The Colossus of Maroussi (21 page)

Good,
he seemed to say, flashing his lightning-like approval first upon me and then upon the interpreter. Now we can go on to other matters, remaining of course strictly polite, strictly
comme il faut
. You have been where exactly in the course of your brief stay? I explained briefly. Oh, but that is nothing! You must go here, there, everywhere—it is all at your beck and call, and as if to show how easily it might be managed, he nimbly and deftly retreated a pace and a half and, without looking, pressed a button under the desk top, whereupon a flunkey instantly made his appearance, received the peremptory instructions and disappeared. I was dying to ask him where he had received his flawless training, but restrained the impulse until a more favorable moment. What an executive he would have made in a typical American corporation! What a sales director! And here he was in an apparently deserted building, all dressed to go on and do his stuff but no audience, no spectacle, just the usual dull routine of a provincial town at the edge of the world. Never have I seen ability so sadly misplaced. Had he been so inclined—and God only knows what might be the vaulting ambitions of such an individual caught here in a vacuum of futility—he could easily have assumed the dictatorship of the whole Balkans. In a few days I could see him taking over the leadership of the whole Mediterranean world, settling with one bold stroke of the pen the destiny of this great basin for hundreds of years to come. Charming, gracious, hospitable though he was, I was almost terrified of him. For the first time in my life I had found myself in the presence of a man of power, a man who could do anything he set his mind to, a man moreover who would not flinch or balk at the cost of fulfilling his dream. I felt that I was looking at an embryonic despot, a not unkindly one, certainly a most intelligent one, but above all a ruthless one, a man of iron will, a man of one single purpose: the born leader. Beside him Hitler seems a caricature and Mussolini an old-fashioned Ben Greet player. As for the great industrial magnates of America, such as they reveal themselves to be through the movies and the newspapers, why they are but overgrown children, hydrocephalic geniuses playing with dynamite in the sanctimonious arms of the Baptist saints. Stavros Tsoussis could twist them like hairpins between his two fingers.

We withdrew in perfect order after the amenities had come to a natural end. The beggar woman was still at the door with her two ragged urchins. I wondered in vain what that interview would be like, assuming that she ever had the good fortune to get beyond the threshold of that forbidding sanctuary. I gave one of the urchins a few drachmas which he immediately handed to his mother. Tsoutsou, seeing that the mother was about to make an appeal for more substantial aid, gently dragged me away.

I made up my mind that night to leave the next day. I had a hunch that there was money waiting for me in Athens. I notified the Air Line that I would not avail myself of the return ticket. I found that the planes were not running anyway—the landing field was too soggy.

I boarded the boat the next evening. The next morning we were at Canea where we remained until late that afternoon. I spent the time ashore eating and drinking and strolling about the town. The old part of the town was decidedly interesting; it had all the air of a Venetian stronghold which I believe it once was. The Greek part was as usual anomalous, straggling, thoroughly individualistic and eclectic. I had the sensation, only to a more intense degree, which I so oft en had in Greece—that the moment the power of the invader was halted or suspended, the moment the hand of authority relaxed, the Greek took up again his very natural, very human, always intimate, always understandable life of everyday routine. What is unnatural, and here in such deserted places it speaks so strongly, is the imposing power of castle, church, garrison, merchant. Power fades away in ugly decrepitude, leaving little vulture-like knobs of manifested will here and there to indicate the ravages of pride, envy, malice, greed, superstition, ritual, dogma. Left to his own resources man always begins again in the Greek way—a few goats or sheep, a rude hut, a patch of crops, a clump of olive trees, a running stream, a flute.

In the night we passed a snow-covered mountain. I think we stopped again, at Retimo. It was a long, slow journey back by ship, but a natural, sensible one. There is no better and no more dilapidated craft than the ordinary Greek boat. It is an ark on which are gathered together a pair of every kind. I happened to have chosen the same boat as had taken me once to Corfu; the steward recognized me and greeted me warmly. He was surprised that I was still knocking about in Greek waters. When I inquired why he mentioned the war, The war! I had completely forgotten about the war. The radio was bringing it to us again—with our meals. Always just enough progress and invention to fill your mind with fresh horrors. I left the salon to pace the deck. The wind was up and the boat was pitching and tossing. Some of the roughest seas in this part of the Mediterranean. Good seas. Fine rough weather, man-sized, bracing, appetizing. A little boat in a big sea. An island now and then. A tiny harbor lit up like a Japanese fairytale. Animals coming aboard, children screaming, food cooking, men and women washing up in the hold at a little trough, like animals. Fine boat. Fine weather. Stars now and then soft as geraniums, or hard and splintery like riven pikes. Homely men walking about in carpet slippers, playing with their beads, spitting, belching, making friendly grimaces, tossing their heads back and with a clicking noise saying no when they should be saying yes. In the rear of the boat the steerage passengers, sprawled pell-mell over the deck, their possessions spread out around them, some snoozing, some coughing, some singing, some meditating, some arguing, but whether asleep or awake all joined indiscriminately one to another and giving an impression of life. Not that sterile, sickly, organized life of the tourist third class such as we know on the big ocean liners, but a contaminating, infectious, pullulating, beehive life such as human beings ought to share when they are making a perilous voyage over a great body of water.

