... and Dreams Are Dreams

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  “But tell me,” I asked, “have you regretted coming back to Greece?”

  “Have I ever!” he said. “At least in Düsseldorf, animals are kept in cages. Here, they roam around the streets free, on wheels.”

  -4-

  Where for Different Reasons,

  Another Immigrant Taxi Driver Regrets

  Returning to Greece

  He saw them coming from a distance, like two scarecrows. His burned property still smelled of smoke. The few tufts of green that had survived on the trees seemed absurd reminders of what had once been there. “Why were they the only ones to survive?” he asked himself. “Why?” He wanted to climb up and chop them off.

  He appeared immersed in his sorrow. “So, Mr. Irineos, where were you when the fire started?”

  “Are you still asking about that? I was at my beehives. They’re gone now too. Nothing but ashes.” He seemed not to want to talk to them. Entrenched in his bitterness, he became completely inscrutable. “If only the planes had arrived sooner....” was all he said. “They couldn’t get here. The wind was blowing like the devil.”

  In the village, they were burying the victims. He would have gone, but he was afraid they’d lynch him. They were wrong to suspect him. He would have to leave now, he had lost everything; he would sell the taxi and go back to Canada. That’s where he would leave his bones. In a foreign land, a foreign continent. Greece was a heartless mother, always chasing you away.

  “The almond trees won’t flower next year,” he said.

  “On your way back from your beehives, you didn’t see anything, you didn’t notice anyone?”

  “The workers were coming back from the mines.”

  “There are no mines anymore. You’re thinking of the years before you emigrated. All the workers left the island, just like you. And just like you, they all came back loaded with dough.” (The truth is, he had come back last. He had taken too long, far too long. He hadn’t had time to build like the others.)

  The two periods of his life began to merge in his mind: first was the social despair. And now, in full bloom, ruination by fire. Always, albeit for different reasons, the same disaster. “There were cars going by. With boats in tow, and caravans. How would I know?”

  “Is there something or someone you could indicate to us?”

  “The donkey crapped and its steamy dung set fire to the dry pine needles,” he said finally. Impenetrable, immured in his silence. “Here,” he said, extending his hands. “Handcuff me if I’m a suspect. Don’t torture me anymore with questions.” The two visitors, the police sergeant and the representative of the court, were forced to leave.

  His property had become a vacant plot full of ashes. The seagulls had turned grey from the smoke. In the dry stream bed, the partridges no longer cackled.

  Old legislation is like an old hat: it does not fit well on the head of a man who evolved according to technology. So it was that Irineos (who was telling me this story while driving cautiously through the jungle of the city) could not get into his head the reason he couldn’t build on his own property. “Because it’s designated a wooded area,” he told me. “What does this mean, designated a wooded area?” he asked the officials. He had lost touch with the way things were in his country, which he left when just a young man, in 1955, with great difficulty, because he belonged to the left, and even then he was able to leave only thanks to the tricks and bribes of a travel agent who managed to get him a passport. (“And don’t you ever come back,” the agent had said, “or I’m done for.”)

  “A wooded area,” they explained at the local office of the Forestry Department, “means it has pine trees, and trees are protected by law.”

  “If there weren’t any pine trees, would I be able to build?” Irineos asked the first time he spoke with the forest ranger, who, like most civil servants, seemed to enjoy the confusion of the man who had become a stranger in his own country.

  “Only if it were rocky, arid ground. Even if there were only brush, you still wouldn’t be able to build.”

  At first, the taxi driver’s story went, he had gone to Belgium, where he worked for five years as a coal miner. But when the dust started bothering his lungs, he went to Vancouver, Canada, where he started off working in a car factory, and then he opened his first used car lot, which was soon followed by a second and then a third. Business was going well; he married Eulalia, a woman from his village, the daughter of immigrants; he had children, he put them through college, he married them off. But his dream—because there are dreams like Christmas trees, covered in ornaments, in the middle of town squares, trees that make you daydream when you look at them, that support our existence, dreams that are enlarged under the magnifying glass of sleep and of being in a foreign land—was one day to return to his village, to his island, and to build, upon the land of his forefathers, a home, a cottage for he and his wife, a sweet little cabin in which to rest their weary bones. He would have his rowboat, his beehives, and his goats; and friends from Vancouver could come and visit.

