... and Dreams Are Dreams

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  “So what happened to the money, Grandfather?”

  “It was pocketed by those more cunning than us. Where else would they find such a pack of rubes, fighting among ourselves like we were? They pocketed the money, they had a great time spending it, and they sent us the cinders.

  “And then, what do you think the nephew said to justify his uncle, the lord admiral? He was a Cochrane too, so he wanted to leave a pretty portrait of his uncle to the historians. He said, ‘At that time (1825, 1826, 1827), I held four titles: lieutenant, private secretary, aide-de-camp, and treasurer of the fleet, and I had the keys to the safe.’ (The dirty crook! The uncle gave the keys to the nephew and now here he comes, supposedly to tell us the truth, and he is naive enough to want us to believe him, because he truly regards us as rubes, as underdeveloped peasants, as thick-skulled dolts who don’t know their asses from their elbows.) ‘Therefore I am able to disclose the total sum that Lord Cochrane made available to the fleet,’ the nephew said. ‘This amount comes to only £8,000. It was this amount that my uncle brought with him from England.’ (And what about the commission from the orders, teabag? What about your uncles payment? Show us the invoices if you want us to believe you.) ‘Besides, part of this amount was intended for the army,’ continued the nephew, in order to whitewash his uncle, the pirate lord. ‘Whereas, if £40,000 had been made available, they could have hired English and American sailors, with whose able assistance the admiral would surely have accomplished feats comparable in glory and magnitude to those achieved in South America.’

  “Talk about being left holding the bag! They had taken our money, they hadn’t given us any ships, and it was all our fault! Therefore how could we not go bankrupt, as we did at that time, without ever having seen a penny? Only one corvette arrived, Endurance, after a delay of a year and a half. Having suffered considerable damage during the voyage, its efficacy did not live up to our expectations. Ellis had kept a £10,000 commission on that corvette, which was to be built by Galloway, whose son was serving under Mehmet Ali, the enemy. Well, you can hardly expect the father to build a ship well enough to kill his son. For fifteen whole months, the captains awaited, from day to day, the arrival of Endurance. ‘An anvil to receive the hammer’s blows and to forge the red-hot ore, he, without a groan, endured in silence, like a tuna fish.’*

  “Such were the first loans of the struggle, my boy; then everything was forgotten: we forgot who these rapacious foreigners were who had taken advantage of our nation’s struggle for independence to make a profit. The only thing left was the debt. But since Greece had not received anything, what was she expected to pay?

  “Our situation was like that of a poor housemaid whose masters are determined to marry her off, and who is offered to the groom with a dowry. ‘More than anything else, we are in need of a Greece,’ said Lord Canning (who, years later, was to be remembered by the square in Athens that bears his name). The master and mistress then ask for the dowry back (the dowry they never gave in the first place, because of course the groom is in on this too) just so she will always be indebted to them, will always be a slave.

  “Yes, they wanted Greece to be a slave; ever since then she has been one, my boy: but not a Turkish slave, a Christian one. If she were a Turkish slave, they would have had to settle the eastern question with the sultan, and they had bigger fish to fry where he was concerned. They wanted Greece, as well as her Balkan sisters, to be independent so as to attain, through them, easier access to the Seraglio.

  “‘But watch out, servant girl!’ the foreign masters said. ‘Don’t you ever dare raise your head. You still owe us the loan for your dowry. We’ve got you right where we want you.’ Their only problem (and they simply could not agree on this point) was whether she would be a maid to the English, the Russians or the French. Either way, Whatever they decided, she would definitely be a slave.”

  On board, the discussion continued among the patricians, the privileged, concerning the devaluation of the drachma that would supposedly facilitate the government’s new loan. “Even though he is a remarkable economist,” somebody was saying, “the prime minister did not correctly foresee the repercussions of this new devaluation, which has resulted in an increase in the prices of practically all products, since 80 percent of those are imported.”

