His gaze took in everything around himdirty, unshaven, unwashed men with long hair and curly beardsunholy tenor! They were from every class: laborers, peasants, teachers, students, shepherdsboth men and women. Many young girls had deserted their homes and taken to the hills. Love of danger, of the male breath, desire for freedom, made them put on the rebel cap, comb their hair loose, and set out to share hunger and lice and death with the men. The women cooked, washed, carried off the wounded, bandaged their wounds, took up their rifles, and ran to the attack. Secretly they stole down to the un—
freed villages and delivered messages to the secret comrades, exchanged letters, risked their lives unflinchingly. And as the men saw the bravery of these women, how they starved, froze, fought and died, their own courage flared, and they tried to surpass one another.
Father Yánaros watched them with pride as they leaped in dance around the fire, their heads held high.
“Oh, if those unforgettable years would returnthose years of youththat I might toss my shoes off and jump into the flames, spread out my arms to the right and left, and take up the dance again with the angels!”
“Greetings, friends!” Father Yánaros shouted unintentionally and offered his hand.
He came closer; a heavy smell hit his nostrils: roasting lamb and the stench of man’s sweat. A chubby young fighter with red shoes and a blond mustache jumped before him. He grabbed the priest from the right, two others grabbed him from the left, and they dragged him to the head of the dance.
“Welcome to Father Yánaros, our handsome friend!” they shouted. “He’s come to dance with us, brothers! Come on, gather your robes, Father!” Father Yánaros steadied himself on his staff and stepped back. “Why are you dancing, men?” he shouted. “Let me be; all right, I’ll dance, but first tell me why you’re dancing. Have you good news? Has the cursed rifle, that mouth of Satan, finally become mute? Have the enemies be-come friends again? Have they opened their eyes to see that all of us are brothers? Speak up friends; I’m going to burst!”
The fighters laughed. Aleko, the lame army cook, limped forward. “Our brothers in China spilled over the valleys; they walked through the cities, freed millions of people and reached the Yellow River; we heard the news on the radio.”
“Who did you say, friends? My ears are ringing from the climb. I didn’t hear you. Who did you say?”
“We said the Chinese, priest, the Chineseour friends, our brothers. Come close, we say; toss the robe away and join in the dance!”
“So now the Chinese are our brothers, too? What do we care what’s going on at the other end of the world? Charity be-gins at home!”
“They’re our brothers!” the teacher from Chalika piped up, “the Chinese are our brothers. There’s no ‘other end’ of the world any more; charity begins at home, but we’re all one home now; all the wronged people are brothers, we have the same father.”
“What father?”
“Lenin.”
“Not Christ, eh?”
The teacher burst into laughter. “My priest, turn the pages of the Bible, there’s a supplementread the Fifth Gospelthe Holy Gospel ‘according to Lenin.’ That’s where you’ll see it! There are no more Greeks and Bulgars and Chinese; we’re all brothers. All the cursed and wronged, all who hunger and thirst for justiceyellow, black, white! Open your heart, Father Yánaros, and place them all inside; don’t be miserly with your love, lead with the heart!”
Loukas, the leader’s adjutant, grabbed Father Yánaros’ shoulder. He was a short man with a red, thorny beard, and he wore a black kerchief on his head and a boar’s tooth on a leather cord around his neck. “Come on, dance the zembekiko, Father,” he shouted, “stamp your feet on the earth that’s going to claim us all in the end. Easter is near, Christos anesti! The people have risen from the dead!”
He turned to the other men. “All right men, the hymn!” And at once, all around the fires, the wild, triumphant revised Easter Hymn broke out: “The people have risen from the dead! Death has crushed death….”
“You see, Father,” the teacher said, “we haven’t changed much; we only changed the word ‘Christ’ to ‘the people’it’s the same thing. That’s what God is today, anywaythe peo-ple!”
“The people are not God,” interrupted the priest angrily. “Woe to us if He were that!”
“Woe to us if He were the other,” retorted the teacher, “the one who watches children die of hunger and does not lift a finger to help.”
“As long as there are starving children there is no God,” an angry young woman cried, shaking her fist at the priest as though he were to blame.
