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.
28
THE PRODIGAL RETURNS
WHEN 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 i
ncidents 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.
• • •
1) A shepherd from Anóghia, a wild, rocky village on the flanks of Psiloriti, used to hear his fellow villagers relate signs and wonders about Megalo Kastro. In this city, so it went, you could find all the goods of the world: horse beans by the ladleful, sacks of salted codfish, barrels and barrels of sardines and smoked herring; shops, moreover, chock-full of boots, and others with muskets for sale, as many as you liked, and gunpowder and penknives and daggers; still others whose ovens disgorged peelful after peelful of bread each morning, white bread in long thin loaves. And in addition, so it went, at night there were women who did not murder you, as Cretan girls did, if you touched them, and their flesh was as white and tasty as the long thin loaves.
The shepherd’s mouth watered as he listened to all these miracles, and Megalo Kastro beamed in his imagination as a Cretan paradise, full of codfish, muskets, and women. He listened and listened, and one noontime, unable to stand it any longer, he belted his wide cummerbund tightly around him, slung his best provision sack, the embroidered one, over his shoulder, took hold of his shepherd’s staff, and plummeted down Psiloriti. In a few hours he was face to face with Kastro. It was still daylight, and the fortress gate stood open. The shepherd halted on the threshold. One stride and he would be in paradise. But suddenly his soul leaped to its feet. It seemed to feel itself straddled by desire; it was no longer doing what it wished, no longer free. Ashamed, the Cretan knit his brows. He would stand on his self-respect.
“If I want, I go in; if I don’t, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t!”
Turning his back on Megalo Kastro, he headed again for the mountain.
2) A handsome young stalwart had died in another Cretan village, in the White Mountains. His four best friends rose and said, “Shall we go and keep the deathwatch by him, to let the women rest from their lamenting?”
“Yes,” they all replied in strangulated voices.
He had been the village’s best pallikári, twenty years old, and his death was a dagger thrust in their hearts.
“Someone brought me some raki today,” one of the friends remarked. “It’s mulberry raki, and that can bring even the dead back to life! What do you say, boys, shall I fill a bottle and take it along?”
“My ma did her baking today. Shall I take a couple of barley rolls?”
“I have some pork sausages left. Shall I bring along a good string of them?”
“Me, I’ll provide the glasses,” said the fourth. “And a couple of refreshing cucumbers.”
Each took his provisions and thrust them beneath his short shepherd’s cloak of frieze. Come nightfall, all four entered the dead man’s house.
Adorned with basil and marjoram, the deceased was laid out in his casket, which stood on trestles in the middle of the house. His feet faced the door; around him the women were wailing the dirge.
“Go and get some sleep, ladies,” said the friends, bidding them good evening. “We’ll keep vigil by him.”
The women retired to an inner room, bolting the doors. The friends went to the stools, placed the raki and mezédhes at their feet, and gazed tearfully at the deceased. They did not speak. A half-hour went by; an hour. Finally one of them lifted his eyes from the corpse.
“What say, boys, shall we have a drink?”
“Why sure!” they all replied. “We’re not stiffs, are we? Let’s drink!”
They bent down and picked up the food. One of them lighted some paper and broiled the sausages. A delicious odor invaded the death chamber. They filled the glasses and, enlacing them in their fists to keep them from making noise, “clinked” them vigorously.
“God forgive him. . . . Here’s to our turn!”
“To our turn! God forgive him!”
They tossed off one raki, two, three, ate the mezédhes, reached the bottom of the bottle, began to feel jolly.
They gazed at the corpse again. Suddenly one of them leaped to his feet.
“What say, boys”—he indicated the corpse with a sidewise glance—“wanna vault him?”
“Let’s!”
Turning up their wide, loose-fitting foufoúles, they stuffed the ends into their cummerbunds so they would not be hindered in running. Then they transferred the casket to the threshold and opened the door leading to the courtyard.
Pftt! Pftt! They spat into their palms, took a running start, and began to vault the corpse.
3) And this final incident:
Easter Sunday, shortly before daybreak. In the mountains of Crete, Father Kaphátos races from village to village resurrecting Christ with mercurial speed because there are many villages having only this one priest, and he must perform the resurrection in all of them before daybreak. Sleeves rolled up, weighted with his vestments and the heavy silver-bound Bible, he clambers over the rocky furze-covered mountains, runs through the holy night gasping for breath, reaches one village, shouts the Christos anesti— Christ is risen—and then dashes to the next village, his tongue hanging out of his mouth.