  “And that’s how trouble starts,” thought the captain to himself, “since in the end, the Greek people are just: they have good sense, good instincts, and political maturity. They might not know exactly what their origin is, but what does it matter? They survive, under difficult conditions, and they always give a fight. They never give in, even though others have tried at times to decapitate them, even castrate them. They have a powerful instinct for self-preservation. The proof being that, the way this poor nation started off on the wrong footing completely, it should have sunk a thousand times by now, it should have buckled under all those blows. And yet it kept going. It still keeps going. It exists. It survives.”

  “The Greek economy has glass feet,” Plasterboard was saying now. “If someone should ask to cash the states reserves into dollars or gold, we would go bankrupt again.”

  “The specter of bankruptcy has haunted us since the small Greek state was first established,” explained Aristotle, who was a progressive and did not like the industrialist, Plasterboard. “If the Greeks brought their Swiss bank accounts back to this country, we’d have one hell of an economy.”

  “But it is the specter of insecurity that makes them take their money abroad. If they knew the drachma was stable, they would all bring their money back,” Aristotle returned.

  “But if you don’t bring your money back, and the next person doesn’t and the next, how will the drachma become strong? What you describe will never happen unless somebody goes first. If, for example, you . . . ”

  “Don’t start getting personal,” Elias cut in. “A yacht is an enclosed space, short-circuited by the sea. If we start quarreling, there aren’t enough cabins to separate us.”

  “But they’re not quarreling,” said the doctor, who had just come up on deck. “They’re having a discussion.”

  “Precisely,” said Plasterboard. “Besides, I don’t have my money abroad. I have it here. But I know of others who . . . ”

  Next to him, his wife, bored beyond belief, was discussing with Irini the best way for a woman to lose those extra pounds painlessly and pleasantly.

  “The problem is that as a people . . . ”

  “Why do you read only English?” interrupted Arion.

  How could Nikos, an importer of cold cuts, tell him that he did not believe in anything Greek? That it was in fact Greek things that seemed foreign to him? Ever since he was a child he had been taught to trust foreign products. Greek writers held no interest for him whatsoever. The western European languages inspired a certain confidence he did not find in modern Greek.

  And now here is the captain, this cowardly, fresh-water captain, who is transformed into a ghost, into an evil spirit, every time he thinks, because he is a captain of the mind; he’s been through a lot, he too has changed employers, those ship owners who sink their old ships just to collect the insurance, not caring whether men go down with them, men with families who would be left to mourn. The ship owner has his own family to worry about: his kids, his dogs, his investments in the city of London. It’s only when the Turk appears that the ship owner becomes Greek again and worries that his homeland is in danger. But as long as the Turk does not show himself, he feels like a stranger in his own country, because he can no longer find cheap labor like he used to; it has become expensive, and so he prefers to hire Philippino and Pakistani and Ethiopian hands for his ships. So here is this captain, who is of Albanian origin, with Black blood on this father’s side, Asia Minor blood on his mother’s side, Slav blood on his great-grandfather’s side, and Scythian blood. He is a descendant of the Empress Theophano, he is a suffering captain, he has been burned, a small prime minister of the mind who wants to explain Greece, from its b
eginnings in the epics of Homer, to the epic of Dighenis Akritas, before it sank into the catacombs of the Turkish occupation (after having placed the dome of Saint Sophia on a square base), from which emerged the song of Rigas Ferraios: “Better one hour of freedom than forty years of slavery.” He, Constantine, son of Constantine Paleologue, descendant of the Paleologues, Captain Constantine son of captains, expert in massage and bonesetting, with an ivory skeleton, he knows how to defeat Mehmet, son of Bayazid.

  “So then, Grandfather?”

  “So then, my boy, this first loan did not end there. There was a second part to it, on the other side of the Atlantic. At that time, there was a progressive, democratic, ‘by the people for the people’ country, which did not want a king in Greece by any means, since it had been built itself by people who, persecuted by the kings of Europe, had found refuge in this country across the ocean and had formed a huge commonwealth: the United States.

