But soon I was horrified: my anger had evaporated and I began to realize my heart was responding to this inhuman appeal of Zorba's. Some wild bird in me was beating its wings and asking to go.
Yet I did not go. Once more I did not dare. I did not obey the divine and savage clamor within me; I did no insensate, noble act. I listened to the moderating, cold, human voice of logic. So I took my pen and wrote to Zorba to explain. And he answered.
You are a pen-pusher, boss, if you'll allow me to say so. You too could have seen a beautiful green stone at least once in your life, you poor soul, and you didn't see it. My God, sometimes when I had no work, I asked myself the question: Is there or isn't there any hell? But yesterday, when your letter came, I said: There surely must be a hell for a few pen-pushers like the boss!
Zorba has never written to me since. We were separated by even more terrible events. The world continued to stagger and reel like a drunken man. The ground opened and friendships and personal cares were engulfed.
I often talked to my friends of this great soul. We admired the proud and confident bearing, deeper than reason, of this untutored man. Spiritual heights, which took us years of painful effort to attain, were attained by Zorba in one bound. And we said: "Zorba is a great soul!" Or else he leapt beyond those heights, and then we said: "Zorba is mad!"
So time passed, sweetly poisoned by memories. Another shadow, that of my friend, also fell across my soul. It never left me—because I myself did not wish to leave it.
But of that shadow I never spoke to anyone. I talked to it in private, and, thanks to it, was becoming reconciled with death. I had my secret bridge to the other side. When my friend's soul crossed the bridge, I felt it was weary and pale; it was too weak to shake my hand.
Sometimes I thought with fright that perhaps my friend had not had time on earth to transform the slavery of the body into liberty, or to develop and strengthen his soul, so that it should not be seized by panic and destroyed at the supreme moment of death. Perhaps, I thought, he had no time to immortalize what there was to immortalize in him.
But now and then he was stronger—was it he? or was it just the more intense way I remembered him?—and when he came at these times he was young and exacting. I seemed even to hear his steps on the stairs.
One winter I had gone on a solitary pilgrimage into the Engadine mountains, where many years before my friend and I, with a woman we both loved, had passed some ecstatic hours together.
I was asleep in the same hotel where he had stayed. The moon was streaming through the open wíndow and I felt the spirit of the mountains, of the snow-covered pines and the calm, blue night enter my mind.
I felt an indescribable felicity, as if sleep were a deep, peaceful, transparent sea and I was cradled, happy and motionless, in the depths; but my senses were so keenly attuned that had a boat passed on the surface of the water, thousands of fathoms above me, it would have made a gash on my body.
Suddenly a shadow fell across me. I knew who it was. His voice came, full of reproach:
"Are you asleep?"
I replied in the same tone:
"You kept me waiting for you; I haven't heard the sound of your voice for months. Where have you been wandering?"
"I have been by you all the time, but you had forgotten me. I do not always have the strength to call, and, as for you, you are trying to abandon me. The light of the moon is beautiful, and so are the trees covered with snow, and life on earth. But, for pity's sake, do not forget me!"
"I do not forget you; you know that very well. The first days when you left me, I ran over the wild mountains to tire my body out, and spent sleepless nights thinking of you. I even wrote poems to give vent to my feelings ... but they were wretched poems which could not remove my pain. One of them began like this:
And whilst, with Charon, you trod the rugged yath, I admired the litheness of your bodies, your stature. Like two wild ducks who wake at dawn and depart ...
And in another poem, also unfinished, I cried:
Clench your teeth, O loved one, lest your soul fly away!"
He smiled bitterly, bent his face over me and I shuddered as I saw his paleness.
He looked at me for a long tíme with empty sockets where there had once been eyes. Now there were just two little pellets of earth.
"What are you thinking of?" I murmured. "Why don't you say something?"
Again his voice came like a distant sigh:
"Äh, what remains of a soul for which the world was too small! A few lines of someone else's poetry, scattered and mutilated lines—not even a complete quatrain! I come and go on earth, visit those who were dear to me, but their hearts are closed. Where can I enter? How can I bring myself to life? I turn in a circle like a dog going round and round a house where all the doors are locked and barred. Ah! if only I could live free, and not have to cling like a drowning man to your warm and living bodies!"
The tears sprang from his sockets; the pellets of earth turned into mud.
But soon his voice grew stronger:
"The greatest joy you ever gave me," he said, "was once at a festival in Zürich. Do you rememberr1 You raised your glass to drink to my health. Do you recall that? There was someone else with us…"
"I remember," I answered. "We called her our gracious lady…"
We were silent. How many centuries seemed to have passed since then! Zürich! It was snowing outside; there were flowers on the table. There were three of us.
