Report to Grego (65 page)

“Stop crying. Marioritsa,” he said. “Even if only two people remained in the world—you and me, let's say—the Greek land would fill up again with children!”

He swept his eyes over the deck.

“Do you know where the hope of the world lies, brothers? In the head, you'll say? No, farther down! In the heart, you'll say? No, no, farther down, brothers, farther down!”

He cast a rapid glance toward the woman.

“Eh, by God, if I wasn't ashamed in front of the ladies, I'd show you, I would, where the hope of the world lies! . . . So stop your crying, will you!”

The women blushed; the men laughed.

“Thodoris, there's no one comes near you,” they exclaimed. “Bless you for making us laugh.”

One man only sat off to the side and did not talk. This man did not laugh, did not relate his sufferings; he seemed reluctant to unburden himself. He had a monstrous body, bull neck, and great long paws that must have reached to his knees. His opened shirt revealed a chest covered with hair. Never had I seen a man who so closely resembled a bear.

When the others had all scattered and lain down on their tatters to go to sleep, this man remained staring at the sea, his thick neck craned forward. I went up to him, aware that a disquieting power sprang from this unmoving human bulk.

“You didn't talk,” I began, in order to open a conversation.

He turned to look at me, then extended his hand. His bones creaked.

“Talk? To say what? To describe my suffering and find relief? I don't want to find relief.”

Falling silent, he rose as if wishing to go away, but then he sat down again. I felt him struggling inwardly. He did not want to talk, but his heart was overflowing. Besides, night had descended and we were alone. He softened a little.

“You saw the mountains and forests in the Caucasus, didn't you? I roamed them, all alone, for years. I was called the wild boar because I kept company with no one. I never went to the café,
never went to church. As I said, I roamed the mountains and forests all alone. I devoured the mountains stone by stone. I was a quarrier, lumberjack, and charcoal-maker—naked and poor, but I was young, strong as an ox, and had no need of anyone. One day, however, I felt my strength choking me as I was climbing a mountain, and to keep myself from bursting I began to hack away at the mountain, to hew beams from the biggest pines, and build a house. I built it next to a spring—doors, windows, everything. It was ready. Men and women came from the nearby village to see it. They brought wine and food. But I just sat on a stone and looked at it. A girl came and sat down by my side. She looked at it too. And while we were both looking at it, my head went dizzy. The next morning I found myself a married man.”

He sighed.

“I found myself a married man. The dizziness passed. My mind returned from the high mountains.

“‘What are we going to eat, wife?' I said to her. ‘I can't feed one, how am I going to feed two? And what about the children?'

“‘Don't worry,' she said. ‘Let's go to church.'

“‘What do you expect me to do in church? I'm not going.'

“‘Let's go, I tell you.'

“We went. We crossed ourselves, felt encouraged.

“‘Now let't go and work our field,' said my wife.

“‘Field? What field, you idiot? Stones, you mean!'

“‘We'll smash the stones, crush them, make soil.'

“We went. We smashed the stones, made soil, planted our crop.

“‘Now let's go and prune the olive trees,' my wife said to me this time.

“‘What olive trees? Those dry sticks?'

“‘Let's go, I tell you.'

“We went. We pruned the dry sticks. We planted, pruned, filled ourselves with bread, lined our innards with olive oil. May God sanctify my grandfather's bones. ‘No need to fear being poor and naked,' he used to tell me, ‘provided you have a good wife.'”

Once more he fell silent. Seizing one end of the rope, he began to sleave it with his nails, like a wildcat. I could hear his teeth gnashing in the darkness.

“And after that, after that?” I asked him, troubled.

“Enough! You expect me to describe my suffering like all those others?”

“What about your wife?”

“Enough, I tell you!”

He wedged his head between his knees, and did not speak again.

