I had first known Onufrios as a salesman for advertising and promotional gifts such as ashtrays, cigarette lighters, wall thermometers, ballpoint pens, key rings, diaries, desk calendars and those small, digital quartz clocks that are supposed to tell you the month, date and time if you press little knobs at the back but which are impossible to set, particularly if you read the instructions. He would carry samples in a large suitcase and trudge around from office to office in Athens and Piraeus until someone took pity on him and ordered a batch of key rings with the company logo encased in transparent plastic.
On another occasion, I met him as a partner in a health studio which guaranteed that customers could lose five kilos in two weeks if they allowed themselves to be wrapped up tightly in sheets of rubber, to be dehydrated in a sauna and to be pummelled by a beefy masseur. The small print in their membership contract also said the treatment would not be effective unless accompanied by a very strict diet. The enterprise failed when his partner absconded with all the money and the masseur, the depilatory expert, and the rubber wrapper-upper threatened to give him the full treatment and lock him up in the sauna unless he came up with their wages.
Then, within a decade, I ran into Onufrios as the PASOK-appointed general manager of a large, state-controlled oil refinery, as the animator at a Club Mediterranee camp on the Red Sea and as the representative of the German company that was supplying the toilets of the new Athens Concert Hall with soap dispensers and hand driers.
Last month, at a cocktail party for the opening of the fifth new bank in Athens in as many months, Onufrios came up to me, beaming, and greeted me as if I were an old friend. He looked very prosperous, reeked of Old Spice and wore an impeccably tailored dark blue suit with a silk Yves Saint Laurent tie and Gucci shoes. Obviously, having nothing more for the Athens Concert Hall, he was engaged in a more profitable line.
He didn’t wait for me to ask. He handed me a card that read “The Onufrios O. Poniros Institute, Dr Onufrios O. Poniros, Director.”
“What’s with the ‘Doctor?” “I asked, rather unkindly.
“I knew you’d notice that, you old rascal,” he said familiarly, slapping me on the back. I backed away and returned his card.
“Don’t tell anyone, but, actually, I’m expecting an honorary doctorate from the University of Ouagadougou in
Burkina Faso. I made a generous donation the other day and the doctorate is in the mail,” he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially.
“All right, doctor, what d’you do at your institute, amateur brain surgery?”
He laughed. “Your sense of humor is always delightful. But, actually, you’re closer to home than you think.”
“Oh?” I inquired. “How’s that?”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I do, and I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it already. You know how they say that if there’s a problem bugging you, if you sleep on it, the answer will come to you in the morning?”
“Yes, I’ve heard a thing like that can happen,” I admitted.
“Well, if a person sleeps on a problem and still can’t find the answer, I get other people to do the sleeping for him, for a fee, of course. And if he’s very anxious for an answer, I can have two, or three, or four people sleep on his problem. Then one of them’s sure to come up with an answer.”
“Is that what you do at your institute? You have people sleeping on other people’s problems?”
“Yes, exactly. That’s it. Isn’t it a wonderful idea?”
I was vastly intrigued. “Tell me, Onufrios, have you had any success with this caper?”
“Of course, of course. My first client was the head of a large insurance company, who shall remain nameless, as you can well understand. Actually, this man had two problems that were giving him sleepless nights. The first was caused by a young man who was the branch manager of one of his offices in a northern province. The young man was a brilliant salesman and the office he managed was the most successful and most profitable of all my client’s branches.”
“One day, my client discovered the young man had found a way of cooking the books and creaming off sizeable amounts every year. He had enough evidence to put the young man in jail, but he also realized that if he did, he would never find anyone to replace him and to run the northern office as profitably as the crooked young man had been running it.”
“His second problem was his daughter. The poor thing was so ugly that she had reached the ripe old age of twenty-eight and was still unmarried, in spite of lures such as a fabulous dowry, a house with a swimming pool and large garden, a BMW 5 series and a cushy job in the insurance company. Prospective suitors took one look at her and fled screaming into the night.”
“1 put my best man to work on that case. Incidentally, the people who sleep for me are experts at solving every kind of problem. Ex-grand masters of chess, crossword puzzle prize¬winners, mathematical geniuses and backgammon champions.”
“So what did he come up with?” I asked.
“He came up with a brilliant solution that solved both problems. He said my client should propose to the young man that he marry the daughter, on pain of being exposed and spending a good number of years in jail. Thus, the money he had embezzled would stay in the family and the daughter’s desire for apokatastasis would be fulfilled.”
“And did the young man accept?”
“What could he do? As a matter of fact, he used a great deal of the money he had embezzled to give his wife a complete face lift and although she doesn’t look anything like Hedy Lamarr, she can now pass ‘with a push in the dark’, to use the British express-ion, and they are very happy together.”
“I must say, I’m impressed,” I said. “What about our politicians? Have any of them approached you for an answer to the seemingly unsoluble problems that are all around us?”
“Oh, yes. Again they must remain nameless, but one of them was very anxious to find out how Rauf Denktash could be persuaded to be more flexible in his stand on the Cyprus problem. One of my backgammon champions slept on that and his conclusion was that the only way to get Denktash to agree to anything was to isolate him for forty-eight hours without giving him any food. He would then agree to, and sign anything,for a bite to eat. One of my chess grand masters is sleeping tonight on the problem of how to isolate Denktash.”
“And what about our other politicians and members of the opposition? Have they come to you for answers to their problems?” I asked.
“At this moment,” Onufrios said proudly, “I have one hundred and twenty-five experts sleeping on problems that are plaguing our political establishment, ranging from how to keep the government afloat until an economic upturn is achieved, to how to bring the government down before the grim reaper appears on the scene.”
“And how are they doing?”
“They’re all having the most terrible nightmares.”