  “If only you could thin the trees out on the sly,” was the advice of an engineer, a fine young man who took pity on him. “Perhaps then you would be able to get a construction permit. Of course, if you had the right connections, that wouldn’t hurt either.”

  The seed began to germinate in his head. And one night, he secretly cut down several pine trees with a chainsaw. But it seems that a fellow villager squealed on him, impelled by one of those ancient, inextinguishable hatreds that one finds in villages. So not only did Irineos not get the construction permit, but the Forestry Department sued him for destroying trees.

  “You don’t have to continue, I get the picture,” I said, for I could see he was getting upset.

  But Irineos wanted to tell me all about it. I was a dream specialist and a journalist; to whom else would he tell his story, if not to me?

  So he got mixed up in the Greek court system, where one needs to be a magician to get one’s rights vindicated. Accustomed to the Canadian way of life, in which bureaucracy is unknown, in which people aren’t always trying to poke each other’s eyes out, and in which everything—work, licenses, permits—obeys other, faster rhythms of development, his dream to build fossilized. But the idea of setting fire to the place never once dawned on him.

  That summer, the whole of Greece had been in flames.

  “I know,” I said, “I was here.”

  Everywhere, during July and August, fires were breaking out as if nature were protesting the pitiless drought of the sky. Fires that would turn entire areas to ashes were started on the eve of the day when strong winds were expected, or on the day itself. Only a fire would get him out of his dead end, Irineos thought to himself, as he watched the news on TV

  “But it was only an idea, mind you, because I was so exasperated.”

  And, indeed, there was such a fire on the island that August. Violent, relentless, infernal. It destroyed everything, including his land. It burned down their prefabricated house; he and his wife barely made it. The fire cost lives, since in their effort to put it out, both locals and foreigners fought with great determination. The wind was blowing like the devil. Irineos and his fellow villagers found themselves in their rowboats out at sea, watching the savage spectacle with mixed emotions. But the others kept glancing over at him suspiciously, because he was unable to conceal in his face, illuminated by the reflections of the fire, an absurd air of satisfaction.

  “Where were you yesterday afternoon, Irineos?” the police sergeant asked him first thing in the morning, while they could still smell the horrible odor of burned wood. By an unfortunate coincidence, Irineos had been at his beehives, the area from which the fire had started, near Kynira. It seems he had been overheard at the cafe, saying that only if he burned the wretched plot of land would he be able to build on it.

  “I’m not the one who set the fire, Officer. It was the wind that brought it all the way here; and nobody knows which way the wind is going to blow.”

&nb
sp; Others had lost their goats, their sheep, their fortunes. Mit-soras, who was going to marry off his daughter on the fifteenth of August and was offering seven hundred lambs as a dowry, didn’t have a single animal left. Aunt Lissava, who looked after the chapel as if it were her own, found only the stone walls and the belfry left. Flames had devoured the sculpted wood icon. And the son of the resistance fighter had burned to death fighting the fire. Because the flames danced around like Salome. You didn’t know where they’d pop up next. And that brave young man had found himself wrapped in their veils without realizing it. He had believed in a new Greece.

  Thus, it was not long before Irineos found himself in court again, since he didn’t have an alibi. Or rather, his alibi placed him in the very spot where the fire had started that afternoon. And that was incriminating evidence.

  “As to who the arsonist was, we have no knowledge,” he told me, as he had told the court. “We can’t know who it is. It might have been one person, or it might have been many. Then again it might not have been anyone.”

  “How can that be?” the court asked.

