Z, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  He went home, more confused than ever. Now all the roosters in the neighborhood were crowing. He waited until dawn, then hurried out to get the early edition of the papers and find out what it was all about.

  The man who, leaving Zaimis at the intersection, had started down Venizelou Street on the right-hand sidewalk saw a man with bushy eyebrows approach from the opposite direction and stop in front of the Singer sewing-machine store. Zacharias—that was his name—had no idea who was beating up whom or why rocks were being thrown and chair legs distributed like sacramental bread to the faithful. As he was standing there looking on, he saw a crowd forming around the bushy-browed man and heard someone say: “Chief, we’re going to hang around here till morning and then we’ll polish off the whole bunch of them.”

  The “chief” tapped the man protectively on the shoulder. “Relax,” said the “chief.” “I know more about it than you.”

  And the man with the bushy eyebrows, whom the other had called chief, left, escorted by two or three members of the group.

  Zacharias was bewildered. True, he had no business being here; he was simply on his way back from the scrap-iron market near the church of the Madonna of Chalkaion, where he went every Wednesday afternoon when the stores were closed, to buy copper and iron wholesale. The mysterious conversation he had just heard aroused his curiosity to such a point that he approached a young man with a neatly clipped mustache who was standing nearby.

  “Who’s the guy with the bushy eyebrows?” he asked.

  The young man stared at him in astonishment. “Don’t you know the Chief of Police?”

  “Oh!” said Zacharias.

  “What are you doing around here anyway?”

  “I was just passing by.”

  “Listen, mister, if you don’t want your skull cracked open I’d advise you to keep your nose out of other people’s business.”

  With a menacing gesture, the young man with the mustache turned and left. Zacharias walked a few steps farther. In front of him a crowd of men were fighting and hurling stones. Then he saw one of them approach another and whisper something in his ear. The latter made a sign to a third, and all three hurled themselves on a fourth person who was standing there motionless, looking on. Who were all these people? What was the meaning of this pantomime? Who was beating up whom? And why?

  “Your identity card.”

  Zacharias displayed his identity card with alacrity.

  “Not this one,” the man said, “the other one.”

  “Which other one?” Zacharias was bewildered.

  “Listen, buddy, if you don’t want any trouble for yourself, get the hell out of here—and fast!”

  “What’s going on anyway?”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  Zacharias went on his way. Continuing along Venizelou Street, he ran into Vangelis, a friend from his village, whom he hadn’t seen in years.

  “How’s the house going?”

  “I’ve added a second story. Thank God! Have you been back to the village at all?”

  “I’m thinking of going this year when I have my vacation. For the grape harvest. Will you be going?”

  “It’s out of the question. It’s too far away, our Crete. I haven’t been there in twelve years.”

  “How’s your wife? And the kids?”

  “They’re okay. And yours?”

  “They’re fine. My oldest is almost through school.”

  “Listen, do you know what’s going on here tonight?”

  “How should I know? It’s a madhouse. I was just going to ask you the same thing.”

  “I don’t know any more than you. Let’s beat it before we get into trouble.”

  They were attempting to bypass a group of counterdemonstrators, when two of them seized Vangelis and began beating him. When Zacharias intervened, they attacked him.

  “Who told you to stick your nose in?”

  “This man hasn’t done anything!”

  Someone kicked him in the stomach. Vangelis’s pockets were ripped. Several coins spilled out, but he didn’t dare pick them up.

  Zacharias’s immediate thought was to go to the Public Prosecutor. He left Venizelous Street and set off in that direction. It was about 9:30. He was revolted to see how completely the law of the jungle had taken over. The Public Prosecutor’s office was closed. Brimming over with indignation, he raced to the offices of the newspaper Macedonia, slung open the glass door, climbed up the steps, and found himself in the editorial room. A few members of the staff were dozing in their glass compartments. In another room the teletype clicked away. Absolute calm reigned. He approached one of the older men.

