Surname: VASSILIKOSFirst Name: VASSILIS
Categories : Novel / Short Story
Date of Birth: 1934
Place of Birth: Kavala
Education: 1. Law school, University of Thessaloniki (1952-56)
2. Drama School at Yale University and S.R.T. School of Radio Television, New York, 1959-1960
Career: Vassilikos is the most prolific Greek novelist of his time, amassing a volume of work over 100 books long. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Writer, since 1952, scenario writer, documentary film maker. He has been a journalist at two of the most prestigious daily newspapers of Athens since 1962. Deputy General Director of the Greek National Television (ERT) in charge of the Programme from 1981 to 1985. In 1994 he was elected Counsillor in the Community Council of the city of Athens, position he held for two years. Since 1994, he has been presenting in ERT the literary programme "Axion Esti", inspired by the Bernard Pivot's "Apostrophes", in the French T.V. Permanent Representative of Greece at UNESCO since September 1996.
Extra Activities: He has worded for the Pacifist Movement throughout his life. He has served as Vice President of the branch of that movement in Greece (1963-1967). He is member in several Non-governmental Organisations of his country who work for peace promotion, the Democracy and the Human Rights.
Foreign Languages: English, French and Italian
E-mail Address: newopera@otenet.gr
Works:
Writer of more than 94 books (novels, short stories, essays, poetry, theater, plays). Most of them translated into English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish e.t.c. His political novel "Z" which made him a world famous writer, was translated in 32 languages. This book which characterizes the Greek Political Life of the "Sixties" was made a film by Costas Gavras featuring Yves Montand and Jean Louis Trentignant, winning the jury prize at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. In 1962, his literary work was rewarded by gaining the literary prize called "The Twelve" (equivalent to the French "Prix Concours").
Vassilis Vassilikos “is a cosmopolitan master deserving of promotion to world fame” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
Portraits of Cabbies
WITH MY OWN title, "Portraits of Cabbies", I have selected from Thrassakis's Diary those passages in which he attempts to analyze the Greek mentality by comparing individuals of the same profession (in the case, taxi drivers) from several different regions of the country. This effort reflects his deep desire to cease being merely a Macedonian writer, like so-called Macedonian halva, and to become more pan-Hellenic in his approach. "Since all Greeks read my work", he writes in a letter, "I should be writing about all Greeks".
READ AN EXCERPT: Portraits of Cabbies
1
THE FIRST in the series of cabbies is a Vlach from Thessaly who married a woman from Corfu and settled down there, since, our writer observes, a wife often comes with a house (from her dowry) – and as everyone knows, everything begins with the acquisition of a permanent place of residence. It's Sunday and the banks are closed, so, after haggling over the price of the ride in Italian lira (in Glafkos's day, western countries, dispensing with the old border disputes, have replaced them with international monetary crises that bring about reciprocal deprecations of currency), Glafkos and Glafka finally get into the taxi to begin their pilgrimage-drive. It is morning of their return; they've just gotten off the ferry from Brindisi, and the sun hasn't yet risen above the square with its combed trees and freshly-washed stones. Though it is early morning, their driver orders a cognac from the coffee shop on the square, which startles and worries the couple, since he'll be driving in the mountains on curves where the trees have rooted in the asphalt. But they say nothing. For them the moment has a special charm: everyone is still asleep, the shop is almost empty, just a few old regulars and a waiter watering the potted plants with a hose. Glafkos and Glafka look at one another, unsure whether or not they are still living in a dream. Ordering a coffee, in Greek, Glafkos feels a shudder pass through his lips, as in his school days whenever he got the best grade in his class on a foreign language exam. The driver is drinking his second cognac. In the village where they stop later, he'll drink yet another ouzo, so as not to displace the people who own the shop. But he seems to be a stable driver. Mild honks, gentle curves. Apparently the alcohol doesn't have much of an effect on him. This heavy-headed man, a Thessalian of the plain through and through, is unable to get drunk off the island's beauty. Born in the blind, stupid plain, he has to drink first before heading up into the mountains. In order to come out of his shell, to tolerate himself in his skin, he needs to be pushed from the inside. Thrassakis, on the other hand, is all smell (the earth after yesterday's rain) and sight (the kerchiefed old women, the goats, the sheep, the jagged hill), uplifted by these external stimulation's. At some point in the journey the driver starts complaining about the price of gas. "Last year it was seven drachmas a liter", he says, "now it's seventeen. Whatever money I make I throw right back into taxi, just to keep it running. And the taxi stand closes in the winter", he continues. "Here on the island we take what we get working three months a year, during the summer. But this year, what with the business in Cyprus, and the other, there was hardly any traffic at all. Not a soul set foot on Corfu".
