Zorba The Greek

12

SLEEP OVERCAME ME, and when I awoke Zorba had gone. It was cold and I did not have the slightest desire to rise. I reached up to some bookshelves above my head and took down a book which I had brought with me and of which I was fond: the poems of Mallarmé. I read slowly and at random. I closed the book, opened it again, and finally threw it down. For the first time in my life it all seemed bloodless, odorless, void of any human substance. Pale-blue, hollow words in a vacuum. Perfectly clear distilled water without any bacteria, but also without any nutritive substances. Without life.

In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls. Something similar had happened to this poetry. The ardent aspirations of the heart, laden with earth and seed, had become a flawless intellectual game, a clever, aerial and intricate architecture.

I reopened the book and began reading again. Why had these poems gripped me for so many years? Pure poetry! Life had turned into a lucid, transparent game, unencumbered by even a single drop of blood. The human element is brutish, uncouth, impure-it is composed of love, the flesh and a cry of distress. Let it be sublimated into an abstract ídea, and, in the crucible of the spirit, by various processes of alchemy, let it be rarefied and evaporate.

All these things which had formerly so fascinated me appeared this morning to be no more than cerebral acrobatics and refined charlatanism! That is how it always is at the decline of a civilization. That is how man's anguish ends-in masterly conjuring tricks: pure poetry, pure music, pure thought. The last man-who has freed himself from all belief, from all illusions and has nothing more to expect or to fear-sees the clay of which he is made reduced to spirit, and this spirit has no soil left for its roots, from which to draw its sap. The last man has emptied himself; no more seed, no more excrement, no more blood. Everything having turned into words, every set of words into musical jugglery, the last man goes even further: he sits in his utter solitude and decomposes the music into mute, mathematical equations.

I started. "Buddha is that last man!" I cried. That is his secret and terrible significance. Buddha is the "pure" soul which has emptied itself; in him is the void, he is the Void. "Empty your body, empty your spirit, empty your heart!" he cries. Wherever he sets his foot, water no longer flows, no grass can grow, no child be born.

I must mobilize words and their necromantic power, I thought, invoke magic rhythms; lay siege to him, cast a spell over him and drive him out of my entrails! I must throw over him the net of images, catch him and free myself!

Writing Buddha was, in fact, ceasing to be a literary exercise. It was a life-and-death struggle against a tremendous force of destruction lurking within me, a duel with a great NO which was consuming my heart, and on the result of this duel depended the salvation of my soul.

With briskness and determination I seized the manuscript. I had discovered my goal, I knew now where to strike! Buddha was the last man. We are only at the beginning; we have neither eaten, drunk, nor loved enough; we have not yet lived. This delicate old man, scant of breath, has come to us too soon. We must oust him as quickly as possible!

So I spoke to myself and I began to write. But no, this was not writing: it was a real war, a merciless hunt, a siege, a spell to bring the monster out of its hiding place. Art is, in fact, a magic incantation. Obscure homicidal forces lurk in our entrails, deadly impulses to kill, destroy, hate, dishonor. Then art appears with its sweet piping and delivers us.

I wrote, pursued, struggled the whole day through. In the evening I was exhausted. But I felt I had made progress, had mastered a few advance posts of the enemy. I was now anxious for Zorba to return, so that I could eat, sleep and build up my strength to resume the fight at dawn.

It was already dark when Zorba came in. He had a radiant expression on his face. He has found the answer to something, too, I thought. And I waited.

I had begun to grow impatient with him and, only a few days before, I had said angrily:

"Zorba, our funds are getting low. Whatever has to be done, do it quickly! Let's get this railway going; if we're not successful with the coal, let's go all out for the timber. Otherwise we've had it!"

Zorba had scratched his head.

"Funds getting low, are they, boss? That's bad!" he said.

"They're gone, Zorba. We've swallowed up the lot. Do something! How are your experiments going? No luck yet?"

Zorba had hung his head and made no reply. He had felt ashamed that evening. "That damned slope!" he said furiously. "I'll get the better of it yet!" And now he had come in, his face lit up with success.

"I've done it, boss!" he shouted. "I've found the right angle! It was slipping through my hands, trying to get away from me, but I held on and pinned it down, boss!"

"Well, hurry up and get the thing working! Fire away, Zorba! What else do you need?"

"Early tomorrow morning I must go to town and buy the tackle: a thick steel cable, pulleys, bearings, nails, hooks… Don't worry, I'll be back almost before you've seen me go!"

