Z, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  Death may be waiting for us everywhere, he told himself. The essential thing is for us not to be waiting for it everywhere. Doing so, we should be no more than the oil that lubricates the machine of fear. Death may be waiting in ambush like a motorcycle on a side lane. The essential thing is not to think about the motorcycle, about the side lane, because if we did we should not be able to walk alone, at our own gait. We should have to support ourselves on other people’s shoulders, like cripples, in annihilating dependence.

  And the sun rises each morning fresh over a fresh world. This sun which we watch for every dawn and which fails us every twilight is the value of life. I measure the molecules of time, I count them, they are mine, not other people’s. No estrangement. Once and for all, the workers must understand that providing them with brighter homes does not put an end to exploitation. They must understand once and for all that they can be emancipated only by …

  Ever since I was little, I wanted to become a pilot, to soar high into the clouds, to live near the sun. Then I became a doctor, because my people wanted it. One brother stayed in the village. Another went abroad. The family must produce one educated man, and the lot fell to me. But the dizzy heights have always fascinated me. The myth of Icarus is my favorite myth.

  (On the island of Icaria, where he had done his military service, he had looked closely at people’s wounds. Big wounds, windows onto life, with pure air passing through, despite all the pus that collected on the sills.)

  And when I married, I came to know the veins of her neck as she smothered her sobs in my arms after I cheated on her or lied to her. Life is beautiful when you are ready at every moment to die. When the roots of the night descend into you and lustily drink your blood. No one can say that I was weak, that I tried to remove my bodily presence which so disturbed them. Writers can write what they please, for the spirit is free in underdeveloped countries. In underdeveloped countries, what is persecuted is the body, the bodily presence that displaces a certain volume of air. That’s why they hounded me when I made my solitary march. So many, many people write about peace. For those others, it’s all just vapor. For those pigs nothing exists but the body. My own, though—and I know it well, down to the slightest tremor of its least fiber—has a protective covering: that of parliamentary immunity. No wonder they didn’t strike as hard as they might, why they didn’t dare finish me off.

  O-o-o beautiful Thessaloniki! Some perfume of Byzantine mysticism still clings to you. In the Hippodrome, now overgrown with apartment buildings, the Yellows were forever battling it out with the Greens in the old days, and here tonight, we the Reds and the lizards outside, the Greens, are shouting in a hippodrome where all the horses have been drugged and race on injections.

  I must let my colleague Spathopoulos say something too. They took him away, he is back. I can’t go on speaking. These people must go home. That’s how it is. Now the problem will be to get out. How to do it? I hope the police will be sensible and prevent incidents—I don’t want any of us to come to harm.

  The rostrum was an outlet for me. I’m glad they listened. I don’t know what else to say. Peace, I want to say, is practice. It’s refusing to pay your taxes when the money goes for armaments. It’s acting crazy to avoid military service. Peace is not an ikon of the Virgin appearing on the front to inspire the soldiers. It’s an ikon of statistics, figures, tangible truths. It is not—above all, it is not an idea.

  Your hand in mine. A microphone working on electricity. Then the light goes dim: “the shadow of the wall is iron.” Black Greekness. Incessantly there are new victims, which, thanks to our progressive municipalities, give their names to streets and squares. Black Greekness which never saw a day’s justice.

  The lights are flickering. They must be cutting the wires to plunge us into darkness, to spread confusion among us. The lights are fluttering, eyelids of drowsy children who want more than anything to sleep.

  And even if you were a whore in your youth, you’ve acquired wisdom enough by now, I hope, not to change any more. To say that life is beautiful, that whoever thinks justly is beautiful. To say that if you get sick I shall come to keep you company; that if you weep I shall be the pillow that drinks your tears. Yes, it is beautiful, life is beautiful when your hand is in my hand, when our two life lines become one, fused as on the palms of lepers, and can no longer separate.

