Dimitris E. Soldatos
The Vine Lazarus
Translation: Miltiadis Oikonomou Copy editing: Eleni Maniati
The Vine Lazarus
There is a resurrection only where there are graves Friedrich Nietzsche
ext to my family’s home in the village – where today’s “Silenus Bill’s Bar” stands – there was in the past an olive oil press. The odour of the fresh pressed oil filled up our nostrils. Every dawn the olive oil workers buzzed like the bees getting ready for the day’s pressing. The tractors, full of sacks with olives, were moaning as they were taking the uphill winding road. Mountain the olive kernels. The oil filters stretched on the thorny wire fence looked like newly slaughtered animal skins still steaming. And we, the children of the neighbourhood, were roaming around until someone called us to look at the grinding mill stones and offer us bread roasted on fire, smeared with fresh hot oil. When I get old, I told myself that I will become an olive oil refinery owner. I will be drinking “Ouzo 12” and smoke “Karelia” cigarettes. Before I came of age the olive oil refinery closed. The village above us was deserted. So the public school was transferred to the abandoned olive oil refinery, half of it transformed into a teaching place, half of it remaining locked with its boilers squeezed among the big mill stones. Sometimes, during the lesson, we could hear the noise of the mice from the other half of the building. Gradually, our village also lost its population. People migrated to the big cities in search of work. The school closed. It was moved to the next village. And the old olive oil refinery was rented by a sixty year old English woman of medium stature, blond short hair and with an air of a phlegmatic lady. No one knew a thing about her. Only that her name was Joy, a name that the peasants took it as meaning “life” in greek. She didn’t have a car. Her friends were coming to take her with their own cars, bringing her back at dawn. She was a party freak. There were a lot of rumours about her. They said that money was running down from her pockets, but she got bored there and finally chose our place to spend the last years of her life, leaving back the luxuriousness and mists of England, while making a new start under the bright sun of Greece. As time went by, Joy started changing behaviour. Her friends became less and less. If she chose to go somewhere she took a taxi or went on foot. She befriended the peasant women, learned the local dialect they used. She memorized by heart the verbal expressions of Lefkas, which she reproduced them by using an old aged pronunciation and a childish charm. The simple-minded women of the village were now her real friends. They woke up at dawn, took in their hands the leaven and baked bread in the wooden oven. They were showing her how to prepare Lefkas recipes and she absorbed all of the information needed. She roamed the neighbourhood with the goods she had prepared offering samplings in order to find out if she had passed the cooking exams.
One day she made the biggest announcement: “Don’t call me again Joy! She’s dead that one… Now I am resurrected and people call me Zoi (“life” in greek). The Englishwoman you knew is gone! I am a villager now. I know well your language, I know how to listen to your heart, I get furious like you, old Joy is gone, God show her mercy! Then she grabbed the glass of ouzo, drank it at one gulp, and then said: “Cheers and good old age!” The peasant women adored her, as one adores somebody who admires. However, the sharp tongued women of the neighbourhood could not swallow her free spirit. They were annoyed so much by the rumour that Joy like men a lot… Those that they had passed a whole life beside one and only male, who opened their legs only to become mothers and performed their marital duties without personal joy, could not stand the idea that a woman had come, a foreigner, and woke up inside them the woman they had buried so deep thousands of years ago under the man’s will, by covering their desires under thousands of regrets. If she wanted to be a genuine peasant woman she should look exactly like them, or they would take care of her. Zoi was well aware of all of these nuances, but her road up to now had been very long to get lost in the gossip and pain of the human condition. Once a poor girl of the village got married. The “foreigner”, as they called Zoi the peasant women, took of her precious cross and hung it on the neck of the newly married girl. All of the peasant women were astounded: “What a cross! Will cost a fortune for sure…” Then rumours started circulating again for her riches, making some old peasant grooms licking their moustaches like cats. Years went by… Zoi got tired from the life of a peasant woman and withdrew into herself. She was a very skilful painter! So you could see her in the country with the easel on her hands painting upon the canvas landscapes of Lefkas. Before that she used to make portraits of peasants. Now boats, seashores, birds and animals, trees and wild flowers. The old arthritis was galloping though… The fingers of her hands and feet were distorted. She could barely walk anymore. You could see her in the coffee house, whenever she was able to reach it, drinking and smoking like a maniac, with her blue eyes lost in the horizon. She had started becoming again an Englishwoman… One day, I saw her in her yard holding a pickaxe. “What are you doing there Zoi?” I asked her. “I am planting a vine”, she replied to me with a glow in her faint eyes exactly at the moment when she pronounced the word “plant”. The vine didn’t survive though, and the shoot remained dry. Zoi was inconsolable! She had tried in every way to keep the vine alive, by dropping upon it water, dung and aspirin. One morning she realized that the plant had died. We offered her a new stick to plant but she didn’t accept it… So on Saturday, as I woke up and looked through the window, I saw Zoi watering the dried shoot while speaking to it “good morning little vine!” This game continued the whole week. “Good morning little vine! Good night little vine! I love you little vine!” I didn’t know what to do, to laugh or cry at the nonsense or the sensitivity of that woman. The neighbours were guffawing behind her back, joking at her by mimicking her voice “Good morning little vine! Good night little vine!” However as time went by they started really worrying about her condition, whispering around that she had started losing her mind…
