...And Dreams Are Dreams

“But at that time, these cylindrical machines didn’t exist,” said our friend, relieved. “This law refers to Linotypes, which indeed, for safety reasons, had to maintain a distance of two meters from the ceiling.

Electronic machines are a different matter. And they weren’t put on the market until 1978.”

“Unfortunately, the law is always the law,” said the inspector, bowing his head.

“But you’re going to ruin us!” cried Dimitris. “We can’t raise the ceiling, nor can we lower the machine.”

“Good heavens, we don’t want to ruin anyone,”

said the inspector. “All we are doing is enforcing the law. If only the law would change, then there would be no problem. But until then, I would advise you to start looking for another place. And do it quickly.”

Of course, I think to myself now, if only they had been able to imagine the success of our Almanac, which became a daily paper within a few months, the press tycoons would have acted differently. That same day they would have kicked us out onto the street, thus drowning the yolk in its own shell. Dimitris would have sold everything and gone back to Australia. (It’s not uncommon for an immigrant to be forced to take that road again, because of the deep hatred every wretch who stayed home shows toward the successful repatriated immigrant.)

And who knows what the rest of us would be doing now? However, progress is accomplished in life thanks to the establishment’s predictable inability to deal with the threat of novelty. After all, isn’t that the way it happened in czarist Russia with the revolution?

If they had known of the October Revolution, wouldn’t they have, before that in 1905, exterminated the revolutionaries down to the last one, the same way that the Americans, seventy years later, did with the leaders of the Black Panthers, leaving only one of them alive, a zoo specimen?

However, I’ll say it again: fortunately, the old order can rarely see the dangers in something new, and that is why they let innovations take root. We ourselves were almost uprooted, but by then, dreams were too advanced in people’s psyches, and whoever tried to attack us fell on his face. Meanwhile, people had started sprouting wings.

Even so, that first, unimportant little side effect we bypassed — I will tell you how — came very close to shaking us up.

Mr. Inspector showed no sign of leaving. It was as if he were waiting for something. Dimitris understood straight away.

“As you can see,” he said, “we are publishing the Almanac not to make money, but because it’s something we love to do. We are selling dreams. Not feta cheese. And not parliamentary bills. Why don’t you do us the favor, if you believe our effort is worth it, of letting us get on our feet first, and then we’ll move to another building. I promise.”

The way he spoke seemed to be doing the trick.

Because it was the right way. If Dimitris had mentioned something about the laws of the

dictatorship still being in force, his argument would have had the opposite result: the inspector was a career civil servant who had loyally served all governments.

So as far as he was concerned, the determining factor of a good or a bad law was not the political background of the government that had decreed it.

Rather, all laws were either right or wrong, in relation to the laws themselves. Thus, in our case, the distance of two meters could only be contested because our machine was new. The law had been intended to regulate Linotypes; he could not contest the law by the political criterion that it had been decreed under a dictatorship. If Dimitris had used the latter argument the inspector, a man of the right, could say to himself:

“What’s the difference between a socialist government and a military dictatorship?” However, even though Dimitris had played it exactly correctly, the inspector was not convinced.

Bribing him didn’t work either. When Dimitris hinted, very smoothly, about a gift, perhaps a kangaroo from Australia, the inspector snapped that he was no animal lover. He didn’t have cats and he didn’t have dogs. He wasn’t about to take in a kangaroo.

The boomerang effect is well known, especially to someone who has lived in Australia. So when Dimitris began to fear that all these things — bribes, politics—

could end up turning against him, he chose to tell the truth about the dream we four had of publishing a newspaper of dreams, and about Dimitris’s offer, which provided us the means to do it for free. And now along comes the state and says, what? That the bed on which the dreamers lay had to maintain a distance of two meters from the ceiling in order for them to be allowed to dream? With this tack, he touched the Achilles’ heel of every man, harsh bureaucrat though he may seem: that is, the need to express the hidden part of ones’ self, the part that dreams, while the other part acts.