Zorba the Greek Read online

  "But why, Zorba?"

  "Oh, don't you see? A passion, that's what it is!"

  The door opened. The sound of the sea once more penetrated the café. Our hands and feet were frozen. I snuggled further into my corner and wrapped myself in my overcoat. I savored the bliss of the moment.

  "Where shall I go?" I thought. "I'm all right here. May this minute last for years."

  I looked at the strange man in front of me. His eyes were riveted on mine. They were little, round eyes with very dark pupils and red veinlets on the whites. I felt them penetrating, searching me insatiably.

  "Well?" I said. "Go on."

  Zorba shrugged his bony shoulders again.

  "Let's drop it," he said. "Will you give me a cigarette?"

  I gave him one. He took a lighter flint out of his pocket and a wick which he lit. He half-closed his eyes with contentment.

  "Married?"

  "Aren't I a man?" he said angrily. "Aren't I a man? I mean blind. Like everyone else before me, I fell headlong into the ditch. I married. I took the road downhill. I became head of a family, I built a house, I had children—trouble. But thank God for the santuri!"

  "You played to forget your cares, did you?"

  "Look, I can see you don't play any instruments. Whatever are you talking about? In the house there are all your worries. The wife, The children. What are we going to eat? How shall we manage for clothes? What will become of us? Hell! No, for the santuri you must be in good form, you must be pure. If my wife says one word too many, how could I possibly be in the mood to play the santuri? If your children are hungry and screaming at you, you just try to play! To play the santuri you have to give everything up to it, d'you understand?"

  Yes, I understood. Zorba was the man I had sought so long in vain. A living heart, a large voracious mouth, a great brute soul, not yet severed from mother earth.

  The meaning of the words, art, love, beauty, purity, passion, all this was made clear to me by the simplest of human words uttered by this workman.

  I looked at his hands, which could handle the pick and the santuri. They were horny, cracked, deformed and sinewy. With great care and tenderness, as if undressing a woman, they opened the sack and drew out an old santuri, polished by the years. It had many strings, it was adorned with brass and ivory and a red silk tassel. Those big fingers caressed it, slowly, passionately, all over, as if caressing a woman. Then they wrapped it up again, as if clothing the body of the beloved lest it should catch cold.

  "That's my santuri!" he murmured, as he laid it carefully on a chair.

  The seamen were now clinking their glasses and bursting with laughter. The old salt gave Captain Lemoni some friendly slaps on the back.

  "You had a hell of a scare, now didn't you, captain? God knows how many candles you've promised to St. Nicholas!"

  The captain knit his bushy eyebrows.

  "No, I can swear to you, when I saw the archangel of death before me, I didn't think of the Holy Virgin, nor of St. Nicholas! I just turned towards Salamis. I thought of my wife, and I cried out: 'Ah, Katherina, if only I were in bed with you this minute!'"

  Once more the seamen burst out laughing, and Captain Lemoni joined in with them.

  "What an animal man is," he said. "The Archangel is right over his head with a sword, but his mind is fixed there, just there and nowhere else! The devil take the old goat!"

  He clapped his hands.

  "A round for the company!" he cried.

  Zorba was listening intently with his big ears. He turned round, looked at the seamen, then at me.

  "Where's there?" he asked. "What's that fellow talking about?"

  But he suddenly understood and started.

  "Bravo, my friend!" he cried in admiration. "Those seamen know the secret. Most likely because day and night they're at grips with death."

  He waved his big fist in the air.

  "Right!" he said. "That's another matter. Let's come back to our business. Do I stay, or do I go? Decide."

  "Zorba," I said, and I had to restrain myself forcibly from throwing myself into his arms, "it's agreed'. You come with me. I have some lignite in Crete. You can superintend the workmen. In the evening we'll stretch out on the sand—in this world, I have neither wife, children nor dogs—we'll eat and drink together. Then you'll play the santuri."

  "If I'm in the mood, d'you hear? If I'm in the mood. I'll work for you as much as you like. I'm your man there. But the santuri, that's different. It's a wild animal, it needs freedom. If I'm in the mood, I'll play. I'll even sing. And I'll dance the Zéimbékiko[4] the Hassápiko,[5] the Pentozáli[6]—but, I tell you plainly from the start, I must be in the mood. Let's have that quite clear. If you force me to, it'll be finished. As regards those things, you must realize, I'm a man."

  "A man? What d'you mean?"

  "Well, free!"

  I called for another rum.

  "Make it two!" Zorba cried. "You're going to have one, so that we can drink to it. Sage and rum don't go very well together. You're going to drink a rum, too, so that our agreement holds good."

  We clinked our little glasses. Now it was really daylight. The ship was blowing its siren. The lighterman who had taken my cases on board signalled to me.

  "May God be with us," I said as I rose. "Let's go!"

  "God and the devil!" Zorba added calmly.

  He leaned over, put the santuri under his arm, opened the door, and went out first.

  2

  THE SEA, autumn mildness, islands bathed in light, fine rain spreading a diaphanous veil over the immortal nakedness of Greece. Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean Sea.

