...And Dreams Are Dreams

Others had lost their goats, their sheep, their fortunes. Mitsoras, who was going to marry off his daughter on the fifteenth of August and was offering seven hundred lambs as a dowry, didn’t have a single animal left. Aunt Lissava, who looked after the chapel as if it were her own, found only the stone walls and the belfry left. Flames had devoured the sculpted wood icon. And the son of the resistance fighter had burned to death fighting the fire. Because the flames danced around like Salome. You didn’t know where they’d pop up next. And that brave young man had found himself wrapped in their veils without realizing it. He had believed in a new Greece.

Thus, it was not long before Irineos found himself in court again, since he didn’t have an alibi. Or rather, his alibi placed him in the very spot where the fire had started that afternoon. And that was incriminating evidence.

“As to who the arsonist was, we have no

knowledge,” he told me, as he had told the court. “We can’t know who it is. It might have been one person, or it might have been many. Then again it might not have been anyone.”

“How can that be?” the court asked.

“I’ll tell you how,” he answered. “There exists within nature the elements of its entropy, as in thermodynamics. It’s the famous second law. That’s how trees catch fire on their own and burn up.”

“Yes, but, as a court of law, we have to examine every possibility. That’s what we’re paid for.

Whatever you might say, the fire was started by certain people who wanted it. Who could those people have been on that Thursday, the day of the fire?”

“First of all, there were two yachts moored in the natural port of Kynira. There were tourists who had set up camp on the beach, under the pine trees.

“The tourists disappeared like birds at the sound of a gunshot, frightened from the forked branches of trees, the whole flock taking to the air and darkening the sky as they flew off elsewhere. As for the yachts….”

This seemed to be a cue for the rest of the members of the court to offer their own candidates.

“There were a couple of shepherds, Lazos and Sotiris, and the refugees at the settlement of Ano Karya.”

“And let’s not forget the wandering monk, with his knapsack over his shoulder, telling everyone

‘Repent! The time is nigh! The fire will burn you all!’”

“He disappeared. Either in the flames, or he returned across to Mount Áthos. In any case, the priest pronounced an anathema on him in church, because the monk was a heretic. But the priest’s beard didn’t escape from the fire either. He had to shave it off, and now he looks like a Catholic priest.”

“So then the monk is also a suspect?”

“Everyone is a suspect, I admit it. But Irineos is the prime suspect. The fire coincided with his third and last visit to the Forestry Department, where he was given the final ‘no’ by the forest ranger, and which he left muttering dark threats.”

“Count him in. But you and me, too. You’ve put on weight recently.”

“I’ve been overeating. I gave up smoking, so now I’m overeating. And do you know why I gave up smoking?”

“Because you’re less of a suspect if you don’t smoke.”

“Exactly.”

The great culprit had to be found and hung in the village square. “Who had reason to set the fire?”

“The Israelis, using the Turks as intermediaries.

Everyone knows their secret services collaborate.”

“Before examining the macrocosm, let us examine the microcosm. Before we look outside, let us look inside ourselves.”

“The arsonist is wandering around among us, a free man,” said the mayor of the village, who wanted to keep his title at the next election.

Irineos was finally acquitted, but meanwhile he had become very embittered. How vile of them to suspect him, instead of each one of them looking inside their own souls to find the culprit. And so he started thinking of emigrating for a second time, in his old age. He would sell the taxi and go back to Vancouver. His homeland had hurt him again. The first time was when it wouldn’t let him leave because he belonged to the left.

And now again….

“I only wept for the son of the resistance fighter,”

he said. “His father and I started off together, working in the coal mines in Charleroi. He stayed there, married a Belgian woman. His son had come back two years ago. He was the first and the finest young man in the village. Along with the other young people he founded the cultural center and the popular art museum. He never stopped working for the good of his country. And, because of our family connection, I was the one who was chosen to notify his father. But I didn’t know if he would want him buried here or there.

Meanwhile nobody would take charge of the body.