Zorba the Greek
by Nikos Kazantzakis
I may have more to say on this later. But for now I’d like to leave here this single passage, where Zorba clarifies that he is dismembered in the manner of Van Gogh (and not that of Origen). It begins with our story’s hero, lively but a bit seasick.
Zorba, too, had turned yellow and green. His bright eyes were blurred. But his sight became playful again toward evening. Pointing with his hand, he showed me two large dolphins leaping as they kept pace with the steamship.
“Dolphins!” he shouted with pleasure.
It was then that I saw for the first time that the forefinger of his left hand had been cut short near the middle.
“What happened to your finger, Zorba?” I shouted.
“Nothing!” he replied, piqued that I hadn’t enjoyed the dolphins as much as I should have.
“Did it get caught in some machine?” I persisted.
“What machine are you talking about? I cut it off myself.”
“Yourself! Why?”
“How can the likes of you understand, Boss?” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I told you that I had tried all the trades. So once I was a potter. I was crazy about that trade. Do you know what it means to grab a lump of clay and make what you want out of it? The wheel and the clay spin around like mad — ffrr! — with you standing over them saying, “I’ll make a pitcher,” “I’ll make a plate,” “I’ll make an oil lamp,” “I’ll make the Devil knows what”! That means, I’m telling you, that you’re truly human. Free!”
He had forgotten the sea, wasn’t biting the lemon anymore, and his sight was no longer blurred.
“So what about the finger?” I asked.
“It got in my way on the wheel, kept getting in the middle and spoiling my design. So one day I grabbed an adze and—”
“Didn’t it hurt?”
“Of course it hurt! Am I a tree trunk? I’m a man: it hurt. But it hindered me in my work, I’m telling you. So I cut it off!”
The sun had set, the sea had grown a little calmer; the clouds were dispersed. Venus, the Evening Star, twinkled in the sky. Looking at sea and sky, I fell into thought. To love live that, to take the adze and chop and feel the pain! But I concealed my emotion.
“That’s a bad system, Zorba,” I said with a laugh. "The saints’ lives record that an ascetic, in the same way, once saw a woman, was tempted, took a hatchet—”
“Damn him!” Zorba shouted, interrupting me because he guessed what I was going to say next. “Cut that off! What a nitwit! To hell with him! That’s blessed and never interferes.”
“What do you mean? It does interfere,” I insisted. “Indeed, a lot.”
“Interfere in what?”
“In entering the kingdom of heaven.”
Zorba looked askance at me and declared snidely, “Stupid! That’s the key to Paradise!” Raising his head, he eyed me carefully as though hoping to determine what ideas I had about the afterlife, kingdoms of heaven, women, priests. But apparently unable to understand very much, he shook his cankered gray head circumspectly. “A mutilated man doesn’t get into Paradise!”
End scene.
