Z, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  Following this, the accused asked for a few hours to visit their homes, to say goodbye to their families and make their preparations. The General had a long face. People in the Police Chief’s office, who used to be scared stiff of him, were now indifferent. Even the waiter from the coffee bar paid no attention to the General, beyond, of course, approaching him and whispering a few words of consolation: “Don’t worry, it will soon be over!” But his glance told the General he no longer feared him. The General went home. The phone rang. While he waited for the warrants to be executed, the reporters had been driving him crazy with their telephone calls. As though they were doing it on purpose, to torture him. And here was another one. He recognized the voice immediately.

  “What do you think I’m taking with me? My pajamas, my shaving things, and lots of books … Yes, I’m going to write my book; Towards the Consolidation of the Hellenic-Christian Civilization … What’s the subject? A reconsideration of the trial of Our Lord Jesus Christ …”

  “Do you believe you’ve been the victim of a judicial error, like Dreyfus?” the reporter questioned him.

  To be compared with a Communist Jew! He’d done it on purpose, the swine! And he slammed down the receiver.

  The Chief of Police headed for the church of Panayia Dexia near the Arch of Galerius and there lit a candle and prayed devoutly. He felt like weeping. And he did weep, in the gloom of the church. He went next to the Evangelistria Cemetery and prayed at the grave of his predecessor, the former Chief of Police of Salonika, to whom he owed everything, under whom he’d received his training as Assistant Chief of Police. When this man had died the year before last of a heart attack, he felt a great void in his own life. He had bought a few flowers, which he laid on the grave. Kneeling down, he began to speak:

  “My dear Spiro, imagine what has been inflicted upon us in our old age! It’s good you’re not alive to see the state I’m in. I wish I had the strength to commit suicide, Spiro! This investigator, Spiro, how can I tell you about him! He got me all mixed up! I didn’t want to squeal. Me responsible? When a full-blown General was there, supervising! I didn’t know what was going to happen, my dear Spiro; I swear by your grave, I didn’t know. And as soon as I got wind of it, I sent someone off to order the pickup to stay where it was. But the man wasn’t in time and the pickup started off. And now here I am at your last dwelling place, weeping! Ah, Spiro, I owe you so much! The only thing you didn’t teach me was how to protect myself from old foxes! Spiro, I can’t bear it! Give me courage! He’s to blame, he’s to blame, he’s to blame … the General!”

  He was cut short by the sound of sobbing. He turned around and saw beside him a woman dressed in black, also speaking to her dead, also weeping.

  The news had the effect of a bomb on Salonika. Newspaper extras, proclamations, street demonstrations. For the moment they seemed to eclipse the Hungarian Circus and the film festival. The sun seemed to have new meaning, thought the young reporter, who’d come back to Salonika for the festival. It had changed into the perceptible sun of justice. Since daybreak he’d been waiting outside the Investigator’s office. But neither the Investigator nor the Prosecutor appeared before noon. Each was shut in his office, communicating with the other by phone. Around twelve o’clock they saw the General’s lawyer enter and after a brief interval come back out.

  “They’re placing them in custody until the trial!” he said and quickly descended the stairs.

  Along with the others, Andoniou was waiting to catch a glimpse of these heroic men—the Investigator and the Prosecutor—who in spite of pressures and threats had dared ferret at the very foundations of society. The Investigator came out first, sweeping them after him to the coffee bar. In spite of the exhausting pace of the past week, he did not look tired. He told them briefly the reasons why the four officers had been placed in custody pending trial and then, with a “Goodbye, gentlemen,” slipped away. Andoniou was deeply impressed by the serene countenance of the Investigator. His face was relaxed. Occasionally he straightened the dark glasses he wore. The Prosecutor, plump and good-natured, said: “Since the Investigator’s told you all about it, I don’t have to say anything.” Beneath this deceptive mask of kindheartedness was a soul of granite, decided the young reporter, who by now knew every last detail about the judges.

