... and Dreams Are Dreams

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  “So back then Greece only went as far as the souvlaki shops at Corinth Canal, Grandfather?”

  “That’s as far as it went, my boy. They could smell the burning scent of freedom from across the way and it made their heads swim.”

  “So how come it grew?”

  The grandson was waiting for the rest of the story. But his grandfather remained silent. He was dreaming of his life. Oh, if only he could rewrite it!

  “And what happened to Capodistrias, Grandfather?”

  “They killed him, my boy, one day when he was on his way to church.”

  “Why did they kill him, Grandfather?”

  “Because people are evil, my boy.”

  The grandson was waiting. He would go and watch the Smurfs video again if his grandfather didn’t go on with the story. But his grandfather seemed distracted. There was something else on his mind.

  “I’ve kept the double-barreled shotgun for you, my boy.”

  The young man did not understand what gun his grandfather was talking about.

  “You know, my shotgun. . . .”

  “And who am I supposed to kill with it, Grandfather?”

  -5-

  The Narrator, Suite

  “Othonos Street, please. The Olympic Airways office.”

  “Where’s that?” asked the taxi driver, hastening to add, “I’m new at the job.”

  “It’s at Constitution Square,” said the narrator, and right away he was struck by the absurdity of it. Imagine that: Othonos Street being at Constitution Square. Otto, who never wanted to grant his subjects a constitution, was now condemned by city planning to name one of its four sides. And to be forced to enter Amalias Avenue, when he had never entered his own Amalia. (“ The protocol of the autopsy performed on Queen Amalia attested that she remained a virgin. ”)

  A taste of videotape, sour, misleading, slippery as a banana peel, comes to the narrator’s mind every time he touches upon, even by mistake, a name or an event of that period. Immediately, he thinks of the television miniseries Queen Amalia, starring the Greek Brigitte Bardot; and of Mando Mavrogenous with the Greek Claudia Cardinale: the fake dialogue, the fake period costumes, the fake scenery, the cheapness of it all. Greek history and the writers of historical novels have financed this miniseries mania, he thinks to himself. At least a novel can be read in the original. But where do you find history? It stays in your imagination, personified by its televisual models: Amalia-Brigitte, Mando-Clau-dia. While reading of Kontostavlos’s reception earlier, he could not avoid feeling the slimy banana peel, his allergy to videotapes, crawling over his skin.

  “Who was Otto, Grandfather?”

  “He was our first king, the second son of the philhellene King of Bavaria Ludwig I and Theresa, daughter of the Duke of Saxon Hildburghausen, niece of the Baron Niebelhausen, and great-grandmother of Maunthausen. According to historians, her father, a ladies’ man, had to abdicate the throne in 1848, because of the scandal surrounding his relationship with Lola Montez, although his abdication was probably really due to the popular uprising that year.

  “Ever since childhood, Otto had been a bit of a dunce. And he was sickly too, poor boy. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Livorno, in Italy, for treatment of a neurological disorder. He had to return the following year. Nowadays, a child with such reactions would be placed under the observation of neurologists and psychiatrists.”

  “So why did they send him to us as a king?”

  “Because, my boy, it seems nobody else was available on the market. Or rather there was one, Leopold, who wanted to come, but Capodistrias was quick to discourage him. You see, Capodistrias, who could not foresee his untimely end, did not want to have anyone else over his head. So he made sure, in his own way, by writing Leopold letters in which he spoke of Greece as a banana republic (which it was in a way, but we usually keep information like that to ourselves) so as to dissuade him from coming. And so, Leopold, who later became king of Belgium and proved himself to be a fine man, longed for Greece into his deepest old age, because he had loved it as he had loved Lord Byron. ‘Belgium is only prose writing,’ he wrote in a letter. ‘Greece satisfied the poetic needs of my soul.’ So, our good old mediators sent us Otto.”

  “But why did we need mediators, Grandfather?”