  Many are the joys of this world—women, fruit, ideas. But to cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into paradise. Nowhere else can one pass so easily and serenely from reality to dream. The frontiers dwindle, and from the masts of the most ancient ships spring branches and fruits. It is as if here in Greece necessity is the mother of miracles.

  Towards noon the rain stopped. The sun parted the clouds and appeared gentle, tender, washed and fresh, and it caressed with its rays the beloved waters and lands. I stood at the prow and let myself be intoxicated with the miracle which was revealed as far as eye could see.

  On the ship were Greeks, cunning devils with rapacious eyes, brains like the trumpery goods of bazaar dealers, wire pulling and quarrelling; an untuned piano; honest and venomous shrews. One's first impulse was to seize the ship by both ends, plunge it into the sea, shake it thoroughly to make all the livestock which polluted it drop off—men, rats, bugs—and then refloat it, freshly washed and empty.

  But at times I was seized with compassion. A Buddhist compassion, as cold as the conclusion of a metaphysical syllogism. A compassion not only for men but for all life which struggles, cries, weeps, hopes and does not perceive that everything is a phantasmagoria of nothingness. Compassion for the Greeks, and for the ligníte mine, and for my unfinished manuscript of Buddha, for all those vain compositions of light and shade which suddenly disturb and contamínate the pure air.

  I looked at Zorba's drawn and waxen face. He was sitting on a coil of ropes in the bows. He was sniffing at a lemon and listening with his great ears to some passengers quarrelling about the king and others about Venizelos. He was shaking his head and spitting.

  "Old junk!" he murmured disdainfully. "Aren't they ashamed of themselves!"

  "What do you mean by old junk, Zorba?"

  "Why, all these—kings, democracies, plebiscites, deputies, fiddle-faddle!"

  Zorba had got so far beyond contemporary events that they had already ceased to be anything but out-of-date rubbish. Certainly, to him telegraphy, steamships and engines, current morality and religion must have appeared like rusty old rifles. His mind progressed much faster than the world.

  The ropes were creaking on the masts, the coastlines were danc
ing, and the women on board had become yellower than a lemon. They had laid down their weapons—paint, bodices, hairpins, combs. Their lips had paled, their nails were turning blue. The old magpie scolds were losing their borrowed plumes—ribbons, false eyebrows and beauty spots, brassières—and to see them on the point of vomiting, you felt disgust and a great compassíon.

  Zorba was also turning yellow and green. His sparkling eyes were dulled. It was only towards the evening that his eyes brightened again. He pointed out two dolphins, leaping through the water alongside the ship.

  "Dolphíns!" he exclaimed joyously.

  I noticed for the first time that almost half of the index finger on his left hand was missing. I started and felt sick.

  "What happened to your finger, Zorba?" I cried.

  "Nothing," he replied, offended that I had not shown more delight in the dolphins.

  "Did you get it caught in a machine?" I insisted.

  "What ever are you going on about machines for? I cut it off myself."

  "Yourself? Why?"

  "You can't understand, boss!" he said, shrugging his shoulders. "I told you I had been in every trade. Once I was a potter. I was mad about that craft. D'you realize what it means to take a lump of mud and make what you will out of it? Ffrr! You turn the wheel and the mud whirls round, as if it were possessed while you stand over it and say: I'm going to make a jug, I'm going to make a plate, I'm going to make a lamp and the devil knows what more! That's what you might call being a man: freedom!"

  He had forgotten the sea, he was no longer biting the lemon, his eyes had become clear again.

  "Well?" I asked. "What about your finger?"

  "Oh, it got in my way in the wheel. It always got plumb in the middle of things and upset my plans. So one day I seized a hatchet ..."

  "Didn't it hurt you?"

  "What d'you mean? I'm not a tree trunk. I'm a man. Of course it hurt me. But it got in my way at the wheel, so I cut it off."

  The sun went down and the sea became calmer. The clouds dispersed. The evening star shone, I looked at the sea, I looked at the sky and began to reflect… To love like that, to take the hatchet and chop and feel the pain… But I hid my emotion.

  "A bad system that, Zorba!" I said, smiling. "It reminds me of the ascetic who, according to the Golden Legend, once saw a woman who disturbed him physically, so he took an axe ..."

  "The devil he didn't!" Zorba interposed, guessing what I was going to say. "Cut that off! To hell with the fool! The poor benighted innocent, that's never an obstacle!"

  "But," I insisted, "it can be a very great obstacle!"

  "To what?"

  "To your entry into the kingdom of heaven."

  Zorba glanced sideways at me, with a mocking air, and said: "But, you fool, that is the key to paradise!"

  He raised his head, looked at me closely, as if he wanted to see what was going on in my mind: future lives, the kingdom of heaven, women, priests. But he did not seem to be able to gather much. He shook his great grey head guardedly.

  "The maimed don't get into paradise," he said, and then fell silent.

  I went to lie down in my cabin and took a book. Buddha was still engaging my thoughts. I read The Dialogue of Buddha and the Shepherd which had filled my mind for some years with peace and security.

  The Shepherd: My meal is ready, I have milked my ewes. The door of my hut is holted, my fire is alight. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please!

  Buddha: I no longer need food or milk. The winds are my shelter, my fire is out. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please!

