Report to Grego (35 page)

Seizing my friend's arm, I pointed to the blossoming tree.

“Angelos,” I said, “during the whole of this pilgrimage our hearts have been tormented by many intricate questions. Now, behold the answer!”

My friend riveted his blue eyes upon the flowering almond tree and crossed himself, as though doing obeisance before a holy wonder-working icon. He remained speechless for a long moment. Then, speaking slowly, he said, “A poem is rising to my lips, a tiny little poem: a haikai.”

He looked again at the almond tree.

I said to the almond tree,

“Sister, speak to me of God.”

And the almond tree blossomed.

W
HEN
I was alone again, I closed my eyes and asked myself what finally remained from the Holy Mountain. Out of so many pleasures and moving experiences, so many questions tormenting my friend and myself, what had finally deposited itself within me? What was I seeking when I went to the Holy Mountain, and what did I find there?

The old wounds inflicted during my adolescence when my teacher divulged the two great secrets to me, that the earth is not the center of the universe and that man is not a privileged creature issuing directly from the divine hand, these old wounds, which had been closed for a number of years, opened once again on the Holy Mountain—the two metaphysical torments: where do we come from and where are we going. One answer had been given by Christ. He brought a balm which healed many wounds. But was this balm able to heal my wounds? For a brief moment the semantron, matins, psalmody, and paintings—the divine rhythm of the ascetic life—had calmed my anguish. Experiencing Christ's struggle at first hand, I felt my own struggle take on courage, sweetness, and hope. But the enchantment was quickly dispelled and once more my soul found itself deserted. Why? What did it lack, whom did it lack? What was my soul seeking when it went to the Holy Mountain, and what did it fail to find there?

As the years passed, I began little by little to have a premonition that I had gone to the Holy Mountain in search of something I have sought throughout my life: a great friend and enemy not of my own stature but bigger, who would enter the struggle at my side. Not a woman, not an idea. Something else. Someone else. This was the thing, the person, my soul lacked; this was why it felt stifled.

Only afterwards, not while I was there, did I realize that I had
failed to find this someone on the Holy Mountain. Was precisely this, I wonder, the fruit of my entire journey over Athos?

The only thing I found as I roamed the Holy Mountain was a veteran campaigner (so he seemed to me at first) holding out his wounded hands to the monks who passed. His naked feet were dripping with blood, his cheeks sunken from hunger, his clothes in tatters, revealing his emaciated body. Shivering, his eyes filled with tears, he knocked on every door, but no one admitted him. He was chased from monastery to monastery, and the dogs ran in back of his ragged cloak and barked. One evening I saw him seated on a stone gazing at the desolate sea. I hid behind a fir tree and spied on him. For a long time he remained silent, but then, unable to restrain himself any longer, he suddenly cried out, “The foxes have holes, but I have not where to lay my head!” A flash tore across my mind, I recognized Him and ran to kiss His hand. I had loved Him when I was a small child, had loved Him ever since. Now I searched everywhere, but He had become invisible. Feeling aggrieved, I sat down on the stone where He had been sitting. Oh, if I could only open my heart to Him so that He might enter it and not have to wander homeless and cold! I thought of the philosopher Proclus, who lived at the time when men had ceased to believe in the gods of Olympus and were rejecting them. Proclus lay asleep in a shack at the foot of the Acropolis; suddenly, in the middle of the night, he heard someone knocking on his door. Jumping up and running to see who it was, he discovered Athena standing in full panoply on his threshold. “Proclus,” she said, “I am rejected wherever I go. I have come to take refuge in your forehead!”

Would that Christ, in a similar way, could take refuge in my heart!

Returning from Mount Athos, I felt for the first time that Christ wanders about hungry and homeless, that He is in danger, and that now it is His turn to be saved—by man.

I was overwhelmed by great sorrow and compassion. Not wanting to return to a life of tranquility and comfort, I took to the road and marched for days and days through the Macedonian mountains, until I found a dark, miserable, woebegone little village-hovels stuccoed over with oxdung, a flock of children and pigs splashing in the mud. The men looked at me with scowling faces;
when I greeted them, they did not answer. The women, as soon as they saw me, slammed their doors.