I went back to the salon around midnight to write a few lines in the little book which I had promised Seferiades. A man came over and asked me if I weren’t an American—he had noticed me at the dinner table, he said. Another Greek from America, only this time an intelligent, entertaining one. He was an engineer doing reclamation work for the government. He had been over every inch of Greek soil. He talked about water supplies, electric equipment, drained marshlands, marble quarries, gold deposits, hotel accommodations, railroad facilities, bridge building, sanitary crusades, forest fires, legends, myths, superstitions, ancient wars and modern wars, piracy, fishing, monastic orders, duck shooting, Easter celebrations, and finally, after talking about long range guns, floating armadas, twin-screwed and double-jointed hurricane bombers, he launched into an account of the massacre at Smyrna of which he had been an eyewitness. In the long list of atrocities to be accredited to the human race it is difficult to say which “incident” is more heinous than the other. To mention the name of Sherman to a Southerner of the United States is to fill him with burning indignation. Even the most ignorant yokel knows that the name Attila is associated with untold horrors and vandalism. But the Smyrna affair, which far outweighs the horrors of the first World War or even the present one, has been somehow soft-pedalled and almost expunged from the memory of present-day man.
^*
The peculiar horror which clings to this catastrophe is due not alone to the savagery and barbarism of the Turks but to the disgraceful, supine acquiescence of the big powers. It was one of the few shocks which the modern world has suffered—the realization that governments, in the pursuit of their selfish ends, can foster indifference, can reduce to impotence the natural spontaneous impulse of human beings in the face of brutal, wanton slaughter. Smyrna, like the Boxer Rebellion and other incidents too numerous to mention, was a premonitory example of the fate which lay in store for European nations, the fate which they were slowly accumulating by their diplomatic intrigues, their petty horse-trading, their cultivated neutrality and indifference in the face of obvious wrongs and injustices. Every time I hear of the Smyrna catastrophe, of the stultification of manhood worked on the members of the armed forces of the great powers who stood idly by under strict command of their leaders while thousands of innocent men, women and children were driven into the water like cattle, shot at, mutilated, burned alive, their hands chopped off when they tried to climb aboard a foreign vessel, I think of that preliminary warning which I saw always in French cinemas and which was repeated doubtless in every language under the sun except the German, Italian and Japanese, whenever a newsreel was shown of the bombing of a Chinese city.
^*
I remember it for the very special reason that at the first showing of the destruction of Shanghai, the streets littered with mutilated bodies which were being hastily shoveled into carts like so much garbage, there arose in this French cinema such a pandemonium as I had never heard before. The French public was outraged. And yet pathetically, humanly enough, they were divided in their indignation. The rage of the just ones was overwhelmed by the rage of the virtuous ones. The latter, curiously enough, were outraged that such barbarous, inhuman scenes could be shown to such well-behaved, law-abiding, peace-loving people as they imagined themselves to he. They wanted to be protected from the anguish of enduring such a scene even at the comfortable distance of three or four thousand miles. They had paid to see a drama of love in comfortable seats and by some monstrous and wholly unaccountable faux pas this nasty slice of reality had been shoved before their eyes and their peaceful, idle evening virtually ruined. Such was Europe before the present débâcle. Such is America to-day. And such it will be to-morrow when the smoke has cleared away. And as long as human beings can sit and watch with hands folded while their fellow men are tortured and butchered so long will civilization be a hollow mockery, a wordy phantom suspended like a mirage above a swelling sea of murdered carcasses.

