Z, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  The now-defunct Gonos kept bringing cans of wine which Yango drank down like water. Yango was a loafer, a bum, but he was a good man in a brawl. That’s why he had been assigned to the organization’s death squad.

  “Well then, I repeat, it’s hell over there. Here we can make a paradise, if we all get together. If you’re good at your job and you’ve got a good boss, what else do you need?”

  “It’s not always the way you say, chief,” an apprentice member dared to comment.

  “Shut up. Read a few books before you open your mouth, you uneducated blockhead. Read Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Who was Hitler?” He addressed this last question to everyone.

  “The one who promised to save the world,” someone answered from the back of the tavern.

  “Excellent! I’m glad you remember everything I’ve told you. Yes, Hitler was the one who wanted to get rid of the Jews and the Communists. To wipe them off the face of the earth. The former he succeeded in exterminating. Take this city as an example. Salonika. Before the war, Jews made up half the population. Now how many Jews are left?”

  “The grocer on the corner.”

  “All right. Let’s say one. What happened to the others? They became little bars of soap. The same thing would have happened to the Communists, but he didn’t have time. That year the earth took a sudden shift and the ice melted the flame. You know, Hitler believed the earth wasn’t round but dug out on the inside like a quarry. We’re living on the bottom. We’re the flame that burns and soars toward the upper regions, trying to rise above the ice. Well, the steppes of Russia froze over without warning and Hitler lost his foothold. His soldiers’ legs were caught in the layers of ice. At that point the Communists advanced on their sledges and slaughtered them with tin-can tops. They didn’t take them prisoner as they should have. They were massacred, helpless, alone, unable to move. I myself knew the Germans. I fought with them against the Communists, who were plotting against the unity and integrity of the Greek nation.”

  “You’ve plunged off into theory again, chief! I need a license to sell eggs,” said someone who was not a regular member. “I’ve been waiting for it for months and all you do is make beautiful speeches. I’m going to quit the organization. I’ll join a soccer club.”

  “I’m taking care of it, I’m taking care of it,” said Autocratosaur.

  “And me—where am I going to find the money to pay off Aristidis?” sighed Yango. “Oh, society, you old whore! It’s your fault we were born poor! Gonos, bring in another pint!”

  “My wife’s sick and she can’t get on the welfare list.”

  “You bastards, you bums!” shouted Autocratosaur. Now he was angry. “I’m trying to make human beings out of you, and you won’t stop begging. What do you do in return?”

  “Beat people up,” said Yango.

  “You, yes. The others don’t even do that. If you said ‘Boo!’ to them, they’d faint.”

  “It’s because we’re so hungry, boss. Little by little we collect our drachmas, like dandelion greens. But at least we know where the dandelion greens are.”

  “The day we take over, you’ll live like kings.”

  “Since we’re in power, isn’t that what you mean?”

  “We’re not, unfortunately, we’re not at all. The people who rule have sold out. Hitler lost his hold for the same reason: his associates were no good.”

  “What am I going to do with all these eggs? My chickens keep laying eggs. Can’t I set up a stall somewhere and sell the eggs for a good price?”

  “In a few days you’re going to have work. We’re going to break up a meeting. You’ll get hold of clubs, stones, and poles and you’ll go to it. Afterward each one will be rewarded according to what he contributed. I’ll be right there, with my eye on you.”

  Which is exactly what happened this evening. He saw Yango, the best of his men, astride the kamikazi, plunging fearlessly through the streets. And when they struck Z. on the head, a wave of physical pleasure swept over him.

  “Before you hook the big fish, you have to knock them out,” he told the General, who this time pretended not to hear.

  Chapter 8

  Hit but not bleeding, he climbed the stairs. He put his hand to the spot. The dizziness crept over him stealthily, like frost. Then all at once the staircase began to toss, a stormy sea; expanding, contracting; a rubber stairway. Two or three men supported him. On the second floor, when it seemed that he was ascending his Golgotha, they hoisted him on their arms. They were powerful young men, the kind to whom the world belongs.

