Z, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  “Greece—we shall never weary of proclaiming it—needs to silence its discords and quarrels. Our enemies are jealous of our progress, and a number of foreign states would like to see us plunged into the abyss of anarchy. It has become customary for people to excuse Mr. Papandreou’s insane mistakes by suggesting that they are a consequence of his passion for power. But however violent this passion may be, the leader of the Center Union Party cannot possibly be unaware that it is not the knight’s steed of Democracy he has mounted, but the rebellious bull of Communist anarchy.”

  The train tore the fabric of night, and the lady watched her little Pekingese trying to cover up its “misbehavior,” unsuccessfully, because there was parquet underfoot, not dirt. However, the mess did have to be concealed because it spoiled the aesthetics of the floor. She pressed the button on her desk, summoning the maid, and ordered her to clean it up. And then, taking her little dog in her arms, she went on writing:

  “The nationalists in this country are sincerely grieved about the death of Z., because respect for human life is one of their fundamental guiding principles. And it is these citizens who are today being shamelessly accused of responsibility for Z.’s death. The truth is that, in accusing the nationalists, the extreme left wing and all the dark forces standing behind it mean to undermine the foundations of the entire edifice of our national, civic, and religious way of life: our Church, our educational system, our Armed Forces, our police system, our judicial system … Mr. Papandreou and the people on his side are gravely deluded if they think that, by outdoing the extreme left with their slanderous charges …”

  The little dog was squirming in her arms. The lady broke off writing to soothe it. Then the maid came back with a plastic dustpan, bent down, picked up the droppings, and sprayed the area with deodorant. The lady got up, still holding her Pekingese in her arms, went over to the spot, and rubbed his little snout in it. In protest the Pekingese tried to sink its teeth into her wrist, but the lady, who knew all about little dogs, let him go in time. Then she returned to her desk and continued, just as the train was passing the royal residence at Tatoï:

  “If we examine candidly the attitude of the extreme left in this matter, it would not be difficult to show that it is by no means grieved by what has happened. If the respect due a dead man permitted, we might say that, on the contrary, its members rejoice. For now they have their Person, their Victim, their Hero. And, indeed, precisely he whom they wanted: a brilliant scientist, a top athlete, a good husband and affectionate father; not a Communist Party member, a young, enthusiastic politician recently celebrated for his strivings for peace rather than for his efforts on behalf of the politics of the Kremlin. Their exploitation of the funeral bier, the free rein given to naïve emotionalism, the laments and the weeping women, the petitions from the seamstresses and the construction workers, all show clearly how the extreme left seeks to profit from the tragedy …”

  The soul sighed above Tatoï, where the royal estates are carefully fenced in to keep the pheasants from running away. She saw the palace where the train whistle crept in like a snake, chilling to whoever noticed it; she saw the pine trees weeping tears of resin, and she too wept because of the fenced-in woods. Gliders from the airport at Tatoï approached, reminding her of the great flight she herself would soon be making. But now Athens came into distant view, a meadow of lights tremulously playing, candles lit to welcome his body, behind the smoke curtain of Eleusis, whose mysteries would remain mysteries forever (for the initiates disappeared without leaving texts or bas-reliefs or ikons), under the protective smokestack and the blue flame of the oil refineries, huge metal tanks, like silver dollars seen under a magnifying glass; sweet Athens, across from ancient Salamis, where the cargoless ships were moored, alongside the dockyards of Scaramanga, where starvation wages no less than its layers of polluted air after so many hours in the open country caused the lepidopter soul to tremble. The lies were over and she had reached her destination. At a moment like this she wanted to be like the body: to understand nothing, to suffer nothing.

  However, she had no reason to complain, she reflected, as she spied in the distance the skeleton of the Acropolis, all lit up (if only for the Sound and Light performance), since so very many had died before her without having given the least bit of what they carried within them. She at least had been able, had given something that would outlast her dissolution: she would become a symbol. Old streets, beloved streets, neighborhoods where every tree stood sentinel, little houses built on the sly, whole households inhabiting the remains of trucks, without water, without light, though everything around them was lit with electricity.

  “It’s mad of Z.’s relatives and friends to insist on displaying the body in the Chapel of St. Eleutherios, by the Metropolis Cathedral.”

  “Tako, did you phone the Archbishop again?”

  “I did phone.”

  “And what did he say? Will he give in to them?”

  “He talked out of both sides of his mouth. I don’t like that at all. They phoned him from the Palace too, but apparently he did the same with them.”

