Report to Grego Read online

  “What is this paper?” he asked the messenger with irritation. “Did my sheep get into somebody’s wheatfield again? Do I have to pay damages?”

  The messenger unrolled the citation joyfully and read it aloud.

  “Put it in ordinary language so I can understand. What does it mean?”

  “It means you’re a hero. Your nation sends you this citation so you can frame it for your children.”

  The captain extended his huge paw.

  “Give it here!”

  Seizing the parchment, he ripped it in shreds and threw it into the fire beneath a caldron of boiling milk.

  “Go tell them I didn’t fight to receive a piece of paper. I fought to make history!”

  To make history! The uncultivated shepherd sensed very well what he wanted to say, but did not know how to say it. Or did he perhaps say it in the finest way possible?

  The messenger was saddened to see the shredded parchment in the fire. The captain rose. He filled a small basin with milk, cut off half a cheese, brought two barley rolls, then turned to the other and said, “Come here, brother; don’t get excited. Eat, drink, and to the devil with citations! Tell them—do you hear?—tell them I don’t want payment. I fight because I like it. Tell them that. . . . Do what I say: eat!”

  There have been two supreme days in my life. The first was the day Prince George set foot on Crete, the second was in Moscow many years later—the tenth-anniversary celebration of the Russian Revolution. On both of those days I felt that human partitions—bodies, brains, and souls—were capable of being demolished, and that humanity might return again, after frightfully bloody wandering, to its primeval, divine oneness. In this condition there is no such thing as “me,” “you,” and “he”; everything is a unity and this unity is a profound mystic intoxication in which death loses its scythe and ceases to exist. Separately, we die one by one, but all together we are immortal. Like prodigal sons, after so much hunger, thirst, and rebellion, we spread our arms and embrace our two parents: heaven and earth.

  With flowing tears that drenched their martial beards, Cretan captains tossed their kerchiefs in the air; mothers raised their infants high so that they could see the blond giant, this fairy-tale prince who had heard Crete’s lamentations centuries earlier and, mounted on a white horse like Saint George, had set out to liberate the island. Cretan eyes were glassily blank after so many centuries’ watch over the sea. There he is! No, he still has not appeared, but he shall appear any minute. . . . Sometimes it was a springtime cloud or a white sail that misled them; sometimes, in the depths of night, a dream. But the cloud always scattered, the sail vanished, the dream expired, and once again the Cretans fixed their eyes northward upon Greece, upon Muscovy, upon the merciless, slow-moving Lord.

  And now, lo! the whole of Crete quaked, its tombs opened, and a voice resounded from the summit of Psiloriti: “He is coming! He has arrived! Behold him!” Aged captains with deep wounds and silver pistols tumbled out of the mountains; youths came with their black-handled daggers and tinkling rebecs; bells tolled from quivering campaniles. The city had been adorned everywhere with palm leaves and myrtles—and the fair-haired Saint George stood on a pier strewn with laurel, the whole of the Cretan sea glittering behind his shoulders.

  The Cretans sang and danced in the taverns, they drank, they played the rebec, but still they did not find relief. Unable to fit any longer inside their bodies, they grasped knives and stabbed themselves in the arms and thighs so that blood would flow and they would be unburdened. In church the elderly Metropolitan stood with raised arms beneath the dome and gazed at the Pantocrator. He wanted to preach but his throat was blocked. Parting his lips, he cried, “Christ is risen, my children”—unable to utter anything else. “He is truly risen!” resounded from every breast, and the cathedral’s great chandeliers shook as though from an earthquake.

  I was young and inexperienced then; inside me the sacred intoxication did not wear off for an extremely long time—perhaps it has not worn off to this day. Even now in my most deeply joyful moments—when I view the sea, the star-filled sky or an almond tree in bloom, or when I relive my first experience of love—December 9, 1898, the day when Crete’s betrothed the Prince of Greece set foot on Cretan soil, flashes undying within me and the whole of my inner breast is adorned, like all of Crete on that day, with myrtles and laurels.