  “We had ordered eight frigates to be built in America. The decision had been made in 1824 by the representatives of the ‘government-in-exile’ in London. But the four mafiosi got in the way, in order to act as intermediaries; they were providing the money, so they felt they (Ricardo, Hobhouse, and company) should have a say in the proceedings. They sent their representative, a French cavalry officer called L’Allemand. In French, L’Allemand means the German. As unrelated, therefore, as his name was to France, so was this man, a cavalry officer, unrelated to ships. Nevertheless he was in on the scam, so they sent him. The American company Leroy, Bayard & Co. built the first two frigates and then waited for the money before it started work on the rest. Like any contractor, they would not continue building until they were paid, And the foursome in London was not sending any money because they’d already spent it among themselves. As a result, the Americans weren’t sending us the ships. An impasse. Concerned, the Greek representative persuaded A. Kontostavlos to travel to America to find out what was going on.

  “Of course, at that time one did not travel to America as one does nowadays. It was an expedition. An ordeal. Kontostavlos, a fervent and a wealthy patriot, finally decided to go. He found L’Allemand, who was furious with him, furious with the Greeks who were not sending the money, and a defendant of the contractors who were demanding the money so they could complete the order. Like all mafiosi, L’Allemand was serving the interests of his godfathers, Burdett and Ricardo, and the last thing he wanted was to see those ships delivered. The lenders’ plan had been clear from the start: to spend the money without delivering the goods and then to have Greece indebted to them, so that the politicians could hide behind them and play their games at the country’s expense.

  “Isn’t that always the way imperialism works? (Don’t forget that, at the time, England was a very powerful empire.) By hiding behind employers, lenders, and loan sharks, it bleeds dry an entire people or a single worker. It’s all the same, since every people struggling to break the chains of slavery is made up of many workers. Until they bring them to their knees, at which point the politicians arrive to play their dirty game. Isn’t it always a von Krupp who prepares the ground for a Hitler? Isn’t it the multinationals of today (ITT, IBM, and so on) that claim, proclaim, and disclaim leaders, chosen by the people, in order to allow rampant capitalism to play its shameless game?

  “History provides us with very little information of Kontostavlos’s actions in America. The rest is left to our imagination. But imagination is not enough. We do not have sufficient knowledge of the period to know what he would do. All we know is that he is a patriot and he is concerned for his homeland, which is in a state of revolt, and which is waiting for these ships to arrive at last so that the struggle may begin.

  “First he goes to the American builders, who tell him that if they don’t get any more money they will auction off the two frigates they’ve already built. They are unyielding, but L’Allemand has given them the right to be so by ganging up with them.

  “Kontostavlos is alone in New York. Emigration has not yet begun because there is no Greek state. Emigration will start a few decades later, when this state, for which Kontostavlos is now fighting, will become independent under such conditions that it will force its inhabitants to seek a better future elsewhere, especially in America.

  “Kontostavlos is unaware of this. And it is just as well, because if he had known about it, perhaps he would not have fought with the same courage that he did then, when, upon realizing he had fallen victim to a gang of London swindlers, who were eating away at the money so that England would later be entided to ask for it back, he listened within himself to the cries and pleas of the brave men who were fighting for their homeland, giving their all for freedom, going into battle with regard to everything but their lives; he listened and he took heart.

  “In order to understand the loneliness Kontostavlos must have felt, we should remember that in 1824, Greece only existed on the map as a province of the great Ottoman Empire, and that in the minds of most Americans, there was only ancient Greece, cradle of civilization. In America at that time, there were no Greek American organizations, no Greek lobby to put pressure on Congress and the Senate. Kontostavlos was probably the first Greek who Sodart, the secretary for Marine Affairs; Henry Clay, the foreign secretary; and Noah Webster, the famous professor of law, had ever seen. As Colonel Benton said when Kontostavlos went to ask him for his help, ‘When I studied Homer, I never imagined that I would ever, in my lifetime, be of use to his descendants.’ He shed tears of joy because he was able to help. And he did help.