  “Phone him again. He has to give a clear answer. Tell him there’ll be disturbances; tell him that blood will be shed, that they’ll burn down the church, that … Tell him whatever comes into your head, only convince him! I’d phone him myself, but I’m afraid of losing control and telling him where to go. Phone him again.”

  These hands will never again touch human hands. These hands will return to water. They will become rich earth to nourish the flowers. These hands that held the lancet and cured human pain, free of charge. This face will never plunge into the sea again. These lips will not kiss again. A body enclosed, and returned to its sender; a letter stamped “Departed without a forwarding address.” Body with blood frozen in the veins, like a photograph on the screen, frozen at the moment of greatest movement in the street, in the shops. Now, at this very moment, everything comes to an end.

  “A secretary entered from the next room and whispered something in his ear. The Archbishop shook his head. ‘I’ll take it in the next room,’ he said. And addressing the relatives and friends of Z., he added: ‘More telephone calls.’

  “He left the room and in a few minutes returned. As he sat down with a sigh, he murmured: ‘It was about this matter again. They communicated to me the wishes of a very high personage whom I would not like to displease. And I put a question to myself: if all these eminent people in responsible positions are so anxious, mustn’t there be something to it? Mightn’t trouble indeed occur? In this new telephone call they mentioned bloodshed and the danger that hundreds of people might be killed. My responsibility is great. I’m in a most difficult position, my children.’

  “ ‘Your Holiness,’ said a cousin of Z.’s then, ‘no trouble is going to break out. You may rest assured on that score. But if you did refuse us the chapel, your action would have highly unfavorable repercussions among the people, and you would become a target for criticism abroad. The man in question died with Christ’s message on his lips, the message of peace and love.’ ”

  May, too, is a cruel month. The earth reabsorbs its fruits. The first flowering and the second are over. Now, heavily, like ears of grain, everything returns to its beginning. Everything is over. Even memory will be lost. To live again perhaps in others, nourished by their blood. His own memory, that of his own soul and body, will wane and be eclipsed. And yet, no, no, reflected the butterfly soul Satyrodes canthus. It cannot be, everything must not be over. Where a hero falls, a people is born. It cannot be, it isn’t possible for me to die. When? How? I do not know. You too will remember me, sweet, beloved body. You will remember me eternally, because I loved you very much. You will remember me. You who reveled in the sea, you whom the sun wearied, you who wanted to make love even without me, you, body, will remember me. Now that you are going into earth, remember my love for you; it will never let you die. My love, if only at this moment I could take your hand! If you could talk to me, look at m
e. I am tired. How? Why did everything end like this? Without my enjoying you as you declined, without my learning to lose you little by little. You left me too abruptly, and I have a sharp emptiness in my arms, through which the wind whistles. I am all of me an empty cistern, without you.

  “The Archbishop paused a moment in thought. Then he turned to the EDA representative and said: ‘Do you guarantee that there will be no trouble?’

  “ ‘We give you our word, Your Holiness, that on our side absolute order will be preserved. If there is any breach of order, it will be created deliberately by the government and the police.’

  “ ‘Very well, I give you the chapel. God help you.’ ”

  Body beloved, adored in the stadiums and in the fire, body which even the most horrible alterations have left so much my own, if only I might have you near me one single evening more, I’d give you leave to go. My eviction was too sudden. I’d never supposed that anyone else could possess you. And now what? Your hands, just your hands, and that quickening—how I miss it all! I’m so alone! I have literally no place in this world. No place and no pleasure. As for reincarnation—there is none! I shall lose myself too. I shall become vapor, atmosphere for the birds to stir on their migrations. The solitude is unbearable without your nerves to explode with. Your nerves, threads of a warm sweater unraveled stitch by stitch. A warm sweater that I wore, and the world was mine. You held life and the living in your embrace, and I rested easy. Now you are going to leave me. You are leaving me. And I shall remain alone.

  “The hour, four minutes before midnight. The special train comes into the station at Athens with a wail that resounds like a funeral chant. It brakes, it stops; the crowd shoves, people trample one another to get up front, nearer the door of the sealed freight car which contains Z.’s remains.

  “The door is unsealed. A coffin laden with wreaths of flowers, and now overspread with the Greek flag, is borne to the hearse. And the throng of people instantly divides to make way for the dead deputy.

  “A one-minute silence. Then two sobs are heard. And cries:

  “ ‘Z., our hero, you’re not dead!’

  “ ‘Z., you will live with us forever!’

  “A thunderous shout shakes the station and immediately afterwards the National Anthem rises from thousands of throats.

