...And Dreams Are Dreams

At first, the taxi driver’s story went, he had gone to Belgium, where he worked for five years as a coal miner. But when the dust started bothering his lungs, he went to Vancouver, Canada, where he started off working in a car factory, and then he opened his first used car lot, which was soon followed by a second and then a third. Business was going well; he married Eulalia, a woman from his village, the daughter of immigrants; he had children, he put them through college, he married them off. But his dream— because there are dreams like Christmas trees, covered in ornaments, in the middle of town squares, trees that make you daydream when you look at them, that support our existence, dreams that are enlarged under the magnifying glass of sleep and of being in a foreign land—was one day to return to his village, to his island, and to build, upon the land of his forefathers, a home, a cottage for he and his wife, a sweet little cabin in which to rest their weary bones. He would have his rowboat, his beehives, and his goats; and friends from Vancouver could come and visit.

“If only you could thin the trees out on the sly,”

was the advice of an engineer, a fine young man who took pity on him. “Perhaps then you would be able to get a construction permit. Of course, if you had the right connections, that wouldn’t hurt either.”

The seed began to germinate in his head. And one night, he secretly cut down several pine trees with a chainsaw. But it seems that a fellow villager squealed on him, impelled by one of those ancient,

inextinguishable hatreds that one finds in villages. So not only did Irineos not get the construction permit, but the Forestry Department sued him for destroying trees.

“You don’t have to continue, I get the picture,” I said, for I could see he was getting upset.

But Irineos wanted to tell me all about it. I was a dream specialist and a journalist; to whom else would he tell his story, if not to me?

So he got mixed up in the Greek court system, where one needs to be a magician to get one’s rights vindicated. Accustomed to the Canadian way of life, in which bureaucracy is unknown, in which people aren’t always trying to poke each other’s eyes out, and in which everything — work, licenses, permits — obeys other, faster rhythms of development, his dream to build fossilized. But the idea of setting fire to the place never once dawned on him.

That summer, the whole of Greece had been in flames.

“I know,” I said, “I was here.”

Everywhere, during July and August, fires were breaking out as if nature were protesting the pitiless drought of the sky. Fires that would turn entire areas to ashes were started on the eve of the day when strong winds were expected, or on the day itself. Only a fire would get him out of his dead end, Irineos thought to himself, as he watched the news on TV

“But it was only an idea, mind you, because I was so exasperated.”

And, indeed, there was such a fire on the island that August. Violent, relentless, infernal. It destroyed everything, including his land. It burned down their prefabricated house; he and his wife barely made it.

The fire cost lives, since in their effort to put it out, both locals and foreigners fought with great determination. The wind was blowing like the devil.

Irineos and his fellow villagers found themselves in their rowboats out at sea, watching the savage spectacle with mixed emotions. But the others kept glancing over at him suspiciously, because he was unable to conceal in his face, illuminated by the reflections of the fire, an absurd air of satisfaction.

“Where were you yesterday afternoon, Irineos?”

the police sergeant asked him first thing in the morning, while they could still smell the horrible odor of burned wood. By an unfortunate coincidence, Irineos had been at his beehives, the area from which the fire had started, near Kynira. It seems he had been overheard at the cafe, saying that only if he burned the wretched plot of land would he be able to build on it.

“I’m not the one who set the fire, Officer. It was the wind that brought it all the way here; and nobody knows which way the wind is going to blow.”