One of Francis of Assisi’s disciples found his shivering master walking naked one night in the heart of winter. “Why do you go naked in such cold, Father Francis?” he said to him in astonishment. “Because, my brother, thousands upon thousands of brothers and sisters are cold at this moment. I have no blankets to give them to make them warm, so I join them in their coldness.”
I recalled the Poor Man of God’s words, but only now did I realize that to join others in their coldness was not enough. One had to cry out, “Forward all together, everyone who is hungry, everyone who is cold. There are scores of extra blankets. Take them and cover your nakedness!”
Little by little I began to divine the all-embracing, panhuman significance of the bloody experiment taking place in Russia’s boundless land, her boundless soul. My mind began to tolerate and accept the revolutionary slogans which formerly had seemed so extremely naïve and utopian to me. As I gazed at the famished faces, sunken cheeks, and clenched fists, I began to have a presentiment of man’s divine privilege: by believing in a myth, desiring it, imbruing it with blood, sweat and tears (tears alone are not sufficient, nor is blood, nor sweat), man transforms that myth into reality.
I was terrified. For the first time I saw how creative man’s intervention is, and how great his responsibility. We are to blame if reality does not take the form we desire. Whatever we have not desired with sufficient strength, that we call nonexistent. Desire it, imbrue it with your blood, your sweat, your tears, and it will take on a body. Reality is nothing more than the chimera subjected to our desire and our suffering.
My heart began to throb for the hungry and oppressed. Their patience had given out; they had begun the assault. It seemed that all my Cretan blood scented revolution and commenced to seethe. I saw freedom and slavery before me again—the eternal adversaries—and Crete rose up inside me and whooped.
Could this be the Cry I was waiting to hear? Perhaps. In the decisive moments of my life Crete has never failed to rise up within me and whoop.
One evening, tired of the day’s horrible sights, I bent over my desk and began looking through a book on Renaissance art in an attempt to forget all I had seen, heard, and suffered while roaming since early morning. More than wine or love, more underhandedly than ideas, art is able to entice man and make him forget. Art takes the place of duty; it fights to convert the ephemeral into the eternal and to transubstantiate man’s suffering into beauty. What does it matter if Troy was reduced to ashes and Priam and his sons killed? In what way would the world have benefited, and how much poorer man’s soul would be, if Troy had continued to live in happiness and if Homer had not come along to convert the slaughter into immortal hexameters? A statue, a verse, a tragedy, a painting—these are the supreme memorials man has erected on earth.
Supreme, but also the most dangerous for everyday human suffering. Art makes us scorn the petty everyday concern for food, and even for justice; we forget that this is the root which nourishes the immortal flower.
The early Christians were right in not wanting their artists to make the Virgin beautiful in sacred paintings. Seduced by her beauty, we forget that she is the Mother of God.
Suddenly there was a knock on the door. I opened it. A telegram from Moscow! I read it again and again, rubbing my eyes from disbelief. I held it up to the lamp and examined it, as though it concealed a dangerous secret which I wished to discover in the light before making my decision. This little piece of paper might be a message from destiny coming to change my life, I reflected. In my interests or against them? Who can trust destiny? It is not blind, it blinds.
Should I go or not? The telegram invited me to travel to Moscow to represent Greek intellectuals at the great tenth anniversary of the revolution. Pilgrims would be speeding to the red Mecca from all over the world. Who had made this invitation possible by mentioning my name? Why had I been chosen? Three days later I understood. I received a short letter from Moscow. It was a teasing summons from Itka:
All hail, you pseudo Buddhist with a full stomach, you aristocrat, you amateur sufferer! Until now you have sought God’s countenance, deserting one false god to go to another false god. Come here, my poor friend, to find the countenance of the true god, the countenance of man. Come if you want to be saved. The world we are building is still a mere framework. Bend down in your turn, add a stone, build; Buddha is fine, fine indeed—for gray beards!