  “All hell is breaking loose on the corner of Ermou and Venizelou,” he said. “Toughs and policemen in plain clothes are beating everybody up without mercy.”

  “Unfortunately we know about it,” the reporter answered him sleepily, gripping his indelible pencil.

  “Something’s got to be done before things get worse!”

  “Unfortunately nothing can be done.”

  “As a Greek citizen, I protest.”

  “What would you like me to do?”

  “Look here, they beat me up for no reason at all.”

  “Lodge a complaint at police headquarters. This is a newspaper.”

  And bending over his metal desk, the reporter began to write. Zacharias went home by a different route.

  Chapter 18

  “The history of the peace movement in Greece, from the time of its birth in 1955,” Z. continued, “is a cruel story. At the first meeting of the Friends of Peace in Piraeus, the police looked the other way while hirelings burst into the theater and threw spittoons at the speakers, shouted, hissed, and threatened, without any interference from the Chief of Police, who was present in the first row of the orchestra. A participant in a disarmament meeting in Lesbos was killed for reasons that have remained mysterious to this day. In Athens a young soldier who took part in another peace meeting was court-martialed and sent to Triethnes, a remote post near the Albania–Yugoslav borders, where he died shortly afterwards, succumbing, to quote the official statement issued by the High Command, ‘to the effects of an accident on the rifle range.’ ”

  “Why is peace so intolerable to them? Why don’t they attack other organizations and movements, such as the Society for Political Exiles and Prisoners, the League for the Rights of Man, the EDA youth groups, the various trade-union organizations? Why do they vent their wrath on our movement alone, which aims at peace and international détente, which draws support from all over the world and includes leaders of all parties? The reason is simple: the other movements are Greek, local, oriented toward internal affairs. Consequently they don’t interest our Allies—those great protectors of ours, who to our faces always play the friend and behind our backs doublecross us right down the line. Think of Asia Minor in 1922, and now today Cyprus …”

  “Cyprus! Enosis!”

  “Self-determination!”

  “Cyprus is Greek!”

  “Our Western allies, I say, and their Greek flunkies, who show the excessive zeal of the slave eager to curry favor with his master, so excessive indeed, so blatantly cruel that even their master is often compelled to disavow them—well, our Western allies and their local flunkies look upon peace as a threat leveled directly against themselves. Because peace in the world would sound the knell of the big monopolies whose power and growth depend on the armaments race. Throughout the eighteen years of peace since the end of the Second World War, some eighteen localized wars have taken place, and if they remained localized it is only because the fear of universal devastation serves as a counterweight to the warlike tendencies of the Great Powers.”

  “Down with NA-TO!”

  “No more Hi-ro-shi-mas!”

  “Bre-e-ad! Bre-e-ad!”

  “In one of his speeches President Kennedy addressed his audience as ‘My fellow inhabitants of this planet.’ And he was right. At a time when the gates of space are openi
ng, it is folly for us to keep our own doors closed, as though we were still living in the past century. Science is forging ahead by prodigious leaps and bounds, we must all try to keep pace with it in our thinking. The world today is no longer divided into East and West. All ideas based on the opposition between antithetical extremes are outmoded. Today, the electronic microscope discloses a world very different from what we were taught. The electronic microscope shows us that if we make two holes, A and B, in a sheet of paper, and if we have a substance capable of passing through these holes, it will not pass through A before B, or through B before A, but will pass through both holes simultaneously. In order to adapt themselves to the modern world, our minds, accustomed to thinking in the old traditional grooves, must assimilate these discoveries and apply them to life in the world. The anti-Communist struggle is the application of the old method of opposing extremes, in its most primitive and obsolete form.

