Gregory

by Panos Ioannides

  “After our meditations my dear” said Kleitos, taking up his favorite topic, the eulogy of the child’s sensitivity.

  “Shall we strangle Hilarion or let him off?” whispered Harry, drawing near. “Scriabin at this hour when the only suitable thing is a smoke.”

  “Good idea! Shall we have one?” I asked.

  “Here? Didn’t you know that nicotine is more harmful than meat?”

  He sighed and asked what I’d been talking about with Merope for so long.

  “About Kleitos of course,” I replied.

  “Stupid question,” he admitted.

  “Really, how did he meet her?”, I asked.

  “Oh, it’s a long story. And what a story! I suppose you want to hear it?”

  “I’ll put up with it!”

  I missed the first sentences of the story. They were drowned out by Scriabin. Luckily Parides decided “for his neighbours’ sake” to lower the volume of the stereo a little.

  “If he’s a saint today by his own volition, he was a saint in spite of himself before. You have to realize that he was only half the man he is today! And very nervous, a bag of nerves. For all that, one of his colleagues, a girl this tall and really pretty, fell in love with him. Our friend, gracefully doing the right thing, spurned her, but the lady archaeologist was in no mood to accept defeat. To get out of what was a painful situation, Kleitos managed to get rid of her by obtaining a scholarship in Rome for her. He paid a price, of course. Deep down he was flattered by her love but he had no choice.

  ”They say that about this time he became obsessed with the idea of death. He was expecting the end to arrive at any moment. He ended up trembling at digs. He believed that one day he was going to uncover himself, embalmed, in some tomb! Anyway this situation carried on until Evangelides appeared on the scene and introduced him to the occult science. The glory for his conversion is actually claimed by many of his students today. In any case the change was a radical one. He threw himself passionately into study and meditation and in a short time had managed to catch up with and overtake his teachers.

  ”Meanwhile the lady was still bombarding him with love letters. Gathering up the strength that his new life had given him he decided once and for all that he was going to do without this small personal happiness and stop cultivating false hopes. So he sat down and wrote her a letter in which he said that he understood her problem but that a life of love and marriage was not for him as he had decided to devote himself to the service of mankind.

  ”At about this time he gave up his position at the museum. Archaeology had ceased to interest him a long time before, especially once he had begun excavations inside himself, to uncover his soul! Right on time came an invitation to visit the sect’s European centre in Lausanne. All the local elders had been invited for a course of advanced lessons. He stayed in Lausanne for about two months and was made a “Companion”, got to know all the top people in the sect and was reborn. There for the first time he heard some truths which made an impression on him and played a decisive role in his later life. They said specifically that all kinds of love are permitted when they are not simply an end in themselves and that until the day when people succeeded in becoming hermaphrodites so that the erotic dialogue between body and soul might begin, marriage was not an obstacle on the path but simply another stage in the practical application of the principles of love, self-sacrifice and adaptability. In the beginning, of course, these revolutionary theories shook the very ground beneath him. In order to assimilate them he started a series of meditations. The subject: love-marriage-the family. On one occasion, as he was analyzing his initial idea “Marriage, reincarnation and the law of karma, three interdependent concepts”, he had his first vision. He “saw” himself in a previous incarnation. He says he was a woman called Eleonora and lord Kontostavlis,* a Frank noble, had fallen madly in love with her. Kontostavlis was tall and fat with a hooked nose and had made off with her to his castle and was about to rape her when she struck him down with a stiletto. The vision was so vivid, with such detail, and she spoke the dialect of the time so wonderfully that there was no room for doubt: he was the girl and Kontostavlis had been the victim of “her morality”, the victim whom, sooner or later, life would place on his path looking for justice.

