Z, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  “Have you been able to obtain a pension?”

  I don’t know whether you loved me. My trouble is, I must keep you alive. My whole body is empty without your kisses. Other kisses, other embraces may console me, but they cannot replace what you were to me.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Z. Goodbye.”

  I know you loathed sentimentality. That’s why I must stop. I’ve been interrupted a number of times by a stupid reporter from a right-wing paper. I won’t mail this letter because I don’t know where you are. I shall read it later, perhaps to our children when they are grown up. It will show me that I once remembered you vividly and was afraid of losing you, and I shall have it when I shall have lost you forever, when you will have become a street, a public square, a novel, a play, a film, an art show, and I an old woman, burdened with the sad duty of being present at openings.

  Chapter 18

  The “individual whose identity has not been made public” remained for some time unidentified. The only thing known about him was that he had been approached by left-wing militants with a proposition that, for a financial consideration, he kill a right-wing deputy in reprisal for Z.’s death. At last he materialized, a man by the name of Pournaropoulos, from a village outside Kilkis.

  “I don’t have any money,” he told the reporters, “and I don’t even own a field. That’s why every two or three months I come down to Salonika to sell my blood.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “I stand in front of the main hospital and auction it. I have more blood than I need and less bread than it takes to keep the blood going. Therefore I sell the blood. They know me at the hospital, and if someone with the same blood group happens to be dying, I can sell it at a high price.”

  “Why don’t you volunteer to the Red Cross?”

  “Why doesn’t someone volunteer to give me something to live on? ‘Your death is my life’—isn’t that what they say? That’s my motto. And when you sell your blood just when the other guy needs it desperately, you get more for it. Like tickets at the football field just before the match begins.”

  “Black market.”

  “Red market, mister. So what? A peasant from our village sold one of his eyes and now he has enough to live on for the rest of his life. What’s wrong with selling a little blood? Besides, even the tourists do it. They come here without any money, sell their blood, and go to the bouzouki. Well, anyhow, last May 28, while I was waiting outside the hospital—the guard had informed the doctors, and they told me they’d call me because someone with B-type blood who’d been injured was being operated on—a black limousine stopped and a fellow got out. He was wearing dark glasses, so if I were to see him today I wouldn’t recognize him.”

  “Would you recognize the limousine?”

  “Not even that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m only a peasant. I don’t know anything about cars. If it was a horse now, I’d recognize it in a million. But all cars look alike, don’t they? They’ve all got four wheels and a steering wheel.”

  “All right, all right, go on.”

  “Well, the fellow asked me if I was the one who sold blood. I said yes and my first thought was that he must need me for something mighty urgent and I said to myself, ‘Yannis, we’ve struck it rich!’ But not at all! Instead of that, he made me a proposition to drink somebody else’s blood.”

  “He took you for a vampire?”

  “I don’t know anything about vampires. He told me that if I agreed to do a job I’d make more money than I make selling a hundred quarts of blood. I looked him over good and hard. To tell the truth, I wasn’t much taken with him. ‘Don’t you need money, for heaven’s sake?’ he asked me. I nodded. ‘Well, you’ll make a pile out of this.’ Then he gave me an idea what the plan was: I was to kill some Karamanlis deputy, that was it. He even told me the name.”

  “How did he want you to kill him?”

  “He didn’t tell me. But me, I told him I love Karamanlis, he’s one of our own people, a Macedonian, he’s a prince. He may not hear very well, but he’s got good sharp eyes. He got us a water tap for our village and he told us that next year, if we vote for him again, he’ll bring us electricity. So how could I go and kill someone on my own side?”

  “Would you have been willing to kill a person on the other side?”

  “I never hurt a fly in my life. I sell blood, I’m not a gangster. And I don’t read newspapers either. If I could read and if I knew what was going on, I would have understood what this was all about. I’d have caught on at once.”

  “Caught on to what?”

  “Who’s stupid—you or me? We’d done one of theirs in, they wanted to do one of ours in. I could have told the guy that he was knocking on the wrong door. But even at the risk of my life, I preferred to clear up the mystery. I pretended to accept the offer.”

  “So then, even without reading the newspapers, you did catch on.”

  “I’m no dope. Then the fellow told me to get into his car. I told the hospital guard that I’d come back next day, and we drove to Aristotelous Street and stopped. He told me to wait a minute while he dashed up to the office to let them know I was coming. And he left me there waiting in the car. I started to play with the doorknobs and buttons. I pushed one button and the windowpane began coming down by itself. What a contraption! When that happened, I stuck my head out the window, and I looked up, and I saw a big EDA sign spread across the front of the building. Then I got scared. Why should I look for trouble with the Communists? Two cousins of mine had their throats slit by the Communists. They did it with a can top. I may be poor, but I’m honest. And since I now understood that was the place the guy had meant when he said office, I opened the door and beat it. I went straight to the Security Police.”

  “How did you know where to find them?”

  “If you know enough to ask the way, you can find the North Pole. You think I couldn’t find the Security Police?”

  “Had you ever gone there before?”

