“Control yourselves,” he said, weightily. “It serves no purpose to bathe Crete in blood. The hour will soon come I see it already marked in Allah’s book when his Greek will have to pay. I can already see his head nailed up over the pasha’s gate. Be patient. Let us go!”
He stepped forward with measured gait, and the agas followed. The coffeehouse was empty.
Captain Michales twirled his mustache and looked down at Nuri. He laughed, his jaw jutted out. His heart gave a bound of pleasure. He turned to the proprietor, who was now venturing out from behind the serving table.
“Hey, Hussein,” he said, “put the pot on the fire and make me a coffee. Without sugar!”
CHAPTER 4
THE STORM HAD BROKEN. The sky fell, Megalokastro seemed to rise and become part of it. The falling water flooded the streets and the world grew dark. Everywhere lightning played around the minarets, and down below, in Broad Street, Captain Michales’ face flared harsh and undismayed as he rode home. The mare’s broad white chest glittered with wet.
It was a bora that lasted scarcely half an hour. Then came a wind from the mountains, the clouds were rent, and through them gleamed the deep blue sky, while slanting, newborn shafts of sunshine fell upon the soaking town. The cobbles seemed to laugh, and the sparrows on the roofs shook their soaked feathers. Megalokastro emerged from the storm freshly washed and young again. From the courtyards came the scent of rain-wet honeysuckle, marjoram and basil.
With one blow Captain Michales opened the door. His wife took the mare by the reins without a word, while he imself strode into the house and hung the Turk’s dagger up on the shrine, in front of the icon of Saint Michael. Captain Michaies was steaming with scorn, sweat and rain. Clean, dry clothes were brought him, and he put them on. With his body refreshed, he stretched himself on the bed, closed his eyes and was immediately embraced by soft, merciful slumber.
While he rested, the Kastrians, Turks and Christians alike, gathered in their homes early that evening. The men whispered together, while the women sat about, listening and sighing, but saying nothing. So Crete, abandoned by all, was once again not to have repose? They pondered. Were the massacres going to begin again? Would we once more have to lose our men? And where shall we go? With the infants, the pots and pans and the linen once more on our backs?
The most prudent of the Christians, the owners of shops and vineyards, cursed Captain Michaies’ drunken exploits which dragged so many men with him into trouble. The others on the contrary, the palikars, were proud of this fresh flouting of Turkey.
The Turks had gathered, some of them in the tekes, some in Nuri Bey’s konak. They cursed and threatened, but could not think of a way to wash away the disgrace. The^muezzin kept fanning the fire in them, and the more reasonable of the elders tried to put it out again, while Nuri Bey sat thoughtful in a corner and said nothing. At length they grew tired of the noise and of slaughtering the Christians hi their thoughts. They chose three spokesmen to go next morning to the pasha and to urge him to tighten the reins upon the Christians. Is he a pasha or a piece of halvah? How long has it been since he stopped hanging Christians from the plane tree or putting them in the pillory? If this goes on, the giaours will venture anything andGod punish us if we are lyingthat mad captain will soon ride even into the mosques and drive us out with his whip! He must be hanged or be stuck in the pillory, even if only to warn his followers to keep within bounds. That’s how Turkey would act! But his pasha deals uch too softly with the Greeks: the weak-witted creature talks of justice! He plays draughts with the Metropolitan, they drink mastic, eat baklava and sit up together all night whispering secrets!
Early next morning the three spokesmen proceeded to the konak. Their ears were still buzzing from the stormy instructions with which they had been charged. In the middle walked the muezzin, on his right Selim Aga, and on the left, sunk hi thought, Nuri Bey. Their gait was measured, and they did not speak to one another. Each was weaving a web of his thoughtswhat he was to say to the pasha and how. Selim Aga was for peace; he had a large yearly income hi oil, corn, almonds and grapes. The muezzin was pressing the Koran to his chest, next to the skin, and it was burning him. Nuri Bey was undecided and he kept his head bowed.
That night his father had again appeared to him in his sleep, still in rags and covered with dirt, and had slipped his costly black-hilted knife under the pillow. But in the morning, when Nuri Bey picked up the pillow and found no knife, his heart was on the point of breaking. The old man doesn’t trust me, he sighed, he’s taken it away from me again. He’s afraid I’ll dishonor it.
