Thoreau Bound, page 36
Two hours of walking brought the three widows to a deserted monastery, where one of the women cooed like a pigeon, but no pigeon-woman responded to the call. Instead, a chill shivered our three spines as a deep male voice from behind us suddenly shouted then spoke.
“Po, po, po! What fine old widows do we have here! Two of them look like goddesses of love and fertility, and the one old widow in the middle has a donkey-sized penis and needs a shave! With more widows like these, all the alter kockers on Kreetee would stop twirling their worry beads and start strumming their baglamas and banging their wooden spoons!”
The two widows clutched and pressed against the middle one — that was me. But there was nothing to fear. The voice came from my old friend with the donkey, the tranquil man who loved olive trees. He would help us, I was sure.
“Kalimera, Thoreau!” said the old man. “To see your face makes me feel twenty-one again. I am the father of your dear friend, Kosmos. I have many names: Luck; Beauty-lover; and in Greek, ‘Storeegeekotees’, which means, ‘Tenderness.’ But lately my friends have been calling me Father, or Pateras.”
I shook the old man’s calloused hand.
“Where,” I asked, “are Katerina and the other women?”
“There was trouble last night,” Pateras said. “A priest who wanted the reward money called for the police. The women — eight of them, I counted — had to leave fast to save themselves. Now they are waiting for these two widows near the cave of Dikte. If you like, I can take them there.”
He placed his hand on my shoulder. I knew what he was thinking now, and disappointedly I sighed.
“And it would be better,” I said, “less strange-looking and safer — if you go onward without me?”
Pateras nodded yes. I removed my black widow’s outfit and all the padding, folded the cloth and stuffed it into the burlap sack, then placed the sack into Meli’s hands. Then from my sock I pulled out a bunch of bills.
“Meli, Romantza, take this,” I said. “It’s all my money.”
I split up the dollars and Euros into two even piles, then gave half to each of them.
“Give all the cash to Katerina. Do you remember what I told you last night? When it’s safe for the ten of you to travel, where are we going to meet?”
Romantza squeezed my arm as she replied.
“In the town of Agia Souvlakis, at the house of a beetch named Penelope.”
“A good plan, Thoreau,” Pateras said. “That isolated house will be the safest place to hide.”
The old man turned around so the women and I could say good-byes, and then he led his donkey along the small dirt path.
“It is best that we leave right away,” he said.
“Thoreau,” said Romantza, “Remember our deal. You promised that you would never forget me!”
“Not for a thousand years, Romantza. Or two thousand, at least.”
She kissed me then bit my bottom lip.
“And you’re so sure you won’t forget me that you promised that if you ever see me again and you don’t recognize me, then you’ll make up for it by giving me one night with you alone!”
“I promised you those two things, Romantza, and I know you won’t let me forget. And remember the two things you promised me: get along well with Meli, and stop stealing, because it’s too dangerous.”
Romantza shook her head to say that she agreed, then kissed me one more time, then turned around to follow the tail of the donkey and the kind old man.
Meli reached out to grasp my hand. We laughed together when I gave her the rose that the pig-tailed Romantza had stuffed into my shirt.
“I will never part with this,” she said. “If I never see you again — ”
I kissed her tenderly.
“Then give it to the man you love.”
We stood staring at each other for one long moment.
“Go now,” I whispered. And Meli walked down the path, slowly, looking back at me once, twice, three times with tears flowing from her star-bright eyes.
Where would I go now, after losing two more I’d loved? ... Back toward my campsite at Agios Nikolodeonos. During the two-hour walk I thought about how strangers can become friends, and friends can become as close as family. ... From the night of love and morning of loss, I was ravenously hungry, and I had nothing now to eat but the shred of appleskin which at last dislodged itself from between my teeth and gums. I removed it from my mouth, examined the golden shred, then chewed it up and swallowed the last bit.
