His boss is apparently blind to Yanni’s superb virtues and has kept his salary nailed to pre-1967 levels. His wife is constantly nagging him to buy a new car, a new refrigerator and a new washing machine in spite of the fact that they are all in perfect working order and that in fifty years’ time they will be priceless antiques. The generation gap between him and his children is as wide as the Grand Canyon and he is convinced his daughter will end up in a Brazilian brothel and his son in solitary confinement.
One of his favourite phrases is ‘The country is going to the dogs’ and he cannot understand why Karamanlis does not jail every communist in sight, declare war on Turkey, march into southern Albania and insist on immediate full membership in the Common Market.
When I ran into him the other day I was expecting to hear all the usual belly-aching once again. But, to my surprise, Yanni was in a different mood.
‘You know/ he said, I’ve been thinking.’
‘Really?’ I said, ‘with what?’
‘That’s not funny, I’ve been thinking that when all’s said and done I have a great deal to be thankful for.’
‘Well, that’s a change,’ I exclaimed. ‘How come?’
I’ve been thinking where would I be now if my mother had not married my father but a Lebanese businessman. I would be a miserable exile in Athens, trying to do business out of my hotel room and living off a fast-dwindling Swiss bank account — a truly desperate situation.’
He paused to allow the horror of his statement to sink in.
‘Or else, what if I had been on that plane that was hi-jacked to Uganda and I had been one of the hostages rescued by the Israelis? You know that some of them got killed because they did not hear the Israelis shouting to them to lie flat on the ground when they raked the place with machine-gun fire. I don’t know Hebrew, I wouldn’t have understood and I would be dead now. Think of that!’
‘But I seem to remember that the only hostages detained at that time were Jews,’ I remarked, ‘so you wouldn’t have been among them.’
‘Ah, you have a point there,’ he admitted. ‘But I’m still thankful I wasn’t on that plane.’
‘What else do you have to be thankful for?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m glad I wasn’t on holiday in Colorado when that flood wiped out all those people. You know, I nearly went to the States this year. I was going to be invited for the Bicentennial celebrations by the U.S. Government but somebody at the Embassy here slipped up and my name never made the list. I don’t sleep nights thinking of myself clinging to a branch in that canyon, the flood waters swirling around me until my strength gave out and I went under.’
‘In that case, you should also be glad your mother didn’t marry a Chinese. You might have got killed in the earthquakes at Tangshan,’ I observed.
He looked doubtful. Ί don’t think my mother would have married a Chinese,’ he said. ‘She had an affair once with an Armenian from Erevan, but that’s as far east as she ventured. Anyway, if she had married a Chinese it would probably have been a Formosan and I would be sitting pretty now growing bananas and pineapples in the southern part of the island. No, I wouldn’t have been anywhere near those earthquakes.’
‘What other disaster are you glad you’ve avoided?’ I went on.
‘Well, when I left the army after doing my military service I was very keen on soldiering and, if I hadn’t found my present job I just might have become a mercenary. They were offering fabulous salaries for mercenaries in the Congo at the time. So, after making a pile there I would have lived high off the hog for a number of years — you know, Monte Carlo and St. Moritz and all that sort of thing, and then, when the money ran out where else could I have gone but Angola. Imagine. I would either have been killed by Callan for not polishing my buttons or faced an Angolan firing squad with all those other poor chaps. It gives me the creeps just to think of it!’
‘That was a close call,’ I admitted. ‘What else are you thankful for?’
Oh, lots and lots of things. I’m glad I wasn’t riding in the same car with the British Ambassador to Ireland who got blown to bits as you know. Also, I’m glad I didn’t have a deposit box in that bank that got robbed in Nice and, coming closer to home, I’m glad I wasn’t on the Greek Olympic team at Montreal!’
