...And Dreams Are Dreams

The captain was lost in thought again. The figure of the governor had caused him problems since his great-grandfather went into a depression because among the iron laws imposed by N’estce pas was one banning piracy. The captain’s grandfather used to tell him pirate stories when he was the same age as his youngest grandchild was now, and he still remembered them. Because Capodistrias had his good points, but he was also a perverse man. “Until I came along, these Greeks didn’t even know how to make a salad,” he said, showing by “these Greeks” how alienated he really was. He was accountable to a Europe that the Greeks did not know; he wanted to cure “the illness Greece had suffered from, after four centuries of slavery and seven of anarchy,” the same way dictators play doctor by putting a country in plaster. He wanted to make Greece into another Switzerland, but he was forgetting that the Greeks had as a model not William Tell, but Dighenis Akritas.

“So back then Greece only went as far as the souvlaki shops at Corinth Canal, Grandfather?”

“That’s as far as it went, my boy. They could smell the burning scent of freedom from across the way and it made their heads swim.”

“So how come it grew?”

The grandson was waiting for the rest of the story.

But his grandfather remained silent. He was dreaming of his life. Oh, if only he could rewrite it!

“And what happened to Capodistrias,

Grandfather?”

“They killed him, my boy, one day when he was on his way to church.”

“Why did they kill him, Grandfather?”

“Because people are evil, my boy.”

The grandson was waiting. He would go and

watch the Smurfs video again if his grandfather didn’t go on with the story. But his grandfather seemed distracted. There was something else on his mind.

“I’ve kept the double-barreled shotgun for you, my boy.”

The young man did not understand what gun his grandfather was talking about.

“You know, my shotgun….”

“And who am I supposed to kill with it,

Grandfather?”

— 5-

The Narrator, Suite

“Othonos Street, please. The Olympic Airways office.”

“Where’s that?” asked the taxi driver, hastening to add, “I’m new at the job.”

“It’s at Constitution Square,” said the narrator, and right away he was struck by the absurdity of it.

Imagine that: Othonos Street being at Constitution Square. Otto, who never wanted to grant his subjects a constitution, was now condemned by city planning to name one of its four sides. And to be forced to enter Amalias Avenue, when he had never entered his own Amalia. (“The protocol of the autopsy performed on Queen Amalia attested that she remained a virgin.”) A taste of videotape, sour, misleading, slippery as a banana peel, comes to the narrator’s mind every time he touches upon, even by mistake, a name or an event of that period. Immediately, he thinks of the television miniseries Queen Amalia, starring the Greek Brigitte Bardot; and of Mando Mavrogenous with the Greek Claudia Cardinale: the fake dialogue, the fake period costumes, the fake scenery, the cheapness of it all.

Greek history and the writers of historical novels have financed this miniseries mania, he thinks to himself. At least a novel can be read in the original. But where do you find history? It stays in your imagination, personified by its televisual models: Amalia-Brigitte, Mando-Claudia. While reading of Kontostavlos’s reception earlier, he could not avoid feeling the slimy banana peel, his allergy to videotapes, crawling over his skin.

“Who was Otto, Grandfather?”

“He was our first king, the second son of the philhellene King of Bavaria Ludwig I and Theresa, daughter of the Duke of Saxon Hildburghausen, niece of the Baron Niebelhausen, and great-grandmother of Maunthausen. According to historians, her father, a ladies’ man, had to abdicate the throne in 1848, because of the scandal surrounding his relationship with Lola Montez, although his abdication was probably really due to the popular uprising that year.

“Ever since childhood, Otto had been a bit of a dunce. And he was sickly too, poor boy. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Livorno, in Italy, for treatment of a neurological disorder. He had to return the following year. Nowadays, a child with such reactions would be placed under the observation of neurologists and psychiatrists.”

“So why did they send him to us as a king?”