Z, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  “Whatever he is, he’s one of their deputies.”

  Baronissimo was silent. He didn’t know what “deputy” meant. And by the Holy Cross, he didn’t want to know! Today being Wednesday and the stores being closed, he’d come home early. He had intended to go down to his shop that evening to take delivery of some figs that Georgios, the commission agent, was bringing him from Michaniona. Unripe figs that he would cover with moistened sacking so they would stay fresh and cool until morning; after that he’d go back to his canaries and chaffinches and nightingales. In the court in back of his house he had songbirds. He spent endless hours with them. But about seven o’clock, while he was resting, Leandros came. He couldn’t stand Leandros. He told him to come in.

  “The Commissioner wants you.”

  “What’s he want me for?” asked Baronissimo. “I’ve got work to do.”

  “I tell you he wants you, damn it. Do you think I came down here at this hour to look at your mug?”

  “I have to go to my shop. Georgios is bringing me figs from Michaniona.”

  “Go tell that to the Commissioner.”

  “Go back and tell him you couldn’t find me.”

  “As if a guy like you could get lost!”

  “Tell him I wasn’t home.”

  “Why should we do all the dirty work?”

  “Cool it. What’s it all about this time?”

  “It looks like something urgent.”

  With a heavy heart, Baronissimo followed Leandros to the station. Mastodontosaur’s invitations made his flesh crawl. Always, or almost always, they had to do with slugging. He’d be sent somewhere to beat someone up, or to start a riot. And the Baron had the good nature of fat people. It was easy for him to do a good clobbering job, but it didn’t thrill him to the bone.

  “Welcome, Goliath! Sit down.” The Commissioner, in plain clothes, was smoking nervously behind his desk. Baronaros sat down, half of him spilling out of the chair.

  “Tonight I’m taking you to a meeting. We’ll go right now, in my car. The others will be there too.”

  “Mr. Commissioner,” Baron said. “Tonight I’m expecting some figs from Michaniona and I have to be at my stall.”

  “The place I’m going to drop you is only a hundred yards from your stall.”

  “But I can’t do a job for you and be at my stall at the same time. Figs are delicate like. If you don’t take care of them, they rot and stink like fish. I paid for them in advance and the guy who’s bringing them …”

  “Listen, Baronaros,” the Commissioner interrupted. “In order to sell figs, you have to have a stall.”

  “I’ve got one, Mr. Commissioner.”

  “I know you’ve got a stall, Baronaros, the widow’s stall. But having a stall means having a license. Catch on?”

  “The widow’s got a license.”

  “I know that, idiot! But who issued her license? Who signed it?”

  “You did, Mr. Commissioner.”

  “Right! You’ve got a drop of common sense, you must know that I can also take it back again, or refuse to renew it, for whatever reason I choose.”

  Baronaros began to see the light.

  “Well—are you coming along?”

  “What else can I do?”

  “Tonight I want you to put your heart into it.”

  “I wish I didn’t have to, Mr. Commissioner. I don’t feel like fighting.”

  “Listen, Baron, it’ll be a great party if you just let yourself go. Yango and Vango are already there.” He paused and looked Baronaros straight in the eye. “And besides,” he went on, “I heard you’ve been palling around with a Communist who comes and buys at your place. You haven’t gone over to the other side, by any chance?”

  “By the Holy Cross, no! no! Every time he comes I tell him to go do his buying somewhere else. But he won’t. How can I chase a customer away? The customer’s always right. I never say a word to him. I always tell him I’m in a hurry.”

  The Commissioner smiled. “It sounds to me as if you’re hiding something. Let’s get going—we don’t want to be late.”

  The three of them left the station and got in the car, Baron in front, Leandros in back. Baron admired the Commissioner’s limousine. The little bear hanging on the windshield jumped up and down every time they hit a bump, until finally they left the badly paved roads of the slum neighborhood and came out on the main highway.

  “Who are we beating up tonight?” Baron asked.

