Gregory

by Panos Ioannides

  “What do you hear? All the shameful slanderous things the Hospitallers say?”

  “And other things… But Gregory, what matters is… it’s not too late… I talked to Fra-Toumas the day before yesterday… He said he will help, but only if you come to the Hospital… They will accept you, they will adopt both of us, they will become our protectors. The King, may be, too. Perhaps even the Pope!”

  Scorn replaced the surprise on Fra-Gregoire’s face.

  “I? Become a Hospitaller?”

  “He promised me, Gregory… if we repent…”

  “I have nothing to repent. Whatever happened I wanted it. Whatever I got I asked for. As for you, if you want…”

  “And you’re not in pain? You don’t feel pain?”

  Fra-Gregoire looked at him suspiciously again. Then a thought flickered in his eye.

  “Because I left you?… Only at the beginning …Then I got used to it. Now I like it!…”

  Efthymios was silent, realising that through the evasion the ambiguous answer to his ambiguous question had been given to him. But he didn’t capitulate even now.

  “Swear!” he said. “Are you happy?”

  “I am,” replied the other unhesitatingly. “From a hooligan, I’ve become a Titular! A Crusader! And in the summer I leave for Rome…”

  On the day of Pentecost Grand Frère Fra-Toumas, in front of the congregation of the Hospitallers, broke the double seal and read the secret message from the Pope.

  Since we have no doubt that the sometime pious and our brothers the Templars have fallen into sin, denying God and the Saints, we command that before the bell for Vespers is rung the Templars of the pleasant land of Cyprus shall be put to death. All of them. At once.

  If anyone breaks the sacred rule and there remains even one of the sinners unpunished or punished with a penalty less than death, the Wrath of Heaven and the King shall be on your heads and on those of your children as on that of Judas!

  Efthymios felt the cold marble give way under his feet.

  “All of them?” he asked a Brother Hospitaller who was standing next to him.

  The Brother nodded “Yes, all of them,” and lifting up his robe pulled out a double-edged knife. He tested the blade on the tip of his finger.

  “And yours, have you sharpened yours?” he asked.

  “I haven’t got one…” he said and did not dare to say that for all these months he had believed that excommunication would be the only punishment imposed by Rome…

  “Didn’t you know?” the man he was talking to asked.

  “But the Pope’s letter … How did the contents become known? Wasn’t it sealed?” he stammered.

  “The letter!… Yes, it was! But the mind of the Pope, no! And above all when you thrust your hand into his purse, as the Templars have. It’s an evil hour for them now. Am I right, Innocentio my brother?” he asked with a smile the monk who was approaching.

  But Innocentio did not have time to answer. Dressed in black and accompanied by an official of the Court, the stranger who had travelled with them from Rome appeared at the Door. A whisper ran through the congregation of Hospitallers.

  The Grand Frère approached and greeted the two strangers. The words they exchanged, though quietly spoken, sounded like sword cuts. And the Pope’s man, who was unknown to them all, was not at all reticent today. The monks watched out of the corner of their eyes, suspicious. Finally the three men came out into the porch.

  The secret hope which the appearance of this blackrobed man from Rome had kindled in Efthymios’ heart grew stronger. For Fra-Toumas to be angry and shout like this means… he was thinking. And he was beginning to hope that with this new intervention by Rome or by some Frankish king, the mortal danger had passed. Nonetheless, he was still wondering why he felt that Fra-Toumas’ anger meant the cancellation of the dreadful plan… Was the Head of the Order one of those people who would fly into a rage if a murder was called off? And if he was, if at the bottom of his heart he felt that he was, what was he, Efthymios, doing with them?

  Grand Frère turned. He spoke to the congregation.

  “Our distinguished visitor is the Envoy of the Pope,” he began slowly, trying to make his voice as calm as he could. “He has come on the orders of the Holy Conclave to supervise the carrying out of the instructions of the Holy See. He also represents the Papal interests…”

  He faltered a little and then spoke with lucidity.

  “Of all the confiscations which will subsequently take place, Rome will benefit by one third and more. Another third will go to the King of Nicosia…What is left over will go the Hospital”.