Night had fallen by now. I rose and opened the window. Outside all was peaceful. The snow had stopped. From some bell tower a clock chimed sweetly in the frigid air. The trees in the street below me glistened, coated with icicles. And as my gaze began to lose itself in the nocturnal haze, Russia suddenly unfurled before me, vast, buried in whiteness, with its warm, lighted isbas, and its sleighs that slide over the snow. Steam rose from the horses’ nostrils, and I even heard the cheerful little bells tinkling on their necks. Beyond, at the snow’s edge, gilded domes flashed brilliantly, crowned not by crosses but by red flags like conflagrations. I recalled a half-mad Athonite monk who used to tell me, “Every man and every object is crowned by a cluster of flames. If these flames go out, the man and the object perish.” He was right. Russia too, I reflected, was crowned by a cluster of flames. If these flames went out, Russia would perish.
I closed the window with great haste. I had decided to depart for Moscow.
26
RUSSIA
MIRACLE butts against reality, makes a hole, and enters. When the time was ripe, Lenin gathered together his rags and tatters, made a thick package of his manuscripts, tied all his worldly possessions into a bundle, and bade farewell to his landlord, the Swiss cobbler who had rented him a room in his house in Switzerland.
“Where are you going, Vladimir Ilich?” said the landlord, holding Lenin’s hand and regarding him with pity. “What madness makes you want to return to Russia? What will you do there? Do you suppose you’ll find a room in Russia—or work? Take my advice, Vladimir Ilich, and stay here in peace.”
“I have to go, I have to,” Lenin replied.
“Have to? Why?”
“I have to,” Lenin calmly repeated.
“But you paid all your rent and the month is not over yet. You realize of course, that I’m not going to refund the difference.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lenin answered him. “Keep it. I have to leave.”
And he left. He set foot on Russian soil with his little cap, his clean frayed shirt, his shabby coat—an army of one, stubby, pale, and unarmed. Over against him: the boundless Russian land, the sinister, brutalized muzhiks, the roisterous aristocrats, the all-powerful priesthood, the fortresses, palaces, prisons, and barracks, the old laws, the old morals, and the knout. The fearful empire, armed to the teeth. There he stood with his little cap, his tiny Mongolian eyes staring fixedly into the air, while inside him a dancing, whistling demon gnashed his teeth and spoke.
“All this is yours, Vladimir Ilich. I give it to you—free! Just say one phrase, say the magic phrase I’ve been dictating to you for so many years: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ Say it, and czars, gold braid, goat-bearded priests, well-dressed, well-fed pot-bellies—with one puff they’ll all fall down on their backs. March over their carcasses, Vladimir Ilich! Forward, lad, march over their carcasses and climb. Nail the red flag to the Kremlin. Smash in their skulls with the hammer; slit their throats with the sickle!”
“Who are you?” Lenin kept asking him, listening with clenched fists to the demon inside him. “Tell me your name. I want to know who you are.”
“I am the Miracle,” replied the demon, and with, his horns he butted Russia.
Until now few men have been able to look at Russia with clear, impartial eyes, unable to see its many-faceted countenance of abundant shadow and light as one unified sphere. A great gulf divides the Slavic soul from the Western. The Russian is able to harmonize inner contradictions which are incompatible to the European’s rationality. The European places ratiocination above everything else, limpid rat
iocination subjected to a rational scale of values. The Russian places the soul above everything else, the dark, rich, contradictory, intricate force which pushes man beyond rationality to violent, irresponsible passion. In him the blind creative forces still have not crystallized into a rational hierarchy. The Russian is still tightly glued to the soil; he is filled with earth and world-engendering darkness.
I considered Lenin’s face, that face so filled with light and flame. Before me I saw the dark dough—the muzhik—which this obstinate mind had undertaken to knead. I yearned with ever-increasing vehemence to view the two primordial, implacable enemies and allies, Spirit and Matter, wrestling inside the Kremlin’s closed, bloody arena.
The snow was falling thickly; it blanketed the entire tilled plain. Beneath the snow the sown wheat took its nourishment. The muzhiks moved tranquilly, without haste, as though eternal. Now and then a pitch-black crow winged silently by, headed for human habitation, to eat.
