Report to Grego (9 page)

He had a daughter of marriageable age named Terpsichore: short, but very delectable. Though she had many suitors, he did not want her to marry. “I won't have any such abominations in my house,” he used to say. And when the toms came out in January and began miaowing on the pantiles, he got a ladder, climbed onto the roof, and chased them away. “Nature be damned,” he murmured, “it has no morals.”

On Good Friday he took us to church to do obeisance to the Crucified. Afterwards he brought us back to school to explain what
we had seen, whom we had worshiped, and what crucifixion meant. We fell into formation in our seats, tired and disgusted because we had eaten nothing that day except sour lemons and had drunk nothing except vinegar so that we too might taste Christ's suffering. Whereupon, New Pedagogy's spouse began in a deeply solemn voice to explain how God descended to earth, how he became Christ, suffered, and was crucified in order to deliver us from sin. Exactly what this sin was we did not understand very clearly, but we did understand clearly that he had twelve disciples, one of whom—Judas—had betrayed him.

“And Judas was like . . . like whom?”

The teacher left his platform and began to proceed slowly, threateningly, from desk to desk, eying us one by one.

“Judas was like . . . like . . .”

His index finger was extended; he shifted it from pupil to pupil, trying to find which of us Judas was like. We all quailed and trembled lest the terrible finger come to rest upon us. Suddenly the teacher emitted a cry, and his finger halted at a pallid, poorly dressed boy with beautiful reddish-blond hair. It was Nikolios, the same who the year before in third grade had called out, “Be quiet, Teacher, and let us hear the bird.”

“There, like Nikoliós!” cried the teacher. “Identical! The same pallor, the same clothes. And Judas had red hair. Deep red, like the flames of hell!”

When poor Nikoliós heard this, he burst into tears. The rest of us, no longer in danger, eyed him with ferociously hateful glances and passed the word secretly from desk to desk that as soon as school was out we would beat him to a pulp because he had betrayed Christ.

Satisfied at having followed New Pedagogy and shown us tangibly what Judas was like, the teacher dismissed the class. We hemmed Nikolios in as soon as we reached the street and began to spit on him and beat him up. He ran off in tears, but we pursued him with stones, jeering “Judas! Judas!” at him until he reached his home and slipped inside.

Nikoliós never appeared again in class, never set foot again in school. Thirty years later, when I had returned to Crete after my stay in Europe, there was a knock on our door. It was Holy Saturday. My father had ordered us all new shoes for Easter, and a pale,
feeble man with red hair and beard stood on the threshold. He was delivering the shoes, which were neatly wrapped in a colored cloth. He stood shyly on the threshold, looked at me, and shook his head.

“Don't you know me?” he said. “Don't you remember me?”

And as he said this, I recognized him.

“It's Nikoliós!” I cried, clasping him in my arms.

“Judas,” he said, and he smiled bitterly.

I
often recall the men and women of our neighborhood, and always with terror. Most of them were freakish and half mad; I passed their doors as quickly as I could, because I was afraid. Their brains had gone to pot, perhaps because they were isolated inside the four walls of their houses all year long, boiling in their own juices, perhaps because of their fear of the Turks and their concern for their lives, honor, and possessions, which were in daily peril. Indeed, they heard the old men tell stories about massacres and wars, about the ordeals of the Christians, and their hair stood on end. If someone came along and stopped in front of their doors, they jumped to their feet, stricken dumb with fear. And how could they sleep at night? Their eyes wide open, their ears cocked, they waited for the evil hour which was sure to come.

It really is with terror that I recall the men and women of our neighborhood. Madame Victoria, just a little below our house, sometimes greeted you sweetly with a barrage of tender chitchat impossible to check, sometimes slammed the door in your face and began to curse you behind it.

Opposite her was Madame Penelope. Fat, greasy, getting on in years, she always chewed cloves, apparently to sweeten her breath. She laughed continually, as if someone were tickling her. Mr. Dimitrós, her husband, was a taciturn, hypochondriacal man who took his umbrella every so often and set off for the mountains. Two or three months later he returned in tatters, dying of hunger, his trousers hanging empty around him. When Madame Penelope saw him appear in the distance holding the opened umbrella above him, she burst into laughter. “Here he comes again to fill up his pants,” she shouted to the neighbors, and they all split their sides with guffaws.