I climbed down to my campsite by the beach. Waiting for me there I found two old women dressed in widow-black. Meli! Romantza! ... No, I was wrong by one-hundred forty years. The widows were Hope’s sisters, Freedom and Destiny. They had brought me gifts: one bread and three wildflowers. After chatting for a few moments — they had added no rum to the bread, they promised! — they departed, advising me to quickly eat my bread. Destiny urged: “Whenever a man is hungry, the world is a terrifying place.” And Freedom reminded me: “There is only one place and one time a man can fight for his liberation: this moment, and this place.”
I bit into the loaf, chewed a few chews, then discovered it was filled with something too tough to swallow. There was money inside: two thousand Euros! I stuffed the money into my pocket; tomorrow I would mail it to Aunt Zoe in Athens, for Kosmos and Irene. I finished eating the bread just as the twelve noon bells rang out from a church in town.
The three flowers and the twelve bells made me remember what I had carelessly forgot.
“Karin!” I shouted.
Better sixteen hours late than never. Grasping the three flowers, I sprinted to the town, dashed though the winding stone-covered streets, glanced at street names and house numbers painted on the houses, then knock-knock-knocked with the golden knocker on the big front door. Across the top of the entrance lay a dried grapevine.
The door swung open, revealing an elegantly decorated living room, plush and luxurious far beyond the sparsely-furnished dwellings of the average natives of Crete. A five-year-old girl, not nearly as tall as my waist, came to the doorway dressed in a black costume like the wickedest witch of Oz.
The child took the three flowers from my hand.
“Karin!” she shouted, as she stared at me up and down. “The scheisskopf is here! The man with the big sex problems that Mama was going to fix. Should I ask him to come in, or should I close the door on his nose?”
34
Wealth and Suffering
First distraction, then destruction. He who has no great love to go to is easily seduced.
Overlooking the whine-dark sea, in a posh second-floor bedroom, Thoreau lies in bed with a naked Karin cuddled on his left side, and a nude Gertrude snuggled on his right. Seven weeks had passed since he had parted from the wild gypsy women. Seven weeks ago he had stood on the threshold of the German sisters’ front door, and swallowed the last golden-apple gob. For seven weeks he had two healthy women delighting in their own sensual pleasures, and devoted to his most fantastic whims.
Wisely, the Stoic philosophers taught the maxim: “Envy not this man, envy not any man.” Sexual relationships are mousetraps: easy to get in, murder to get out. From the moment that Thoreau had neglected to hear his inner guiding-voice — and forgotten that this voice existed — he felt lost, trapped, empty, unhappy, and thoroughly confused.
Every morning at 8 a.m. bells from the unorthodox church clang eight times. Bells clang, women cling. Inside the elegant bedroom, an alarm-buzzer blares the three lovers awake. The Greek light, witness and abettor of so many miracles and monstrosities, helps to disentangle the three-backed beast.
Karin (or Gertrude) rises immediately and makes the breakfast while Gertrude (or Karin) makes fast love to Thoreau. The sexed screams of the woman are accompanied by the trio of sizzling sausages. Hanging everywhere in Germany — to remind the natives to stop working and have sex — these phalloid wursts resemble the German style of lustmaking. Sex and sausages are clean, mysterious, easy to make, and well done in a Munich minute.
At 8:10 precisely, the sated sister travels from bedroom to bathroom for a ten-minute ice-cold shower; she will then take over the cooking chores while her sister showers cold. Before departing from the perfect-bodied Thoreau, the woman whispers in the man’s ear: “Hat es dir gefallen?”
At first he thought that the woman had been asking, “Did your hat fall off?”, but his German language skills improved to get the real meaning: “Did you enjoy it?” ... His body enjoyed it while his mind rebelled. So Thoreau — who cannot lie to women and children — answers the question without answering, with kisses where words should have been.
The fat-filled breakfast — coffee, cream, sausages, seafood, cheeses, eggs, breads, jellies, cakes and a smorgasbord of aphrodisiacs — would be served precisely at 8:30 a.m. This gave Thoreau, every morning, twenty precious minutes to ponder his pitiful plight.
