Report to Grego by Nikos Kazantzakis

thrust me into the yard, and bolt the door behind me.
    The sole fear I had not succeeded in conquering up to that point was the fear of earthquakes. Megalo Kastro often shook to its very foundations. A rumble sounded below in the world’s cellars, the earth’s crust creaked, and the poor people above went out of their minds. Whenever the wind subsided abruptly, not a leaf moved, and a hair-raising hush settled over everything, the inhabitants of Kastro rushed out of their homes or shops and glanced first at the sky, then at the ground. They did not say a word lest the evil hear and come, but to themselves they thought fearfully, There’s going to be an earthquake, and they made the sign of the cross.
    One day our teacher, old Paterópoulos, tried to set our minds atease. “There is nothing to an earthquake, really,” he explained. “Don’t be afraid of it. It’s just a bull beneath the ground. He bellows, butts the earth with his horns, and the ground shakes. The ancient Cretans called him the Minotaur. There’s really nothing to it at all.”
    But after being consoled in this way by our teacher, we found that our terror had increased all the more. The earthquake was a living thing in other words, a beast with horns; it bellowed and shook beneath our feet, and it ate people.
    â€œWhy doesn’t Saint Minas kill him?” asked chubby little Stratís, the sexton’s son.
    But the teacher became angry. “Don’t talk nonsense!” he shouted, whereupon he left his desk and twisted Stratis’s ear to make him keep quiet.
    One day, however, as I was racing through the Turkish quarter at top speed because the smell the Turks exuded disgusted me, the earth began to shake again, the windows and doors rattled, and I heard a great clatter, as though from collapsing houses. I stood petrified with fear in the middle of the narrow lane, my eyes riveted to the ground. I was waiting for it to crack and the bull to emerge and eat me, when suddenly a vaulted door swung open, revealing a garden, and out darted three young Turkish girls, barefooted and unkempt, their faces uncovered. Quaking with fear, they scattered in all directions, uttering shrill cries like swallows. The entire lane smelled of musk. Ever since that moment earthquakes began to display a different face for me, one which endured my entire life. It was no longer the fierce face of the bull. They stopped bellowing and began to chirp like birds. Earthquakes and the little Turks became one. This was the first time I saw a dark force merge with the light and become luminous.
    Many times in my life, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily, I placed an expedient mask over terrors in this same way—over love, over virtue, over illness. This is how I made life bearable.

8
SAINTS’ LEGENDS
    F REEDOM was my first great desire. The second, which remains hidden within me to this day, tormenting me, was the desire for sanctity. Hero together with saint: such is mankind’s supreme model. Even in my childhood I had fixed this model firmly above me in the azure sky.
    In those days everybody in Megalo Kastro had roots deeply sunk in both earth and heaven. That was why, after I had learned to read syllables and form words, the first thing I had my mother buy for me was a legend, the Holy Epistle . “God’s manifestation is a marvelous miracle! A stone fell out of heaven . . .” and this stone broke, and written inside was found: “Woe to him who uses oil or drinks wine on Wednesdays and Fridays!” Clutching the Holy Epistle and holding it high above me like a flag, I knocked on our neighbors’ doors each Wednesday and Friday—on Madame Penelope’s, Madame Victoria’s, on old lady Katerina Delivasilaina’s. Beside myself with fervor, I bounded into their houses, made a beeline for the kitchen, smelled what was being cooked, and alas the day I caught the scent of