Father Yánaros was silent. There was much he could say in defense of God, but he remained silent. Who could fight earthquakes and firesand youth? He opened his eyes wide and looked at the excited, handsome young men and women, and sweat poured from his brow. He struggled to gather his wits, to see, to understand. Forgive me, God, he thought, can it be that this is a new religion? How did man’s heart become so big? be-fore this, it contained only the people of our homesmothers, fathers, brothers; it was smallsmall and narrow. At most it took in Yánnina, Epirus; at most, Macedonia, Roumeli, Morea, the islands of Greece, and, further out, Constantinople. It could go no further; but look at it now! Now it has encom-passed the world! What is this new attack, my Lord? They tell me to get up and dance for the Chinese, the Hindus, the Africans! I can’t! My heart has room only for the Greeks. Can it be that I’ve aged, IFather Yánaros who boasted that I was twenty years old and that I’d conquered old age? No, I could never take such a jump now!
Loukas, the wild one, looked at the priest from the corner of his eye, and watched him lean on his staff thoughtfully; he approached him and his voice was mocking. “For your own good, old man, don’t come and go between the two sidesboth the red and the black bullets can reach you, you know. Make up your mind to join us; you’ll have thousands before you to shield you; alone, you’re lost.”
“No matter what position I take, my friend,” Father Yánaros replied, “I don’t want anyone to shield meonly Godthat’s the way I am.”
“Ah, Father Yánaros, you’ll see that during great danger, this God you speak of will desert you.”
“But I will not desert Him!” the priest said and struck his staff against the rocks. “Where can He go! I’ve got Him by the edge of His robe; I won’t let Him go!”
Loukas shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “The robe will tear, it will remain just a rag in your hands; and your ambi-tious God will have vanished. But why do I waste my time talking to you? I know you, Father Yánaros, you’re stubborn as a rock.”
The teacher broke into laughter. “You’re wasting your words,
Loukas,” he shouted. “Father Yánaros’ soul is likeand forgive me for thislike the bitch my late father kept to guard his sheep.”
“A bitch?” one of the women said with curiosity. “Have you no respect, teacher? The old man is a holy man, even if he is not one of us.”
“Don’t be shocked, comrades; I’ll explain, so you can understand. My father was a shepherd; I was only a child, but what I’m about to tell you impressed me greatly, and I never forgot it; we had a white bitch, a real beast, who guarded the few sheep we kept. One night a wolf came into the flock and mated with the bitch. Since that night the dog never barked when the wolf entered. My father would notice the sheep disappearing, first one, then another, yet the bitch was among the flock, and we could not hear her bark. ‘What’s this mystery,’ he said, ‘I can’t understand it.’ One night he took his rifle and set watch; and what did he see? Around midnight he heard the wolf jump into the flocknot a sound from the dog; she only raised her head and wagged her tail. The wolf was about to leap for the sheep when my father fired, and then fell upon the wolf with his ax. He must have been wounded because he ran, howling. Then my father took the club and beat the dog violently. He wanted to kill her but he felt pity; so he opened the door and threw her ou
t. Daylight came. The bitch ran, she ran howling; she climbed the lookout post between the village and the valley and there she stopped. Where could she go? Before her was the wolves’ lair, and behind was my father with the club; whichever way she turned, she was lost. Three days and three nights she howled between the wolves and the sheep. Although years have passed, and I’m almost an old man, I still shudder when I remember her howling. The fourth day she was silent; my father went up and found her dead.”
“So what, teacher?” a woman asked, “and what do you mean by that?”
“That bitch,” the teacher replied, and his voice was bitter he was not laughing now“that bitch, comrades, is the soul of Father Yánaros. He howls in the same manner, between the reds and the blacks and he’s going to die; pity on his soul!”
Father Yánaros did not say a word, but a knife had slashed his
heart; for a moment he was terrified. I’m going to die, he thought. Can the teacher be right? Yes, yes, I’ll die howling between the wolves and the sheep. He shuddered; a black whisper of wind raced along his spine.
