I
I drove west out of Limassol yesterday afternoon, into the Base, because Theano Kassianou had sent me a message of five words and in the nine years I have known her I have never found a way to say no to her. The message said: Sunday. Lefteris’s house. Bring your hands.
My hands are what I have. I am a court stenographer. For eleven years I have sat below the bench and written down, at a hundred and eighty words a minute, what people say when they are under oath or in a temper or both, and I have learned to do it without listening, which is the secret of the trade: the words go in through the ears and out through the fingers and touch nothing on the way. Three of those years were at the Supreme Court in Nicosia, and in those three years I took down every word Theano Kassianou said from the bench, including the last ones, in the judgment where she was in the minority, after which she resigned. She has never said which judgment it was. I typed all of them. I have a guess. I have never asked.
The road west of the city passes, for a stretch of some kilometres, through land that is not Cyprus. By the treaty of 1960 it is sovereign British territory, the Western Sovereign Base Area, and there is no border, no fence, no checkpoint; you know you have entered it only if you already know. Kourion sits inside it. The theatre, the mosaics, the house where they found the family, all of it. The Department of Antiquities of the Republic tends the stones, and the ground under the stones belongs, on paper, to the King of England. I had driven this road perhaps two hundred times in my life and had thought about this perhaps never.
Theano was waiting in the car park at Kourion, not at the house, which was the first sign that she had planned the evening more carefully than she would admit. She was in grey linen and the straw hat she wore to court every summer for forty years, since a judge’s robe covers everything except the head. She is seventy-six. She walks the way she used to enter a courtroom, which is to say without hurry and without the possibility of being stopped.
“Sit with me up there first,” she said, and pointed at the theatre. “I want to start here. I don’t want to start with them.”
“Why not with them?”
“Because at a table with food on it, everybody performs. Up there it’s just the sea, and the sea has heard everything already.”
We climbed to the top row. The theatre at Kourion faces south and the cliff drops away under it to the bay, and at six o’clock in September the light comes in flat from the west over the water toward Paphos and the stone turns the colour of bread. There were two Dutch couples below us taking photographs of each other and a guard who looked at his watch. Theano sat down on the top step as if it had been put there for her.
“What was this?” she said.
“A theatre.”
“Before it was a theatre.”
“A city.”
“And what is a city?”
“Is that the question? Tonight?”
“No.” She took the hat off and put it on the step beside her. “Tonight I want the smaller one. The city is too big to see. I want the thing inside it. Do you know about the family?”
I said I knew there was a house with skeletons in it.
“On the twenty-first of July, in the year 365, early in the morning, the ground under this city moved. They dug the house out in the nineteen-eighties. In one room they found a man, and under him a woman, and under her a child. He had put himself over her and she had put herself over the child. It didn’t help. Now here is the part I want you to write down, because it’s the part that matters.” She waited until I had my machine on my knees. She has never once, in nine years, started a sentence she wanted recorded before she saw my hands were ready. “Those three were Roman citizens. Everyone was, by then. In the year 212 an emperor signed a paper that made every free person in the empire a citizen of Rome. The historians say he did it for the inheritance tax, which only citizens paid. So that man was a citizen of a city he had never seen, under the protection of an emperor who did not know Kourion existed, and on a morning in July the ground moved and his citizenship did precisely nothing. Not one stone less fell.”
“You’re saying citizenship is not a roof.”
“I’m saying we know one thing it isn’t. What is it, then?”
I said the first thing. “A passport.”
“Show me.”
I had my identity card in my bag and I took it out and gave it to her. She looked at it for a while, longer than a person looks at an identity card.
“There’s no citizen in this,” she said. “There’s a photograph of a woman who needs a haircut and a number. Where’s the citizen?”
“It’s what the card means.”
“Then tell me what it means and we can go and eat.”
I could not, and she knew I could not, and she gave me back the card.
“Good,” she said. “It isn’t a roof and it isn’t a card. In the Supreme Court we’d call that progress and adjourn for lunch.” She put the hat back on. “Do you want to know why I asked you?”
“I assumed you wanted a record.”
“Everyone wants a record. Marina will have her phone on the table recording; Aris will have two. I don’t want a record, I want you, because you’ll write it down and you won’t improve it. Everyone at that table tonight will improve what they said, in their heads, by breakfast. They’ll remember the better version. You have a professional disease, Myrto. You remember what was actually said. Eleven years of it. It’s the only honest skill left in the country.”
“And what do I do with it?”
“You write it the next day, while it’s still ugly, and you put it where anyone can read it.”
“Anyone.”