He lit the fire shortly afterwards, prepared our meal and we ate and drank with excellent appetites. We had both worked well that day.

The next morning I went with Zorba as far as the víllage. We talked like serious and practical-minded people about the working of the lignite. While going down a slope, Zorba kícked against a stone, which went rolling downhill. He stopped for a moment in amazement, as if he were seeing this astounding spectacle for the first time in his life. He looked round at me, and in his look I discerned faint consternation.

"Boss, did you see that?" he said at last. "On slopes, stones come to life again."

I said nothing, but I felt a deep joy. This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything-as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.

The universe for Zorba, as for the first men on earth, was a weighty, intense vision; the stars glided over him, the sea broke against his temples. He lived the earth, water, the animals and God, without the distorting intervention of reason.

Dame Hortense had been informed and she was waiting for us on her doorstep. She was painted, caulked with powder, and uneasy. She had got herself up like a fun fair on a Saturday night. The mule was in front of her gate; Zorba jumped on its back and seized the reins.

The old siren came up timidly and placed her plump little hand on the animal's breast, as if she wanted to prevent her beloved from leaving.

"Zorba…" she cooed, raising herself on tiptoe. "Zorba…"

Zorba turned his head away. He hated having to listen to lovers' nonsense like this in the middle of the road. The poor woman saw his look and was terrified. But her hand still pressed on the mule's breast, full of tender entreaty.

"What do you want?" Zorba asked angrily.

"Zorba," she pleaded, "be good… Don't forget me, Zorba… Be good…"

Zorba shook the reins without replying. The mule started off.

"Good luck, Zorba!" I cried. "Three days, do you hear'? No more!"

He turned round, waving his big hand. The old siren was weeping and her tears washed furrows in the powder on her face.

"I gave you my word, boss!" Zorba shouted. "Goodbye!"

And he disappeared beneath the olive trees. Dame Hortense went on crying, but she kept her eyes on the splash of color made by the gay red rug which she had placed so carefully for her beloved so that he should be comfortably seated. It was constantly being hidden by the silver foliage of the trees. Soon even that had disappeared. Dame Hortense looked round her. The world was empty.

I did not go back to the beach. I felt sad and walked towards the mountains. As I reached the mountain track, I heard a trumpet sound. The country postman was announcing his arrival in the village.

"Master!" he called to me, waving his hand.

He came over and gave me a packet of newspapers, some literary reviews and two letters: one I immediately put away in my pocket to read in the evening, when day is done and the spirit is calm. I knew who had written it and I wanted to defer my joy so that it should last longer.

The other letter I recognized from its sharp, jerky writing and the exotic stamps: it came from one of my old fellow students, Karayannis. It was from a wild African mountainside, near Tanganyika.

He was a strange, impulsive, dark man with very white teeth. One of his canines stuck out like a wild boar's. He never talked, he shouted. He never discussed, he quarrelled. He had left his own country, Crete, where he had been a young theology teacher and a monk. He had flírted wíth one of his students, and they had been surprised one day kissing out in the fields. They had been booed. The same day the young teacher threw off the cowl and took a boat. He went to an uncle in Africa and started to work with a will. He opened a rope factory and made a lot of money. From time to time he wrote to me and invited me to go and stay with him for six months. Whenever I opened one of his letters, even before I read it, I could feel, arising from the crowded pages, which were always sewn together with string, a violent breath which made my hair stand on end. I was always deciding I would go and see him in Africa, but never went.

I left the track, sat on a stone, opened and began reading this letter:

When are you going to make up your mind to come here to me, you damned limpet clamped to the rocks of Greece? You, too, have turned into a typical lousy Greek, a tavern-loafer, a wallower in café-life. Because you need not think only cafés are cafés; books are, too, and habits, and your precious ideologies. They are all cafés. It is Sunday today and I have nothing to do: I am on my estate and I'm thinking of you. The sun is like a furnace, and there has not been a drop of rain. Here, when the rain does fall, in April, May and June, it's an absolute deluge.

I'm all alone, and I like that. There are quite a lot of lousy Greeks here (Is there anywhere this vermin doesn't get to?) but I don't want to mix with them. They disgust me. Even here, you damned tavernloafers-may the Devil take you-you've sent us your leprosy, your miserable back-biting. That's what is ruining Greece -politics! There's card-playing, too, of course, and ignorance, and the sins of the flesh.

