39 Arsenios

39 Arsenios

Father Arsenios was saved by the war, as though the entire cycle of his life had been nothing but a curve through purgatory that had finally broken through an invisible carapace and brought him to his mission. His agonies of self-revulsion fell away, his greed and indolence, his alcoholic excesses, followed one another into the graveyard of the past, and it was as if a cubit had been added to his height. His theology wound subtly around itself like a snake, and transformed his soul, so that whereas in the past he knew that he had failed his God, he now knew that God had failed the holy land of Greece. It came to him, as a man, that he might surpass the God that made him, and do for Greece what God had not. He discovered within himself the gift of prophecy.

It occurred to him that he should acquire a large dog and train it to bite Italians, and to this end he bought an animal from Stamatis that was guaranteed to be patriotic, since its own sire already had achieved a long and honourable record of biting at the calves of soldiers. His own mongrel however, misinterpreting his teaching as commands to bite the tyres of passing military trucks, passed prematurely beyond the veil, and Arsenios adopted another, less excitable dog. He set out on foot, laden with nothing but a scrip and an olivewood cross that

would serve him as a staff.

Arsenios walked and preached. His blubbery thighs chafed against each other, bringing rashes and sores to his groin; in the height of summer the perspiration poured from his brow and the pits of his arms so that his black robes blossomed with sodden darker rings whose circumference was marked by wide irregular rims of fine white salt, and his beard glistened and dripped like the Arethusa spring. The leather soles of his black boots abraded away into contiguous holes until he walked on bare feet shod only by the uppers, trailing long strands of cobbler's thread behind him that left tracks in the pale dust like the marks of hair-thin snakes. In winter Arsenios discovered that any man will be warm who preserves himself in motion, and he `leaned his weight against the callous wind and the inordinate rain whilst his abject dog followed behind him, soaked to the skin, its tail between its legs, its head hanging dolefully, the very picture of unwise and unquestioning fealty.

From the lentisk bushes and the cypress of the north to the shingle sands of Skala in the south, from the underground lakes of Sami in the east to the vertiginous slopes of Petani in the west, Arsenios trudged and sermonised. As he walked, his head as lowered as that of his dog, he constructed phrases of righteous rage that would emerge as wild tirades outside the encampments of Italians. At the German garrisons he was ignored or rudely driven away with the butts of rifles, not because they were cruel, but because they did not share their ally's love of drama. To the Teutons he was an irritation rather than an entertainment, but to the Italians he was welcome relief from interminable card games and watching out for British bombers. They looked forward to his visitations with as much anticipation as they awaited the truck of whores, Arsenios being all the more welcome for the unpredictability of his arrivals and departures.

When he came the soldiers would gather round him, mesmerised by the operatic gestures of the weather-beaten priest and the thunderous roll of biblical Greek, of which they understood not one word. Arsenios would look from one smiling and delighted face to another, knowing that their incomprehension was absolute, but would still persist because it seemed to him that he had no choice. There were words piling up inside him, words of supernatural strength, and it seemed to him that the hand of the Virgin pushed him on, that the grief of Christ had been poured into him, that it overflowed his soul and must be given to the land: `Schismatics of Rome, brothers lost to us, children of Christ who weeps for thee, sacrificial lambs, pawns of tyrants, ye who are unjust, ye who are filthy, ye who

are unrighteous, ye who are dogs and whoremongers, sorcerers and idolaters, ye whose hearts are unlit by the sun, ye that have no temple within, ye of a nation that shall not be saved, ye who work abominations, ye who defile the Virgin, ye that thirst for truth and cannot drink it; ye are corrupt and have done nothing good, ye have done iniquity, ye have eaten my people as they eat bread, ye have not called upon God, ye have encamped against our cities, ye have been put to shame and God has despised thee and scattered thy bones. Behold, the Lord shall give ear to the words of my mouth, for He is my helper, He is with them who uphold my soul, He shall reward evils unto mine enemies, he shall cut them off in His truth, for strangers are risen up against my people, oppressors seek after our trees of olive and our maidens, wickedness is in the midst of them. My soul is amongst lions, and I lie even with them that are set on fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword.

`Yea, in heart ye work wickedness, ye weigh the violence of your hands upon the earth, ye are estranged from the womb, ye go astray as soon as ye be born, speaking lies, thy poison is like the poison of the serpent, ye are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear.

`But we are like the green olive in the House of God, and we shall trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever, for God has stretched forth His hand and God has spoken with the word of His mouth and behold I have heard him speaking in a great wind and in the midst of storms, in the stones of Assos and the caves of mountains. He bath strewn His salt in the lake of Melissani, He hath stored up iron in the skies of Lixouri.

`Schismatics of Rome, the Lord bath prepared a pit, He bath laid up a net for thy steps, and calamities shall overpass thee, for Satan shall be loosed from his prison, and Gog and Magog shall go out to deceive the nations that are in the four quarters of the earth, to gather them together in battle; the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And fire shall come out of heaven above the beloved city, and devour thee, and thou shalt be cast, yea, even the innocent and those as pure as babes, into the lake of oil and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are, and thy flesh shall be divided from thy bones, for ye have not been found written in the book of life and shall be cast into the flame.

make all things new, and He shall give to my people that are athirst to drink of the water of the fountain of life freely. For He shall take the Beast and the false prophet and the armies gathered together against us that wrought miracles before them, and He shall smite them, and the fowls of the air shall be filled with their flesh, and they shall be cast alive into the lake of fire burning with brimstone, and the remnant shall be slain.'

The soldiers provided Arsenios and his dog with bread and water, scraps and olives, and in monasteries as far apart as those of Agrilion and Kipoureon he was cared for by nuns and monks. But the hard nights in caves, the meagre diet, the two years of relentless tramping, caused his ample flesh to fall away until his vast black robes flapped about a body that had become a skeleton stretched with skin and burned with sores. His vivid eyes burned forth from above hollow cheeks, the parchment of his hands and face grew dark as teak, and for the first time in his life he found peace within himself and was happy. It is true that he neglected his parish completely, but it is probable that, had he lived, Arsenios might have become a saint.