  “A VIP is coming from Athens to talk about peace. The Commies are planning a beautiful reception. We’re going to beat the hell out of them, because this VIP deserves it.”

  “How come, Commissioner?”

  “He’s no weakling and he’s not afraid to fight. That’s why we need tough guys to give him a lesson.”

  Baronaros was enjoying the little bear’s dance.

  “And this VIP has the gall to send a female comrade to London to rip our Queen’s dress.”

  Baronaros scratched his crotch.

  “He had the nerve to lay a hand on our Queen?”

  “He didn’t do it himself, idiot. He got someone else to do it. And in the House, he gave one of our deputies a black eye.”

  At that moment Baron was thinking about his figs. The bus usually arrived from Michaniona at 8:10. It took the guy a good quarter of an hour to get to the stall with the baskets. That would make it 8:30. If he could sneak away and get back to the stall to spread the figs out and dampen them!

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Quarter to eight. Why?”

  “I just asked.”

  “Are you thinking about the figs?”

  “No.”

  “If you want me to renew the widow’s license, you’d better be on the ball tonight.”

  He put on the brakes and they got out of the car.

  “I’ll be coming back along the other street,” he said. “I’m going to park the car. I’ve got my eye on you.”

  And so Baron slipped into the frenzied crowd of counterdemonstrators. He was the only one who wasn’t shouting. He didn’t do anything, until someone said to him: “There’s Pirouchas. Go clobber him.”

  The idiot supposed this was the man the Commissioner was talking about in the car. He gaped in bewilderment. Where was this so-called tough guy? Was it this runt?

  It was only when his work was finished that he found out from Jimmie the Boxer that the VIP was still in the hall. He’d come out shortly.

  “When?” Baron asked.

  “How should I know?”

  Baron calculated that he would have time to hop over to his stall. Giving Jimmie the slip, he cut down a side street.

  The Modiano Market, after hours, was like a big cemetery. Smells of fish and meat. Display windows with frozen goods, crates of vegetables. He greeted the caretaker of the arcade, who was washing the pavement. When he reached his stall, he saw the baskets of figs. The commission agent had left them for him; they had been paid for in advance. Quickly he ripped off the covering and looked at them: big, fresh, egg-sized figs from Michaniona, with layers of fig leaves between the rows to keep them from getting crushed during the trip. He took a fig and ate it, skin and all. Then, fig by fig, he emptied the basket on the ground. Without removing the leaves in between, which would have taken time, he quickly spread them out as best he could, eating a few more as he went—the biggest and sweetest. Large, fresh figs, which tomorrow he’d sell for a handsome price to the people who fancied them. Then he spread sacking over them, took the rubber hose from the arcade caretaker, and wet them thoroughly. He lowered the iron stall front, locked up, and, in terror that the Commissioner might have noticed his absence, furtively rejoined the ranks of the dinosaurs.

  After Baronissimo had left him, Jimmie the Boxer went back alone to the demonstration. He too felt dissatisfied with his evening’s work. He was a boxer—that’s how he got his name—and for him a good fistfight was a sport. But to clobber the first person who came along, especially if he
didn’t have the vaguest notion about boxing—there was no fun in that, there wasn’t any point to it.

  But what else could he do? He worked on the docks, and there wasn’t always work. Every morning he’d take his gear and stand outside with the others waiting for a call to do some unloading. The harbor of Salonika was dead. Ships turned up once in a blue moon. There was a surplus of workmen. And whenever a job did present itself, a union man in the pay of the police came and called for the person he wanted. At first Jimmie couldn’t understand why they never called him. He would get angry, curse a blue streak, and walk off the dock. Next day, rain or shine, he’d be back, waiting for God knows what … One day a fellow worker named Vlamis, who’d been working in the harbor longer than anybody else and had his finger in every pie, let him into the secret.

  “You were born in Russia?”

  “Yes.”

  “In Batum?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, Jimmie, my boy, for them you’re a Communist. That’s why you never get any work.”

