Freedom or Death Page 4

  “Can you do that, too, Nuri Bey?” she asked breathlessly. “Can you do that? Can you do that?”

  Nuri turned pale. He gathered all his strength into his right hand, stretched it out and was about to insert two fingers into the other glass to split it. But he broke out in a cold sweat and drew back. He felt put to shame in front of his wife, and cast a dark look at Captain Michales, Once again he’s made a fool of me, he thought. I won’t stand it any longer. He seized Emine’ by the arm and shook her like a madman. “Go up to your room!” he shouted.

  “Can you do that too?” she repeated, and her cheeks were burning. “Can you do it too? Can you do it too?”

  “Go up to your room!” the Bey ordered for the second time. He seized the mandolin and smashed it into a thousand pieces against the wall.

  The Circassian gave a dry, contemptuous laugh. “Yes, that you can do smash a mandolin. Yes, that you can do, Nuri!”

  She grazed past Captain Michales, her dress brushing the back of his hand. Once more the air was stifling with musk. Captain Michales felt his hand burning.

  Smiling, mockingly, she described a circle around Nuri once, twice gave him a play push and laughed. And suddenly she ran to the stairs and vanished.

  The two men were left standing opposite each other in the middle of the room. The Bey rolled his mustache. His chest rose and fell violently. Captain Michales bit his dry lips sulkily and watched him. Both laid their hands on the hilts of their knives, which stuck out from their belts.

  At last Nuri half opened venomous lips. “Go, Captain Michales,” he said.

  “Nuri Bey,” he answered, “I’m going when it suits me. Take the unbroken glass and give me a drink.”

  The Bey clutched the hilt of his knife and glanced quickly at the lamp. He had the idea of putting it out and leaving them in the dark, to wrestle until one of them was dead. Yet his heart was undecided.

  “Take the unbroken glass and give me a drink,” Captain Michales repeated quietly. “Otherwise I’m not going.”

  Nuri turned toward the table and advanced a foot. It was heavy as lead. Bathed in sweat, he reached the table. He filled the glass too full. His band was shaking; the raki spurted over the remains of the partridge.

  “Drink,” he said, and pointed to the glass.

  “Hand it to me,” said Captain Michales.

  The Bey groaned. He seized the glass and pressed it into Captain Michales’ fist.

  And Captain Michales raised it, gravely and somberly, saying, “To your health, Nuri Bey. I’m going to do what you asked and tell my brother not to scoff at Turkey.”

  With those words he moistened his lips. Then he tightened the black headband around his head and strode across the threshold.

  The lamp threw a shaft of green and red light over the now quite dark garden. Captain Michales went quietly and slowly out to the street door without looking about him.

  Darkness reigned. Megalokastro had now had its evening meal. It yawned, shivered, shuttered first one window and then another, crossed itself and went to bed. A few belated people still moved hi the streets, a few pairs of lovers embraced under the shuttered windows. Here and there subdued talk could be heard from lighted cellars: night workers.

  The Hags became frozen in their effort to keep up the watch behind their door. Captain Michales was taking his time about returning. The darkness, too, had become impenetrable, and their brother, monosyllabic and morose as usual, came home. So they laid the table and exchanged a few words: what the meals would be tomorrow, how there was no more coal, no oil for the salad, no oil for the lamp. How Aristoteles must pull himself together. They talked, served the meal, cleared it away, prepared their nightly chamomile tea for digestion, donned their night dresses which reached to the ground, and crossed themselves; but their thoughts were on the green door.

  Captain Michales went home by the longest way round. He felt he could not contain himself within four walls this evening. His heart was swelling, overflowing. There was not enough room for it in his body or in his house. Suddenly even Megalokastro was too small for him. He strode on. Houses, alleys, human beings stifled him. He went with long strides and with his teeth clenched like a hunted wild beast. He came to the main street. It was empty. Spaced-out petroleum lamps threw palered glimmering shafts on the pavement. He passed through the Bazaar. A Turkish cookhouse was still open, a coffeehouse, two or three taverns. Someone called him. It seemed to be the voice of Captain Polyxigis. He quickened his stride. He came past the pasha’s door, past the Venetian marble fountain with the lions. He raised his eyes and saw the tall plane tree-accursed tree! He moved nearer. Nobody was coming. He crossed himself.

