The Potato Eater

He woke up in a fuzzy, confused way and those first couple of minutes of the day were all he lived for now. The seconds it took for his brain to start focusing and working properly were almost like before, he had not registered yet where he was or what year and month it was, he was still in the forgiving, pill-assisted arms of sleep, his nose sniffing the smell of the pillow, his eyelids still heavy, his fingers and cheek smelling faintly of saliva. And then, as he got dragged out of the sleepy, dispersing fog by his own consciousness, he remembered and felt that it no longer was like before and that the nightmare was real and he had just woken up into another day of it.

The pain he felt seemed to wake up with him and follow him around the whole day, making a point about it so that he could not forget himself at any instance. It turned everything inwards, so that all his attention was forced back onto himself, so that he was made aware of his own body and was unable to escape it. He often thought that this might have been his body's way of declaring that it had been lacking in attention and nurturing by it's owner, so he had observed himself taking extra care of certain parts of his body, like his fingers and had caught himself staring and fiddling with them repeatedly. He had bought a glycerine smelling ointment with which he massaged his fingers and palms frequently each day and then he sat and waited for the oily substance to dry so that he could move on and use his hands again. It was often a good part of an hour till he got up after massaging his hands, but the sense of time had little significance to him now.

He would have had no interest in getting up from the bed and doing much at all had it not been for one sickly and yellowing ficus plant that she had left behind. He wanted with all his heart to kill it and had purposefully not watered it for weeks, but when it denied its destiny he became obsessed with seeing how much it would last before it dried out. Lately he had felt the cruelty of the fact that he had to be burdened with it because her mind was clear and light and free enough for her to have forgotten the damn thing behind. He wanted to throw it away, but he hated the fact that he had no choice. In a moment of rage he had kicked it and broken the pot into three visible parts, but the ficus roots still held the pot more or less together. Since then he had picked it up, put a black tape all around it and started to water it a little bit each day. The water dripped down onto the marble top of the table and onto the floor. Other than that, there was only green tea, the potatoes and the smell of soap that held him together.

He took an awfully long time with each thing he did. He stayed under the shower and let the water run on him till he lost the sense of his skin. He washed his hands with an old fashioned soap and smelled it in the damp air gaining a great amount of pleasure from it. When he got an instant of a pleasurable moment he immediately tensed and stilled to see if his pain was still there. And of course it was, but he now realised that he might soon be unable to live without this pain. The apartment was so bare, free from anything that would cause memories to resurface as they had put it, and he liked it very much this way. But it was not true that he would feel a great weight being lifted when all the clutter was gone. He felt a great sense of loss and he missed everything, so much so that sometimes he stretched his hand to catch something and when he reached an empty space his heart tingled like an amputated limb. He was nevertheless able to only take care of as few things as possible now.

If it was up to him he would not eat. He felt as if he was feeding his pain to keep him alive. He boiled water in a big pot and in a small one at the same time. The small one was ready very quickly and he threw in green tea leaves and stirred them around with a Japanese delicate bamboo whisk which he did not remember owning. He strained the tea through a sieve in his one mug and sat down to drink it. He sat for ages and drank it slowly and watched himself sitting there, his mind blank and his gaze glazed. At least that was some improvement, he was not thinking. The pain returned, refreshed by the tea it seemed, and forced him to move. The water in the big pot was boiling now.

He took the potatoes in the sink in a plastic tub and washed them very carefully with a metal brush. Some earth and sprouts were cleaned out and he run his fingers over the surface to make sure they were clean. He often scratched his fingers with the metal brush as he cleaned the potatoes and he made no effort to be careful about it; he enjoyed the stinging of the water and soap on the tiny cuts. He peeled each potato carefully with a knife and tried to make one continuous cut so that he ended with a curly garland-like bit of potato left behind. Once the potatoes they were all peeled, he cut each one into six parts, as equal in size as possible. At that point he stopped and stilled in a moment of panic, checking, and then he felt his pain again.

The water was almost all evaporated in the big pot, so he filled it up again with cold water from the tap. He fiddled about on the spot while waiting for it to boil again and then threw the potatoes in. He had tried all sorts of different potatoes lately and had finally found the ones he liked the best. After that he stuck to those ones and got into a state of great agitation when they were not in stock at the local shop. He now took some green oil and a lemon and made his dressing and for the first time in months felt the inklings of hunger. He drained the potatoes and salted them and dressed them and then he sat down to eat them. He had been eating them just like that for weeks and that predictability of their taste, of their purchase and preparation was what gave him something constant to grab upon.