“Anyone. Plato waited thirty years and then put words in the mouth of a dead man who couldn’t object. We’ll do the opposite. The day after, by someone who cannot lie professionally, and out the door.” She stood up. Her knees are not what they were and she does not pretend otherwise; she puts a hand on her thigh and pushes. “If we’re going to do what I think we’re going to do, the people who read it are the ones it’s for. Not us. We’re old, or tired, or paid.”
“Which am I?”
“You’re the hands,” she said. “Come on. Lefteris starts with the food and he doesn’t wait.”
II
Lefteris Kyprianou’s house is above the beach at the end of a track, a house he built in 1979 with the first money that was his and not the bank’s, and it faces the sea because, he says, a man from Famagusta cannot sleep facing inland. There is a terrace along the whole south side of it with a table under a vine that is older than his daughter. When we came up the steps there were already nine people at the table and the food was already on it: the bread, the halloumi, the tomatoes cut in halves and salted, a whole fish that had been on the coals and was now on a board with its eye looking at the ceiling of leaves. It was a quarter to seven and the sea had gone from silver to that grey-blue it goes before it decides whether to be dark.
I will say who they were, since I am the only one at that table who was not there to speak and can therefore describe the others without describing myself.
Lefteris sat at the head, eighty-three, in a white shirt buttoned to the neck, the kind of old man who has been the biggest thing in every room for fifty years and has recently begun, with visible effort, to let the room be bigger than he is. He was born in Famagusta in 1943 and left it on the fourteenth of August, 1974, with his father, his mother, his wife, one suitcase, and a set of ship’s papers in a leather folder, and from those papers he built the company that now manages some two hundred vessels from a glass building in Limassol he refuses to enter because it has, he says, no windows that open.
His daughter Marina sat at his right. She is fifty-two and runs the company and has not been aboard one of its ships in ten years, because a ship, she said at some point that evening, is a spreadsheet that gets wet. She read economics in London. She sits on the board of a bank. She has her father’s jaw and none of his patience, which she does not need, because she has his money.
Aris Stamatiou sat opposite her. Nobody at the table had invited him; Marina had, which is not the same thing. He is fifty-eight and from Athens and has run political campaigns in Greece, in Cyprus, in three Balkan countries, and in one country he does not name, and he has won most of them and speaks with particular warmth of the ones he lost, because, he says, he lost them honestly and was paid regardless. He now advises a firm that sells something to governments that the governments describe as analytics. He had a phone on the table, face down, and another in his pocket, face down.
Eleni Zachariadou, sixty-one, general surgeon at the Limassol hospital, sat beside him. She ate the way surgeons eat, which is fast and completely, as though the plate might be taken away by an emergency, and when she was not eating she sat with her hands folded on the table in front of her like instruments laid out.
Sotiris Georgiou, forty-six, teaches the second class at the primary school in Episkopi, twenty-three children of seven and eight years old. He is Theano’s neighbour; she moved to the village when she resigned, and half the children he teaches have been sent by their mothers to bring her lemons. He had come straight from a football match on the television and had not, it was obvious, expected to stay past nine.
Danae Christofi, thirty-eight, had spent nine years in London building the part of a very large company that decides what you see next, and had come home in 2024 and had not, as far as anyone could tell, decided what to do with the fact that she knew how it worked. She had brought wine and had put it at the far end of the table where it would not be mistaken for a contribution to the argument.
Colonel Andreas Pantelides, retired, sixty-eight, sat at the end nearest the sea. He was in the National Guard for thirty-eight years. He said perhaps forty words the whole night and I have all of them.
Iakovos Stylianou, forty-one, is a composer. He has written the music for two films nobody saw and one that everybody did, and he had come, he said, to listen, because he had never in his life heard a conversation that lasted more than twenty minutes and he wanted to know what one sounded like.
And Theano sat at the foot of the table, facing Lefteris, with me beside her on a kitchen chair somebody brought out, the machine on my knees, under the edge of the tablecloth where the crumbs fall.
Lefteris looked at us come in and said: “Theano asked me to feed some people she wanted to argue with. I’ve fed worse. Eat first.”
We ate first.
III
It was Theano who started, when the fish was a skeleton and Marina had gone in for the second bottle, and she started with the oldest.
“Lefteris. You’re the oldest here, so you go first. Plato started with the oldest. It’s the one thing in him I’d keep.”
Lefteris wiped his mouth. “He started with the oldest and then he sent him to church so the young ones could talk. I’ve read it, judge. I know what you’re doing.”
“Then do it well.”
He laughed, which for Lefteris is a single sound, like a door.
“What do you want to know? How it is to be old? People my age complain. The body. The friends. The children who don’t call. Half of it is true and the other half is the man, not the age. I was impatient at thirty and I’m impatient at eighty-three; the years didn’t do that, I did. What else. The wanting stops, mostly. Not all of it. Enough that you can hear yourself think for the first time since you were twelve. It’s quieter in here.” He touched his chest. “That’s the only thing I’d tell a young man. It gets quieter and you find out what was making the noise.”