  His assailants had struck him before the very eyes of the police captain, there in uniform indifferently observing the spectacle. Z. hadn’t even turned around to look at them. Nor had he condescended to make any self-protective movement whatsoever, cheapening them further by treating them as nonentities. They were holding something hard in their hands. This is what he had felt striking him: a stone perhaps, or an iron bar.

  He didn’t immediately go into the hall, where the audience had been waiting for him quite a while. Instead he went to an adjacent room, fitted out with a frayed couch, and lay down for a bit. The blow had caused a slight concussion; he wanted to calm down. Stationing someone at the door to keep others away, he surrendered briefly to lethargy.

  Then the swarming shapes in his head gradually thinned out and assumed coherence. The square he’d crossed after emerging from his hotel was full of flowering tangerine trees. A little square that had the scent of burnt wood. It was cared for by an old gardener with an ancient hoe. “My child, don’t neglect your garden …” Life took on again the beauty it had worn in childhood. And how, later on, did our garden fill with brambles? Our trees get covered with scale? What made our hearts go on strike?

  In the blind dark—his temples bursting—the square changed shape. It became an egg. A white egg. Queer shapes hovering over it, fluid threads enmeshing it, its inner complexity made plain. Suddenly the egg, this huge egg, was dyed red. But Easter had just passed. How could it still be Holy Thursday?

  A little boy on his mother’s knees. A mother whose face was that of earth itself, deep-lined, suffering, earth of the village where he went at Easter, home from his studies in the capital. A mother, head of the household, proud within her own kingdom. A sweet mother, all “my child, my little son”; no complaint ever crossing her lips. Mother Earth, Holy Thursday, red eggs, red eggs, red like blood, his hand grasping them.

  The concussion made him feel as though underpinnings had been suddenly removed; at any moment everything might crumble. A flaw deep in the foundations. He sank his face into the couch and pressed his fingers against his eyes to keep from seeing those red, swarming sands.

  And now what? What was it now? What crazy, chilling ideas? Look, if his eyes were made of glass he wouldn’t be able to dig his fingers into them this way to keep from seeing. Suppose he’d sold one eye to the blind Negro singer for ten thousand dollars—those were the terms offered in the advertisement—then he wouldn’t … A farmer had done it, yes. Outside Volos. He said it was like winning a lottery. Undreamed-of luck. And besides, what did he need two eyes for? He could get along fine with one. He’d see less of the ugliness around him.

  But what kind of people were these who sold their hair and their eyes to live? Hair to be turned into a rich woman’s wig, like hers, the American who several months ago had come to his office for an abortion. She’d taken off her blond wig; underneath was short black hair like a boy’s. He had picked up the wig and begun to daydream about whose hair it might be. What peasant girl, blond, beautiful, plump, from what village in southern Italy, had sold it, perhaps as a vow to the Madonna?

  Once again, the square. He knew anatomy. He knew that the last image received by the eyes is engraved forever in the memory of the dead man. Through this last image he begins to contemplate the other world. In his retina, in his brain cells, the image survives, beyond death. Well then, what image would be himself take with him as he left life? Would it perhaps be t
he image of this square?

  O-o-o beautiful Thessaloniki! Old fortresses, the kind that provide walls for a camping ground of the poor. Children flying kites. Mothers spreading jam and margarine on slices of bread. O-o-o beautiful Thessaloniki! A sea, your own sea, now a bay. At bay. Your coast, horseshoe, shaped for luck. Nights and nights without your love. Those diamond metamorphoses of your lights. The fields at Diavata have been appropriated for the Esso-Pappa’s refineries. When will the farmers, on tractors, arise and invade the city? Concussion? Rubbish! Why must a high rate of illiteracy go hand in hand with violence? Why does it all go backwards? O-o-o beautiful Thessaloniki!