  Chapter 22

  He had gone to the meeting early, and now that Z. had finished his speech, he was determined not to leave him for an instant. When he had seen him enter the hall after being hit, and heard him declare: “This is what they’ve done to me for coming to you,” his eyes had filled with tears.

  He, Hatzis—or the Tiger, as they called him—had no definite occupation. He had worked as blacksmith, mason, plasterer, iceman—he had even shined shoes. A slight, wiry, bald man, he lived in his own way, and he was always on hand at meetings like this. When there were clashes, he took part—not because anyone told him to but because he felt it as an obligation.

  An obligation to whom? And why? He didn’t know. He was obliged to no one. He moved in an orbit of his own and took advice from no one. Today, for instance, he’d come all the way from Ano Toumba on foot. He didn’t have enough money to buy a bus ticket. Along the way he saw the automobiles, the shop windows, the sweets, all the riches of a civilization he couldn’t begin to approach, much less enjoy. He didn’t care. He wasn’t jealous of anyone. He practiced a private brand of asceticism.

  Tonight he’d been supposed to call on a contractor who he’d been told was a left-winger and who might give him a week’s work. But instinctively he decided instead to come to the meeting of the Friends of Peace. He didn’t know Z. But he admired him for the march he’d made last month all alone, and for punching in the eye that deputy in the Chamber. And he felt that Z. was vulnerable, especially because the others would not hesitate to plot against a man who laughed off all efforts to protect him.

  Now that Z. had finished his speech and was proceeding without any hesitation to plunge once more into the inferno in the street, Hatzis resolved to appoint himself Z.’s anonymous bodyguard. He went over and posted himself near the door through which Z. would be passing on his way downstairs.

  He had scarcely begun his watch when he saw Z. in the corridor, and workmen’s hands in dense concentrations turning suddenly to sprigs of oleander which grazed his passing body. They all wanted to get close, to snatch one of his buttons, touch his skin while he wended his difficult way through the thousand-handed fireworks, greeting them, smiling, from time to time dropping some remark.

  As Z. approached the door where Hatzis was waiting, the crowd in his wake straightened up, like a field of grass after the wind has passed over it. Their faces were pressed tightly together. A wall of faces. Hatzis the daydreamer saw it all in images. He had the lyricism of the true lyre player, who transforms his instrument into a bow in order to confront his enemies, but who retains all his virtuosity. Now, as he watched Z. moving toward him, he thought of a battleship coming out of the roadstead to enter the storm-tossed sea. He, Hatzis, was the tugboat that would pilot him safely, for even though the battleship was covered with armor, there were still the reefs and the torpedoes.

  Behind Z. came the members of the Committee for International Détente and Peace. The banners and emblems on the platform were already being pulled down so that the hall could be turned back to the Labor Union employees tomorrow in the same condition as it had been found.

  An old woman approached Z., crying, “Doctor, my child is ill. What can I do? I have no money for a doctor.”

  Z. stopped, looked at her, and said: “Bring him to my hotel tomorrow morning and I’ll examine him. I won’t be leaving before noon.”

  “Aren’t you ashamed, old woman?” someone in back of her chided. “Talking like that to our leader. What have we come here for, anyway?” But the old woman wasn’t ashamed. She had many other things to confide to him, and ills of her own for him to cure as well.


  Hatzis saw him now, scarcely a yard away. The wound above his eye had become discolored, as though death had planted on his forehead its first poisonous fungus.

  Someone in the entourage—the members of the committee, behind Z. in a group, were mostly lawyers—said to him: “Mr. Deputy, it would be better if a few of us got ahead of you, to avoid any repetition of the incidents.”

  “Let them come back, if they dare!” Z. was angry.

  He started down the staircase. Hatzis slipped behind him. Someone tried to shove him away, but with his slight build and cat-like suppleness he was able to make a place for himself directly in front of his charge. Z. noticed him and the Tiger felt a trident spring up in his blue eyes. He no longer had any doubt that Z. was a born leader, the leader for whom he’d been searching all these years, ever since the heroes of the Resistance had been killed and only the politicians and theoreticians were left, none of whom, it seemed to him, had the makings of a true leader.

