“If there weren’t any pine trees, would I be able to build?” Irineos asked the first time he spoke with the forest ranger, who, like most civil servants, seemed to enjoy the confusion of the man who had become a stranger in his own country.
“Only if it were rocky, arid ground. Even if there were only brush, you still wouldn’t be able to build.”
At first, the taxi driver’s story went, he had gone to Belgium, where he worked for five years as a coal miner. But when the dust started bothering his lungs, he went to Vancouver, Canada, where he started off working in a car factory, and then he opened his first used car lot, which was soon followed by a second and then a third. Business was going well; he married Eulalia, a woman from his village, the daughter of immigrants; he had children, he put them through college, he married them off. But his dream— because there are dreams like Christmas trees, covered in ornaments, in the middle of town squares, trees that make you daydream when you look at them, that support our existence, dreams that are enlarged under the magnifying glass of sleep and of being in a foreign land—was one day to return to his village, to his island, and to build, upon the land of his forefathers, a home, a cottage for he and his wife, a sweet little cabin in which to rest their weary bones. He would have his rowboat, his beehives, and his goats; and friends from Vancouver could come and visit.
“If only you could thin the trees out on the sly,”
was the advice of an engineer, a fine young man who took pity on him. “Perhaps then you would be able to get a construction permit. Of course, if you had the right connections, that wouldn’t hurt either.”
The seed began to germinate in his head. And one night, he secretly cut down several pine trees with a chainsaw. But it seems that a fellow villager squealed on him, impelled by one of those ancient,
inextinguishable hatreds that one finds in villages. So not only did Irineos not get the construction permit, but the Forestry Department sued him for destroying trees.
“You don’t have to continue, I get the picture,” I said, for I could see he was getting upset.
But Irineos wanted to tell me all about it. I was a dream specialist and a journalist; to whom else would he tell his story, if not to me?
So he got mixed up in the Greek court system, where one needs to be a magician to get one’s rights vindicated. Accustomed to the Canadian way of life, in which bureaucracy is unknown, in which people aren’t always trying to poke each other’s eyes out, and in which everything — work, licenses, permits — obeys other, faster rhythms of development, his dream to build fossilized. But the idea of setting fire to the place never once dawned on him.
That summer, the whole of Greece had been in flames.
“I know,” I said, “I was here.”
Everywhere, during July and August, fires were breaking out as if nature were protesting the pitiless drought of the sky. Fires that would turn entire areas to ashes were started on the eve of the day when strong winds were expected, or on the day itself. Only a fire would get him out of his dead end, Irineos thought to himself, as he watched the news on TV
“But it was only an idea, mind you, because I was so exasperated.”
And, indeed, there was such a fire on the island that August. Violent, relentless, infernal. It destroyed everything, including his land. It burned down their prefabricated house; he and his wife barely made it.
The fire cost lives, since in their effort to put it out, both locals and foreigners fought with great determination. The wind was blowing like the devil.
Irineos and his fellow villagers found themselves in their rowboats out at sea, watching the savage spectacle with mixed emotions. But the others kept glancing over at him suspiciously, because he was unable to conceal in his face, illuminated by the reflections of the fire, an absurd air of satisfaction.
“Where were you yesterday afternoon, Irineos?”
the police sergeant asked him first thing in the morning, while they could still smell the horrible odor of burned wood. By an unfortunate coincidence, Irineos had been at his beehives, the area from which the fire had started, near Kynira. It seems he had been overheard at the cafe, saying that only if he burned the wretched plot of land would he be able to build on it.
“I’m not the one who set the fire, Officer. It was the wind that brought it all the way here; and nobody knows which way the wind is going to blow.”
Others had lost their goats, their sheep, their fortunes. Mitsoras, who was going to marry off his daughter on the fifteenth of August and was offering seven hundred lambs as a dowry, didn’t have a single animal left. Aunt Lissava, who looked after the chapel as if it were her own, found only the stone walls and the belfry left. Flames had devoured the sculpted wood icon. And the son of the resistance fighter had burned to death fighting the fire. Because the flames danced around like Salome. You didn’t know where they’d pop up next. And that brave young man had found himself wrapped in their veils without realizing it. He had believed in a new Greece.
Thus, it was not long before Irineos found himself in court again, since he didn’t have an alibi. Or rather, his alibi placed him in the very spot where the fire had started that afternoon. And that was incriminating evidence.
“As to who the arsonist was, we have no
knowledge,” he told me, as he had told the court. “We can’t know who it is. It might have been one person, or it might have been many. Then again it might not have been anyone.”
“How can that be?” the court asked.
“I’ll tell you how,” he answered. “There exists within nature the elements of its entropy, as in thermodynamics. It’s the famous second law. That’s how trees catch fire on their own and burn up.”
“Yes, but, as a court of law, we have to examine every possibility. That’s what we’re paid for.
Whatever you might say, the fire was started by certain people who wanted it. Who could those people have been on that Thursday, the day of the fire?”
“First of all, there were two yachts moored in the natural port of Kynira. There were tourists who had set up camp on the beach, under the pine trees.
“The tourists disappeared like birds at the sound of a gunshot, frightened from the forked branches of trees, the whole flock taking to the air and darkening the sky as they flew off elsewhere. As for the yachts….”
This seemed to be a cue for the rest of the members of the court to offer their own candidates.
“There were a couple of shepherds, Lazos and Sotiris, and the refugees at the settlement of Ano Karya.”
“And let’s not forget the wandering monk, with his knapsack over his shoulder, telling everyone
‘Repent! The time is nigh! The fire will burn you all!’”
“He disappeared. Either in the flames, or he returned across to Mount Áthos. In any case, the priest pronounced an anathema on him in church, because the monk was a heretic. But the priest’s beard didn’t escape from the fire either. He had to shave it off, and now he looks like a Catholic priest.”
“So then the monk is also a suspect?”
“Everyone is a suspect, I admit it. But Irineos is the prime suspect. The fire coincided with his third and last visit to the Forestry Department, where he was given the final ‘no’ by the forest ranger, and which he left muttering dark threats.”
“Count him in. But you and me, too. You’ve put on weight recently.”
“I’ve been overeating. I gave up smoking, so now I’m overeating. And do you know why I gave up smoking?”
“Because you’re less of a suspect if you don’t smoke.”
“Exactly.”
The great culprit had to be found and hung in the village square. “Who had reason to set the fire?”