  ”His prediction simply had to come true. He met Kontostavlis sooner than he would have liked, only in this reincarnation he was not a man but a woman. Just as she had, so too had he changed sex, so as to have more experience, you realize! When he reached the island, on the second day, at his sister’s house he saw Merope. She was his niece’s piano teacher. As soon as he caught sight of her he broke out in a cold sweat. The big-bodied girl holding our her hand to him was the other man…

  ”After this fateful meeting he threw himself into studying apocryphal books dealing with the law of karma, looking for a way of getting round it. In the end he found it. The solution was love! Instead of letting the eye for an eye idea work against him, it was wiser to abandon his plans to marry the pretty archaeologist and try, through his devotion to the piano teacher, to blunt the effectiveness of justice. He confessed to his sister that he had liked Merope from the first moment and persuaded her that despite all their differences, she was the one and only woman who could make him happy. He then asked her to persuade Merope of the sincerity and his feelings. It did not take much effort. The wedding took place a few months later, and from then on our friend, with all the time in the world and every reason to do so, started to offer Merope the love he had refused Kontostavlis and thereby redeem, drop by drop the blood he had spilt, through sacrifices and total submission. At the same time he was secretly impatient for the day when she would hurt him! Do you get it? But Merope, either because she loved him or because she wasn’t revengeful showed no sign of using a small or big knife on him to free him. On the contrary! His attentions caused hers to multiply and his affection forced her to make her own even more tyrannical. In the end our friend was so desperate that he wished that the child they were expecting might be born deficient or mentally retarded or that they might lose it… But fortunately the child was born normal. And the retrospective fear that such a person could have been lost because of him filled him with panic and guilt.

  ”Only on one occasion Merope did something, out of love, which he had been hoping for so long that she would do out of hatred! He had started giving a new course of advanced lessons on the nature of love; more or less what he had been taught in Lausanne. To stress what he was saying he assured them that he did not think there was anything wrong in making love to another man since he would be just as pure, before and after! And as regards the theory of androgyny, they could take him as an example. It had already begun to take shape in him. And he lifted up his clothes to show how he had begun to develop rounded breasts with erect nipples. Merope, who suspected what was going on, swallowed her anger and did not allow her love to claim its own special privileges. But she did later on when two of the newer pupils started becoming more liberal than their teacher! Another version of the story says that the young men did not stop at words. They wanted to show their faith practically, placing their bodies at their teacher’s disposal! That was when Merope took up the fight. After swearing at them in Turkish she threw them out, and forbade them to see him, to telephone him, to write to him or send him “love-thoughts”. Otherwise she would chop to bits the means at their disposal for testing their theories! Kleitos didn’t know what had hit him. What was going on? Was he or was he not master of his own body and his own house? But then he remembered and felt relieved. The collapse of the lodge was the beginning of his liberation. He accepted it stoically and started to prepare for the next step. But nothing happened. Perhaps the pupils were really frightened, or maybe Merope was afraid that with one more scandal she would lose her beloved Kleitos… Anyway after the episode she became totally subservient, even on matters on which they had disagreed in the past. For example, from one day to the next she became a vegetarian. In vain he told h
er that “for her sake and that of the child he could lay his principles aside now and then”. She was unyielding and prepared to make other, more serious sacrifices. She recalled that he had once told her that an initiate should only make love when he had decided to bring a child into the world. She decided to make things easier for him in that respect too. In spite of his chivalrous objections! They would only make love when the signs of Aries and Virgo were in sizygi and with the sole aim of providing Hilarion with a brother! That’s the story and there’s much more. It’s a whole epic. And our friend is still waiting in vain for the knife…”

  “Between you and me that would be salvation.”

  Scriabin’s music had meanwhile died away and we could no longer continue the conversation under its protective umbrella. We thought it polite to mingle with the others. But it was already too late. Our host announced officially that “at last” the time for meditation had arrived!

  “Tonight with the rising of the full moon the divine energy of Christ and Buddha will pour forth into the world. An electric river of energy, a torrent of thoughtforms proceeding from the two Avatars has to be absorbed and used for the realization of the divine Plan. For this reason, friends, let us spend the next thirty minutes in deep meditation, let us sink into that ocean of ethereal material-thought-energy and let us spread it into the bosom of the world.”