  “God bless your remains,” he muttered. “Till we meet again in joy, my fathers!”

  From this magnificent plane tree, for generations and generations, the pashas had hanged the Christians who had dared to raise their heads; and winter and summer on its strongest bough there hung the rope with the noose ready.

  “As I’m a Christian, one night I’ll rise up, take an ax and cut you down. Curse you!” he muttered, and gazed furiously at the old plane tree as though it were a Turk.

  He resumed his way and plunged into a long, dark alley. He came out by the Three Vaults. Not a soul! He unbuttoned his shirt it was stifling him. He breathed deeply and looked around him. There, to the north, the sea gleamed and roared. About him in the air the dark-blue mountains were visible Luchtas, Selena, Psiloritis. Above, in the sky, the stars flared. Like a wild horse he went in circles, ran back and forth. He reached the moat which girdled Megalokastro. Up above, on an isolated hill, some mud huts lay apart Meskinia, the lepers’ village. By the sea there was another, lower hill, called “Seven Axes.” From it, two hundred years ago, the Turks had stormed out and occupied Megalokastro. And seven of their axes were still embedded in the ground. Ahead, out to sea, far off and vaulted like a tortoise, appeared the uninhabited island of Dia.

  Behind him he heard women’s voices and a soft rustling of silk. There emerged an aged Turk with a toop, holding a huge, flaring lantern. Tittering and chattering, two Turkish ladies with black veils and open parasols followed him. The night reeked of musk.

  Captain Michales growled, “All the devils are on my track.” He turned his eyes away toward the sea, so as not to see the hanums. “All the devils but they shan’t succeed!”

  Now he longed to get home. But he wished to see no one. They would hear his stride a long way distant. He would cough. They would understand and hide. That would be all right. Once he had kicked open his door, he would be quite alone. No wife, no children, no dogs quite alone!

  And then he would make his decision.

  Bent under the lamp, his wife, Katerina, and his daughter, Renio, sat and waited. Behind them, at the window end of the long narrow divan which went the whole length of the wall, was the place where Captain Michales and nobody else sat. And when he was absent, a weighty shade sat there, and neither the wife nor the daughter dared go near it. They felt as if they touched his body, and shrank back with a shudder.

  The mother was knitting a stocking. The lamplight fell obliquely on thick, straight brown hair, proud eyebrows “‘and firm cheeks; it revealed a bitter mouth and a broad,’ obstinate chin. The woman had a strange charm, charm and strength and independence. As a girl she had been a defiant captain’s daughter. Since no son had been granted to her father, Captain Thrasybulos Ruvas, Katerina had enjoyed a son’s masculine freedom and favor. But with her marriage she fell into the claws of a lion. In the first years she showed defiance and put up a resistance. But in time she bowed her head. He was Captain Michales. Who could fight him? Strength and independence slackened. She grew softer.

  She knitted, knitted and thought. Her whole life was flowing past her like water. Sometimes she looked up. High up around the four walls were ranged, in wide, dark rames, all the heroes of 1821 wild beasts, iron-beards. In the middle, in front of one of the warriors, burned a small silver lamp.

 
Katerina silently shook her head. Her whole life, in her father’s house and in her husband’s house, had been lived under arms. When she was still unmarried, during the 1866 rising, she too had put on a cartridge belt, taken a musket and fought to keep the Turks from trampling her village. Even as a child she had cut up old books which the monks had brought from the monasteries and, along with other girls, had made cartridge cases out of them. Katerina knew the smell of powder well, and loved it. Captain Michales was good, a real man, and she loved him. And yet a life like hers was hard on a woman, and somewhere inside her she was unhappy.

  She left off her knitting and raised her eyes again. Above the divan hung a huge old lithograph”: Samson, bound and being insulted by the Philistines. The unbowed young hero was in the middle, trussed hand and foot with nets, thongs and chains, and behind him was a rabble of youths, tugging at him, hitting him and mocking him. And up above in the tower Delilah was leaning out of a little latticed window malevolent, full-bosomed, scornfully grinning woman.

  Katerina’s glance darted from picture to picture, as though she saw them all for the first time. She sighed. Then without a word she bent over the stocking again.

  Her daughter, a plump, blooming thing of fifteen, with her father’s thick, bushy eyebrows and her mother’s broad, obstinate chin, looked up from her knitting. She stroked the savage, lanky cat which lay in a ball at her feet.

  “Why are you sighing, Mother?” she asked. “What are you thinking about?”

  “What should I think about?” her mother answered. “My life. And you, you poor thing, who’ve fallen into the claws of a wild beast. I’m thinking, too, of the baby. I’ve lulled him to sleep again, so he shan’t cry and rouse the vile spirits again in your father. Thrasaki is the only person he’s well disposed to because he’s like him.”

  She looked at the coverlet and listened. “He’s gone off to sleep,” she said. “Bless his heart!” And after a moment: “His father all over the image of him! Have you seen the way he gets angry? The way he puckers his eyebrows? The way he hits his friends? The wild way he has of looking at women?”

  Renio said nothing. She was afraid of her father, but she loved him and was proud of him. What he did seemed right to her, and if she had been a man she would have done the same. She too would have wanted to see only her son; the girls could just creep away as soon as they heard the door open and him coming. From the day when she had completed her twelfth year and her bosom was becoming full, her father had forbidden her to come into his sight. For three years .he had not seen her. She always stayed in the kitchen or concealed upstairs in her little room, when he was in the house. The girl could scent his footsteps far off, and would hide at once. The cat too would scent him, and she too made off, even sooner, with her tail between her legs. It had to be so. Her father was right. Renio could not unravel the “why.” But she was sure her father was right.

  Her mother felt the same, but she was not reconciled to it. Her husband was the same as her father and would do the same. How many years had old Captain Ruvas, her father, let pass without seeing her. She was already twenty, and still unmarried, when one night the Turkish soldiers fell upon the old captain in his home. He killed as many as he could, but there were too many. They took him prisoner, brought him out to the yard, and were given the order to hand him over to the pasha in Megalokastro. And so Katerina came out with her mother and saw him. His clothes were all torn, and there was blood all over him. He raised his hand. “Farewell,” he called to them, “and don’t be sad, you women. Bake the funeral cakes for me in the proper way. I’m dying for freedom. Don’t cry! Look after yourself, Katerina! And ear a man child. Then you’ll have a Thrasos, one like me!”

  He was taken to Megalokastro and placed in front of the pasha’s door, under the tall plane tree. Then a Turkish barber came, took his knife and beheaded him. Mustapha Pasha had a tobacco box made for himself out of the skull.

  All this went through Katerina’s head now, and she knitted her stocking and sighed. She got on well with-Captain Michales; she had nothing to complain of. He was a palikar, honorable and honored, a serious man. He did not run after other women or play cards; he was not niggardly. He got drunk only twice a year, to calm himself down. He was a man; no harm in that. Others did worse he merely got drunk. And yet, this year, life was really too hard. The girl she had borne at this time last year Captain Michales refused to look at her eyes.

  “I won’t see it, I won’t hear it!” he shouted at her each morning as he opened the door to go to his shop. “Where the devil did she get those blue eyes?”

  No one of his stock had blue eyes. And this infant had. As though some black sheep had strayed into his house, as though his blood were defiled. Captain Michales could not endure the thought.

  The unfortunate mother swallowed her tears and said nothing. What should she say to him? She possessed herself in patience, knelt down in front of the great icon of her house the Archangel Michael with the golden wings, the flaming sword and a newborn soul which he held curled up in his hand like a trembling infant… . She fell on her knees before him and implored him was he not the protector of her house? To speak with her husband, to stride in upon his dream in the night and to chide him, that his heart might become a trifle gentler… .

  The captain stayed in his shop all day. She sent him his meal by the apprentice Charitos. And the mother let the baby shriek and cry and rocked it on her knees. But toward evening she gave it something to make it sleep, so it would not wake till morning.

  It warm, cherished creature, always ready whenever he ordered. Proud and obedient. Never did she disturb his mood she was with him always, like his own flesh, until death.

