The Scapegoat

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“Every crook in Greece is in the government,” the villager told the CBS correspondent.

At first this declaration sounded extreme, but the man spoke with no emotion at all, a fact that impressed the foreigner. Barefoot, filthy, dressed in rags. Scratches on his ankles, dried blood, bruises everywhere. A man who took life as it came and made the most of it — or so he seemed to the American, who’d been raised on eggs and bacon, had studied at expensive schools, had seen plenty of poor people in photographs. Now he wrote dispatches about them, and he did so with compassion.

He hadn’t intended to interview the villager, he was on his way to meet someone else, a man of power and status, he’d been told; a man with political credentials and strict party discipline; a man of action. Something suddenly compelled him to have the driver stop the car. The villager was watching from across the way. There wasn’t a green leaf in sight, though in the outside world spring was bursting into bloom. Here it smelled of ash and scorched earth; days later the odor still filled their nostrils.

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