...And Dreams Are Dreams

Trans. Kanaris who, on a different night, a moonless night, had set fire to the flagship of the pasha.

“When did that happen, Grandfather?”

“When our great-grandfathers were fighting for independence, my boy, and Greece was a dog that had been tied up for four hundred years and was trying to break its chains. But three masters were lying in wait to see who would take it over. For the great powers of the time, Greece was a very useful dog. The masters wanted it to be free in order to scare the sultan’s wolfhounds, but not so free that it would become a master itself. And so, the three masters, the Russians, the English, and the French, helped free the Grecian dog, but then they quarreled among themselves over who would own it. The dog didn’t yet know its new masters. It would look up at them with its sad eyes, the way dogs do, full of gratitude that they had helped it break its chains. And it was hungry. It was bleeding from its struggle to break its fetters. It was a starving dog, but proud to show its ribs under its skin.

Unfortunately, it didn’t know people. It would run to the one who tossed it the biggest piece of meat. And the three big guys tormented the poor thing, to the point where it didn’t know what was going on.

“That was when they sent the first government diplomat from Corfu, who had lived for years abroad, in the court of the czar of Russia. As soon as he set foot in the basement where the dog lived, the stench forced the diplomat to hold his breath. ‘We need to straighten up around here’, he said, and started to train the dog, in rather a brusque manner. Deep down, he liked the idea of a dog, though not so much the dog itself, which, having been oppressed and starved all those years, wanted to run and leap and enjoy its newly acquired freedom. ‘You can forget everything you learned from the sultan all these years’, said its master, who spoke to the dog in French rather than Greek. He would say couche-là instead of katse kato. He was bent on turning the dog into a Saint Bernard, a little barrel of brandy around its neck. The very smell of the drink nauseated the dog, which was used to the wine and liqueurs of its own country. So, one day, he attacked his master and tore him to pieces. This was followed by a period in which the dog, free again, became wild and independent and happy like it used to be. It would grab every single chicken it came across, it would chase after foxes. ‘That’s enough’, said the foreigners, seeing that, unrestrained, the dog could become even more dangerous than its old master the sultan.

Especially since it was also laying claim to other fields, crossing the Isthmus of Corinth in one bound, and devouring sheep from their pens. But neither of the three big guys would accept one of the other two as master of the dog.

“So they found a young prince, underage,

abnormal, and a bit of a flake, and they told his father, Ludwig of Bavaria, to send him down to be master of the dog’s country. The father accepted, and sent his son, at exactly seventeen years of age, a hippie of his time, who since childhood had been dropping acid, and the dog saw his new master coming with an army of Bavarian soldiers, fourteen thousand of them. Not one of the new arrivals spoke Greek. The dog went up to them, sniffed at them; they seemed to be friends and not new conquerors. After all, that’s what its three protectors had kept whispering in its ear the whole time it was waiting for them to arrive. So the dog didn’t bark, but instead wagged its tail with joy, because these strangers, these Bavarians, would bring lots to eat (in the form of a monumental loan), and the dog, having pillaged the sheepfolds and chicken coops, had been left with nothing more to eat. So the dog was excited. But it noticed some other dogs at its master’s side, dogs of a different breed, well-fed, ferocious, and with pretty big appetites themselves. It was explained that these three dogs were accompanying the young king, as he was still underage. Until he turned twenty, these three Bavarian dogs would rule the palace. The dog took a liking to the king, because he was like a child but was afraid of his guard dogs, Armansberg, Mauer, and the other one. These three dogs then gathered together all the Greek dogs and tried to Bavarify them.

“Up to that point, our dog had managed to escape being barbarified, but it could see that it would be difficult to avoid being Bavarified. And while in the beginning it thought that it was going to get fed, the Greek dog saw that the wolfhounds were eating its food. They would bark in a tongue that our dog didn’t understand. Everything was ruled with the military discipline of the Bavarians. They put our dog in prison, charging it with liking its master but not his dogs. And they would have killed it, if the good king himself hadn’t intervened and begged his dogs to spare its life.