I detest Europeans; that's why I am wandering about here in the mountains of Usumbara. I hate Europeans, but most of all I hate the lousy Greeks and everything Greek. I'll never set foot in Greece again. This is where I'll finish up. I've had my tomb made already, in front of my hut, here on the wild mountainside. I've even put up the stone and myself carved these words in large capitals:

HERE LIES A GREEK WHO HATES THE GREEKS

I burst out laughing, spit, swear and weep whenever I think of Greece. So as to see no Greeks and nothing Greek, I left the country forever. I came here, brought my destiny with me-it was not my destiny which brought me: man does what he chooses!-I brought my destiny here and I've worked and still am working like a slave. I've been sweating and will continue to sweat by the bucketful. I am fighting with the earth, the wind, the rain, and with the workmen, my red and black slaves.

I have no pleasures. Yes, one: work. Physical and mental, but preferably physical. I like to exhaust myself, sweat, hear my bones crack. Half my money I throw away, waste it however and wherever I feel inclined. I'm not a slave to money: money is my slave. I am a slave to work, and I'm proud of it. I fell trees; I have a contract with the British. I make rope; and now I've started planting cotton, too. Last night, among my negroes, two tribes-the Wa'yao and the Wa'ngoni-began fighting over a woman-over a whore. Just hurt pride, you know. Just the same as in Greece. Insults, brawls, and then out come the clubs. They broke one another's heads over her. The women ran to fetch me in the middle of the night, and woke me with their yapping, to go and arbitrate. I was angry, told them all to go to the devil, then to the British police. But they stayed there howling in front of my door the whole night. At dawn I went out and arbitrated.

Tomorrow, early, I am going to scale the Usumbara mountains, with their dense forest, fresh waters and everlasting greenness. Well, you lousy Babylonian Greek, when will you cut adrift from Europe? "… that great whore that sitteth upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication…!" When will you come, so that we can climb these pure and wild mountains together?

I have a child by a black woman: a girl. I've sent her mother away: she cuckolded me in public in the full glare of the midday sun, under every green tree in the neighborhood. I had enough of her, and threw her out. But I kept the girl; she's two. She can walk, and she's beginning to talk. I'm teaching her Greek; the first sentence I taught her was: "I spit on you, you lousy Greeks, I spit on you, you lousy Greeks!"

She looks like me, the little scamp; she's only got her mother's broad, flat nose. I love her, but just as you love a dog or a cat. Come out here and get a boy by a Usumbara woman. We'll marry the two of them one day, just to amuse ourselves, and to amuse them, too!

Goodbye! May the devil go with you, and with me, dear friend!

Karayannis, Servus diabolicus Dei.

I left the letter open on my knees. An ardent desire to go took possession of me once more. Not because I wanted to leave-I was quite all right on this Cretan coast, and I felt happy and free here and I needed nothing-but because I have always been consumed with one desire: to touch and see as much as possible of the earth and the sea before I die.

I stood up, changed my mind, and instead of climbing the hill went hurriedly towards the beach. I felt the other letter in the upper pocket of my coat, and could not wait any more. That sweet, unbearable foretaste of joy had lasted long enough.

I reached the hut, lit the fire, made some tea, ate some bread and honey and oranges. I undressed, stretched out on my bed and opened the letter:

Master and neophyte-Greetings!

I have a tremendous and difficult job here, thank "God"-I enclose the dangerous word in inverted commas (like a wild beast behind bars) so that you do not get excited as soon as you open my letter. Well, a very difficult job, "God" be praised! Half a million Greeks are in danger in the south of Russia and the Caucasus. Many of them speak only Turkish or Russian, but their hearts speak Greek fanatically. They are of our race. Just to look at them-the way their eyes flash, rapacious, ferrety, the cunning and sensuality of their lips when they smile, the way they have managed to become bosses and have moujiks working for them in this immense territory of Russia-it's quite enough to convince you that they are descendants of your beloved Odysseus. So one comes to love them and cannot let them perish.

For they are in danger of perishing. They have lost all they had, are hungry and naked. From one side they are harried by the Bolsheviks; from the other by the Kurds. Refugees have swarmed in from every direction to settle in one town or another in Georgia and Armenia. There's no food, medicine, or clothing. They gather in the ports, scan the horizon anxiously for Greek ships coming to take them back to their Mother- Greece. One part of our race-that means one part of our soul-is panic-stricken.