  In the clamour of disapproval and the agitation which followed, Efthymios felt his last hope sink. He stumbled, began to fall, but the arm of Innocentio held him up. He led him to the Door. The palace soldiers had flooded the forecourt. Whole platoons in black cloaks.

  “All counted! One for each of us…” said one of the monks to Innocentio.

  “We do the dirty work and they’ll get the rich pickings,” complained fat Fra-Lampardo.

  “Isn’t that what always happens?” replied a third.

  “I’ve lost my appetite,” continued the fat monk. “Is this justice?” And spat.

  “Must we?…” whispered Efthymios and freed himself from the embrace of Innocentio.

  He signed yes.

  “However harsh it seems…”

  “And however unprofitable,” sneered Fra-Lampardo.

  “Today is the day?” asked Efthymios again.

  “Now!”

  “How many Templars live on the island?” asked someone.

  “Three thousand or there abouts.”

  “As many as us… We are three thousand Hospitallers living in exile on this barren island and as many in civilised Christendom, we’ll do our dirty duty again today… For the benefit of the Pope.”

  “A neck falls to each of us,” the fat monk halflaughed.

  “And all for the Pope,” laughed Fra-Lampardo.

  “It’s… but it’s…” whispered Efthymios again.

  “It’s more terrible to refuse…” whispered Innocentio in his ear, realising what he was thinking. “Whoever fails to do it won’t be considered just a deserter… rather a Templar too… That’s what we’ll call him and reckon him… And remember, Efthymios, over our neck will be poised a pair of swords, one from the King and one from the Pope.”

  Fra-Toumas came up.

  “Have you told him? Who his man is?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” swallowed Innocentio with difficulty.

  “What are you waiting for? Hurry!” the other scolded him, and went out of the door in a fury.

  “What haven’t you told me?” asked Efthymios.

  “We made a list,” began Innocentio, falteringly. “To make things easier so we don’t meet resistance… Each one of us will accost his man, in a friendly way, as always, as if nothing is going to happen… We will delude them, they’ll be eliminated in whatever way… As soon as the bell rings for Vespers…”

  “Who is… mine?”

  The Fra-Innocentio hesitated. But Efthymios fixed his gaze upon him.

  “Fra-Gregoire…”

  “Gregorios..?” said Efthymios and pulled savagely away from him.

  “Now you are one of us,” continued the other, in the same guilty and apologetic tone. “If you leave, it’s to join with the enemy, ours and Rome’s. And this we will not allow… For your own good!”

  And his hand sought the sheath hidden under his cassock. But no, it was not needed… Efthymios was paralysed, began to weep, and the raised arm of Fra-Innocentio relaxed and encircled the youthful body.

  The cathedral emptied. One by one the monks moved off, their rosaries in their fingers and serene, with the name that they had already learnt days ago, with the knife that they had sharpened days ago, with the decision that they had plotted months ago… The last to leave were Innocentio and the youth Efthymios. Behind, the Royal Official and the Pope’s Envoy.
The door creaked closed and Efthymios sank into the infinite void of inescapable duty.

  IV

  As he proceeded, with the white candle and robe of a novice, Evidence of self-denial, sacrifice, as the choir of smooth-faced Cypriot boys had chanted shortly before in the Catholic cathedral, before Grand Frère Hospitaller Fra-Toumas, the last words of his friend still buzzed in his ears.

  “Have you understood? Why? Why I urinated on it? Because they are all …”

  But Fra-Innocentio thrust in the blade and forestalled the word, cutting it in two…

  Behind them, the official and the Envoy were watching.

  Innocentio, who was now proceeding on his right, signed to him to raise his head. It was the third time he had reminded him. The Cypriot choirboys had noticed and as they chanted, sniggered at the signs…

  The first three pairs had already entered the dark passage-way. At the end there awaited them the marble building of Sancto Spitali, next to the ruins of the Temple, which Fra-Toumas had set fire to himself, after he had first managed to lock inside the man who held the same rank and had been his friend for years, Grand Frère and Initiator Gianis Templar.

