ROMEO THE POTHEAD AND JULIET THE SNITCH

Twelve Stories

by John Chioles

Kastaniotis Editions, 2004

A burning fire hovers over these short stories. The conflagration is both real and figurative, as deportation, immigration, exile. The eighth short story, "Wittgenstein, the One-eyed Cat and the Rain", finds the black cat of the house to be ablaze together with the house; she refuses to abandon it. But she survives the fire and walks along the ruins, atop the blackened walls, until her mistress, a teacher of philosophy now in exile, a mere child then, baptizes her with the name of her beloved philosopher, Wittgenstein.

The twelfth and final narrative in the collection, "White Fire", finds Koutalianos, a student of The Athens Divinity School, now in London to pursue postgraduate study in Psychoanalysis. He is deeply impressed with the story of the hedgehogs in Schopenhauer and Freud and through that begins to dig for the root of unhappiness in himself and in philosophy. He searches and thinks he has located love, work and leisure, the three main reasons for existence, according to his philosophers and psychoanalysts. And in the process he happens upon the yellowed papers of his grandfather and the burning to the ground of their small town by the Germans and their Sympathizer Battalions. The Nazi name “Operation Hedgehog” in the spring of ' 44 in northern Peloponnese, comes to close the circle of this bittersweet narrative.

In the first story, "The Five Day Trip", Photini and Stelios, on their school excursion to Delos, discover love through the broken ancient statues that lie about on the island. The lectures on Heliodorus bring them near to the blood of the ancient writer, where they lose their virginity in the caique of their return.

The refugees of the stories "Paradiso ", "The Silence", and "The Coming Together” bring us closer to displaced persons, in the chaos and misery of their lives in exile, in a not always hospitable European Union. In "Paradiso" Antonio leaves his homeland for some paradise and he finds in Crete his sister…at the spot where Europa was first raped… In “The Silence” an Englishman who teaches Shakespeare at the University of Athens finds the Albanian student, Benari. In a Shakespean performance Benari plays the role of silence. There two foreigners meet across that mute chasm. “The Coming Together” takes place in Arkadia and at Berkeley, California. The long conversation that the “foreign student” to the US has with the Albanian illegal alien in Arkadia moves him to recount his own story in distant California. Through their two stories they realize the finality of their displacement; and how unlikely it is that they will ever return to their homes.

“Romeo the Pothead and Juliet the Snitch” is the adaptation of a scene from “Romeo and Juliet”, which is being enacted by a group of truant boys, Greeks and foreigners, mainly from the Balkans, while in Korydallos prison for juveniles.