Zatouna,
July 29 1969
Today
is my birthday.
Now they oblige me to remain indoors all day. The only time
I am allowed out: from eleven to twelve in order to sign at
the police station. In the evening we sit, Myrto and myself,
on the balcony. Across the road, on her balcony Mrs Marigo is
busy with her knitting. On the right on her balcony Mrs Photini
is also knitting. These two old neighbours hate each other and
their quarrels started well before our arrival. We are the spectators
of their implacable hostility. We hear them calling their respective
chickens when they cross the demarcation line (invisible of
course) which divides their territory on the square.
Between them and us the guards. People take their walk on this
square and on the street which is a sort of "promenade,"
a quite limited area which may be found in all Greek towns and
where all the inhabitants meet each other in the late afternoon.
They look at us and greet us almost secretly. Taking all sorts
of precautions. Then the street becomes deserted once more.
-Sing us your song "Charis." Mr. Mikis, asks the younger
of our guards.
I satisfy their wish and then I come out again to explain:
-Charis is not dead. For we still need him. We who are here,
tied up in this house, besieged. You who are tied up in this
village, besieged. The Greeks who are tied up by military decrees,
besieged.
-We are all on the same boat, they tell me.
Before completing "The Survivor" I had started working
on two poems by Manolis Anagnostakis "Charis" and
"I speak." For so many years I had anticipated that
collaboration! But now the moment had come. I play my new composition
to a brigadier who was a newcomer. He is a rather aged man.
Music makes him speak in confidence, it soften him.
- I was tracking you everywhere to kill you during the Civil
War. And now I have to supervise you, not to let you out of
my eyes, even when you go to the toilet! Now that I know you
it upsets me to treat you like a mischievous beast.
I offer him a glass of wine. He is quite moved by the music
he hears. When I finish he takes me into his arms and says in
a loud voice not heeding the other guards:
- How did they dare shut you up in here, you that have touched
our hearts!
He went to the gendarmerie headquarters and asked to see his
superior and make a report.
- I was guarding Mikis, he said. He played the piano for me.
I cannot remain in this post any longer.
He was put under strict isolation for a month. He has a wife
and a child.
Non-commissioned officers, men of the gendarmerie come up to
me to listen to me playing and singing. I can see that they
are often moved. As for the inhabitants they send me messages:
"Leave your window open when you play. We sit in the garden
waiting for your music."
So I open my windows wide open and I sing "Charis."
© Mikis Theodorakis: Journals of Resistance
Poems by Anagnostakis | Comment
by Gail Holst | Biography of Anagnostakis
| O Epizon
(Arkadia VII) | Index