I’ve got a freak taking care of my roses

05.09.04

There are tons of pictures inside my head. I want to record some of them. Let’s start with the freak and the roses. There is a beast in front of my window. A human beast. It’s a fat creature, dark-skinned, with an unshaved face and blond, dyed hair (the roots are black because the colour has faded. He has a name; it’s George. He is wearing a dirty white T-shirt and lets his arms just hang heavy while he is shoveling the ground and covers it with compost. My mother asked him to take care of our roses, with some money and a broken-down black-and-white (or white-and-black) television.

George had nowhere to go. His parish undertook the building of a little house close to the church. He refused to accept it (in the beginning, at least). He regretted that afterwards and said ‘all right’. He pronounced this ‘all right’ in broken Greek, because he is not from our country. He was working for a long time at the building site opposite our house. He woke up in the middle of the night and was stumbling on the cement he was carrying. Once he lost his balance and fell. The noise he made was so terrible that my father jumped up from the couch half-asleep and went to see what happened.

‘Stop working at night. You’ll kill yourself.’, said my dad. He got no answer. He also said that he would call the police if George did not stop working. My dad had taken up the surveillance of the building site and he would be in trouble (and so would the contractor himself), if any worker was injured while working in hours that work was not allowed on the site. And yet George would stop at nothing. ‘Do whatever you want’, he said to my dad and continued to carry the cement. George was not just a freak. He was a freak with psychological problems. The neighbours had assured us of that. He had the relevant papers in his pocket.

From a far distance, he looked like a middle-aged housewife. From a close distance, he looked like a detainee. His long blond hair was almost flashing like neon lights in the dark night. At dawn you could understand that he was no other than the ‘crazy’ George. This was not his real name. People from the neighbourhood had named him as thus, just as they name the strays that go around their houses and beg for a little bone. If they’re lucky, they get what they want and then they disappear for days or months, until they come back again. That’s how George had come back. He was standing outside my window shoveling the ground without even understanding that I was watching him. I looked at him like a jerk. He seemed to be awfully different from the whole scene. I looked at him once again and thought, ‘Man, I’ve got a freak taking care of my roses’.