  My father took me by the hand in the early afternoon, while Megalo Kastro was still bellowing with joy. Stepping upon myrtles and laurels, we walked the length of the main street. Then we passed through the fortified gate and emerged into open fields. It was winter, but the day was pleasantly warm and an almond tree behind a hedge had produced its first flower. The fields had begun to turn green, deceived by the weather’s sweetness, while far off to our left the Selena mountains sparkled with full caps of snow. Though the vines were still dry stumps, the almond’s flower, striking out gallantly in the vanguard, had already begun to announce the coming of spring, and the stumps would open once again to liberate the white and black grapes inside them.

  A huge man came by with a load of laurel branches. Seeing my father, he halted.

  “Christ is risen, Captain Michael!” he exclaimed.

  “Crete is risen!” replied my father, placing his palm over his heart.

  We continued on our way. My father was in a hurry, and I had to run to keep up with him.

  “Where are we going, Father?” I asked, gasping for breath.

  “To see your grandfather. March!”

  We reached the graveyard. My father gave the gate a push and opened it. Painted on the lintel was a skull over two bones crossed to form an X, the initial letter of —Christ—who rose from the dead. We proceeded to the right, beneath cypresses, striding over abject graves with broken crosses and no watch lamps. I was afraid of the dead; I clutched my father’s jacket and followed behind him, stumbling constantly.

  My father halted at one of the abject graves—a small mound of rounded earth with a wooden cross. The name had been effaced by time. Removing his kerchief, he fell face-downward on the ground, scraped away the soil with his nails and made a little hole in the shape of a megaphone. Into this he inserted his mouth as deeply as he could. Three times he cried out, “Father, he came! Father, he came! Father, he came!”

  His voice grew louder and louder. Finally he was bellowing. Removing a small bottle of wine from his pocket, he poured it drop by drop into the hole and waited each time for it to go down, for the earth to drink it. Then he bounded to his feet, crossed himself, and looked at me. His eyes were flashing.

  “Did you hear?” he asked me, his voice hoarse from emotion. “Did you hear?”

  I remained silent. I had heard nothing.

  “Didn’t you hear?” said my father angrily. “His bones rattled.”

  Whenever I recall that day, I thank the Lord for allowing me to be born. And I thank him for allowing me to be born a Cretan and in time to have seen, with my own eyes, Liberty tread the laurel leaves and march up from the harbor gate to Saint Minas’s lair. What a shame that man’s eyes of clay are unable to discern the invisible! On that day I would have seen Saint Minas leap from his icon and stand at the church door mounted on his horse, the tears running down his sunburned cheeks and gray beard as he awaited the Prince of Greece.

  After the joy had finally subsided, after a strong south wind came a few days later and brushed, as I remember, the laurel leaves from the streets, after a fresh rain washed the spilled wine off the sidewalks, life became sober again and our minds shrank back inside their boundaries. The barbers had swept up the beards from their shop floors; the shaved faces of the Christians were sleek and resplendent. From time to time various belated shouts still issued raucously from the taverns. As for myself, I roamed the lanes sopping from rain, and whenever I saw the street in front of me deserted, I screeched and bellowed to find relief. Thousands of generations inside me were screeching and bellowing to find relief.

  Never have I felt
so deeply that our departed ancestors do not die, that at critical moments they cry out, jump to their feet, and take possession of our eyes, hands, and minds. During those days, all my grandfathers that had been murdered by the Turks, all my grandmothers whom the Turks had tortured by ripping off their breasts, bellowed and screeched from joy whenever the street was deserted and no one could see us. I rejoiced because I had a presentiment, without being able to think this out very clearly as yet, that I too would live on, would be able to think and see even after I died. All that was needed was the continued existence of hearts to remember me.

  Through that portal, that gateway decorated with laurel and ancestral bones, I entered my adolescent years. I had ceased to be a child.

