Report to Grego (68 page)

As I wrote in the peace of my family home, wrote away in a transport, this terrible responsibility never left my mind. Verily, in the beginning was the Word. Before action. The Son, only Son, of God; the spermatic Word which creates both the visible and invisible world.

Gradually, exultantly, I found myself engulfed in ink. Great shadows jammed around the pit of my heart and sought to drink the warm blood which would bring them back to life—Julian the Apostate, Nicephorus Phocas, Constantine Palaeologus, Prometheus. Great tormented souls that had suffered and loved exceedingly in their lives, and had impudently contended against God and destiny. I fought to drag them up from Hades in order to glorify their pain and struggle—mankind's pain and struggle—in front of living men. In order to gain courage myself.

I know that what I write will never be artistically consummate, because I intentionally struggle to surpass the boundaries of art, and thus harmony, the essence of beauty, is distorted.

The more I wrote the more deeply I felt that in writing I was struggling, not for beauty, but for deliverance. Unlike a true writer, I could not gain pleasure from turning an ornate phrase or matching a sonorous rhyme; I was a man struggling and in pain, a man seeking deliverance. I wanted to be delivered from my own inner darkness and to turn it into light, from the terrible bellowing ancestors in me and to turn them into human beings. That was why I invoked great figures who had successfully undergone the most elevated and difficult of ordeals: I wanted to gain courage by seeing the human soul's ability to triumph over everything. This is what I knew, what I saw: the same eternal battle which had broken out before my eyes when I was a child was still breaking
out uninterruptedly inside me, breaking out uninterruptedly in the world at large. It was the inexhaustible motif of my life. This is why in all my work these two wrestlers, and these alone, were always the protagonists. If I wrote, it was because my writings, alas, were the only means I had to aid the struggle. Crete and Turkey, good and evil, light and darkness, were wrestling uninterruptedly inside me, and my purpose in writing, a purpose at first unconscious and afterwards conscious, was to do my utmost to aid Crete, the good and the light, to win. My purpose in writing was not beauty, it was deliverance.

I chanced to be born in an age when this struggle was so intense and the need of help so imperative that I could quickly see the identity between my individual struggle and the great struggle of the contemporary world. We were alike in our battle to be delivered, I from my dark ancestors, it from the old iniquitous world, both from darkness.

World War II had been declared, the whole earth had gone mad. Now I plainly saw that each age has its demon. This demon governs, not we. The demon of our age is a bloodthirsty carnivore, as is always the case when a world rots and must disappear. It seems that an infiuman, superhuman Mind aids the spirit to deliver itself from putrescent man and ascend; when it sees a world stepping in the way, it dispatches the carnivorous demon of havoc to demolish this world and clear a road, always a bloody one, so that the spirit may pass.

Now, without respite, I saw and heard the world around me being demolished. Everyone saw it being demolished. The purest souls tried to resist, but the demon puffed upon them and they lost their wings.

I took to the Cretan mountains again when war was declared, knowing that only there could I find, not peace or consolation, but the pride a man needs in difficult moments to keep him from becoming worthless. Once I saw an aged campaigner sitting on the church stoop one Sunday after the service and advising young men in the stratagems of manly valor. “Look fear straight in the eye if you can,” I heard him say, “and the fear will feel afraid and run away.” I took my staff, therefore, slung a rucksack over my shoulders, and headed for the mountains. It was the time when the
Germans were forcing their way into Norway and fighting to subjugate it.

One midday I heard a savage voice high above me as I was traversing the foot of Psiloríti. “Hey, neighbor, wait a minute! I want to ask you something!”

Lifting my head, I perceived a man draw away from a boulder and come tumbling down. He descended with giant strides from rock to rock; the stones rolled away under his feet, a great clamor began, the entire mountain seemed to be tumbling down with him. Now I could distinctly see that he was an immense, elderly shepherd. I stopped and waited for him. What could he want with me, I asked myself, and why such eagerness?

He came close to me, halting on a rock. His uncovered chest was hairy and steaming.

“Hey, neighbor, how is Norway getting on?” he asked with panting breath.