  “Did you see how easy it was?” asked Fra-Toumas afterwards, serenely. “With the might of the Grand Seigneur, not one of them escaped…”

  Gregorios, with whom he had run hungry and flushed from games in the alley ways, died with a small, twoedged knife, like a needle, at the base of his throat. And Gregorios, who always laughed even when they beat him and were angry with him and threw stones at him, wept in front of him;

  “Why should I repent? Who treated us better?”

  Gregorios who, when Efthymios cried or was in pain used to take his hand to console him and to pat him, now just laid his fingers on him, Gregorios whom so many fingers had touched and hurt and stroked and drained, fell silent and drew back. Faded away …

  And he, he! He who had already performed the first major obligation of his short life, paused before the Guardian of the Threshold. They had already passed through the dark passage without encountering a caravan, without a hooligan tripping them up. They passed through the passage in good order and behind the flames of the candles which the wind did not blow out…

  The monk who was guarding the entrance blessed his head, offered him the Host, stepped aside…

  No, this was not the cathedral he knew, where only the day before yesterday they had broken the papal double seal… The stools had been removed and had disappeared. The marble slabs revealed an engraved emblem, the ripe pomegranate… The mosaics and the Pietà were all covered with black cloth; and the windows and the doors and the apertures; with a thick black cloth that kept the light out and plunged the bright church into half-darkness.

  Innocentio drew close to him and whispered in his ear “Happy initiation!” And let him not forget all he had done for his sake…

  From the depths, from the sanctuary, the Steward came out dressed in white, with two unlit candelabra and set them before him. With him also approached Grand Frère Fra-Toumas, dressed in his initiation robes, scattered with silver pomegranates. He held a crucifix of gold and ivory. He gave it to the young man. He smiled at him.

  “The Crucified is the Son of God as…”

  The choir of boys broke into a polyphonic stammer…

  From the short story collection

  Chronaka, I.M. Publications, Nicosia 1972

  Translated by Christine Georghiades

  * Efthymios in Greek means joyful, merry

  Kypriani

  One day Maria de Molino, the young wife of Filippo de Molino, the Venetian Proveditor of Cyprus, saw in horror the signs of leprosy on the body of her child. She locked the door, stripped off her clothes and examined herself.

  Once she had confirmed she did not have the disease, she slumped down on the edge of the cot and wept, insensible to the cries of the child. Then she dressed and summoned the servant girl.

  “Call Fra-Jacomo.”

  The monk signed to her to leave him with the child. He sent the servant girl out as well.

  “He was well yesterday…” Kypriani said.

  Maria de Molino turned her back to her and stood under the arch. The olive groves were rippling on the mountainside and the hills sinking into the sea.

  “My lady, Fra-Jacomo is coming…”

  She felt the constriction, the colours faded and the castle was uprooted from the back of Pentedactylos mountain. “The child…” she heard the monk’s voice. The summit of Buffavento leapt as if its fifty cannons had suddenly awoken. “No, I am sorry… Shall I speak to the Proveditor?” She did not reply. In the dusk, she saw the monk shake his head and leave, without kissing her hand, as he was accustomed to do.

  She picked up the child who was gurgling, kissed its chest which the monk had left bare, closed with her palm the lips that were smiling at her and locked herself in the Chapel…

  The shouts of the Proveditor and the servant girl, begging her to open up, died away at some point. They mingled with the orders of the guard changing on the walls. Three cannon shots from Kyrenia Castle announced that the galley had come into the harbour; the forty new gowns for the Queen and the new Commander of the Santo Larco Garrison had arrived…

  Only yesterday she had been envious of those forty Venetian garments… Only yesterday she had been impatient to hear these cannon shots… Those forty gowns were forty invitations to the Court, to the Castles, to the forests of Amorosa… They were forty meetings with Livio de Nores, the new Commander of the Santo Larco Garrison, who at this moment was setting foot on Cyprus to bring back to her again the hours in Venice when, as youngsters, they settled down in the gondola with the planks filled with peacock feathers beneath their bare bodies.

