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The dawn

I had heard about it, but I didn't pay any attention until I saw them with my own eyes. Some while before the dawn, when it is still dark, they appear from that corner of the upper town, coming along the street. They fill almost all its width. When you first see them flowing down the road, you can't believe your eyes. So many living beings in the heart of a dead town. Like a white river.
As it was the first time, I felt surrounded. They were so warm, spreading their dirty smell. Then I saw the black dog. On the other side... He had already distinguished me from those sheep and goats. Rearing on his hind legs, he showed all his teeth suspiciously, smelling my fear...
Soon enough I realised that it was better for me to stay with them. I was hoping, if possible, that this flow would never stop. Their stink had become mine. And their fur so warmed me at that day-break, I had surrendered to their protection.

I always knew that sometime it would happen. Now this wild black dog is waiting for me... He is powerful, with strong legs and pointed teeth. I know that I will not fight.

Everything that comes after will be humiliation.

                                                                                     ( extract of «Notes for Ifigenia» - Pd Hermes, 1980 )
                                                                                                      Translated by Evelyn Toynton

The explosion

Most of them were young, in their mid thirties, for what is worth, for the cassock like the uniform, make people look older in the eyes of others. Bowed, the shoulders hunched with no reason...I do not believe that it was due to repentance, some crazed apprehension rather kept them bent ; moving somehow femininely, always speaking in low voices, so as not to wake up the Wild Beast. The old men, however, looked more masculine.
I was waiting for my friend, from far-off Peru, to have his sleep out, as they had the vigil of John the Divine overnight. I chose to stay outside, sat on a stone bench in the yard. At a time, dropped in fatigue, worn out by a lifetime full of vigils, my eyelids and joints weighting down, some more visitors arrived, clergymen as well as laymen, that were surrounded courteously and obediently. The door-keeper started gathering them up in the inner yard, piling up the suitcases one beside the other, a blurred scene reminding of the time of school strolls when we were briefly introduced to Greece.
Embarrassed, I stood up and went to the reception, where a priest –at least thought so- revealed to me that he was, as it were, Most Reverent, Metropolite from Lesbos. "Each year I pay a visit the Mount", he confided in me and thought I reminded him of someone of his family that has been away for years. Besotted by sleep, since the host monk had left us alone engaged in showing around the newcomers, I offered to make the coffee for both of us.

I entered the small kitchen. At the corner seven boxes of delights were piled one on top of the other for treating "travelers or ill people"... Certainly, we look seriously ill. They see us running around, while they move slowly and pray... This is when I felt sobbing my heart out, having stifled my feelings for years. I turned on the gas cylinder, full open ; the spare cylinder too. I had just the time to see once more the treacle look in the Most Reverent and drugged the match with firm fingers. It was the very explosion that a Sunday afternoon, on the ninth of October, one thousand nine hundred eighty eight years after "our Savior's" birth, blew up the Monastery of Stavronikita, located in the eastern part of the Holly Mount and scattered the twenty-six monks among the cabbage and leek orchards.

The funny thing about it is that I was not heart. I went out again, full of vigor. I walked toward that wooden workbench at the edge of which a black clamp was attached. It was half-opened, suited me perfectly. I put my whole left palm in and started with my right hand squeezing my fingers full tilt to the bone. I was seized with a mild numbness, like a sweet faintness from head to toe, until I felt the outflow. In soft spasms, as if disciplined by an omnipotent order, I started ejaculating as I stood there, staring straight ahead of me at Mary, through the dirty window, with the eyes wet, trembling from anticipation, and throwing her cloths off one by one...

- What are you up to there ?... Go and have your smoke elsewhere !
  A monk was showing me reproachfully the way out.
  This one, I thought, had caught sight of me ... smoking ; this is only what he perceived !
- "I am a worker", I replied. One of those you called to fix the roof, now that winter is near and the roof is leaking...

                                                                                                              At Holly mount Athos, October 1988
                                                                                    ( extract of "Exercising readiness" – Pd Exandas, 1995 )
                                                                                                                           Translated by Irene Skouzos