ON MY RETURN TO ATHENS I FOUND A STACK OF MAIL
forwarded from Paris, also several notices from the post office inviting me to call at my earliest convenience for money. The American Express also had money for me, money that had been cabled by friends in America. Golfo the maid, who came from Loutraki where Katsimbalis once owned a gambling casino and who always spoke German to me, was excited by the prospect of my receiving several sums of money at once. So was the night porter, Socrates, and the postman who always had a broad grin when he counted out the money to me. In Greece, as in other places, when you receive a sum of money from abroad you are expected to make little dispensations in every direction. At the same time I was informed indirectly that I might have an excellent room with private bath at one of the best hotels for what I was paying at the Grand. I preferred to stay at the Grand. I liked the maids, the porters, the bellhops and the proprietor himself; I like hotels which are second or third rate, which are clean but shabby, which have seen better days, which have an aroma of the past. I liked the beetles and the huge water bugs which I always found in my room when I turned on the light. I liked the broad corridors and the toilets all jammed together like bath houses at the end of the hall. I liked the dismal courtyard and the sound of the male choir practicing in a hall nearby. For a few drachmas I could get the bellhop, who was an old Parisian of fourteen years of age, to deliver my letters by hand, a luxury never before enjoyed. Getting so much money at once I almost lost my head. I was on the verge of buying a suit of clothes, which I needed badly, but fortunately the bellhop’s uncle who ran a little shop near the Turkish quarter, couldn’t make me a suit quickly enough. Then I was on the point of buying the bellhop a bicycle, which he claimed would be of inestimable service in running his little errands, but as he couldn’t find one he liked immediately I compromised by giving him some sweaters and a pair of flannel trousers.

One day Max, who had nothing to do but deliver news bulletins for the British Press Bureau in his car, announced that it was his birthday and that he was going to squander a small fortune by inviting all his friends and acquaintances to eat and drink with him. There was something desperate about this birthday party. Despite the lavish flow of champagne, the extravagant abundance of food, the women, the music, the dancing, somehow it never quite came off. The English of course were immediately drunk and in their charming subaqueous way slid off into their habitual comas. The evening reminded me of a night I once spent in London at a dance hail with a man from Baghdad. The whole evening he talked insurance to me or else dress clothes and how to wear them. Max, who couldn’t drink because of his health, kept filling the glasses and sparkled with a reflected brilliance, like a room lit up with tinkling chandeliers. His idea of how to bring the festivities to a pleasant termination was to drive to some Godforsaken ruin and wreck the cars. On a previous celebration he had actually driven his car up the steps of the King George Hotel, much to the astonishment of the flunkeys. I left the party about three in the morning, feeling drunk but not at all gay.

About this time I received a letter from the American Consulate requesting me to step in and have my passport validated or invalidated. I went round to the office to make inquiries. Being a native-born I took the matter lightly. Just a bit of red tape, I thought to myself. Had I brought a photograph, I was asked immediately. No, I hadn’t thought of that. The porter took me down the street a few blocks to look for a man who usually stood on a certain corner. The apparatus was there but no sign of the man. I had nothing to do so I sat down on the curb and waited patiently. When I got back to the bureau there were several Americanized Greeks waiting to be cross-examined. One sly old peasant who had evidently become prosperous in America amused me. He was talking in Greek to one of the secretaries, a Greek woman. He evidently didn’t like her efficient and somewhat superior attitude. He became mulish. He would say neither Yes nor No to the questions put him. He smelled a rat somewhere and he was on his guard. The young woman was almost beside herself. But the more frantic she became the cooler he behaved. She looked at me in despair. I thought to myself it serves you right, what business have you to be tantalizing people with all these stupid questions? Finally it came my turn. What are you doing in Greece? Where is your home? How many dependents have you? Whom do you work for? I was so pleased with the fact that I could answer readily—no home, no dependents, no boss, no aim, et cetera, that when he said “Couldn’t you just as well do your writing elsewhere?” I said “Of course, I’m a free man, I can work anywhere, nobody is paying me to write.” Whereupon he said—very clever of him—“Well then, I take it you could write in America too, couldn’t you?” And I said “Of course, why not? Only I don’t care to write in America. I’m writing about Greece now.” However, the game was up, as I discovered in a few moments. A brief colloquy with a higher-up and my passport was returned to me invalidated. That meant get home at the earliest possible moment. Clear out!

At first I was angry; I felt that I had been tricked. But after I had walked around the block several times I decided that it was probably an act of fate. At least I was free to clear out. Max was only free to stay and spend his remaining drachmas. The war was spreading. Soon the Balkans would be inflamed. Soon there would be no choice.

I went back the next day to see the American Minister and find out how much time they would accord me. The former director of “The Dial,” as he turned out to be, received me cordially. I was delighted to learn of his great sympathy and love for the Greeks. Everything went smoothly. No undue hurry. Only please prepare to leave as soon as possible. I sensed that it was best to comply graciously. So I shook our minister, Mr. Lincoln MacVeagh, cordially by the hand and departed. On the way out I made the sign of the cross in Orthodox fashion.