This description of the dead summer should be compared to the sixth portrait, in which the cab driver likens the square in Navplio to a graveyard. But the most important element in the narration, as the informed reader will understand, is the reference to the "other", which is how the cabby refers to the "cholera" epidemic, the seven years of shame. It has neither name nor gender – it is entirely neuter. At this mention of the junta, Glafkos and Glafka glance doubtfully at one another. (Later, with the experience he has gained, Glafkos will tell us that he would never have opened up to thew cabby. But at that point, not knowing, he took a chance). "The junta", he says, "is the reason we stayed away for so many years". The cab driver accepts this pronouncement calmly, his face devoid of expression, lighting a cigarette and offering them the pack. "No thanks, I don't smoke". Throughout the remainder of the portrait, as the day proceeds, the cabby's form grows darker. When they stop for lunch he orders spaghetti and drinks two beers, one after the other. Thrassakis, in his bathing suit, pushes his chair back to escape the sound of the cabby chewing, and is hit hard on the back by a young kid carrying a crate of fruit to the kitchen. The nudge of the homeland, he says to himself. In returning, I take up valuable space. I block the passage of others. Then, at the journey's end, he hears the braying of a donkey, turned him, and accepts it as a welcome into the small, bitter love of his homeland.
2
LEAVING IGOUMENITSA, they chose not the best cab but the youngest driver, a kid who honked at everyone on the road to Ioannina. Of course there weren't many cars, but he still seemed like lord of the place and the people. He was a carefree, light-hearted guy, though already washed in the slight melancholy that belongs not just to Epiros but to all of continental Greece. He had no tapes in his car, just the radio. They took a girl along with them to Ioannina who looked like anything but the cousin he said she was; she slept in the front seat, waking on the wild mountain to say she had been dreaming of lightning. But it wasn't a dream, it really was lightening – a bolt hit the wires that hung in the air before them, throwing out sparks like fireworks that never go out. After Zalogo and Laka Souli they descended, while the storm stayed up on the mountain, like a scarf around a wild man's throat. They stopped at a spring. "It has the best water in this region", the cab driver told them. "People come all the way from Igoumenitsa and carry it back in buckets". There was a cafe next to the spring. An old woman was mopping the patio with chlorine. The cabby, always cheerful, always in high spirits, pointed out the camouflaged army tents set up in the surrounding mountains. He himself had gotten away without being enlisted because the army didn't have enough uniforms to clothe the new recruits. Glafka bought feta from the old woman. "It's from the Dodoni factory in Ioannina", the old woman told here. There were hens in the yard, pecking at innards and corn.
3
THEY GOT TO know the third cabby better, if only because the drive was longer – from Ioannina to Athens. They saw him unloading clothes from a washing machine and close him because his cab was sparklingly new. He was also their only life-long driver up to now. A veteran truck driver, he had "put a cab on the market", as he put it, at a time when in hindsight it would have been wiser to stick to trucks, since the gas prices skyrocketed immediately afterwards. To Glafka's question as to why all the taxi drivers in the city's main square were over fifty, he answered that none of them were lifers at the job. Most of them had gone as young men to work in Germany, and had come back with a bit of money in their pockets, and instead of opening a store or a cafe preferred to sink their capital in a cab. Now the profession was bottlenecked. They were even given specific numbers. (One exasperating thing in the "Portraits" is the customer's right to choose his taxi, as he had once chosen horses at the track. But unemployment, you see… So if the square resembles a graveyard, as the cabby from Navplio says, Thrassakis is a ghost who has returned to a place suffering from apparent death). But hadn't the junta opened up the profession, to send in its spies? No. At least not out here in the country. Of course you had to grease palms here, too, to get a permit. At first the cabby's political stance is hard to gauge. Neither with one side nor with the other. Sure, for the political exiles to return to their villages from the eastern-block countries, "all it takes is for people to need them in the fields". "But haven't they been forgiven by now, thirty years after the civil war?" "How should I know what's going on? Blood is blood. If I were a little kid when so-and-so killed my father, how would I look at him now if he were to come back to the village?" Glafka is sitting in front, the curves make her dizzy. "And our once-strong warrior?" "If he'd been in the 1969 elections, he would've won by a landslide. But as they say, whoever dips his finger in the honey wants to eat the whole dessert". The tape of Epirot songs keeps playing, again and again. He has other tapes, stored in a case, but his passengers always like this one best. Like the previous cabby, he too honks at the traffic cops he knows on the road. He seems to know everyone in Arta, Amfilohia, and Antirrio. But in the capital, he loses it. The roads, the noise, the bright lights and the honking make his head spins. All he wants is to unload them, quite literally, an hour early so he can head back up to his beautiful city on the lake, with its Ioanninian silver and the legendary Mrs. Frosini.