  That afternoon leaflets were scattered on the streets:

  “Indomitable General … Your struggles have been the struggles of our race, have been the struggles for the survival of the Greek nation. A few poor wooden stools; a mortgaged house; an only son, he too a police guardian of the Fatherland; along with the innumerable, lofty, honorary distinctions and medals awarded you by the Fatherland in its gratitude, are together with your prison cell the sole awards for your honor, manliness, and devotion to duty. The General gave everything. And now he is even giving his freedom. The body may be imprisoned, but the soul never! The students for National-Mindedness.”

  A little later, other leaflets took the place of the previous ones:

  “Patriots and Democrats! The four officers, accomplices in the cowardly assassination of the First Martyr of Peace, Z., are now inmates of Yendi-Koule, keeping their counterparts company, the Yangos, the Vangos, the Baronissimos, the Autocratosaurs and the Mastodontosaurs. The conception, organization, and execution of the plan for the dastardly assassination originated in a very high place. What high-ranking persons are concealed behind the General and Co.?”

  The following day the Macedonian Battle reported: “Multiple bundles of leaflets were confiscated from EDA headquarters.” It concluded: “Let the wretched not forget that beyond the investigation—or any investigation, for that matter—public opinion is what counts. When the nationalist party triumphs in the forthcoming elections, we shall then decide …”

  The night the festival prizes were awarded at the State Theater, the front-row seats reserved for the General and the Chief of Police were vacant.

  PART V

  ONE YEAR LATER

  Chapter 1

  I live beneath your phantom, Pirouchas reflected. Wherever I turn, I see your face. My hands grow rigid in the dry air of facts. They hang like stalactites above transcripts. I search the newspaper for something concerning you. Until lately, it was your trial. Now this too has been buried beneath new layers of journalistic cinder.

  You have conquered me, all of me. Your eyes have inundated me. Now I know you too well to tell you that I didn’t love you, that you set in motion, rather, my entire mechanism. Brain, heart, body, all placed at your disposal. I am a screen which looked big at first, then shrank as your image filled it. Now I understand that in order to contain you I should have needed cosmic proportions. Even so, I do contain you, however much you overflow the borders. These drops staining my street are what I leave behind me for others to find you by, to take you up, at whatever point I abandon you, and lift you to the heights. For, to tell the truth, I am growing weary.

  At first I got well for you. Satellite that I am, I stole your light and for a spell shone with it. Then in the orbit of time we all obey, I began to wane. I grew thin. And now I am at that geographical juncture where the moon has disappeared. Will a new one rise? I don’t know. I’m in the dark.

  I measure by cigarettes the space that divides us. And rejoice that nothing I do can change you. Others, yes. You, no. You have entered into me as the meteorite in the museum: a strange rock with dull colors that one day while I was out planting tobacco lit upon my field, brilliant as all chaos. It could have burned me like a bolt of lightning. It plowed a deep trough in the earth which still can be seen, especially when it rains and the waters gather there. Only you are missing. The specialists, the space experts and the diggers, came and removed you. They examined you beneath their lenses, classified you, put a little tag on you with the date of your landing on earth, and then glassed you up in the museum, like somebody’s costume for a famous role, when the actress herself no longer exists. Only when you look closely at this costume, there in its co
ld vitrine, something about the sleeves suggests the movement of her hand. And all your corners, your excrescences, your granite surface, frozen in death like sculpture, bear witness to something of the flame that nourished you when you fell, the spurs of fire pricking your now invisible belly. Only the hewn marble is able to convey the stonecutter’s shiver of intuition.

  The more I let you slip away like this between my expert fingers—mine, “the surviving deputy”—the more you enter the region of dreams. Your own real face teeters between nightmare and waking, itself another nightmare since you no longer exist. In dreams you truly exist, because they do not. The degree of your involvement in the investigations, in the violent emotions I nourish for you—betrayal, jealousy, sick sensitivity, manic depression—bothers me not at all. But the moment I open my eyes and cannot find you, my dear emigrant, absence overwhelms me and I loathe whatever nails me to a bed in this provincial hospital.

