...And Dreams Are Dreams

Another Immigrant Taxi Driver Regrets

Returning to Greece

He saw them coming from a distance, like two scarecrows. His burned property still smelled of smoke. The few tufts of green that had survived on the trees seemed absurd reminders of what had once been there. “Why were they the only ones to survive?” he asked himself. “Why?” He wanted to climb up and chop them off.

He appeared immersed in his sorrow. “So, Mr.

Irineos, where were you when the fire started?”

“Are you still asking about that? I was at my beehives. They’re gone now too. Nothing but ashes.”

He seemed not to want to talk to them. Entrenched in his bitterness, he became completely inscrutable. “If only the planes had arrived sooner….” was all he said.

“They couldn’t get here. The wind was blowing like the devil.”

In the village, they were burying the victims. He would have gone, but he was afraid they’d lynch him.

They were wrong to suspect him. He would have to leave now, he had lost everything; he would sell the taxi and go back to Canada. That’s where he would leave his bones. In a foreign land, a foreign continent.

Greece was a heartless mother, always chasing you away.

“The almond trees won’t flower next year,” he said.

“On your way back from your beehives, you

didn’t see anything, you didn’t notice anyone?”

“The workers were coming back from the mines.”

“There are no mines anymore. You’re thinking of the years before you emigrated. All the workers left the island, just like you. And just like you, they all came back loaded with dough.” (The truth is, he had come back last. He had taken too long, far too long. He hadn’t had time to build like the others.) The two periods of his life began to merge in his mind: first was the social despair. And now, in full bloom, ruination by fire. Always, albeit for different reasons, the same disaster. “There were cars going by.

With boats in tow, and caravans. How would I know?”

“Is there something or someone you could

indicate to us?”

“The donkey crapped and its steamy dung set fire to the dry pine needles,” he said finally. Impenetrable, immured in his silence. “Here,” he said, extending his hands. “Handcuff me if I’m a suspect. Don’t torture me anymore with questions.” The two visitors, the police sergeant and the representative of the court, were forced to leave.

His property had become a vacant plot full of ashes. The seagulls had turned grey from the smoke. In the dry stream bed, the partridges no longer cackled.

Old legislation is like an old hat: it does not fit well on the head of a man who evolved according to technology. So it was that Irineos (who was telling me this story while driving cautiously through the jungle of the city) could not get into his head the reason he couldn’t build on his own property. “Because it’s designated a wooded area,” he told me. “What does this mean, designated a wooded area?” he asked the officials. He had lost touch with the way things were in his country, which he left when just a young man, in 1955, with great difficulty, because he belonged to the left, and even then he was able to leave only thanks to the tricks and bribes of a travel agent who managed to get him a passport. (“And don’t you ever come back,”

the agent had said, “or I’m done for.”)

“A wooded area,” they explained at the local office of the Forestry Department, “means it has pine trees, and trees are protected by law.”

“If there weren’t any pine trees, would I be able to build?” Irineos asked the first time he spoke with the forest ranger, who, like most civil servants, seemed to enjoy the confusion of the man who had become a stranger in his own country.

“Only if it were rocky, arid ground. Even if there were only brush, you still wouldn’t be able to build.”