“Easy to say from a house with a vine,” said Theano. “What’s the money for, at eighty-three? Not comfort. You could have had comfort at forty with a tenth of it.”
“No. Not comfort.” He put his hand into the pocket of his shirt and took out a notebook, a small black one, the kind you buy in a kiosk, worn white at the corners. He put it on the table. “The money is for this.”
Nobody at the table had seen it except Marina, who closed her eyes briefly.
“Two columns,” Lefteris said. “Left: what I owe. Right: what I’m owed. I’ve kept it since 1975. My father kept one. When he died in 1981, in a room in Larnaca he hadn’t chosen, his was full on the right and clean on the left, and that was the only thing about his death that he was proud of. He didn’t owe. Not the bank, not a man, not the tax; the tax he fought and then paid. Where I come from, that’s what a life is for. To arrive at the end with the left column empty.”
“And the right column?”
“Is why I’m a citizen.”
Theano did not say anything. She has a way of not saying anything that makes people continue.
“My house,” Lefteris said. “In Famagusta. Kennedy Avenue. Four floors, we had the top two. In 2021 they opened the street so tourists could walk past it. I went. Once. I stood on the pavement in front of it for eleven minutes and a boy took my picture, a nice boy, from Ankara I think, because I was standing in the frame of his photograph and he wanted the balcony. That balcony is in my right column. And who owes it to me? Not Turkey; Turkey says it’s theirs. Not the United Nations; they say it’s a problem. Not Brussels; Brussels says it’s regrettable. The Republic of Cyprus says: Lefteris Kyprianou, Kennedy Avenue, number so-and-so, title deed, registered. It is the only entity on the face of the earth that has it written down that the balcony is mine. That is what I am a citizen of. Not the flag. The deed.”
“So a citizen,” said Theano, slowly, the way she used to say things from the bench when she wanted the lawyer to hear the trap before he walked into it, “is somebody the state owes.”
“A citizen is somebody who keeps the book.” Lefteris tapped it. “Both columns. The ones who only keep the right column, who only know what they’re owed, they’re not citizens. They’re—” he looked for the word and found it with distaste — “customers.”
“Thank you, Dad,” said Marina, coming back with the bottle.
“You know I’m right.”
“I know you’ve said it before.”
“And the left column,” Theano said. “What does the citizen owe?”
Lefteris stood up. He did it the way she had done it at the theatre, hand on thigh, and once he was up he was as tall as the vine.
“Ask her,” he said, and put his hand on Marina’s shoulder. “It’s her company now. It can be her argument. I’m going to church.”
“You are not,” said Theano.
“Tonight they bring the Cross out. Tomorrow’s the feast. I have gone to the vespers of the Cross every year since 1975.” He put the notebook back in his pocket and buttoned it. “I stopped believing in God in July 1974 and started going to church in September 1975. Work that out, judge. You’ve got all night.”
“I intend to.”
He kissed Marina on the head and Theano on both cheeks and nodded to the rest of us and went down the steps to his car, and we heard it start, and we heard it go down the track, and then it was just the sea again.
IV
“He’s left you the argument,” Theano said to Marina, “as well as the company. You’ve read the book too, I imagine. You know what happens to the son.”
“He gets told that helping friends and harming enemies is not justice, and then a loud man from out of town takes over.” Marina looked at Aris. “I’m not going to be as easy as the son.”
“I don’t want you to be easy. I want to know what’s in the left column. Your father says a citizen keeps both. What does she owe?”
“What she’s agreed to pay.” Marina sat down. She has a very clean way of setting out a position; she does it the way she would set out a deal, terms first, and she does not decorate. “My father’s notebook is a balance sheet, he just doesn’t like the word. Fine. The state is an account. A citizen is a party to it. She contributes: taxes, obedience to law, service if it’s asked, her children eventually. She receives: protection, roads, courts, the school Sotiris teaches in, a deed that says the balcony’s hers. It’s a contract. Not a written one, Rousseau was wrong about that, but a contract in the sense that matters, which is that both sides know what they’re getting and both sides can be held to it. A citizen is a party to the account. That’s all it is. Everything else people say about it is sentiment.”
“Sentiment isn’t in your columns.”
“Sentiment doesn’t clear.”
“All right.” Theano turned her glass a quarter turn on the cloth, which is what she does instead of taking notes. “A child of five pays nothing and receives everything. Is she a citizen?”
“She’ll pay. The account is intertemporal. She draws now and contributes later, and my father drew on nothing and contributed for fifty years and now draws a pension he doesn’t need. Over a lifetime it balances, or it’s meant to.”
