Zorba the Greek

Nikos Kazantzakis

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781439144664
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Altertumswissenschaften

The classic novel, international sensation, and inspiration for the film starring Anthony Quinn explores the struggle between the aesthetic and the rational, the inner life and the life of the mind. The classic novel Zorba the Greek is the story of two men, their incredible friendship, and the importance of living life to the fullest. Zorba, a Greek working man, is a larger-than-life character, energetic and unpredictable. He accompanies the unnamed narrator to Crete to work in the narrator's lignite mine, and the pair develops a singular relationship. The two men couldn't be further apart: The narrator is cerebral, modest, and reserved; Zorba is unfettered, spirited, and beyond the reins of civility. Over the course of their journey, he becomes the narrator's greatest friend and inspiration and helps him to appreciate the joy of living. Zorba has been acclaimed as one of the most remarkable figures in literature; he is a character in the great tradition of Sinbad the Sailor, Falstaff, and Sancho Panza. He responds to all that life offers him with passion, whether he's supervising laborers at a mine, confronting mad monks in a mountain monastery, embellishing the tales of his past adventures, or making love. Zorba the Greek explores the beauty and pain of existence, inviting readers to reevaluate the most important aspects of their lives and live to the fullest.

I

I first met him in Piraeus. I had come down to the harbor to take the boat to Crete. It was almost daybreak—rain, strong southeast wind, sea spray reaching the small café, its glass doors shut, the air inside smelling of sage and human sweat. Cold outside; windows frosted over from exhalations. Five or six seamen, up all night in their brown goat-hair undershirts, were drinking coffee and sage tea as they gazed out at the sea through the misty windows.

The fish, dizzied by the rough sea’s punches, had taken refuge in the peaceful waters below and were awaiting the return of calm in the world above. Fishermen cramming the cafés were likewise awaiting the end of the godlike commotion so the fish, no longer afraid, might rise again to the water’s surface and begin to bite. Flounder, rock perch, and ray were returning from their nighttime raids in order to sleep. The sun was rising.

The double glass door opened. A short, leather-faced dockhand entered, hatless, shoeless, covered with mud.

“Hey, Kostandis,” called an old-timer, a sea dog in a blue pea jacket. “How goes it?”

Kostandis spat, exasperated.

“How goes it?” he replied. “Morning: café. Evening: home. Morning: café. Evening: home. That’s my life. Work: yuck!”

Some laughed; others shook their heads and swore.

“Our existence equals life imprisonment,” said a mustachioed sailor whose philosophical training derived from the Karaghiozis puppet theater. “Life imprisonment, goddamn it to hell!”

A sweet blue-green light suffused the filthy windowpanes. Entering the café, it draped itself over hands, noses, brows, jumped to the fireplace, ignited bottles. The electric lights lost their strength. The proprietor, languid after a sleepless night, reached out and switched them off.

A moment’s silence; every eye raised to observe the muddy daylight outside; audible growls from breaking waves; gurgles from several hookahs in the café.

Sighing, the aged sea dog shouted, “Bah, what’s happened to Captain Lemonis? May God lend a hand!” Viewing the sea fiercely, he bit his gray mustache and growled, “I spit on you! You separate wives from husbands!”

I was sitting in a corner, feeling cold. Fighting both the desire to fall asleep and an early morning sadness, I ordered another sage. I was looking out through the misty windows at the oxcarts and boatmen of the awakening harbor with its ships’ sirens howling away. As I continued to stare, my heart became entwined with a trawling net filled to completion with sea, rain, and emigration.

I had my eyes pinned on the black prow of a large steamship opposite, still submerged in night from the gunwales downward. It was raining. I could see rain threads joining sky and mud. As I watched this black ship, the shadows and the rain, my sorrow acquired a face little by little, memories arose: my beloved friend grew as solid as a composite of rain and yearning in the humid air. I had come down to this same harbor to bid him farewell. When? Last year, in another life, yesterday? Then, too, I remember, there was rain, cold, daybreak, and stormy weather swelling my heart.

To prolong one’s parting from a beloved friend is poison. To leave with a knife stroke is better, for it allows one to return to humanity’s natural climate: solitude. Yet on that rainy dawn I was unable to unglue myself from my friend (I learned why later, alas too late). I had boarded the ship with him. Sitting in his cabin among scattered valises while his attention was directed elsewhere, I observed him deliberately, persistently, as though wishing to tick off one by one his distinctive features: the bright blue-green eyes, the chubby, youthful face, the proud, refined expression, and, above all, the long-fingered, aristocratic hands. At one point he noticed my glance passing greedily, absorbingly, over him. Turning and displaying the bantering expression he acquired whenever he wished to hide his emotion, he looked at me out of the corner of his eye. He had understood. In order to divert the sadness of separation, he asked me, smiling ironically, “How much longer?”