  Three silent young men, up to their necks in black, three young men had hit him. For a moment he’d seen thousands of little stars and then a black incision in the darkness, a door opening upon further darkness, blacker, sootier. Now, little by little, things were solidifying again. The room was regaining its own shape. He was lying on a couch. The dizziness was passing. More quickly than he’d expected, he thought with relief. And he could get up on his feet. He was all right; he could speak. He opened the door and entered the hall amid a storm of applause, while down below, the jackals and the flying lemurs had gone wild and were shrieking appallingly.

  Now he had ascended the rostrum. He looked down at the faces—faces full of intensity—whose gaze was fixed upon him. The eyes looked thirsty for a few drops of rain to soothe their smarting.

  And he said: “They struck me here!” He pointed to the place above his eyebrow.

  “For shame!”

  “What were the police doing?”

  “What’re the authorities up to?”

  “It’s only us they’re after!”

  “The others can go where they please!”

  “Come on in, wolves, the sheep are waiting for you!”

  “Shouts don’t mean anything. Better close the blinds.”

  Two or three got up and started to carry out his order. As they opened the windows to reach the blinds, the roar of the raging sea outside burst into the room. It had grown fiercer. Anything could happen now. The building be set on fire, themselves burned like rats!

  “Bulgars back to Bulgaria!”

  “Z., you’re going to die!”

  Pressing the button that hooked up the instrument in the hall with the megaphones on the third-floor balcony, Z. spoke into the microphone: “I demand from the Chief of Police the protection of colleague Spathopoulos’s life. Spathopoulos is in danger. They’ve kidnapped him.”

  Then he turned back to the audience in the hall and counseled them: “Calm. You must be calm. Otherwise we won’t be able to accomplish anything.”

  He opened his briefcase and took out some papers. He had no written text to speak from, just some notes, the skeleton of what he had to say.

  “Thank you for inviting me here tonight. We are not isolated. At this very moment the eyes of the world are upon us. The world is expecting a great deal from this meeting. Those of you who have come have done so because you don’t let anyone interfere with you. There are other people who would have liked to come but did not, for reasons that …”

  A stone from outside hit the closed blinds.

  “Let them throw stones. They’ll rebound on their own heads. They’ll get hit themselves. As you can see for yourselves, peace incenses them; they find it intolerable. But why?”

  “Disarmament!”

  “Down with the death bases!”

  “Down with NATO!”

  “Don’t interrupt me. As you understand, we must give ourselves with all our souls if we are to achieve anything. Peace is not an idea. It’s a practice. It needs human hands to support it. The world becomes habitable only when human beings live together in peace.”

  “Democracy! De-moc-ra-cy!”

  “Dis-ar-ma-ment!”

  “No more Cypruses!”

  “No more blood!”

  “One bullet costs as much as a bottle of milk.”

  “Peace! Peace! P-e-a-c-e!”

  He felt dizzy. The concussion returned like a wave. It struck upon the breakwater of his forehead and retreated backward into the labyrinth of the cerebrum. He heard the rhythmic chants around him; he heard from outside the chants of hatred louder now through the broken windowpanes. The two mingled, it was chaos. The audience before him now seemed like molten metal not yet cast into steel columns. It was a fluid mass, and he was its fluid leader.

  He couldn’t speak calmly in such an atmosphere. And his listeners had become inflamed. Hearing the wolves outside, they could hardly sit penned-up and sheepish. And then the moon emerged from behind the tallest building; he saw it through the crack between the blinds.

  The night, he thought to himself, the black night pierced by your smile, death pierced by Beloyannis’s red carnation. The night, and such desolation within me; why I don’t know. It’s the first time that such a sweetness paralyzes my limbs, a sweet dimness undoes me. Before the blow on my head, I believed in common, very common sense. Now all of a sudden I am drugged, undone, as if by a sweet voice calling me to a world of visions. Like yesterday, in my room, listening to poetry on records …

  But you must talk, he told himself. You must talk. These people are waiting. They’ve left the quiet of their own homes and come here to listen to you. You must talk, say something, address them. But what to say? Where to begin? I have so much to say that I can’t say anything, can’t venture a single phrase.

