The Colossus of Maroussi

by Henry Miller

  Herakleion was almost dry when we arrived. In the lobby of the hotel I found Mr. Tsoutsou waiting for me. It was most urgent, he informed me, to pay a visit to the prefect who had been waiting to see me for the last few days. We went round to his office at once. There was a beggar woman and two ragged urchins outside his door, otherwise the quarters were empty and immaculate. We were ushered into his bureau immediately. The prefect rose from behind a huge, bare desk and came forward briskly to greet us. Nothing had prepared me to meet such a figure as Stavros Tsoussis turned out to be. I doubt if there is another Greek like him in all Greece. Such alertness, such alacrity, such punctilio, such suave, steely politeness, such immaculateness. It was as if he had been constantly groomed and attended during the days and nights that he had been waiting for me to put in an appearance, as if he had rehearsed his lines over and over until he had attained the perfection of reeling them off with a nonchalance that was absolute and terrifying. He was the perfect official, such as one imagines from the cartoons of German officialdom. He was a man of steel through and through, yet bending, compliant, gracious and not in the least officious. The building in which his office was situated was one of those modern cement barracks in which men, papers, rooms and furniture are monotonously the same. Stavros Tsoussis had managed by some undefinable adroitness to transform his bureau, bare though it was, into an alarmingly distinguished tabernacle of red tape. Every gesture of his was fraught with importance; it was as if he had cleared the room of everything which might obstruct his flashing movements, his crisp orders, his terrifically concentrated attention upon the business at hand.

  What had he summoned me for? He made that known instantly to Tsoutsou who acted as interpreter. He had asked to see me, immediately upon learning of my arrival, in order first of all to convey his respects to an American author who had graciously deigned to visit such a remote spot as Crete, and secondly to inform me that his limousine, which was waiting outside, was at my disposal should I wish to inspect the island at leisure. Thirdly, he had wished to let me know how deeply he regretted not having been able to reach me sooner because a day or two before he had arranged a banquet in my honor which unfortunately I had evidently not been able to attend. He had wanted me to know what an honor and privilege it was to welcome to his country a representative of such a vast liberty-loving people as the Americans. Greece, he said, would forever be indebted to America, not only for the generous and unselfish aid which she had so spontaneously offered his countrymen in times of anguish, when indeed she seemed to have been deserted by all the civilized nations of Europe, but also because of her unswerving loyalty to those ideals of freedom which were the foundation of her greatness and glory.

  It was a magnificent homage and I was for a moment thoroughly overwhelmed. But when he added, almost in the same breath, that he would be pleased to hear what my impressions of Greece were, and particularly Crete, I quickly found my tongue and, turning to Tsoutsou who stood ready to aid me with his own inventive elaborations should I fail, I launched into an equally florid, sweeping testimonial of my love and admiration for his country and his countrymen. I got it out in French because that is the language par excellence for floral wreaths and other decorations. I don’t think I had ever before used the French language with such seeming grace and facility; the words rippled off my tongue like pearls, all beautifully garlanded, entwined, interlaced and enchained with deft usages of the verb which ordinarily drive the Anglo-Saxon crazy.