"What are you thinking about, master?" asked the shadow, with a touch of irony.
"A number of things, everything…"
"I am thinking of your last words. You raised your glass and said in a trembling voice: 'My dear friend, when you were a baby, your old grandfather held you on one knee, and placed on the other the Cretan lyre and played some Palikaria airs. Tonight I drink to your health. May destiny see to it that you always sit in the lap of God!'"
"God has quickly granted your prayer, alas!"
"What does it matter?" I cried. "Love is stronger than death."
He smiled again bitterly, but said nothing. I could feel his body was dissolving in the darkness, becoming a mere sob, a sigh, a jest.
For days the taste of death remained on my lips. But my heart was relieved. Death had entered my life with a familiar and well-loved face, like a friend come to call for you and who waits patiently in a corner until you have finished your work.
But Zorba's shadow was always prowling jealously about me. One night I was alone in my house by the sea on the island of Aegina. I was happy. My window was open on to the sea, the moon came streaming in, the sea was sighing with happiness, too. My body was voluptuously weary with too much swimming and I was sleeping profoundly.
Suddenly, just before dawn, in the midst of all that happiness, Zorba appeared in my dream. I cannot remember what he said or why he had come. But when I awoke my heart was ready to break. Without my knowing why, my eyes filled with tears. I was filled with an irresistible desire to reconstitute the life we had lived together on the coast of Crete, to drive my memory to work and gather together all the sayings, cries, gestures, tears, and dances which Zorba had scattered in my mind—to save them.
This desire was so violent that I was afraid. I saw in it a sign that, somewhere on earth, Zorba was dying. For I felt my soul to be so united with his that it seemed impossible for one of them to die without the other being shaken and crying out with pain.
For a moment I hesitated to group together all my memories of Zorba and put them into words. A childish terror took possession of me. I said to myself: If I do that, it will mean that Zorba is really in danger of dying. I must fight against the mysterious hand which seems to be urging mine to do it.
I resisted for two days, three days, a week. I threw myself into other writing, went out on excursions all day and read a great deal. Such were the stratagems I employed to elude the invisible presence. But my mind was entirely absorbed by a powerful feeling of disquiet on Zorba's behalf.
One day I was seated on the terrace of my house by the sea. It was noon. The sun was very hot and I was gazing at the bare and graceful flanks of Salamis before me. Suddenly, urged on by that divine hand, I took some paper, stretched myself out on the burning flagstones of the terrace and began to relate the sayings and doings of Zorba.
I wrote impetuously, hastening to bring the past back to life, trying to recall Zorba and resuscitate him exactly as he was. I felt that if he disappeared it would be entirely my fault, and I worked day and night to draw as full a picture as possible of my old friend.
I worked like the sorcerers of the savage tribes of Àfrica when they draw on the walls of their caves the Ancestors they have seen in their dreams, striving to make it as lifelike as possible so that the spirit of the Ancestor can recognize his body and enter into it.
In a few weeks my chronicle of Zorba was complete. On the last day I was again sitting on the terrace in the late afternoon, and gazing at the sea. On my lap was the completely finished manuscript. I was happy and relieved, as though a burden had been lifted from me. I was like a woman holding her new-born baby.
Behind the mountains of the Peloponnesus the red sun was setting as Soula, a little peasant girl who brought me my mail from the town, came up to the terrace. She held a letter out to me and ran away… I understood. At least, it seemed to me that I understood, because when I opened the letter and read it, I did not leap up and utter a cry, I was not stricken with terror. I was sure. I knew that at this precise moment, while I was holding the manuscript on my lap and watching the setting sun, I would receive that letter.
Calmly, unhurriedly, I read the letter. It was from a village near to Skoplije in Serbia, and was written in indifferent German. I translated it:
I am the schoolmaster of this village and am writing to inform you of the sad news that Alexis Zorba, owner of a copper mine here, died last Sunday evening at six o'clock. On his deathbed, he called to me.
"Come here, schoolmaster," he said. "I have a friend in Greece. When I am dead write to him and tell him that right until the very last minute I was in full possession of my senses and was thinking of him. And tell him that whatever I have done, I have no regrets. Tell him I hope he is well and that it's about time he showed a bit of sense.
"Listen, just another minute. If some priest or other comes to take my confession and give me the sacrament, tell him to clear out, quick, and leave me his curse instead! I've done heaps and heaps of things in my life, but I still did not do enough. Men like me ought to live a thousand years. Good night!"