In the final village, a little hamlet wedged between two crags, the people are assembled in the diminutive church. They have lighted the cressets and adorned the icons and portal with laurels and myrtles they carried from the ravine. Their candles remain unlit in their hands; they are waiting for the Great Word to come so that they can light them.
Just then they hear a crunching of pebbles in the silence, as though a horse were hastily climbing the mountainside and the stones cascading down.
“He’s coming! He’s coming!”
They all fly outside. The east is already tinted rose; the skies are laughing. Heavy breaths are heard, the sheep dogs bark with joy, and then all at once from behind a frizzled oak—shirt unbuttoned, drenched with sweat, flushed from running, engrossed in the many Christs he has resurrected—out springs old, black, dwarfish Father Kaphátos, his unbraided hair flowing.
The sun is at that very instant emerging from behind the mountain’s crest. Taking a leap, the priest lands in front of the villagers and spreads his arms:
“Christos anéstakas, lads!” he shouts.
The familiar, trite word anesti had suddenly seemed small, cheap, wretched to him; it was incapable of containing the Great News. The word had broadened and proliferated on the priest’s lips. Linguistic laws had given way and cracked in the wake of the soul’s great impetus, new laws were created, and lo! in creating the new word, this morning, the old Cretan felt for the first time that he was truly resurrecting Christ—all of him, in every inch of his great stature.
• • •
Love of liberty, the refusal to accept your soul’s enslavement, not even in exchange for paradise; stalwart games over and above love and pain, over and above death; smashing even the most sacrosanct of the old molds when they are unable to contain you any longer—these are the three great cries of Crete.
In these three incidents, what fills the soul with pure unadulterated joy is the fact that philosophers or moralists are not speaking here, men who fabricate and promulgate difficult, elevated theories in their spare time, away from all danger. Rather, we have simple souls, Cretan peasants who follow the impulses of their bowels and, without growing short of breath, ascend the highest peaks man is capable of attaining: liberty, scorn of death, creation of new laws. Unveiled to our eyes here is man’s thrice-noble origin, for we see how the two-legged beast, in following other than intellectual roads, succeeded in becoming human. Our journey to the fatal intellectual Golgotha thus becomes more loaded with responsibility because now, looking at the Cretans, we know that if we fail to become human, the fault is ours, ours alone. For this lofty species—man—exists, he made his appearance on earth, and there is no longer any justification whatever for our deterioration and cowardice.
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In Crete, a person who will not deign to deceive either himself or others encounters face to face, to a degree found nowhere else, the single-breasted goddess, the Amazon, who shows favor to no one, who sits on the knees of no one, neither gods nor men: the goddess Responsibility.
For many days I roamed the old beloved lairs where I had spent my youth. Promenades by the edge of the sea. In the evenings the same cool breeze blew that used to blow through my hair when it was black; the same perfume of jasmine, basil, and marjoram arose when I went through the narrow lanes at twilight and the doors stood open and the housegirls began to water the flowerpots in the courtyards.
Breeze, perfume, and sea possessed immortal youth; only the houses had aged, and also my former friends. Many of them I did not recognize; many did not recognize me. They stared at me for a moment—I reminded them of someone, but of whom? Weary of trying to remember, they passed on. Only one raised his arms in astonishment as he saw me and halted.
“Is that you, my old friend?” he cried. “Look at you—what happened!”
It was my former bosom friend, the third of the group which had founded the Friendly Society. He appeared well fed, and had an empty pipe in his mouth so that he could inhale the aroma, hoax himself, and break the habit of smoking. He looked me over, examined me, then clasped me indulgently in his arms.
“How skinny and black you’ve become! Your cheeks are sunken, your forehead covered with crests and troughs; your eyebrows have luxuriated like thorns and your eyes spit fire. What happened to you? How long will you keep on burning, how long will you roam the world?”
“As long as I’m still alive—when I can’t change any more, and I stand dead and beatified, with an unlighted pipe in my mouth, making fun of the living.”
“I’m old, am I? I’m dead?” said my friend, breaking into a hissing, mocking laugh.