Heavy and morose, the pasha sat waiting for them on the big divan. More trouble, the dogs and the cats are fighting again. These giaours want freedomcurses on them! The Mussulmans are pressing him to slaughter all giaourscurses on them too! Servitude, my respected giaours, is a thing ordained by God! The bondsmen too, my agas, are ordained by God: they till the fields, they keep trade going, they bring in taxes. Who wants to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?
The Moor appeared. “Pasha Effendi, they’ve arrived.”
“Show them in,” replied the pasha, his voice rising.
They came in, one after another, made their bows, and without a word took their places cross-legged on the large divan.
The muezzin was the first to open his mouth. Lanky and bony, with sunken cheeks, sparse, whitish wisps of eard and a hairy wart as big as a horsefly, which sat between his brows and made him look three-eyed, he spoke and spoke. The longer he heard his own voice, the fiercer it made him. Foaming with wrath, he pulled the Koran from his bosom and began rocking to and fro as he read. The pasha felt faint; he raised his long pipe.
“Hodza Effendi,” he said, “you’ve made me giddy. Speak simply, so I can understand. I’m an Anatolian, a slow mind. In a word: what do you want?”
“Action,” the muezzin answered, and the hairs on his wart stood out.
The pasha sighed and turned to Selim Aga. “And what’s your opinion, Selim Aga?” he asked. “Is that also your view?”
“We need peace, Pasha Effendi,” replied the gray-headed property owner, “not a massacre, peace. We’re having a good year: March has brought us plenty of rain and given the crops strength; the olives, too, are promising. We shall have a rich harvest and excellent oil this year, God be praised. So peace, Pasha Effendi! This Crete is a great savage beast. Let’s not wake it upit devours men! What does it matter that a madman broke into our coffee house? After all, he was drunk. Let’s shut our eyesit’s hi our interest to do so. If we pigheadedly give, blow for blow, we’re lost. Pigheadedness turns to wrongheadedness, Pasha Effendi. Open your records and enter the giaour in them: his name is Captain Michales. His hour will come. You are the pasha; you bear the scimitar, you strike off heads.”
He turned to the muezzin. “That is my opinion, Hodza Effendi,” he said. “I’m sorry. You own no trees, vineyards or fields, and you don’t know the distress of the earth and of men and women. But ask me. Ask the trees and the crops. Do they want a rising? No, they don’t.”
“I don’t ask among trees, crops and human beings,” the muezzin bellowed, thumping the Koran, “I ask Allah.” He again took the Koran out from his bosom and opened it.
But the pasha stretched out his hand. “The Koran says hatever its reader has in mind,” he said with a yawn. “You want a slaughter? you open the Koran and find a justification. If Selim Aga opens it, he’ll find another wordpeaceand that too comes from God. Both are from God, so be quiet!”
He turned to Nuri Bey. “And what’s your opinion, Nuri Bey?” he said. “Massacre or peacewhich does your Koran say?”
Nuri Bey rubbed his fist several times ‘along his hairy, crossed legs, as he sought the right answer. He took a long time to weigh his opinion. He certainly did not want peace. Turkey had already been patient too long, the Greek had grown too insolent. The moment had come to knock him on the head. But he also wanted no massacre he was not bloodthirsty, nor was he a hodza w
ho fetched his fire from the Koran.
“Well?” asked the pasha, annoyed by his hesitation. “I’m asking you again: do you want peace, Nuri Bey, or a massacre?”
“The straightforward, simple way has become lost to us, Pasha Effendi,” said Nuri Bey, trying to gain a little more time.
“It’s not lost, young man, but we’ve grown blind and can’t find it. Or has your lordship found it?”
“I think so, Pasha Effendi.”
“I hope so for your sake! Speak, then, and free us from our blindness.”
“Neither peace nor a massacre. The guilty one must ay.”
“Captain Michales?” asked the pasha. “Do you mean him?”
“Grant me the liberty, Pasha Effendi, not to say whom I mean. You are pasha. If you intervene, weapons will speak and we shall swim in blood. Let me undertake the vengeance on behalf of Turkey. Who the guilty man is, you’ll soon learn.”
