Free Report to Grego by Nikos Kazantzakis Page B

“Habakkuk!” In other words, “Stop! I’m going to eat you!”
    The sound of certain words excited me terribly—it was fear I felt most often, not joy. Especially Hebrew words, for I knew from my grandmother that on Good Friday the Jews took Christian children, tossed them into a trough lined with spikes, and drank their blood. Oftentimes it seemed to me that a Hebrew word from the Old Testament—and above all the word Jehovah —was a spike-lined trough and that someone wanted to throw me in.
    In the third grade we had Periander Krasákis. What merciless godfather gave the name of Corinth’s savage tyrant to this sickly runt of a man with his high starched collar to conceal the scrofula on his neck, his skinny grasshopper legs, the little handkerchief always at his mouth so that he could spit, spit, and spit as though breathing his last? This one had a mania for cleanliness. Every day he inspected our hands, ears, nose, teeth, and nails. He did not thrash, did not entreat; he shook his oversized head which was covered with pimples, and shouted at us:
    â€œBeasts! Pigs! If you don’t wash every day with soap, you’ll never, never become men. You know what being a man means? It means washing with soap. Brains aren’t enough, you poor devils, soap is needed too. How are you going to appear before God with hands like that? Go out to the yard and get washed.”
    He drove us to distraction for hours on end—which vowels were long, which short, whether to use an acute or circumflex accent-while we listened to the voices in the street—vegetable mongers, kouloúri boys, donkeys braying, women laughing—and waited for the bell to ring so that we could escape. We watched the teachersweating away at his desk as he repeated the points of grammar over and over again in an effort to make’ them stick in our minds. But our thoughts were outside in the sun, on pebble warfare. We adored this game and often came to school with broken heads.
    One divine spring day the windows were open. A tangerine tree was in bloom across the street, and its perfume entered the classroom. Each of our minds had turned into a blossoming tangerine tree; we could not bear to hear anything more about acute and circumflex accents. A bird came just then, perched on the plane tree in the schoolyard and began to sing. At that point a pale redheaded student who had arrived that year from his village, Nikoliós by name, was unable to control himself. He raised his finger.
    â€œBe quiet, sir,” he cried.
    â€œBe quiet and let us hear the bird.” Poor Periander Krasákis! One day we buried him. He had rested his head calmly on his desk, palpitated a moment like a fish, and given up the ghost. Terror-stricken at the sight of death right in front of our eyes, we rushed screaming into the yard. The next day we donned our Sunday clothes, washed our hands carefully (in order not to deny him anything at that point) and took him to the old cemetery by the sea. It was springtime; the heavens were laughing, the soil smelled of camomile. The coffin lay uncovered. The dead man’s face was full of oozing pimples; it had begun to turn green and yellow. And when his students leaned over one by one to give him the parting kiss, the spring no longer smelled of camomile, but of rotting flesh.
    I n grade four we had the principal of the school, who both reigned and governed. He was short, as tubby as a storage jar, and had a small pointed beard, gray eyes that were always angry, and bowlegs. “Good God, just look at his legs,” we used to say to each other in hushed voices so that he would not hear. “Just look how they wrap around each other. And listen to him cough. He isn’t a Cretan!” He had come to us from Athens, freshly educated, apparently bringing New Pedagogy with him. We thought it must be some young woman named Pedagogy [the word new in Greek can also mean young woman