Z, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  Once the assassins had begun to be wrested one by one from their sanctuary and locked up in prison, attention focused on those still at large; among these was that brash EKOF student who was just waiting for more trouble to flare up so he could assault someone else. But the various witnesses produced sufficient evidence to bring about Kareklas’s arrest. Kareklas himself, of course, denied everything when he appeared before the Investigator. Specifically, he claimed he had had an affair with Pirouchas’s daughter and she, feeling he was betraying her with other women and knowing his extreme right-wing political views, had decided to take revenge. The evening of the incidents he had had a date with another girl and she knew it. Instead of throwing vitriol in his face, he said, she did something much worse. She accused him of having beaten her injured father. “If I understand the situation correctly,” Pirouchas said to himself while his daughter sat on the bed changing the compresses on his forehead, “Kareklas has been locked up not only for assault but for slander as well.”

  * A student organization of the extreme right wing.

  Chapter 15

  Meanwhile Salonika, “the south wind’s bride,” had surrendered to the sweet torpor of summer. Its daily routine continued undisturbed. Through the prison bars of Yendi-Koule, Yango watched the somnolent city lulled by the noon breeze off the gulf; it reached him untainted by the New City’s raw cement, since the prison stood on a barren hill. From another wing he could even see his neighborhood, below the huge horseshoe of the new stadium. Twice he had attempted suicide. A waste of time. They had forgotten him. He believed he was a scapegoat for the authorities. And he remembered the words of wisdom of Mastro-Kostas that Wednesday morning at the stand on Vasileos Irakleiou Street: “You’ve got a family, Yango … Don’t get involved in such things … The big fish eats the little one …” Life continued without him. Nobody needed him any longer. His silence was the only precious thing for them, and it wouldn’t be difficult to obtain. Vango, in prison, found what he had always lacked: sleep. He slept endlessly. He got fat and round; and from time to time, just to practice, he would whitewash a wall. Baron, however, got thin; his heart almost broke every Sunday when he heard the cheers from the football stadium. And later on, when Autocratosaur joined them, he acted like a teacher who had failed the same examinations as his pupils.

  And life in Salonika went on. Aristophanes’ The Birds was being performed at the Park Theater. The new Baxe-Tsifliki beach was inaugurated. At Tagaredes, on the road to Michaniona, the land was being feverishly broken up into plots to be sold to Greek workers coming back from Germany. Esso-Pappas continued expropriating the fields near Diavata to establish his big industrial unit there. People died, got married, went swimming. They danced at Swings and were bored at Do-Re. A patient escaped from the city psychiatric clinic. The sea washed up an unidentified corpse. The Ogre hadn’t been arrested yet. The ladies who raised money for the Home for the Blind played cards every afternoon. In the evenings the verandas were hosed down with water which drained onto the sidewalks as though the buildings were urinating. The moon turned moldy over Aretsou. There were relatively few campers this year. And eventually the opinion of the Judge of the Areopagus was made public. It held the police force responsible for a “breach of duty, with criminal intent.”

  Chapter 16

  “If I hear one more word against the Royal Greek Police Corps, I’m going to commit suicide.” He drew a .45 from his jacket and, with his plump finger on the trigger, pressed it against his graying temple.

  Samidakis was appalled. He couldn’t believe that the Generalissimo himself was talking this way.

  “All right, I’ll sign,” he said.

  “That’s the way! Good lad! Now you’re talking like somebody from Crete!”

  He had had Samidakis in his office four whole hours, trying to persuade him to retract his testimony about the policeman’s shaving of his head. What with the slanderous campaign now raging against the police force, this affair, if it came out into the open, would be the bitter end.

  “All you have to say is you shaved it yourself.”

  “Yes, but for what reason?”

  “Because of the heat.”

  “Like this, without leaving a hair?”

  “Well, because you’re getting prematurely bald. Where’s your barber?”

  “Near Kamara.”

  “We can make him declare that you’re losing your hair.”

  “But, Generalissimo, sir …”

  “Call me comrade.”

  “Well then, comrade! … When you lose your hair …”

  Here’s what had happened. The previous evening—exactly two months to the day since Z. was killed—Samidakis and some other students had gone to the spot where the hero had fallen, to leave flowers as a memorial. The point where Spandoni Street joins the public square was watched constantly from neighboring houses and shops by plain-clothesmen. Aware of this, the students had planned simply to toss the flowers on the pavement and make a quick getaway. What Samidakis had not foreseen was that one of his loose moccasin-style shoes would get stuck in the tar softened by the heat. He was stooping down to pull it out when a policeman came up from behind, scissors in hand, and clipped a large tuft of hair from the top of his head. This tonsure, which resembled one of the swathes cut in the mountain forests against fires left by careless shepherds, could not be concealed. There was nothing to do but have his head shaved. Then he had gone to the Public Prosecutor and testified that the policeman had cropped his hair for leaving roses at the spot where Z. had been assassinated.