  The crowd of people who hadn’t been able to enter the hall had now swarmed into the building and were blocking the staircases. They were sitting on the steps, frightened, penned in: at times the iron gate, pressed on from outside by the tidal waves of “outraged citizens,” seemed about to give way. Sometimes it would open to admit a police officer with eyes like the lenses of a camera and a little roll of film in his brain, recording their faces for the inquisitions, hearings, or tortures to come; at other times nothing could be heard but the cry: “Come on out and you’ll be roasted alive!” while fragments of stone flew about like a shower of foam when a wave breaks against the rocks and sprays the people on shore. Seeing that the entire police force of Salonika was unable to disperse some two hundred hoodlums, the Friends of Peace held back on the steps. But as Z. came toward them, and they pressed against the wall or the banister to make way for him, they regained confidence. Like leaves singed by sulphur, then washed clean by the spring rain, they could again breathe freely, and their assurance returned.

  “What a great man!” thought Hatzis, intent on keeping the crowd from separating them. “His body must fascinate women, his mind must speak straight to the heart, his skillful hands must reassure his patients.”

  By now Hatzis had reached the iron gate. From there he could see outside. The hoodlums had backed away. Two or three police caps could be glimped circulating behind the heavy iron grille. With a steady hand, Z. drew the bolt and the gate opened with a grinding noise.

  The opening of the gate brought the two hostile worlds into communication. Z. walked through the gate, handsome, proud, alone. When he appeared, there was no clamor, for the simple reason that he was unknown to the people outside. To none of the hirelings who were threatening him with death was Z. more than a name. The name had been whispered to them, an initial, nothing more. They would have behaved the same way if some other name had been whispered to them. They were hammering at a stranger’s door.

  Hatzis now slipped over to Z.’s left. He could see the General and the Chief of Police on the sidewalk opposite. Apparently Z. had also seen them; he immediately headed straight for them. With his athletic tread, Z. crossed the street in six steps, according to Hatzis’s count, who himself had to take ten. Hatzis saw Z. beside him, illuminated by the red light of the Melissa Shop window.

  “Mr. Police Inspector!” he called out in a piercing voice.

  Hearing these words, the General turned abruptly away, like a comic-opera phantom, as if he were the ghost of himself, visible only to Z. The General’s sudden turning away struck Hatzis as very strange. He’d acted as though Z. had some contagious disease, as though, by breathing the same air, he might catch a fatal illness.

  “Mr. Police Inspector,” Z. repeated.

  But the General had already reached the corner of Ermou and Venizelou Streets and was gazing emptily at the sea.

  Z. turned toward the Chief of Police.

  “Mr. Chief of Police,” he said, “this is a scandal. I protest vigorously. This is an open violation of the law.”

  “If you hadn’t installed the loudspeakers, Mr. Z., this crowd would not have gathered. You could have held your meeting quite peacefully, and we should not have had to be present in such force.”

  “Your men are lending support to the counterdemonstrators instead of dispersing and arresting them. I’m afraid of what might happen when the Friends of Peace come out.”

  “It’s exactly for that reason,” the Chief replied, “that I took the precaution of bringing these buses in”—and he pointed to the six dimmed buses. “Your friends need only board them to leave the premises without any trouble.”

  Hatzis saw Z. stiffen. He turned around and whispered to the members of the committee; they nodded their heads in complete agreement. Z. turned back to the Chief.

  “The Friends of Peace,” he said firmly, “came as free citizens and will leave as free citizens. They do not find it acceptable to be evacuated in coaches.”

  Hatzis had immediately figured out what the Chief had in mind. Once bundled into the buses, the pacifists would have been unable to defend themselves and would have been completely at the mercy of the counterdemonstrators. The same thing had happened once before, he remembered. Even assuming that the Chief of Police was acting in good faith and not setting a trap, it would be the same. Hatzis was relieved to hear his leader reply as he did.

