... and Dreams Are Dreams

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  “It would be quite a joke if you passed on some kind of disease to me from the American,” she said, since she was unable to adjust the air-conditioning (it was controlled by the engine room), and she had to let off steam somehow. But the fact that she had thought of this afterward and not before was a clear sign of her remorse. The doctor handled her like a porcelain curio he wanted to keep from breaking.

  “How was she?” Persephone asked.

  “Thirsty, just like you,” he replied. “The good thing was she didn’t bring emotions into it. We had good clean sex for sex’s sake. She asked for my phone number in Athens, but I gave her a fake one. So she doesn’t find me. After all, it’s not as if the Tourist Board gives us a subsidy, right?”

  It was true that he didn’t make all that much money from medicine. He did research; he didn’t have a practice. And he detested the way the health minister regarded doctors. You’d think he wanted to classify them as being either factory or farm chickens.

  The yacht had dropped anchor in a protected cove, near another yacht that had its light on. They would spend the night there. Aristotle was still explaining the outdated structures of Greek society to whomever would listen. Arion and Eleni were chatting with Irini, who worked as a receptionist at a slimming center. The weight-loss classes were taught to teams, she explained, and the competition among them brought results. Arion and Eleni, who were members of a musical group and had recently taken part in a concert to benefit starving Ethiopians, kept asking, masochistically, for details about how a fat woman can lose weight.

  “The center is making a mint,” Irini was saying. “But they’re strict. If we employees put on more than one or two pounds over our original weight, we’re fired. It’s in the contract.”

  The cook had taken the dinghy and gone ashore to the island port, where his home was. He would be back at dawn. The engineer was reading a newspaper by the light of a lantern. The sailor was listening to the customs officer, a friend of Elias’s, tell him pirate stories. And the old captain, on the bridge, wrapped up inside his solitude, dreamed of times gone by and glorious moments of the past. He had met so many people on this yacht . . . big names in finance and international politics.

  The sea was calm. So was the sky. The full moon consoled the sea and the sky on their mutual loneliness. Like a good host, Elias made sure everyone had everything they desired. He was touchingly attentive. Then he dove naked into the sea.

  Irini, who worked at the slimming center, had been without a man for a long time. Having watched the doctor’s activities throughout the day, she became interested in him. The same way sheep follow the leading ram, without wondering why.

  She saw him lying alone on the bridge, next to the main mast, and approached him. She asked him if he was tired.

  “Not at all,” he replied. “Since I gave up smoking a year ago, I feel like a different person. My stamina frightens me.”

  Irini was chain-smoking nervously.

  “I heard your cabin is furnished in Louis XV style,” she said.

  The doctor laughed.

  “Come and take a look. But let’s not go together. I’ll go down first and you follow in five minutes.”

  He went down to the cabin and waited for her. When Irini appeared, she was flushed.

  “Am I the third or the fourth you’re going to screw today?”

  The doctor shook his head.

  “The number is unimportant. What is important is that we both want it.”

  She was undoubtedly the most attractive. At least her body was. She was in good shape, athletic; he had watched her diving into the sea that morning like a dolphin and he had desired her. But because she was the most attractive, she was also the coldest. In order to grease the machine, he started telling her of his experiments on mice. For him, he meant to imply, a body was of no significance. He had opened up so many bodies on his operating table before devoting himself to research. What was important to him was the moment when a woman wants something more than pure love.

  “You’re just curious,” he told her. “You came here to try what the others tried before you. But as soon as you have to face reality, you don’t know what to do, like the hare that freezes in the middle of the road, blinded by a car’s headlights. There are no headlights, my little Irini. You’re traveling on this floating living room. You’re thinking of your boyfriend or your husband. Until suddenly, pirates capture the ship and take you prisoner. The pirate will set you free the following morning, as long as you give yourself to him completely that night. Otherwise, you’ll end your days in a harem on the Barbary Coast.”

  Presented with this dilemma, Irini had no choice. The mechanism came unblocked and she gave herself to him unreservedly, without remorse. She was struck by his tenderness. An almost paternal gentleness. But at the instant when she was about to climax, there was a knock on the cabin door. It was the American.