Winter was coming on; the days were short and sunny, the nights cold and long. The stars seemed more brilliant than ever. Owing to the shortage of coal the heat was turned on for an hour only in the morning and an hour in the evening. I quickly developed sciatica and was reminded that I was getting old. Golfo the maid was very solicitous; Socrates, the night porter, came up every evening to rub me with a Greek horse liniment; the proprietor sent up grapes and mineral waters; Niki with the Nile green eyes came and held my hand; the bellhop brought letters and telegrams. All in all it was a very pleasant illness.

I shall always remember the walks through Athens at night under the autumn stars. Often I would go up to a bluff just under Lykabettos and stand there for an hour or so gazing at the sky. What was wonderful about it was that it was so Greek—not just the sky, but the houses, the color of the houses, the dusty roads, the nakedness, the sounds that came out of the houses. Something immaculate about it. Somewhere beyond the “ammonia” region, in a forlorn district whose streets are named after the philosophers, I would stumble about in a silence so intense and so velvety at the same time that it seemed as if the atmosphere were full of powdered stars whose light made an inaudible noise. Athens and New York are electrically charged cities, unique in my experience. But Athens is permeated with a violet-blue reality which envelops you with a caress; New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness, if you have no inner stabilizer. In both cases the air is like champagne—a tonic, a revivifier. In Athens I experienced the joy of solitude; in New York I have always felt lonely, the loneliness of the caged animal, which brings on crime, sex, alcohol and other madnesses.

At midnight, returning to the hotel, I was frequently intercepted, usually by some wily Greek who knew enough English to strike up a running conversation. Usually he would invite me to join him in taking a coffee, pretending to be overjoyed to meet an American like himself (sic). One evening I ran into a Cretan from Utica, New York. He had come back to do his military service in Greece, so he said. He had a brother in Herakleion who was well off. After much beating about the bush, inquiring after the state of my health and so on, he admitted blushingly that he was short 73 drachmas for the boat fare to Crete. Now 73 drachmas is only about a half dollar in American money and a half dollar is nothing to offer a stranger from Utica who desires to do his military service abroad, especially if like the one I am talking about he has already paid for your coffee, pastry and ice cream, has already offered you his cigarettes and already invited you to make use of his brother’s car while in Crete. I hadn’t told him that I had just been to Crete, of course. I listened to him in sympathetic silence and acted as naif and ignorant as Americans are supposed to be. As a matter of fact I was really itching to be taken in—otherwise I would have felt cheated, disillusioned about the Greek character. Aside from my experience of the first day nobody in Greece, no Greek certainly, had ever tried to gyp me. And perhaps this one would have been successful had he not been so maladroit. In the first place I happened to know Utica fairly well, having spent one of my honeymoons there, and the street which he described to me as being his home I knew did not exist; in the second place he had made the mistake of telling me that he was taking the “Elsie” to Herakleion, whereas I knew, having just come back on the “Elsie,” that this boat would not be returning to Crete for several months; in the third place, having inquired of him what he thought about Phaestos, which is pronounced the same in all languages, including Chinese, he asked me what
it
was, and when I told him it was a place he said he had never heard of it, he even doubted its existence; in the fourth place he couldn’t remember the name of the hotel which I ought to stop at when going to Herakleion, and for a man born in Herakleion, which has only two hotels to its name, the sudden loss of memory struck me as rather glaring; in the fifth place he no more resembled a Cretan than a man from Canarsie would, and I very much doubted that he had ever seen the place; in the sixth place he was too free with his brother’s car, and cars are not plentiful in Crete where the bullock still draws the plough. None of these factors would have deterred me from handing him the seventy-three drachmas since, being a born American, a half dollar has always seemed to me to be just the right sized coin to throw down a sewer if there is nothing better to be done with it. Only I did want him to know that I knew he was lying. And so I told him so. At this he pretended to be aggrieved. When I pointed out why I thought he had been lying to me he rose up solemnly and said that if I should ever go to Crete and there meet his brother I would regret what I had said—and with that he stalked out looking as injured and wounded as possible. I called the waiter over and asked him if he knew the man. He smiled. “Why, yes,” he said, “he’s an interpreter.” I asked if he had been living a long time in Athens. “He’s been here all his life,” he said.