By any method of accounting, Thoreau had become a rich man. He lived in a rich house. He ate rich foods from china plates, he drank sweet drinks from crystal glasses. He had been dressed in expensive clothing, and undressed on a pillow-soft bed. Thoreau had lapped up the lips of luxury, sunned in the summa of sumptuousness, tiddlied the winks of idleness. He had no work, no debts, no deadlines, no responsibilities. He could have sex whenever he wanted — but he hardly wanted it at all. And because he was taking, buying, daydreaming, consuming — instead of giving, loving, learning, creating — his life became boring and soul-less and stale.
Why didn’t he pack his backpack and walk out? ... In some ways, living free-from-poverty had been a paradise like basking on a perfect beach. And Thoreau gleaned that if he had been born with a modicum of money, then he might have learned how to be a serious artist instead of a lighthearted vagabond. Yet there was another, and far more powerful, invisible lock on the front door of his present life. The faces had changed but the story remained the same: both sisters were in love with him. If he left them now he would hurt them, crush them, perhaps destroy them. These lovely women would hate him, they would despise all men, and for the failure of this relationship they would immolate themselves in blames.
Thoreau liked the sisters, he admired them, he enjoyed their company — but Love, as he imagined it, would be a completely different thing. And that subtle difference — the starry space between the worlds of Like and Love — makes all the difference between mere satisfaction and wholehearted happiness.
Once every week he would try to face the situation, always with the same result ...
Thoreau: Good afternoon, Dr. Heissundkalt. I have a problem that I cannot solve alone. May we talk?
Gertrude: Take off your clothes and lie down on the couch.
Thoreau: Lately I have been unhappy.
Gertrude: When was the first time you remember feeling this way?
Thoreau: When I was eight years old, my father came home from work, threw his newspaper against the wall, and then yelled at my mother because dinner would not be ready on time.
Gertrude: Mr. Thoreau, do you know Oedipus?
Thoreau: Tell me about him.
Gertrude: He was a king who, unbeknownst to himself, killed his father then married his mother then had four children with her. Twenty years later he found out, and to avoid seeing his post-incestuous world, he put out his own eyes. The Oedipus complex, discovered by Sigmund Freud, is the desire of the male child to eliminate his rival father, and then to have sexual relations with his mother.
Thoreau: But could Freud have been mistaken, in assigning his own secret desires to the psyches of every man?
Gertrude: Freud is never mistaken.
Thoreau: Do you think that is my problem?
Gertrude: To answer that question could take years of penetrating analysis. Would you feel uncomfortable if I removed my dress?
Thoreau: Is that slip silk or Freudian?
The woman corrected her slip by removing it. She pressed her body onto the man’s, and they psychoanalyzed no more on the couch that day.
One bell from the church announced that it was fifteen minutes past eight. Thoreau washed his hands, his face, his public parts. He stepped into a pair of comfortable shorts, and then he returned to the plush bed to sink into a stupor of contemplative broods.
The door of the bedroom eased open. For an instant, Thoreau imagined that the morning ritual would be broken by the whim-filled women, and Karin or Gertrude or both would slip back into bed for more fornicating fun. Instead, the five-year-old Nikola entered, wearing a white sun dress covered with yellow moons and stars. Attentively, the child carried a tray bearing a cup of hot Swiss cocoa topped with Austrian whipped cream. Nikola placed the tray with the steaming cup on top of a table, then she jumped up onto the bed.
“Mama said that the new maid is here, and she wants to start cleaning upstairs. And Mama said to tell you to put some clothes on your lazy and wunderschön Klösse.”
Thoreau opened his constant companion — a German-English dictionary — then translated the wunderschön Klösse into “beautiful dumplings”.
The child drew a picture for the man — a little girl riding on a tall white horse — then told him it was a gift for him to keep, and he thanked her and said he liked it very much. Nikola laughed as she watched the rays of kindness pouring from Thoreau’s fatherly eyes. The child ran her hand across the man’s whisker-stubbled cheek.