“Will you kill him?”
“I shall kill him, but no one will find out who the murderer was. Trust me.”
The muezzin jumped up, furious. “One man isn’t guilty, thousands are. They all deserve the pillory. That’s what keeping the peace means. The Greek understands nothing else. Cut off his head, if you like, then he’ll be quiet.”
Selim Aga’s brain was full of trees and vines. He too jumped up and began to shout. But the muezzin’s voice was like a bellhow was he to silence it? They came to blows. Nuri Bey stepped between them, to separate them. Unmoved, the pasha remained sitting on his divan. These Turks of Crete made his head whirl. All were right, all were wrong: how was he to unravel it? Above all, he was sleepy. He had not had a good nighthe had overeaten and drunk too much. He was in a hurry to have done with the affair. He shook off his fatigue and shouted:
“Hey, you, aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? Stop fighting, I tell you! Nuri Bey, you are right. That is the camel’s way, the correct one. So do as Allah enlightens you. I give you freedom to do so!”
Selim Aga picked up his white headband from the floor and turned to Nuri Bey. “You have my blessing, Nuri Bey,” he said in a tone of entreaty, “if you proceed cautiously, kill with moderation, don’t make the Greeks wild, keep the peace for us.”
“I shall not let my law be trampled underfoot,” bellowed the muezzin. “I shall preach hi the mosque and awaken Turkey!”
That brought life into the pasha, and he raised his fist.
“Hodza,” he shouted, “I am in command In Megalokastro. By the beard of the Prophet, I’ll make you wear a muzzle, like a dog that bites! Listen! There will be no massacreget the idea out of your headas long as I receive no orders from Constantinople.”
He stood up, turned his face away (for he had a pain in his stomach) and yawned again.
“Go, I am busy. Do as we said, Nuri Bey, but be careful. Careful, children, for these are Greeks, damn them! If they had not been in our path, Turkey would already have swallowed up the world.”
He clapped his hands, and the Moor came hi. “Show the beys out,” he said.
While this meeting was taking place, three other distinguished heads, Greek this time, were making their measured way to the Metropolitan. They were Hadjisavas, Captain Ellas and old Mavrudes, known us Rose
The first, a pale hobbler and stutterer with a gray beard stained yellow by cigarette smoking, had in his time traveled into the land of the Franks to become a doctor, and had come back with his head turned. His madness consisted in paying workmen to dig up the earth for him in places where there were ruins, or on deserted parts of the coast and even in the caves of Psiloritis. He dug and dug, and found hands and feet of marble, dishes covered with odd lettering, and pottery vases. All this he took into the Bishop’s Residence. He had already stuffed a huge room with it. That was now not large enough, and he had begun to spread out his treasures in the churchyard. The Christians grumbled that they could no longer send their wives and daughters to church for fear of their seeing those shameless ancient demons, stark naked.
It had been good advice that had been given to old Hadjisavas the father, not to send his son to the land of the Franks, for he would get his soul damaged there. Quite right! Back he had come with a shovel, and dug and dug and dug. It was said he was looking for the golden sow with the nine piglets. But how should he find her? All he possessed he spent on workmen’s wages. Now he ran about in a shabby suit and worn-out shoes. He talked to himself in the street, and soon, for sure, he would begin throwing stones. Onlylookthe Metropolitan respected him, gave him a seat near his own at church, and on Sunday handed him the consecrated bread before anybody else. And whenever the Christians found themselves groping in the dark, they sent him as spokesman to the Metropolitan and to the pasha. And once, when Prankish warships were anchored in the harbor, he ť had chattered with the Franks. He had talked and talked nd none of the Greeks could understand him. Poor thing!or did he really speak foreign languages?
Captain Elias was another relic of 1821, a crumbled, weed-grown tower without door or window. His body, pierced like a sieve with bullets, was square and big-boned, and his voice was like a clap of thunderanyone to whom he said good day received a shock. His right eye had been put out by a Turkish pasha with a fork. But the Athenian National Committee had sent him a glass eye, the first glass eye to land in Crete. And Captain Elias wore it and shot sparks from it at those he could not hurt. On official occasions he took it out and put it in a glass of water. Then he came into the presence of Metropolitan or pasha with one eye, to remind them of 1821. The other two elders had now placed him in the middle and, bowed over his cudgel, he was on his way, one-eyed once more, to see the Metropolitan.