I had enough! I decided to speak to her. She listened to me patiently. Then she took in her hands a thick black book, she searched for a certain page, she found it and started to read: “Jesus said to her. I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who lives in me and believes in me will live even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. Do you believe this?” For a moment I thought that the question was directed to me and not included in the passage, but she hurried up to make clear that it was written in the Gospel of John, where he speaks about the resurrection of Lazarus. I tried to say something but she nodded at me to remain silent, then she continued reading: “Then Jesus shouted ‘Lazarus, come out!’ And the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound in grave clothes…” She closed the Holy Bible and leaning to me she told me in a confidential tone: “I named my dead vine Lazarus. Now every day I tell him to resurrect. And because I want this to happen so much and I believe deeply inside that it will happen, I am waiting for him to come back to life!” I was looking at her speechless. Expressless as a Budda. “And our deep talk became the bridge of silence”. She was not Zoi anymore. In my eyes she looked like a blue eyed western Madonna. So I decided to change faith. “I believe that too!” I said to her. “And if you want I can come every day to your place reading to it Homer from the original text. You know, the vines exist thousands of years in this place. Can it be, that the vine’s DNA remembers something from that wonderful language”. We agreed. I said to myself, tomorrow the straightjacket that the peasants were preparing for her will be sewed for me as well. With the first rays of the sun we were saying: “Good morning little vine! We love you a lot little vine!” Then we were giving Lazarus cool water, opening then the book of Iliad: “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousand fold upon the Achaeans, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes…” Same ritual next day: “Good morning little vine! We love you a lot little vine!” Then water again. This time the book of Odyssey had its turn: “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, hurried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy. He saw the town lands and learned the minds of many distant men…” Zoi gaped at me enthusiastically, as I was giving the same show every day. And I was very glad that I was able at last to recite the passages that I loved, even to a vine I was waiting… to resurrect! A month passed. Lazarus remained a dried root. I had also started to get tired. One day I was going, another did not, until I stopped going all together. Zoi wasn’t affected by my unfaithfulness and continued by herself: “Good morning little vine! I love you a lot little vine!” I was listening to her whenever I opened my window and my heart was bleeding. What a cross must somebody carry if he abandons his country to go to an almost deserted village, stay in an abandoned olive oil press, trying to resurrect in vain one dead root? One day passed my mind a crazy idea: to steal one night the dry shoot and put in its place another budding one instead. But this would look like the stealing of the body of Jesus from his disciples, namely with a fake resurrection. If something like that would have happened then the whole Christendom would be based upon a fraud. In my case the whole faith of Zoi would be based upon the miracle that
my infidelity produced. Who knows? Maybe this lonely woman, now in the last years of her life, would place her ultimate hope in the hands of God, in the afterlife, and the Vine Lazarus would be the proof that everything does not end here, that “everyone who lives and believes will live even if he dies”. One Sunday morning, exactly at the time when the church bell of Saint Christopher was tolling calling the faithful for the mass, we heard Zoi’s voice mixed with the joyful sounds of the church bell: “Resurrected! Resurrected… The vine Lazarus is alive!” We all came out and we saw with our own eyes the paradox: a vestige of a bud had appeared upon the shoot, almost invisible. Everybody could discern a germ of life here. Some made their cross, not because the church bell was tolling, but because the miracle was hitting the door of their hearts. After some time the bud – they call it small eye in the village – grew leaves, some velvet green small leaves like the wings of a butterfly. New buds opened soon and then more, until the vine Lazarus was fully resurrected, climbing up the reed, more and more… Now everybody that passed in front of Zoi’s house was saying tenderly: “Good morning Zoi! Good morning little vine!” but without a sense of irony this time in their voices. And whenever a carnation or a rose bush was eaten up by greenflies or a lemon tree was burnt by the hail, they recalled the vine Lazarus in the village, speaking the same way to the impotent plant or tree, hoping for a miracle. Not long afterwards, Zoi left the village. She bought a plot of land opposite the cemetery, whereupon she built a small house. She wanted to be closer to the town, as her health was deteriorating. We met her rarely now… Once, I went to visit her. She was really exhausted. She asked me about the vine Lazarus. I told her that it will soon bear grapes, and then I promised her that I will bring her some to taste the aroma of her faith in her mouth. She smiled bitterly. Her look was really dim! It reminded me of the mist of her country. She was looking at the flickering small candles of the cemetery, without saying a word… She died suddenly… She didn’t taste the grapes. Although, she had bought a grave in the cemetery of the village, they transported her to England to get buried there. Her house was sold in a night. Where her loneliness had stayed, came other people, with children, dogs, cars. Her trails were lost, the peasant women that remembered her, got old, died… The vine Lazarus, however, exists still, even today! “Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
Dimitris E. Soldatos “Lefkas short stories” Fagotto books, second edition, 2017 Translation: Miltiadis Oikonomou Copy editing: Eleni Maniati www.dimsol.blogspot.gr
The vine Lazarus