The Colossus of Maroussi (23 page)
We slept with the windows closed and a great fire roaring in the huge stove. At breakfast we congregated about a long communion table in a hall that would have done credit to a Dominican monastery. The food was excellent and abundant, the view from the window superb. The place was so enormous, the floor so inviting, that I couldn’t resist the temptation to do some fancy skating in my shoes. I sailed in and out the corridors, the refectory, the salon, the studios, delivering glad tidings from the ruler of my ninth house, Mercury himself.
It was now time to inspect the ruins, extract the last oracular juices from the extinct navel. We climbed up the hill to the theatre whence we overlooked the splintered treasuries of the gods, the ruined temples, the fallen columns, trying vainly to recreate the splendor of this ancient site. We speculated at length on the exact position of the city itself which is as yet undiscovered. Suddenly, as we stood there silently and reverently, Katsimbalis strode to the center of the bowl and holding his arms aloft delivered the closing lines of the last oracle. It was an impressive moment, to say the least. For a second, so it seemed, the curtain had been lifted on a world which had never really perished but which had rolled away like a cloud and was preserving itself intact, inviolate, until the day when, restored to his senses, man would summon it back to life again. In the few seconds it took him to pronounce the words I had a long glimpse down the broad avenue of man’s folly and, seeing no end to the vista, experienced a poignant feeling of distress and of sadness which was in no way connected with my own fate but with that of the species to which by accident I happen to belong. I recalled other oracular utterances I had heard in Paris, in which the present war, horrible as it is, was represented as but an item in the long catalogue of impending disasters and reversals, and I remembered the skeptical way in which these utterances were received. The world which passed away with Delphi passed away as in a sleep. It is the same now. Victory and defeat are meaningless in the light of the wheel which relentlessly revolves. We are moving into a new latitude of the soul, and a thousand years hence men will wonder at our blindness, our torpor, our supine acquiescence to an order which was doomed.
We had a drink at the Castellian Spring where I suddenly remembered my old friend Nick of the Orpheum Dance Palace on Broadway because he had come from a little village called Castellia in the valley beyond the mountains. In a way my friend Nick was largely responsible for my being here, I reflected, for it was through his terpsichorean instrumentations that I met my wife June and if I hadn’t met her I should probably never have become a writer, never have left America, never have met Betty Ryan, Lawrence Durrell and finally Stephanides, Katsimbalis and Ghika.
After wandering about amidst the broken columns we ascended the tortuous path to the stadium on high. Katsimbalis took off his overcoat and with giant strides measured it from end to end. The setting is spectacular. Set just below the crest of the mountain one has the impression that when the course was finished the charioteers must have driven their steeds over the ridge and into the blue. The atmosphere is superhuman, intoxicating to the point of madness. Everything that is extraordinary and miraculous about Delphi gathers here in the memory of the games which were held in the clouds. As I turned to go I saw a shepherd leading his flock over the ridge; his figure was so sharply delineated against the sky that he seemed to be bathed in a violet aura; the sheep moved slowly over the smooth spine in a golden fuzz, as though somnolently emerging from the dead pages of a forgotten idyll.
In the museum I came again upon the colossal Theban statues which have never ceased to haunt me and finally we stood before the amazing statue of Antinous, last of the gods. I could not help but contrast in my mind this most wonderful idealization in stone of the eternal duality of man, so bold and simple, so thoroughly Greek in the best sense, with that literary creation of Balzac’s,
Seraphita
, which is altogether vague and mysterious and, humanly speaking, altogether unconvincing. Nothing could better convey the transition from light to darkness, from the pagan to the Christian conception of life, than this enigmatic figure of the last god on earth who flung himself into the Nile. By emphasizing the soulful qualities of man Christianity succeeded only in disembodying man; as angel the sexes fuse into the sublime spiritual being which man essentially is. The Greeks, on the other hand, gave body to everything, thereby incarnating the spirit and eternalizing it. In Greece one is ever filled with the sense of eternality which is expressed in the here and now; the moment one returns to the Western world, whether in Europe or America, this feeling of body, of eternality, of incarnated spirit is shattered. We move in clock time amidst the debris of vanished worlds, inventing the instruments of our own destruction, oblivious of fate or destiny, knowing never a moment of peace, possessing not an ounce of faith, a prey to the blackest superstitions, functioning neither in the body nor in the spirit, active not as individuals but as microbes in the organism of the diseased.
