‘Cleanliness is almost as bad as godliness’. — Samuel Butler
The psychiatrists tell us that the hand-washing complex is an obsessive-compulsive reaction to guilt feelings. If Taki’s hand-washing was any yardstick, the crimes he must have been feeling guilty about could have been nothing less than double parricide, fratricide and pulling the wings off flies as a little boy.
He would avoid hand-shakes to the point of fitting hooks to the end of his arms. When a hand-shake was unavoidable, he would rush to the nearest washroom and scrub his hands cleaner than Dr. Barnard’s before a heart transplant. To guard against the nonavailability of a washroom in the vicinity, Taki would carry a small bottle of diluted Dettol which he would sprinkle on his hands and rub them vigorously for five minutes. This was why he always smelt like a dispensary when you went near him.
Another constant companion was a bottle of Airwick. On the rare occasions that he sat in company (he avoided parties or public gatherings where the danger from germs was at its highest), he would sit patiently, talking as little as possible and breathing as shallowly as he could. As soon as someone lighted a cigarette, Taki would whip out his Airwick, lift the wick as high as it would go and place the bottle ostentatiously in the middle of the room.
At dinner parties, he would make up some excuse to go into the kitchen where he ran an eagle eye over everything. If he saw as much as the left antenna of a cockroach peeking out from under the sink, he would feign a sudden migraine and go home supperless. Once he caught a cook tasting the soup out of a tureen with the same ladle she was using to stir it. He fainted on the spot.
As might have been expected, Taki became more and more of a recluse, avoiding human contact as much as possible. His occasional girl friends were almost invariably registered nurses and preferably those who worked in the operating theatre of a hospital. But such liaisons were usually short-lived, particularly when Taki insisted on surgical gloves while holding hands in the cinema.
His one pride and joy was the huge medicine chest in his bathroom which, in a pinch, could have accommodated a week’s production from the Abbott Laboratories at Kalamaki.
But in recent years, Taki had become disenchanted with the medical world. The discovery that vitamin D was bad for bone growth when taken in excess was the first blow. He had to give up his daily intake of ten vitamin D pills. The conclusion that vitamin C was not effective in preventing colds was another disappointment. The news that hexachlorophene could cause brain damage threw him into a panic. His favourite underarm deodorant was based on hexachlorophene. The danger from cyclamates, from hormone-fed chickens, from vinyl chloride packaging of food threw him into such a state of depression that even my offer of an automatic steriliser for his cutlery and a life subscription to ‘The Lancet’ could not relieve it.
After the figures of the colobacillus count in the sea from Faleron to Vouliagmeni were published, Taki never went seabathing again, and he countered my offer to take him to Porto Rafti with: ‘And how do you know some colobacillus has not taken it into his head to leave the teeming shore of Faleron and explore the northern coast of Attica?’ — to which, of course, I had no answer since statistics on the movement of colobacilli in Aegean waters are extremely rare if they exist at all.
Then Taki was highly disturbed to read that the Minister of Transport had granted a reprieve to four hundred urban buses that had been condemned years ago. They were being allowed to continue to spew their clouds of noxious carbon monoxide gases along the entire lengths of Acadimias, Panepistimiou and Stadiou streets. One could hold one’s breath when one bus went by, but four hundred were really too many.
The last straw was when an Athens newspaper began printing horrifying stories claiming that our drinking water was being polluted by pesticides washed off the surrounding countryside into Lake Yliki.
Taki, who drank nothing but boiled Loutraki water, was terrified. ‘However careful you are,’ he explained, ‘you cannot totally avoid contact with tap water. I’m getting out of here.’
He bought a chalet in the Jura mountains, by an ice-cold stream of pure mountain water. He took his Dettol, his Airwick, his medicine chest, his hooks and his surgical gloves with him and settled in his new home, happy to be away from the deadly atmosphere of Athens.
In his last letter to me he wrote: ‘My fears are diminishing. I wash my hands only fifteen times a day. A friendly cowherd came by this morning and offered me a pail of fresh milk. Naturally, I refused it. But I may try some after I have sent a sample for analysis to Geneva.’
Two days later, while walking on the mountain, Taki stepped on some fresh cow dung, hidden in the grass. He slipped and fell backward, hitting the base of his skull on a stone. The doctors said death must have been instantaneous but the cowherd swears he heard Taki’s last worde which were: ‘The colobacilli got me in the end, the bastards!’