  “I can’t now,” the doctor said.

  She understood, and, apologizing profusely, tiptoed away.

  Irini then found herself before an ancient wall. That was where the wicked witch lived. When Irini was a little girl, they had told her that if the witch saw you smile and counted your teeth, you would die. That was why even during her happiest moments, Irini kept her lips sealed, persistently refusing to open her mouth. The doctor noticed the gravity of her expression, the concentrated intensity of it, and realized that at any moment, the joints would come undone, and the fish would tumble out of the net, free.

  And that was what happened. Once the net came up from the bottom of the sea and was emptied onto the deck of the trawler, it unfolded a carpet of writhing red mullet, jumping around joyfully naked in the sun. Soon, the spasms subsided, and there were only a few posthedonic palpitations from one or two sargos that still resisted.

  Long after she had gone, the doctor was unable to sleep, thinking about the way one woman follows in the other’s footsteps, on the same path. It was as if there were a silent understanding among their sex, to drink from the same pistil, of the same nectar. Something that simplified the process of the search. After all, he didn’t consider himself a Don Juan, nor much of a ladies’ man. Finally, a sweet lethargy started to come over his body. It came down from his throat through underground tunnels and made him melt.

  The heavy bird of sleep was settling on his eyelids. It pushed him downward and made him sink to an immeasurable depth. The years were blankets. Deep tulips. And the more his body sank down, the more the galley came to the surface. He was sinking, he kept on sinking. And it was sweet. He was being transformed into a woman. He pressed down on his ovaries, where his ovaries would have been if, instead, that strange thing hadn’t grown in their place. It felt sweeter and sweeter. He pressed the patch of grass that covered his annulled ovaries, until, shaken by a spasm, he flooded the sheets.

  “Because the laws of development don’t always produce the best results for schemers,” Aristotle’s weak voice was saying, floating down from the deck through the ventilator shaft.

  -2-

  The Captain

  Standing on the bridge, wrapped in his solitude, the captain was not sleeping. Because dreams blossom on the fringes of dreams, they react like toxic liquids that dissolve first, before recomposing themselves afterwards, into hopes that had ceased to be hopeful, galleries and calories, until...

  “Grandfather, tell me a story.”

  “Which story, my boy?”

  “The one about the forest fire, Grandfather, when you would swing by your belt from one tree to another, and even the beasts of the jungle couldn’t catch you. You, Grandfather, the hunter, the captain, the burlotieris* of Admiral Kanaris . . . Come on, Grandfather, tell me.”

  Standing on the bridge, leaning against the wheel of the ship that was about to weigh anchor, while here too the fire was destroying the forests, the captain, by simply touching the wheel that has remained the same all these years, was transformed into the old sailor Kanaris who, on a different night, a moonless ni
ght, had set fire to the flagship of the pasha.

  “When did that happen, Grandfather?”

  “When our great-grandfathers were fighting for independence, my boy, and Greece was a dog that had been tied up for four hundred years and was trying to break its chains. But three masters were lying in wait to see who would take it over. For the great powers of the time, Greece was a very usefiri dog. The masters wanted it to be free in order to scare the sultans wolfhounds, but not so free that it would become a master itself. And so, the three masters, the Russians, the English, and the French, helped free the Grecian dog, but then they quarreled among themselves over who would own it. The dog didn’t yet know its new masters. It would look up at them with its sad eyes, the way dogs do, full of gratitude that they had helped it break its chains. And it was hungry. It was bleeding from its struggle to break its fetters. It was a starving dog, but proud to show its ribs under its skin. Unfortunately, it didn’t know people. It would run to the one who tossed it the biggest piece of meat. And the three big guys tormented the poor thing, to the point where it didn’t know what was going on.