  “Is it my fault I was born in Batum?”

  “Nobody says it’s your fault. But they’re suspicious of you. If you want, I can tell them that you said O.K., and then, you’ll see, everything will change. You’ll get plenty of work.”

  “Said O.K. to what?”

  “Never mind. Rush jobs.”

  “Say I said O.K. I’ve got strong arms, I like to work. I want all the work I can get.”

  A few days after, a stranger from the free port approached him and talked to him about the Communist danger threatening the country, about the Reds who slaughter people with tin-can tops. He also told him that here in Salonika the menace was especially serious, for with the first crack of a gun the Bulgarians would pitch into them and wipe them out, because they wanted a passage to the sea. “You’re a dock worker; you understand the value of ships. Therefore,” he concluded, “since you’re a boxer and since we need men with strong arms, we’ll give you a call the first chance we get …”

  Jimmie accepted eagerly. Though he hadn’t understood much of what had been said, the very next day he began to see the difference as far as work was concerned. When there was work, he was always the first to be called. He was soon working five or six days a week. They also gave him a code number—seven. And invited him to a few meetings, like tonight’s, and he’d throw a few punches, even if, deep down, he still looked on boxing as a sport and didn’t like this kind of roughing up.

  Now, once again at the scene of the demonstration, which he’d left in pursuit of the ambulance, he greeted two or three fellow workers from the docks. They were throwing stones and shouting, while eating roasted chick-peas.

  Chapter 13

  Someone told Z. that Pirouchas had been wounded on his way to the meeting, that they’d beaten him up and were now taking him to the first-aid station. He knew about Pirouchas’s weak heart, having cared for him for two months in the hospital. Spathopoulos had disappeared; Pirouchas was finished. His own turn was coming. He had no reason to fear.

  Now more than ever, on the rostrum, he felt the need to talk about peace. All he’d been saying—figures, statistics, quotations from great men, from leaders—was well and good, but it failed to express what he felt. He was not an eloquent man. He had difficulty finding the right words, but tonight something was suffocating him, strangling him—a lump in his throat, a protest he wanted to send beyond city, nation, world, to reach all the way to another planet.

  Because life was worth living. He didn’t want to die, not at all. He did not accept biological death, often as he faced it in his daily work. An imperceptible melancholy pervaded him. Penned in this hall with the blinds closed, with these people squeezed together listening, his vertigo recurring in waves; alone and bruised, another Stephen stoned by the unbelievers, among them first and foremost the centurion Saul, who later on, when he saw the vision on the road to Damascus, repented in anguish and became Paul, herald and apostle of the new religion that abolished idols; without her eyes, which he had never truly made his own, without her voice, which the children would now be listening to, safe at home; what nostalgia, what pebbles lost forever on the shores of his childhood, in the ancestral haunts, the village sunk in the slope, a little jaw whose houses poked through one by one like teeth, abandoned now to scarecrows and empty courtyards in whose ovens no one baked country bread any more; at six o’clock the goats to be milked, evenings at the coffee place, the peasants, he a little child, discussing the boats no longer manned by oars, little childlike river, cradle of my first love, how we grew up without ever meeting and how you ran dry, white stones in your little bed, dead men’s bones, how I became what I became, without her eyes, without anyone’s ever learning how much I loved her, and she went away just like that, married, had children, and was not to return but as an old woman, a little old woman, to the soil of her fathers; what nights when gliding forth on secret streams we were taught what we must now forget in order to learn what we were never taught, about this poverty heaped on poverty, I a little child before the great beggar of humanity, “a penny, please, because it’s raining”; a gardenia in gold tinfoil at the tavern, the woman pinning it to her bosom, and afterwards the balloons exploding, the holiday cannons of Lycabettos, exploding and scattering noise till the air was full of it, the balloons tugging to ascend while her fragile hand, the vendor’s, pulled them down to earth for the customers to burst with lighted cigarettes; everything, the music, your gaze roving unrepelled over the past decade, when you were almost a girl still and I loved you and admired you and wanted to make you my own. What has caused your face to wrinkle now? my hair to fall out? both of us to put on all this weight? That absolute of having you near me, with no one and nothing to disturb us: that absolute I now rediscover as an idea, containing everything and everyone, and I am above a sea of clouds, because I do not want to die.

