...And Dreams Are Dreams

She was undoubtedly the most attractive. At least her body was. She was in good shape, athletic; he had watched her diving into the sea that morning like a dolphin and he had desired her. But because she was the most attractive, she was also the coldest. In order to grease the machine, he started telling her of his experiments on mice. For him, he meant to imply, a body was of no significance. He had opened up so many bodies on his operating table before devoting himself to research. What was important to him was the moment when a woman wants something more than pure love.

“You’re just curious,” he told her. “You came here to try what the others tried before you. But as soon as you have to face reality, you don’t know what to do, like the hare that freezes in the middle of the road, blinded by a car’s headlights. There are no headlights, my little Irini. You’re traveling on this floating living room. You’re thinking of your boyfriend or your husband. Until suddenly, pirates capture the ship and take you prisoner. The pirate will set you free the following morning, as long as you give yourself to him completely that night. Otherwise, you’ll end your days in a harem on the Barbary Coast.”

Presented with this dilemma, Irini had no choice.

The mechanism came unblocked and she gave herself to him unreservedly, without remorse. She was struck by his tenderness. An almost paternal gentleness. But at the instant when she was about to climax, there was a knock on the cabin door. It was the American.

“I can’t now,” the doctor said.

She understood, and, apologizing profusely, tiptoed away.

Irini then found herself before an ancient wall.

That was where the wicked witch lived. When Irini was a little girl, they had told her that if the witch saw you smile and counted your teeth, you would die. That was why even during her happiest moments, Irini kept her lips sealed, persistently refusing to open her mouth.

The doctor noticed the gravity of her expression, the concentrated intensity of it, and realized that at any moment, the joints would come undone, and the fish would tumble out of the net, free.

And that was what happened. Once the net came up from the bottom of the sea and was emptied onto the deck of the trawler, it unfolded a carpet of writhing red mullet, jumping around joyfully naked in the sun.

Soon, the spasms subsided, and there were only a few posthedonic palpitations from one or two sargos that still resisted.

Long after she had gone, the doctor was unable to sleep, thinking about the way one woman follows in the other’s footsteps, on the same path. It was as if there were a silent understanding among their sex, to drink from the same pistil, of the same nectar.

Something that simplified the process of the search.

After all, he didn’t consider himself a Don Juan, nor much of a ladies’ man. Finally, a sweet lethargy started to come over his body. It came down from his throat through underground tunnels and made him melt. The heavy bird of sleep was settling on his eyelids. It pushed him downward and made him sink to an immeasurable depth. The years were blankets. Deep tulips. And the more his body sank down, the more the galley came to the surface. He was sinking, he kept on sinking. And it was sweet. He was being transformed into a woman. He pressed down on his ovaries, where his ovaries would have been if, instead, that strange thing hadn’t grown in their place. It felt sweeter and sweeter. He pressed the patch of grass that covered his annulled ovaries, until, shaken by a spasm, he flooded the sheets.

“Because the laws of development don’t always produce the best results for schemers,” Aristotle’s weak voice was saying, floating down from the deck through the ventilator shaft.

— 2-

The Captain

Standing on the bridge, wrapped in his solitude, the captain was not sleeping . Because dreams blossom on the fringes of dreams, they react like toxic liquids that dissolve first, before recom-posing themselves afterwards, into hopes that had ceased to be hopeful, galleries and calories, until….

“Grandfather, tell me a story.”

“Which story, my boy?”

“The one about the forest fire, Grandfather, when you would swing by your belt from one tree to another, and even the beasts of the jungle couldn’t catch you.

You, Grandfather, the hunter, the captain, the burlotieris4 of Admiral Kanaris… Come on,

Grandfather, tell me.”

Standing on the bridge, leaning against the wheel of the ship that was about to weigh anchor, while here too the fire was destroying the forests, the captain, by simply touching the wheel that has remained the same all these years, was transformed into the old sailor 4 Crew member of fire ships used against the Turkish fleet.