4
THE CABS in the capital look awful. Thrassakis compares them to the ones the Americans abandoned in Cuba when they were kicked out. The companies that made them have since gone under, so they have no spare parts, and sink with time into the gutters of the roads. Headed for Tripoli, they end up in one such cab. The care and kindness of its driver, a young blond kid from Navpakto, aren't enough to make up for the brakes, which sound like the creaky pedal on some ancient piano. After Argos, in the steep mountains, though the moon's light erases the shadows from their cheeks, the air-brushing of this nighttime snapshot can't erase their fears that the taxi might tumble over a cliff as they veer around some curve. And the driver's enormous hands, his words of comfort – "Don't worry, we'll get where we need to go, the worst is behind us" – seem like a camel driver's consolations in the middle of a desert.
5
ONCE AGAIN, the square in Tripoli with its gray taxis. The better the car, the less attention they pay to its driver. The more the engine and schocks and tires protest, the louder, the more emphatic the conversation grows about how horribly the world is going, while what's really going horribly is that particular taxi. And so the driver from Tripoli to Sparta passes unobserved, like a tiny figure in a enormous fresco, while the Spartan's humanism becomes almost emblematic as he embraces our strangers and takes them wherever they want to go. He too has nice tapes. He's blond, an agreeable guy. In Githeo he turns them over to a man from Mani who will take them the rest of the way. This Maniat seems like the best driver of all, because the road, from Githeo to Gerolimena, is all highway. In his Diary, Thrassakis often returns to this trip. It stands out in the "Portraits" for the manner in which the driver himself becomes part of the landscape, as he holds steadily to the wheel, guiding his passengers through legendary Mani.
6
THE CABBY from Navplio, whom I've already mentioned twice, is distinguished by the following characteristic: he refuses to drop his fares, though all the empty taxis lined up in the square make his insistence seem unreasonable. Work might be scarce, he says, but he isn't going to drop his fares when a new road that passes behind the ancient site of Epidavros – a road, as Glafka comments, which resembles the dictatorship that built it in the manner in which it avoids real life, bypassing villages, looking only on pine trees and rocks – looking, in short, on an inhuman landscape, whitewashed and idyllic, as the dictators wanted Greece to be, without Greeks, populated only by ancient ruins and ladders of light dancing the sirtaki to chords from an electric bouzouki. Yes, something like that. The cab driver, guessing that they belong to the "other side", puts in a tape of Theodorakis. The driver is from Peristeri, outside of Athens, and before heading into the city center, they stop to see his sister and his brother-in-law, who has a truck and carries tomatoes to the farmers' markets from Kopaida. When they pay him in dollars, expecting him to be glad, he pulls a scornful face and says, "What if I can't change them?" (Note: Due to "Dillinger", anti-American sentiment in Greece had reached its peak).
7
A CRETAN, transplanted into Old Greece, is a lost glory when the north wind is blowing. Such a man is the driver who takes him from Athens to Lamia, after calling to tell his wife not expect him home that afternoon. "As soon as they heard I was going up to Lamia, my little girls told me, ‘Dad, bring us back some kourabiedes’". A family man, there's no need to tell him not to speed. In Bogiati, where he stops to get gas, he points to the army base across the way and said, "This is where all the torment took place". "Torment", he says, not "torture". Exiting Highway I, passing through the second toll, he drops Glafkos off at People's Square in Lamia, where Glafkos rests in the shade of the ancient plane trees, once again, after so many years.
