Vassilis Vassilikos - ...And Dreams Are Dreams

I said. ‘As soon as you stop I’ll hear the key to my door turn inside me, and it’ll be him. You’ll see, rain, you’ll see. As long as you stop.’ In fact, the rain stopped soon after. The greatest of silences fell over the city and the house.”

Lying down, Doña Rosita was beginning to get groggy. (Her hair, covered in an oil that she would later wash out, was still wrapped in a turban.) She heard the key in the door, as if it were turning inside her, unlocking her own deepest, seven-times-sealed door. She heard his steps, then felt him lying down next to her, with his soaking head and cold feet: he had in fact come to meet her as soon as the rain stopped.

She wept, so as to join her tears with the raindrops that still covered him. All of her became a trembling tree of tears. Then, having calmed down, she washed her hair with a dream shampoo, filling the bathtub with dream bubbles.

Obeying Doña Rosita’s call, Don Pacifico had rushed, as soon as the rain stopped, to carry out his duty, which was to provide water for her mill, so that it might open its beautiful wings and the wind might rejoice in its blowing. “ A fine, virtuous mill, made by angels ” (Rilke). But the wind is diabolical. It blows furiously on Mykonos in the summer, just as it blew on his own island when the fires started, at the time when he was accused, indirectly, of arson. Which he had not committed. Only in his mind. But suspicion regarding the Jew caught on easily among the mistrustful islanders. So, as things were going from bad to worse and no decisions were being made concerning matters of import, the horses wallowed, destined never to race.

Because there are turn-of-the-century dreams that face the great changes, like vultures beaten by Visigoth winds; syndicated and unionized dreams, condemned to be put into practice, and other, aphasic, unenlisted, internationalist dreams, like hymns with a musical refrain; leitmotiv dreams that recur; Saint Simonic, routine, railroad dreams, idle, centripetal, hard of hearing, vengeful dreams; centennial dreams, constructivist, domesticated or wild, with interest, interest-free, usurious, CIA, and KGB dreams, dreams that have escaped from prison guards; productive dreams that multiply for you, or dreams that, like governments that have lost their base and cadres, dissent from sleep; and others, hypnotic ones, that are outlined by the Grand Interpreter of Dreams; dreams of the Central Committee, of the Executive Office, of sections, of cells; dreams of extreme clandestinity and dreams that are reinstated at Party Conferences long after the dreamers have died; ivory dreams, aphrodisiac dreams that overflow like the froth on glasses of Bavarian beer; dreams without ornaments and others from Susa, made of heavy gold, of Darius and Parisatis; dreams that set fire to the aprons of young girls like magnifying glasses gathering the rays of the sun into one; outdated dreams, narrow dreams that limit the economy of the bed and dreams with sesame seeds that are sold, like jasmine, for a penny; dreams that are tear drenched, teargassed, tearjerkers.

His heart, torn in two this way, was unable to achieve balance. Outside, the rain completed his inner misery. “Since I have nothing left other than this light well through which I receive the tenants’ garbage, in order to acquire a plot of land to build on I have to burn the land I inherited. I have to set fire to the forest to make a dreamport where flying words (my grandfather’s pheasants and my aphasia) will finally be able to land.”

With a mind as sharp as a razor, he shaves the beards off his dreams, and finds himself with naked cheek, scarred, face to face with the grooves of his pain. They both sink into a gigantic sleep. And while prudent people cook before they get hungry, they, lost in a hunger that sometimes reached its peak, gnawed, for lack of anything else to eat, at their very flesh. The brain, that great invalid, was not programming the questions correctly. Thus, they were called upon to give answers to erroneous questions, and the words of the oracle kept coming out wrong. Meanwhile the money was running out.

In any case, a writer’s job is difficult. But her job was even more difficult. “Human beings can live without the word, but not without music. Music is the most profound form of human expression.” And as he watched her, she seemed like a huge, beautiful bird whose wing had once been broken. It would be difficult for the bird to rise again, to take to the sky.

And yet it would. Every door has its nail, but every nail opens a hole when you pull it out, what the Christians call the eye of Judas , through which you can see who’s knocking at your door. If it’s not the north wind. And so, climbing up high, he saw down below his beloved city with its irregular development and violated town planning. “This city is without a heart,”

he thought to himself. “Somebody ought to give it a transplant.”

— 1-

How a White Bear Ended Up in Athens

The white bear was wandering around the streets of Athens, searching for its lost master. Who is this white bear?

Who is its lost master? That is the topic of our story today.

But let’s start with some background information.

Which Athens was it wandering around? What did Athens of that period look like? That period of crisis, of inflation, of renewed devaluation.

Do economic terms, terms that are detached from the action and the character of its heroes, have their place in a story? What is the difference between the myth and the mythified?

All questions that demand an answer. But we, readers, are not about to mythologize. We are enlisted in the struggle for a better tomorrow for the world and for ourselves, we are fighting for better days to come.

And they are bound to come, there’s no doubt about that. All bodes well in this better-than-all-possible worlds.

But before we even start, we have to obey a narrative convention that wants the bear to be of neutral gender, because since childhood we are used to referring to a bear as “it,” unless it is specified as a Papa or a Mama bear. In any case, we have no other choice but to work with the materials available. And these materials are, for the most part, determined by chance.

Let us not try to make head or tail of something that has neither. If we had an organized life, a timetable, a position that gave us precise authorities, whether constitutionally guaranteed or not, we might proceed according to a gradual, well-thought-out method. But when everything is on the verge of chaos, when everything marches on in the dark (inside power, in the center of its center, in its main core, there is a dark nucleus), everything is possible, every beginning is good, nobody is forcing anyone: I am not forced to tell the story of the bear that got lost in Athens during the holidays, nor you, much less you, reader, to listen to this story, which, alas, is in danger of becoming a boomerang coming back to hit me in the gut, making me, once again, throw up all the disgust and joy I get from life.

The important thing is that, up to this moment when I am sitting down to write, even though I smoke a lot, I have yet to suffer a heart attack, which would scare me and make me give up or cut down on my smoking, roll up my sleeves, and start writing only about the important events of my life, leaving a sort of heritage testament to posterity. I am still now (knock wood) perfectly healthy. I have not burdened others with insurmountable worries. When Aliki and I broke up, we both cried a little of course, but this took place within reasonable, human limits. She flew off to stay with a friend to alleviate her solitude, while I buried myself in the anonymous crowd that was traveling by plane, in order to retire into my own solitude. Of course, I am still damp from Aliki’s touch, from her virginal freshness against my cheek, her lust for life that nothing could injure. I think of her, I want her; that girl tore me to pieces. I’m like a schoolboy when I’m with her, but I like this state she often put me in.