  “Because, my boy, we were good Christians. We believed in the Holy Trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In those days this meant England, Russia, and France. But before sending us Otto, who was still a kid, they sent us a professor, Friedrich Thiersch, who hellenized his name to Friderikos Thir-sios, as was the fashion back then. They sent him on the pretext of an archaeological expedition. Up until World War II the Germans always sent us their agents disguised as archaeologists. Nowadays, the English send them as journalists and the Russians as commercial representatives.

  “In any case, Otto learned that he was to be king of Greece even before he had turned seventeen. He asked whereabouts that country was, and presumably he was told that it did not yet exist, but that by the time he came of age, which would be in three years, it would have appeared on the map. ‘And what am I supposed to go and do there?’ ‘You will reign,’ said his father. ‘It’s by the sea, and the scenery is beautiful.’ (The young boy loved riding and swimming.) Besides, his father, who was such a debauchee, had given him a complex. Like Kafka. Otto kept writing letters to his father that he never sent. He only sent the ones his tutor dictated to him. And, like Kafka, he died before his father.

  “So, Otto arrived, not transformed into a cockroach like Kafka’s hero Gregor Samsa, but like a bridegroom, with his whole trousseau (he played the piano, he spoke French and a little Greek). One hot number, we would say nowadays. Or a stud. After all, he disembarked in the stud capital, Nafplion. He rode into town on a white horse (and ever since, young girls are said to be waiting for a prince on a white horse). But at the moment when he was about to speak in his broken Greek, he forgot everything and spoke to the provisional government and the people, who were in a way handing over power, in his native tongue. Needless to say, nobody understood a word. And that was the way modern Greek history began, in incomprehension. ‘Hellenen, berufen durch das vertrauender erlauchten grossherzigen Vermittler . . . ’ (Greeks, invited here by the confident, illustrious, and magnanimous mediator . . .).

  “Along with him came Bavarian soldiers who used the national loan for subsistence. At the time, my boy, the Greek tribunals were not able to try a foreign army man. This policy of providing immunity to the foreign military is still in force today. Bavarian jurists came, Bavarian architects, and ladies of the Bavarian court, and all that’s left of them today is a dessert, the famous Bavarian cream.

  “This is how a foreign traveler, the Russian painter Vladimir Davidoff (no relation to the cigars of the same name), describes life in Athens in 1834: ‘We are on Ermou Street, near the entrance of the Bavarian cafe Grunen Baum (The Green Tree). We are surprised not only by the poverty of the city, but also by the absolute predominance of foreigners of every nationality over the natives, even in their own capital. In the street, the only well-dressed people one comes across are Italian shop owners, Bavarian soldiers, government employees, and the members of the diplomatic corps. The only natives we see are manual workers and beggars dressed in their national costume. ’

  “It was at that time that the old man of the Morea, Theodoros Kolokotronis, decided to retire.

  “‘To the extent that I was able, ’he wrote, ‘I fulfilled my duty to my country, and so did my entire family. I saw my country free, I saw what we had all longed for, myself, my father, my grandfather, and all my race, as well as all the Greeks. I decided to go to an orchard I had outside Nafplion. I went there and I stayed, spending my time growing things. It gave me pleasure to watch the little trees I had planted growing bigger. ’

  “But they didn’t leave Kolokotronis alone either. They convicted him of being a Russophile, the same way that one hundred years later they convicted the Russophiles o
f being part of the E.A.M.* It was the Germans now, the Bavarians then. Meanwhile, Bavaria had become part of Germany.”

  “And what was Otto like, Grandfather?”

  “He was pathetic. Not all there. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he had some kind of cerebral lesion. He couldn’t understand anything they told him. They would take him documents, and he would spend hours studying them, correcting the spelling mistakes and punctuation, and after he had gone over everything, he still hadn’t understood anything. His last word on any subject was, ‘We’ll see.’ As Claude Herve wrote, ‘I did not understand what he told me and it was obvious that he rarely understood me . . . . His hair was so flat that it always appeared to be stuck to his head. He was in the habit of passing his hand over it all the time to keep it in a state of perfect control. I never once saw a single hair out of place and I imagined that was what he desired of his subjects.’ Fortunately, he would often travel to his homeland and in his absence, his wife Amalia would conclude affairs of state and sign in his place. When he visited Smyrna, he really went nuts. He saw himself ‘as the successor of the paleologues. I dream, he said, ‘of this country becoming big and strong and I dream of my throne being there, where the last emperor of Byzantiumfell.’As for Greece, he saw it in the same way modem tourists see it. He liked going on excursions. He liked the ancient ruins.