8
THE LAST CABBY is the one who takes him from Lamia to the brother, by way of Katerini. A cheerful guy, down-to-earth, with a heavy accent – in short, an old-time cabby. His father is also a cabby and he himself has been on the job for fifteen years. A cab, he declares as he closes the window between the front and back seats to create atmosphere, needs three things. "Tires, upkeep, and heart". He stresses the last. "Without heart even the best cab won't run". He and his father used to have two cabs. Then they sold one, and now only this one is left. He tells stories about last month's mobilization. They took his cab too, of course. "One of the officers says, ‘I'll be driving this’. ‘Over my dead body you will’, I tell him. For a pro to drive it, sure. They even pulled down the telephone poles in Thessaly, so airplanes could land in the plain". He breaks into laughter. When the cabby went to report for duty, they found him in no kind of condition. So they gave him a truck to drive, filled to the brim with ammunition. "But the truck'll break down, it can't carry this kind of load. "How was he to know – and here he bursts again into laughter – that the boxes were empty…
Glafkos notices fires in the field. They are preparing the ground for the second planting.
?
AS A GENERAL observation on the "Physiognomies", we might note that all the cabbies turn up the volume on the radio as soon as the news comes on. The cabbies who work out in the country are in contact with the people, the tractors and horses, while the city cabbies might honk at another cabby or two at the most. And from North to South, West to East, their concerns are the same: the skyrocketing price of gas, and the fear of another mobilization.
Thrassaki's dealings with taxis constitute an important element in his intellectual makeup. He is the kind of intellectual whose contact with the common element comes solely in the form of conversation with whatever cabby might be driving him from his house to some theater or demonstration – where, in his capacity as an intellectual, he will address the masses, finding himself once more behind footlights that distance and isolate him from the people. And, respecting the unwritten obligations of the ride, a cab driver usually feels obliged to answer whatever questions his customer might ask.
Such was the situation upon Glafko's return to Greece, flushed with the agent's money. He took cabs not only within Athens but between cities, paying the double fare for long distances, which, compared to the single fares he was used to paying abroad, still seemed like next to nothing. In Germany the meter starred at two-and-a-half marks, while in Greece it was eight and a half drachmas, a third as much. Besides, unemployment was so bad during the summer of his return that the drivers, most of them family men, dropped their prices for long distances. Would it have been cheaper to rent a car and driver? (Glafkos himself, we should note, either didn't know how to drive or was scared to). Perhaps. If he preferred the taxi, it was because: 1. He could replace it with another at any point along the way; and 2. A cab driver comes into contact with every level of society, from wage earners on their way to the bouzouki joints to whores, thieves, spies. And since Thrassakis's only contact with the lower class came through his dealings with cabbies, he preferred them over some hired driver whose only customers would be people like Thrassakis himself.
The collecting of life from the back seat of a cab; communication with the driver through a window big enough to frame only his eyes; the paid relationship that furnishes him with information; the fleetingness of contact – all this is completely consistent with what Thrassakis notes in "Lazarus's Return": "My frame of mind is like that of the Italian actor who lends his voice to Marlon Brando's face for the dubbing of American movies into Italian". This confession, though awkwardly phrased, constitutes one of my hero's rare moments of sincerity. Indeed, in every country that dubs foreign films into its own language (and Italy is the country par excellence of this practice), an actor is chosen from among tens of potentials, with the help of machines that test for compatibility with the voice being dubbed. How must this man feel, speaking from under the mask of another man's face? For this voice-actor, the alienation inherent to the representational arts must take on dreadful dimensions. And Thrassakis, eavesdropping on life, peeping through the closed windows of the everyday, identifies with this man who lends his voice to another, just as he accepts the voice of a life foreign to him, filtered through the impressions of another, of the man in the driver's seat.
Oh, what weather. what weather!
All rain, all longing.
I'll find a voice with which to shout and speak
of the fading of my bitterness.
As I waited through the years
for the sun to shine,
I never noticed the well
they were digging beside me.
And when I finally yelled, "Drawn,
radiant dawn, end of martyrdom",
I stepped forward, blind,
and slipped and fell.
Lying here in the suspicious whiteness
of lime,
I now look back and wonder,
How could I not have noticed?
