The Colossus of Maroussi Read Online Free Page B

It has a desultory air which by evening becomes a quiet, irritating sort of dementia. You are constantly sitting down drinking something you don’t want to drink or else walking up and down aimlessly feeling desperately like a prisoner. Usually I treated myself to a shave and haircut whenever I went to town: I did it to while away the time and because it was so ridiculously cheap. It was the King’s barber, I was informed, who attended me, and the whole job came to about three and a half cents, including the tip. Corfu is a typical place of exile. The Kaiser used to make his residence here before he lost his crown. I went through the palace once to see what it was like. All palaces strike me as dreary and lugubrious places, but the Kaiser’s madhouse is about the worst piece of gimcrackery I have ever laid eyes on. It would make an excellent museum for Surrealistic art. At one end of the island, however, facing the abandoned palace, is the little spot called Kanoni, whence you look down upon the magical Toten Insel. In the evening Spiro sits here dreaming of his life in Rhode Island when the boot-legging traffic was in full swing. It is a spot which rightfully belongs to my friend Hans Reichel, the water colorist. The associations are Homeric, I know, but for me it partakes more of Stuttgart than of ancient Greece. When the moon is out and there is no sound save the breathing of the earth it is exactly the atmosphere which Reichel creates when he sits in a petrified dream and becomes limitrophe to birds and snails and gargoyles, to smoky moons and sweating stones, or to the sorrow-laden music which is constantly playing in his heart even when he rears like a crazed kangaroo and begins smashing everything in sight with his prehensile tail. If he should ever read these lines and know that I thought of him while looking at the Toten Insel, know that I was never the enemy he imagined me to be, it would make me very happy. Perhaps it was on one of these very evenings when I sat at Kanoni with Spiro looking down upon this place of enchantment that Reichel, who had nothing but love for the French, was dragged from his lair in the Impasse Rouet and placed in a sordid concentration camp.
     
     
    One day Theodore turned up—Dr. Theodore Stephanides. He knew all about plants, flowers, trees, rocks, minerals, low forms of animal life, microbes, diseases, stars, planets, comets and so on. Theodore is the most learned man I have ever met, and a saint to boot. Theodore has also translated a number of Greek poems into English. It was in this way that I heard for the first time the name Seferis, which is George Seferiades’ pen name. And then with a mixture of love, admiration and sly humor he pronounced for me the name Katsimbalis which, for some strange reason, immediately made an impression upon me. That evening Theodore gave us hallucinating descriptions of his life in the trenches with Katsimbalis on the Balkan front during the World War. The next day Durrell and I wrote an enthusiastic letter to Katsimbalis, who was in Athens, expressing the hope that we would all meet there shortly. Katsimbalis …we employed his name familiarly, as if we had known him all our lives. Soon thereafter Theodore left and then came the Countess X. with Niki and a family of young acrobats. They came upon us unexpectedly in a little boat laden with marvelous victuals and bottles of rare wine from the Countess’s estate. With this troupe of linguists, jugglers, acrobats and water nymphs things went whacky right from the start. Niki had Nile green eyes and her hair seemed to be entwined with serpents. Between the first and second visits of this extraordinary troupe, who always came by water in a boat heavily laden with good things, the Durrells and myself went camping for a stretch on a sandy beach facing the sea. Here time was completely blotted out. Mornings we were awakened by a crazy shepherd who insisted on leading his flock of sheep over our prone