  Good, he seemed to say, flashing his lightning-like approval first upon me and then upon the interpreter. Now we can go on to other matters, remaining of course strictly polite, strictly comme il faut. You have been where exactly in the course of your brief stay? I explained briefly. Oh, but that is nothing! You must go here, there, everywhere—it is all at your beck and call, and as if to show how easily it might be managed, he nimbly and deftly retreated a pace and a half and, without looking, pressed a button under the desk top, whereupon a flunkey instantly made his appearance, received the peremptory instructions and disappeared. I was dying to ask him where he had received his flawless training, but restrained the impulse until a more favorable moment. What an executive he would have made in a typical American corporation! What a sales director! And here he was in an apparently deserted building, all dressed to go on and do his stuff but no audience, no spectacle, just the usual dull routine of a provincial town at the edge of the world. Never have I seen ability so sadly misplaced. Had he been so inclined—and God only knows what might be the vaulting ambitions of such an individual caught here in a vacuum of futility—he could easily have assumed the dictatorship of the whole Balkans. In a few days I could see him taking over the leadership of the whole Mediterranean world, settling with one bold stroke of the pen the destiny of this great basin for hundreds of years to come. Charming, gracious, hospitable though he was, I was almost terrified of him. For the first time in my life I had found myself in the presence of a man of power, a man who could do anything he set his mind to, a man moreover who would not flinch or balk at the cost of fulfilling his dream. I felt that I was looking at an embryonic despot, a not unkindly one, certainly a most intelligent one, but above all a ruthless one, a man of iron will, a man of one single purpose: the born leader. Beside him Hitler seems a caricature and Mussolini an old-fashioned Ben Greet player. As for the great industrial magnates of America, such as they reveal themselves to be through the movies and the newspapers, why they are but overgrown children, hydrocephalic geniuses playing with dynamite in the sanctimonious arms of the Baptist saints. Stavros Tsoussis could twist them like hairpins between his two fingers.

  We withdrew in perfect order after the amenities had come to a natural end. The beggar woman was still at the door with her two ragged urchins. I wondered in vain what that interview would be like, assuming that she ever had the good fortune to get beyond the threshold of that forbidding sanctuary. I gave one of the urchins a few drachmas which he immediately handed to his mother. Tsoutsou, seeing that the mother was about to make an appeal for more substantial aid, gently dragged me away.

  I made up my mind that night to leave the next day. I had a hunch that there was money waiting for me in Athens. I notified the Air Line that I would not avail myself of the return ticket. I found that the planes were not running anyway—the landing field was too soggy.

  I boarded the boat the next evening. The next morning we were at Canea where we remained until late that afternoon. I spent the time ashore eating and drinking and strolling about the town. The old part of the town was decidedly interesting; it had all the air of a Venetian stronghold which I believe it once was. The Greek part was as usual anomalous, straggling, thoroughly individualistic and eclectic. I had the sensation, only to a more intense degree, which I so oft en had in Greece—that the moment the power of the invader was halted or suspended, the moment the hand of authority relaxed, the Greek took up again his very natural, very human, always intimate, always understandable life of everyday routine. What is unnatural, and here in such deserted places it speaks so strongly, is the imposing power of castle, church, garrison, merchant. Power fades away in ugly decrepitude, leaving little vulture-like knobs of manifested will here and there to indicate the ravages of pride, envy, malice, greed, superstition, ritual, dogma. Left to his own resources man always begins again in the Greek way—a few goats or sheep, a rude hut, a patch of crops, a clump of olive trees, a running stream, a flute.

  In the night we passed a snow-covered mountain. I think we stopped again, at Retimo. It was a long, slow journey back by ship, but a natural, sensible one. There is no better and no more dilapidated craft than the ordinary Greek boat. It is an ark on which are gathered together a pair of every kind. I happened to have chosen the same boat as had taken me once to Corfu; the steward recognized me and greeted me warmly. He was surprised that I was still knocking about in Greek waters. When I inquired why he mentioned the war, The war! I had completely forgotten about the war. The radio was bring
ing it to us again—with our meals. Always just enough progress and invention to fill your mind with fresh horrors. I left the salon to pace the deck. The wind was up and the boat was pitching and tossing. Some of the roughest seas in this part of the Mediterranean. Good seas. Fine rough weather, man-sized, bracing, appetizing. A little boat in a big sea. An island now and then. A tiny harbor lit up like a Japanese fairytale. Animals coming aboard, children screaming, food cooking, men and women washing up in the hold at a little trough, like animals. Fine boat. Fine weather. Stars now and then soft as geraniums, or hard and splintery like riven pikes. Homely men walking about in carpet slippers, playing with their beads, spitting, belching, making friendly grimaces, tossing their heads back and with a clicking noise saying no when they should be saying yes. In the rear of the boat the steerage passengers, sprawled pell-mell over the deck, their possessions spread out around them, some snoozing, some coughing, some singing, some meditating, some arguing, but whether asleep or awake all joined indiscriminately one to another and giving an impression of life. Not that sterile, sickly, organized life of the tourist third class such as we know on the big ocean liners, but a contaminating, infectious, pullulating, beehive life such as human beings ought to share when they are making a perilous voyage over a great body of water.