I waited many hours for the train, surrounded in the station by Mongolian faces, slanting eyes, beards filled with the shells of melon seeds, two women fortunetellers tossing cards, an elderly muzhik pouring tea into a little sancer and sucking it up thunderously with animalistic joy, Chinese mothers wrapped in filth) quilts, their infants bound to their backs or hanging from their necks like kangaroos—a warm human mass which sweated and reeked. The air smelled everywhere like a stable, perhaps like the stable of Bethlehem.
Midday came, evening bore down; we waited. The faces were grave and peaceful around me. No one darted outside to see if the train was coming or not. Everyone waited, certain that today, or tomorrow, the train would appear without fail. They did not count the hours with a watch. They knew that time is a nobleman, a great duke, and they were afraid to contradict him.
Toward dawn the train’s whistle sounded in the distance. All the people rose and gathered their bundles, once more without any haste. An old graybeard who had stretched out at my side and snored the whole night long looked at me now and winked triumphantly, as though to say, Well, my little old man, how silly of you to get all excited because the train didn’t come, and grumble and not sleep a wink all night. Look, here it is. It came!
Snowing again. Hamlets; tiny churches with green pointed domes; smoke motionless above the rooftops. More crows, lowering sky, snow. I looked and looked; my eyes had taken on a remote bluish depth, like the eyes of all who live in boundless plains. I looked, and suddenly round gilded domes appeared faintly in the distance against the gray-black sky.
It was about noontime; we were finally coming near, arriving finally at the new Jerusalem of the new god, the Worker, in the heart of Russia—perhaps the heart of today’s world. Moscow!
Itka was waiting for me at the station. When she saw me, she laughed. “You’ve fallen in the trap, but don’t be afraid. It’s a big trap; no matter how much you walk in it you won’t find its bars. That’s what it means to be free. Welcome!”
I roam from dawn to dusk, gazing with insatiable eyes at this multicolored, multispermous chaos—Moscow. The whole of the Orient is poured out over the snow. Anatolian peddlers wearing weighty turbans; Chinese with leathery, monkey-like skin selling oxhide belts and little toys of wood and paper. Every inch of sidewalk taken up by men and women vociferously retailing fruit, smoked fish, infants’ bibs, drawn fowl, statuettes of Lenin. Young girls hawk newspapers, a cigarette in their mouths; women workers go by, red kerchiefs on their heads. Fat, coarse women with Mongolian cheekbones and eyes. Half-naked children wearing dome-shaped astrakhan hats. Cripples who drag themselves along the sidewalk with outstretched hand and grovel before each passer-by. The muzhiks pass in their orange-colored cowhides, their beards thick and clotted like maize, and the air everywhere around them smells as though a herd of cows had passed.
Churches with green and gilded domes. Skycrapers. “Workers of the world, unite!” inscribed on the streets, the churches, the trams; and in red paint on the walls of a huge church, “Religion is the opiate of the masses!” Toward evening, above all this disorderly din, the deep Russian chimes suddenly resound with utmost sweetness, the chimes for the vesper service, which persists in remaining alive. . . . Chaos—that is one’s first impression of Moscow.
The second is fright. In no other city of the world can you see these hard, resolute, morose faces, the flaming eyes, compressed lips, the tension and violent fever. You feel as though you have moved to a somber medieval town full of towers and battlements, where the knights are donning their armor behind barricaded doors as the enemy approaches. The atmosphere is filled with savage preparation for war. A great menace and a great hope hang over every head. Something lurks in the air here, giving rise to fear. A fiery cherubim all eyes and sword sits on the Kremlin towers like a medieval chimera on a Gothic campanile, keeping sleepless watch over Moscow with thousands of eyes, thousands of swords.