“So citizenship is credit. It’s a bet the state makes on a five-year-old.”
“Roughly.”
“And the state, in this picture, is the bank.”
“Roughly.”
“In March 2013 the bank took the deposits.”
Marina’s face did nothing, which is something I had seen it do before, in another room, when she was not a party to the case but had reason to be in the gallery.
“That was the Eurogroup,” she said.
“Somebody always is,” said Theano, and let it go, or seemed to. “Leave the bank. Take the other side of the account. Amir, who runs the garage on the Paphos road, has been here fourteen years. He pays tax; I’ve seen his returns, he’s very proud of them. He’s not a citizen. Your father’s cousin in Melbourne has not paid a cent to the Republic since 1976 and he votes in the presidential election by post. So paying isn’t it, is it. There are people who pay and aren’t, and people who don’t and are.”
“Then it’s the vote. I’ll concede paying. Residents pay. Citizenship is the share in deciding. A citizen is someone with a share.”
“A share. How big is your share, Marina?”
“One in five hundred and some thousand.”
“And your company’s?”
Aris laughed, once, into his glass. Marina did not look at him.
“That’s cheap, judge.”
“It’s cheap because it’s true and you know it’s true. But I’ll let it lie with the bank. Here is a better one. Forty percent of the people who hold that one-in-five-hundred-thousand don’t use it. They don’t vote. Are they citizens?”
“Legally.”
“I did not ask you about the law.” Theano said it gently. “I sat inside the law for forty years. I know what it says. It says a citizen is whoever the law says. That’s a circle with a flag on it. I asked you what a citizen is. You’ve given me the one who pays and the one who votes, and both times there’s somebody who does it and isn’t one, and somebody who doesn’t and is.”
Marina was quiet for a moment. Then she said, in a different voice, lower: “Then the one who stands with the city when it’s attacked. Strip it all back. The one who’s there when it matters. In 1974 there were people who stayed and people who were on the first plane to London, and everybody in this country still knows which families were which, fifty years later, and it’s the only distinction that’s ever meant anything here. Citizen: the one who stayed.”
It was the first thing she’d said that had heat in it, and it was the thing she believed.
Colonel Pantelides spoke from the end of the table. He had not turned his chair. He was looking at the sea.
“In July of ’74 I was sixteen,” he said. “Too young for a rifle, old enough for a shovel. I watched Cypriots shoot Cypriots for five days before a single Turkish soldier landed. Both sides were citizens. Both sides said they were saving the Republic. Both sides had stayed.” He drank. “Tell me which ones were the citizens, Marina, and I’ll tell my brother, because he was on the other side and we haven’t decided yet.”
Nobody said anything. The vine moved a little.
“So,” said Theano, after a while, “the citizen is not defined by the enemy, because the city could not tell which of its own were the enemy. It still can’t. That’s three, Marina. The one who pays, the one who votes, the one who defends. And we don’t know what she pays, we don’t know what her vote’s a share in, and we don’t know who she’s defending it from.”
“You’ve knocked down three walls,” Marina said. “I haven’t heard you put one up.”
“No. I haven’t. I’m not sure I can.”
“Then what are we doing?”
“Finding out how much of the house is walls,” said Theano, “and how much is us standing very still so it doesn’t fall.”
V
Aris Stamatiou had been eating with one hand and, under the table, doing something with the phone in his pocket with the other, and now he put the phone on the table, face up, and pushed it away from himself the way you’d push away a plate.
“I’ll tell you what a citizen is,” he said, “since the rest of you are so delicately not saying it.”
“Please,” said Theano.
“A citizen is a unit of legitimacy. It’s the thing a state counts to prove it exists. That’s all. Before the citizen there was the subject, and before the subject there was the soul, and the word changed each time because the man at the top needed something different from you. The bishop needed your soul, so you were a soul. The king needed your obedience, so you were a subject. The nation needed you to die on a hill in Macedonia, so they made you a citizen, and gave you a vote so you’d feel the hill was yours. Now the platform needs you to look at a screen, so you’re a user. In ten years you’ll be something else and there’ll be a fine old word for it, because the words are always old. That’s the trick of it. Citizenship is whatever the strongest institution in the room needs you to be, wrapped in a word old enough that you think it’s yours.”
“You’ve said ‘needs’ four times,” said Theano.
“I’ll say it a fifth. The state is a protection racket that lived long enough to become respectable. That’s not me; that’s a professor from Michigan, and he was a gentle man. It needs your taxes to pay the men who protect you from the men it says are coming. The citizen is the customer who has been persuaded he owns the shop.”
“And the persuasion is your trade.”
“Was.” He smiled. It is not an unpleasant smile; it’s the smile of a man who has never once been surprised by how a thing turned out. “I don’t persuade anymore. I measure. It’s more honest and it pays better.”