“Friends,” he said, “I’m going to sit down, I’m tired.”
He found a rock and huddled on it.
As the dance ended, the fighters knelt around Father Yana-ros; some of them took letters from inside their shirtsletters which the captain’s wife had distributed to them. Some read them, others asked the teacher for help; and he, kneeling beside them, read their letters to them.
The first who asked the teacher to read his letter for him was Kosmas. Once, a long time ago, he was a settled landowner, and in partnership with an Armenian merchant in Preveza, where they sold fabrics. But the Armenian swindled him and Kosmas became a traveling salesman. When he was a property owner, he hunted down the communists with fury. “The bastardsthey want to sell out their country and Christ, too,” he would shout. “They want to take my shop and distribute my goods among themselves, I tell you!” But now that he was des-titute, he, too, joined the dance of the reds; he wanted to destroy this rotten world and avenge himself with the Armenian. “Whoever is rich, and is a communist, is an idiot,” he would say. “Whoever is poor, and is not a communist, is a bigger idiot.” Now he called to the teacher and asked him to read his letter.
“Eh, teacher,” he said, “if I’d only had you as my partner, I’d never have lost my business.”
“But you wouldn’t be up here in the hills with us, my friend; you’d be with the blacks in the valley.”
“You’re right, teacher, to hell with my shop. I just can’t get over what happened; but let’s stop it nowhere’s the letter, read it.”
The teacher took the letter and read aloud:
“Dear Brother Kosmas: We’re all well, thank the Lord, ex-cept that all of us are sickcall it hunger, call it malaria. None of the crucifiersneither the blacks nor the redshave bothered us yet; but every time there’s a knock on the door, our hearts do somersaults. Pardalo, our goat, had kids the other daythree of thembut damn her, they’re all male. A short while ago a
little old man passed by the village with a white mouse in a cagehe was telling fortunes, but we didn’t go. Our mother dreamt that there was a heavy rain, and then the sun came out. We went to the priest so he could explain the dream to us. ‘Ob-viously, a light,’ he told us, God bless him, ‘a brilliant lightit’s a good, blessed dream. Probably Kosmas will return soon; that’s the explanation for the sun.’”
“I’m the sun!” Kosmas cried, and burst into laughter. “My poor mother! The old lady thinks about it all day, so she sees it in her dreams.”
The teacher went further down the line; he paused and knelt beside a dark-faced giant of a man who was holding a piece of paper in his hand, turning it helplessly as he cursed at not be-ing able to understand what all these black smudges meant. The teacher came and explained it all to him. The letter read:
“You bird-brained oafwhat are you doing up in those hills, leaving me alone in the fields with the goats and the brats? What God-damned people filled your brain with hot air? You write me that you’re fighting for freedomyou have rocks in your head, my dear husband. You poor fool, does freedom give you food to eat? Does it come to help me with the chores? Does it clean our house, plow our fields, wash and comb out the lice from our children’s heads? You ingrateis this what you promised me when we were married? I’m a priest’s daughter, remember? I was raised in comfort. I’m no peasant girl, don’t forget that! I’m not one for heavy chores! Get back here immediately or you’ll never see me again. There are plenty of men around, begging me, you know”
“Enough, God damn her!” the dark-faced one shouted and tore the letter into a thousand pieces.
The teacher laughed. “Don’t get sick over it, Dimitri, we’ve started big things herethe devil with women!” he said and walked on, toward the men who surrounded Father Yánaros, making idle talk.
Two young fighters arrived, sweating and joyful; they wore short shepherds’ capes and carried staffs; their hands were covered with blood. They approached and motioned to Loukas.
“Our deepest sympathies,” they said laughing.
“Where’s the box?” Loukas asked, and put out his hand.
One of the men took out a long silver container from under his cape and handed it to him.
“Alms, Captain Loukas,” he said jokingly.
“Don’t joke, comrade,” Loukas said. “This Holy Sash is going to be our fighting ally; wait and see.” He placed two fingers to his mouth and whistled. “Eh, comrade! Eh, Aleko!” he shouted. He turned to the two messengers. “And the clothing?” he asked.