  “Outside car Z-4383, an employee affixes a sign: NO ADMITTANCE ALL PERSONS FORBIDDEN TO ENTER TO BE DISINFECTED.”

  The procession advanced slowly and the soul reveled to see so many bodies protecting her own. From on high, they became one single body, as on Good Friday, with the flag in the middle. The streets ran in new directions. The lights were transformed into candles, which melted as he was carried past. And the policemen escorting the procession might have been those who officiate at the Good Friday ceremonies, armed with rifles.

  They were taking him to the chapel by the Metropolis Cathedral. There they would leave him until Sunday. Day of Resurrection. And the crowd tightened further and further around his dead body, as if Roman soldiers might steal it.

  The omnipresent Caiaphas radioed instructions to all the police patrol cars. When the body had been deposited in the Chapel of St. Eleutherios—without any incident—he felt relieved; he accompanied Pontius Pilate home. On the way they talked about Sunday.

  “Strict measures must be taken, Draconian measures.”

  “The entire force will be on hand,” Caiaphas assured him. “With tear gas, fire hoses, and all the paraphernalia.”

  “I’m quite anxious,” said Pilate.

  They took leave of each other at three o’clock in the morning, wishing each other pleasant dreams.

  But events belied their fears: no incident occurred, not even on Resurrection Day. The only “incident,” reflected the soul, was this extraordinary mass of flowers, the like of which had never been seen. The entire springtime came to the funeral, floating in from all sides, passing first through the suburbs and then for three whole hours occupying the city of Athens, fragrant at her heart of hearts. “There was no flower left in all of Attica.”

  “Immortal!”

  “He lives!”

  “No more blood!”

  “He lives! He lives!”

  With battle cries such as these, the Romans might rest easy. Wars are not waged with carnations, however many, however red. Neither are revolutions. And yet the finger remained on the trigger. And though ineffably bitter, the butterfly soul Neonympha eurytus tasted deliverance of a sort. It wasn’t that crowds inundated streets and squares around the Cathedral: it was the fact that this crowd constituted a single body. And if one person had been missing, nothing would have been altered. Even if ten, a hundred, a thousand persons had been missing, the body of the people, come to restore their hero to life, would have remained indissoluble. This was the soul’s consolation. Her body had served to bring about a sudden, unbreakable union of numberless human molecules. So be it! What she had lost, the others had gained a hundredfold. And the idea of peace, for which the one body had been sacrificed, suddenly became flesh and blood in the rarefied air. The same immortality that flooded the streets flooded also the hearts of men. The sea is inexhaustible; it is full of unexploitable riches. It will not dry up when you lean from your small boat and draw a pail of water. The sea is what never ends.

  And so, between two heavens, the soul followed the procession of the Resurrection. She well knew, now, that the body had not died, since a whole people thronged around its coffin. She knew too that immortality is whatever survives in the memory of others. And the cry that reigned throughout the whole journey was “He lives!” No one would admit that death existed in the realm of the idea. Death exists only for the individuals who one day discover with stupefaction that their private little lives come to an abrupt end. At that point they panic. And must shut themselves up in psychiatric hospitals to recover. There is no death when by falling you help a people to rise, when your monument has become the very scale and standard of a people.

  “In the foreground came the young people with the wreaths of flowers. Each wreath was held by two boys and two girls, taking turns. The members of the Peace Committee and the Bertrand Russell League followed, holding sprays of roses and carnations. Not far behind came the Philharmonic Municipal Band of Piraeus. An enormous banner with the symbol of disarmament was carried by the young people of the B. Russell–Piraeus branch. Z.’s fellow athletes marched in front of the hearse, displaying the trophies won by the dead Balkan champion. All along the route, people crowded on balconies of apartment houses threw flowers as the procession passed. Citizens of every age and class lined the whole length of Mitropoleos Street, Philhellinon Street, Syngrou Avenue, Anapafseos Avenue. The cries ‘Long live Z.’ ‘No more blood!’ ‘He lives!’ ‘Peace—Democracy!’ were rebroadcast as though this ceaseless mass of people were an electric cable accompanying the procession along the whole endless way to the cemetery.”

  When they arrived there, the soul came to rest, in profound anguish, like the kite at its zenith when you see it suddenly halt, a motionless speck in the sun, while on the ground the kite string in the child’s hand relaxes, just as above deep waters his fishing line slackens inward without revealing the exact spot where it has touched the sea’s floor—so proving once again that up and down are the same; arrived there, the soul came to rest, waiting for them to set the body down so that she could ascend, waiting for the earth to receive him so that she could head high up, up and down, body and soul, making only one; until after having come to a halt above the huge body of the halted world, at one point she had to descend again for a clearer view of an old woman dressed in black who darted through the crowd, pulling her hair hysterically and crying just as they laid him in the grave: “Wake up, Z.! We’re waiting for you! Wake up!”