  I went back to the salon around midnight to write a few lines in the little book which I had promised Seferiades. A man came over and asked me if I weren’t an American—he had noticed me at the dinner table, he said. Another Greek from America, only this time an intelligent, entertaining one. He was an engineer doing reclamation work for the government. He had been over every inch of Greek soil. He talked about water supplies, electric equipment, drained marshlands, marble quarries, gold deposits, hotel accommodations, railroad facilities, bridge building, sanitary crusades, forest fires, legends, myths, superstitions, ancient wars and modern wars, piracy, fishing, monastic orders, duck shooting, Easter celebrations, and finally, after talking about long range guns, floating armadas, twin-screwed and double-jointed hurricane bombers, he launched into an account of the massacre at Smyrna of which he had been an eyewitness. In the long list of atrocities to be accredited to the human race it is difficult to say which “incident” is more heinous than the other. To mention the name of Sherman to a Southerner of the United States is to fill him with burning indignation. Even the most ignorant yokel knows that the name Attila is associated with untold horrors and vandalism. But the Smyrna affair, which far outweighs the horrors of the first World War or even the present one, has been somehow soft-pedalled and almost expunged from the memory of present-day man. * The peculiar horror which clings to this catastrophe is due not alone to the savagery and barbarism of the Turks but to the disgraceful, supine acquiescence of the big powers. It was one of the few shocks which the modern world has suffered—the realization that governments, in the pursuit of their selfish ends, can foster indifference, can reduce to impotence the natural spontaneous impulse of human beings in the face of brutal, wanton slaughter. Smyrna, like the Boxer Rebellion and other incidents too numerous to mention, was a premonitory example of the fate which lay in store for European nations, the fate which they were slowly accumulating by their diplomatic intrigues, their petty horse-trading, their cultivated neutrality and indifference in the face of obvious wrongs and injustices. Every time I hear of the Smyrna catastrophe, of the stultification of manhood worked on the members of the armed forces of the great powers who stood idly by under strict command of their leaders while thousands of innocent men, women and children were driven into the water like cattle, shot at, mutilated, burned alive, their hands chopped off when they tried to climb aboard a foreign vessel, I think of that preliminary warning which I saw always in French cinemas and which was repeated doubtless in every language under the sun except the German, Italian and Japanese, whenever a newsreel was shown of the bombing of a Chinese city. *I remember it for the very special reason that at the first showing of the destruction of Shanghai, the streets littered with mutilated bodies which were being hastily shoveled into carts like so much garbage, there arose in this French cinema such a pandemonium as I had never heard before. The French public was outraged. And yet pathetically, humanly enough, they were divided in their indignation. The rage of the just ones was overwhelmed by the rage of the virtuous ones. The latter, curiously enough, were outraged that such barbarous, inhuman scenes could be shown to such well-behaved, law-abiding, peace-loving people as they imagined themselves to he. They wanted to be protected from the anguish of enduring such a scene even at the comfortable distance of three or four thousand miles. They had paid to see a drama of love in comfortable seats and by some monstrous and wholly unaccountable faux pas this nasty slice of reality had been shoved before their eyes and their peaceful, idle evening virtually ruined. Such was Europe before the present débâcle. Such is America to-day. And such it will be to-morrow when the smoke has cleared away. And as long as human beings can sit and watch with hands folded while their fellow men are tortured and butchered so long will civilization be a hollow mockery, a wordy phantom suspended like a mirage above a swelling sea of murdered carcasses.