  13

  ADOLESCENT DIFFICULTIES

  I SPENT my adolescent years beset by youth’s customary difficulties. Two huge beasts awoke inside me, that leopard the flesh, and that insatiable eagle which devours a man’s entrails and the more it eats the more it hungers—the mind.

  When I was still very young, only three or four years old, I was overcome by a violent curiosity to untangle the mystery of birth. I asked my mother and aunts, “How are babies born, how do they suddenly enter the house? Where do they come from?” I reasoned that some verdant country must exist, perhaps Paradise, where children sprouted like red poppies; every so often a father entered Paradise, picked one, and brought it home. This I turned over and over in my mind without giving it very much credence. As for my mother and aunts, they either failed to answer me at all or else told me fairy tales. But I understood more than they thought, more than I myself thought, and did not believe their tales.

  One day during that same period our neighbor Madame Katina died, although still a young woman. When I saw her brought out of her house lying on her back and followed by a large group of people who turned hurriedly into a lane and disappeared, I was seized by terror. “Why did they take her away?” I asked. “Where are they bringing her?” “She died,” I was told. “Died? What does that mean?” But no one offered me an explanation. Huddling in a corner behind the sofa and covering my face with a pillow, I began to cry, not from sorrow or fear, but because I did not understand. When my teacher Krasákis died a few years later, however, death had ceased to astonish me. I felt that I understood what it was, and I did not ask.

  These two, birth and death, were the very first mysteries to throw my childish soul into a ferment; I kept beating my tender fist against this pair of closed doors to make them open. I saw that I could expect help from nobody. Everyone either remained silent or laughed at me. Whatever I was to learn I would have to learn by myself.

  Gradually the flesh awoke also. My kingdom, which had been composed of premonitions and clouds, began to solidify. I overheard street talk. Although I had no clear understanding what these overheard expressions meant, some of them seemed to be filled with secret and forbidden matter. Thus I set them apart, marked them out in my mind, and repeated them over and over—always to myself—so that I would not forget them. One day, however, one of them escaped me; I pronounced it aloud in my mother’s presence. She winced from fright.

  “Who told you that naughty word?” she shouted. “Don’t say it again!”

  Going to the kitchen, she got some ground pepper and rubbed it thoroughly into my mouth. I began to howl; my mouth was on fire. But then and there, to spite her, I secretly vowed that I would continue to say those words, though to myself. For I felt great pleasure in pronouncing them.

  Ever since then, however, every forbidden word has burned my lips and smelled of pepper—even now, after so many years and so many sins!

  In those faraway times in Crete, puberty awoke extremely late. Blushing deeply from bashfulness, it struggled to hide behind many different kinds of masks. For me, the first of these masks was friendship, a passion for an insignificant classmate, indeed the most insignificant of all my classmates, a short, fat, bowlegged boy with a heavily athletic body and not a jot of intellectual curiosity. We exchanged fiery letters daily. If a single day passed when I did not receive a letter from him, I felt reproachful and often even wept. I used to prowl about his house and observe him by stealth, my heart skipping a beat whenever I saw him emerge. My flesh had awakened but it still did not know what features to give its desire, it still had not sorted out very well what distinguishes male from female. On the other hand, associating with a boy rather than a girl must have seemed much less dangerous to me, much more convenient. When I confronted a woman, I felt a strange antipathy mixed with fear; and when a wind blew and lifted the hem of her dress a little, I turned my head abruptly away, flushing deeply from shame and indignation.

  One day—it must have been noontime, for the sun was broiling—I was walking along a narrow, shaded lane on my way home. Suddenly a Turkish woman appeared on the other side of the street. As she passed in front of me, she parted her tunic slightly and exposed her naked breasts. My knees gave way beneath me. Staggering home, I leaned over the basin and vomited.

