Z, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  “The true facts concerning the sanguinary incidents incited by the Communists in Salonika.—Deputy Z. accidentally injured by a motorcycle while he was leading an illegal Communistic demonstration.—The Police had offered to transport the Communists from the scene by buses, but the Communists refused in order to organize a march upon the EDA headquarters.—A police captain was gravely wounded when he attempted to protect Deputy Pirouchas from being molested.—Such has been the solicitude manifested by the government in this affair that it even provided a military aircraft to transport a great surgeon to the bedside of the accident-injured deputy, Z.”

  And the train whistled before entering the tunnel, emerging presently with the darkness for its trail, while the helicopter soul had started to tremble during the few seconds she had lost sight of the body and one of her great colored wings had begun to flutter as though a valve had loosened, soul the Papilio cresphontes, soul the Argynnis cybele, soul the Neonympha eurytus, soul the Satyrodes canthus, soul the Vanessa atalanta, a butterfly emerging on schedule from its cocoon woven of the strong threads by which men attach their dreams, like balloons, like anchors dropped on fine cord into the bosom of the deep, but the soul grew calm as she saw the diesel engine’s nostrils reappear from the tunnel, followed by the dimmed coach, his own sealed coach, tear-stained windows of the relatives’ coach, and finally that tent of green caterpillars, plague of the pine tree, the coach full of policemen, which, if it were to burst, would have drowned the world in slobber; and he, unseeing, saw nevertheless everything from his lepidopter, this earth, his earth, earth of his fatherland, mother earth, sagely fashioned by the aeons, an ever-living landscape, and of a beauty for which human beings ought always to suffer, always wallow in blood to defend from the barbarian hordes, from the neo-Fascist gangs, always, with no justification other than the safety of the mountains beneath the blessed, blessing sun; he saw the trees, little prayers, resting on the sea’s doorstep like old women spinning on thresholds; he saw a sea gull veer in fright as the train brushed against the sea by the Moschofs’ villa where the locomotive leaves the tunnel; he saw villages imprisoned forever in mountain ravines, no human eye to see them, villages emptied clean by emigration; soon he saw Olympus too, snow-covered in the glory of May, and Mount Kissavos opposite, the two still unreconciled, like the rival Resistance camps during the Occupation; the Venetian fortress above Platamon, a fortress abandoned centuries ago, now the redoubt of crows keeping watch over the sea, if no longer for pirates, then for the mine-sweepers of the Sixth Fleet, and just here the soul, wishing to rest a moment, entered a cranny in the wall, displaced a green lizard; she saw the marble, wind-veined sea, hoped for a sail, a sea temple facing Olympus; she welcomed the breeze, because it is said that the soul, so long as the body remains unburied, wanders insouciant, but once the body has returned to its dark womb, her self returns to air, dissolves into molecules which then become oxygen for the living to breathe; and the soul knew that on this last journey she was seeing the fortress for the last time, how she had loved it once, crown of the little mountain turning and turning beyond the windshield as on a revolving stage, only it was in fact the road itself winding and winding, memories for whose sake she had lingered a moment today until the train whistled her back to Tempe, the propeller started to whirl, the butterfly soared off the ground, leaving no trace of its momentary presence in the fortress, carving no date, returning the cranny to a green lizard much put out by the whole affair, and hastening off in the wake of her body—a stranger to all this—a body terribly damaged, appallingly mutilated, which would have chosen for its own crown the very tar of the streets, though perhaps not, after all, because:

  “The fracture found on the skullcap of the aforesaid Z. could not have been caused by a fall on the macadam pavement of the street and the ensuing blow; it can only have resulted from a blow dealt when the victim was standing with his head erect, for it is only in such circumstances that one finds symmetrical lesions of the brain in the underlying region and in the region opposite to the wound. In the autopsy of the said Z., such lesions of the brain were in fact found, accompanied by a cerebral hemorrhage of the left hemisphere, while the fracture occasioned by the blow was located in the right temporal bone, and had it resulted from a fall onto a hard surface such as the pavement of a street, these typical symmetrical lesions would not have been found.”