  One by one they took their places. They sat in a strange and, as I discovered, awkward posture. Feet entwined, chest out, the jaw pressed onto the Adam’s apple and hands in the lotus position, representing the symbolic flower of the soul.

  Merope switched off the light and tiptoed out of the room.

  I tried, in vain of course, to sit like them. It was a good try though, judging from the sharp pain that bit into my spine. I nearly swore. I stopped myself by bringing my body back to a more natural position, and relaxing my muscles. And in this advantageous position I proceeded to observe them through half-closed eyes. First of all they sat as awkwardly as possible. Then they closed their eyes. There was a momentary pause and then they took ten very loud deep breaths. There followed a second pause, succeeded by something which impressed me greatly. One by one, fugue-like at first and then all together, in harmony, they began intoning a strange word, something like “Aum, Aum, Aum” so loudly and with such semitones that you would have thought we were in a very busy obstetrician’s clinic!

  Then they fell silent perspiring and out of breath I imagined, and sank into ecstasy, trying, as was patently clear, to fish for as much of that divine energy as Christ and Buddha were exhaling to mankind.

  After this the minutes passed slowly. I was beginning to feel bored when the sudden appearance of a boy grabbed my attention. He had a large, round, blonde head, which looked dropsical and out of proportion with his small body. Hilarion! He must have heard the divine sounds and the initiate within him had awoken.

  He was a really unpleasant looking boy about five years of age, with an indifferent expression that reminded one of old age or undernourishment. In the light of day one would certainly notice the lines of tomorrow’s wrinkles, “the eternal wrinkles of the soul…”

  From the way he looked here and there it was evident that he was looking for something specific in the half-light. He looked searchingly and coldly at the stretched out gentlemen, and particularly coldly at his father on whose face two beads of sweat betrayed the degree of inner intensity. Then his gaze rested warmly on the large dropsy-like head of Uncle Evis.

  He made his way silently towards him, thrust his hand into Mummy’s cousin’s pocket and took out a large, locally made salami… Evangelides, taken up with his meditation, did not realize what had happened. The boy then advanced to the centre of the room, curled himself into the lotus position on the carpet and began to eat - He! Of all the children in the world, at such a moment, nibbling an already half-eaten salami.

  It appears that either his munching was noisy or that I was not the only one in control of my senses, because one after another the guests, and Harry first of course, suddenly began to open their eyes in astonishment.

  How did the salami come to be in Kakaraka’s pocket and how did the little “prodigy” find it? And if Uncle Evis was to blame with his cheating ways how was Hilarion misled so easily, he who according to Daddy’s reports felt sick at the very sight of meat?

  It was not long before Mr. Parides was clearly asking himself the same questions. When he felt intuitively that the others had left him to carry the energy from Christ and Buddha on his own and opened his eyes to protest and he saw… he leapt up like a spring, grabbed the salami, threw it away, turned to the boy, lifted him up and with sweat pouring off him, began shaking him and demanding to know where he had found that “thing”, who had given it to him, when, and why he was eating something without Daddy’s permission.

  Crying bitterly, more from the disappearance of his treasure than fear, the boy managed to explain that he had seen Uncle Evis putting slices of that red cheese in his sandwiches and wanted to try it. “Stop telling lies. Your uncle was here.” “In my room,” wailed the boy. “He came to bring me some nuts. He threw the white cheese into my jigsaw and put some of that…”

  “That explains it,” whispered Harry. “The smell of sin forced the boy to follow his uncle closely. And since he saw him concentrating, in order not to remove him from his ecstasy, he removed it from his pocket…”

  “A very discreet child” I said.

  And abandoning the lotus position I sank happily into the armchair.