  “I’ll tell you how,” he answered. “There exists within nature the elements of its entropy, as in thermodynamics. It’s the famous second law. That’s how trees catch fire on their own and burn up.”

  “Yes, but, as a court of law, we have to examine every possibility. That’s what we’re paid for. Whatever you might say, the fire was started by certain people who wanted it. Who could those people have been on that Thursday, the day of the fire?”

  “First of all, there were two yachts moored in the natural port of Kynira. There were tourists who had set up camp on the beach, under the pine trees.

  “The tourists disappeared like birds at the sound of a gunshot, frightened from the forked branches of trees, the whole flock taking to the air and darkening the sky as they flew off elsewhere. As for the yachts...”

  This seemed to be a cue for the rest of the members of the court to offer their own candidates. “There were a couple of shepherds, Lazos and Sotiris, and the refugees at the settlement of Ano Karya.”

  “And let’s not forget the wandering monk, with his knapsack over his shoulder, telling everyone ‘Repent! The time is nigh! The fire will burn you all!”’

  “He disappeared. Either in the flames, or he returned across to Mount Áthos. In any case, the priest pronounced an anathema on him in church, because the monk was a heretic. But the priest’s beard didn’t escape from the fire either. He had to shave it off, and now he looks like a Catholic priest.”

  “So then the monk is also a suspect?”

  “Everyone is a suspect, I admit it. But Irineos is the prime suspect. The fire coincided with his third and last visit to the Forestry Department, where he was given the final ‘no’ by the forest ranger, and which he left muttering dark threats.”

  “Count him in. But you and me, too. You’ve put on weight recently.”

  “I’ve been overeating. I gave up smoking, so now I’m overeating. And do you know why I gave up smoking?”

  “Because you’re less of a suspect if you don’t smoke.” “Exactly.”

  The great culprit had to be found and hung in the village square. “Who had reason to set the fire?”

  “The Israelis, using the Turks as intermediaries. Everyone knows their secret services collaborate.”

  “Before examining the macrocosm, let us examine the microcosm. Before we look outside, let us look inside ourselves.”

  “The arsonist is wandering around among us, a free man,” said the mayor of the village, who wanted to keep his title at the next election.

  Irineos was finally acquitted, but meanwhile he had become very embittered. How vile of them to suspect him, instead of each one of them looking inside their own souls to find the culprit. And so he started thinking of emigrating for a second time, in his old age. He would sell the taxi and go back to Vancouver. His homeland had hurt him again. The first time was when it wouldn’t let him leave because he belonged to the left. And now again...

  “I only wept for the son of the resistance fighter,” he said. “His father and I started off together, working in the coal mines in Charleroi. He stayed there, married a Belgian woman. His son had come back two years ago. He was the first and the finest young man in the village. Along with the other young people he founded the cultural center and the popular art museum. He never stopped working for the good of his country. And, because of our family connection, I was the one who was chosen to notify his father. But I didn’t know if he would want him buried here or there. Meanwhile nobody would take charge of the body. The hospital would only accept someone who was alive. ‘What if they’re dying?’ I asked. ‘In that case, yes. But not dead.’ He was beginning to smell. The heat was unbearable. There was no cold storage area available. I took him to Kavála....” Indignation filled the smoke-stained breast. The struggle, the sacred struggle for justice and the equal distribution of wealth. “ Where are you youth, you who predicted I would become another?“

  “What do you mean another?” I asked.

  “That verse of Varnalis’s became a reality for me: I changed my name in Canada. Nobody could pronounce it there. Since in Greek it means pacific, I changed it to Pacifico.”

  Doña Rosita

  and

  Don Pacifico

  -1-

  Doña Rosita is a vast woman. Because she encompasses the dream. That is to say damp expanses, planted with trees, with gardens where birds can live. Doña Rosita embroiders. An embroidery into which she passes all the uncomplicated thread of her love. She has eyes that call you to become a seafarer, to explore it all, right and left, right side up and upside-down. Doña Rosita is irrigated by tributary dreams. Since, as we already said, dreams constitute the center of our existence, Doña Rosita materializes dreams, as when she bends down to collect autumn leaves with which she composes large tableaux. She has them framed at her neighborhood frame shop. Or when she catches birds’ cries, passes them through her, and then exhales them in the forms of song. Snail people, suspended from their windows, come out of their shells to listen to her.