The neighbor's kids are grown,
the neighbor inched
into places that once were mine,
and heartlessly they shut me out.
Oh, what weather, what weather!
All rain, all longing.
Career: Vassilikos is the most prolific Greek novelist of his time, amassing a volume of work over 100 books long. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Writer, since 1952, scenario writer, documentary film maker. He has been a journalist at two of the most prestigious daily newspapers of Athens since 1962. Deputy General Director of the Greek National Television (ERT) in charge of the Programme from 1981 to 1985. In 1994 he was elected Counsillor in the Community Council of the city of Athens, position he held for two years. Since 1994, he has been presenting in ERT the literary programme "Axion Esti", inspired by the Bernard Pivot's "Apostrophes", in the French T.V. Permanent Representative of Greece at UNESCO since September 1996.
Extra Activities: He has worded for the Pacifist Movement throughout his life. He has served as Vice President of the branch of that movement in Greece (1963-1967). He is member in several Non-governmental Organisations of his country who work for peace promotion, the Democracy and the Human Rights.
Foreign Languages: English, French and Italian
E-mail Address: newopera@otenet.gr
Works:
Writer of more than 94 books (novels, short stories, essays, poetry, theater, plays). Most of them translated into English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish e.t.c. His political novel "Z" which made him a world famous writer, was translated in 32 languages. This book which characterizes the Greek Political Life of the "Sixties" was made a film by Costas Gavras featuring Yves Montand and Jean Louis Trentignant, winning the jury prize at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. In 1962, his literary work was rewarded by gaining the literary prize called "The Twelve" (equivalent to the French "Prix Concours").
Vassilis Vassilikos “is a cosmopolitan master deserving of promotion to world fame” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
Portraits of Cabbies
WITH MY OWN title, "Portraits of Cabbies", I have selected from Thrassakis's Diary those passages in which he attempts to analyze the Greek mentality by comparing individuals of the same profession (in the case, taxi drivers) from several different regions of the country. This effort reflects his deep desire to cease being merely a Macedonian writer, like so-called Macedonian halva, and to become more pan-Hellenic in his approach. "Since all Greeks read my work", he writes in a letter, "I should be writing about all Greeks".
READ AN EXCERPT: Portraits of Cabbies
1
THE FIRST in the series of cabbies is a Vlach from Thessaly who married a woman from Corfu and settled down there, since, our writer observes, a wife often comes with a house (from her dowry) – and as everyone knows, everything begins with the acquisition of a permanent place of residence. It's Sunday and the banks are closed, so, after haggling over the price of the ride in Italian lira (in Glafkos's day, western countries, dispensing with the old border disputes, have replaced them with international monetary crises that bring about reciprocal deprecations of currency), Glafkos and Glafka finally get into the taxi to begin their pilgrimage-drive. It is morning of their return; they've just gotten off the ferry from Brindisi, and the sun hasn't yet risen above the square with its combed trees and freshly-washed stones. Though it is early morning, their driver orders a cognac from the coffee shop on the square, which startles and worries the couple, since he'll be driving in the mountains on curves where the trees have rooted in the asphalt. But they say nothing. For them the moment has a special charm: everyone is still asleep, the shop is almost empty, just a few old regulars and a waiter watering the potted plants with a hose. Glafkos and Glafka look at one another, unsure whether or not they are still living in a dream. Ordering a coffee, in Greek, Glafkos feels a shudder pass through his lips, as in his school days whenever he got the best grade in his class on a foreign language exam. The driver is drinking his second cognac. In the village where they stop later, he'll drink yet another ouzo, so as not to displace the people who own the shop. But he seems to be a stable driver. Mild honks, gentle curves. Apparently the alcohol doesn't have much of an effect on him. This heavy-headed man, a Thessalian of the plain through and through, is unable to get drunk off the island's beauty. Born in the blind, stupid plain, he has to drink first before heading up into the mountains. In order to come out of his shell, to tolerate himself in his skin, he needs to be pushed from the inside. Thrassakis, on the other hand, is all smell (the earth after yesterday's rain) and sight (the kerchiefed old women, the goats, the sheep, the jagged hill), uplifted by these external stimulation's. At some point in the journey the driver starts complaining about the price of gas. "Last year it was seven drachmas a liter", he says, "now it's seventeen. Whatever money I make I throw right back into taxi, just to keep it running. And the taxi stand closes in the winter", he continues. "Here on the island we take what we get working three months a year, during the summer. But this year, what with the business in Cyprus, and the other, there was hardly any traffic at all. Not a soul set foot on Corfu".