  “That was when they sent the first government diplomat from Corfu, who had lived for years abroad, in the court of the czar of Russia. As soon as he set foot in the basement where the dog lived, the stench forced the diplomat to hold his breath. ‘We need to straighten up around here,’ he said, and started to train the dog, in rather a brusque manner. Deep down, he liked the idea of a dog, though not so much the dog itself, which, having been oppressed and starved all those years, wanted to run and leap and enjoy its newly acquired freedom. ‘You can forget everything you learned from the sultan all these years,’ said its master, who spoke to the dog in French rather than Greek. He would say couche-là instead of katse kato. He was bent on turning the dog into a Saint Bernard, a little barrel of brandy around its neck. The very smell of the drink nauseated the dog, which was used to the wine and liqueurs of its own country. So, one day, he attacked his master and tore him to pieces. This was followed by a period in which the dog, free again, became wild and independent and happy like it used to be. It would grab every single chicken it came across, it would chase after foxes. ‘That’s enough,’ said the foreigners, seeing that, unrestrained, the dog could become even more dangerous than its old master the sultan. Especially since it was also laying claim to other fields, crossing the Isthmus of Corinth in one bound, and devouring sheep from their pens. But neither of the three big guys would accept one of the other two as master of the dog.

  “So they found a young prince, underage, abnormal, and a bit of a flake, and they told his father, Ludwig of Bavaria, to send him down to be master of the dog’s country. The father accepted, and sent his son, at exactly seventeen years of age, a hippie of his time, who since childhood had been dropping acid, and the dog saw his new master coming with an army of Bavarian soldiers, fourteen thousand of them. Not one of the new arrivals spoke Greek. The dog went up to them, sniffed at them; they seemed to be friends and not new conquerors. After all, that’s what its three protectors had kept whispering in its ear the whole time it was waiting for them to arrive. So the dog didn’t bark, but instead wagged its tail with joy, because these strangers, these Bavarians, would bring lots to eat (in the form of a monumental loan), and the dog, having pillaged the sheepfolds and chicken coops, had been left with nothing more to eat. So the dog was excited. But it noticed some other dogs at its master’s side, dogs of a different breed, well-fed, ferocious, and with pretty big appetites themselves. It was explained that these three dogs were accompanying the young king, as he was still underage. Until he turned twenty, these three Bavarian dogs would rule the palace. The dog took a liking to the king, because he was like a child but was afraid of his guard dogs, Armansberg, Mauer, and the other one. These three dogs then gathered together all the Greek dogs and tried to Bavarify them.

  “Up to that point, our dog had managed to escape being barbarified, but it could see that it would be difficult to avoid being Bavarified. And while in the beginning it thought that it was going to get fed, the Greek dog saw that the wolfhounds were eating its food. They would bark in a tongue that our dog didn’t understand. Everything was ruled with the military discipline of the Bavarians. They put our dog in prison, charging it with liking its master but not his dogs. And they would have killed it, if the good king himself hadn’t intervened and begged his dogs to spare its life.

  “All this happened at Nafplion, in the fortress of Palamidi. Then, the king’s court left Nafplion and came to Athens. The dog moved with them, during which it watched the Bavarians making the laws, the Bavarians building, the Bavarians constituting the army. ‘Who am I?’ wondered the dog. ‘I’m a Christian Orthodox dog. What do these people of another religion want? I had my own Holy Virgin and my own Jesus who sustained me during four hundred years of darkness. Who are they? What do they want?’ It was as if, little by little, the dog’s self-awareness was awakened. And it started exercising its jaws to bite. ‘Beware of the dog,’ read the sign outside its hovel, while the foreign dogs lived in the palace. Meanwhile the years went by, and the dog kept demanding its rights, which the Bavarian dogs adamantly refused to grant. Until one day, the dog kicked them out. It had grown by then, it had become strong. But with all the crossbreeding that had gone on during all these years, there had appeared a mixed breed of dog in our country, and the blood of the original dog, the one they had imprisoned in Palamidi, had been polluted. Thus there were four parties of dogs, the French, the English, the Russian, and the dogs of the Steppe. Only the Bavarians hadn’t succeeded in grafting their breed before leaving, in order to produce wolfhounds. And that is how, since then, my boy, we have had these breeds . . .”