  “So, without counting on the all-powerful Greek colony, on the archbishop of the Orthodox Church, on John Brademas or any other senators and politicians of Greek descent (which is the sole weapon that Greece has acquired since then, and which she only uses when the Turkish threat appears), Kontostavlos had an advantage over his modern-day equivalent, whether he is called an ambassador, a minister without portfolio, or a special envoy sent to negotiate military aid or the rent paid by United States military bases or the preserving of the 7:10 ratio of United States military aid to Greece and Turkey respectively. His advantage was not knowing in advance what the result of his efforts would be, of having the right to dream of an independent, strong, autonomous state, free of foreign guardianship, where those who fought in the revolution would become the leaders of the liberated nation. While he understood, because he was an intelligent man, that absolute independence is difficult to achieve, he hoped nevertheless that the Greeks would succeed as much as possible, since the name of Capodistrias had already been mentioned by the foreign protecting powers. He hoped nevertheless that that great diplomat who had helped the czar to solve the hitherto unsolvable problems of Russia in Geneva would be able to solve the problems of little old Greece. Kontostavlos hoped, the way those people at the end of World War I dreamed of a better world and fought for it with the self-sacrifice and courage of giants. The disappointment that came later in no way diminishes their glory. After all, that is the way the world goes forward: with its ignorance of what is to come. Fortunately, this ignorance allows humankind the necessary margins for it to hope, for it to struggle to change the world. If everybody knew in advance what was to come, then not a leaf would move in the human forest. There would have been no Paris Commune, no October Revolution. Thus, armed with his ignorance of what it meant to create an independent Greek state, the same ignorance that kept Kolokotronis and Karaiskaki fighting in the trenches, Kontostavlos struggled and fought all alone.

  “Straight away he drew up a plan. He went to see a lawyer, Mr. Emerett, who, they said, was the best in New York. With his purse full of his own money, Kontostavlos presented the problem: they had ordered some frigates for the war. But the company they were dealing with, Leroy, Bayard & Co., was being difficult. ‘Either you send us more money so that we can go on,’ they said, ‘or you lose the money you’ve already sent us, since we’ll auction off the two frigates we’ve built.’ The reason they were behaving this way, Kontostavlos explained to
Emerett, was that the contractors had taken on the frigate contract as a single order: either all eight frigates or none at all. It wasn’t worth their while otherwise.

  “The lawyer listened, then said, ‘You have no legal recourse against the merchants; hence you will have to appeal to their sense of compassion.’

  “‘Experience had taught me,’ wrote Kontostavlos later, ‘that if I had to appeal to their sense of compassion, I hadn’t much to hope for.’

  “Himself a merchant, Kontostavlos was a realist. He knew that there is no pity in commerce. If there were, then merchants would close up their shops and set up charities.

  “This merchant Kontostavlos who was now burning with other ideals was frilly aware of these realities. He went to the shipyard, where he saw the two frigates, the two dolls, waiting, as we would say nowadays, for a bottle of champagne to smash against their cheek, for their voyages to be good ones, for the waters to be gentle with them. He saw them, and in his mind’s eye he saw them frill of brave warriors who would have the rare fortune to fight the fleet of the pasha on board these ships. He saw them there, on dry land, in the huge shipyard in lower Manhattan, and his heart almost broke. It had taken him two months of traveling to get there. That’s as long as a letter would take. There was no communication, no telephone. Whatever he achieved he would have to achieve alone.

  “Desperate, he sat down and wrote to his friend Korais in France. He told him the story of the impasse he had reached. And Korais sent him a letter of introduction to the philhellene Edward Everett, who also happened to be a member of Congress.

  “Kontostavlos took the letter to him immediately and, miracle of miracles, Everett opened up for him the legendary gates of power.

  “‘It is difficult for me to describe the obliging manner with which I was received by this eminent friend of Greece, Mr. Everett,’ Kontostavlos wrote. ‘Within twenty-four hours he had presented me to Adams, the president of the United States, to Henry Clay, the foreign secretary, to Sodart, the secretary for Marine Affairs, to Professor Noah Webster (whose advice I took and for which I offered him payment but which he refused), to Colonels Benton and Hill and to all the members of the Senate and Congress who could help the most. With what kind feelings toward Greece they all received me! With what pleasure they heard me tell of the exploits of our heroes! I felt an inexpressible joy as I observed the enthusiasm with which they competed to see which one of them could be of the most service.’