“H
uman tears can turn all the world's water mills, but God's mill they do not turn.” I was once told this in a Macedonian village by a centenarian who had squatted on the doorstep of his poor shack in order to warm himself in the sun. Love and compassion are man's daughters, not God's. What unbearable suffering this boat was carrying and bringing to Greece! But time, all blessings upon it, takes pity on us. Time is a sponge, and it erases. The new crop of spring grass quickly covers the tombstones, and life pantingly resumes the ascent.

The heavens were filled with stars. My beloved constellation Scorpio, with its twisted tail and red eye, issued in fury from the sea. Around me was the suffering of man, and above me the star-filled sky, mute and inhuman, full of menace. Surely all those luminous spots must have a hidden meaning. Surely this thousand-eyed Argus guarded some terrible secret. But which? I did not know. The one thing I felt deep down within me was that this secret had not the slightest connection with man's heart. It seemed that two separate kingdoms existed in the cosmos: the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God.

With such conversations, such meditations, we crossed the Black Sea. We saw Constantinople in the distance again, bathed in sunlight this time and filled with orchards, minarets, and ruins. My fellow voyagers crossed themselves emotionally and did obeisance to her; one man leaned over the bow and called out, “Courage, mother. Courage!” When we arrived opposite the Greek coast, the priest from Sukhumi, who was among those traveling with us, rose, slipped on his stole, and lifted his aged arms to heaven. “Lord, Lord,” he cried in a loud voice, so that God would hear him, “save your people, help them cast roots in new soil, so that they may turn the stones and wood into churches and schools, and glorify your name in the language you love!”

We skirted the coasts of Thrace and Macedonia, weathered the Holy Mountain, and entered the port of Salonika. My assignment
had lasted eleven months. Shiploads of people and livestock kept arriving continually from the Caucasus; new blood was entering the veins of Greece. I went around Macedonia and Thrace choosing fields and villages from those left by the Turks when they departed. The new owners took possession and began to plow, plant, and build. I believe that one of man's most legitimate pleasures is to toil and see his toil bearing fruit. Once a Russian agronomist took Istrati and myself to a stretch of desert near Astrakhan. Spreading his arms, he triumphantly embraced the boundless sands. “I have thousands of workers,” he said. “They plant a type of long-rooted grass which holds the rain and soil. In a few years this entire desert will be an orchard.” His eyes were beaming. “Look! Do you see the villages, orchards, and water everywhere around you?” “Where?” cried Istrati in astonishment. “Where? We don't see anything.” The agronomist smiled. “You'll see it all in a few years,” he said, and he drove his walking stick into the sand, as though taking an oath.

Now I saw that he was right. I looked around me similarly at the devastated soil my fellow voyagers were dividing among themselves, and saw it abounding in people, orchards, and water. And I heard the bells from the future churches, the children playing and laughing in the schoolyards . . . and here was an almond tree in bloom before me: I must reach out and cut a flowering branch. For, by believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired, whatever we have not irrigated with our blood to such a degree that it becomes strong enough to stride across the somber threshold of nonexistence.

When everything finally ended, I suddenly felt how tired I was. I could not stand on my feet, could not eat, sleep, or read; I was exhausted. I had mobilized all my forces up to that time, as long as the great need lasted; the soul had buttressed the body and kept it from falling. But immediately the battle ended, this inner mobilization dissolved, the body remained undefended, and fell. Not before I had accomplished the mission entrusted to me, however. Now I was free. I submitted my resignation and immediately turned my face toward Crete. I wanted to tread her soil and touch her mountains again in order to gain strength.

W
HEN A MAN
returns to his country after many years of wandering and struggle abroad, leans against the ancestral stones, and sweeps his glance over the familiar regions so densely populated with indigenous spirits, childhood memories, and youthful longings, he breaks into a cold sweat.