This is just the place for me, I said to myself. O my soul, here in this horrible village of horrible people, you will demonstrate if you are able to endure.

The wounded Campaigner did not leave my thoughts. Wanting to mortify my body, I decided to spend the winter in this village.

After no end of trouble I finally succeeded in making an old shepherd comprehend that I was neither a criminal, Freemason, nor madman. He consented to rent me one corner of his hut and to give me a little milk and bread each day. There being more than enough wood, I sat and read in front of the fire. I had nothing with me except the Gospels and Homer; at times I read Christ's words of love and humility, at times the immortal verses of the Patriarch of the Greeks. You should be good, peaceful, forbearing; when you are slapped on one cheek you should turn the other; this life on earth has no value, the true life is in heaven—thus dictated the first. You should be strong, should love wine, women, and war; should kill and be killed in order to hold aloft the dignity and pride of man; love this earthly life, better a slave and alive than a king in Hades—thus dictated the second, the grandfather of Greece.

The Achaeans rose to the edge of my mind, the Achaeans with their large noses, their greaves, their broad callused feet, hairy thighs, pointed beards, long greasy mops of hair, their odor of wine and garlic. And there was Helen promenading untouched and immortal on the walls, radiantly pure in the light, with only the arched soles of her feet submerged in blood; and the gods, enthroned reposefully in the clouds above, passing their time by watching men slaughter one another.

Here in my solitude I pricked up my ears and listened to these two Sirens. I listened to them both. Their talons embedded in my entrails, both were deeply bewitching me, and I had no idea to which of these two Sirens' ghosts I should render up my bones.

There was snow outside; I used to look through the tiny window and watch the falling flakes cover the hamlet's ugliness. Each morning flocks of sheep passed, waking me with their bells. I jumped out of bed and climbed the snow-covered paths with them, exchanging a few words with the shepherd on the subjects
of poverty, the cold, the sheep that died. Never once did I hear a shepherd speak of anything pleasant; it was nothing but poverty, the cold, the sheep that died.

On one particular day when everything had been covered with a plump bed of snow, the village chimes began to toll mournfully; someone must have died. The villagers had locked themselves inside their houses. From time to time a mule's bell sounded in the motionless air. Through my window I could see famished crows flying back and forth. I had lighted a fire; the warmth clasped me in a tenderhearted embrace, like a mother. I felt that I was completely happy. But then, suddenly, as though joy were treasonous and a great sin, weeping broke out within me—a tranquil, despairing, tender weeping, as from a mother singing a lullaby to her dead son.

This was not the first time I had heard this inner weeping. Whenever I felt sad, it grew a little milder, sounding to me like the remote humming of bees. Whenever I was happy, however, it raged uncontrollably. I used to cry out in fear, “Who is weeping inside me? For what reason? What have I done wrong?”

Night had fallen. As I gazed into the fire my heart resisted. It refused to join the lamentations. Why should I begin to wail and lament? No great sorrow was crushing my soul. I had quiet and warmth, the house's peasant air smelled of sage and quince, I was sitting before the hearth and reading Homer—I was happy. “I am happy,” I cried. “What do I lack? Nothing! Well then, who or what is weeping inside me? What does he want? What does he want with me?”

For a moment I thought I heard a knock on the door. I got up but found no one. The sky was absolutely clear, the stars burning like lighted coals. I leaned over and searched the snow-covered road in the starlight to see if perchance I might discover human footprints. Nothing. I cupped my ear and listened. A dog was barking lugubriously at the edge of the village; it must have seen Charon roaming over the snow. An aged but robust and seemingly immortal shepherd had fallen into a ravine two days before and had spent this entire day giving up the ghost, the whole village bellowing from the thunderous râles of his death agony. Now he was silent, and nothing could be heard except his dog's barked lamentations.

He must have died, I said to myself with a shudder. Death angered me. Consoling words about Second Comings and future existences still had not managed to seduce me; but on the other hand, neither had I acquired the strength to confront death fearlessly.