There was another one called George, George of Cyprus, who was even less capable. George pretended to be a close friend of the American Minister, our Mr. MacVeagh no less. He had been watching me read a German news weekly at a little kiosk in the same “ammonia” region. He greeted me in German and I answered him in German. He asked me how long I had been in Athens and I told him. He said it was a beautiful night and I agreed, it was indeed. “Where do you go from here?” he asked next and I said “To Persia perhaps.” All this in German. “Where do you come from?” he asked. “From New York,” I replied. “And you speak nothing but German?” “I can speak English too,” I said. “Then why did you speak German to me?” he inquired, with a sly smile. “Because you addressed me in German,” I said. “Can you speak Greek?” he asked next. “No,” I said, “but I can speak Chinese and Japanese—can you?” He shook his head. “Do you speak Turkish?” I shook my head. “Arabic?” Again I shook my head. “I speak all the languages except Chinese and Japanese,” he said, smiling again in his strange way. “You’re very intelligent,” I said. “Are you an interpreter?” No, he was not an interpreter. He smiled and lowered his eyes. “Have a drink with me?” he said. I nodded.

Seated at the table he began a long roundabout discussion to find out what my occupation was. I told him I had none. “You are a rich man, yes?” he said, his eyes gleaming. “No, I am very poor. I have no money.” He laughed in my face, as if the very thought were absurd. “You like women?” he asked suddenly. I said I liked them very much, especially if they were beautiful. “I have a friend—she is very beautiful,” he said immediately. “We will go to see her—now, as soon as you have finished your coffee.” I told him I didn’t care to see her right away because I was going to bed soon. He pretended not to have heard me correctly and went into a long rhapsody about her charms. “She must be very beautiful,” I said. “Aren’t you jealous of her?” He looked at me as if I were slightly cracked “You are my friend,” he said. “She will be honored to see you. Let’s go now,” and he started to rise from his seat. I sat there as if made of lead and looking up at him I blandly inquired what day it was. He wasn’t sure—he thought it was Tuesday. “Ask the waiter,” I said. He asked the waiter. It was Tuesday all right. “Well,” I said, slowly dragging it out, “I shall be busy until Thursday a week from now, but if you are free Thursday evening, Thursday the 17th, I’ll call for you here about ten in the evening and we’ll go to see your friend.” He laughed. “Come, we’ll go there now,” he said, taking me by the arm. I remained seated, allowing him to hold my arm which had become as inert as a stovepipe. “I’m going to bed in a few minutes,” I repeated calmly. “Besides, I have no money—I told you I was poor, you remember?” He laughed. Then he sat down, drawing his chair up closer. “Listen,” he said, leaning over in confidential style, “George knows everybody. You don’t need any money—you are my guest. We’ll stay just a few minutes—it’s right near here.” “But it’s late now,” I said, “she may be asleep.” He laughed. “Besides,” I continued, “I told you I was tired. Thursday a week will be fine for me—about ten o’clock.” George now dove into his inside pocket and brought out a packet of letters and a dirty, crumpled passport. He opened the passport and showed me his photograph, his name, where he was born, etc. I nodded my head. “That’s you, George, no?” I said innocently. He tried to pull his chair still closer. “I am an English citizen, you see? I know all the consuls, all the ministers. I will speak to Mr. MacVeagh for you. He will give you the money to go home. He’s a very good man.” Here he dropped his voice. “You like boys—young boys?” I said I did, sometimes, if they behaved themselves. He laughed again. He knew a place where there were very beautiful boys, very young too. I thought that was very interesting—were they friends of his, I wanted to know. He ignored the question and, dropping his voice, he inquired discreetly if I had enough to pay for the coffee and pastry. I said I had enough to pay for my own share. “You pay for George too?” he said, smiling slyly. I said No flatly. He looked surprised—not injured or aggrieved, but genuinely astounded. I called the waiter over and paid for my check, I got up and started to walk out. I went down the stairs. In a moment—he had been whispering to the waiter—he followed me to the street. “Well,” I said, “it was a pleasant evening. I’ll say good-night now.” “Don’t go yet,” he urged, “just two more minutes. She lives right across the street.” “
Who?
” I asked innocently. “My friend.” “Oh,” I said, “that’s very convenient. Next Thursday a week, then, eh?” I began walking off. He came up close and took me by the arm again. “Give me fifty drachmas, please!” “No,” I said, “I’m not giving you anything.” I walked a few paces. He crawled up on me again. “Please, thirty drachmas” “No,” I said, “no drachmas tonight.” “
Fifteen drachmas
!” “No,” I repeated, walking away. I got about ten yards away from him. He yelled out: “
Five drachmas!
” “No!” I yelled back, “not one drachma! Good-night!”