23f - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (Lazy Fanis)

At the other end of the dark corridor of the busy first floor, opposite to grandma's, was the door of the apartment of an unemployed slob and, by all indications, a lazy-born person: Fanis. From our point of view, he looked middle-aged and rather big, but age and stature are generally magnified in the eyes of a child, in proportion to the difference in years. He had gray-blond hair, which fell straight at the back of his neck without a parting and a fringe to his eyebrows. It was like a cheap wig. Could it have been one? He lived with his widowed mother in their small apartment, a mirror image of my grandparents’. There was a shallowness and a lack of cultural depth evident around Fanis’ personality, a biased opinion, it could be said, given the intellectual standards that Father had set in judging a humble environment, and he led an existence which many in our house, especially my parents, found socially marginal and irritatingly parasitic. His superficiality was further evidenced by the array of folk and light pop songs he enjoyed listening on radio or television, for the best part of the day: during working hours for most residents, as well as evenings. In warm summer afternoons, with his balcony door wide open, his music could be heard by housewives, children and traders, everyone on the street below, while he was enjoying his cup of Turkish coffee in the shade that our balcony above offered, usually still dressed in pyjamas from the afternoon siesta until sunset and his pair of beach flip-flops protruding through the rails. Watching us play ball and other games on the street below was one of his pastimes in those late afternoons. On a couple of occasions when his brother, a handsome young man with a more vibrant personality, was visiting from Athens, both left the apartment to participate in a makeshift footie, played on our alley downstairs or in the sandlot by the stream. A Peter Pan syndrome would be an apt term in the circumstance.

Any loud noise emanating from our living room -just above his, during the evening hours he normally spent watching TV, he found a nuisance -perhaps, understandably so given the poor sound insulation of the walls and ceilings. Whenever the three children, I, Brother, and my first cousin from next door got together into our relatively spacious living room, under my guidance, we improvised games, which often involved simply jumping around or aimlessly running back and forth from one end of the room to the other, carefree and tireless. Our piece of fun could not have lasted long; Fanis, with a broomstick, would knock at his ceiling, our floor viciously. On occasions, if noises from our living-room persisted for more than a few days in a row, he would complain vigorously to grandmother, who, however, conveyed his complaints with a gesture of the hand that meant: ‘Let him say whatever, don't pay too attention! Don’t bother!’, then tapping her index finger to her head as if to highlight Fanis’ empty-headedness.

Indolent, single, without mates, without major expectations from life, possibly without dreams or ambitions. His sole aim was to spend another ‘good day’ (whatever that meant for him) in peace and quiet -in the plainest definition of ‘good’, excluding the satisfaction of basic human needs. Goncharev's hero Oblomov was a personality I would most closely associate with Fanis, although Oblomov, unlike Fanis, enjoyed a rather wealthier lifestyle, had a few friends no matter how rogue, even once fell in love, although unreciprocated. We never got around to know about his main source of income and how he sustained himself. Bad rumours attributed it to a disability benefit fraudulently obtained without genuine medical grounds, as he always looked fit-to-work, or a rental income he was receiving from a parental property he inherited. Any income of his might have been complementing the mother's meagre pension while she was alive. In the eyes of my family, he was a personification of αραχτή [laid back attitude and aversion to strain] that on average terms characterizes Greek society at large and the αραλίκι [laziness and lounging] in extreme manifestation. In a plain English, Fanis was a loafer.

Echoes from the neighborhood we left years later whispered that he eventually got married and left behind him the idleness in the uneventful reality of the alley, which for him, as far as we could tell, fulfilled his life sufficiently in the apartment below ours. Before we left another tall building was being raised across from the narrow street, which would have eliminated the remaining traces of skyline visible from our balconies and blocked the last rays of sunshine in summer afternoons Fanis. Lost, along with the ghost of his mother on the threshold of their door gossiping with grandmother, along with Fanis’ figure on the balcony in his pyjamas and flip-flops drinking coffee and listening to Greek pop music of the 1970’s and, later, after the fall of junta, the formerly prohibited song ‘Good Morning, Sun, Good Morning!’, which became a favourite of his, evidence one would say of a progressive political inclination. Lost along with the sun and out kickabouts under his balcony with Fanis the sole spectator.