  At midnight the police came and got him out of bed. He was wanted immediately at the station. His landlord, who knew all about it, told them he hadn’t come home. But they forced their way to his room and took him away.

  “Be gentle, the boy has a weak heart,” the landlord warned them.

  At the station they conducted him straight to a room where the Generalissimo was seated behind a desk, having arrived the same evening from Athens by special plane. It was impossible to let the newspapers print a story about a policeman who cropped the hair of a student. What a scandal! The police force was under enough fire from the libelous Commies. After the verdict rendered by the Judge of the Areopagus, the airing of this case would complete the cycle of shame.

  “Welcome! You know who I am?”

  “I know you from the newspapers,” Samidakis answered.

  “All right. Sit down. And now talk to me as if I were your godfather. Tell me everything that happened.”

  “I’ve already told everything in my deposition.”

  “I want to hear it from you.”

  Samidakis repeated the whole story.

  “Impossible!” exclaimed the Generalissimo when he finished.

  “Why impossible?”

  “It’s impossible that what you say took place.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will.” And pressing a button, he asked to be connected with Athens.

  The student began to catch on.

  “Now you’re going to talk with your uncle,” said the Generalissimo.

  The student did in fact have an uncle who was head secretary in a key ministry.

  “Yes, Uncle, this is Samidakis. How’s my aunt? Yes, they cut my hair … Impossible? Why impossible? No one forced me to say it … No, I don’t belong to the Bertrand Russell Society … Nor to the Z. Youth … You want me to tell the truth? But that’s what I’m doing … The other truth? But there aren’t two truths, Uncle!”

  Since the cord on the receiver was short, he had to stoop over the desk, and not liking this servile posture, he walked around the desk to a point where he could talk standing up straight. From his new position he could observe the Generalissimo stroking his thick mustache with the air of some great landowner in Czarist Russia. His uncle was speaking to him in the severe tone he had adopted since Samidakis’s father died and he assumed the obligations of legal guardian. He had difficulty hearing and was finally cut of
f.

  “How long has it been since you were in Astrachades?” the Generalissimo asked. Astrachades was the village in southern Crete that both of them came from.

  “I haven’t been back since my father died,” Samidakis replied coldly.

  “I haven’t been back in five years,” said the Generalissimo. “But today somebody sent me some magnificent pears from there. They smell like home. Mm!” He opened the desk drawer and took one out. “Have one.”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “Go ahead, eat it, I tell you—you’ll have a change of heart.”

  “Do you think a pear will make me retract my testimony?”

  “It’s not the pear,” the Generalissimo said, puffing up like a turkey. “It’s Crete, where this pear comes from and where you and I come from too. We Cretans, Samidakis, aren’t like the other Greeks. We’re a distinct race. We have a language of our own, a tradition of our own. We produced El Greco.”

  “And Kazantzakis.”

  “He was an atheist,” said the Generalissimo. “And a Communist. We Cretans are never Communists. It’s a disease that never touched our island. Even Venizelos fought the Communists, though … Well, to get to the point, we must support each other. The rest of the Greeks are jealous of us. The openly avowed aim of the Communists is to heap calumny upon the prestige of the Royal Greek Police Force. A stupid policeman, who in the middle of the street shaves the head of a student of the National Aristotelian University of Salonika, is of course behaving barbarously—which by extension proves that the entire police force is barbarous. With this Z. affair they threaten to tarnish the reputation of our incorruptible police. But I call the fatherland to witness, they’re going too far, I shall commit suicide! We’re not letting the Bulgars make our laws!”

  The Generalissimo began to weep like a baby. The orderly who was present at the scene played nervously with his wedding ring. Samidakis was in a quandary. And when the Generalissimo drew out the revolver and pressed it against his temple, he looked as if he were saluting someone even higher than he. The student passed his hand over his shaven head, and at the touch all his fury blazed up again.

  “Well, if that’s the way you want it,” he said. “But on one condition.”

  “Whatever you wish, my boy.”

  “In a few months I’ll be going into the army. I’m ready to say that I willfully shaved my head; but I want your written assurance that when I present myself at the recruiting center at Corinth they won’t shave me again, as the regulations require.”

  The Generalissimo sprang out of his chair gleefully. He wiped his tears with his handkerchief and blew his nose so loudly that the whole police station vibrated. Then they destroyed Samidakis’s previous statement. The student signed a new one. That night he slept at the police station to avoid encounters with the press.