  The gate of the building, acting like a safety valve, allowed the people inside to emerge only a few at a time, in small groups. These small groups, spaced out as they were, started homeward. The cordon of police was trying to reduce the flow of the valve to a minimum and to hold up the exodus, for reasons only too obvious.

  Z. and the people escorting him went in the direction of the Kosmopolit Hotel, which was diagonally across the way from the sidewalk where they had been standing. Down Ermou Street they could see the dimly lit Ayia Sophia Church, looking like a wedding cake at some royal marriage ceremony. A lawyer held Z. by the arm. Hatzis followed on Z.’s left side. Suddenly he saw three young men in black pullovers advancing toward them menacingly. Z. saw them too and, at once disengaging his arm from the lawyer’s, turned his back on the hotel and shouted to some invisible person: “Here they are! They’re here again! Why don’t you arrest them? What are the police doing?”

  At that precise moment, from the opposite corner, on the hotel side of the square, a pickup van swooped in like a rocket. A man crouched in the rear hit him on the head with an iron bar. He wavered, he fell; the wheels of the vehicle passed over him, dragging him a foot or two in the process; a pool of blood began to form on the street.

  “For shame!”

  “Stop them!”

  “Get the number!”

  “They’ve killed Z.!”

  “Shame! Shame!”

  “Death to the assassins!”

  Chapter 23

  He was coming from the tailor’s, where he was an apprentice, right across the way from the Caravanserai. Bits of thread still clinging to his trousers, he walked toward Nea Megalou Alexandrou Street to catch the bus for Phoenix, the suburb where he lived. Eight months ago he had managed, by a simple political maneuver, to get a roof over his head. Although not right-wing, he had said he was, in order to get on the preferred list of applicants for housing in a new working-class settlement outside Salonika, near the airport, “on either side of the highway.” The highway was a menace to children; nevertheless, the low-income apartments were clean and uniform, with a row of trees around them. And so he was on his way home, having just finished cuffing a pair of trousers for a customer, when a policeman politely asked him to turn back.

  “But I’m on my way to get my bus!”

  “There’s an EDA demonstration and I’m asking you not to go any farther. I’ve got strict orders not to let anyone through.”

  The tailor obeyed. He was a nationalist. He was well acquainted with the area and knew there was another street he could take to get to the bus stop. He went by way of Solomos Street and came out o
n Spandoni Street. As he walked along, he noticed at the far end of the street a parked three-wheeled pickup truck with a man on the driver’s seat. Five or six people standing in front of it formed a kind of living barrier, and a few yards to the side were a police lieutenant and two gendarmes. He went along paying no attention to anybody, when he heard someone behind him issue a command: “Get going! What are you waiting for? They’re coming!”

  He turned around sharply. The voice must have been the lieutenant’s because he was the person nearest him. He saw the driver of the pickup settle his weight on the pedals as he raised himself on his saddle. The motor roared. The men in front moved aside and the pickup raced toward the intersection at such an incredible speed that the tailor thought the vehicle was being driven by a motorcycle acrobat from the circus. He heard a noise, a thud. Then: “For shame!” “Catch them!” He saw the police lieutenant clutching his head with his hands in horror and he heard him cry to the person next to him: “What happened? I never imagined such a terrible thing could happen.” And the other replied sarcastically: “Aren’t you ashamed? A man like you!”

  The tailor couldn’t understand. Many of his customers were police officers. He repaired their uniforms. He was fond of them. All he could figure out was that the pickup must have run over someone. But who? He had no idea. Acting on the saying that no mouse can prove itself not an elephant if arrested as one, he took to his heels. Not until the next day, when he learned from the newspapers whom they’d killed, did he go testify what he’d heard: “Get going! What are you waiting for? They’re coming!” He added that immediately after, someone had pointed Z. out to the driver of the pickup as the person he was meant to hit.