Farther down the street lived Mr. Manoúsos, a merchant of
consequence but a little touched. Every time he left his house in the morning, he inscribed a cross on the front door with a piece of chalk he held in his hand, and at midday when he came home to eat, he thrashed his sister—regularly, always at exactly the same hour. When we heard her screams, we knew it was dinnertime and we went to the table. Mr. Manoúsos never parted his lips to say good morning; he simply glared at you with a mixture of savagery and fear.

Mr. Andreas the Feeler occupied a large house a little above us, at the head of the street. Rich and pock-marked, he had a fat nose with wide nostrils, which made him look like a calf. Every time he closed his door, he stood and felt it for an hour to make sure it hadn't by chance remained open, all the while murmuring exorcisms to chase away burglars, fire, and sickness. Finally he crossed himself three times and went on his way, looking continually behind him. The children of the neighborhood had noticed that he always stepped on the same stones, and they used to heap mud or horse manure on these stones in order to tease him. But he pushed the piles to one side with his stick and stepped as before.

We also had as our neighbor the excellent Dr. Pericles, the pride of the street. He was a physician freshly arrived from studies in Paris. Blond and handsome, he had gold spectacles, wore a top hat, surely the first “mirabeau” ever to disembark at Megalo Kastro, and made calls to his patients in slippers because (so he said) his feet were swollen. These slippers had been embroidered by his old-maid sister, who exhausted her dowry to pay for his education. He was our family doctor. I used to bend down and admire the embroidery: silken roses surrounded by green leaves. Once when I had temperature and he came to see me, I told him imploringly that if he wanted me to get well, he would have to give me the slippers. And he, with the utmost seriousness—he never deigned to laugh—put them on my feet to determine if they fit. But they were much too large. To console myself, I glued my nose on top of the embroidered roses to see if they smelled. They smelled, but not like roses.

I cannot recall my neighbors without bursting into laughter mixed with tears. In those days men were not cast by the dozen in the same mold. Each was a separate world with his own peculiarities. He laughed differently from his neighbor, talked differently.
Shutting himself up in his house, he kept his most secret desires hidden out of shame or fear, and these desires luxuriated within and strangled him. But he said nothing, and his life took on a tragic seriousness. In addition there was poverty, and as if this were not enough, the pride which demanded that no one discover this poverty. People fed themselves bread, olives, and mustard stems to avoid having to step outside with patched clothes. I once heard a neighbor remark, “A poor man is someone who fears poverty. I do not fear it.”

I
MUST
have still been in elementary school when a shepherd came scurrying from the village to get me and bring me to my grandfather, who apparently was breathing his last. He had asked for me so that he could give me his blessing. It was August, I remember. Torrid heat. I rode on a donkey while the shepherd walked behind holding a forked stick with a nail at the tip. He goaded the animal frequently, drew blood, and the suffering donkey kicked and began to run. I kept turning to the driver.

“Have pity!” I implored him. “Don't you feel sorry for the beast? You're hurting him.”

“Only men feel pain,” he answered me. “Donkeys are donkeys.”

But I forgot the donkey's pain as soon as we reached the vineyards and olive groves. The women were still vintaging and spreading the grapes over the cloth-covered drying areas to become raisins. The world was fragrant, the grasshoppers deafening. One of the vintagers saw us and laughed.

“Why is she laughing, Kyriákos?” I asked the donkey driver (I had learned his name by now).

“She's being tickled and she's laughing.”

He spat.

“Being tickled? Who is tickling her, Kyriákos?”

“Demons.”

I did not understand, but I felt afraid. Closing my eyes to keep from seeing the demons, I pounded the donkey with my fist to make it carry us by quickly.