  Many years later, when I discovered my friend’s letters in a neglected drawer, I was terrified. Great God, what ardor, what innocence! Without wanting to or being aware of it, this homely, coarsely fashioned classmate had become a mask to hide women from me for a number of years. And I, assuredly, had become the same for him, delaying a little the fatal moment when he would fall into woman’s terrible trap. I learned that he did fall eventually—fell and perished.

  One summer during vacation this friend and I, together with another classmate, a tight-lipped lad with blue-green eyes and slender limbs, founded a new “Friendly Society.” We held sessions in secret, took and received oaths, signed a list of by-laws, and gave our lives a goal: to make uncompromising war on falsehood, servitude, and injustice until the day we died. The world seemed false, unjust, and dishonest to us. We undertook to save it—we three. Isolating ourselves from our other classmates, we always went about together. We drew up plans how to achieve our goal, and distributed to each his battle sector. I was supposed to write plays, my friend would become an actor and perform them, and the third, who had a mania for mathematics, would study engineering and produce a great invention in order to swell the society’s treasury and thus enable us to aid the poor and oppressed.

  In the meantime, until the arrival of this great moment, we did what we could to remain faithful to our vows. We never told lies, we beat up all the Turkish children we happened to meet in outlying lanes, and we replaced our collars and ties with undershirts striped white and blue, the colors of the Greek flag.

  Down at the harbor one winter evening we spied an old Turkish stevedore huddled in a corner and shivering. It was dark already; no one was looking. One of us removed his undershirt, the other his shirt, the third his vest. We gave them to the man. We also wanted to embrace him, but did not dare. Disturbed and ashamed because we had not accomplished our duty to the full, we departed.

  “Let’s go back and find him,” my friend suggested.

  “Good! Let’s go.”

  We returned at a run and searched for the old porter in order to embrace him, but he was gone.

  On another day we heard that a distinguished Kastrian lawyer had become engaged to a wealthy young lady; their marriage was to take place that Sunday. In the meantime, however, another young lady had arrived from Athens. Poor but very beautiful, she had been the lawyer’s girl friend during his student days at the university, and he had promised to marry her. The moment I heard of this scandal, I called the members of the Friendly Society into session. All three of us assembled in my room, boiling with indignation. In accordance with the by-laws of our society, we found it impossible to tolerate an injustice of this sort. After debating for hours what measures to take, we finally came to a decision: the three of us would present ourselves before the Metropolitan and denounce the perpetrator of this immoral act. In addition, we addressed a letter to the lawyer over the signature “Friendly Society,” threatening him that if he did not marry Dorothy (t
his was the Athenian’s name) he would have to answer for it both to God and us.

  Donning our Sunday best, we presented ourselves before the Metropolitan. He was a feeble, consumptive old man, but as sly as they come. Though the effort of speaking made him gasp for breath, his eyes gleamed like live coals. The icon hanging over his desk depicted a rosy-cheeked well-fed Christ with a part in his hair. A large lithograph of Saint Sophia hung on the opposite wall.

  “What’s on your minds, boys?” he asked, looking at us with surprise.

  “A great injustice, Your Reverence,” all three of us began pantingly, in unison, shouting to gain courage. “A great injustice is taking place.”

  The Metropolitan coughed, spat into his handkerchief, and said in a sarcastic tone, “A great injustice? And is that any of your business? You’re schoolboys, aren’t you? You should attend to your lessons.”

  “Your Reverence . . .” began my friend, who was the most accomplished orator of the group, and he related the commonly known scandal in its entirety.

  “We won’t be able to sleep, we won’t be able to attend to our lessons, Your Reverence,” he concluded, “unless this injustice is first corrected. The lawyer must marry Dorothy.”

  The Metropolitan coughed again, put on his glasses, and regarded us for a long time. It seemed to us that a strange sorrow had spread across his face. All three of us waited in agony. Finally he parted his lips.

  “You are young,” he said, “you are still children. I wonder if God will grant me enough time to see how you regard injustice fifteen or twenty years from now.”

  He fell silent for a short while; then he murmured, as though talking to himself, “This is the way we all begin.”