“All right,” Theano said. “Let me take one thing you said and not the rest, because the rest is a speech and you’ve given it before, I can tell by where you breathed. You said the word changes when the man at the top needs something new. So tell me: who needs a citizen today? Which strong institution, in the year 2026, needs me to be a citizen?”
Aris thought about it, which I did not expect. He is a man who gives the impression of never having to.
“Nobody,” he said.
“Go on.”
“That’s my point, if I have one. The Treasury needs a taxpayer. The party needs a voter. The platform needs a user. The army needs a body but it’s not asking anymore, it’s hiring. The citizen is what’s left over when you subtract all of them. It’s a word without a customer. Nobody at the top needs it, so nobody at the top is paying to keep it alive, so it’s dying. You’ve noticed that it’s dying, that’s why we’re here, that’s why the judge has us round a table like the last meeting of a club. You’ve noticed and you’ve come to the wrong man, because I’m the one who knows exactly why it’s dying and I don’t know how to stop it and I’m not sure I’d bother.”
“You’ve just said something very strange,” said Theano, “and I don’t think you heard it.”
“I hear everything I say. It’s a professional condition. Myrto has it too.”
“You said every word for us was invented by the strong to get what they needed. Soul, subject, citizen, user. And then you said that today no one strong needs the citizen. If that’s true, then for the first time in this whole history there’s a word for what a person is that nobody powerful is paying for. Which means it’s the first one that can’t be their fiction. You set out to bury it and you’ve just told me it’s the only free word in the language.”
“Free and unwanted,” Aris said, “is what they call a stray dog.”
“Yes,” said Theano. “And a stray dog is the only dog that’s not somebody’s.”
Danae Christofi spoke then, for the first time. She has a low voice and does not raise it; people lean in to hear her and I think she knows this and uses it.
“He’s right that nobody needs it,” she said. “I can tell you exactly what my systems needed, because I wrote the objective. They needed you to be predictable. That’s the whole business, nine years of my life: take a hundred million people and make each one of them easier to call. What they’ll click, what they’ll buy, what they’ll believe on Thursday. And the thing about the citizen, if the word means anything, if it’s the thing you’re all circling, is that a citizen is precisely the person the model can’t call. The one who might, for reasons of her own, say no. We had a name for those people internally. We called them noise.” She turned her glass. She’d picked that up from Theano within the hour. “And there were fewer of them every quarter. I have the graphs. I’m not supposed to have the graphs, but I have them.”
“Then the citizen isn’t extinct,” Theano said. “She’s unprofitable. Those aren’t the same.”
“Give it time,” said Aris.
“You’ve run seven campaigns,” Theano said to him. “You told me that in the car park at the wedding where we met, I remember it, seven and you’d won five. Tell me honestly. In seven campaigns, did you ever once make a citizen?”
The question sat there. Aris did a thing I have seen witnesses do when they realise the question is not the one they prepared for: he looked at the person who’d asked it as though checking whether it was a trick, and saw it was not, and that was worse.
“Voters,” he said. “I made voters. I made them in bulk, I made them cheaply, I made them by the busload, literally, there were buses. I never made a citizen. Not one. Making a citizen would have made me unemployable.”
“Why?”
“Because a citizen can’t be delivered.” He said it flatly, like a man reading a specification. “That’s the whole difference. You can promise a client a voter. You can put her on a bus, you can tell her what she’s afraid of, you can get her to the school hall by four o’clock and she’ll do what she was brought to do. You cannot promise a client a citizen. She might read the thing. She might ask who paid for the bus. She might get to the hall and vote the other way because the man at the door was rude to her. She can’t be sold because she can’t be shipped.” He picked up his phone, looked at it, put it down again face down. “You want to know what a citizen is, judge? It’s the thing I was paid for thirty years to make sure didn’t show up.”
He did not blush. He is not a man who blushes. But he did not say anything for a while after that, and Aris Stamatiou not saying anything is a physical event; the table noticed it the way you notice a fridge stopping.
“You’ve just said what she is,” Theano said, gently.
“I said what I couldn’t sell.”
“That’s what I said.”
VI
It was Sotiris who broke it, because he had been waiting to and because he is a man who cannot let a good sentence go by without checking it against a child.
“No,” he said. “No. Sorry. That’s wrong, or it’s not enough. ‘The one who can’t be delivered.’ A stone can’t be delivered either, not by persuasion. I have three in my class who refuse everything. Refuse to sit, refuse to write, refuse the bread at break. Are they citizens? They’re the most undeliverable people I’ve ever met. They’re seven. Refusing is not the thing. Any mule can refuse.”
“He’s right,” said Eleni. It was the first thing she’d said and she said it like a diagnosis.