This description of the dead summer should be compared to the sixth portrait, in which the cab driver likens the square in Navplio to a graveyard. But the most important element in the narration, as the informed reader will understand, is the reference to the "other", which is how the cabby refers to the "cholera" epidemic, the seven years of shame. It has neither name nor gender – it is entirely neuter. At this mention of the junta, Glafkos and Glafka glance doubtfully at one another. (Later, with the experience he has gained, Glafkos will tell us that he would never have opened up to thew cabby. But at that point, not knowing, he took a chance). "The junta", he says, "is the reason we stayed away for so many years". The cab driver accepts this pronouncement calmly, his face devoid of expression, lighting a cigarette and offering them the pack. "No thanks, I don't smoke". Throughout the remainder of the portrait, as the day proceeds, the cabby's form grows darker. When they stop for lunch he orders spaghetti and drinks two beers, one after the other. Thrassakis, in his bathing suit, pushes his chair back to escape the sound of the cabby chewing, and is hit hard on the back by a young kid carrying a crate of fruit to the kitchen. The nudge of the homeland, he says to himself. In returning, I take up valuable space. I block the passage of others. Then, at the journey's end, he hears the braying of a donkey, turned him, and accepts it as a welcome into the small, bitter love of his homeland.
2
LEAVING IGOUMENITSA, they chose not the best cab but the youngest driver, a kid who honked at everyone on the road to Ioannina. Of course there weren't many cars, but he still seemed like lord of the place and the people. He was a carefree, light-hearted guy, though already washed in the slight melancholy that belongs not just to Epiros but to all of continental Greece. He had no tapes in his car, just the radio. They took a girl along with them to Ioannina who looked like anything but the cousin he said she was; she slept in the front seat, waking on the wild mountain to say she had been dreaming of lightning. But it wasn't a dream, it really was lightening – a bolt hit the wires that hung in the air before them, throwing out sparks like fireworks that never go out. After Zalogo and Laka Souli they descended, while the storm stayed up on the mountain, like a scarf around a wild man's throat. They stopped at a spring. "It has the best water in this region", the cab driver told them. "People come all the way from Igoumenitsa and carry it back in buckets". There was a cafe next to the spring. An old woman was mopping the patio with chlorine. The cabby, always cheerful, always in high spirits, pointed out the camouflaged army tents set up in the surrounding mountains. He himself had gotten away without being enlisted because the army didn't have enough uniforms to clothe the new recruits. Glafka bought feta from the old woman. "It's from the Dodoni factory in Ioannina", the old woman told here. There were hens in the yard, pecking at innards and corn.
3
THEY GOT TO know the third cabby better, if only because the drive was longer – from Ioannina to Athens. They saw him unloading clothes from a washing machine and close him because his cab was sparklingly new. He was also their only life-long driver up to now. A veteran truck driver, he had "put a cab on the market", as he put it, at a time when in hindsight it would have been wiser to stick to trucks, since the gas prices skyrocketed immediately afterwards. To Glafka's question as to why all the taxi drivers in the city's main square were over fifty, he answered that none of them were lifers at the job. Most of them had gone as young men to work in Germany, and had come back with a bit of money in their pockets, and instead of opening a store or a cafe preferred to sink their capital in a cab. Now the profession was bottlenecked. They were even given specific numbers. (One exasperating thing in the "Portraits" is the customer's right to choose his taxi, as he had once chosen horses at the track. But unemployment, you see… So if the square resembles a graveyard, as the cabby from Navplio says, Thrassakis is a ghost who has returned to a place suffering from apparent death). But hadn't the junta opened up the profession, to send in its spies? No. At least not out here in the country. Of course you had to grease palms here, too, to get a permit. At first the cabby's political stance is hard to gauge. Neither with one side nor with the other. Sure, for the political exiles to return to their villages from the eastern-block countries, "all it takes is for people to need them in the fields". "But haven't they been forgiven by now, thirty years after the civil war?" "How should I know what's going on? Blood is blood. If I were a little kid when so-and-so killed my father, how would I look at him now if he were to come back to the village?" Glafka is sitting in front, the curves make her dizzy. "And our once-strong warrior?" "If he'd been in the 1969 elections, he would've won by a landslide. But as they say, whoever dips his finger in the honey wants to eat the whole dessert". The tape of Epirot songs keeps playing, again and again. He has other tapes, stored in a case, but his passengers always like this one best. Like the previous cabby, he too honks at the traffic cops he knows on the road. He seems to know everyone in Arta, Amfilohia, and Antirrio. But in the capital, he loses it. The roads, the noise, the bright lights and the honking make his head spins. All he wants is to unload them, quite literally, an hour early so he can head back up to his beautiful city on the lake, with its Ioanninian silver and the legendary Mrs. Frosini.