These were his last words. He then sat up in his bed, threw back the sheets and tried to get up. We ran to prevent him—Lyuba, his wife, and I, along with several sturdy neighbors. But he brushed us all roughly aside, jumped out of bed and went to the window. There, he grípped the frame, looked out far into the mountains, opened wide his eyes and began to laugh, then to whinny like a horse. It was thus, standing, with his nails dug into the window frame, that death came to him.
His wife Lyuba asked me to write to you and send her respects. The deceased often talked about you, she says, and left ínstructions that a santuri of his should be given to you after his death to help you to remember him.
The widow begs you, therefore, if you ever pass through our víllage, to be good enough to spend the night in her house as her guest, and when you leave in the morning, to take the santuri with you.
About The Author
Nikos Kazantzakis has been acclaimed by Albert Schweitzer, Thomas Mann, and critics and scholars in Europe and America as one of the most eminent and versatile writers of our time. He was born in Crete in 1883 and studied at the University of Athens, where he received his Doctor of Law degree. Later he studied in Paris under the philosopher Henri Bergson, and he completed his studies in literature and art during four other years in Germany and Italy. Before World War II he spent a great deal of his time on the island of Aegina, where he devoted himself to his philosophical and literary work. For a short while in 1945 he was Greek Minister of Education, and he was president of the Greek Society of Men of Letters. He spent most of the later years of his life in France. He died in Freïburg, Germany, in Octóber 1957.
He was the author of three novels which have been enthusiastically received in the United States and England: Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, and Freedom or Death. He was also a dramatist, translator, poet and travel writer. His crowning achievement, which he worked on over a period of twelve years, was The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. In Kimon Friar's magnificent verse translation, this modern epic was published in the United States in 1958 and was acclaimed by critics and reviewers in such superlatives as "a masterpiece," "a stirring work of art," "a monument of the age," and "one of the outstanding literary events of our time."
Footnotes
1 Karagheuz, or Karagöz, meaning "Black Eyed." A puppet shadow-play given in cafés and common to Arabia, Turkey, Syria and North Africa. These plays were the only dramatic performances known to orthodox Mohammedans. The Karagheuz play, which is comic, can be compared to Punch and Judy. It derived its shadow technique from Java thanks to fourteenth century Arab traders. C. W.
2 Rumanian author who suffered from tuberculosis. He wrote in French. His chief claim to fame was La Maison Thüringer (1933). the first volume of The Life of Adrian Zograffi-the man without convictions. C. W.
3 A stringed instrument. A variety of cimbalom or dulcimer, usually played with a small hammer or plectrum. C. W.
4 Dance of the Zeimbeks, a coastal tribe of Asia Minor.
5 Butchers' dance.
6 Cretan national warriors' dance. C. W.
7 Bouboulina was a heroine of the war of independence (1821-28). She fought valiantly on the sea like Canaris and Miaoulis.
8 Here a coasting vessel with sails. This name is also used for barges and formerly galleys. It comes from the Arabic, ma'on. C. W.
9 The feast of Klydonas, held on the fifteenth of August. It can be compared to Hallowe'en. C. W.
10 Named after the famous Friendly Society which prepared the Greek revolution of 1821.
11 Muslim name for Christians or Infidels, from Roman. C. W.
12 A celebrated Greek actress. Pouli means chicken.
13 A corruption of prima donna.
14 Turkish holy man.
15 A Muslim interjection, expressing entreaty, deprecatíon or surrender. Compare: Alas! Mercy! C. W.
16 New Year carols.
17 The last of the East Roman Emperors (1448-53).
18 Basilius Digenes Acritas: tenth-century Byzantine hero. Digenes: of double birth (Moslem father and Christían mother). Acritas: frontier-guard of the Empire. C. W.
19 Salted roast pumpkin seeds.
20 Grilled meat on a skewer.
21 A sweet Turkish pastry, containing nuts, etc.
22 A small pyramidal vessel for making coffee.
23 Pastries or sweets made of fruit paste, in a ring.
24 A sweet containing sesame oil and sugar.
25 A person who has been on a pilgrimage to Mecca or Jerasalem, and, by extension, a person having made any pilgrimage, or related to such a person. C. W.
26 A Greek officer who distinguished himself in the war against the Bulgarian Comitadjis.
27 A kind of viola da braccio with three strings and bells attached to the bow. It shows Venetian influence. C. W.
28 In the Levant, Europeans are referred to as "Franks." C. W.
29 A mourning song, or dirge, chanted by modern Greeks. C. W.
30 A variety of Turkish Delight. C. W.
31 Eleventh-century Byzantíne. C. W.
32 Or Omonia Square. C. W.
33 A Rumanian maize gruel. C. W.
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About The Author
Footnotes
Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
(Series: # )
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