  Chapter 17

  A reporter knocked on her door. She opened it.

  “I realize, Mrs. Z., that you have refused to make any statement. I realize the futility of my visit. Still I wonder if you could tell me …”

  I miss your face terribly, face like the earth, as you used to say of your mother’s; I miss your eyes, need them to make me radiant; miss your lips, for without them I cannot love my own. I miss everything about you. Forty days have passed since then, forty-two days since I stood at your bedside in the hospital and you didn’t know me, while the doctors worked to revive a dead brain in a body still intact. But only today I realized that little by little you are dissolving within me. I recollect details of your body; I can no longer remember you in your entirety. Even in the old days, there came times when we were apart for months, but deep within me I knew I should see you again, and your absence perfectly corresponded to my shock of joy at our eventual meeting. Now …

  “How do you explain the fact that you entrusted your case to Communist lawyers?”

  I know all this is happening in a region that has ceased to concern you, that no longer has anything to do with you, since you are dead. Otherwise it would be so easy: a movement, a word, a quarrel, a kiss on the floor of a boat, a tremor shaking the body, a cigarette, and everything would become human, quite human. We would understand each other; others would understand us too. Now no one can understand me because you have left me alone in my grief and become a symbol, a banner for others.

  “Are you distressed at the political exploitation of your husband’s death?”

  I know you always wanted this to happen. I think your ambition was justified. “God helps those who have no goal,” you used to say. But it is one thing, believe me, to have such an ambition while living, and quite another to have fulfilled it in death. I was orphaned by you at that very moment when the world made you its own.

  “Are you thinking of looking for some kind of work?”

  The morning sun through the window is not the same, it does not reveal you at my side. The night’s black swathe is poison. Where will our next meeting be? On what dead point of the horizon?

  “Have you ever considered writing a book about the tragedy?”

  Night descends upon you like a veil, hiding those fine points that were visible only after you had shaved. Details that make a face different from all others. The pores are the first to fade. Then the mole. Then the furrow at the base of the nose. The relief vanishes as in a badly printed map where the green of mountains runs into the blue of the sea.

  “Did you ever quarrel with your husband about ideology?”

  “I am without you” means “I no longer know what is happening to me and I don’t care to know.” A heightened lethargy in the depths of my being. The blood thickens in my veins. To be without you is to have nothing left. Light of your street, darkness of my house. To others you mean the rising sun, for me you have darkened the moon.

  “How do you spend your time here in your retreat?”

  Now I am looking for the particles of air that have preserved traces of your passage. I am looking for the streets that loved you, for the houses touched by your glance. I cannot rise to the occasion, as they say. I am inconsolable. Nothing said about or written about you has any meaning for me, nor does the investigation. I think about these things only when the lawyer calls. Afterwards the abyss opens: a void full of you.

  “Was your husband tender with you?”

  I miss you terribly. Nothing has any savor. And although you could not possibly be more present—everyone is talking about you, every newspaper I pick up mentions you—still I am hideously alone, because only your human presence could assure me that you haven’t become a phantom in the minds of others, a means of relieving their own frustrations.

  “Do you intend to remarry?”

  Strangest of all, I am no longer jealous of your former mistresses. On the contrary, I seek them out, ask for them, want to know them. I believe that if each of us contributed the part of you she knew, we might all together be able to resurrect you. If each contributed her bit of stolen warmth, we might be able to rekindle your fire. Outside the heat is stifling, but indoors it’s cold as ice!

  “How long will you wear mourning?”

  I talk to myself, to the wall. I have taken down your photograph. Now that Greece is covered with photographs of you, I think I have the right—haven’t I?—to imagine you alive, moving, not framed and frozen by the click of the shutter. To others a paradise, for me a wasteland.

  “Is your silence your own wish, or imposed by others?”

  And your eyes are fixed in time. What troubles me is that last image of you. All the others, strange to say, have dimmed, or return only after an exhausting effort to remember. The morning you left for Salonika, you said something about the coffee, said it would make you miss your plane.

  “This tragedy is a trump card for the Communists. Have you anything to say about this, since you are not a Communist?”

  The church bells are pealing. It’s Sunday. I imagine you on some other island, I’ve missed the boat and cannot come to you tonight. How will I get through a wh
ole week of waiting for next Sunday’s boat? I imagine myself at a railway crossing and the guard has put up the chain between us, an endless train roars over the rails, with as many cars as the years I shall not see you. Only at fleeting moments, through the spaces between the cars, I catch a rare image of you waiting for me on the far side.