  Wild beasts—ravenous beasts of a desert which is not a desert, love for all and for no one in particular: these are the emotions flooding me. I am alone and the panic is mounting. In the end we are all alone. However much we deceive ourselves, however much we think otherwise, each of us suffers in private.

  “I bring you a word of greeting form Aldermaston, from Betty Ambatielou, whose husband is still in prison. I bring you greetings from all the friends of peace the world over, who at this moment follow our meeting in spirit. Nowadays peace is a new faith. We know that whoever does not believe in peace is, to say the least, a madman. The dead do not speak, but if they were to speak, they would have much to say about the people who killed them. They would rise from their graves and ask ‘Why?’ But they cannot say anything, ever. And that is why we must speak on their behalf. We must defend the right in their absence. Why? Why? A bullet, for whom? We are all brothers. Brothers must stand together on this tiny earth of ours. Think of the other planets. For the sake of a nobler kind of human being, for the sake of a life that does not end in violent death, I call on you to join the great Peace March!”

  “P—e—a—c—e! P—e—a—c—e!”

  “Down with NATO!”

  “Fascism can’t get away with it!”

  “Or terrorism!”

  From outside, through the blinds, came the slogans of the counterdemonstrators:

  “Bulgars back to Bulgaria!”

  “You dirty dogs, you’ll all die tonight!”

  “Z., you’re going to die!”

  “Commies, your end has come!”

  They’re shouting, but they don’t have anything to say, he thought to himself. Aloud he said:

  “Bulgars? What Bulgars? The ones who fought us, tyrannized over us, stole our lands are not the same Bulgars as are living today. Men change with the system. Now they too believe in peace. So why are you shouting out there?”

  Without my desiring you, he thought to himself, I want you unbearably. I want you the way water dreams of its source. The way life itself, in your eyes at night, unlids its mystery. I want you because you are a gallant woman, a bloodstained sword, a sheath of lightnings. I want you the way the child seeks its mother. I, a child, seek protection, seek rebirth so as not to die. At your womb’s gate, immortality begins. From your hearth streams warmth alone—never that fearful cold which envelops and preserves those who have crashed into snowy peaks and died. I want you because without you I am small, insignificant: even my madness scatters elsewhere, a seed flung where it does not belong, since
all things must be measured good, correct, intact. But what am I thinking? Where am I? They’re still waiting for my talk!

  “Disarmament!”

  “No Polaris!”

  “Down with the bases!”

  And from outside:

  “Down with the Bulgars!”

  “What are the Bulgars after in Macedonia?”

  “Dirty dogs, you’ll all die when you come down!”

  Inside: “No more Hiroshima!”

  Outside: “We want war!”

  “Mr. Prosecutor, Mr. Prefect, General, Chief of Police, all of you who are outside, I demand your protection. I am sounding the alarm!”

  No response. The night had wound its noose about his neck. Any tighter and it would choke him. Only the night, only an effect of the earth’s revolution upon its axis, and here were the consequences. “There is no water, only light. The road is lost in light, and the shadow of the wall is iron.”

  O night, so infinite, so gentle. O stars, stones of the midnight sea … Who is tired? Who is drowsy?

  “Long live peace!”

  “Down with NATO!”

  Chapter 9

  The slogans issuing from the megaphones and spreading out over the city aroused the General’s wrath to the point where he felt like going up to the meeting alone and exterminating them all with a machine gun. At the same time they provided a perfect justification for the gathering down below. Actually the “outraged citizens” down there—the subproletariat from the poorest districts of the city—had been assembled by order of the Head of Security Police. This the General knew very well, because everything that concerned the left wing in this eternal struggle between spirit and matter had first to receive his approval. It was his passion, his vice. And with the blaring megaphones there was the magnificent excuse that these counterdemonstrators—otherwise peaceable, nationalistic-minded individuals—had just chanced to be passing through this central section of the city and had found themselves unexpectedly confronted by the incendiary slogans of the Communists and that they had considered it their supreme patriotic duty to retaliate with slogans of their own. In this way a counterdemonstration had come about.