Great hairy giants were treading grapes in one of the villages we passed through. Stripped to the waist, they were dancing in the wine press and telling jokes which made them double over with laughter. The ground smelled of must. Women were removing fresh loaves from the ovens, dogs barking, bees and wasps buzzing, the westering sun inclining with a rubicund face as though treading grapes along with the others, completely drunk. I too began to laugh. Whistling, I took the forked stick from the shepherd and started to goad the donkey, thrusting the nail deep into its rump.

By the time we reached my grandfather's house, I was dizzy from fatigue, sun, and grasshoppers. When we arrived and I saw him lying in the middle of the courtyard surrounded by his children and grandchildren, I felt relieved. For night had fallen already, the heat had subsided, and my grandfather lay with closed eyes, unaware of my presence. In this way I escaped the immense hand which reddened my skin wherever it touched me.

“I'm tired,” I said to the woman who took me in her arms and lowered me from the donkey.

“You'll have to be patient,” she replied. “Your grandfather is going to give up the ghost at any minute. Better stay near him so that you can be the first to receive his blessing.”

This blessing I had come such a distance to receive seemed like some miraculous gift, some expensive toy. The dragon's hair mentioned in the fairy tales—that is what it would be! You kept this one hair on your person as a talisman, and in time of great need you burned it, and the dragon came to save you. So I began to wait for my grandfather to open his eyes and give me the dragon's hair.

At that very moment, uttering a cry, he rolled into a ball on the sheepskin which had been spread out beneath him.

“He saw his angel,” said an old lady. “He's going to surrender his soul any minute now.”

Crossing herself and taking up a piece of wax, she began to warm it in her breath and knead it with her fingers. She was making it into a cross to seal the dead man's lips.

One of his sons rose. He had a thorny jet-black beard. Going inside, he brought out a pomegranate and placed it in his father's palm so that he could take it to Hades.

We all went close and gazed at him. A woman began chanting the dirge, but the son with the thorny beard placed his hand over her mouth.

“Quiet!”

At this point my grandfather opened his eyes and beckoned. Everyone went still closer, his sons in the first circle, the male grandchildren behind them, further back the daughters and daughters-in-law. The moribund extended his hands. An old lady placed a pillow behind his neck. We heard his voice.

“Goodbye, lads,” he said. “I ate my share of bread; now I'm going. I filled my yard with children and grandchildren, filled my jugs with oil and honey, filled my barrels with wine—I have no complaints. Goodbye!”

He moved his hands, bidding us farewell. Turning slowly, he looked at each of us, one by one. I had forgotten all about the blessing. I was hidden behind two or three of my cousins, and he did not see me. No one spoke. The old man parted his lips again.

“Give an ear, lads, and listen to my final instructions. Look after the animals—the oxen, sheep, and donkeys. Don't fool yourselves, they have souls just like us, they're men, only they wear hides and don't know how to talk. They're men from way back; give them enough to eat. And look after the olive trees and vines. Be sure you manure, water, and prune them if you want them to bear fruit for you. They're men from way back too, but so far back they don't remember. But man remembers; that's why we're men, after all. . . . Are you listening? Or am I talking to a flock of deaf-mutes?”

“We're listening.” “We're listening,” replied several voices.

The old man held out his huge hand and called for his eldest son. “Eh, you—Kostandís!”

Kostandís, a curly-haired giant with a gray beard and large bovine eyes, touched his father's hand.

“Here I am, sir. Tell me what you want.”

“I've got some select wheat in the small jar. I've been keeping it a long time now, for my memorial offering. Boil it on the ninth day, and mind you put in plenty of almonds (we've enough, thank the Lord) and don't skimp on the sugar, as you usually do. Hear? You're a skinflint and I don't trust you.”

“I honor your wishes,” answered the eldest son, nodding his head. “Yes, I honor your wishes, but let the others share the
expenses. The whole works, provided everyone shares the expenses. We're dealing with a memorial offering and that means money, it's no joke. Then there are the candles, and the priest who has to be paid, and then the gravedigger, don't forget, and then the funeral pies, and the mezédhes and wine for the memorial spread, not to mention all the coffee the women will drink. It means money, I tell you, it's no joke. We'll all share the expenses.”