The return to the ancestral soil perturbs our hearts. It is as if we were coming back from unmentionable adventures in new, forbidden regions and suddenly, there in our sojourn abroad, we sensed a weight on our hearts. What business do we have here with the pigs, eating acorns? We gaze behind us to the land we left, and sigh. Remembering the warmth, the peace, the prosperous well-being, we return like the prodigal son to the maternal breast. In me this return always caused a secret shudder, a foretaste as though of death. It seemed I was coming back to the long-desired ancestral clay after life's jousts and prodigalities; as though darkly subterranean, inescapable forces had entrusted a man with the execution of a specific charge, and now on his return a harsh voice rose from the great bowels of his earth and demanded, Did you carry out your charge? Give an account of yourself!

This earthen womb knows unerringly the worth of each of her children, and the higher the soul she has fashioned, the more difficult the commandment she imposes on it—to save itself or its race, or the world. A man's soul is ranked by which of these commandments it is assigned, the first, the second, or the third.

It is natural that each man should see this ascent, the ascent his soul is obliged to follow, inscribed most deeply upon the soil where he was born. There is a mystical contact and understanding between this soil which fashioned us, and our souls. Just as roots send the tree the secret order to blossom and bear fruit so that they themselves may receive their justification and reach the goal
of their journey, so in the same way the ancestral soil imposes difficult commandments upon the souls it has begotten. Soil and soul seem to be of the same substance, undertaking the same assault; the soul is simply maximal victory.

To refuse ever to deny your youth, right up to extreme old age, to battle all life long to transubstantiate your adolescent flowering into a fruit-laden tree—that, I believe, is the road of the fulfilled man.

The soul knows full well (even though it pretends to forget many times) that it must render account to the paternal soil. I do not say “fatherland,” I say “paternal soil.” The paternal soil is something deeper, more modest, more reserved, and it is composed of age-old pulverized bones.

This is the terrestrial—and unique—Last Judgment, where your life is weighed within your still-living entrails. You hear the strict, righteously judging voice rise from the soil of your forebears, and you shudder. What answer can you give it? You bite your lips and think, Oh, if only I could live my life over again! But it is too late. The opportunity is given us once and for all, once in all eternity. Never again.

The childhood memories which fly out from every direction serve to increase the pain all the more. A thick crust has enwrapped our upward-gushing souls, immobilizing them into humps, wrinkles, and humiliating habits. This soul which longed in the acutely quavering blaze of youth to conquer the world, which felt too constricted in its splendid adolescent castle, now sits shivering in one corner of a body all shriveled and leathery. In vain does ancient and modern wisdom admonish it to submit with understanding and patience to the law of necessity. This wisdom tells it by way of cowardly consolation that plants, animals, and gods all surge forward, conquer, are conquered, and decline in exactly the same way. But an exacting soul will not deign to accept such consolations. How can it? It was born precisely to declare war against this law of necessity.

The return to our homeland is a decisive event. The comfortable, treacherous crust bursts, the trap door opens, and all the once-possible identities we have killed—all the better selves that we could have become and failed to become out of laziness, misfortune,
and cowardice—revive like unwanted ghosts and jump into our consciousness.

This ordeal becomes even more unbearable when a person's paternal land is recalcitrant and unmanageable, when its mountains and seas—and the souls fashioned from such crags and brine—do not permit him to settle into manageable ease for even an instant, to feel sweet contentment and say, “Enough!” This Crete has something inhumanly cruel about it. I do not know if she loves her children and torments them accordingly; all I know is that she flogs them until blood flows.

One day Sheik Glailan, son of Harassa, was asked, “What must the Arabs do to keep from declining?” He replied, “All will go well as long as they gallop forward with the sword in their hands and the turban on their heads.” As I inhale the Cretan air and gaze at the Cretans, I can think of no other people on earth who have followed this proud Arabian commandment more faithfully.

At life's most decisive moment—when the young man pushes aside the multitude of possibilities open to him, selects one and one only, identifies his destiny with it, and enters adulthood—at that moment three Cretan incidents saved (no, did not save; attempted to save) my soul. Perhaps they will save other souls, and therefore I will be forgiven if I cite them. They are very simple, with a thick peasant rind; but whoever can crack this rind will taste three mouthfuls of solid, leonine brains.