  Now… those three cannon shots signified the journey of the Proveditor to Kyrenia, her being left behind in the castle, the certainty that she would now never meet her youth again in the eyes of Livio.

  She would kill it and then she would kill herself. She would wait for her husband to depart, the servant girl to go absent-minded and she would leave. She would fall with the child into the Buffavento gorge, from the rock where, years ago, when they were newly arrived on the island, the Proveditor had given her their first child. Thus the end would merge with the beginning, the first pain for a woman with the final bitterness of the mother…

  The child was no longer crying. Kypriani had given him the breast as she did every morning and had put him to bed. Had she noticed? She must have; He was naked. She would have seen and would not have touched him. But no, if she had left the baby hungry, he would have raised the roof. So she had suckled it! She had dared! Or she didn’t suspect. Yes, only she, she and Fra-Jacomo knew! Better that way… Filippo de Molino had left, Kypriani had fed the baby and gone away with the sickness in her nipples. The guard had changed. And Livio de Nores would now be looking in the direction of the tower and hoping…

  On tiptoe, she slipped into the child’s bedroom. She did not dare to look at it. Tenderness and anguish were confused with an obstinate hatred. She wrapped it in the first blanket she found. It was the one a blind beggar-woman had given her. She picked up the child and held it firmly against her breast. It burped in its sleep and a trickle of milk ran down her neck. She shuddered. She threw the child onto the bed and cleaned her skin with water and wine. But suddenly realising what she was doing, she knelt beside him, kissed him on the mouth, took him in her arms and went out into the passage and thence into the courtyard.

  The Porta Leone creaked behind her but she did not turn round. She heard voices and the barking of her dog. But Maria de Molino quickly passed by the guard and went out into the wood.

  She could still feel on her lips the dampness from the baby’s saliva, which she did not dare to swallow or wipe away…

  The sun was scorching the island of snakes when she reached the rock. The steps which had once led to the summer palace of the Regina were now overgrown with weeds. What had driven the people from here
? What had made them abandon it to decay and the winds?

  Perhaps the same disease that had smitten her child. Perhaps the same sins that marked people’s skin, perhaps the transgressions and the cruelty of the Proveditors had turned at sometime on themselves and their stony deeds. Perhaps! But she hadn’t come to find an answer to all this… She had come to let two bodies whistle for a moment in the wind and then surrender themselves to the vertical tranquility of the rocks…

  Luckily the child had not yet woken. Protected in the blanket of the old woman who had two scars for eyelids, he was fast asleep…

  …angry waves surrounding the Santa Angelica and the wind whistling in the rigging… A dolphin chasing them and Filippo’s hand on the side of her neck… Rippling on the chords of the troubadour who, leaning on the carved wooden saint on the prow, awakened her memories… The Kyrenia harbour with the castle full of cannons and standards… The three cannon-shots and beacons lit in greeting on the nearby castles… The people thronging round them, beggar-women and children diving to retrieve the coins that the foreigners were throwing into the sea… The trumpet calls from the watch-towers… The coach with the horses, black and white, grinding along as they galloped to the mansion built for her… “Two hundred peasants worked to build it… The garrison had the freedom to choose the best materials, and for furniture, the finest there is in the mansions and the churches of the local people …” The earthen houses, perched one next to the other, lower than a man’s height, with doors you had to bend double to go through… Barley, maize and reapers… Madonna mia, what people! Caked with earth. The most misshapen peasant women she had ever seen… Her castle, the reception by the guard and servants… Kypriani with eager eyes… The parade of the Venetian officers, the first evening at Kyrenia Castle and the night that seemed unending as they strolled round the walls, with all that silver on the waves…Nicosia, the King’s Palace; and afterwards… The first night at Buffavento… Buffavento with the half moon lightly touching the muzzles of the cannons and the Regina; and the crystal and the shouts of the knights chasing her and of the starving prisoners in the oubliettes… This rock! And the hands drunkenly ripping off her clothes in the moonlight! And that pain that shot within her the rain of life…