  Which sent a shock through the crowd, for this old woman with her simple words had expressed precisely what an entire people was feeling at that moment. And the soul sighed, knowing that what the old woman had said in her simplici
ty could not be, for the body had plainly not gone to sleep, it had been cleft asunder, disfigured, deprived of its foundations, and the total demolition of the house was being completed.

  Big rooms where they had lived together, she and he, with windows open to the sun and wind, spacious rooms without a spider or a figment of mold, this house, his body, was descending into earth. In these rooms they had seen innumerable suns rise through the bodies of neighboring houses, through her thickets who lay all night long at his side. Here the soul had built her hearth, her nest, a house adored by her as well as by that other woman, those other women. In its place now remained nothing but wind. The house had displaced a certain volume of air, and now the gap was closing. The house was sinking, in ruins, into the earth from which it had risen. Its raw materials, now mere worthless rubble, were returning to earth. And her grief was boundless as she watched earth reassume this house, her hearth, big rooms with windows open, Thessiou Street, number 7.

  At the moment when I’m losing you, she thought in her pain, at this last instant, after which I shall neither see you again nor caress your beloved form, this voice of yours that uttered my everything I felt, your arms linked with the cypresses, your nerves, conductors of a whole world’s power and light, at the moment of losing you, do not say that what we lived was a lie. Suddenly this earth which is swallowing you consumes me as well. I rise without wanting to, I am rising higher, higher. We are losing one another.

  Ships from the North no echoing trace of your passage, fires that have burned and left no ashes behind, and you, my house, my warmth, who gave me new faith in life, legs on which my world rested, you, now, hands of light, eyes without my image, why, why are you leaving me like this, with so much pain, such anguish and fatigue, a stopped clock in the sky, I keep ascending, ascending without wanting to, as you are descending without wanting to, there is no hope of finding you again, I know there is none, I do not want to leave, let me at least stay near what you loved, when we lived, in our house, with our pictures, the very chinks in the wall, I want to stay near the streets where you lived, but I cannot, I am rising, leaving, vanishing into space and I don’t know how to tell you, my house, my love, I miss you, I miss you horribly, there is no wine to drown your memory, I knew you or did not, if I had truly known you, you would not now be escaping from me, me, raving on because I can less and less make out what is happening below, more and more the people, the crowd gathered to see you off, are turning into an inkblot, a black smudge on the map of the world, this world that I am leaving and do not want to leave, for the grain is sweet before the harvest, and your hair sweet shining like grain to the wind’s touch and mine, and your large mouth molded for kisses, I miss you now shamelessly, I curse you, hate you, worthless body that they killed, thing, cipher, house that surrendered to the city planner, dumb thing, and defenseless, ridiculous thing too, disappearing like this without a pang of remorse, without the least alarm sounded in the almond grove of the stars, and stupid, don’t even feel that you might miss me also, don’t even know that I am orphaned by you, I who know you don’t know it, ah, why spend so much precious time with you, why not try to slip in somewhere else, form some lasting relationship, don’t know how good it is never to have been born and how horrid to die just when you want most to live, I see nothing below me any more, a poor photograph of land and water in some intermediate state, neither city nor Greece; I don’t know where I’m going or who cut my string, only that I am going, and tell me why, why don’t I have your hand now to caress me, tell me, why don’t I have your smile, where are you, what are you doing, I am losing myself as you are, and I need to know how you are faring in that darkness, that dampness riddled with furtive subterranean railways and undermined foundations, I need to know, in that inferno you have entered, what you feel as the fever sears you, for up here, in this intense light hardly different from your own intense darkness, I have lost contact, the Hertzian waves bring me no messages from that world, and yet that world exists, it does, only you and I exist no more, only you and I, my house with curtains and tall palm trees, with all the things that made us one, what will become of me now, I’ve never been sentimental, I am losing myself but not my feeling for you, it is terrifying, if at least I could forget you, if at least I weren’t suffering, I am losing myself, it isn’t the sky here, big birds lie sleeping on couches of air, a different kind of transparency, a different depth and density, yet more than anything now I miss your voice, miss more than anything your laugh, your bravado, your strong arms round the whole world. That embrace ended, the world ends as well.