4
THE CABS in the capital look awful. Thrassakis compares them to the ones the Americans abandoned in Cuba when they were kicked out. The companies that made them have since gone under, so they have no spare parts, and sink with time into the gutters of the roads. Headed for Tripoli, they end up in one such cab. The care and kindness of its driver, a young blond kid from Navpakto, aren't enough to make up for the brakes, which sound like the creaky pedal on some ancient piano. After Argos, in the steep mountains, though the moon's light erases the shadows from their cheeks, the air-brushing of this nighttime snapshot can't erase their fears that the taxi might tumble over a cliff as they veer around some curve. And the driver's enormous hands, his words of comfort – "Don't worry, we'll get where we need to go, the worst is behind us" – seem like a camel driver's consolations in the middle of a desert.
5
ONCE AGAIN, the square in Tripoli with its gray taxis. The better the car, the less attention they pay to its driver. The more the engine and schocks and tires protest, the louder, the more emphatic the conversation grows about how horribly the world is going, while what's really going horribly is that particular taxi. And so the driver from Tripoli to Sparta passes unobserved, like a tiny figure in a enormous fresco, while the Spartan's humanism becomes almost emblematic as he embraces our strangers and takes them wherever they want to go. He too has nice tapes. He's blond, an agreeable guy. In Githeo he turns them over to a man from Mani who will take them the rest of the way. This Maniat seems like the best driver of all, because the road, from Githeo to Gerolimena, is all highway. In his Diary, Thrassakis often returns to this trip. It stands out in the "Portraits" for the manner in which the driver himself becomes part of the landscape, as he holds steadily to the wheel, guiding his passengers through legendary Mani.
6
THE CABBY from Navplio, whom I've already mentioned twice, is distinguished by the following characteristic: he refuses to drop his fares, though all the empty taxis lined up in the square make his insistence seem unreasonable. Work might be scarce, he says, but he isn't going to drop his fares when a new road that passes behind the ancient site of Epidavros – a road, as Glafka comments, which resembles the dictatorship that built it in the manner in which it avoids real life, bypassing villages, looking only on pine trees and rocks – looking, in short, on an inhuman landscape, whitewashed and idyllic, as the dictators wanted Greece to be, without Greeks, populated only by ancient ruins and ladders of light dancing the sirtaki to chords from an electric bouzouki. Yes, something like that. The cab driver, guessing that they belong to the "other side", puts in a tape of Theodorakis. The driver is from Peristeri, outside of Athens, and before heading into the city center, they stop to see his sister and his brother-in-law, who has a truck and carries tomatoes to the farmers' markets from Kopaida. When they pay him in dollars, expecting him to be glad, he pulls a scornful face and says, "What if I can't change them?" (Note: Due to "Dillinger", anti-American sentiment in Greece had reached its peak).
7
A CRETAN, transplanted into Old Greece, is a lost glory when the north wind is blowing. Such a man is the driver who takes him from Athens to Lamia, after calling to tell his wife not expect him home that afternoon. "As soon as they heard I was going up to Lamia, my little girls told me, ‘Dad, bring us back some kourabiedes’". A family man, there's no need to tell him not to speed. In Bogiati, where he stops to get gas, he points to the army base across the way and said, "This is where all the torment took place". "Torment", he says, not "torture". Exiting Highway I, passing through the second toll, he drops Glafkos off at People's Square in Lamia, where Glafkos rests in the shade of the ancient plane trees, once again, after so many years.