  From the collection:

  Cyprus Epics, P.K.I. Publications, Nicosia 1968

  Translated by John Vickers

  *Constable

  Cinyras

  I

  The Priest-King of Paphos stroked his beard and smiled at his interlocutor. That was something else which characterized a true leader: the ability to substitute, whenever necessary, eloquence for policies, generosity for arguments. Talthyvios may not yet have succumbed to his suggestion that he take a bath, relax and get acquainted with the young priestesses of the temple or the pleasant youth from Crete before revealing the unpleasant duties that had brought him to Cyprus, but at least it was not possible for him to guess the intimate thoughts of Cinyras!

  He gave a sign for the goblets to be refilled. The wine of Paphos, he had observed, intoxicated foreigners more easily than locals. And he had a duty to conceal his surprise from the envoy of Agamemnon, to put off as long as possible the moment when he would be obliged to confirm officially that the conventions and treaties remained in force, to first of all find the ideal compromise…

  The Greek envoy, after savouring his wine, resumed his recitation of the situation:

  “After the firing of our fleet by the Trojans, the outcome of the campaign is in doubt… Cut off in a hostile country, with no possibility of re-provisioning, we are condemned, if not to annihilation, then at the very least to ignominious retreat… Already, fear and uncertainty have begun to sap the morale of the men and sow discord amongst the kings…”

  He paused, with his eyes glued to the copper goblet, which, without his noticing when or how, had been filled again. Raising it to his lips, he noticed that the front curve was skillfully engraved with the head of Cinyras. The craftsman who had created it had taken particular pains over the mouth, which he had graced with an affable smile, the eyelids half-closed; and in the precious stones which he had placed in the eye sockets the light was pallid and intoxicated. The sculptors who had created the other busts and full-figure statues of Cinyras which dominated the halls and arcades of the palace had evidently been numerous and had employed various techniques. One had stamped on the face and gesture of the Paphian King the imposing calm of the Arch-Priest; another, on the face of the Arch-Priest, the agreeable austerity of the King; a third, in an assemblage of figures that depicted Cinyras distributing goods to the people, showed the real source of his popularity; others his piety, patriotism, altruism and other attributes - so many that a
s he crossed the city-state and later the palace, Talthyvios had become convinced that even had there been a likeness of Cinyras at every stride in Paphos, neither his virtues nor the inventiveness of the palace artists would have been exhausted.

  Meanwhile, as Talthyvios, occupied with his wine, tried to fathom how so many virtues could have been forged in so few years, Cinyras wiped his broad brow, which nevertheless was perceptibly narrower than the artists had seen it. ‘Now is the opportunity,’ he thought. ‘I shan’t find a better one to prove that Agamemnon is not the leader that Greece needs in these arduous times.’

  “Agamemnon was therefore obliged to resort to the explicit promise that as Arch-Priest you had given to Menelaus, Odysseus and myself, when we visited you as representatives of the Hellenes to inform you about the campaign,” Talthyvios recommenced. “With the generosity befitting a Greek, you had promised that if Greece assisted you in uniting the kingdoms of Paphos and Amathus under your sceptre, she would be able to count on an ally that was not only faithful but also strong, which would be in a position, should it ever prove necessary, to send to Troy or wherever else it was needed, a fleet of fifty vessels. And as you will remember, you insisted that the treaty be ratified and be binding on both parties. Agamemnon accepted the condition, not with the expectation of repayment, but because he believed in your leadership abilities and ardently desired the progress and prosperity of the island. And he honoured it. I have no need to remind you that both I and the more than one thousand soldiers who were landed on the Paphian coast, used all our diversiform influence to persuade the Paphians and the Amathusians that Cinyras was, and would remain, their one and only leader.”

  ‘Fifty vessels! Almost my entire commercial fleet…’ Cinyras thought. ‘Should they be immobilized or fired on the Trojan coast, the transport of gold, copper and terracotta would be interrupted for months, years perhaps, when just a few weeks were often enough to bring about complete disaster. By the time the shipyards had delivered new vessels, the foreign markets would be inundated with merchandise from Assyria, Crete and Egypt. A month of stormy seas last year, and Paphos had lost the monopoly of jewelry and perfumes in the East and her political influence in Nileria…’