Free Report to Grego by Nikos Kazantzakis Page A

married a solid, kindhearted, foul-mouthed peasant girl, who did not tie him. He used to come to our house, all elated, and find my mother.
    â€œHow are you getting along now with your new wife, Nikoláki?” she inquired.
    â€œMarghí, no need to ask how happy I am! She doesn’t tie me.”
    Afraid of my father, he never lifted his eyes to look him in the face but gazed constantly at the street door, rubbing his hairy hands together. On this day, as soon as he heard that Captain Michael was calling him, he rose from table with his mouth still full of food and sped to our house.
    What could the ogre want with me now? he asked himself with irritation, swallowing his last mouthful. How does my poor sister stand him? Recalling his first wife, he smiled contentedly and murmured, “I, at least, was saved. Praise the Lord!”
    â€œCome here,” my father said as soon as he saw him. “You went to school. Explain this.”
    The two of them held council, bending over the book.
    â€œBirthright means hunting costume,” said my father after much reflection.
    My uncle shook his head.
    â€œI think it means musket,” he objected. But his voice was trembling.
    â€œHunting costume,” roared my father. He knitted his brows, and my uncle cowered.
    The next day the teacher asked, “What does birthright mean?”
    I jumped up. “Hunting costume.”
    â€œWhat nonsense! What ignorant fool told you that?”
    â€œMy father.”
    The teacher quailed. Afraid like everyone else of my father, how could he dream of contradicting him?
    â€œYes,” he said, swallowing hard, “yes, certainly, sometimes, but very rarely, it can mean hunting costume. Here, however . . .”
    Sacred History was my favorite subject. It was a strange, intricate and somber fairy tale with serpents who talked, floods and rainbows, thefts and murders. Brother killed brother, a father wanted to slaughter his only son, God intervened every two minutes and did His share of killing, people crossed the sea without wetting their feet.
    We did not understand. We asked the teacher, and he coughed, raised his switch angrily, and shouted, “Stop this impertinence! How many times do I have to tell you—no talking!”
    â€œBut we don’t understand, sir,” we whined.
    â€œThese are God’s doings,” the teacher answered. “We’re not supposed to understand. It’s a sin!”
    A sin! We heard that terrible word and shrank back in fright. It wasn’t a word, it was a serpent, the same serpent that had beguiled Eve, and it was coming down from the teacher’s platform and opening its mouth in order to eat us. We shrank into our desks and did not utter a sound.
    Another word which horrified me when I first heard it was Abraham . Those two ah’s reverberated inside me; they seemed to come from far away, out of some deep, dark, and dangerous well. I whispered “Abraham, Abraham” secretly to myself and heard footsteps and panting behind me—someone with huge bare feet was pursuing me. When I learned that he had taken his son one day in order to slaughter him, I became terror-stricken. Without a doubt he was the one who slaughtered little children, and I hid behind the back of my desk to keep him from discovering me andcarrying me off. When the teacher told us that whoever follows God’s commandments goes to Abraham’s bosom, I swore inwardly to transgress all the commandments in order to save myself from that bosom.
    I felt the identical agitation when, in the same subject, Sacred History, I first heard the word Habakkuk. This word also seemed extremely dark to me. Habakkuk was a bogeyman who came to lurk in our courtyard every time the darkness fell (I knew just where he crouched: behind the well). Once when I dared to venture all alone into the yard at night, he sprang from behind the well, reached out his hand, and shouted at me: