Report to Grego (10 page)

He turned toward his brothers on either side.

“Do you hear? All of us, each his share. Let's get that straight.”

The sons grumbled between their teeth. One of them spoke up. “Fine, Kostandís, fine. We're not going to fight over it.”

I had slipped into the first circle. As I've already remarked, death was always a strange mystery which lured me. I approached in order to have a close view as my mother's father died.

His eye fell on me.

“Eh, welcome, welcome to the little fellow from Kastro. Bend down so I can give you my blessing.”

The old lady who was kneading the wax grasped my head and lowered it. I felt my grandfather's huge heavy paw spread over my entire scalp.

“Bless you, grandson from Kastro,” he said. “May you become a man one day.”

He moved his lips to say something else, but he was exhausted now, and he closed his eyes.

“Which way does the sun go down?” he asked in an expiring voice. “Turn me that way.”

Two of his sons took hold of him and turned him toward the west.

“Goodbye,” he whispered. “I'm going.”

Uttering a deep sigh, he tautened his legs. His head rolled off the pillow and struck the stones of the courtyard.

“Is he dead?” I asked one of my little cousins.

“Pff, that's the end of him!” he answered. “Let's go and eat.”

B
UT WHAT
influenced my life incalculably—far more than schools and teachers, far deeper than the first pleasures and fears I received from viewing the world—was something which moved me in a truly unique way: the struggle between Crete and Turkey.

Without this struggle my life would have taken a different course, God surely have acquired a different face.

From the day of my birth I inhaled this terrible visible and invisible battle in the very air I breathed. I saw Christians and Turks cast fierce sidelong glances at each other and twist their mustaches in a furor; I saw Christians barricade their doors with curses as the musket-armed occupation troops patrolled the streets; I heard the old men tell about wars, massacres, heroic deeds, about freedom, about Greece, and I lived all this deeply, mutely, waiting to grow up and understand what it all meant, so that I too could tuck up my sleeves and go to war.

In time I saw clearly. The opponents were Crete and Turkey; Crete was battling to gain freedom, the other trampling on its breast and preventing it. After that everything around me acquired a face, the face of Crete and Turkey; in my imagination, and not only in my imagination but in my flesh as well, everything became a symbol reminding me of the terrible contest. One summer the icon of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin was brought into the church on the fifteenth of August and placed on a prie-dieu. The Mother of Christ lay with crossed hands. An angel had dashed forward on her right, the devil on her left, both in the hope of winning her soul. The angel had drawn his sword and cut off the devil's two hands at the wrist—they were suspended in mid-air, oozing blood. As I gazed at the icon, my heart swelled with happiness. The Virgin is Crete, I told myself, the black devil is the
Turk, and the snow-white angel is the Greek king. One day the Greek king will cut off the Turk's hands. When? As soon as I grow up, I thought to myself, and my childish breast swelled.

This tender childhood breast began to fill with yearning and hate. I too clenched my tiny fists, ready to enter the fray. I knew full well where my duty resided, with which of the two antagonists, and I was in a hurry to grow up so that I could follow in line behind my grandfather, my father, and make war.

This was the seed. From this seed the (entire tree of my life germinated, budded, flowered, and bore fruit. What first truly stirred my soul was not fear or pain, nor was it pleasure or games; it was the yearning for freedom. I had to gain freedom—but from what, from whom? Little by little, in the course of time, I mounted freedom's rough unaccommodating ascent. To gain freedom first of all from the Turk, that was the initial step; after that, later, this new struggle began: to gain freedom from the inner Turk—from ignorance, malice and envy, from fear and laziness, from dazzling false ideas; and finally from idols, all of them, even the most revered and beloved.

In time, after I grew up and my mind broadened, the struggle broadened as well. Overflowing the bounds of Crete and Greece, it raged in all eras and locales—invaded the history of mankind. Battling now were not Crete and Turkey but good and evil, light and darkness, God and the devil. It was always the same battle, the eternal one, and standing always behind the good, behind light and God, was Crete; behind evil, behind darkness and the devil, Turkey. Thus, through the accident of being born a Cretan at a critical moment when Crete was fighting for its freedom, I realized as far back as my childhood that this world possesses a good which is dearer than life, sweeter than happiness—liberty.

My father had a friend, a hoary captain known as Polymantiliás—“Many-kerchiefs”—because he always had so many on him: one covering his hair, another beneath the left armpit, two hanging from his silk cummerbund, and one which he held in his hand and employed to wipe his forehead, which was always sweating. He was a frequent visitor to my father's store. My father ordered him a cup of coffee and a hookah, his juniors gathered around him, he opened his tobacco pouch, stopped up his nostrils with tobacco, sneezed, and began to talk.

I stood off to one side and listened. Wars, assaults, massacres. Megalo Kastro vanished, the mountains of Crete towered before me. The air filled with roaring; roaring from Christians, roaring from Turks. Silver-handled pistols flashed before my eyes. It was Crete and Turkey battling. “Freedom!” cried the one. “Death!” answered the other, and my mind filled with blood.

One day the old captain squinted his eyes at me and weighed me in his glance.

“Crows don't hatch doves!” he said. “Do you understand, my little pallikári?”

I blushed.

“No, Captain,” I replied.

“Your father is a pallikári. Like it or not, you'll be a pállikari too.”

Like it or not! Those heavy words hammered themselves home in my mind. Crete was speaking through the old captain's mouth. I did not understand his words at the time; only much later did I realize that I had a superior force in me, a force not my own, and that this force was governing me. Though I was ready to give up many times, this force did not let me. What force? Crete!

Indeed, even as a child I managed to conquer fear—out of self-respect: the idea that I was a Cretan. Also because I was afraid of my father. At first I dared not venture into our yard at night. A tiny, glittery-eyed devil was stealthily spying on me in every corner, behind every vase, and at the brim of the well. But my father used to give me a rap, thrust me into the yard, and bolt the door behind me.

The sole fear I had not succeeded in conquering up to that point was the fear of earthquakes. Megalo Kastro often shook to its very foundations. A rumble sounded below in the world's cellars, the earth's crust creaked, and the poor people above went out of their minds. Whenever the wind subsided abruptly, not a leaf moved, and a hair-raising hush settled over everything, the inhabitants of Kastro rushed out of their homes or shops and glanced first at the sky, then at the ground. They did not say a word lest the evil hear and come, but to themselves they thought fearfully, There's going to be an earthquake, and they made the sign of the cross.

One day our teacher, old Paterópoulos, tried to set our minds at
ease. “There is nothing to an earthquake, really,” he explained. “Don't be afraid of it. It's just a bull beneath the ground. He bellows, butts the earth with his horns, and the ground shakes. The ancient Cretans called him the Minotaur. There's really nothing to it at all.”

But after being consoled in this way by our teacher, we found that our terror had increased all the more. The earthquake was a living thing in other words, a beast with horns; it bellowed and shook beneath our feet, and it ate people.

“Why doesn't Saint Minas kill him?” asked chubby little Stratís, the sexton's son.

But the teacher became angry. “Don't talk nonsense!” he shouted, whereupon he left his desk and twisted Stratis's ear to make him keep quiet.

One day, however, as I was racing through the Turkish quarter at top speed because the smell the Turks exuded disgusted me, the earth began to shake again, the windows and doors rattled, and I heard a great clatter, as though from collapsing houses. I stood petrified with fear in the middle of the narrow lane, my eyes riveted to the ground. I was waiting for it to crack and the bull to emerge and eat me, when suddenly a vaulted door swung open, revealing a garden, and out darted three young Turkish girls, barefooted and unkempt, their faces uncovered. Quaking with fear, they scattered in all directions, uttering shrill cries like swallows. The entire lane smelled of musk. Ever since that moment earthquakes began to display a different face for me, one which endured my entire life. It was no longer the fierce face of the bull. They stopped bellowing and began to chirp like birds. Earthquakes and the little Turks became one. This was the first time I saw a dark force merge with the light and become luminous.

Many times in my life, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily, I placed an expedient mask over terrors in this same way—over love, over virtue, over illness. This is how I made life bearable.

F
REEDOM
was my first great desire. The second, which remains hidden within me to this day, tormenting me, was the desire for sanctity. Hero together with saint: such is mankind's supreme model. Even in my childhood I had fixed this model firmly above me in the azure sky.

In those days everybody in Megalo Kastro had roots deeply sunk in both earth and heaven. That was why, after I had learned to read syllables and form words, the first thing I had my mother buy for me was a legend, the
Holy Epistle
. “God's manifestation is a marvelous miracle! A stone fell out of heaven . . .” and this stone broke, and written inside was found: “Woe to him who uses oil or drinks wine on Wednesdays and Fridays!” Clutching the Holy
Epistle
and holding it high above me like a flag, I knocked on our neighbors' doors each Wednesday and Friday—on Madame Penelope's, Madame Victoria's, on old lady Katerina Delivasilaina's. Beside myself with fervor, I bounded into their houses, made a beeline for the kitchen, smelled what was being cooked, and alas the day I caught the scent of meat or fish. I waved the Holy Epistle menacingly and shouted, “Woe to you, woe to you!” whereupon the terror-stricken neighbors caressed me and implored me to be still. And one day when I questioned my mother and learned that I had nursed on Wednesdays and Fridays when I was an infant, and had therefore drunk milk on those holy days, I broke into wailing and lamentation.

Selling all my toys to my friends, I purchased the lives of the saints in popular, pamphlet-sized editions. Each evening I sat on my little stool amid the basil and marigolds of our courtyard and read out loud all the various ordeals the saints had endured in order to save their souls. The neighbors congregated around me with their sewing or work—some knitted socks, others ground
coffee or cleaned mustard stalks. They listened, and little by little our courtyard began to ring with lamentations for the saints' sufferings and torments. When the canary, suspended beneath the acacia, heard the reading and lamentations, it threw its head back drunkenly and began to warble. With its spices and the trellis overhead, the little garden—so sequestered, warm, and fragrant-seemed like an epitáphios surrounded by women's keening: like Christ's flower-canopied tomb. Passers-by hesitated and said to themselves, Someone has died in there. They went to my father to bring him the sad news, but he shook his head and told them, “It's nothing. Just my son trying to convert the neighbors.”

Distant seas unfolded in my childish imagination, boats cast off furtively, monasteries glittered amid rocky crags, lions carried water to the ascetics. My mind brimmed with date trees and camels, strumpets fought to enter the church, fiery chariots rose into the sky, the deserts warbled with women's clogs and laughter, the Tempter came like a kindly Santa Claus and brought gifts of food, gold, and females to the eremites. But they had their eyes riveted on God, and the Tempter vanished.

Be hard, be patient, scorn happiness, have no fear of death, look beyond this world to the supreme good: such was the insuppressible voice which rose from these popular editions and instructed my childish heart. And together with this came a vehement thirst for furtive departures and distant voyages, for wanderings filled with martyrdom.

I read the saints' legends, listened to fairy tales, overheard conversations, and inside me all this was transformed—deformed—into dazzling lies. Assembling my schoolmates or the children of the neighborhood, I passed these lies off as my own adventures. I told them I had just returned from the desert. I had a lion there, and I'd loaded two jugs on his back and we had gone together to the fountain to fetch water; or that outside our door the other day I had seen an angel who plucked out one of his plumes and gave it to me. I even had the plume in my hand ready to show them (we had killed a white rooster at home the other day and I had removed a long white feather). I said in addition that I planned to make the feather into a pen and write.

“Write? Write what?”

“Lives of the saints. My granddad's life.”

“Was your granddad a saint? Didn't you tell us he fought the Turks?”

“Isn't that the same thing?” I answered, sharpening the tip of the feather with my clasp knife in order to make it into a pen.

One day in school we read in our primer that a child fell down a well and found himself in a fabulous city with gilded churches, flowering orchards, and shops full of cakes, candies, and toy muskets. My mind caught fire. Running home, I tossed my satchel in the yard and threw myself upon the brim of the well so that I could fall inside and enter the fabulous city. My mother was sitting by the courtyard window combing my little sister's hair. Catching sight of me, she uttered a cry, ran, and seized me by the smock just as I was kicking the ground in order to hurl myself headforemost into the well.