  PART III

  ON MY RETURN TO ATHENS I FOUND A STACK OF MAIL forwarded from Paris, also several notices from the post office inviting me to call at my earliest convenience for money. The American Express also had money for me, money that had been cabled by friends in America. Golfo the maid, who came from Loutraki where Katsimbalis once owned a gambling casino and who always spoke German to me, was excited by the prospect of my receiving several sums of money at once. So was the night porter, Socrates, and the postman who always had a broad grin when he counted out the money to me. In Greece, as in other places, when you receive a sum of money from abroad you are expected to make little dispensations in every direction. At the same time I was informed indirectly that I might have an excellent room with private bath at one of the best hotels for what I was paying at the Grand. I preferred to stay at the Grand. I liked the maids, the porters, the bellhops and the proprietor himself; I like hotels which are second or third rate, which are clean but shabby, which have seen better days, which have an aroma of the past. I liked the beetles and the huge water bugs which I always found in my room when I turned on the light. I liked the broad corridors and the toilets all jammed together like bath houses at the end of the hall. I liked the dismal courtyard and the sound of the male choir practicing in a hall nearby. For a few drachmas I could get the bellhop, who was an old Parisian of fourteen years of age, to deliver my letters by hand, a luxury never before enjoyed. Getting so much money at once I almost lost my head. I was on the verge of buying a suit of clothes, which I needed badly, but fortunately the bellhop’s uncle who ran a little shop near the Turkish quarter, couldn’t make me a suit quickly enough. Then I was on the point of buying the bellhop a bicycle, which he claimed would be of inestimable service in running his little errands, but as he couldn’t find one he liked immediately I compromised by giving him some sweaters and a pair of flannel trousers.

  One day Max, who had nothing to do but deliver news bulletins for the British Press Bureau in his car, announced that it was his birthday and that he was going to squander a small fortune by inviting all his friends and acquaintances to eat and drink with him. There was something desperate about this birthday party. Despite the lavish flow of champagne, the extravagant abundance of food, the women, the music, the dancing, somehow it never quite came off. The English of course were immediately drunk and in their charming subaqueous way slid off into their habitual comas. The evening reminded me of a night I once spent in London at a dance hail with a man from Baghdad. The whole evening he talked insurance to me or else dress clothes and how to wear them. Max, who couldn’t drink because of his health, kept filling the glasses and sparkled with a reflected brilliance, like a room lit up with tinkling chandeliers. His idea of how to bring the festivities to a pleasant termination was to drive to some Godforsaken ruin and wreck the c
ars. On a previous celebration he had actually driven his car up the steps of the King George Hotel, much to the astonishment of the flunkeys. I left the party about three in the morning, feeling drunk but not at all gay.

  About this time I received a letter from the American Consulate requesting me to step in and have my passport validated or invalidated. I went round to the office to make inquiries. Being a native-born I took the matter lightly. Just a bit of red tape, I thought to myself. Had I brought a photograph, I was asked immediately. No, I hadn’t thought of that. The porter took me down the street a few blocks to look for a man who usually stood on a certain corner. The apparatus was there but no sign of the man. I had nothing to do so I sat down on the curb and waited patiently. When I got back to the bureau there were several Americanized Greeks waiting to be cross-examined. One sly old peasant who had evidently become prosperous in America amused me. He was talking in Greek to one of the secretaries, a Greek woman. He evidently didn’t like her efficient and somewhat superior attitude. He became mulish. He would say neither Yes nor No to the questions put him. He smelled a rat somewhere and he was on his guard. The young woman was almost beside herself. But the more frantic she became the cooler he behaved. She looked at me in despair. I thought to myself it serves you right, what business have you to be tantalizing people with all these stupid questions? Finally it came my turn. What are you doing in Greece? Where is your home? How many dependents have you? Whom do you work for? I was so pleased with the fact that I could answer readily—no home, no dependents, no boss, no aim, et cetera, that when he said “Couldn’t you just as well do your writing elsewhere?” I said “Of course, I’m a free man, I can work anywhere, nobody is paying me to write.” Whereupon he said—very clever of him—“Well then, I take it you could write in America too, couldn’t you?” And I said “Of course, why not? Only I don’t care to write in America. I’m writing about Greece now.” However, the game was up, as I discovered in a few moments. A brief colloquy with a higher-up and my passport was returned to me invalidated. That meant get home at the earliest possible moment. Clear out!