...And Dreams Are Dreams

“‘To the extent that I was able,’ he wrote, ‘I fulfilled my duty to my country, and so did my entire family. I saw my country free, I saw what we had all longed for, myself, my father, my grandfather, and all my race, as well as all the Greeks. I decided to go to an orchard I had outside Nafplion. I went there and I stayed, spending my time growing things. It gave me pleasure to watch the little trees I had planted growing bigger.’

“But they didn’t leave Kolokotronis alone either.

They convicted him of being a Russophile, the same way that one hundred years later they convicted the Russophiles of being part of the E.A.M6. It was the Germans now, the Bavarians then. Meanwhile, Bavaria had become part of Germany.”

“And what was Otto like, Grandfather?”

“He was pathetic. Not all there. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he had some kind of cerebral lesion. He couldn’t understand anything they told him. They would take him documents, and he would spend hours studying them, correcting the spelling mistakes and punctuation, and after he had gone over everything, he still hadn’t understood anything. His last word on any subject was, ‘We’ll see.’ As Claude Herve wrote, ‘ I did not understand what he told me and it was obvious that he rarely understood me…. His hair was so flat that it always appeared to be stuck to his head. He was 6 Resistance front during the German occupation. Trans.

in the habit of passing his hand over it all the time to keep it in a state of perfect control. I never once saw a single hair out of place and I imagined that was what he desired of his subjects.’ Fortunately, he would often travel to his homeland and in his absence, his wife Amalia would conclude affairs of state and sign in his place. When he visited Smyrna, he really went nuts.

He saw himself ‘ as the successor of the paleologues. I dream’, he said , ‘of this country becoming big and strong, and I dream of my throne being there, where the last emperor of Byzantium fell. ’ As for Greece, he saw it in the same way modern tourists see it. He liked going on excursions. He liked the ancient ruins. But when the natives saw him accompanied by

Armansberg’s daughters, they thought it was the sultan and his harem, and that Armansberg and his aide-de-camp were the eunuchs. His case resembled that of a mentally handicapped child: you ask it what the time is, and it looks at the hands of the clock, and it tells you the minutes and seconds, but it never tells you what time it is.”

“Here we are,” said the taxi driver. “Isn’t this Othonos Street?”

The narrator got out on the side facing

Constitution Square, and crossed the street to the offices of Olympic Airways.

— 6-

The Captain, Suite: And End

“It was a harsh winter.”

“Which winter was that, Grandfather?”

“The one that marked the end of the first half of the century. It was very cold. Six below and even less.