Report to Grego by Nikos Kazantzakis Page A

meat or fish. I waved the Holy Epistle menacingly and shouted, “Woe to you, woe to you!” whereupon the terror-stricken neighbors caressed me and implored me to be still. And one day when I questioned my mother and learned that I had nursed on Wednesdays and Fridays when I was an infant, and had therefore drunk milk on those holy days, I broke into wailing and lamentation.
    Selling all my toys to my friends, I purchased the lives of the saints in popular, pamphlet-sized editions. Each evening I sat on my little stool amid the basil and marigolds of our courtyard and read out loud all the various ordeals the saints had endured in order to save their souls. The neighbors congregated around me with their sewing or work—some knitted socks, others groundcoffee or cleaned mustard stalks. They listened, and little by little our courtyard began to ring with lamentations for the saints’ sufferings and torments. When the canary, suspended beneath the acacia, heard the reading and lamentations, it threw its head back drunkenly and began to warble. With its spices and the trellis overhead, the little garden—so sequestered, warm, and fragrant-seemed like an epitáphios surrounded by women’s keening: like Christ’s flower-canopied tomb. Passers-by hesitated and said to themselves, Someone has died in there. They went to my father to bring him the sad news, but he shook his head and told them, “It’s nothing. Just my son trying to convert the neighbors.”
    Distant seas unfolded in my childish imagination, boats cast off furtively, monasteries glittered amid rocky crags, lions carried water to the ascetics. My mind brimmed with date trees and camels, strumpets fought to enter the church, fiery chariots rose into the sky, the deserts warbled with women’s clogs and laughter, the Tempter came like a kindly Santa Claus and brought gifts of food, gold, and females to the eremites. But they had their eyes riveted on God, and the Tempter vanished.
    Be hard, be patient, scorn happiness, have no fear of death, look beyond this world to the supreme good: such was the insuppressible voice which rose from these popular editions and instructed my childish heart. And together with this came a vehement thirst for furtive departures and distant voyages, for wanderings filled with martyrdom.
    I read the saints’ legends, listened to fairy tales, overheard conversations, and inside me all this was transformed—deformed—into dazzling lies. Assembling my schoolmates or the children of the neighborhood, I passed these lies off as my own adventures. I told them I had just returned from the desert. I had a lion there, and I’d loaded two jugs on his back and we had gone together to the fountain to fetch water; or that outside our door the other day I had seen an angel who plucked out one of his plumes and gave it to me. I even had the plume in my hand ready to show them (we had killed a white rooster at home the other day and I had removed a long white feather). I said in addition that I planned to make the feather into a pen and write.
    â€œWrite? Write what?”
    â€œLives of the saints. My granddad’s life.”
    â€œWas your granddad a saint? Didn’t you tell us he fought the Turks?”
    â€œIsn’t that the same thing?” I answered, sharpening the tip of the feather with my clasp knife in order to make it into a pen.
    One day in school we read in our primer that a child fell down a well and found himself in a fabulous city with gilded churches, flowering orchards, and shops full of cakes, candies, and toy muskets. My mind caught fire. Running home, I tossed my satchel in the yard and threw myself upon the brim of the well so that I could fall inside and enter the fabulous city. My mother was sitting by the courtyard window combing my little sister’s hair. Catching sight of me, she uttered a cry, ran, and seized me by the smock just as I was kicking the ground