...And Dreams Are Dreams

“The music began. Maison looked around for the chiefs of war promised by the governor, but he did not see them. Next came the waltzes, one, two, three. Then the cadrilles. Two hours had gone by. Maison asked the governor why the leaders hadn’t appeared. The governor, not knowing the reason, shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Let us wait.’ Meanwhile, he sent somebody to find out why they hadn’t come. ‘They’re sleeping.’ So, in order to make excuses to his guest, he mentioned something about ‘uncouthness and ignorance.’ But Maison didn’t buy it. He had seen these men fight with him like lions, and they had always been civil and polite to him. Therefore, something else was going on, something they weren’t telling him, but which he could sense, military man that he was.

“And so, my boy, those soldiers gave one of the first lessons of national independence and pride. They refused to dance syrtaki and zeibekiko for the foreign locusts, for the Western Euro-trash. They demanded a constitution. Free elections and a constitution. A Parliament and a constitution. But the governor did not want to put a razor in an infant’s hands, as he said.

That’s how he viewed a people who had fought for liberty and won: as infants.

‘“I would give the razor to the infant,’ said the English admiral, Lyons, ‘and then I would take its right hand and guide it so it could shave without cutting itself.’

‘“Admiral,’ replied Capodistrias, ‘I did not come to Greece to end up the laughing stock of Europe. I will continue to shave in front of the infant in order for it to learn how to use a razor safely.’

“Capodistrias wasn’t especially liked by his host, Kontostavlos. His friend Korais had written to Kontostavlos that he found the governor very haughty.

Korais was not wrong. But that year was a particularly important one for the land. (‘Although, of course, which year wasn’t important for this land?’ the captain thought to himself. ‘Every year was as important as a day in the life of a dying man, because this infant was born half dead, and for the past 180 years everybody has been trying to bring it to life. But let’s just say that that year, 1829, counted more than the others.’)

“It was the year during which the borders of the new Greece were being widely discussed. The French insisted that if ‘ it were limited to the Peloponnese, it would be too weak to defend itself.’ The Russians ‘ are in favor of imposing a solution, even if it is done by them unilaterally,’ and, having guaranteed the neutrality of Austria, they started the Russo-Turkish War to help Greece grow larger. But the English did not agree. They were afraid that if Greece grew larger, it would pass under the influence of the Russians, and then the English would lose their domination of the Ionian Islands. (One hundred ten years later, Churchill, fearing that Greece would be taken over by the Soviet Union, provoked the repression of December 1944.)

‘Thank God,’ cried Wellington in London. ‘ It (the liberation of Greece) had never cost a shilling and never shall. ’ Besides, his orders the previous year (on October 21, 1828), to his envoy in Nafplion had been clear: ‘ On the subject of Greece, I would limit its borders to the Peloponnese if possible, and if not, as close to the Isthmus of Corinth as possible.’

“It was in such an atmosphere that the

Kontostavlos’s reception was held, and the host was circumspect in his actions.”