  “I am speaking to you at this moment primarily as a physician. Every day I am brought face to face with the deplorable condition of our country. There are not enough doctors. The mountain villages are isolated. The land that gave birth to Hippocrates lacks so much as a public health system worthy of the name, and it claims to be living in the twentieth century. And when these elementary essentials are absent, how can civilization exist? How can people live under such conditions? If instead of half the government’s budget going for military expenditures, it went into education, athletic fields, medical care, and industrial investment, wouldn’t we live better? Wouldn’t we escape the curse of emigration, which is decimating our towns and villages? That is what peace would mean, and that is why this evening’s meeting, and I in particular, is so odious to them that they have hired hoodlums to jeer at us.

  “But if these hoodlums were able to read two lines and understand them, they would realize that they are attacking their own interests. Because they are all poor, ragged, wage slaves without wages. And they are condemned to remain so for the rest of their lives because the powers that be have an interest in the existence of this ragged subproletariat, out of which, as occasion arises, they can choose the hoodlums they require, offering them a pittance or some small favor, and so having them always available, as they are tonight.

  “My friends, these people who are shouting at us tonight are much to be pitied, because they will never know that we are fighting for them too. To tell you the truth, they don’t bother me. I let them strike me, because they weren’t out for me personally, but for somebody who had been pointed out to them by the hidden masters on whom the poor wretches depend. They themselves don’t even know who I am, who you are. Whatever they do, they do to curry favor with the higher-ups. All of them have children who can’t go to school, sick wives, decaying teeth, ulcers, phobias, diseased lungs. They are, I repeat, to be pitied. Therefore, don’t listen to their shouts. History is marching on, they will catch up some day. Blessed be the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”

  Chapter 19

  Every word Z. uttered was a slap in the General’s thin, cavernous face. He stood rooted to the spot, every now and then shifting to left or right, his gaze pinned on the loudspeaker, which reminded him of the funnel-shaped horns used by the Resistance during the Occupation to blast out incendiary slogans. He was waiting patiently for the end of the meeting. But with the phrase “Blessed be the peacemakers …” a chill ran down his spine. How could the words of the son of God, flesh of Mary, Mater Dolorosa, dare come out of the filthy disbeliever’s mouth? “The significant turbulence on the solar mass,” he reflected, “produces the melting of ice at the poles and the probable deviation of the earth’s axis.” Such phrases gave him relief and diverted his attention from the loudspeaker.

  The Chief of Police, on the other hand, was growing more and more anxious. All the responsibility for the counterdemonstration fell on him. And the thieves, gangsters, hoodlums, dregs of society assembled here tonight to jeer at Z. were carrying things too far. “Give them an inch, they’ll take a mile,” he thought. He could see the results. After they’d been pushed back to create an empty space in front of the entrance to the building, their fury, far from subsiding, had mounted to a new high. They were completely out of hand and he did not know what to do to restrain them. The General had no responsibility, anything might happen when the Communists came out; he was not in charge of preserving law and order. It was the Chief of Police who would inevitably be blamed for any untoward incidents. He racked his narrow but practical brain to recall some police regulation to invoke. He thought of buses: he might send an officer or two, to requisition some buses from the depots of Vardariou Square and at the Administration Building, so that the Friends of Peace could board them. Knowing the kind of men who made up the crowd, he felt apprehension. Cement-workers, scrap-iron workers, stevedores. If they decided to battle it out, there would be real bloodshed. And it wasn’t the wage earners they were after.

  “Dirty Bulgar, you’ll pay for Papadopoulos!”

  “Go back to Bulgaria!”

  “Down with Z.!”

  Chapter 20

  The police lieutenant’s jeep started off at breakneck speed and within three minutes had reached Vardariou Square. It stopped in front of the dispatcher’s booth at the bus terminal, which looked out upon the statue of Constantine I on horseback. The dispatcher was bent over his timetables, checking arrivals and departures of buses.

  “There’s an emergency and we need all the buses at your disposal,” the lieutenant said to him as he jumped out of the jeep.

  The dispatcher looked at him dully. “We have no buses at our disposal.”

  “I see at least two.”

  “The first one is leaving in two seconds.” And putting his whistle to his lips, he gave the signal for departure.