“Do you know what? ... Later today Mama will buy a big reading desk for you, and Aunt Karin will fill up the den with your favorite books. They said that since the minute you came to live with us they are the happiest women on Earth. And they said that they want you to stay and live with us for a million million years.”
The child looked again into Thoreau’s deep eyes, placed her small hand on his strong shoulder, then kissed his cheek.
“Why are you sad?” she asked.
Always, Thoreau had been amazed by children: by the deepness of their intuition, by the freshness of their ideas. Women are fooled by words and men are deceived by beauty, but from children nothing profound can be concealed.
Thoreau jumped off the bed, grasped the child, lifted her up skyward until her head touched almost to the ceiling. He smiled as she screamed with delight.
“Come down here, Nikola the Giant,” said Thoreau, “and crush me with a mama-bear hug!”
“I can’t come down!” Nikola shouted, between streams of shrieks, giggles and laughs.
Thoreau lowered her down then swiftly raised her up again.
“Come down, come down, and hug the clown!”
“I can’t come down!” shouted the laughing, laughing, laughing child.
Into the bedroom stepped the new maid, carrying a bucket of sponges and a broom. Like the typical Greek widow, she had de-sexed herself inside a black loose-fitting dress. The dress neutralized the sinuous curves of her body, and a long black shawl hid her face and her man-killing hair. As the maid dusted the furniture, Gertrude, from the kitchen, shouted something in German to Nikola, her child.
“Mama said to give you the letters, Daddy,” Nikola said, between her bursts of laughing. “The letters ... heeheehahaha ... on the ... hahaheeheehee ... tray.”
Nikola kissed Thoreau’s hand, then ran downstairs to help deliver the morning feast.
The letters! ... Instantly Thoreau knew that they would be momentous. Since his self-chosen captivity by Gertrude and Karin he had written to no one except Kosmos and Penelope. To Kosmos he had sent inspiring words from Kazantzakis. To Penelope he had written a long letter that first explained his current situation, and then asked three questions: “What do you need?” ... “Can I send money to you?” ... “Can I help you with anything else?”
Yes, the return addresses proved that the missives had been sent by Kosmos and Penelope. He opened the letter from Kosmos first. It was not a letter, but a picture. The colors, the simple lines, and the vitality between the lines all combined to bring that work of art to life, and to make it stick in his distracted mind. The picture comprised a large bird — it was a puffin — with black and white feathers and a flat brightly-colored beak. A red circle encircled the middle of the bird’s leg, around the area of the knee joint. The picture had a title at the top: ‘O Joy Seein’ A Puffin Knee’.
And these words were calligraphied below the feet of the bird:
The whole secret is to be yourself, to be open, to be sincere.
Said the poet:
“Are not the joys of morning sweeter
Than the joys of night?
And are the vig’rous joys of youth
Ashamed of the light?”
And now, to Penelope’s letter. Thoreau ripped open the envelope, careful not to damage the stiff paper inside. The envelope carried no sentences of reproach or praise; it requested no money; it contained nothing at all except a photograph of Kosmos. On the back of the photo, Penelope had penciled these Odyssean words:
“Beautiful Calypso, don’t be pissed off at me!
We both know that compared to you, my wife looks like a sack of olives! She is human and grows stale, you are divine and will remain young forever.
And yet, my whole heart breaks in waiting for the day that I will return home!”
Thoreau dropped the photograph. Tears fell from his eyes as he stared out at the sea and wondered about the essence of the human problem: Why is it so difficult for a man to open his own mind, to live heroically, to change and to improve his life?
And he looked at the light in the sky then answered his own question:
“Whoever lives a life smothered by material possessions becomes a coward, fearful of losing things, afraid of fresh experiences, terrified of all varieties of change. For as long as he values comfort above honesty his mind withers and his courage shrinks. He can never change his life because he is at war with his own mind. Goethe shouted, ‘Remember to live!’ — but what courage it takes, just to remember this simplest of all things.”