  And so I advance, casting off my burden. Each daybreak reveals the increased distance between us. I no longer know how I shall reach you. Your face, for so many a lighthouse in the night, awakens in me the loneliness of the lighthouse keeper. At times I switch off your beacon and the ships crash against the rocks. I glut myself upon the shipwrecked bodies; dead men tell no tales. But what I’m saying is exaggerated. I am only he who worshipped your person and who remained behind, whistling like the wind, like a train, that is to say, romantically. But there’s no place for romanticism in our age. Nowadays sounds are more abrupt than drawn out, more metallic than languishing, freaks of rhythm, no longer held to familiar scales and prescribed tonalities. Nowadays these sounds on the sonograph would form dots, tiny, disconnected lines, angles, intersections, depicting an asymmetrical structure, where nonetheless a swallow might perch and a paper kite become entangled, bequeathing us its skeleton. This skeleton I have become, swallow, bird of my heart.

  To think of you in this way gives me the right or the pretext not to approach you in any real sense, not to mingle with the mob that surrounds your idol. Because there is no doubt that for the others you have become a photograph. Upon that likeness they project their own selves, whereas for me you are a pair of eyes only, eyes wet as the sea, eyes dry as a drained pool.

  In my nightmares I see you needing me; even you have human needs. And then I want to come and help you, but it’s as though I am bound by ropes I cannot break. And I wake up, drenched with sweat. And the thought that you are no more is a relief to me.

  I say “relief.” Don’t let this seem too odd to you. At heart, I too mistrust change. I like my little lighthouse eyrie, gazing out to sea. I love this rock. I shall die here, not with you. You brought me only this infinitude. There are those of the vanguard and those of the rear who care for the fallen. I belong to the latter, however much you, the hero, may despise them. In order to be different now, I should have lived differently. But the one life granted us—for this one life granted us, I am all anxiousness.

  Thoughts drop into the courtyard like ripe fruit. All this time without talking, my voice had grown ripe. But the spring snapped, the clock broke down. Every so often I wind it to the exact limit of its resistance, like faucets you mustn’t twist beyond a certain point because the washers have been eaten away and they will start dripping again uncontrollably. That’s how I am too.

  All this, you’ll already have noticed, does not concern you. It concerns only me and you don’t care. I do care from the moment you create in me this need to tell you about it. You, no one else. From this moment there is a bond between us. I feel well, I feel ill, I have hope, I have none, in accord with you. That we cannot coexist is merely due to our belonging to different worlds: you to the world of the living dead and I to the world of the dead living.

  And other times I see you in my sleep accusing me, telling me that you too are human and have need of me. That it is egotism, all my lonely suffering. And at this point I love you for certain little things that make or do not make our life. For a cigarette I lit you once, for some poems we listened to on records, for a blow you might have dealt but held back.

  These few things I had to tell you before returning to the hospital ward. My abstinent heart pieces you together from an ocean of newsprint. Think how much ink you’ve consumed, how much film negative! Turn all that into blood and you would live eternally. But even so, you do live eternally, because that blood of yours has become light.

  Chapter 2

  He could no longer endure his city. He saw it small, confining, dangerous. Big ships are for big waters, he would tell himself and others. Ever since City Planning had stepped in to demolish his three little columns, he’d realized that the “hunting accident” wasn’t far off. And so he made his decision, leaving wife, mother, children behind, and came down to Athens. Here in the anonymity of the big city he felt more secure. Here Hatzis was not in danger. Here his “own kind” were more powerful than the “others.”

  He had reached his own conclusions about the Z. case. Conclusions he discussed with everyone, since he considered himself an authority on the matter. Thanks to his leap onto a three-wheeled pickup truck, whole governments had collapsed. The police force had been turned inside out. The judges were at each other’s throats. Society had purified its corpses, rejected its dead cells. He’d reached the conclusion that they would never have dared to assassinate Z. in Athens. Because the capital city (now that he lived here, he became more sure of this every day) had an expansiveness, a different layout, streets that did not lead to dead-ends, an atmosphere unshadowed by suspicion. All lay clear and distinct beneath a crystalline sky. The clouds did not cling to earth as in his own city, creating a curtain behind which plots could be hatched. And just as no atmospheric threat hung over upon the rock of the Acropolis, so no political threat dangled its sword above the heads of statues. In Salonika “the danger from the North” was a magnificent excuse for every sort of blackmail. “The Bulgars will butcher us!” “The Reds will descend on us!” “Arm yourselves!” “Destroy all!”