The second man took out a bundle of clothes from under his cape.
“Here,” he said, “we left him in his underwear.” He spread out a robe, a cap, a belt, two boots, a pair of heavy light-blue socks, and a silver cross on the ground.
“We took his baskets and the mule, too; there were a few figs left in the bottom of the baskets, and we ate them.”
“Aleko!” Loukas shouted again.
The men stepped back as smiling, well-fed Aleko the cook limped into sight.
“Present!” Aleko shouted, and stood before Loukas.
“Father Alexander,” the second-to-the-leader chided, smiling, “here is your angelic garbdress quickly! We have a job to do!”
“A monk?” Aleko’s eyes bulged, as he took the clothing.
“Dress quickly and don’t ask questions!”
Aleko threw off his jacket and trousers, wrapped himself in the robe, pulled the monk’s hood over his head, and hung the cross around his neck. He raised his hand, “blessed” the men and the young girls who had gathered around, and roared with laughter.
Loukas held the silver case and tossed it in the air, playing with it as it came down.
“Gather your wits carefully, Father Alexander,” he said to Aleko. “I turn over this silver bomb to yougo carefully through all the villages and call out your wares: ‘Eh, Christians, the Sash that was worn by the Virgin is hereit is here! It has come to embrace your village, your souls; to rout the black de-mons, poverty, war, injustice! And the Virgin has a secret message for you: Come to worship, come and hear, all you who believe!’ That’s what you’re to shout, and when the crowd gathers, lean over and whisper to each one, ‘The Virgin ordered me to tell you that you will have her blessing if you kill the fascists.
They are the black devilsthe blackhoods!’ That’s what you’re to say, you understand?”
“I understand; in other words, it’s a farce.”
“Be very careful, now, and don’t laugh; you’re a sly one, and that’s why I chose you for this job; but this matter calls for the slyness of a monk, because if they even suspect, they’ll crucify you, Father Alexander, as they crucified your master.”
Father Yánaros stood there, looking and listening, and he choked with anger. This was a different world, without respect, without God, full of youth and heroism and blasphemy. They laugh at the mention
of Christ here, and they are prepared to die for justice and freedom. Can these rebels who rise against injustice, can they beGod forgive methe new Christians, and not know it? And because they do not know it, they blaspheme? But the day will comeit must comewhen they will find out. I wonder if Nicodemus, the wounded monk, was right in saying that one day Christ would come to lead these fighters! That He would no longer hold a cross to be crucified with, but a whip to rout the lawless ones, the unjust, the merchants, from the temple of God, from the world!
One by one, Father Yánaros looked at the young men around him, who laughed and cursed and polished their rifles, and he sighed. Ah, if such a God would come down to earth, he thought, how quickly I would wear the rifle belt, even if I am seventy, and I would seize the flag and leap into the assault with them to scatter the lawless, the unjust, the merchants!
Father Yánaros’ mind floated over deep waters; he closed his eyes and listened to the noise around himthe laughter, the crackling fire. Where was he? The moon had just slipped from its zenith and begun to descend. Loukas’ first fighter turned, noticed Yánaroshe had forgotten about himleaned over and nudged him with his foot. “Oh, we forgot about you, Father,” he said. “Forgive us, but we had work to do; you see, we had to give a purpose to the Virgin’s Sash. He clapped his hands. “Eh, Kokolios!” he shouted.
A wild-haired animal of a man, with two pointed foxlike ears and two crafty eyes, leaped in front of him.
“Present!”
“Where’s the leader?”
The animal giggled. “At the lookout post, with the captain’s wife.”
The others burst into laughter; but the blood rushed to Lou-kas’ head. “Shut up!” he growled.
The animal turned. “Go tell him that his father’s here looking for him; he has a message.”
“What’s he got, you say?”
“A message from Castellogo on now!”
14
CAPTAIN DRAKOS slowly crumbled the rock in his fist. He had scrambled atop the high lookout post just a stone’s throw from his comrades, and as he crouched there in the moonlight with his neck craned, pondering his black thoughts, he resembled a bear about to spring on his victim.
The Fratricides Page 20