The Colossus of Maroussi

by Miller, Henry

  It rained all night and in the morning, when we came down to the breakfast table, it was still pouring. Durrell, still feeling somewhat English, insisted on having a couple of boiled eggs for breakfast. We sat in a little nook overlooking the square. Nancy and I had almost finished our tea and toast when the eggs arrived. Durrell turned the egg cup upside down and gently chipped the first egg. It was hardly boiled and already quite cool, he complained aloud, ringing for the waitress who happened to be the proprietor’s wife. “Please boil it a little longer,” he said—“the two of them.” We waited ten or fifteen minutes. The same performance and the same result. Only this time the egg was too badly chipped to be sent back again. However, determined to have his eggs, Durrell rang again. He explained elaborately, with ill-suppressed rage, that he wanted his eggs medium boiled. “Don’t bother with that one,” he said, “just have this one done a little more—and quickly, please, I can’t sit here all morning.” The woman left, promising to do her best. Again we waited, this time longer than before. Nancy and I had ordered more tea and toast. We smoked a couple of cigarettes. Finally I got up to look out of the window, hearing some strange noise below, and as I was gazing out I espied the woman crossing the square with an umbrella over her head and carrying the egg in her hand. “Here it comes,” I said. “Here comes what?” said Durrell, “Why the egg! She’s carrying it in her hand.”

  “What’s the meaning of all this?” Durrell demanded, taking the cool egg and smashing the shell. “We have no stove,” said the woman. “I had to take it to the baker’s to have it boiled. Is it hard enough now?”

  Durrell was at once apologetic. “It’s just right,” he said, cracking it vigorously with the back of his spoon. And as he smiled gratefully up at her he added in English—“The damned idiot, couldn’t she have told us that in the first place? It’s as hard as a rock, b’Jesus.”

  We started back in the rain, stopping here and there on the edge of a precipice to take snapshots. The car was working badly, gasping and wheezing as if on its last legs. About three miles outside of Tripolis, in the midst of a veritable cloudburst accompanied by hail and thunder and lightning, the road flooded like a rice field, the car suddenly gave a violent shudder and stopped dead. We might as well have been fifty miles away; there was absolutely no traffic and no way of getting assistance. To step out of the car was to wade in up to one’s knees. I was to get the train for Athens at Tripolis and there was only one train to get. If I were to miss it I would miss the boat which was due to leave the next day. It was so obvious that the car had given its last spark of life that we sat there laughing and joking about our plight without thinking to make the slightest effort to start her again. After ten or fifteen minutes of it the laughter died away. It looked as if we were doomed to sit there all afternoon, maybe all night. “Why don’t you try to do something?” said Nancy. Durrell was saying, as he usually did when Nancy proffered her advice—“Why don’t you shut up?”—but instinctively he had made a few automatic motions. To our amazement we heard the thing spitting. “The bloody thing’s going,” he said, and sure enough, as he stepped on the gas she jumped like a kangaroo and was off. We art wed at the door of the hotel at top speed and were greeted by a porter with a huge umbrella. The car looked as if it were going to be carried away in the flood and deposited on top of Mt. Ararat.

  The train was due to leave at four o’clock, so we had time for a last meal together. Durrell did his best to persuade me to stay overnight, convinced that the boat would not leave on schedule. “Nothing goes according to schedule in this bloody country,” he assured me. In my heart I was hoping that some convenient accident would detain me. If I were to miss the boat I might not get another for a month and in that time Italy might declare war on Greece and thus shut me off in the Mediterranean, a most delightful prospect. Nevertheless I went through the motions of leaving. It was up to Fate now, I thought to myself. Durrell and Nancy were going to Epidaurus and then to Olympia. I would be going back to jail.