On his next trip to the shop something extraordinary happened to him. He picked up a jar of capers. He did not realise that he had done it until he was at the till and had the money counted and ready to pay for the potatoes. Then he noticed that the woman asked for more money and he saw the jar of capers. He flushed and flapped about with the change, put everything in his bag and rushed off. He did not touch the jar of capers for a week. Then one day another thing happened. He crossed the road and approached the shop from the opposite side. He had not done this for months and stopped half way up the street, thinking that he should cross back again and walk his usual way. But he kept on and then stopped outside the florist's. He saw a pink pot with black handles and before he knew it he was paying for it at the till and was also buying a bag of soil. He reached the house completely exhausted, he felt totally spent and cried a shaking, violent sob with no tears.

The next two days he felt worse than ever and he dragged himself around lost in a pill-filled miasma. But the third day he got up, went straight to the ficus plant, took it out of his broken pot, unravelled slightly its spinning roots and re-potted it into the new pink and black amphora-like pot. He cleaned everything and placed it back on its spot, watered it and finally sat down to observe it. It looked perfect and somehow less yellow now and less sick. He cleaned his hands with the soap and stopped and stilled to inhale the warm steamy old soap smell. He made his boiled potatoes and decided to add the capers to the dressing. By the end of the day he felt his pain coming back, like an old friend knocking on a paper door and walking through it anyway, without waiting for an answer. But that day he felt a physical tiredness that was so welcomed, so longed for, that he cried in his sleep and woke up on a wet pillow.

He applied the glycerine-like cream on his knees and rubbed his thinning legs. He went to boil the water and only put on the small pot for the tea. The tea felt tart and he put a spoonful of jam in it, like they used to do in Russia. He licked the spoon and felt the forgotten sweetness of it. He stared at the ficus who was now leaning towards the window and the light. The curtains on the window were dirty. He had never noticed how dirty they were. They must have accumulated all the smells of cigarettes and of cooking from the last decade. He thought of what kind of colour curtains would suit this place best. Thick enough to stop the strong sunlight from entering and blinding him but not so thick and dark as to prevent any light from reaching the ficus plant. He turned a bill envelope around and started sketching a pattern for a curtain for the room. He was happy with it after half an hour and then he got up and filled the big pot with water for the potatoes.

~

For Ms Regina Stavraki, our Art teacher who taught us everything about the potato print

Εγώ

I often try to remember the way I thought as a child, in an attempt to understand better and put myself in the place of young children and students. I find that one often remembers a lot of things about their childhood, incidents, conversations, places, people and objects, but it is very hard to try and remember how one thought about things when they were children. The pattern of thought established over the years seems to overtake and conceal the early paths of childhood thought. If I do not do this, I often find myself getting quite frustrated at the apparent self-centred demeanour of young students and at the inflexibility of opinion in teenage students. But if I try and remember some of the ways in which I thought as a child, then I am able to harvest much more patience towards seemingly unfounded behaviour because I begin to understand, or rather I begin to remember, how things seemed to me when I was a child.

One of the things that pops in my mind first, is the trouble I had as a child of comprehending the idea of identity and of people having more than one role. A very vivid example and one that I find embarrassing thinking about today, was my profound confusion over the character of James Bond. I remember someone commenting that Sean Connery was great playing James Bond in Goldfinger. Then my mother said that Ian Fleming had created the character of James Bond. And then that Ian Fleming had based James Bond on real people he had met during his service as an intelligence officer. So it was: Sean Connery is James Bond (who is based on many other people) in Ian Fleming's Goldfinger. I remember asking repeated questions about that, of who is who, and many adults explaining it to me, but not doing a great job, as I kept on it for ages, till people shushed me or laughed. I also had trouble establishing the fact that people had more than one role and more than one name to describe them, all at once. That they could be a man, and a father, and a son and a brother and a teacher and a husband and a gardener and so on. I felt that the more roles they had the more complicated they were thus the worse they would be at it, so that someone who was only a man, a son and a teacher, was definitely better than someone who was a hundred things all at the same time. If it was possible that someone was only a man or only a teacher that would be the best of all; but I saw that that was impossible by definition. The difficulty of comprehending the complexity of human identity which I demonstrated as a child, lies I think in the very strong sense that children have of their own self. It's because they have such a powerful and clear sense of their own self, that it is very hard for them to see the world from other people's points and put themselves into other people's place, so that their actions and behaviour often appear to adults as egocentric and lacking in empathy.

This very clear and strong sense of the self that children demonstrate, is often reflected in their teenage years through their opinions and beliefs on different issues. These opinions are often expressed in a black and white manner, are very categorical and inflexible and the teenager is adamant that their opinion will never change and that nothing that might happen in the future will ever alter their mind. The reason for this, lies I think in the difficulty of children to project themselves into different situations, environments and circumstances and due to their lack of experiences purely based on their age, it is extremely hard for them to see things in any other way than what feels and seems to be right for them, there and then. And because things feel and seem extremely clear to them at the time, they are very passionate that they will never change their mind about them and will always feel the same, no matter what.