  Doña Rosita is a vast woman. She also has a vast wardrobe. The two rows of dresses that hang in it are not enough for her. She has a rich collection of outfits of all kinds and she changes them with the frequency of dreams. Never has Don Pacifico seen her wear the same dress twice. “I’m empty, empty,” he cries to her. “Empty.”

  “Fill yourself with water. Fill yourself with dream,” replies Doña Rosita.

  “But what will the water reflect? An empty sky?”

  “No, it will reflect my face.”

  Doña Rosita’s face is made from the soft dough that fritter dreams are made of,because there are fritter dreams as there are napoleon dreams, and chocolate cake, and cheesecake, and angel food cake, and Black Forest cake dreams; half-eaten and half-baked dreams; dreams with almonds, with walnut and cinnamon filling, covered in syrup; chocolate eclair and caramel cream dreams, lollipop dreams, ice cream dreams—Baskin-Robbins, Ben and Jerry’s, strawberry sorbet, lemon and lime sorbet—sugar cone and popsicle dreams, boutique, batik, and Calvin Klein or cotton candy dreams.Doña Rosita is a vast woman. And Don Paci-fico is too narrow to accommodate her entirety.

  But if Doña Rosita is the dream, then Don Pacifico is the implied arsonist. Even though he himself never set the fire that logically he could have set, considering his lack of logic. (The suspicion that the arsonist was a Jew caught on easily among the mistrustful islanders.)

  By burning the hinterland and transforming it from a wooded expanse into a barren wasteland, they reasoned, he could then build his home. “As an arsonist, I bear my guilt in full. As a builder, I pass this guilt through the building materials, the plasterboard and fiberglass that are words.”

  On the horizon of Doña Rosita, mistakes are marked in the words she makes out of clouds. When Don Pacifico burned down one of her wooded areas, Doña Rosita (the land of Doña Rosita) grew poor
er by a few acres, but she had boundless expanses inside her to withstand the devastation of his fire. She was annoyed that he had filled her sky with smoke, but a different sun shone down upon her undamaged expanses the following day.

  “Why did I do it?” Don Pacifico asks himself. “Or could it be that I didn’t do it? Could it be that the fire started by itself and that I had nothing to do with it? Could it be that the joy I draw from this cleared land, where I am finally able to build with words, is a guilty joy, drawn from the Talmudic scriptures and the Old Testament, while I am anything but guilty?

  “It hadn’t rained since April. And then in August, that terrible month (I always hated August), the pine needles caught fire by themselves, those pine needles whose presence burned us, pricked us, and aroused our senses without us being able to resist them, because they would drag us along every day into a conflagration, after which we never knew where to hide the ash and cinders. Could it be that because they were not allowed to burn Judas in effigy, Christian fanatics and fifth-column activists set fire to the entire land of Judea? No, it is not me who is guilty.”

  -2-

  Doña Rosita has overcome her crisis, and Don Pacifico is leading her at a steady pace where he chooses to go. One, two pictures come to her mind: it was midday, on a hill overlooking the sea. The pine trees were small, gnawed by the salt. On the ground, pine needles. Inside her, a dense heat, with no outlet, made her want him very much.... Now he is reviving that scene for her. He is talking to her of dry brushwood, of pine needles, of the burning of the sun, of her own burning. And of his burning. He takes her by the hand. He leads her to a vestibule with heavy red drapes. She identifies with the picture in her mind. She gives herself to him. It all happens in the mind. He covers the weakness of his body with the power of the word. He dominates her. He takes her there where she becomes a sea, a lilac, a flower, a vision, a tree.