8
THE LAST CABBY is the one who takes him from Lamia to the brother, by way of Katerini. A cheerful guy, down-to-earth, with a heavy accent – in short, an old-time cabby. His father is also a cabby and he himself has been on the job for fifteen years. A cab, he declares as he closes the window between the front and back seats to create atmosphere, needs three things. "Tires, upkeep, and heart". He stresses the last. "Without heart even the best cab won't run". He and his father used to have two cabs. Then they sold one, and now only this one is left. He tells stories about last month's mobilization. They took his cab too, of course. "One of the officers says, ‘I'll be driving this’. ‘Over my dead body you will’, I tell him. For a pro to drive it, sure. They even pulled down the telephone poles in Thessaly, so airplanes could land in the plain". He breaks into laughter. When the cabby went to report for duty, they found him in no kind of condition. So they gave him a truck to drive, filled to the brim with ammunition. "But the truck'll break down, it can't carry this kind of load. "How was he to know – and here he bursts again into laughter – that the boxes were empty…
Glafkos notices fires in the field. They are preparing the ground for the second planting.
?
AS A GENERAL observation on the "Physiognomies", we might note that all the cabbies turn up the volume on the radio as soon as the news comes on. The cabbies who work out in the country are in contact with the people, the tractors and horses, while the city cabbies might honk at another cabby or two at the most. And from North to South, West to East, their concerns are the same: the skyrocketing price of gas, and the fear of another mobilization.
Thrassaki's dealings with taxis constitute an important element in his intellectual makeup. He is the kind of intellectual whose contact with the common element comes solely in the form of conversation with whatever cabby might be driving him from his house to some theater or demonstration – where, in his capacity as an intellectual, he will address the masses, finding himself once more behind footlights that distance and isolate him from the people. And, respecting the unwritten obligations of the ride, a cab driver usually feels obliged to answer whatever questions his customer might ask.
Such was the situation upon Glafko's return to Greece, flushed with the agent's money. He took cabs not only within Athens but between cities, paying the double fare for long distances, which, compared to the single fares he was used to paying abroad, still seemed like next to nothing. In Germany the meter starred at two-and-a-half marks, while in Greece it was eight and a half drachmas, a third as much. Besides, unemployment was so bad during the summer of his return that the drivers, most of them family men, dropped their prices for long distances. Would it have been cheaper to rent a car and driver? (Glafkos himself, we should note, either didn't know how to drive or was scared to). Perhaps. If he preferred the taxi, it was because: 1. He could replace it with another at any point along the way; and 2. A cab driver comes into contact with every level of society, from wage earners on their way to the bouzouki joints to whores, thieves, spies. And since Thrassakis's only contact with the lower class came through his dealings with cabbies, he preferred them over some hired driver whose only customers would be people like Thrassakis himself.
The collecting of life from the back seat of a cab; communication with the driver through a window big enough to frame only his eyes; the paid relationship that furnishes him with information; the fleetingness of contact – all this is completely consistent with what Thrassakis notes in "Lazarus's Return": "My frame of mind is like that of the Italian actor who lends his voice to Marlon Brando's face for the dubbing of American movies into Italian". This confession, though awkwardly phrased, constitutes one of my hero's rare moments of sincerity. Indeed, in every country that dubs foreign films into its own language (and Italy is the country par excellence of this practice), an actor is chosen from among tens of potentials, with the help of machines that test for compatibility with the voice being dubbed. How must this man feel, speaking from under the mask of another man's face? For this voice-actor, the alienation inherent to the representational arts must take on dreadful dimensions. And Thrassakis, eavesdropping on life, peeping through the closed windows of the everyday, identifies with this man who lends his voice to another, just as he accepts the voice of a life foreign to him, filtered through the impressions of another, of the man in the driver's seat.
Oh, what weather. what weather!
All rain, all longing.
I'll find a voice with which to shout and speak
of the fading of my bitterness.
As I waited through the years
for the sun to shine,
I never noticed the well
they were digging beside me.
And when I finally yelled, "Drawn,
radiant dawn, end of martyrdom",
I stepped forward, blind,
and slipped and fell.
Lying here in the suspicious whiteness
of lime,
I now look back and wonder,
How could I not have noticed?
The neighbor's kids are grown,
the neighbor inched
into places that once were mine,
and heartlessly they shut me out.
Oh, what weather, what weather!
All rain, all longing.