  But Hatzis felt lost in Athens. The crowds circulating in and around Omonia Square, the tourists with their long beards and knapsacks, the inescapable advertisements, the furious rhythm of life (always in comparison with the heavy, indolent rhythm of his own city) made him from time to time regret Salonika. He felt nostalgia even for its dangers, its melancholy, for his mother, his wife, his children, his neighborhood.

  Above all, his mother’s letters upset him. Writing entirely about bills they didn’t have the money to pay, she reproached him between the lines for having turned his back on the common fate of mortals and stepped into some unexploitable realm of immortality. Glory was all very well, halos were fine, she was proud of her son, but they had no bread at home. Had his head perhaps been turned? Why didn’t all those people who were praising him give him a penny? And if they were, if pennies were getting to him “down there,” then why didn’t one or two reach them “up here”? Who was going to chop wood for the winter so they wouldn’t freeze? His children had no shoes. The little girl was entering the third grade this year and didn’t have the money to buy a school bag.

  These badly written, bitter letters from the old woman (his wife, who worked as a cleaning woman, never wrote) made him feel guilty. But he didn’t get discouraged. Left-wing as he was, he knew the meaning of history. And he felt that he had come into history lock, stock, and barrel, that he had made history.

  The worst letter from his mother arrived when his photograph appeared in the newspapers along with the Prime Minister’s! He and Nikitas, the furniture varnisher, had gone to visit him in his Prime Minister’s office, as every citizen has the right to do. The kind and reverend old man with the clever eyes, with all the humor behind them, had asked him, Hatzis, to tell how he’d leapt onto the pickup. And Hatzis began relating the details, altered as they were by time and repetition, like a record whose fidelity, however often you change the needle, must in the end give way to scratches, static, and grooves skipped over. Yet the Pri
me Minister listened in wonder like a child carried away by a fairy tale. “Tiger, you’re a fiend!” he told him when it was over. And then he took the Black Book of the Fixed Elections of October 29, 1961 (when the very trees and the dead had voted) and inscribed it to him, with the phrase: “To the heroic Hatzis.” The right-wing newspapers reported that the “old man” had said: “To you two the democracy owes a great deal. We must take particular care of you. From now on, you must take it easy. We’ll find you comfortable jobs. You will work short hours, because you must acquire some education. Society needs you!” And so on. These newspapers were shown to his mother by well-wishers, and the illiterate old woman, seeing her son posing there with the Prime Minister, had written him this letter. The truth was that the “old man” had said nothing of the sort. Only that he was ready to help them whenever they needed help. And after that they’d left, because a crowd had gathered in the antechamber. The time allotted each visitor was measured by the second hand. On their way out they ran into a committee from Diavata that had come to protest the new expropriations made by Esso-Pappas. Other newspapers reported that Hatzis had gone to ask the Prime Minister for help and protection. At that point Hatzis dictated an open letter. “Heroes,” the letter ended, “as the Prime Minister calls me in the Black Book, never ask for help and protection! Let the libelists take note!” The only thing he had done was sell his photograph to the newspapers, and this less for the money than for the glory.

  Hatzis walked through the streets of the capital—streets constantly being dug up; did occasional construction work to make ends meet, rode up and down the escalators in Omonia Square and went as far as Piraeus to stare at the ships. Accustomed to the sea of Salonika, he suffered here without it. He was tempted by the smells of roast meat, freshly broiled souvlakia, the kokoretsia fragrant for miles around—Omonia Square was full of barbecue places: crusty roast pork, chops, grilled meatballs, fried potatoes. He was dazzled by shop windows, by the stream of cars, all this without a penny in his pocket. But he didn’t mind. His task was not over yet, the Z. affair still lay over all Greece like a menace. At close range, he observed its developments and recorded them, as one by one they came to the surface, like mines disentangled from a dragnet.