  But when the natives saw him accompanied by Armansberg’s daughters, they thought it was the sultan and his harem, and that Armansberg and his aide-de-camp were the eunuchs. His case resembled that of a mentally handicapped child: you ask it what the time is, and it looks at the hands of the clock, and it tells you the minutes and seconds, but it never tells you what time it is.”

  “Here we are,” said the taxi driver. “Isn’t this Othonos Street?”

  The narrator got out on the side facing Constitution Square, and crossed the street to the offices of Olympic Airways.

  -6-

  The Captain, Suite:

  And End

  “It was a harsh winter.”

  “Which winter was that, Grandfather?”

  “The one that marked the end of the first half of the century. It was very cold. Six below and even less. Even the olive trees were killed by the frost. My great-grandfather’s was the last sailing ship to enter the port of Piraeus. Piraeus was small then, with very few houses. But on that day it was deserted. Outside, the ships of the English fleet had started the blockade. Just when we thought that the following year, 1850, we’d finally get going, a new life would begin, commerce and the economy would get back on their feet. The banker Stavrou wrote: ‘There are three things missing from Greece: quiet, order, and money. If we wish to be useful, we should bring money.’At the time, in the spring of 1849, the great Jewish banker Rothschild was visiting our country. In order to flatter him, Stavrou, the director of the Bank of Greece, had the police ban the traditional burning of the effigy of Judas on Good Thursday. The Christians used to burn Judas out of love for Jesus, because he had betrayed Him. But this Judas who had betrayed the Messiah was the Savior of the Jews. Stavrou was counting on a hefty loan from the international capital that Rothschild represented, and he didn’t want to hurt the banker’s feelings.

  “Then the English Secret Service concocted a diabolical plan: they sent their men in the guise of ‘indignant citizens,’ who were supposedly upset by this ban, to storm the house of a Jew, Don Pacifico, who had been born in Gibraltar, was of Spanish descent, and had been a Portuguese citizen before moving to Athens, but who was actually a British national. For the pillaging of his home, Don Pacifico demanded of the Greek state the disproportionately high compensation of 886,739 drachmas, and this demand was fully supported by Lyons, the British ambassador in Athens. The Greek state referred the case to the courts, but Lyons had the British prime minister ask for the opinion of the Council of Jurists of the English Crown. That way, the English had the pretext in their pocket and were simply waiting for the right moment to broach the delicate subject of the ‘pending compensation’ of their national.”

  “It was the English again, Grandfather?”

  “Them again, my boy. My great-grandfather wrote: ‘Whatever I write down here is the truth. The same way two plus two makes four. England wanted an Anglicized Greece, not a Russified one. Moreover, being selfish and most violent in her decisions, she will say one day, gun in hand: “Rather than Greece going to the Russians, we would prefer it went to the Turks. ” Those are the frightful politics of England of today. Let us not deceive ourselves into thinking she has charitable feelings toward us.’At that time, the English wanted to have one of their own in the government, a certain Mavrokordatos, whom Otto had sent to Paris as an ambassador, just to get rid of him.

  “In the same way, one hundred years later, in 1945, they still wanted to have one of their own involved in the affairs of the country. So they sent General Scobie, just as in 1849 they had sent General Parker and his ships.

  “‘It is impossible for a sailboat to leave Piraeus. An English battleship has been positioned in the middle of the section of the port occupied by the foreigners, opposite the lighthouses, and it does not allow any vessel to exit. At Spetses, the English are still seizing the vessels of civilians, and at Patras they have seized more and transported them to the Ionian Islands.’”