A company of red soldiers suddenly flew into the street from around a corner, their faces ferocious and rapt. The pavement shook, the pedestrians raced to get out of the way, a chubby little woman with a basket of apples shrieked from fear, and the apples spilled out and rolled over the snow, brilliantly red. The soldiers marched with heavy steps; they were wearing the pointed hat of the Mongols, and gray greatcoats which reached their feet. The officer marching in front was the first to begin to sing. I saw him as he passed in front of me. His mouth was in epileptic spasm, the veins of his throat swollen to the breaking point, sweat flowing down his cheeks. For some time he sang all alone; he seemed to be dancing as he marched, so uncontrollably ecstatic was the rhythm of his body. He sang all alone, but suddenly the soldiers took up the song, and the frozen street burst everywhere into flame and resounded like a battlefield. A faint shudder ran down my spine. Future reality—who could tell?—knifed through me like a lightning flash. The Russians had made their appearance in a great city, London or Paris, and were pillaging it. Which is the most bloodthirsty and carnivorous of beasts? A new faith. Which is the most herbivorous? A faith that has grown old. We had entered, now, the new faith’s maw.
That same evening I met the most mystical and voluptuous of muzhik poets, Nikolai Kliuev. Scanty blond beard, receding hairline; he must have been forty, and looked seventy. His voice was muted, caressing.
“I’m not one of those Russians who busy themselves with politics and cannons,” he said to me with secret pride. “I am part of the golden lode which makes fairy tales and icons. The true Russia depends on us.”
He stopped; he seemed to regret having spoken so frankly. But his inner pride had carried him away. Unable to restrain himself, he continued. “Bulls and bears cannot smash the door of fate; the heart of a dove, however, smashes it.”
He filled his glass with vodka and began to drink it sip by sip, clacking his tongue with contentment. Once more he regretted his words. Half closing his eyes, he glanced at me.
“Don’t listen to me. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I am a poet.”
The eve of the great day: the Russian Revolution was celebrating its gory birth. White, black, and yellow pilgrims had come from all over the world. In other ages, the dark-skinned races of the East would have descended similarly on Mecca, the yellow race would have gathered similarly at Benares in mute antlike swarms. The earth’s centers were shifting. Today all eyes, of both friends and foes, willingly or unwillingly, whether with love or hate, were pinned on Moscow.
In the center of Red Square the contemporary Holy Sepulcher of the new Jerusalem was hooded with snow. Four-abreast in densely packed rows, thousands of pilgrims were waiting for the squat door to open. Men, women, infants, they had come from the ends of the earth to see and do homage to the red czar who lay fully alive beneath the ground. I had come with them. No one spoke. We waited for hours in the snow and cold, our eyes riveted to the Holy Sepulcher. Suddenly a great hulk of a man moved in front of the squat door; the red guard had opened the tomb.
Slowly, by fours, without speaking, the multitudes plunged int
o the black entrance and vanished. I vanished with them. We descended gradually into the earth, the air heavy with the respiration and stench of people. Suddenly the drab, bovine faces of the two muzhiks preceding me became radiant, as though struck by a subterranean sun. I craned my neck. Far, far below, the large crystal which covered the sacred relics could at last be seen; flashing beneath it was the livid, bald pate of Lenin.
He lay fully alive in his gray worker’s blouse, covered from the waist down by the red flag, his right hand clenched, his left opened upon his breast. His face was rosy and smiling, his short beard exceedingly blond. An air of serenity filled the high heated crystal. The Russian masses stared ecstatically, with the precise gaze they had employed just a few years earlier when they viewed the rosy, blond face of Jesus upon the gilded rood screens. This man was also a Christ, a red Christ. The essence was the same: humankind’s eternal essence, made of hope and fear. Nothing had changed but the names.
I emerged onto the snow-covered square in a pensive mood. How very much this man had struggled, I reflected, full of admiration. How very much he had endured in his exile—poverty, betrayals, calumny. How even his dearest friends, frightened by his faith and obstinacy, had abandoned him! Inside that bald pate which I saw beneath the crystal, behind those small eyes, now extinguished, Russia with her villages and cities, her boundless plains, wide slow-moving rivers, and desolate tundras, had cried out and demanded freedom.
Because he was Russia’s strongest and therefore most responsible soul, he believed that she was calling him, imposing on him the duty to save her. Why, after all, had she fashioned this strongest soul out of her struggles and blood and tears, if not to commit the terrible, fatal task to it?
While I paced pensively back and forth in Red Square, Itka, who had been assigned to me as a guide, kept speaking to me, and I marveled at her youthfulness and faith. As she spoke, her entire body turned to flame, just like El Greco’s saints.