Vassilis Vassilikos - ...And Dreams Are Dreams

“Because the laws of development don’t always produce the best results for schemers,” Aristotle’s weak voice was saying, floating down from the deck through the ventilator shaft.

— 2-

The Captain

Standing on the bridge, wrapped in his solitude, the captain was not sleeping . Because dreams blossom on the fringes of dreams, they react like toxic liquids that dissolve first, before recom-posing themselves afterwards, into hopes that had ceased to be hopeful, galleries and calories, until….

“Grandfather, tell me a story.”

“Which story, my boy?”

“The one about the forest fire, Grandfather, when you would swing by your belt from one tree to another, and even the beasts of the jungle couldn’t catch you.

You, Grandfather, the hunter, the captain, the burlotieris4 of Admiral Kanaris… Come on,

Grandfather, tell me.”

Standing on the bridge, leaning against the wheel of the ship that was about to weigh anchor, while here too the fire was destroying the forests, the captain, by simply touching the wheel that has remained the same all these years, was transformed into the old sailor 4 Crew member of fire ships used against the Turkish fleet.

Trans. Kanaris who, on a different night, a moonless night, had set fire to the flagship of the pasha.

“When did that happen, Grandfather?”

“When our great-grandfathers were fighting for independence, my boy, and Greece was a dog that had been tied up for four hundred years and was trying to break its chains. But three masters were lying in wait to see who would take it over. For the great powers of the time, Greece was a very useful dog. The masters wanted it to be free in order to scare the sultan’s wolfhounds, but not so free that it would become a master itself. And so, the three masters, the Russians, the English, and the French, helped free the Grecian dog, but then they quarreled among themselves over who would own it. The dog didn’t yet know its new masters. It would look up at them with its sad eyes, the way dogs do, full of gratitude that they had helped it break its chains. And it was hungry. It was bleeding from its struggle to break its fetters. It was a starving dog, but proud to show its ribs under its skin.

Unfortunately, it didn’t know people. It would run to the one who tossed it the biggest piece of meat. And the three big guys tormented the poor thing, to the point where it didn’t know what was going on.

“That was when they sent the first government diplomat from Corfu, who had lived for years abroad, in the court of the czar of Russia. As soon as he set foot in the basement where the dog lived, the stench forced the diplomat to hold his breath. ‘We need to straighten up around here’, he said, and started to train the dog, in rather a brusque manner. Deep down, he liked the idea of a dog, though not so much the dog itself, which, having been oppressed and starved all those years, wanted to run and leap and enjoy its newly acquired freedom. ‘You can forget everything you learned from the sultan all these years’, said its master, who spoke to the dog in French rather than Greek. He would say couche-là instead of katse kato . He was bent on turning the dog into a Saint Bernard, a little barrel of brandy around its neck. The very smell of the drink nauseated the dog, which was used to the wine and liqueurs of its own country. So, one day, he attacked his master and tore him to pieces. This was followed by a period in which the dog, free again, became wild and independent and happy like it used to be. It would grab every single chicken it came across, it would chase after foxes. ‘That’s enough’, said the foreigners, seeing that, unrestrained, the dog could become even more dangerous than its old master the sultan.

Especially since it was also laying claim to other fields, crossing the Isthmus of Corinth in one bound, and devouring sheep from their pens. But neither of the three big guys would accept one of the other two as master of the dog.

“So they found a young prince, underage,

abnormal, and a bit of a flake, and they told his father, Ludwig of Bavaria, to send him down to be master of the dog’s country. The father accepted, and sent his son, at exactly seventeen years of age, a hippie of his time, who since childhood had been dropping acid, and the dog saw his new master coming with an army of Bavarian soldiers, fourteen thousand of them. Not one of the new arrivals spoke Greek. The dog went up to them, sniffed at them; they seemed to be friends and not new conquerors. After all, that’s what its three protectors had kept whispering in its ear the whole time it was waiting for them to arrive. So the dog didn’t bark, but instead wagged its tail with joy, because these strangers, these Bavarians, would bring lots to eat (in the form of a monumental loan), and the dog, having pillaged the sheepfolds and chicken coops, had been left with nothing more to eat. So the dog was excited. But it noticed some other dogs at its master’s side, dogs of a different breed, well-fed, ferocious, and with pretty big appetites themselves. It was explained that these three dogs were accompanying the young king, as he was still underage. Until he turned twenty, these three Bavarian dogs would rule the palace. The dog took a liking to the king, because he was like a child but was afraid of his guard dogs, Armansberg, Mauer, and the other one. These three dogs then gathered together all the Greek dogs and tried to Bavarify them.

“Up to that point, our dog had managed to escape being barbarified, but it could see that it would be difficult to avoid being Bavarified. And while in the beginning it thought that it was going to get fed, the Greek dog saw that the wolfhounds were eating its food. They would bark in a tongue that our dog didn’t understand. Everything was ruled with the military discipline of the Bavarians. They put our dog in prison, charging it with liking its master but not his dogs. And they would have killed it, if the good king himself hadn’t intervened and begged his dogs to spare its life.

“All this happened at Nafplion, in the fortress of Palamidi. Then, the king’s court left Nafplion and came to Athens. The dog moved with them, during which it watched the Bavarians making the laws, the Bavarians building, the Bavarians constituting the army. ‘Who am I?’ wondered the dog. ‘I’m a Christian Orthodox dog. What do these people of another religion want? I had my own Holy Virgin and my own Jesus who sustained me during four hundred years of darkness. Who are they? What do they want?’ It was as if, little by little, the dog’s self-awareness was awakened. And it started exercising its jaws to bite.

‘Beware of the dog’, read the sign outside its hovel, while the foreign dogs lived in the palace. Meanwhile the years went by, and the dog kept demanding its rights, which the Bavarian dogs adamantly refused to grant. Until one day, the dog kicked them out. It had grown by then, it had become strong. But with all the crossbreeding that had gone on during all these years, there had appeared a mixed breed of dog in our country, and the blood of the original dog, the one they had imprisoned in Palamidi, had been polluted. Thus there were four parties of dogs, the French, the English, the Russian, and the dogs of the Steppe. Only the Bavarians hadn’t succeeded in grafting their breed before leaving, in order to produce wolfhounds. And that is how, since then, my boy, we have had these breeds….”

The captain was standing, wrapped in his solitude, thinking. He could hear the conversation taking place on deck, about the loan that the Socialist government was preparing to receive from the Common Market (“Taking out a loan,” Aristotle explained in his nasal voice, “presupposes the devaluation of the drachma.”).