  “No. And from there I went to the Public Prosecutor and told him the whole story. But I asked him to keep my name out of it, so I wouldn’t get into trouble with those guys.”

  “Why didn’t you get a policeman to follow you and let him catch them in the act, just as they were handing over the money to you?”

  “I didn’t want to get mixed up in it. I earn my bread with my blood.”

  “What else did this man say to you? Do you remember?”

  “He told me the people on the right are like the downy mildew that’s scourging our fields. ‘I don’t have any fields,’ I told him. ‘One more reason,’ he says to me then, ‘for you to do what I’m telling you. When we take power, the land will be distributed equally among all the peasants.’ ”

  “You’ve only made one gaffe, Mr. Pournaropoulos,” said Andoniou. “There’s just one person in Salonika who has an automobile with a button that automatically raises and lowers the windows. And that’s the well-known rightist terrorist, from your own haunts—Kilkis. You’ll be locked up for slander. Because, you understand, blood cannot turn to water.”

  Chapter 19

  An anticlimax by definition follows a climax. How can you have an anticlimax all by itself? Ever since you died, that’s what I’ve been experiencing. I reread what I wrote you the other day; and today I feel the need to continue, because I didn’t say everything.

  The night was sweet when it came down from the mountains and we welcomed it into our house. We opened all the windows to make it feel more at ease and we sent it packing whenever we wished. Love with music, music with love, it all belonged to us, do you remember? Now—this painful now, from which I can’t escape—now the night besieges me, stifles me in the widow’s weeds provided by your assassins.

  A question obsesses me: Why you and not someone else? Why you, who were not a Communist but a humanitarian in the broadest sense, a pacifist like everyone else? Then the other day I read the letter about you written by Pauling to Presid
ent Kennedy. Among other things—the biographical details were rather funny—he writes that what the Greek right struck out against in you was the spirit of cooperation with the left. The left they know and are not afraid of. But they fear just such men as you who lean more and more in that direction. The intention of the right was to intimidate the others. They succeeded in killing you, concludes Pauling, but they didn’t succeed in arresting the movement, which because of you goes on with increased momentum.

  Today I started moving. I’m going to my brother’s temporarily. I can’t live any longer at 7 Thessiou Street. Every time a board creaks I feel a thorn in my flesh. The book you ordered from abroad arrived. Things keep arriving every day, packages, letters, poems addressed to you, and they drive me to despair. I don’t have the courage to bear it alone. Today your son came in from play, in a state of panic. They’d been playing with their scooters and some child had threatened, “I’ll kill you the way they killed your dad.” He thinks you’re still in London and he imagined you had had an accident. I reassured him. But in the end my own eyes filled with tears.

  The whole house is in disorder, a kind of rectangular disorder—the movers come and go as if this place were a sanctuary. As I leave this nest of our love, my legs tremble and I don’t know how I’m going to manage, alone and exposed to the world. I talk to you at night for hours on end.

  This letter sounds like Romance Magazine. And I know you’d hate it if you read it. But I hate you for not writing to me. I’ve taken two sleeping pills, and I hope that in a little while I’ll fall asleep. I miss you unimaginably. The bed is too big for me, your coffin too narrow for you. Isn’t there some middle way? Can’t we find some compromise that will make your life and my death more bearable? Whoever lays a flower on your grave defiles my heart. Because from this point on I am indissolubly bound to you. That is why I hate you even more.

  Chapter 20

  The rock had become an obsession. Since the side of a mountain had broken away and blotted out the whole village of Mikro Horio at Karpenissi, Hatzis had felt certain that one day that rock was going to come crashing on his roof. The little house, his wife’s dowry, was on the outer edge of Salonika, where the neighborhood ended and the mountain reared itself, a hovering weight, primitive, ominous. An enormous rock hung over his roof like a curse. His wife was forever harping on the danger. But what could he do without money?

  It was March this year, during a night storm, that he heard strange cracking noises. At the time of the Mikro Horio disaster he had read in the papers that rainwater sapping away the earth beneath the surface had loosened the crag which crushed the village. He had children; when they grew up, he didn’t want them accusing him of being a neglectful father. The next day he started to build three cement columns to prop up the menacing rock.

  Not knowing much about building, he enlisted the aid of a cementworker friend. Together they put up frames to hold the cement. When it had set and the frames were removed, the rock had three strong buttresses. The job took two months. Nobody came around to interfere, for everyone knew what a difficult time he had of it. All his neighbors said was, “Bravo, Tiger, you should have done that long ago.” This was before Hatzis had become famous.

  For the time being the rock was no longer a menace, but presently a new, worse menace appeared. During the interval Hatzis had become a celebrity. He was the man whose jump into the pickup van, the night of the crime, had introduced a thread into the labyrinth. Since then his life had been threatened and he was often followed. It would be very easy, he knew, some evening, in his deserted neighborhood …

  It happened not at night but in the morning. At nine o’clock, three clerks from the Prefecture, accompanied by two workmen, knocked on his door. Introducing themselves as representatives of the City Planning Bureau, they asked to see Hatzis’s permit for building the columns on land he didn’t own. Hatzis told them he didn’t have a permit, and that he had put up the columns to keep the rock from breaking away and burying him, the way Mikro Horio had been buried.