I plunged once more into Homer, as though seeking refuge at the old grandfather's knees. The immortal verses began to roll like waves again and break over my temples. Across the centuries, I heard the din raised by gods and mortals striking out with their lances; I saw Helen as she walked slowly along the Trojan walls surrounded by the old men of the city, and seeing her, I struggled to forget. But my thoughts were on death. Oh, I said to myself, if only man's heart were omnipotent, powerful enough to wrestle with death! If only it were like Mary Magdalene—Mary Magdalene the prostitute—and could resurrect the beloved corpse!

I felt stricken at heart. Alas, how could I in my turn manage to resurrect Him and find relief! He, I sensed, was the one lying still dead in my entrails, the one who kept weeping. He was struggling to rise, but could not without man's help, and on account of this He felt great resentment toward me. How was I to save Him—and be saved?

My grandfather would have boarded his corsair and sailed out to the straits to ram Turkish sloops, since he held Turks and Jews equally responsible for crucifying Christ. He would have vented his spleen in this way and found relief. My father would have mounted his mare and likewise assaulted the infidels, returning from battle at night to hang the gory turbans of Christendom's foes on our household iconostasis, beneath the icon of the Crucified. In this way he too would have found relief and, in his own fashion, felt Christ being resurrected in his heart. After all, my father was a warrior, and war was his way both of delivering and receiving deliverance.

But what was I, the dregs of our lineage, to do?

High up in the mountains of Crete it sometimes happens, though rarely, that a milksop is born into a family of ogres. The old sire looks him over, looks him over once more, and is at a loss to understand. How the devil did this refuse, this jellyfish, issue from his loins? He calls into council the rest of the beasts he has engendered, his sons, to see what can be done with him. “He is a
disgrace to our lineage,” roars the old man. “What are we going to make of him, boys? He can't be a shepherd; how can he vault into other sheepfolds to steal? He can't be a fighter; it grieves him to kill. He's a disgrace to our stock; let's make him a schoolteacher!”

I, alas, was the schoolteacher of our family. But why resist? I might as well become resigned to it. No matter how much my ancestors might despise me, I too had my weapons, and I would go to war.

It was snowing out. God was mercifully covering the world's unseemliness with His snow. The rags hanging on the fence around the Macedonian hovel I occupied had become precious white furs, and the dormant thistles had all blossomed. Occasionally you heard a baby's wail, a dog's bark, the voice of a man; but everything became immediately mute once more, and then you heard nothing but silence, the voice of God.

Tossing a log onto the fire and also an armful of laurel branches to make the air fragrant, I bent over my Homer again. But my thoughts were no longer with Achaeans, Trojans, and Olympian gods; the sun-washed vision flitted before my eyes like a butterfly and vanished. Once again I heard my entrails weep.

He was lying inside the sepulcher, expecting the Disciples to run, roll back the stone, crouch in the darkness and call Him, whereupon He would rise again to earth. But no one had come. Feeling aggrieved, He was weeping.

As I stared into the dying flames, I saw the panic-stricken Disciples gathered together in an attic. “The Rabbi is dead, he is dead.” They were awaiting nightfall so that they could leave Jerusalem and disperse. But a woman jumped up. She alone refused to accept His death, for Christ had risen within her heart. Barefooted, unkempt, half naked, she ran toward the tomb at the break of day. Certain that she would see Christ, she saw Him; certain that Christ had been resurrected, she resurrected Him. “Rabbi!” she cried, and inside his tomb the Rabbi heard her voice, bounded to his feet, and appeared to her in the dawnlight, walking on the springtime grass.

M
y brain filled with this vision of resurrection. A slight, extremely sweet fever weighed down my eyelids, and the blood began to throb vigorously at my temples. Just as when a wind blows
vigorously, the clouds scatter, reunite, are metamorphosed into men, animals, and ships, so in the same manner inside me, as I huddled next to the fire, my mind blew and the vision within me became dismembered and transformed, turning into human faces clothed in longing and wind. But these faces would likewise quickly disperse into smokelike rings in my head, unless words came—at first timid and uncertain, then continually more impetuous and sure—to jell that which cannot be jelled. I understood: the spermatic, generative wind which had blown into my entrails had taken on substance, become an embryo, and was kicking now in a desire to emerge.