0 - Eureka Street

Mikis, and built on a grand scale, as so
many Cretans are. Either a statue or
a god. Looking at that shaggy leonine
head, I for one felt that he could easily
have flown in from Olympus
just for the occasion.
IN
1980 THERE WERE NO such things
as video shops in nearby Kalamata; now
anyone viewing the Zorba film in maturity
would be bound to agree. Crete's form 'is
austere. Furrowed by struggles and pain.'
Now the quite terrifying struggles and
pain are what I take from the film, which
could only have been shot in black and
white: God forbid any attempt at a remake
of any sort; colour would be unthinkable.
Forty years on I know that the crop
Zorba announces that life is trouble; only
death is not. A man needs a little madness;
else, how is he ever going to break
the thread that binds him, and be free!
And he asks what Isaac Bashevis Singer
called 'the eternal questions'. Why must
we suffer! Why must we die! And the
viewer can almost feel the constriction of
Alan Bates's throat as he replies, I don't
there are several. And so it came to pass
that I recently watched the Zorba film
again. This time I was not bowled over,
at lea t not in the same way; instead, I
was deeply shocked. There were all sorts
of reasons for my shock, not the least of
which was the sobering reminder of the
protected, heedless girl I had been way
back then, at the time of my first viewing.
But over my long Greek years, of course,
I had been forced to accept that the world
I had once found so hard to believe in had
actually existed.
Although Kazantzakis's harsh Crete is
a world or even a galaxy away from the
Crete of the 21st century, with its glitzy
tourist beaches and its overpoweringly
opulent hotels, it still exists in remote
corners. Only a few years ago, a half­
Greek friend of mine, a woman travelling
on her own in Crete and well off the
beaten tourist track, stopped for a drink
at a kafeneion in a mountain village, and
soon fell into conversation with two old
men. Predictably, they wanted to know
her life story, so she obliged with the potted
version: Greek mother who had met
father when he was in the British army
and thus in Greece during the war; subsequent
marriage, followed by the establishment
of a family in London.
'We are glad and relieved to learn that
you are Greek,' said the more communicative
of the two. 'Because if you were a
Turka, we should have to rape you.'
Kazantzakis wrote his novel, and
nearly ten years later was interviewed
on Parisian radio. 'I don't see Crete as a
picturesque, smiling place,' he said, and
area of Crete is a mere three-eighths
of its total area, and I have learned that
there is nothing at all romantic or ennobling
about poverty: in the film the village
simpleton is the only person to keen
over the body of the widow (Irene Pappas),
a woman who was tender, generous and
alone, and who was killed for her pride,
for her rejection of an importunate local
suitor who eventually suicided, and for
choosing Alan Bates instead. After her
murder outside the church, the rest of the
village turned away in a kind of strategic
indifference, the indifference of those
who have obeyed the implacable rules
applying to the vengeful concepts of honour
and shame, and who then slope away
in order to avoid whatever
consequences might be in store.
A
lso SHOCKING, I THINK, is the
examination of the inexorable power of
desire: in the yearning of the widow, in
the pathetic flirtatiousness of the faded
coquette, Madame Hortense, in the
amoral but somehow inspiring wretch
that is Zorba himself. Kazantzakis was
deeply interested in the conflict between
mind and body; thus it was a master
stroke to give the Alan Bates character an
English upbringing but a Greek mother.
This might seem a simple dichotomy,
but there is rarely anything simplistic
in Kazantzakis, and so the liberation
of the bookish Englishman exacts a
dreadful due.
I was not shocked, merely very surprised
to discover how much of the dialogue
echoed within the ageing brain.
know. Inevitably, Zorba cannot let this
highly unsatisfactory answer pass.
What use are all your damned books
then, if they don't tell you this! What do
they tell you! All Alan Bates can say is,
They tell me of the agony of men who
cannot answer your questions.
Despite the harshness, suffering and
savagery, there is still always the dancing,
the method by which Zorba comes to
terms with both death and life. To a Greek,
dancing is both catharsis and celebration.
Each part of Greece has its own traditional
dances; here in the Peloponnese,
men dance a slow solo zembeil