  And the train raced on, whistling in a paralyzed world, on a day when only stationmasters and switchmen gave way to panic, “Never before in a lifetime spent in the service of the railroads,” thought the master of the little station at Papapouli, “have I seen such a thing,” telephones buzzing with reports that the funeral train had passed this or that station “without incident,” only here at Papapouli, whose stationmaster had just eaten a chicken decapitated by the previous day’s express, and could not manipulate the switch, so that the train got onto another track and all but collided with some freight cars seen fortunately by the engineer in time to put on his brakes, and slid two hundred yards before coming to a stop, the coffin, fastened down, though it was rocked in its bolted enclosure, the relatives glued their masks to the windowpanes, a suitcase fell from above, and the caterpillars, the policemen, into a tangle from which it seemed doubtful they would ever extricate themselves; for a moment the officer in charge suspected sabotage, feared that the corpse was going to be stolen, signaled, as soon as the train stopped, for his men to jump down from the coach and spread out like sharpshooters along the tracks, until of course they saw the train backing up and the engineer’s gesture of reassurance and realized that no hostile force was threatening them. The soul, watching the confusion from on high, came to rest on an elm tree at whose roots a young Thessalian shepherd was playing the flute, charming a snake or two thereabouts, while the stationmaster, once the train had got back onto the right track, breathed with relief and duly made his telephone call, adding yet another buzz to the telephone wires crossing the Pinios, that sweet green river indifferent to the rest of the plain, flowing in unchanging servitude ever since its Liberation; only the river, reflected the soul, dream of the plain-dwellers, which alone bore their dreams seaward to liberation, only the river, soul of the leveled life, its banks embroidered with willows, deep-rooted plane trees wading in its waters, would give way to the tremors and gooseflesh of adolescence before disappearing into the sea, just as she—his soul—before disappearing into cloud, could look beyond his dead body upon the world she was soon to lose. Now she descended, passed the vale of Tempe, passed the National Highway, the sugar factory with trucks full of sugar-beets lined up in front of it, reached the station at Larissa, through which the train shot like an arrow, leaving the little yoghurt vendor, hand in air, unable to understand why the peasants were brandishing rakes with red handkerchiefs tied on top, he thought it must be some Minister, one of the big landholders of the plain who often became Ministers in order to defend their interests, and so all the more expected the train to stop, but it shot past like a rocket, leaving behind only a veil of smoke and a bundle of newspapers thrown from a window to burst at his feet like a grenade. Morning newspapers, which said:

  “But, from whatever angle one surveys the incidents at Salonika, no one can entertain any doubt that they were a consequence of truly unendurable provocation on the part of Communistic elements. Unless the populace of Salonika had felt this provocation, why would anyone have bothered the assembled Communists? Had there been no loudspeakers broadcasting incendiary slogans, what law-abiding inhabitant of Salonika, happening on the vicinity, would have thought it necessary to take action? Wasn’t it precisely because of the provocation emanating from the Red orators that they felt such a need? And if, after this provocation, the Communists had not attempted to organize a protest march headed by the Communist deputy who was to meet with a fatal accident, would any of these events have occurred?

  “From the instant that the Communist organizers decided to conduct this march, in defiance of an order not to do so
, the subsequent events became inevitable. At that point in the demonstration the motor vehicle of Gazgouridis appeared. He was coming out of Spandoni Street—conceivably not by chance, just as the Communist and the Center parties claim—and he lunged intentionally upon the column of demonstrators. But here questions arise. How could Yango know that the Communists were organizing a march, how could he arrive with his pickup at just the right moment and get into just the right position to cause an unavoidable accident? Might he not have feared that the Communist demonstrators would attack him, lynch him? Even granting that the act may in fact have been premeditated—as has been brought out, the Communists murdered Yango’s father—once he had decided to assault the line of marchers with his vehicle, how would he have recognized the EDA deputy among so many demonstrators, and aimed for him, even if he was marching in front?

  “Communism, the bloody Communism which rages in our land and which has already in the recent past shed whole rivers of Greek blood, is attempting to exploit these incidents for the purpose of casting our country into disrepute abroad and of creating internal upheavals. We believe that the state is duty-bound at this juncture to take a decisive stand, and that it must begin with the IMMEDIATE DISSOLUTION of the subversive Bertrand Russell League and of the swindlers of ‘peace,’ who today are serving as the spearhead of revolutionary Communism.”