  The gentlemen from the City Planning Bureau appeared unmoved by his pleas. They represented the law and the law said no one could build anything, even a column, without authorization. And so, to their great regret, they must demolish the columns immediately. They ordered the workmen to set to work without delay.

  Hatzis was outraged. If they did this, the rock would fall; the extremities of the columns were cemented to it. Did they want to shatter his little house? Who could possibly be bothered by these columns which no one could see anyway here at the end of town? Who had sent them? They’d come on their own, they said. Then why hadn’t they come earlier, why had they waited until now? Was it because they’d just heard about his part in the Z. affair? The three gentlemen weren’t going to listen to a word about politics. They were merely employees of the Prefecture, and as employees they were not allowed to express any opinion whatever. Meanwhile the workmen had got out their crowbars and sledgehammers and had begun the demolition. It had taken two months to build the columns; it would take two hours to pull them down.

  Hatzis rushed to the neighborhood café and telephoned Matsas the lawyer and told him about his latest difficulty. Matsas promised to take action at once.

  Before an hour had passed—the first column had already been torn down and the workmen were hacking away at the second—a limousine stopped in a dust cloud outside Hatzis’s door. The chauffeur opened the back door, and out stepped the Prefect himself in all his early-morning magnificence.

  “What is going on?” he demanded.

  “These columns were erected without a permit,” answered the senior clerk of the City Planning Bureau. “We’re pulling them down.”

  “Stop at once.”

  “But that’s the order we were given, Mr. Prefect.”

  “Well, I’m canceling that order.”

  The entire neighborhood—old women, little children, housewives, men from the café—stood watching the scene, ready to intervene. Since the Z. affair, the Tiger had become in a sense the pride of the neighborhood. The Prefect turned to consider these people: women with kerchiefs around their heads, old women with their spindles, unemployed men waiting to be called to Germany, an oppressive group of mute and tense human beings. He felt uncomfortable. The chauffeur was busy chasing away youngsters who kept fingering the limousine’s gleaming chromium.

  “I am ordering you,” the Prefect repeated in a ringing voice, “to stop the demolition at once. And the community must begin reconstruction work within one hour. The entire rock must be sealed with cement and the whole thing rebuilt. I repeat: within one hour! Our country is obliged to support heroic men of the people like Hatzis. The step taken by the City Planning Bureau was, to say the least, badly timed.”

  With this finale worthy of a Neapolitan operetta, he shook Tiger’s hand twice and got back into his limousine. This was the same Prefect who on the day of the assassination had done nothing to protect Z., although warned of the danger by Matsas. The situation was different now. The disbanding of Autocratosaur’s quasi-governmental organization had been decreed on his authority only a day before. His intervention on Hatzis’s behalf, added to yesterday’s deed, made the Prefect feel like a good Christian who has performed his Sunday act of charity.

  “That was a premonition,” thought Hatzis when they’d gone. “Now it’s rabbit and partridge season on my mountain. I wonder if I shouldn’t expect a hunting accident?”

  Chapter 21

  The Investigator is cornered. He is hemmed in on all sides. The pack is closing in on him. The Investigator is a door leading not to freedom but to prison. Since getting Mastodontosaur incarcerated in Yendi-Koule, the Investigator has become the target of the dinosaurs.

  The dignitaries bustle about. The Minister is permanently settled in the “little palace.” The Generalissimo; the Grand Judge of the Areopagus; the personal adviser of the Prime Minister. Interviews. Telephone calls. Tension. Layers of paint slapped on to hide the cracks. B
ut at this stage it is difficult to conceal the truth. The Grand Judge of the Areopagus expresses anxiety: “Are you never going to finish the Z. affair? You promised to end the investigation in June and it’s already August. You deceived me. What are you doing anyway? Don’t you see that by examining witnesses incessantly you’re likely to get confused?”

  The Investigator knows all this. He is hunted. Doubly hunted, by those above him and by the masses who turn to him as their only salvation. The Investigator keeps vigil. He works eighteen hours out of twenty-four. He has already formed an opinion, but it’s of no avail to utter it. He must allow the facts to speak for themselves.

  “Why did you issue a warrant for the arrest of an officer of the police corps? Why did you place him in custody? Hadn’t we agreed that officers would be jailed only if certain to be convicted? Yet the Public Prosecutor tells me the evidence at your disposal is not enough to convict Mastodontosaur, only enough to justify summoning him. However, I am not able to say any more to you about this matter over the telephone. What you do not seem to understand is that your activities are damaging the very structure of our society.”

  The Investigator is young, handsome, courageous. The hope of a cure for the rottenness. A dream moored to the dock. A door opened into the prison. Without water, without light. He rummages in the black hole. “I am performing my duty.” He keeps working. He weaves the fabric for the merchants who will come to determine the price. But it must be knit firmly enough to endure the cold. With two needles, chopsticks, he counts each stitch, reels off the rice grain by grain. Each jerk of the needle is sagely calculated. Each stitch in relation to another stitch.