...And Dreams Are Dreams

It was the kind of number one only dreams about. It unfolded like the stream of subtitles that accompany news programs for the hard of hearing. A streamer of numbers thrown at a carnival. What was I dressed up as? I saw myself as Saint Francis of Assisi and the old woman as the Holy Virgin. Her grace was abandoning me. She had been my good fate and she was leaving me.

“No, no, it can’t be. Let’s start da capo (from the beginning),” said the accountant from behind his window, while I continued to smoke more and more nervously.

But his da capo hit me. It was Capodistrias whom I had spent the most time studying and telephoning in the great beyond so that he could tell me what had happened before he was assassinated by Petrobey Mavromichalis in Nafplion one day on his way to church. A black dagger from the Mani.

“There must have been a mistake,” said the accountant. “Technology is subject to errors, you know.”

“So is logotechny,” I started to say, but the play on words didn’t work in Italian.

“It can’t be, it can’t be,” he kept muttering. “I’ve been working here for years. So many people have come through this place. Celebrities calling everywhere, all over the world. And yet I’ve never had a bill like this before.”

“Well, of course, I have been staying here for two months,” I attempted.

“But there have been others who have stayed for six months. Even twelve. Take the witch. She stays here all year round. She calls her clients who live in every corner of the earth. She’s never had to pay so much.”

Indeed there was a witch staying in the hotel, a fat woman who looked like a fortune teller, who ran her own mail order business of herbal concoctions in little sachets, and had quite a large clientele. She did all her business over the phone, and, in fact, that is where I would invariably see her camped: outside the hotel phone booths. But at least she got paid for her magic potions, whereas nobody paid me. I was phoning into a vacuum. Whenever I felt lonely I would dig up phone numbers of old friends and call them because I needed to talk. None of them ever called me. I was always the one to call. It was like a sickness, which I was now about to pay for dearly.

Naturally, the accountant came up with the same number again. I told him I would be going away for a couple of days. I would be going to France to get the money.

“No problem,” he said.

In any case, our mutual friend had vouched for me. I called Ursula to cancel our appointment for that evening and to tell her that I would be calling her in a day or two, as soon as I got back.

— 6-

I kept my savings in gold bars in a French bank. A film based on one of my books had been a success and had suddenly brought me a lot of money, which I had deposited into my account in Paris, where I had lived at the time. This was during the years when I could not return to Greece for political reasons. So this was money I had earned abroad and was keeping there legally. But one day, the old lady at the bank, who knew me, told me I had to immediately withdraw my money, since a new law had just gone into effect prohibiting foreigners from having more than a certain amount of cash.

“Otherwise, you will lose whatever amount

exceeds the limit,” she said.

“What should I do?” I asked.

“Buy shares, invest in real estate, gold….”

I wasn’t familiar with business matters or the stock exchange, so I chose gold; it was the easiest. And I had lived off this money for the past twenty years. I remembered how, every time I went to the bank my safe deposit box became lighter rather than heavier with the passing of the years. Now I had to cash in my last gold bar, in order to pay my hotel bill and return to my base, where I had started, still without a completed manuscript. Defeated on all counts. Extinguished. And old.

No sooner said than done. It is easy to liquidate.

To consolidate, now that’s another matter. So I cashed in my last ingot, like one who sells a plot of land at a sacrifice because of a health problem. It was the same with me, only my sickness was of a different kind.

Nevertheless I didn’t relinquish my safe deposit box. I left some of my adolescent poems in it, including “The Old Plane Tree,” as well as the diary my father had kept of the Asia Minor disaster. You never know, I said to myself. After all, hadn’t the Bolsheviks, upon opening the safe deposit boxes of the Russian czar in 1920, found Platonov, an unpublished play by Chekhov? Maybe one day, upon breaking open all terrestrial safe deposit boxes, extraterrestrials would find my “Old Plane Tree.” Immediately, I felt very relieved.