  Ever since morning, when he’d first awakened, he’d had this troubled feeling. When he left home, he kissed his wife and children and took their pictures along to show his friends up here. But in the plane he kept looking at them himself, sentimental about something for the first time—about the family, that necessary evil. Beyond this world, life was not enclosed in predefined social molds. Beyond this world lay another infinite embrace. His motions, his actions were not those of a politician. He lacked the cold logic that makes for compromise, so that in the end everyone survives except the gallant. In him, violent emotions induced violent actions, not negative ones like striking and hurting, but positive ones like persuading and touching and guiding.

  No, he could not be alone. Thousands of men now dead hadn’t even conceived the things he was at present pondering, weaving together the images of a life before its being filed away for good in the archives of eternity. As a little boy, he had loved decalcomanias; later on those transferred images had become reality. He had dreamed dreams. He’d wanted to board ship and see the world. A month ago he’d climbed the Tymbos at Marathon all alone, had walked alone, yes, marched forty-two kilometers, decked in a Greek flag. Peace March. Friends of Peace. Peace on earth. No more Vietnams. No more Hiroshimas. Peace written in letters made from loaves of bread. And that Sunday excursion on the good ship Joy to Aegina, the island now in the throes of a second Occupation by German tourists. The mothers of the Resistance waiting to see their sons in the prison parlor. Twenty years behind bars those boys, while the Germans, all shorts and cameras now instead of boots and machine guns, reveled in the last rays of a sun taking to its bed exhausted by the sight of so much injustice. That old woman in black from Kalamata had recognized him: “Ah, Doctor, my tortures are many and my sufferings great,” she had said. “I come here to see my boy. How was he to blame? Sixteen years old then, what did he know?” “Sprechen sie Deutsch? Sehr gut! Nescafé! Temple of Aphaia!” And the return trip on a Joy which was utter sorrow—how could he accept all that?

  “Blessed be the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God,” he sai
d.

  Meanwhile two policemen had come up to tell them to turn off the loudspeakers.

  “They struck me, here,” Z. informed them, pointing to his forehead.

  “We’ll see that you leave the building without being molested,” they promised. “A ring of policemen will be formed to protect you. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m not worried for myself. I’m worried for all these people you see in the hall.”

  “The proper measures will be taken. Anyway, it’s an order, to shut off the loudspeakers.”

  “The loudspeakers cannot be shut off. A great many people who came have been left outside and now they can’t enter because the rabble would break in along with them. They must hear what we’re saying.”

  “The counterdemonstrators are getting excited.”

  “It’s the duty of the police to disperse them. We’re the ones holding a meeting, not they. What are the police doing? Have they come to protect us or betray us?”

  “But, Mr. Deputy …”

  “For the last time I call upon the Public Prosecutor, the General, the Chief of Police, the Prefect, the Minister to protect the life of my colleague Spathopoulos. We do not know what has become of him.”

  Chapter 14

  The Chief of Police strode into the hotel like a gust of wind. He found him in the hall, terrified.

  “Since your friends, Mr. Spathopoulos, are afraid that you’ve been kidnapped and are being tortured somewhere, the way it happens in gangster films, I beg you to accept my escort. Let’s go to the meeting together, because Mr. Z. keeps on making appeals over the loudspeaker.”

  “This is a disgrace,” Spathopoulos protested. “Where are we? In Katanga?”

  “The loudspeaker’s getting them excited.”

  “Why don’t you disperse them? Why don’t you make them go away?”

  “The operation of dispersal is already under way.”

  As they moved along, Spathopoulos heard some policemen saying: “Go on, boys, tomorrow you can kill them. Move back.”