  The horse and carriage were at the door waiting for me. Durrell and Nancy stood on the steps waving good-bye. The sleigh bells began to ring, the flaps came down over my eyes and we started off in a teeming mist which was made of rain and tears. “Where will we meet again?” I asked myself. Not in America, not in England, not in Greece, thought I. If anywhere it will be in India or Tibet. And we are going to meet haphazardly—on the road—as Durrell and his friend had met on the way to Mystras. The war will not only change the map of the world but it will affect the destiny of everyone I care about. Already, even before the war had broken out, we were scattered to the four winds, those of us who had lived and worked together and who had no thought to do anything but what we were doing. My friend X, who used to be terrified at the very mention of war, had volunteered for service in the British Army; my friend Y, who was utterly indifferent and who used to say that he would go right on working at the Bibliothèque Nationale war or no war, joined the Foreign Legion; my friend Z, who was an out-and-out pacifist, volunteered for ambulance service and has never been heard of since; some are in concentration camps in France and Germany, one is rotting away in Siberia, another is in China, another in Mexico, another in Australia. When we meet again some will be blind, some legless, some old and white-haired, some demented, some bitter and cynical. Maybe the world will be a better place to live in, maybe it’ll be just the same, maybe it’ll be worse than it is now—who knows? The strangest thing of all is that in a universal crisis of this sort one instinctively knows that certain ones are doomed and that others will be spared. With some, usually the shining, heroic figures, one can see death written in their faces; they glow with the knowledge of their own death. Others, whom one would normally think of as worthless, in the military sense, you feel nevertheless will become hardened veterans, will go through hell’s fire unscathed and emerge grinning, perhaps to settle down in the old routine and amount to nothing. I saw the effect of the last war on some of my friends in America; I can see the effect which this one will produce even more clearly. One thing is certain, I thought to myself—the chaos and confusion which this war is engendering will never be remedied in our lifetime. There will be no resuming where we left off. The world we knew is dead and gone. The next time we meet, any of us, it will be on the ashes of all that we once cherished.

  The scene at the railway station was one of utter confusion. Word had just been received that the train would be an hour or two late—there had been a washout up the line somewhere, nobody knew exactly where. The rain came down relentlessly and unceasingly, as if all the cocks in the celestial plumbing system had been opened and the monkey wrench thrown away. I sat down on a bench outside and prepared myself for a long siege. In a few minutes a man approached me and said “Hello, what you doing here? You an American?” I nodded and smiled. “Helluva country this, eh?” he said. “Too poor, that’s what’s the matter. Where you come from—Chicago?”

  He sat down beside me and began to chew my ear off about the wonderful efficiency of the American railways. A Greek, naturally, who had lived in Detroit. “Why I come back to this country I don’t know,” he went on. “Everybody poor here—you can’t make no money here. Soon we go to war. I was a damn fool to leave America. What you think of Greece—you like it? How long you stay here? You think America go to war?”

  I decided to get out of his clutches as soon as possible. “Try to find out when the train will arrive,” I said, dispatching him to the telegraph office. He didn’t budge. “What’s the use,” he said, “nobody knows when the train will come. Maybe to-morrow morning.” He began to talk about automobiles, what a wonderful car the Ford was, for instance.

  “I don’t know anything about cars,” I said.

  “That’s funny,” he said, “and you an American.”

  “I don’t like cars.”

  “But just the same, when you want to get somewhere….”

  “I don’t want to get anywhere.”

  “That’s funny,” he s
aid. “You like the train better maybe, yes?”

  “I like the donkey better than the train. I like to walk too.”

  “My brother just like that,” he said. “My brother say, ‘Why you want a car?’ My brother, he never been in a car in his life. He stay here in Greece. He live in the mountains—very poor, but he say he don’t care just so long as he have enough to eat.”

  “He sounds like an intelligent man,” I said.

  “Who, my brother? No, he know nothing. He can’t read or write; he can’t even sign his own name.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, “then he must he a happy man.”

  “My brother? No, he’s very sad. He lose his wife and three children. I want him to go to America with me, but he say ‘What I go to America for?’ I tell him he make lots of money there. He say he don’t want to make money. He just want to eat every day, that’s all. Nobody got ambition here. America everybody want to be a success. Maybe some day your son be President of the United States, yes?”

  “Maybe,” I said, just to please him.

  “In America everybody got a chance—poor man too, yes?”

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe I go back again and make big money, what you think?”

  “Nothing like trying,” I answered.

  “Sure, that’s what I tell my brother. You must work. In America you work like a son of a bitch—but you get paid for it. Here you work and work and work and what you got? Nothing. A piece of bread maybe. What kind of life is that? How you going to succeed?”

  I groaned.

  “You make lots of money in New York, I bet, yes?”

  “No,” I said, “I never made a cent.”

  “What you mean?” he said. “You couldn’t find job in New York?”

  “I had lots of jobs,” I answered.

  “You don’t stay long on one job, that’s it, yes?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Maybe you don’t find the right job. You got to try many jobs—till you find the right one. You got to save your money. Maybe you have bad luck sometimes—then you have something for a rainy day, yes?”

