Report to Grego (66 page)

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1) A shepherd from Anóghia, a wild, rocky village on the flanks of Psiloriti, used to hear his fellow villagers relate signs and wonders about Megalo Kastro. In this city, so it went, you could find all the goods of the world: horse beans by the ladleful, sacks of salted codfish, barrels and barrels of sardines and smoked herring; shops, moreover, chock-full of boots, and others with muskets for sale, as many as you liked, and gunpowder and penknives and daggers; still others whose ovens disgorged peelful after peelful of bread each morning, white bread in long thin loaves. And in addition, so it went, at night there were women who did not murder you, as Cretan girls did, if you touched them, and their flesh was as white and tasty as the long thin loaves.

The shepherd's mouth watered as he listened to all these miracles, and Megalo Kastro beamed in his imagination as a Cretan paradise, full of codfish, muskets, and women. He listened and listened, and one noontime, unable to stand it any longer, he belted his wide cummerbund tightly around him, slung his best provision sack, the embroidered one, over his shoulder, took hold of his shepherd's staff, and plummeted down Psiloriti. In a few hours he was face to face with Kastro. It was still daylight, and the fortress gate stood open. The shepherd halted on the threshold. One stride and he would be in paradise. But suddenly his soul leaped to its feet. It seemed to feel itself straddled by desire; it was no longer doing what it wished, no longer free. Ashamed, the Cretan knit his brows. He would stand on his self-respect.

“If I want, I go in; if I don't, I don't,” he said. “I don't!”

Turning his back on Megalo Kastro, he headed again for the mountain.

2) A handsome young stalwart had died in another Cretan village, in the White Mountains. His four best friends rose and said, “Shall we go and keep the deathwatch by him, to let the women rest from their lamenting?”

“Yes,” they all replied in strangulated voices.

He had been the village's best pallikári, twenty years old, and his death was a dagger thrust in their hearts.

“Someone brought me some raki today,” one of the friends remarked. “It's mulberry raki, and that can bring even the dead back to life! What do you say, boys, shall I fill a bottle and take it along?”

“My ma did her baking today. Shall I take a couple of barley rolls?”

“I have some pork sausages left. Shall I bring along a good string of them?”

“Me, I'll provide the glasses,” said the fourth. “And a couple of refreshing cucumbers.”

Each took his provisions and thrust them beneath his short shepherd's cloak of frieze. Come nightfall, all four entered the dead man's house.

Adorned with basil and marjoram, the deceased was laid out in his casket, which stood on trestles in the middle of the house. His
feet faced the door; around him the women were wailing the dirge.

“Go and get some sleep, ladies,” said the friends, bidding them good evening. “We'll keep vigil by him.”

The women retired to an inner room, bolting the doors. The friends went to the stools, placed the raki and mezédhes at their feet, and gazed tearfully at the deceased. They did not speak. A half-hour went by; an hour. Finally one of them lifted his eyes from the corpse.

“What say, boys, shall we have a drink?”

“Why sure!” they all replied. “We're not stiffs, are we? Let's drink!”

They bent down and picked up the food. One of them lighted some paper and broiled the sausages. A delicious odor invaded the death chamber. They filled the glasses and, enlacing them in their fists to keep them from making noise, “clinked” them vigorously.

“God forgive him. . . . Here's to our turn!”

“To our turn! God forgive him!”

They tossed off one raki, two, three, ate the mezédhes, reached the bottom of the bottle, began to feel jolly.

They gazed at the corpse again. Suddenly one of them leaped to his feet.

“What say, boys”—he indicated the corpse with a sidewise glance—“wanna vault him?”

“Let's!”

Turning up their wide, loose-fitting foufoúles, they stuffed the ends into their cummerbunds so they would not be hindered in running. Then they transferred the casket to the threshold and opened the door leading to the courtyard.

Pftt! Pftt! They spat into their palms, took a running start, and began to vault the corpse.