“What do you mean, ‘How much longer?’ ”

“How much longer are you going to continue gnawing paper, smearing yourself with ink? Come with me. Thousands of our fellow Greeks are in danger out there in the Caucasus. Come with me so we can save them together.”

He laughed, as though wishing to ridicule his lofty aim.

“Of course we may not save them,” he added. “But we will save ourselves by attempting to save them. Isn’t that right? Didn’t you once preach that yourself, dear teacher? ‘The only way to save yourself is to fight to save others.’ Forward, therefore, O teacher who used to teach. Come!”

I did not answer. The holy, God-begetting East with its high mountains, Prometheus pinned to his rock, his outcry—our nationality—pinned now to those rocks, in danger, calling, a son calling once again to be saved; and I, disengaged, heard our nation’s suffering as though it were a dream and life were an enthralling dramatic tragedy during which it would be boorish and naive to rush onto the stage from my highest, cheapest balcony seat in order to intervene in the action!

My friend arose without waiting for an answer. The steamship was sounding its gong for the third time. He held out his hand:

“So long, paper gnawer!” he said tauntingly to hide his emotion.

He well knew how shameful it was to lose control of one’s heart. Weeping, tender words, messy gestures, working-class intimacies, these struck him as ugly, unworthy manifestations of true manhood. We who so greatly loved each other had never once exchanged a tender word. We played together and scratched each other like animals—he refined, ironic, civilized, I barbaric; he constrained, easily exhausting every expression of his soul thanks to a smile, I abrupt, bursting ineptly into uncouth laughter.

In my turn, I tried to camouflage my turmoil by expressing myself sternly. But I was ashamed to do this—no, not ashamed, unable. I squeezed his hand, holding it and not letting go. He looked at me, puzzled.

“Emotion?” he inquired, attempting to smile.

“Yes,” I calmly replied.

“Why? Didn’t we agree? Haven’t we agreed for years now? The Japanese you love, how do they say it? Fudōoshin. Equanimity; imperturbability; one’s features an unmoving, smiling mask. Whatever happens behind the mask is one’s own business.”

“Yes, we did agree,” I replied, attempting to avoid expatiating via some further remark, not being certain that I would be able to control my voice and prevent it from quivering.

The ship’s gong sounded, expelling visitors from the cabins. Rain was slowly falling. The air around us filled with fervent words of separation, vows, long-drawn-out kisses, instructions swiftly spoken by panting voices. Mothers clutched sons, wives husbands, friends friends as though separating forever, as though this minor parting reminded them of the major one. The exceptionally sweet sound of the gong suddenly echoed from prow to stern in the humid air like a church bell proclaiming a funeral.

My friend leaned over to me and said softly, “Listen. Do you have some foreboding?”

“Yes, I do,” I answered, replying positively once again.

“Do you believe in such fairy tales?”

“No,” I responded with certainty.

“Well, then?”

There was no “Well, then” since I did not believe. However, I feared.

My friend rested his left hand lightly upon my knee. Whenever we conversed together he was accustomed to do this at the most warmhearted moment when I was prodding him to make a certain decision and he was resisting but finally accepted, at which point he would touch my knee as though to say, “I’ll do what you want—from friendship.”

His eyelids fluttered two or three times. Then he gazed at me again. Realizing that I was extremely sad, he hesitated to employ our two best-loved weapons, laughter and mockery.

“Fine,” he said. “Give me your hand. If either of us finds himself in danger of dying—”

He stopped, as if ashamed. For years we had made a mockery of parapsychological flights, tossing vegetarians, spiritualists, theosophists, and ectoplasmatists into the same ditch.

“What then?” I asked in an effort to discover his meaning.

“Let’s consider it a game,” he said swiftly, in order to mollify the danger. “If either of us finds himself in danger of dying, let him think of the other with such intensity that he notifies him no matter where he happens to be. Do you agree?”

He tried to laugh but his lips seemed frozen and did not move.

“Yes, I agree,” I said.

My friend, fearing that his distress had been too evident, quickly added:

“I certainly do not believe in such flights of psychic communication.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I murmured. “Let’s—”

“Fine. Let’s play the game. Agreed?”

