Nikos Kazantzakis - Zorba The Greek

Thereupon he pulled the chestnuts out of the ashes, gave me a handful, and filled our glasses with raki.

"May God weight the scales on the right side!" I said, clinking glasses.

"On the left!" Zorba corrected. "On the left! Up to now, the right's produced nothing good."

He swallowed the liquid fire in one gulp and lay on his bed.

"Tomorrow," he said, "I'm goíng to need all my strength. I'll have to fight against a thousand demons. Good night!"

The next day, at first light, Zorba disappeared down into the mine. The men had made progress in cutting out the gallery along the good seam. The water was seeping through the roof and the men were splashing about in black mud.

Two days ago Zorba had called for tree trunks to strengthen the gallery. But he was uneasy. The props were not so big as they should have been, and, with his profound instinct which made him feel all that was going on in that subterranean labyrinth as if it were his own body, he sensed that the props were not safe. He could hear creakings, very slight ones, ímperceptible as yet to the others-as if the supports of the roof were groaning under the weight.

Another thing had increased Zorba's uneasiness that day. Just as he was about to go down the shaft, the village priest, Pappa Stephanos, passed by on his mule, going posthaste to the neighboring convent to give the last sacrament to a dying nun. Fortunately Zorba had just enough time before the priest spoke to him to spit on the ground three times and pinch himself.

"Morning, father!" he replied glumly to the priest's greeting.

And then he added in a slightly lower voice:

"May your curse be upon me!"

He felt, however, that these exorcisms were insufficient, and he went nervously down the new gallery.

There was a heavy smell of lignite and acetylene. The men had already begun to strengthen the beams holding up the gallery roof. Zorba wished them good morning in a brusque, surly fashion. He rolled up his sleeves and set to work.

A dozen men were beginning to pick into the seam and heap the coal at their feet, others were shovelling it up and carting it out on little barrows.

Suddenly Zorba stopped, signed to the men to do likewise, and pricked up his ears. Just as the rider becomes one with his steed and the captain with his ship, so Zorba had become one with the mine. He could feel the ramifications of the galleries like veins in his flesh, and what the dark masses of coal could not feel, Zorba felt with a conscious, human lucidity.

After listening intently with his large, hairy ears, he peered into the gallery. It was at that moment I arrived. I had waked with a start, as if I had some presentiment, as if urged by some hand. I had dressed in haste and rushed out, without knowing why I was hurrying so, or where I was going. But my body had unhesitatingly taken the road to the mine. I had arrived at the moment when Zorba was anxiously listening and looking.

"Nothing…" he said after a while. "I thought for a moment… Never mind. To work, boys!"

He turned round, saw me and puckered up his lips.

"Boss, what are you doing here so early?"

He came up to me.

"Why don't you go up and get some fresh air, boss?" he whispered. "You can come and take a little turn here another day."

"What's the matter, Zorba?"

"Nothing… I was imagining things. A priest crossed my path first thing this morning. Go away."

"If there's any danger, wouldn't it be shameful if I left?"

"Yes," Zorba replied.

"Would you leave?"

"No."

"Well, then!"

"What Zorba has to do is one thíng," he replied irritably, "what others have to do is another! But as you feel it's shameful to leave, don't. Stay here. It's your funeral!"

He took a heavy hammer and stood on tiptoe to hit some nails into the roof bracings. I took an acetylene lamp from a post and went up and down in the mud, looking at the dark, shining seam. Immense forests must have been swallowed up millions of years ago. The earth digested and transformed its children. The trees turned into lignite, the lignite into coal, Zorba came…

I hung the lamp up again on the nail and watched Zorba work. He was completely absorbed in his task; he thought of nothing else; he was one with the earth, the pick and the coal. He and the hammer and nails were united in the struggle with the wood. He suffered with the bulging roof of the gallery. He sparred with the mountainside to obtain its coal by cunning and force. Zorba could feel matter with a sure and infallible instinct, and he struck his blows shrewdly where it was weakest and could be conquered. And, as he appeared then, covered and plastered with dirt, with only the whites of his eyes gleaming, he seemed to me to be camouflaged as coal, to have become coal itself, in order to be able to approach his adversary unawares and penetrate its inner defences.

"Bravo, Zorba! Go to it!" I cried, carried away by a naïve admiration.

But he did not even look round. How could he possibly have talked at that moment to a bookworm who, instead of wielding a pick, held in his hand a miserable stump of pencil? He was busy, he did not wish to speak. "Don't speak to me when I'm working," he said one evening. "I might snap!" "Snap, Zorba? Why?" "There you go again with your 'whys' and 'wherefores'! Like a kid! How can I explain? I'm completely taken up by my work, stretched taut from head to foot, and riveted to the stone or the coal or the santuri. If you suddenly touched me or spoke to me and I tried to turn round, I might snap. Now, d'you see?"

I looked at my watch, it was ten o'clock.

"Time to break off for lunch, my friends!" I said. "You've gone past the time."

The workmen immediately threw their tools down in a corner, mopped the sweat off their faces and prepared to leave the gallery. Completely absorbed in his work, Zorba had not heard. Even if he had, he would not have budged from there. Once again he listened anxiously.

"One moment," I said to the men, "have a cigarette."

I was rummaging in my pockets, with the men standing round me.

Suddenly Zorba started up. He stuck his ear to the gallery partition. By the light of the acetylene lamps, I could see his gaping, contorted mouth.

"What's up, Zorba?" I shouted.

But at that moment the whole gallery roof seemed to shudder above us.

"Get out!" Zorba shouted in a hoarse voice, "Get out!"

We tore back towards the exit, but we had not reached the first wooden frame when a second, louder cracking noise burst out over our heads. Zorba, meanwhile, was lifting up a great tree-trunk to wedge it in as a buttress against the timbering which was giving way. If he managed it quickly enough, it might hold up the roof a few more seconds and give us time to escape.

"Get out!" Zorba yelled again, but this time his voice was muffled, as if it were coming from the bowels of the earth.

With the cowardice which often comes over men in critical moments, we all rushed out, completely forgetting Zorba. But after a few seconds I pulled myself together and ran back into the gallery.

"Zorba!" I shouted. "Zorba!"

At least, I thought I shouted. I realized afterwards that my cry had not left my throat. Fear had strangled my voice.

I was overcome with shame. I leapt towards him with arms outstretched. Zorba had just made firm the great prop and was running, slithering in the mire, towards the exit. Rushing headlong in the darkness, he ran into me and we accidentally fell into each other's arms.

"We must get out!" he yelled. "Get out!"

We ran and reached the light. The terror-stricken workmen had gathered at the entrance and were peering inside.

We heard a third and louder cracking noise, like a tree splitting in a storm. Then, suddenly, a fearful roar, like a clap of thunder. It shook the mountainside, and the gallery collapsed.