3) And this final incident:

Easter Sunday, shortly before daybreak. In the mountains of Crete, Father Kaphátos races from village to village resurrecting Christ with mercurial speed because there are many villages having only this one priest, and he must perform the resurrection in all of them before daybreak. Sleeves rolled up, weighted with his vestments and the heavy silver-bound Bible, he clambers over the
rocky furze-covered mountains, runs through the holy night gasping for breath, reaches one village, shouts the
Christos anesti—
Christ is risen—and then dashes to the next village, his tongue hanging out of his mouth.

In the final village, a little hamlet wedged between two crags, the people are assembled in the diminutive church. They have lighted the cressets and adorned the icons and portal with laurels and myrtles they carried from the ravine. Their candles remain unlit in their hands; they are waiting for the Great Word to come so that they can light them.

Just then they hear a crunching of pebbles in the silence, as though a horse were hastily climbing the mountainside and the stones cascading down.

“He's coming! He's coming!”

They all fly outside. The east is already tinted rose; the skies are laughing. Heavy breaths are heard, the sheep dogs bark with joy, and then all at once from behind a frizzled oak—shirt unbuttoned, drenched with sweat, flushed from running, engrossed in the many Christs he has resurrected—out springs old, black, dwarfish Father Kaphátos, his unbraided hair flowing.

The sun is at that very instant emerging from behind the mountain's crest. Taking a leap, the priest lands in front of the villagers and spreads his arms:

“Christos anéstakas,
lads!” he shouts.

The familiar, trite word
anesti
had suddenly seemed small, cheap, wretched to him; it was incapable of containing the Great News. The word had broadened and proliferated on the priest's lips. Linguistic laws had given way and cracked in the wake of the soul's great impetus, new laws were created, and lo! in creating the new word, this morning, the old Cretan felt for the first time that he was truly resurrecting Christ—all of him, in every inch of his great stature.

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Love of liberty, the refusal to accept your soul's enslavement, not even in exchange for paradise; stalwart games over and above love and pain, over and above death; smashing even the most
sacrosanct of the old molds when they are unable to contain you any longer—these are the three great cries of Crete.

In these three incidents, what fills the soul with pure unadulterated joy is the fact that philosophers or moralists are not speaking here, men who fabricate and promulgate difficult, elevated theories in their spare time, away from all danger. Rather, we have simple souls, Cretan peasants who follow the impulses of their bowels and, without growing short of breath, ascend the highest peaks man is capable of attaining: liberty, scorn of death, creation of new laws. Unveiled to our eyes here is man's thrice-noble origin, for we see how the two-legged beast, in following other than intellectual roads, succeeded in becoming human. Our journey to the fatal intellectual Golgotha thus becomes more loaded with responsibility because now, looking at the Cretans, we know that if we fail to become human, the fault is ours, ours alone. For this lofty species—man—exists, he made his appearance on earth, and there is no longer any justification whatever for our deterioration and cowardice.

In Crete, a person who will not deign to deceive either himself or others encounters face to face, to a degree found nowhere else, the single-breasted goddess, the Amazon, who shows favor to no one, who sits on the knees of no one, neither gods nor men: the goddess Responsibility.

F
or many days I roamed the old beloved lairs where I had spent my youth. Promenades by the edge of the sea. In the evenings the same cool breeze blew that used to blow through my hair when it was black; the same perfume of jasmine, basil, and marjoram arose when I went through the narrow lanes at twilight and the doors stood open and the housegirls began to water the flowerpots in the courtyards.

Breeze, perfume, and sea possessed immortal youth; only the houses had aged, and also my former friends. Many of them I did not recognize; many did not recognize me. They stared at me for a moment—I reminded them of someone, but of whom? Weary of trying to remember, they passed on. Only one raised his arms in astonishment as he saw me and halted.

“Is that you, my old friend?” he cried. “Look at you—what happened!”

It was my former bosom friend, the third of the group which had founded the Friendly Society. He appeared well fed, and had an empty pipe in his mouth so that he could inhale the aroma, hoax himself, and break the habit of smoking. He looked me over, examined me, then clasped me indulgently in his arms.