“He is right,” Theano said. “So we need what she refuses for. The no by itself is a mule. What’s the no for?” And then she turned to me, which she had not warned me she would do, and which I have decided, on reflection, she had planned in the car park at Kourion along with everything else.
“Myrto. You’ve written down eleven years of courts. Every kind. What did people say?”
I stopped typing, because I could not type and answer, and then I thought better of it and kept typing, because if it is going in it should all go in.
“What they were owed,” I said.
“Go on.”
“That’s what they said. Every day. Eleven years. What they were owed, who owed it to them, since when, with interest. Contract, tort, land, family, the lot. I have written the words ‘I am entitled’ more times than I have written my own name. I don’t remember anybody standing up in a courtroom to say what they owed. Ever. Except the ones being sentenced, and they were being told.”
“Same in the hospital,” Eleni said. “Everyone knows their rights. The relatives have them printed. Laminated, some of them. I’ve never once had a family come to me with a list of what they owed the ward.”
“Then here’s a candidate,” Theano said, “and I’ll say it plainly so it can be knocked down plainly. The citizen is the one who says, unasked, what she owes.”
“That’s a saint,” said Sotiris.
“Is it?”
“About twenty centuries’ difference,” said Aris, who had recovered enough to be unkind again, “and the saints got the better deal. They only owed God, and God doesn’t send invoices.”
“No,” Eleni said. “That’s not the difference.” She unfolded her hands. “The saints owed one thing to one person, and they loved him. A citizen owes something to people she doesn’t like. The man in the bed next to hers. The one who parks across her drive. Amir at the garage, who she’s never met and who is not, she’s fairly sure, one of hers. That’s harder than sainthood. Sainthood is love with a schedule. This is obligation to someone who irritates you. There’s no religion for it. There’s barely a word.”
“There was a word,” Theano said. “It was ‘citizen.’ We’ve spent the evening proving we’ve lost it.”
“Fine,” said Marina. “Then say it. She owes something to people she dislikes. Owes what? Tax? We’ve done tax. Obedience? We’ve done that. Blood? The Colonel’s done that.” She was not being cruel; she was being an economist. “Name the thing in the left column, judge, or admit that you’re back at my father’s book with nothing to write in it.”
“I’m back at the question of what goes in it,” Theano said. “Which is not nothing. It’s the only question. And I’ll tell you why I can’t answer it, and it’s not because I’m old and the fish was heavy.” She put both hands flat on the table. “I can’t say what a citizen owes until I know what the city is for. Nobody can. You can’t say what a sailor owes until you know where the ship is going.”
“A ship isn’t going anywhere,” said Marina at once, and it was the reflex of a woman who has spent thirty years correcting people about ships. “That’s the amateur’s picture. A ship’s carrying something, for somebody, and the somebody has a name and an address and a penalty clause. Ask what it’s carrying and who’s paying.”
“Then say what the city carries,” said Theano. “And for whom.”
And Marina, who had an answer for everything else that night, did not have one for that, and knew it, and to her credit did not pretend.
VII
Iakovos had said nothing all evening. He’d eaten very little and drunk less and sat with his chair pushed back a little from the table, half in the light and half in the dark under the vine, the way, I suppose, a man sits in a theatre when he’s paid for the ticket but isn’t sure of the play. Now he said:
“Can I say something that isn’t an argument?”
“It’d be a relief,” said Sotiris.
“You’ve spent four hours saying what a citizen does. Pays, votes, defends, refuses, owes. Verbs. Nobody has said what one looks like.” He leaned forward into the light. “I write music for pictures. I sit in a dark room and they show me a face and I have to know, in about a second and a half, what that person is, because the note has to be under the face before the audience knows they’ve decided about him. I’d know a citizen if I saw one on a screen. I’m nearly sure I would. I’d know it the way you know a man in a film is going to betray somebody before he’s opened his mouth. And I’m trying to think whether I’ve ever seen one in the street, in Limassol, in my life, and I’m not sure I have. I’ve seen people being very brave and people being very right. I’m not sure that’s it.”
“What does it look like, then?” said Danae.
“I don’t know. Something in how they stand. As if the street were partly theirs and partly not, and they’d made their peace with both.” He sat back. “I don’t know. That’s why I came. I thought if I heard you say it I’d know whether I’d seen it.”
“And have you?”
“I heard Aris say it. When he said he couldn’t sell her. That was the closest. I’d have put a note under that.”
“What note?” said Theano.
“Not a major one,” said Iakovos. “Something that doesn’t resolve.”
Theano looked at him for a moment with the expression she used to have for the very rare junior advocate who said something she had not already thought of.
“That’s yours, then,” she said. “Not tonight. But it’s yours. Somebody at this table has to say what she looks like, and none of the rest of us are qualified.”
