Books: Last of the Sweaty Saints

THE FRATRICIDES by Nikos Kazantzakis. 254 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.

A fervent recorder of wars and revolutions, the late Nikos Kazantzakis knew that progress is often ushered in by violence. But the 1947-49Greek civil war seemed to him beyond all reason. “The criminals have cut Greece in two, as if she were not alive,” cries the priest-hero of his last novel. “And each piece has gone mad and wants to eat the other. I stand alone, deserted, and no matter whose corpse I see, my heart aches; because I see a part of Greece rotting.” Kazantzakis’ The Fratricides is a frantic, sometimes bombastic book, more sermon than novel, written, as it were, at the top of his voice. The old man, who died in 1957, did not go gentle into that good night.

Dancing on Coals. The town of Castello, perched high in the rugged, inhospitable Epirus mountains, has been split by the war. The Royalists still control the village; the Reds have taken to the hills. Every day the two forces meet in bloody, hand-to-hand combat, using rifles, knives, teeth and fingernails. It is because they have lived so close to one another that they fight so fiercely. No one excels Kazantzakis in portraying this love-hate ambivalence. In one memorable vignette, Kazantzakis tells how a group of Royalists and Reds shoot it out one winter’s day in a ravine, and then, exhausted and wounded, huddle together for warmth as their lives ebb out.

Only one man in Castello refuses to take sides. Seventy-year-old Father Yánaros is the last of a distinguished line of Kazantzakis heroes—sweaty, seedy, tortured saints, torn between faith and doubt, hope and despair, a yearning for solitude and a compulsion to aid their fellow men. Yánaros travels through life as if on a tightrope, or as he puts it, dancing barefoot on hot coals: “Every saint is a firewalker. And so is every honest man in this hell we call life.”

Dreaming of a Last Judgment in which God not only shows mercy to everyone but in which even devils exchange their horns for wings, Yánaros determines to rely on the good will of both sides to end the war. He goes up into the hills one night, offers to surrender the town to the Communists if they promise to spare its inhabitants and allow them freedom. The Communists agree, and Yánaros departs with a fresh understanding of Communism as “the heart of man awakening and growling because it was hungry.”

Freedom from God. Father Yánaros returns to town and persuades his fellow citizens to overpower the Royalist leaders and truss them up. The Communists enter the town unmolested, announce that freedom will come “later,” and that all their enemies will be shot, including Yánaros. “Night falls upon us and the massacre of night begins,” the priest cries. “Now the beasts—birds, mice, caterpillars, jackals—will leap on one another to kill or kiss. God, what kind of world have you created? I cannot understand!”

Kazantzakis is made of sterner stuff than his doomed hero. It is clear from all his works that the greatest happiness is to be found in the greatest suffering, or as Kazantzakis puts it, Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection are one. Man helps God, as much as He helps man. By his own actions, man defines the nature of God. In spite of death and defeat, Father Yánaros enriches the world with the vision of the God for which he sacrificed himself.