That night, at the dinner table in the big hall, while listening to Pericles Byzantis, I made up my mind to return to Athens the next day. He had just been urging me to stay, and indeed there was every reason for me to stay, but I had the feeling that something awaited me in Athens and I knew I would not stay. Next morning at breakfast, to his great amazement, I told him of my decision. I told him very frankly that I could give no good reason for my departure—except that best of all reasons, imperious desire. I had had the distinction of being the very first foreigner to enjoy the privileges of the new pavilion and my abrupt leave-taking was undoubtedly a poor way of expressing my gratitude, but so it was. Ghika and Katsimbalis quickly decided to return with me. I hope that when he reads what happened to me upon my return to Athens the good Kyrios Byzantis will forgive my rude behavior and not consider it as typically American.
The return at top speed was even more impressive to me than our coming. We passed through Thebes in the late afternoon, Katsimbalis regaling me with a story of his mad motorcycle trips from Thebes to Athens after he had had a skinful. It seemed to me that we had just skirted the vicinity of the great battlefield of Platea and were perhaps facing Mount Kithaeron when suddenly I became aware of a curious trap-like formation through which we were whirling like a drunken cork. Again we had come to one of those formidable passes where the invading enemy had been slaughtered like pigs, a spot which must be the solace and the joy of defending generals everywhere. Here it was, it would not surprise me to discover, that Oedipus had met the Sphinx. I was profoundly disturbed, shaken to the roots. And by what? By associations born of my knowledge of ancient events? Scarcely, since I have but the scantiest knowledge of Greek history and even that is thoroughly confused, as is all history to me. No, as with the sacred places so with the murderous spots—the record of events is written into the earth. The real joy of the historian or the archaeologist when confronted with a discovery must lie in the fact of confirmation, corroboration, not in surprise. Nothing that has happened on this earth, however deeply buried, is hidden from man. Certain spots stand out like semaphores, revealing not only the clue but the event—provided, to be sure, they are approached with utter purity of heart. I am convinced that there are many layers of history and that the final reading will be delayed until the gift of seeing past and future as one is restored to us.
I thought, when I got back to my hotel and found that money had been cabled me for my return to America, that that was what had drawn me back to Athens, but in the morning when I found Katsimbalis waiting for me with a mysterious smile upon his face I discovered that there was another, more important reason. It was a cold wintry day with a stiff wind blowing down from the encircling hills. It was a Sunday. Somehow everything had undergone a radical change. A boat was leaving in about ten days and the knowledge that I would take that boat had already brought the journey to an end.
Katsimbalis had come to propose a visit to an Armenian soothsayer whom he and several of his friends had already consulted. I consented with alacrity, never having been to a soothsayer in my life. Once in Paris I had been on the verge of doing so, having witnessed the hallucinating effect of such an experience upon two of my close friends. I was of the opinion that nothing more could be expected than a good or bad reading of one’s own mind.
The abode of this particular soothsayer was in the Armenian refugee quarter of Athens, a section of the city I had not yet seen. I had heard that it was sordid and picturesque but nothing I had heard about it had quite prepared me for the sight which greeted my eyes. By no means the least curious feature of this neighborhood is its duality. Around the rotten yolk of the egg lies the immaculate new shell of the community which is to be. For almost twenty years these miserable refugees have been waiting to move into the new quarters which have been promised them. These new homes which the government has provided and which now stand ready for occupancy (rent free, I believe), are models in every sense of the word. The contrast between these and the hovels in which the refugees have somehow managed to survive for a generation is fantastic, to say the least. From the rubbish heap a whole community provided shelter for itself and for its animals, its pets, its rodents, its lice, its bedbugs, its microbes. With the march of civilization such pustulant, festering agglomerations of humanity are of course no unusual sight. The more staggering the world cities become in elegance and proportion, in power and influence, the more cataclysmic the upheavals, the vaster the armies of footloose, destitute, homeless, penniless individuals who, unlike the miserable Armenians of Athens, are not even privileged to dig in the dung-heaps for the scraps with which to provide themselves with shelter but are forced to keep on the march like phantoms, confronted in their own land with rifles, hand grenades, barbed wire, shunned like lepers, driven out like the pest.