He had heard that a country was in danger of being enslaved. He had no real idea what Norway was, where it was located or what kind of people lived there. The one thing he clearly understood was that liberty was in danger.

“Better, grandpa, better. No need to worry,” I answered.

“Thank God,” roared the old shepherd, making the sign of the cross.

“Want a cigarette?” I asked him.

“Bah! What do I want with a cigarette? I don't want anything. If Norway's all right, that's enough for me!”

Saying this, he swung out his crook and climbed up again to find his flock.

The Greek air is truly holy, I thought to myself; surely freedom was born here. I do not know if the ordeal of a remote and unknown land fighting for its freedom could have been experienced with as much anguish and disinterestedness by any other peasant or shepherd in the world. Norway's struggle had become this Greek shepherd's struggle, because liberty, for him, was like his own daughter.

Such was the combative assignment I gave my duty as I wrote in the peacefulness of my family home, trying to play my part in the eternal battle. But sometimes I abandoned paper and ink in order to take the olive- and vine-surrounded road which leads to Knossos.
When this unforeseen Cretan miracle first rose like spring out of the soil, when I first saw the stone stairways, the columns, courtyards, and frescoes, I was overwhelmed by inexpressible gladness and sorrow for this extraordinary world which had perished, for the doom of every human exploit: to maintain itself a split second in the light and then plunge into chaos for all eternity. To the degree to which the royal palace was reconstructed, loomed again in the Cretan sunlight, and the bullfights and the women with high, exposed breasts, painted lips, and curled unruly tresses came to life again on the half-demolished walls, to this same degree a Last Judgment loomed before me; age-old unknown ancestors rose from the soil, the men mute, jolly, and cunning, the women wearing skirts embroidered with stars from the sky, stars from the sea, flowers from the earth, and dandling God's poisonous snakes in their arms.

But one day when I took the verdurous road again, reached the Last Judgment's sacred hill, and strolled for hours among the crumbling miracles, one painting shook me above all. It was as though I had seen it for the first time. Doubtlessly, this painting must have corresponded to my soul's present concerns and hopes; that was why I understood its hidden meaning on this day for the first time. Numerous fish were cruising in the water with lifted tails, frolicking happily, whereupon a flying fish in their midst suddenly spread its little fins, took a leap and bounded out of the sea in order to breathe air. Too big for its slavish piscine nature it was, too big to live all its life in the water. It suddenly longed to transcend its destiny, breathe free air, and become a bird—for a flash only, as long as it could endure. But that was enough; this flash was eternity. That is the meaning of eternity.

I experienced great agitation and fellow feeling as I gazed at this flying fish, as though it was my own soul I saw on that palace wall painting which had been made thousands of years before. “This is Crete's sacred fish,” I murmured to myself, “the fish which leaps in order to transcend necessity and breathe freedom.” Did not Christ, the ICHTHYS, seek the same thing: to transcend man's destiny and unite with God, in other words with absolute freedom? Does not every struggling soul seek the same thing: to smash frontiers? What good fortune, I reflected, that Crete should have been perhaps the first place on earth to see the birth of this symbol
of the soul fighting and dying for freedom! The flying fish—behold the soul of struggling, indomitable man!

I observed the flying fish venture the fatal leap out of the water, observed the svelte, narrow-waisted man and woman playing happily with the bull in the stone-paved arenas, observed the lioness sleeping peacefully among the lilies, and struggled to find their hidden meaning. What was the source of such valor and joy? What prayer were the woman's triumphant arms offering, and to whom—those bare arms entwined by black snakes? This indestructible thirst for life and this heroic fearless smile in the face of danger and death awakened fatal ancestral feats of derring-do in me, long-desired encounters with death. Bull and man, death and the soul, seemed to be friends; both naked, both anointed like athletes with aromatic oil, they were playing for one hour, two hours, as long as the sunlight lasted. Shaken and disturbed, I reflected that it is here in this terrible moment of confrontation between the Cretan and the abyss that Crete's secret lies concealed. I had to find this secret.