If we leave them to their fate, they will perish. We need a lot of love and understanding, enthusiasm and practical sense-those qualities which you like so much to see united-if we are going to save them and get them back to the part of our own free land where they will be of most use-that is, on the frontiers of Macedonia, and, further afield, on the frontiers of Thrace. That is the only way we shall save hundreds of thousands of Greeks, and save ourselves with them. For as soon as I arrived here I drew a circle, in the way you taught me, and called that circle "my duty." I said: "If I save this entire circle, I am saved; if I do not save it, I am lost!" Well, inside that circle there are five hundred thousand Greeks!

I go to towns and villages, collect all the Greeks together, write reports, send telegrams, try to make our officials in Athens send boats, food, clothes, and medicine, and transport these poor creatures to Greece. If to struggle with zeal and obstinacy is to be happy, then I am happy. I do not know whether I have cut my happiness to my stature, to use your phrase. Please heaven I have, because then I would be a great person. I would like to increase my stature to what I think would make me happy; that is, to the farthest frontiers of Greece! But that's enough theory! You are lying on your Cretan beach, listening to the sound of the sea and the santuri-you have time, I have not. I am swallowed up by activity and I am glad of it. Action, dear inactive master, action; there is no other salvation.

The subject of my meditations is, in fact, very simple and all of a piece. I say: These inhabitants of the Pontus and the Caucasus, peasants of Kars, big and small merchants of Tiflis, Batum, Novo Rossisk, Rostov, Odessa and the Crimea, are ours, they are of our blood; for them, as for us, the capital of Greece is Constantinople. We all have the same chief. You call him Odysseus, others Constantinos Palaeologos [17]-not the one who was killed beneath the walls of Byzantium, but the other, the legendary one, who was changed into marble and still stands erect waiting for the Angel of Liberty. With your permission, I call this chief of our race Acritas. [18] I like that name better; it is more austere and warlike. As soon as you hear it, there rises within you the image of the eternal Hellene, fully armed, fighting without cease or respite on the boundaries and frontiers. On every frontier: national, intellectual, and spiritual. And if you add Digenes, you describe even more completely that marvellous synthesis of East and West which is our race.

I am in Kars now; I came to assemble all the Greeks of the neighboring villages. On the day of my arrival the Kurds had seized a Greek teacher and priest in the district and nailed horse-shoes to their feet. The notables were horrified and took refuge in the house where I am staying. We can hear the Kurds' guns coming closer all the time. All these Greeks have their eyes fixed on me, as if I were the only one with the strength to save them.

I was counting on leaving tomorrow for Tiflis, but now, in the face of this danger, I am ashamed to leave. So I am staying. I don't say I am not afraid; I am aFraid, but I'm ashamed. Wouldn't Rembrandt's Warrior, my Warrior, have done the same thing? He would have stayed; so I am staying, too. If the Kurds come into the town it is only natural and just that I should be the first to be shoed. I am sure, master, you never thought your pupil would end like this!

After one of those interminable Greek discussions we decided that everyone should assemble this evening with mules, horses, cattle, women and children, and at dawn we will all start out together for the north. I shall walk in front, the ram guiding the flock.

A patriarchal emigration of a people over chains of mountains and plains with legendary names! And I shall be a sort of Moses-an imitation Moses-leading the chosen race to the Promised Land, as these naive people are calling Greece. Of course, to be really worthy of this Mosaic mission and not disgrace you, I should have done away with my elegant leggings which you tease me about and wrapped my legs in sheepskin. I should also have a long, greasy, wavy beard, and, above all, a large pair of horns. But I'm sorry, I can't give you that pleasure. It's easier to get me to change my soul than my costume. I wear leggings; I am as smooth shaven as a cabbage stump; and I'm not married.

Master, I hope you get this letter, for it may be the last. No one can say. I have no confidence in the secret forces which are said to protect men. I believe in the blind forces which hit out right and left, without malice, without purpose, killing whoever happens to be in their way. If I leave this earth (I say "leave" so as not to frighten you or myself with the proper word), if I leave this earth, I say, I hope you keep well and happy, dear master! I am embarrassed at having to say it, but I must, so please excuse me: I, too, have loved you very dearly.

Then underneath, written hurriedly in pencil, was this postscriptum:

ps. I haven't forgotten the agreement we made on the boat the day I left. If I have to "leave" this earth, I shall warn you, remember, wherever you are; don't let it scare you.