The home of Aram Hourabedian was buried in the heart of the labyrinth and required much questioning and manoeuvring before we could locate it. When at last we found the little sign announcing his residence we discovered that we had come too early. We killed an hour or so strolling about the quarter, marvelling not so much at the squalor but at the pathetically human efforts that had been made to adorn and beautify these miserable shacks. Despite the fact that it had been created out of the rubbish heap there was more charm and character to this little village than one usually finds in a modern city. It evoked books, paintings, dreams, legends: it evoked such names as Lewis Carroll, Hieronymus Bosch, Breughel, Max Ernst, Hans Reichel, Salvador Dali, Goya, Giotto, Paul Klee, to mention but a few. In the midst of the most terrible poverty and suffering there nevertheless emanated a glow which was holy; the surprise of finding a cow or a sheep in the same room with a mother and child gave way instantly to a feeling of reverence. Nor did one have the slightest desire to laugh at seeing a squalid hut surmounted by an improvised solarium made of pieces of tin. What shelter there was was shared alike and this shelter included provision for the birds of the air and the animals of the field. Only in sorrow and suffering does man draw close to his fellow man; only then, it seems, does his life become beautiful. Walking along a sunken planked street I stopped a moment to gaze at the window of a bookshop, arrested by the sight of those lurid adventure magazines which one never expects to find in a foreign land but which flourish everywhere in every land, in every tongue almost. Conspicuous among them was a brilliant red-covered volume of Jules Verne, a Greek edition of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” What impressed me at the moment was the thought that the world in which this fantastic yarn lay buried was far more fantastic than anything Jules Verne had imagined. How could anyone possibly imagine, coming out of the sky from another planet in the middle of the night, let us say, and finding himself in this weird community, that there existed on this earth other beings who lived in towering skyscrapers the very materials of which would baffle the mind to describe? And if there could be such a gulf between two worlds lying in such proximity what might be the gulf between the present world and the world to come? To see even fifty or a hundred years ahead taxes our imagination to the utmost; we are incapable of seeing beyond the repetitious cycle of war and peace, rich and poor, right and wrong, good and bad. Look twenty thousand years ahead: do you still see battleships, skyscrapers, churches, lunatic asylums, slums, mansions, national frontiers, tractors, sewing machines, canned sardines, little liver pills, etc. etc.? How will these things be eradicated? How will the new world, brave or poor, come about? Looking at the beautiful volume of Jules Verne I seriously asked myself the question—
how will it come about?
I wondered, indeed, if the elimination of these things ever seriously occupies our imagination. For as I stood there daydreaming I had the impression that everything was at a standstill, that I was not a man living in the twentieth century but a visitor from no century seeing what he had seen before and would see again and again, and the thought that that might be possible was utterly depressing.
It was the soothsayer’s wife who opened the door for us. She had a serene, dignified countenance which at once impressed me favorably. She pointed to the next room where her husband sat a table in his shirtsleeves, his head supported by his elbows. He was apparently engaged in reading a huge, Biblical book. As we entered the room he rose and shook hands cordially. There was nothing theatrical or ostentatious about him; indeed he had more the air of a carpenter pursuing his rabbinical studies than any appearance of being a medium. He hastened to explain that he was not possessed of any extraordinary powers, that he had simply been a student of the Kabbala for many years and that he had been instructed in the art of Arabian astrology. He spoke Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Armenian, German, French, Czech and several other languages and had until recently been in the service of the Czechoslovak consulate. The only information he demanded was the date, hour and place of my birth, my first name and my mother’s and father’s first names. I should say that before he had put these questions to me he remarked to Katsimbalis that I was decidedly a Capricorn of the Jupiterian type. He consulted the books, made his computations slowly and methodically and then, raising his eyes, began to talk. He spoke to me in French, but now and then, when things became too complicated, he addressed himself to Katsimbalis in Greek and the latter translated it back to me in English. Linguistically, to say the least, the situation was rather interesting. I felt unusually calm, steady, sure of myself, aware as he talked of every object in the room and yet never for a moment distracted. It was the living room we were seated in and it was extremely clean and orderly, the atmosphere reminding me strongly of the homes of poor rabbis whom I had visited in other cities of the world.
