{"id":4185,"date":"1978-01-01T13:38:00","date_gmt":"1978-01-01T13:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.the-athenian.com\/site\/?p=4185"},"modified":"2022-11-05T13:47:36","modified_gmt":"2022-11-05T13:47:36","slug":"the-inheritance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.the-athenian.com\/site\/1978\/01\/01\/the-inheritance\/","title":{"rendered":"The Inheritance"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You see, Polykarpos was terribly superstitious. Not the ‘walking under a ladder’ or ‘black cat crossing your path’ type of superstition. That was too easy and not rewarding enough. He was, rather, a believer in astrology and, in his later years, he became an ardent spiritualist. His interest in astrology began when he met the mystical Madame Lazonga at a party in Kifissia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A little later, he described this encounter to me in the following words: \u038a was sitting in an armchair sipping my scotch and soda, wondering why this atrociously ugly woman sitting opposite me was staring at me so intently, when she suddenly leaned forward and put a claw-like hand on my knee. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You are a Sagittarian”she said, just like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I am not!” I replied indignantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I am a Greek Orthodox.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s how much I knew about astrology. She then explained to me what she meant and asked me for the exact date and time of my birth. Naturally, I remembered the date and, fortunately, the exact time because my mother never let me forget it. Apparently the birth pangs came during a dinner party she was giving and just as she was getting a cheese souffle out of the oven at nine p.m. The souffle collapsed and I was born on the sitting room couch with the aid of the dinner guests and the family doctor who had also been invited just in case. With this information at hand, Madame Lazonga rapidly made some mental calculations. Then she told me I had a big deal in the works and that I was suffering from piles. She was dead right in both respects. She told me to cancel the deal because Saturn was sitting on my Sun, or something like that, and she recommended an excellent ointment for the piles. I took her advice on the ointment but I could not cancel the deal because I had already committed myself.’<\/p>\n\n\n

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To cut a long story short, Polykarpos lost a rather sizable amount of money on the deal \u2014 and from then on, he did nothing without consulting the elaborate astrological chart Madame Lazonga made out for him with guidance on how to conduct his life and his affairs. The result was that he made a great deal of money by making investments only when the planetary conjunctions were auspicious and by staying in bed when the signs were all against him. Even that wasn’t foolproof when on one occasion he spilled some tea on his electric blanket, got a mild shock, jumped out of bed, and sprained his ankle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In time he began to supplement astrology with palm reading, coffee-cup reading, and even opening the Bible at random and putting his finger on a passage which might provide him with some significant advice. But soon he gave that up when, more often than not, he would put his finger on such gems as ‘The sons of Merari were Mahli and Mushi: the sons of Jaaziah; Beno,’ trom which, try as he might, he could extract no coherent guiuance. Eventually, he turned to spiritualism. And he struck gold on the first night he attended a seance with a ouija board. The spirit who answered his call was named Bashi Bizaz and he informed Polykarpos that they had lived together in a previous incarnation as rug pedlars in Shiraz. Polykarpos was rather disappointed to hear that he had been only a rug pedlar in this previous incarnation and not a Byzantine emperor but Bashi Bizaz consoled him by revealing that in another incarnation he had been a wealthy merchant in Venice. The spirit also informed Polykarpos that his preoccupation with commercial gain was so strong that it was preventing him from attaining higher spheres of spiritual development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘You mean I will keep being reincarnated on this earth until I learn there are better things in life than just making money?’ Polykarpos asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘Yes, alas,’ the spirit had replied through the ouija board. ‘You must mend your ways.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Polykarpos pretended to be contrite and to seek further guidance from the spirit of Bashi Bizaz during subsequent seances, but he also cunningly managed to elicit such information as he needed to make even more money on the stock exchange. He happened to hold a seance the day before he died when Bashi Bizaz told him to prepare for a long journey. He was so unsuspecting that he was happily poring over a gaily-coloured array of travel brochures the following day when his coronary struck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although I was not a relative, I had been mentioned in Polykarpos’s will and was thus invited by his solicitor to the reading of that document in the presence of all his beneficiaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were about twenty of us in all and, as we waited in the lawyer’s office, I was rather upset to hear some derogatory comments being made by a few of his young nephews who could hardly contain their excitement at coming into sizable chunks of a very large estate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘Superstitious old codger. Thought he would live forever with all that spiritualist stuff. Never gave me a penny while he was alive,’ I heard one of them say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon after, we were ushered into the office of the solicitor who, adjusting his glasses, coughed drily and read the will. There were small amounts left to all the relatives; to me he left his large collection of bridge manuals \u2014 from Culbertson to Goren. Then came the punch line: ‘The remainder of my estate, amounting to some twenty million dollars, is to be held in trust on my account, until my next reincarnation, which, if I can have my way, will be very soon indeed.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I WAS sorry to hear that my friend Polykarpos had died suddenly of a heart attack. He had been a pleasant fellow and a good bridge partner \u2014 that is, when some sign or omen had not prevented him from joining the game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":4190,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-onlooker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-athenian.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-athenian.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-athenian.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-athenian.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-athenian.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-athenian.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4198,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-athenian.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4185\/revisions\/4198"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-athenian.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-athenian.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-athenian.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-athenian.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}