“Yes, agreed,” I repeated.

Those were our final words. With fingers eagerly joining, we clasped our hands in silence, then abruptly unclasped them. I left quickly without looking back, as though being pursued. I started to turn my head in order to see my friend one last time, but restrained myself. “Do not look back!” I told myself. “It is finished!”

The clay of the human soul is entirely unworked, unsculptured, its feelings still crude and boorish, unable to divine anything with clarity or certainty. If it had been able to divine, how utterly different this separation would have been.

* * *

Daylight was increasing. Since the two mornings were joining together, I was able to identify my friend’s beloved face more clearly now in the harbor’s ambience as he stood unmoving and sorrowful in the rain.

The café’s double glass doors opened, the sea roared, and in came a sailor with drooping mustache, his short legs spread wide. Happy voices rang out:

“Welcome to Captain Lemonis!”

Wedging myself into my corner, I attempted to concentrate my thoughts once more, but my friend’s face had already melted into the rain and disappeared.

Captain Lemonis had taken out his worry beads and was twirling them. He was peaceful, serious, taciturn. I kept struggling to see and hear nothing, as I tried to retain the vision that was disappearing, to relive the anger that had overcome me then—not the anger, the shame—when my friend called me a “paper gnawer.” He was right. How was it that I, who loved life so much, had been involved with paper and ink for so many years? My friend, on that day of separation, had helped me see clearly, and I was glad. Knowing the name of my ill fortune at long last, perhaps I could conquer it more easily, for that ill fortune finally seemed no longer diffuse, bodiless, impalpable. It had acquired a body, making it easy for me now to wrestle with it.

My friend’s cruel words had spread insidiously inside me. To have a wretched animal, a “gnawer,” on my coat of arms was something I detested, something I viewed with shame. Since he had spoken, I had been seeking to find some pretext for abandoning my papers and throwing myself into a life of action. I found the opportunity a month ago. Having rented an abandoned lignite mine in Crete on the shore of the Libyan Sea, I was going down to Crete now to live with simple people—workmen, peasants—far away from the gang of paper gnawers.

Preparing to leave, I had been extremely moved, as though this journey of mine harbored some extraordinary secret meaning. I had made an internal decision to follow a new road. “Until now, O my soul,” I told myself, “you have been fulfilled by viewing a shadow; now I am bringing you to raw meat.”

I was ready. Rummaging among my papers on the eve of departure, I discovered a half-completed manuscript that I picked up and leafed through hesitantly. For the past two years a seed of conflict, a great yearning, had resided deep within me. Buddha! I felt him inside my body continually eating, assimilating, becoming part of me. He was growing bigger, stomping, beginning to kick against my breast in order to emerge. I did not have the heart now to discard him. It was already too late for such an intellectual miscarriage.

As I held the manuscript in this way, undecided, my friend’s tenderly ironic smile suddenly signaled me ghostlike in the air. “I’ll take it!” I said, digging in my heels. “It does not frighten me. I’ll take it. Stop smiling!” I wrapped the pages carefully, as though enfolding a newborn child in its swaddling clothes, and took them along.

Captain Lemonis’s deep, hoarse voice could be heard. I pricked up my ears. He was talking about the goblins that had taken hold of the masts of his ship during the storm and were licking them.

“They’re soft and slimy; you catch them and your hands light up with fire. I rubbed my mustache then, and I glowed like the Devil the whole night long. Well, as you might imagine, the sea got into my ship, soaking my cargo of coal, which gained so much weight that the ship began to fall down on its knees. But God lent a hand and tossed his thunderbolt, breaking the cargo hatch, so out goes the coal, filling the sea. The ship loses weight; it’s on the mend; I’m saved. . . . Enough!”

I took out my fellow traveler, a pocket edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Lighting my pipe and leaning against the wall, I made myself comfortable. For a moment I weighed my choice. From which part should I extract the immortal verses—from the scorching tar of the Inferno, the pleasantly cool flame of Purgatory, or should I pounce straightaway onto the uppermost floor of human hope? The choice was mine. Holding my microscopic edition of Dante, I rejoiced in my freedom. The verses I chose now, in early morning, would control my entire day.

I leaned down to read the densest of all the visions in order to come to a decision. But I was too late. Suddenly ill at ease, I looked up. I don’t know how, but I felt that two holes were being opened in the top of my head. Turning abruptly, I looked behind me toward the double glass...