The third, Mavrudes, old Rose Bug, was a hideous, sour bachelor and miser who went hungry and moaned when he ate, shivered with cold and cursed when he bought himself a warm coat. He threw widows and orphans into the streets when they owed him money. He collected and collected: gold pounds, vineyards, fields, houses, steamboats. But if anyone asked him why he did not eat regular meals, he would whine: “What should I eat? Where am I to get it? Nothing’s mine; all this belongs to the nation. I won’t touch it!” In the 1871 rising he had gone to the Metropolitan with a sealed document. “Bishop,” he had said, “take this paper. I am giving all my fortune to the senate of Megalokastro. An insurrection is an expensive thing, it requires money. Sell what I possess, and put it into arms.” “And youhow are you going to live, Mavrudes?” the Metropolitan had asked with tears in his eyes. “Why are you worrying about me, Bishop? I shall knock at the doors and beg.” The Metropolitan had taken care of him and had set apart a monthly allowance for him. But he had at once begun stinting again, would not eat, would not drink, would not dress respectably. He lent money at high rates of interest, nd extracted their capital from widows and orphans. He had got together a new fortune. Old now and with one foot in the grave, he had made a will again leaving all to the nation. His brain was like an ax, and in difficult moments it hewed to right and left and opened up a way. So the Christians had sent him too as their spokesman.
The Metropolitan was waiting for them on a soft divan in the Bishop’s Residence. Before him, on a stand of cypress in the form of a dove with outstretched wings, lay the silver-clasped Gospel. Above it hung three lithographs: on the right, the Patriarch of Constantinople, on the left, the Czar, in the middle, Hagia Sophia. The sun came in through colored panes and threw a blue and violet light on the opposite wall, which was crowded with photographs of living and dead Metropolitans and bishops. They had snow-white or pitch-black beards, miters and amulets and chains and crosiers. Some of them looked out with gracious and benevolent eyes and were as hairy as unshorn rams. Others had protruding eyes, wide mouths and stubborn necks, and clutched the crosier as though it were a police cudgel. Also among them was the present metropolitan as a young archimandrite in Kiev. How powerfully he gazed out, what noble force he showed! This young hero had been created by God to be either a great leader or prophet, or a wencher and enjoyer of lif
e. But Christ had wooed him for Himself, with words that to the young man were sweeter than honey, and had led him slowly on the way to what he was to becomea Metropolitan.
He glanced at his picture as a young man and sighed: “I’ve grown old, I’ve got yellow as a cabbage, and the day is drawing near when I shall stand before the Judgment Seat with empty hands. How many Metropolitans of Crete will take their places before the Incorruptible Judge, bearing in their hands the gear of martyrdom knives, axes, whips and stakes. And I shall stand there with empty hands. O God, grant me to die for Thy honor and for the honor of Thy poor daughter!”
Murzuflos came in with drawn face. “The elders have come, my lord,” he said. “They’re waiting.”
“Show them in. And take the large silver salver to hand round. These are gentlemen, you know.”
Murzuflos hesitated on the threshold. The Metropolitan looked at him in surprise. “Is there anything else you want, Murzuflos?”
“Do you forgive me, my lord?” said Murzuflos, and his face was anxious again. “Do you forgive me for what I’ve done?”
The Metropolitan laughed. “Don’t worry, Murzuflos,” he said. “The Crucified One will forgive you. Build on His mercy!”
“My guilt is great___”
“But His mercy also is great. Go now!” The three elders came in, kissed the Metropolitan’s hand and sat down on the divan. They pulled out their rosaries and waited for the Metropolitan to speak first.
“Lovely weatherrmy children,” said he, looking out of the window. “What pleasant days these are! What sunshine! God’s own good cheer! The spring! Saint George! How goes it now with the crops, old Mavrudes?” “God be praised,” he answered.
“With the crops it goes well,” said Captain Elias. “With men, not well. I’m for heroic deeds when they’re needed. If not, they’re idiocies!”
“The men of old used to say–” began Hadjisavas, ut Captain Elias raised his hand angrily and interrupted him:
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