VIII
Sotiris looked at the time on Aris’s phone, which was the nearest, and stood up, and did not go.
“I’ll tell you where I am,” he said. “It’s ten past eleven. On Tuesday, at a quarter to eight in the morning, twenty-three children are going to come through a green door and sit down in front of me and I have to turn them into citizens. That is the word. It’s in the curriculum. ‘Αγωγή του πολίτη,’ it says, forty minutes a week, and there’s a book, and the book has a flag on the cover and a page about recycling. I’ve done it for nineteen years. And I have sat here all night and watched this woman,” he pointed, not rudely, at Theano, “take apart five definitions like they were a child’s chair, and I believed her every time, and now I don’t have one, and I still have Tuesday. So what do I tell them? Tell me what to say on Tuesday, judge, or admit that all this is a very expensive way of not saying anything.”
“Tell them you don’t know,” said Theano.
“They’re seven.”
“Tell them you don’t know, and that you’re finding out, and that they may watch you do it.”
“That’s not a curriculum. They need to know a red light means stop. They don’t need to know that the concept of stopping is contested.”
“Then teach them that.” She said it without heat. “Teach them the red light means stop. And then teach them that somebody, once, decided the light should be red and not blue, and that it could have been them. Two sentences, Sotiris. You can manage two sentences by Tuesday.”
He stood there with his hand on the back of his chair.
“The second sentence is the whole problem,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You can’t teach the second sentence to a seven-year-old.”
“You’ve been teaching it to me all night,” Theano said. “Every time I put a wall up you asked who decided it should be there. That’s the second sentence. You’re already teaching it. You just haven’t put it on the board.”
Sotiris sat down. He did not concede; he is not a man who concedes; he sat down the way a man sits down who has decided the bus isn’t coming and he may as well hear the rest.
“Then here’s what I think we’re doing,” Theano said, and she said it to all of us, “and I’ll say it now, because it’s late and Lefteris will be back soon and he’ll want to know what he’s paid for.
“We’ve spent the night looking for the citizen and we can’t find her, and I think it’s because she isn’t a thing you can see on her own. She’s a shape inside another shape. You can’t say what a sailor is without a ship. You can’t say what a citizen is without a city, and the cities we have don’t know what they’re for, so they can’t tell us what she’s for, so she’s disappearing, and Danae has the graphs. So.” She turned her glass. “Let’s build the city.”
“On paper,” said Aris.
“In speech. Here. At this table and at other tables. I’m aware of what that sounds like. I’m aware a man did it two and a half thousand years ago and wrote it down, and that for two and a half thousand years the book has been read as a floor plan by people who should have been kept away from cement. Every man who read it and believed it built a wall with a guard on it. I know. I’ve read the century. I’m not proposing a plan. I’m proposing that we ask, in order and out loud and with people who know what they’re talking about, what a city would have to be for it to be worth being a citizen of. And then—”
“And then?” Marina.
“Then we go out and see if anyone comes.”
“Comes where?”
“I don’t know yet,” Theano said. “That’s the last question, not the first. But I want the record to be public from the start, from tonight, from Myrto’s ugly version tomorrow morning, because if we are building a city, then the first citizens aren’t us. We’re the ones who’ll be dead or tired or paid. The first citizens are whoever reads the plans and shows up.”
“You’ll publish this,” said Aris. “Tonight. A meeting where nine people agreed on nothing.”
“Plato did. Ten books, and the first one settles nothing at all. It’s the best of them.”
IX
Lefteris came back at twenty to twelve. We heard the car on the track before we saw the lights, and then he came up the steps slowly, smelling of incense and of the basil they give out at the doors on the eve of the Cross, and he had a sprig of it in his shirt pocket beside the notebook. He looked at the table, at the bottles, at the fish bones, at his daughter, at Theano, and at me under the tablecloth with my hands still going, and he said:
“Well? What did you build?”
“Nothing,” said Theano. “We don’t know what a citizen is. We’ve decided to build a city to find out.”
He nodded as if that were the expected result, and sat down heavily in his chair at the head, and Marina poured him some water without being asked.
“Every Greek who ever lost a city tries to build one,” he said. “It’s the national disease. We’ve been doing it since Troy. What will you call it?”
Nobody had thought of it. I could see that nobody had; a name had not occurred to any of them, which is perhaps the difference between the people who build cities and the people who lose them.