  The captain was standing, wrapped in his solitude, thinking. He could hear the conversation taking place on deck, about the loan that the Socialist government was preparing to receive from the Common Market (“Taking out a loan,” Aristotle explained in his nasal voice, “presupposes the devaluation of the drachma.”). Times of old came to the captain’s mind, long-forgotten memories of that first loan our nation took out, because, the captain’s great-grandfathers had explained, “We must have a powerful fleet. We can only fight the Turk at sea. We must have steamships, armed with heavy cannons for the urgent needs of the struggle.” It was a loan for which our national territory was mortgaged, but we never saw the ships, and the money was pocketed by those who had given it. “We are an oppressed people, because we are indebted,” Aristotle’s voice could be heard intoning from on deck. And the captain dreamed on, standing on the bridge, though he did not sleep.

  “But who pocketed the money, Grandfather?”

  “It’s a mixed-up story, my boy.”

  “Tell me, Grandfather.”

  “There were four of them in on it. A satanic foursome from the city of London. Ellis, Hobhouse, Burdett, and the Ricardo brothers, the mafiosi of that time. They started by looking for an admiral. And they found one. A ‘killer’ of the seas, famous for his exploits in Latin America, in Brazil. He was the one we would do business with. His name was Cochrane. ‘Within a few weeks, he will arrive in Constantinople and destroy by fire the entire Turkish fleet inside the Golden Horn.’ That’s what they said, and that’s what we believed. As if we didn’t have our own fire ships, as if we didn’t have our own brave warriors. But it’s always the foreigner who’s the coach, the technical advisor of our national team. Karaiskaki and Miaoulis accepted him in order to please the Anglophiles. The Russophiles were pleased with Capodistrias, who had not yet agreed to be governor, but who would do so presently. The Francophiles had their Fabvier. What a state this was going to be! And who were we? Kassomoulis wrote: ‘It was rumored that Lord Cochrane would arrive in Greece overnight, and that Greece would be saved by his stratagems and his maritime fireworks. This encouraged us gready.’ Poor Kassomoulis! Poor heroes!

  “But Cochrane wanted a lot of dough. He was considered an expert coach whose team was guaranteed to b
ecome world champion. So he charged accordingly. It was decided he would be paid out of the second loan, which was about £2,000,000. Of this, Cochrane would receive £37,000 in advance, and £20,000 upon completing his mission. Furthermore, he was entrusted with deciding what ships they would buy. Which meant he decided how the £300,000 intended for purchasing and arming the ships would be spent.

  “Having ensured the approval of the four lenders (Ellis, Hobhouse, Burdett, and the Ricardo brothers), Cochrane went ahead and did the ordering. Having just returned from Latin America and his great victories, the killer knew what huge profits one can make from orders. His own salary was nothing compared to what he could make off the shipbuilders. So he ordered a total of five ships: two large and three small. The first of the large ones, the Enterprise (there is an aircraft carrier of the same name in the Sixth Fleet), barely reached the mouth of the Thames. It almost sank there and was rescued by chance by an English battleship that towed it to the port of Plymouth, where it underwent the proper repairs. It arrived in Greece, in very bad shape, in the autumn of 1828. It could not be used. It came to us simply to leave us its carcass, to die in our hands, since we had ordered it and we had to accept it.

  “The second large steamship, the Invincible, was burned during testing. It didn’t even go to the trouble of coming all the way to Greece to die like the Enterprise had, which, at that, had come to us like a swan and died in our arms. The Invincible didn’t even show up. It died over there. Without a fight. Just like those French submarines with impressive names—the Unsinkable, the Fearless, the Thunderbolt—which would disappear from time to time, I remember, without a trace. They would disappear into the deep ocean waters, along with their entire crews, without even a signal.”

  “And what about the other three, Grandfather?”

  “Two of the three rotted on the Thames, my boy. As for the third one, after they replaced its engine, it managed to reach Greece only to announce the death of the other two and then to die itself in our waters.”