“How skinny and black you've become! Your cheeks are sunken, your forehead covered with crests and troughs; your eyebrows have luxuriated like thorns and your eyes spit fire. What happened to you? How long will you keep on burning, how long will you roam the world?”

“As long as I'm still alive—when I can't change any more, and I stand dead and beatified, with an unlighted pipe in my mouth, making fun of the living.”

“I'm old, am I? I'm dead?” said my friend, breaking into a hissing, mocking laugh.

I said nothing. The thought of my old friend suddenly filled me with sorrow and indignation. How I had loved him! In those days of youth's divine, comic haughtiness when we roamed Kastro's streets until dawn, with what conviction and vehemence we demolished and rebuilt the world! The walls of our small city constricted us, the ideas we learned from our teachers constricted us, we found it impossible to subside comfortably into man's customary joys and aspirations. “Let's smash the frontiers,” we said constantly. Which frontiers we did not know. We simply kept spreading our arms, as though we were suffocating.

Now my friend's arms were at his side and he found no trouble in breathing. If he still had an unlawful desire left, he was fighting to drown it by smoking a tobaccoless pipe.

“Why did you go to Russia, to do what?” my father asked me on the night of my arrival.

He eyed me furiously, restraining his anger only by force. For years he had been expecting me to open an office and begin touring the villages to act as sponsor in baptisms and weddings. My friends would multiply, and then I would declare my candidacy and be elected to the Boule. But now, instead, he saw me roaming the world. Rumor had it, furthermore, that I wrote books. The last time I'd seen him he had asked me, “What kind of books-fairy tales, love letters, amanédhes? For shame! Eunuchs and
monks are the only ones who write. Settle down at long last in your own territory; you're a man, work at a man's job.”

Now he regarded me out of the corner of his eye and said, “Maybe you've turned Bolshevik on me—is that it? No God, no country, no honor. Forward, dogs, and no holds barred!”

I told myself that this was a good time to explain what was happening in Russia, what kind of a new world was being built there. So I began to relate in simple words how neither rich men nor poor existed in Russia any longer. Everyone worked and everyone ate; there were no masters and serfs now, everyone was a master. A new humanity existed there, a superior morality, a more honorable honor, a new family. Russia had taken the lead and was showing the way; the whole world was going to follow her, so that justice and happiness might finally reign on earth.

I had worked up steam and begun to preach. My father listened in silence. He kept rolling a cigarette, unrolling it, rolling it again, without deciding to light it. I thought to myself, He understands, thank God. Suddenly he raised his arm with irritation and I fell silent.

“All you say is well and good,” he declared, shaking his head. “But what if it really happens?”

In other words: Go ahead, talk, talk—if you think it's worth the trouble. They're just words—twaddle—they can't do any harm. But take care, wretch, you don't go turning them into action!

Would that I really could have turned those words into action! But I was afraid I could not. In me the fierce strength of my race had evaporated, my great-grandfather's pirate ship had sunk, action had degenerated into words, blood into ink; instead of holding a lance and waging war, I held a small penholder and wrote. Contact with people annoyed me, diminished my strength and love. Only when I was by myself and contemplating man's destiny did my heart overflow with compassion and hope.

Upon returning from the world-engendering Soviet laboratory, however, I gathered up courage. Now I said to myself, Man can conquer his incompetence and imperfections, can't he? Of course he can! Shame on me then to sit passively and accept what nature has given me. I shall rebel!

And just precisely at the instant I needed him, a rich uncle came along and gave me a sum to have me stop wandering shiftlessly
around the world, as he put it, and instead apply myself zealously to my work, open a law office, be elected to the Boule, perhaps one day even be asked to head a ministry, and thus glorify my ancestral name. After all, I was the first of our lineage to be educated, the first to open a book and read. Therefore, I had a duty to carry out.

I turned this over and over in my mind. No, I still could not shut myself up in an office—I was suffocating. I would find some other way to enter the practical life. But which? I had no idea. I recruited workers in my imagination. Together, we would harness ourselves to a job, eat the same food, wear the same clothes. There would be no boss and workers; the workers would not be workers but co-workers, with exactly the same rights as myself.