Christ, Buddha, and Lenin had paled inside me; I had been swept away by the soil of Crete. Without looking behind me now, I lifted my eyes to gaze with longing and fright upon an invisible peak still enveloped in clouds—a God-trodden peak of Sinai where, armed with thunderbolts and stern commandments (such was my presentiment) my God had his abode.

I sensed new strength, new responsibility, swelling my veins. My soul seemed to have been enriched along with the Cretan soil; it felt kneaded from more of the age-old laughter and tears. Once again I realized how intensely and with what secret assurance soil feels its correspondence to the soul. Similarly, a flower must surely have an inner awareness of the mud which rises from its roots and is transformed into aroma and color.

I saw my soul expanding in my blood like a mysterious miniature of Crete. It had the same contour of a three-masted schooner; it lived through the same centuries, the same terrors and joys, cruising in the middle of the three continents—the three violent, spermatic winds—of saintly Asia, ardent Africa, and sober Europe. The conscious or unconscious longing I had for years awoke even more imperatively inside me now: the longing to harmonize
these three disparate desires and drives, and to reach the supreme exploit—the synthesis, the sacred trihypostatic Monad.

In me, the world-wide religious symbol of the Holy Trinity was transposed to another, less symbolic plane. It became burning imperious reality, an immediate, supreme duty. “This or nothing!” was the inner vow I took in a moment of rapture. This Trinity was not given me ready-made from on high; I had to create it myself. This was my duty, this and only this! I told myself that it was not for nought that Crete was situated in the middle of three great Breaths, not for nought that my soul assumed Crete's contours and destiny. It was my duty to take what Crete had cried out over the centuries, with her people, her mountains, the frothy seas around her, with her body and soul, in her sleeping hours and waking hours, to take this and turn it into an integrated message. Was I not her son? Was I not of her soil? Was it not she, now when I confronted her most ancient splendor, who had commanded me to find the hidden meaning of her struggle, and why she had been crying out for so many centuries, and what—what Cretan message all her own—she was toiling to deliver to mankind?

I took the road leading back to my house. When did I pass the olive groves and vineyards, when did I enter Megalo Kastro and reach home? I saw nothing. The flying fish kept desperately leaping in front of my eyes. I thought to myself, would that I could fashion a soul able to leap and to smash man's boundaries if only for a split second, able to escape necessity if only for a split second, to leave joys, sorrows, ideas, and gods behind it, and to breathe unsoiled, uninhabited air!

A letter with a mourning band on the envelope was awaiting me at home. It bore a Serbian stamp; I understood. I held it in my trembling hand. Why should I open it? I had surmised the bitter news at once. “He's dead, he's dead,” I murmured, and the world grew dark.

For a long time I looked through the window at the descending night. The pots in the yard must have been watered that evening; the soil was fragrant. The evening star suspended itself from the acacia's thorny branches like a drop of dew. The evening was lovely; life seemed very sweet to me. For an instant I forgot the sorrowful letter I held in my hand.

Suddenly I realized that in regarding the world's beauty I had been attempting to forget death. Feeling ashamed, I ripped the envelope open with a violent movement. At first the letters danced, but then they settled little by little into immobility, and I was able to read:

I am the village schoolmaster. I am writing in order to inform you of the sad news that Alexis Zorba, who ran a magnesite mine here, passed away last Sunday at six o'clock in the evening. He called for me during his death agony and said, “Come here, teacher. I have a certain friend in Greece. When I die, write him that I'm dead and that I was in my right mind to the very last, all my wits about me, and was thinking of him. And that no matter what I did, I don't regret it. Tell him I hope he stays well, and that it's high time he put some sense into his head. . . . And if any priest comes to confess me and give me communion, tell him to make himself scarce, and may he give me his curse! I did this, that, and the other thing in my life, yet I did very little. Men like me should live a thousand years. Good night!”

I
closed my eyes and felt the tears rolling slowly, warmly down my cheeks. “He's dead, dead, dead . . .” I murmured. “Zorba is gone, gone forever. The laughter is dead, the song cut off, the santir broken, the danee on the seaside pebbles has halted, the insatiable mouth that questioned with such incurable thirst is filled now with clay, never will a more tender and accomplished hand be found to caress stones, sea, bread, women. . . .”