  He stepped back from the mare’s warm body and groped for his boots. He pulled them on over his knees, over his thighs, up to his loins, and his chest braced itself for the spring with strength from within.

  He vaulted into the saddle.

  “Charitos,” he called.

  His wife came out. “He’s asleep,” she said.

  “Wake him up!”

  Once more he rolled a cigarette, and waited without moving. He smoked, and no longer felt any poison in his mouth. He blew thick smoke through his nose and waited tranquilly.

  Charitos came out, rubbing sleepy eyes. Shaggy hair, long neck, bare feet like a wild twelve-year-old goat. Charitos was his nephew, son of his brother, Famurios the shepherd. He had come from his village, sent by his father, he said, to learn his letters. But Captain Michales thought book learning stupid.

  “Do you want me to make you into a starving noble man?” he would say. “Or a schoolmaster? Can’t you see the misery of your uncle, the schoolmaster Tityros, whose life is made a burden by the school louts? You’ll ruin your eyes, you poor child, wear glasses and get yourself laughed at. Stay in the shop and you’ll grow big and your brain will get solid. Then I’ll give you an advance, and you can set up a shop of your own and become a man.”

  He had said the same to Famurios. “Do as you please,” the brother had answered. “The bones are mine; the flesh is yours. Lick him into shape, make a man of him.”

  Captain Michales caught Charitos by the nape and shook him. “Go to the trough,” he told him, “wash yourself and wake up. Then I’ll give you your orders.”

  Charitos drew water from the well, washed himself and combed his unruly hair with his nails. He went back to his uncle.

  “I’m awake,” he said.

  Captain Michales clapped him on the shoulder. “Go to the five houses you know,” he commanded, “and knock on the doors till they open. Take a stone, and knock till they open. Understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Vendusos”, Furogatos’, Kajabes’, Bertodulos’ and the teke(*A Moslem Shrine), where Efendina lives.”

  “Horsedung Efendina?”

  “And tell them, Greetings from my uncle, Captain Michales, and tomorrow, he says, is Saturday. On Sunday good and early will they please come to his house. Unders
tand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Go.”

  He called his wife. “Kill three hens and cook them. Clear the cellar, set out the big table, the benches and the lasses.”

  She wanted to say to him, “It’s the time of the fourteen fast days; have you no fear of God?” But he held up his hand. His wife sighed and said nothing.

  “We’re having another feast, curse my luck!” she said to Renio, who was standing at the sink washing up. “We’re to kill three hens, he says, and clear the cellar.”

  The stairs were heard creaking. Captain Michales was going up to bed.

  “What’s come over him? The six months aren’t up,” said Renio, but her heart leaped with pleasure. She liked it when the house was in confusion, when the dainties were passed to and fro, when the men sat in the lower room and drank.

  “Her heart has swelled up too soon,” muttered the mother. “The evil spirit has awakened in her again.”

  She crossed herself. “I am a sinner, O God,” she said. “I’m saying things I shouldn’t, but I can’t bear it any longer. He tramples on the great fast times now. He no longer fears God!”

  Her thoughts turned rebelliously to the Archangel Michael up there in the icon. How often have I confessed repentance before him, she reflected. How many prayers have I addressed to him. How often have I filled his lamp with oil and lighted candles to him. All in vain. Even He is now on his side!

  “Ah, if only I were a man!” she muttered. “By my soul’s salvation, I’d do the same. I too would have five or six friends, and, when my heart was smoldering, I’d invite them to the cellar, make them drunk, let them sing, play the lyre and dance, and so be lightened. That’s what it is to be a man!”

  CHAPTER 2

  HEAVY NIGHT, full of sultry spring air, lay over Megalokastro. Shortly before midnight the crisp breeze from the north had dropped, and now a warm, damp wind took its place, making the trees belly. It came from Arabia, crossed the Libyan Sea, swept the plain of Mesara from Tybaki and Good Harbor to Saint Barbara, left behind it the famous vineyards of Archani, leaped over the fortress walls and, though the chinks of doors and windows, fell upon the women like a man and upon the men like a woman, allowing them no sleep. Malignant April came to Crete like a thief in the night.