  The body imprisoned in the train saw nothing. The body was without memory. Memory had abandoned it at two minutes to ten on Wednesday evening. Clinically speaking, Z. was dead. From that moment on, no organ, no sense functioned. The body, the beautiful athletic body, lived inanimate, like wheels of a capsized car which—all contact lost with brakes and gears, everything smashed in the disaster—nevertheless keep spinning in the void. So it was with the body, the deep rattle in its throat serving as a kind of basso ostinato to the doctors’ efforts. There were many doctors. Some had come from abroad: Hungary, Germany, Belgium. They could do nothing. They marveled that an organism was still alive when all its centers had been paralyzed. The organism refused its death. It was too early for it to die. The headless body clung to an existence of its own. But now at last it had surrendered. And it was journeying in peace toward the grave. What bothered the soul was not so much having been evicted and forced to watch the autopsy. (Of course, it is disagreeable to discard a costume because they’ve botched it, to see it ripped to shreds before your very eyes. This part, however, she could bear.) What bothered her was a coroner, who had insisted from the outset—before the autopsy, as indeed after it, with all that it had brought to light—that the fracture could not have been caused by a blow dealt while Z. was standing upright. The sole cause, he said, was the “violent collision of the head with a stable, hard surface, such as the pavement”: in other words, the fall onto the asphalt. A coroner’s profession is a gruesome one. But death has no room for politics. Professional detachment is one thing, reflected the soul, and quite another to indulge in low politics over a corpse. Leave low politics to the living. For the dead, let there be only high politics. And this coroner, after returning to Athens—whence he had come uninvited—dispatched a report to be countersigned by his opposite number in Salonika. Backed up by two other doctors, however, the Salonika coroner maintained a contrary opinion. He believed the fracture to have been caused by a blow on the head, and he refused to sign. At that point the doctor from Athens was obliged to draw up another report which admitted as “probable” the contingency of a blow caused “by some contusive instrument, but without personally sharing this view.” All this sickened the soul through and through.

  The train raced demoniacally on, passing mountains and plains, a zipper drawn upon this great affair. But it was a broken zipper, one of those that reopen in back what they have closed in front. For no affair could be closed by a drugged train stopping nowhere. The case remained wide open like doors in the dog days. The train blew its whistle and raced on, panicked and guilty. The relatives feared the worst. The wife looked out the window, seeing nothing. Her mind was in the next car, where her husband was shut alone, as if in a dungeon, while the policemen ate their meal. She got up. On the one hand, he was dead. On the other, those who had killed him slept on. She could not stir, could not go anywhere. The train became a prison on wheels. She could stand no more. She was stifling. The alarm signal? Not to be left with this last image of him: under the oxygen tank, gasping for breath, pulsebeats getting feebler and feebler, surrounded by doctors no longer hoping for the miracle. One mountain followed another, one plain followed another. She saw nothing.

  Only at some point so high that the air was rarefied, they stopped to wait for a local connection, apparently a scheduled run there had been no time to cancel. There, high in the mountains, the policemen got down and stood guard around the train. There on the mountains, the high mountains, the soul perched herself on a post and waited for the klephts to come and steal the body. Waited for the brave men of the Resistance, for Ares Velouchiotis, to come out of their hideouts and fall upon the policemen and take possession of the body. For them to carry it to the peak, adorn it, roast many lambs and drink much wine, and then bury it up there among the eagles. All night long to dance—old Dimos with Leventoyannis—and when they were good and drunk, to start firing shots into the air, the way the cannons on Lycabettos boom out for royal funerals. Thus would the body find its place in Greekland, and be honored in keeping with ancestral tradition, though today the brave men of the Resistance were not on the mountains but in the cities. A whistle summoned the policemen from their thicket-urinals and they climbed back aboard the train. The connection had passed, they could start up again. The body was aware neither of the stop nor of the starting up, nor did it smell the mountain thyme. The body was like those third assistant engineers, who spend their lives deep in the bowels of ships, who, if the engine breaks down, never see a port or breathe the salt air of the open sea.

  At one station, somewhere after the train had returned to flat country, a steam engine replaced its diesel. And now the butterfly soul—the Papilio cresphontes, the Argynnis cybele, the Neonympha eurytus—must fly through smoke. Her beautiful iridescent colors blackened. Her wings grew heavy. And she grieved, needed protection, wanted to reenter a skin where nothing could touch her. Night was falling and the soul had always been afraid of darkness. These three nights without a roof over her head had been harrowing. But the body received no message from her, and she despaired. His batteries had broken down, his antennae, everything. A crippled typewriter in the junkshops of Monastiraki; a deaf-and-dumb machine. That’s how the soul felt when the sun’s fires began to dim.

  The train passed through level fields where the grain took courage from the setting sun. The ears of grain straightened as the light diminished. And in the breeze that came in the great benefactor’s wake they all rustled together, the ripe ears rise up, my love, let us dance till dawn! Formless waves, like those of the ocean, lapped the breakwater of the railway line. The deep breathing of a woman surrendered to the stars. And this beauty grieved the soul still more.

  An old woman drew the chain at the intersection. A tractor crossed the tracks. Now the sparse villages with their sparse lights glittered in the foothills. Night had fallen. The stations were projected upon the darkness like colored slides. The train did not pause at any of them. It raced and whistled demoniacally. A train whistling in the night, a train, the train, compartment Z-4383, engineer Kostas Konstantopoulos, assistant engineer Savas Polychronidis, a train, the train, and the body mute, a door closed at nightfall, the body, a tree uprooted in a thunderstorm, the body deprived of the caresses which once restored it, in a walnut coffin, a good coffin, but how desolate in there, without its soul!