When I remember it, I am often very reminiscent of this power, of feeling a hundred percent sure of something, of feeling invincible and certain and of the naivety and innocence of the belief that everything which is done with good intentions is bound to come to a good end. I remember an incident which happened during the Yugoslav war in my home town in a suburb of Athens. I think it must have been around 1993, but it could have been slightly earlier. The Yugoslav wars were very much part of our lives in Greece for several years and the coverage on the radio and television was extremely extended, detailed and constant. Everyone was following the developments of the wars, especially the Bosnian war, as if there was a war in our own country and the radio in our home and most homes was on all the time with the news. At some point there was a war alarm and everyone went to buy canned goods and bottled water from the supermarkets as news had it that the war would reach the Greek region of Macedonia. By the time I got to the supermarket with my grandmother, all that was left were jarred caper leaves and sweetened condensed milk cans.

Many operations were organised to send help to the refugee camps, by schools, churches and bigger organisations, in the form of blankets, canned food, clothes and bottled water. I took an active part in collecting and packing the aid goods at the local youth centre and it was a very uplifting and rewarding experience. What I really liked about it, was that I knew who was offering what, and I often saw fellow kids donating their dolls, or men I knew giving their old coats and ladies giving their household blankets. Everything was put in big crate boxes, and things had to be layered a certain way, so that blankets were at the bottom, followed by a layer of canned good, then more clothes, then tins again, then coats and so on and so forth. We managed to fill several large boxes and together with boxes filled from the neighbouring suburb, a whole van was filled ready to be send to the border. We were told the people would have the goods within the next two weeks and that the boxes would be delivered by air. At that point I felt that for the first time I was doing something other than listening to the radio in the night and worrying about the people of Yugoslavia, doing nothing at all to help them.

Ten days later, news came with visual images in the television, that due to a mistake several tonnes of aid goods were dropped upon a refugee camp in the border, resulting in the death of an unknown number of civilians, mainly women and children. I was never certain whether our boxes were amongst the aid dropped on the refugee camp, (but I did see images of stuffed toys, blankets and tins amongst dead bodies). Apparently our boxes were passed on to an international organisation and it was impossible to track them. But the fact was, that I was left unable to comprehend how a fundamentally positive and good willed action could have turned like that and in my desperation to understand it, I blamed it on war, giving war itself an evil personification, so that such bad and unfortunate and unfair things could surely be happening because war/evil was on. That gave me a bit of a peace of mind for a while, having something evil to blame when things went wrong, but when my child's mind started to notice that unfair and bad things were happening all the time, everywhere, regardless of whether there was a war on, and even if there was no evil around, then I was totally at a loss of how to proceed with understanding the world. Now that my earlier understanding of cause and effect was shaken, now that there was no guarantee that an action that had started with good intentions and hard work would necessarily end well, I came to notice an element of randomness and fickleness and uncontrollability, that could easily defy logic, faith and everything in between.

Of course, that worked both ways, and it could equally happen with positive things, so that the element of the unknown, of a surprise, a coincidence, luck or whatever it could be called, could become an incredibly magical thing. I thankfully noticed that also, so that I could now start perceiving myself as a person in the world who was bound to be affected by their surroundings and by circumstances. At some point I let myself see the world from as many points of view of other people as I could possibly imagine and I tried my best to put myself in the position of people whose opinions I completely and passionately disagreed with. I was hoping that in this way I could begin to understand how and why they may think the way they do and how that was justified in their own eyes. I became so good at that though, so detached from my own views and beliefs, that I lost myself a bit, as I could now see the world from everybody's point of view, so that even the actions of the worst criminal became more transparent to me. I could never agree with the beliefs, or with the actions of a criminal mind for example, but I could now understand it. When that happened and when I noticed myself understanding with ease how it was possible for people whose acts I detested to do the things they did, I stopped and after that became content with being less forceful when expressing my own views. 

The word Εγώ (Ego) means "I" and "self" in Greek and I was expecting it to be one of the first words that a child would use to describe themselves, since it is such an easy, short word. However, I have noticed that very young children refer to themselves in third person with their names, so that a boy named Harry would say for example "Harry wants some water" before he says "I want some water". Aretousa says a whole story in third person, so that Aretousa did this and that today and so on, and when I try to tell her to say "I did so and so today", she then says "Yes, you did do so and so, but Aretousa did this and that". So the letter Έψιλον (Epsilon) stands for Εγώ in the Greek alphabet letters we are making with Aretousa, although I think we are both still coming to grips with exactly what ourselves stand for.