  The captain of 1850, grandfather of the old captain of today, suffered as he saw his small homeland under seige. Of course, Piraeus was not the only port. There were Syros, Patras, and Naf-plion. But Piraeus was the capital’s port, and when the capital is under seige, so is the entire country.

  It was only later, much later, that the grandson, who was now the grandfather, found out what the course of events had been. After the death of the Francophile Kolletis, in 1847, the appetite of the English was whetted again. But the general climate of the period was not favorable. So they waited for the revolution of 1848, which had shaken Europe, to die down before they took action.

  Meanwhile, Greece was changing courtier governments as if they were shirts: Tzavellas, Koundouriotis, Kanaris, Kriezis. Otto had been forced to grant a Constitution in 1944, after a bloodless revolution, but he kept violating it. He was still the “tyrant,” the “traitor,” the “hyena,” the “foreign locust,” and his wife Amalia the “Greek Messalina.” Lyons found her “very beautiful, but also very proud of her relations with the royal family of Russia. ” So where did this leave the English? How would they impose their politics on this small state that was so critical to the control of the Mediterranean? The captain of the past wrote: “England was determined to have total influence over Greece at any cost. Any other solution would be contrary to her interests. Just as Russia exercised its uncontested influence over the Serbo-Vlach countries, England wanted to control Greece. That was what the interests of England dictated.”

  One hundred years later, after the betrayal of the second insurrection, the problem would recur: instead of the czar there would be Stalin, instead of Palmerston, Churchill; the French would once again constitute a European guarantee.

  But what should you do when others are fighting over your own interests? “A wise Greek government could benefit from these pernicious politics by flattering this colossus who, thanks to his floating fortresses, held in his hands the fate of our coasts, our navy, and our commerce. But where to find such a government? For five whole years British politics had been scorned in Greece. And yet one cannonball would be enough to end it all. ”

  And so the new ambassador, Wise, who was to replace Lyons (whom Otto and Amalia had not wanted and finally succeeded in getting rid of), arrived freshly pressed from the Foreign Office. A sour, querulous, disagreeable man, but a lover of ancient Greece, he found the opportunity, amidst the governmental instability, to dig up the old question of the islets of Sapiéntza and Elafónisos, north of Kythira, and to claim that they came under the jurisdiction of the Ionian State, which at the time was British. But since such an untimely claim could provoke the intervention of the protection powe
rs, France and Russia, Wise first brought up British national Don Pacifico’s damage claim for the pillaging of his house by “Christian natives indignant at the ban of the burning of Judas.” This claim consisted of 9,700 drachmas for money stolen; 12,000 drachmas for distress caused; 665,000 drachmas for the destruction of Portuguese letters of credit (how could one possibly verify that?), etc., etc., which came to a total of over 800,000 drachmas.

  (“One hundred years later,” thought the narrator to himself, “in Athens, when the Italians handed over the city to the Germans, and they wanted to round up the Jews like they had done in Salonika, Archbishop Damaskinos started christening them; the chief of police issued certificates of christening that very day. The ones who did not have time to get baptized were saved by E.A.M., which issued a proclamation to the people telling them to help the Jews escape to the mountains or to the Near East. Not a single one, not even half a one, was caught by the Nazis. Only the English played their dirty game again in 1948, by not letting them disembark when Israel became a state.”)

  The captain of the past knew nothing of all this. All he knew was that he wanted to load up at Piraeus and set sail for Smyrna where a cargo of silk was waiting for him, and he couldn’t leave. Parker, the commander of the fleet, had sent an ultimatum with a time limit of twenty-four hours. As soon as the twenty-four hours were up, he declared the blockade.

  “I went uptown. The people, looking solemn, are hurrying around the markets.” (That is to say they were stocking up on groceries.) “Opinions differ. Some speak of treason, others say it is a ruse, still others say it is a disciplinary action. But everyone agrees that the English are most violent. They insult, they besiege, they obstruct, they trample on the rights of Greece. And meanwhile we expect help from Russia and France. Presently, perhaps we will see the English at the gates of the capital, and we will still be expecting help from Russia and France.”