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “Sometimes you get sick and you lose all your money. Sometimes a friend he take your money away from you. But you never give up, right? You stick it out. You try again.”

  “That’s the idea,” I grunted.

  “You got a good job waiting for you in New York?”

  “No,” I said, “I haven’t any job.’

  “Not so many jobs now as before,” he said. “In 1928 lots of jobs. Now everybody poor. I lose ten thousand dollars in stock market. Some people lose more. I say never mind, try again. Then I come to this country to see my brother. I stay too long. No money here. Only trouble…. You think Italy make trouble soon for Greece?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You think Germany win—or France?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “I think United States should go in the war. United States clean up those sons of bitches quick, yes? If United States make war on Germany I fight for United States.”

  “That’s the stuff,” I said.

  “Sure, why not?” he continued. “I no like to fight, but United States good country. Everybody get square deal, rich or poor. Uncle Sam afraid of nobody. We raise ten million, twenty million soldiers—like that! We kill those sons of bitches like dogs, yes?”

  “You said it, brother.”

  “I say to myself Uncle Sam he give me gun, he send me over to fight, I fight for him. Greek people no like Italians. Greek people like America. Everybody like America….”

  “I like you too,” I said, getting up and shaking hands with him, “but now I’ve got to leave you—I must make pipi.”

  “That’s all right, I’ll wait for you,” he said.

  You’ll have a long wait, I thought to myself, as I disappeared inside the station. I got out on the other side of the station and walked around in the rain. When I returned I saw that the train was due to arrive at eight o’clock. A string of cars was standing at the platform waiting for the other section to arrive. Towards seven o’clock a bellhop from the hotel arrived and handed me a note. It was from Durrell, urging me to come back to the hotel and have dinner with them. The train wouldn’t arrive until after ten, he informed me. I thought it over and decided against it, more because I hated to say good-bye a second time than for any other reason.

  I got into one of the coaches and sat there in the dark. Towards nine-thirty a train pulled in from the opposite direction and everybody got excited. But when we tried to climb aboard we found that it was an excursion train that had been hired by a club. As I stood on the platform of the special I learned that it was leaving for Athens in a few minutes. I was wondering if I couldn’t persuade them to take me along when a man came up to me and spoke to me in Greek. I answered in French that I couldn’t speak Greek, that I was an American and that I was very anxious to get to Athens as soon as possible. He called a young lady over who spoke English and when she learned that I was an American tourist she got excited and told me to wait, saying she thought she could fix it for me. I stood there a few minutes congratulating myself on my good luck. The young lady returned accompanied by a grave, melancholy-looking man with an officious air. He asked me very courteously why it was important for me to get back to Athens quickly, why couldn’t I wait for the other train which was due now in a little while, he was certain. I answered very courteously that there was no good reason except fear. He assured me there was nothing to be worried about. The other train was due in a few minutes and he had not the slightest doubt that it would leave in good time. He hesitated a moment and then cautiously, as if giving me a straw to grasp at, he inquired politely and with the utmost tact, as if unwilling to wrest the secret from me, whether I did not have a more urgent reason for wishing to leave ahead of time. There was something about his manner which warned me that it would be better not to invent a false reason. Something told me that he suspected me of being more than just a tourist. Beneath that suave, courteous exterior I divined the police inspector. True, I had in my pocket a letter from the Bureau of Tourisme which Seferiades had given me when I went to Crete, but experience has taught me that when a man is suspicious of you the better your credentials are the worse it is for you. I backed quietly down the steps, thanking him for his courtesy and excusing myself for the inconvenience I had caused him. “Your bags?” he said, with a flash of the eye. “I have none,” I said, and quickly disappeared in the crowd.

  As soon as the train had pulled out I came out on the platform of the station and dove into the buffet where I put away some tender bits of lamb and a few cognacs. I felt as though I had narrowly missed going to jail. Two prisoners who were handcuff ed came in escorted by soldiers. I learned later that they had murdered the man who had violated their sister. They were good men, mountaineers, and they had surrendered without resistance. I went outside and got up an appetite watching a tender lamb being rolled on a spit. I had some more cognac. Then I got inside a coach and fell into conversation with a Greek who had lived in Paris. He was even more of a bore than the guy from Detroit. He was an intellectual who liked all the wrong things. I extricated myself as gracefully as possible and paced up and down in the rain again.