Naturally, I would not be allowed to live in my villa at Psyhiko. That would be taken over by some minor official in the party machine. But I would not mind sharing a two-room flat in Peristeri with three other families as long as they did not spend too much time in the bathroom and did not play bouzouki records louder than 130 decibels—a sound level I will have got used to in the boiler factory to which I will probably be assigned.
I won’t need my car either because the boiler factory will be right next to the flat and not too far from the lecture hall where I shall have to go after work for my daily indoctrination on the duties and obligations of a productive worker in a socialist society.
The highlight of the evening will be the get-togethers with fellow workers after the lectures. Perhaps a game of chess with the attractive brunette in the assembly line opposite mine who won the Manolis Glezos Award for turning out more rivets in a day than any worker, male or female, in the entire Balkan peninsula. Or else a quiet discussion on how to combat deviationism with my foreman over a glass of imported slivovits.
I shall miss Western movies at first but in time I shall come to realise that their educational and cultural content, Woody Allen notwithstanding, is minimal and that all they really do is reflect a sick and decadent society that will shortly become as extinct as the poor dodo.
Religion has never been my strong point so I shall not shed any tears when the Greek Orthodox Church loses its importance and couples can get married without having to spend a fortune on fancy candles and sugared almonds—or when Mount Athos is turned into a holiday playground for Bulgarian stakhanovites.
Every fourth summer, with luck, I shall be allowed to spend a holiday at a seaside resort in Crimea and sun myself on a beach side by side with brawny Brunhildes from Brandenburg or a svelte siren from Sverdolvsk.
But best of all, I will no longer have to worry about such things as school bills, doctors’ bills, income or inheritance taxes or the Dow Jones average. Indeed, the American Forces Radio Station and Mr. Eliasco who reads out the New York Stock Exchange closing prices will then be nothing but a memory from the distant past.
I am afraid I shall not be able to understand the Soviet announcer who will give the Russian equivalent of ‘Yassou, baby mou’ or follow his daily readings of the Pravda editorials but I shall surely enjoy the Russian Forces Station’s broadcasts of the Red Army choir, songs of the Volga boatmen and Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf.
If, however, in spite of my best intentions, the boiler factory job and the social order of Greek egalitarianism begin to pall, and nostalgia for the wicked Western way of life becomes too strong to resist, I can always stow away on an American cargo ship bringing grain to Greece, seek political asylum in the United States and gladly hand my wallet and all it contains to that mugger in the elevator.