“When Constantine moved the capital,” Lefteris said, “in the year 330, he didn’t call it New Athens. He had the choice. Athens had the philosophy, the schools, the whole business you’ve been doing at my table. He called it New Rome. Because Rome had the thing that lasts. The law. The roads. The water. And the citizenship, Aris; Rome gave it away, to everybody, to a shepherd in Cappadocia, and the shepherd’s great-great-grandchildren were still calling themselves Romans in 1453 and my grandmother was still calling herself one in 1960. She never said ‘Greek.’ She said Romiá. She said Romiosyni. That was the name of the thing she belonged to, and it was eleven hundred years old when the Turks took the city, and it was still there when the British left this island, and I don’t know what it is now but I know what it was called.” He drank the water. “You want a city that lasts? You’re not building New Athens. You’re building New Rome.”
“Rome fell,” said Theano.
“Twice. It fell twice. And each time it took a thousand years.” He put the glass down. “Show me anything else in the history of the world that fell that slowly, judge, and I’ll call it whatever you like.”
“The citizenship of 212 was a tax measure,” Aris said. “The edict. Caracalla wanted the inheritance tax and only citizens paid it. Your shepherd was made a Roman so he could be billed.”
“Then let it be both,” said Theano. “Let it be a tax measure that made citizens. That’s more than most ideals have managed.”
There was a silence then, but a different one from the silence after the Colonel spoke: not the silence of something that had been broken but of something that had been set down and was being looked at.
“New Rome,” said Danae, trying it.
“Νέα Ρώμη,” said Iakovos, and I think he was listening to the vowels.
“It’s a terrible name,” said Marina. “Everyone will think we mean Constantinople.”
“Everyone did mean Constantinople,” said her father. “For eleven hundred years. Get used to being misunderstood; it’s the first thing a citizen learns.”
X
We did not decide much else. It was midnight and past it, and the wine was gone, and the sea had done the thing it does at the end where you can hear it but not see it. But there are three things I should set down, because they were decided, and the point of me is that what was decided is written.
The first is that we meet again on Sunday, and not here. Theano said she wanted somewhere harder. “This is too pleasant. A vine and a shipowner’s fish. I want to be somewhere that argues back.” Sotiris said: “Come to the school, then. Tuesday. Quarter to eight. See what you’re talking about.” Theano said: “Sunday. I’m seventy-six; Tuesday at a quarter to eight is a young person’s idea of the truth.” So it is to be the school in Episkopi, on Sunday, when it’s empty. “You’ll have to imagine the children,” Sotiris said. “I’ve been imagining citizens for forty years,” said Theano. “Children will be a rest.”
The second is that the record is public. Theano put it as a condition, and no one at the table refused it, though Aris looked at his phone for a long time, and Marina asked whether names would be used, and Theano said: “Yours will. You spoke. People who speak are named; it’s the one rule of a court I’d keep.” Marina said: “Then I’ll speak more carefully next time.” Theano said: “No, you won’t. Nobody ever has.”
The third is what Theano said at the end, which I would have set down anyway, but which she asked me to, and she has never before asked me to set anything down; the machine was simply on and she simply spoke, for three years, as if it were not there.
“I want this in,” she said. “In these words.
“For forty years I sat in a building with the word Justice cut into the stone above the door, and I decided what people owed each other, and I did it, by my count, something over six thousand times. And in forty years not one advocate, not one litigant, not one colleague, ever asked me what a citizen was. And I am glad they didn’t. Because I’d have answered. I’d have answered fluently and at length, and I’d have been wrong, and it would be in the law reports, and Myrto would have typed it.” She looked at me. “It turns out I don’t know. That is the only thing tonight has proved, and it took nine people and a fish to prove it. It’s not nothing. It’s where a city starts. Everything else starts with somebody who’s sure.”
Then she put her hat on, at midnight, under a vine, because she has never in her life left a place without it.
XI
I drove home through the Base at one in the morning. The road is empty then and the signs are the same signs and nothing tells you, unless you already know, that for a stretch of some kilometres you are passing through a country you are not a citizen of, under the sovereignty of a king whose face is on none of your coins. Nobody stops you. Nobody has ever stopped me. I have driven it two hundred times.
I noticed it this time. I noticed it the whole way, from the turning below the theatre to the roundabout where the lights of the city begin, and I noticed that noticing it changed nothing about the road and something about me, and I did not have a word for what the something was, and I still do not, and I have spent this morning writing this down instead of looking for one, because that was the condition.
It is the fourteenth of September. The bells for the Cross went at seven. I have not improved anything. Where I have written that nobody spoke, nobody spoke. Where I have written that Aris was silent, he was, and for longer than I have made it look.
Next Sunday, the school. If you are reading this, it is because I kept the condition, and because the judge was right about one thing at least: she said the people who read it would be the ones it was for.
She did not say what you are for. Nobody has. That was the whole evening.
What is a citizen?
We do not know. We are going to build a city to find out. The name has been chosen, over water, by an old man who lost one.
New Rome.
End of Chapter One.