  The Shepherd: I have oxen, I have cows. I have my father's meadows and a bull who covers my cows. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please!

  Buddha: I have neither oxen, nor cows, I have no meadows. I have nothing, I fear nothing. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please!

  The Shepherd: I have a docile and faithful shepherdess. For years she has been my wife; I am happy when I play with her at night. And you, sky, you can rain as much as you please!

  Buddha: I have a free and docile soul. For years I have trained it and I have taught it to play with me. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please!

  These two voices were still speaking when sleep overcame me. The wind had risen again and the waves were breaking over the thick glass of the porthole. I was floating like a wisp of smoke between sleeping and waking. A violent storm broke, the meadows disappeared under the waters, the bullocks, the cows and the bull were swallowed up. The wind carried away the roof of the hut, the fire was quenched, the woman uttered a cry and fell dead in the mud, and the shepherd began his lamentations. I could not hear what he said, but he was crying aloud and I was sinking deeper into a slumber, slipping like a fish down through the watery depths.

  At daybreak I awoke, and there, to our right, lay the proud, wild and lordly island. The pale-pink mountains were smiling through the mists beneath the autumnal sun. Round our ship, the indigo-blue sea was still seething restlessly.

  Zorba, wrapped in a brown rug, was gazing eagerly at Crete. His eyes turned rapidly from mountain to plain, followed the shore, exploring it as if all the coast and land were familiar to him, and that he were delighted to wander there again in his mind.

  I went to him, touched him on the shoulder and said:

  "Zorba, it's certainly not the first time you've come to Crete! You're gazing at it like an old friend."

  Zorba yawned, as if bored. I felt he was not at all inclined to start a conversation.

  I smiled. "Talking bores you, doesn't it, Zorba?"

  "It's not exactly that, boss," he replied. "Only talking's difficult."

  "Difficult? Why?"

  He did not reply at once. His eyes roamed again slowly over the shore. He had slept on deck, and his curly grey hair was dripping with dew. The rising sun shone right into the deep furrows lining his cheeks, his chin and his neck.

  Finally he moved his lips. They were thick and drooping, like those of a goat.

  "In the morning I find it difficult to open my mouth. Very difficult. I'm sorry."

  He lapsed again into silence, and once more his small round eyes were fixed on Crete.

  A bell rang for breakfast. Greenish-yellow, screwed-up faces began to emerge from the cabins. Women, with their coils of hair coming loose, reeled as they dragged themselves from table to table. They smelled of vomit and eau-de-Cologne, and their eyes were cloudy, terrified and stupid.

  Zorba, sitting in front of me, sniffed his coffee in a sensual way which was quite oriental. He spread butter and honey on his bread and ate it. His face gradually became brighter and calmer, the lines of his mouth softer. I secretly watched him as he slowly emerged from his wrapping of sleep, and saw how his eyes shone more and more brightly.

  He lit a cigarette, inhaled with pleasure and blew the blue smoke out of his hairy nostrils. He folded his right leg under him and made himself comfortable in eastern fashion. It was now possible for him to speak.

  "Is this the first time I've been to Crete?" he began. (He half-closed his eyes and looked through the porthole at Mount Ida, which was disappearing in the distance behind us.) "No, it's not the first time. In 1896 I was already a fully grown man. My moustache and my hair were their real color, black as a raven. I had all my thirty-two teeth, and when I got drunk I swallowed the hors d'oeuvres first and then the dish. Yes, I enjoyed myself no end. But suddenly the devil took a hand in things. A new revolution broke out in Crete.

  "In those days I was a pedlar. I peddled haberdashery from village to village in Macedonia, and instead of money I used to take cheese, wool, butter, rabbits and corn. Then I sold all that and made a double profit. In every village I came to at dark I knew where to spend the night. In every village there's always a tenderhearted widow, God bless her! I'd give her a reel of thread, or a comb, or a scarf—a black one, of course, on account of the late-lamented—and I slept with her. It didn't cost me much!

  "No, it didn't cost me much, boss, the g
ood time I had! But, as I said before, the devil got mixed up in things and Crete took up arms again. 'Ah, to hell with her destiny!' I'd say. 'Can't that damned Crete ever leave us in peace?' I put aside my cottons and combs, took my gun and set off to join the rebels in Crete."

  Zorba became silent. We were now following the curve of a quiet, sandy bay. The waves spread out here gently without breaking and only leaving a thin líne of foam along the shore. The clouds had broken up, the sun was shining, and the rugged contours of Crete became serene.

  Zorba turned round and gave me a mocking look.

  "And now I suppose, boss, you think I'm going to start and tell you how many Turks' heads I've lopped off, and how many of their ears I've pickled in spirits—that's the custom in Crete. Well, I shan't! I don't like to, I'm ashamed. What sort of madness comes over us?... Today I'm a bit more level-headed, and I ask myself: What sort of madness comes over us to make us throw ourselves on another man, when he's done nothing to us, and bite him, cut his nose off, tear his ear out, run him through the guts—and all the time, calling on the Almighty to help us! Does it mean we want the Almighty to go and cut off noses and ears and rip people up?