  The driver, who was sitting on a bench with the ticket taker, consulted his watch in bewilderment.

  “You’re ahead of time, Mitso,” he shouted.

  “Get going, I tell you.” And he motioned him off with his hand.

  “Give me your papers,” ordered the lieutenant. “Refusal to obey an officer on duty isn’t going to get you very far.”

  “But, lieutenant, it’s not in my power to give you a bus. We’ll telephone the general superintendent of the lines. He’s the one in charge.”

  “Do you understand the meaning of an order? War has been declared.”

  The dispatcher adjusted his eyeglasses and looked at the officer with curiosity. “He must be off his nut!” he said to himself.

  Meanwhile the driver, discarding his cigarette, scrambled up through the side door, took his place behind the wheel, pressed the button which automatically closed the doors, and started the motor. In a rage the lieutenant signaled him to stop. He ordered his own driver to move the jeep in front of the bus. The passengers began protesting: “We’ve got to get home. It’s nine o’clock.”

  In his booth the dispatcher was talking to the superintendent on the phone. “Boss,” he said. “There’s a police officer here who wants to requisition all the available buses. And there are only two, and one of those is all set to leave.”

  “Let him have them, Mitso,” was the answer. “A police captain came here and took four. They seem to want them for some kind of emergency.”

  “All right. I can give one. But I can’t give him the other one.”

  “Order the passengers off and give him the bus. You can space out the next departures so as to fill the gap.”

  The dispatcher hung up and came out of his glass booth. Signaling to the driver to open the front door, he climbed aboard. He asked the passengers to get off, “because of an unforeseen emergency,” and to keep their tickets for the next bus. Two or three grumbled, complaining that this was no way to do business, and muttering about “the good old days when they had streetcars,” but they got off. A blind and deaf beggar with an accordion began playing “I Dream of Your Beautiful Hair” and took off his cap to collect coins.

  “Com
e on, Barba-Kosta, get off,” the dispatcher urged. “You’re the last one. Get off.”

  “Your credentials,” the lieutenant said, addressing the dispatcher.

  “I don’t have them with me. Come by tomorrow. I’m always here.”

  Drivers and ticket takers climbed aboard the buses while the lieutenant got into the jeep and, signaling the buses to follow him, started off in the direction of the demonstration. The empty buses, with their lights off, resembled those that crossed the city at midnight on their way to the terminal—big, hollow Easter eggs, which the passengers, shivering at the stop and watching them pass, could only regard as dead visions of disappointed hopes. That is how the ejected passengers felt now when they found themselves waiting once again at the terminal.

  With the police jeep leading the procession, they arrived at the square. Then the two buses took their places behind the other four, which had already arrived, blocking the Ano Toumba stop; six buses all in a line, silent and deserted factories. The drivers and ticket takers got off to see what was happening. And what they saw made them shudder.

  The lieutenant reported to the Chief of Police that the order had been executed to the letter.

  Chapter 21

  It would soon be over. Nine-thirty had passed. The audience had been in the hall since 7:30. They too had homes, jobs the next morning, Thursday. The masons had to rise before sun-up. Tired faces, beautiful ones, carved by life, ploughed by its ploughshare. Poor people, but aware of it. The people outside, poor but unaware.

  Ah, how beautiful life is when you touch it with a virgin hand, before it is blackened by smoke and dimmed by exhaust fumes! How beautiful life is when it goes on a massive strike, all the arms refusing to work, like the hundred arms of Buddha attached to one body! What new dimension is acquired when the body proliferates into thousands of other bodies! How immortal it becomes! Alas for those who die without ever having realized that they form the interchangeable cells on the skin of an idea; that when they vanish, other cells will replace them, so the skin can breathe through open pores. Alas for those who go to die like animals in their lairs, unready to give themselves with all their souls, wherever they may be—on a sidewalk, in a public square, at a demonstration, in a depot.