Frank Georgalis – Writer

Salome: The Secret Love Story of the Third Maria; (Book, Part III)

“The Massacre of the Monks”

” The Atrocity on the monastery”   ”

The monastery

By: Frank Elias Georgalis

Part III “Expecting to hear nothing in return and feeling nothing but anger, I hastily began to examine these prostrated bodies one after another; they were all dead men. There were nothing but copies, fake copies of my friends. Most of them had no shoes. Here and there I could distinguish among those piles of limb and heads a familiar part or face. I saw some fingers dug into the ground as they had tried to crawl away having no other way of escaping. I put a curse on all the German, not along for shooting naive men and followers of celestial beliefs, which brings harm to no one, but they did not even take a little time to bury them. I rushed and rang the church bell signaling for help. Before I could get back to the pile of dead, hurried bodies with alarmed faces of some peasants and shepherds appeared to be rushing in my way. They were peasants who had heard the firing of the machineguns and assumed there was something wrong, rushed through the cruel terrain under the heat of the day from a long distance on foot to curb some suffering however they could. We all at first sat around and cried. Those who massacred were gone once they committed their horrid deed of their day. They left satisfied with their accomplished atrocity and we could just bury the dead, but the sorrow stayed behind. I did not thank God for letting me stay alive; how could I and why should I thank him?” “The following morning did not come with any intentions to elevate my spirit, or to lessen my depression. The sky was dark and gloomy and the clouds held back their pouring of the rain as if they were not in the mood to let go the cargo of water, as if not wishing to breathe life into any, plant, bird or animal, they seemed so insignificant to nature My breakfast consisted of just coffee, hoping to awake me from the nightmare, which haunted me all through the night. Those awful images of the boy stretched on the slab, the dead and disassembled monks, whom I had learned to love as my dearest brothers and the image of the Germans marching in, and the image of my cowerdness, hiding behind the church bell to save my skin were the only pictures in my mind. The kitchen looked like an empty space. The little boy’s foot steps coming to me bring the tobacco did not echo any more anywhere. The guilty feeling of not ringing the bell for aid whirled constantly in my head and it would not set me free. My dear Dimitri, please believe me when I tell you that I did not think that they were going to kill all of them.” While the old man stood erect, uttering this, still with the feeling of passion and pain, great drops of sweat grew upon his forehead. “I really did not think that there were people like those German soldiers in the world, Dimitri,” he said, in a whispering tone of his voice as if he had lost the strength of speaking. “I thought then that I had failed all the dead and did wrong for not ringing the bell and the only way to undo the wrong was to dispose of me,” Socrates continued, in the same voice. “I had no one to turn to for any consolation. I lived in a land without God with those horrible pictures in my head day and night; I felt cursed. I still don’t understand how one can live with such pictures in his head. I really did not live at all. The only difference between a dead man and me was that I breathed. I just breathed. I did not eat much and very often, I did not wash, I could not sleep. I listened, trying to catch a sound of a voice or a cry of an appeal. The terrible event stood before my eyes and led me to circles of no return or end. I waited for death to come to relieve me from that suffering. I knew that life will never leave us in peace, but why the additional suffering? I was alive and it was my fault to be alive.

Everything was hateful to me, and most of all myself. I hated everything dead or alive, big or small. But most of all, I hated the enemy coming in our country making terror to triumphant and progress to ferment. With their presence they clouded our beautiful skies. The rays from heaven, which bring down justice, tolerance, truth and love, were cut off by the intruders. How long can one go on hating so much and so many? How long can one live without having no one to please? How long can one go on living and not looking to do something good to anyone? I felt the monsters of lust and anger that live in our breast demanding to be fed. But lust had died from horrible death, giving room to anger to grow into rage. I only thought of ills in life. I only knew the two real ills in life, hate and sickness and I was stricken with both.

Life is no good when is cursed with those two ills. I tried to think which came first the hate or the sickness. Which do I try to get rid of first? I found out they both go together. I tried to think of some pleasures that I had known before and I found none. They say that a man should live for himself first.  I tried and could not. How could one live with someone he doesn’t like? I lived while I let others die, I thought. I then discovered another illness of life; the guilt.

“Such were my immeasurable bad feelings fed by the power of darkness, and grew by the wind of hate and guilt,” saying this  Socrates stopped for a moment to fill his lungs with some air. “I learned one day that the Germans had gone from Greece,” he continued with a slow pace. “Astakos was free and the people were happy again. They were happy but I wasn’t. How happy could they be, I asked myself, living as before with God, senseless payers and cheap religious ceremonies. I was disappointed for not being given the opportunity to pay back the intruders for what they had done at the monastery.”

“Suddenly one day coming out of the church, I came face to face with a man, who, standing in the rain, shivering from top to bottom with his shoulders raised to their highest and the neck lowered to its lowest, dressed in a worn out German uniform, looked at me and said nothing at all.

The German Visitor

What a great thing that was; a German soldier was suffering before my eyes. I was holding a piece of Lituria (Holy Bread) in my hand and he kept on looking at it. I knew he was hungry and I was glad. Then I knew that I would began to live again avenging the monks’ and the little orphan’s death. I knew then that I would live for glory and I would begin to live the life to the point I would spoil myself. Looking at him and surveying him, I discovered in that process another one of life’s ills; remorse. Thank God I was not stricken with hs kind of remorse, because I had done no harm to anyone, as I knew he had done. I knew the reason he had come there was that he was returning to the scene of the crime out of remorse and the only way one can get rid of remorse is to repent and to be punished? No, no repentance is any good unless one finds somebody to forgive him and I wasn’t about to forgive him, I was ready, willing and able to punish him severely. I stood there and I watched his every move. He attempted to put his bony hands in the folds of his tattered garments. His hands trembled as violently as if there were some eerie bugs on every knuckle. What was passing through his mind during his standing there in the rain, I could not guess. If there were any fears in me of God’s reprisal that would have been more powerful inducement to recoil from killing him, but there was none.” “Leaving him there, I began to walk towards my cell with the thoughts which were working within my brain. I paused when I reached the door to my cell, looked back and saw the German still standing in the rain shivering and probably knowing his unavoidable fate was unkind and very near and he knew I had a plan. There was no expression of surprise, no assumption of any inability to understand my behavior. There was no hint of an apology written anywhere on his face; there was no pleading for forgiveness; there was no declaration of any kind of remorse.  He clearly comprehended my intentions, but he did not take any steps to secure his own safety or to run away from his unkind pending fate. To the captors belong the spoils, I mumbled, and to the captured fit the punishment. Now I was the captor and he was the captured. How can two men standing a few feet from each other, breathe the same air and yet live in two different worlds and be plagued by different fates? All my former errors in life were to be renounced forever and his were to be brought forward before justice for the punishment.” “As I stood there and looked at him, I fastened my eyes upon his worn out uniform, the rain soaked cap that dripped water down his spine, his shivering body; it was all fashionable and part of the punishment because I had it” “I turned and headed for my cell to leave the bread there and fetch a rope to hang him, I suddenly thought of another of life’s ills: revenge. Revenge is so sweet and satisfying; it is like scratching the itching spot on a healing sore. I realized that he and I were in the same boat. The boat of the self condemned that the war creates. He wished to die as I wished to die, but neither one of us had the courage to take our own lives. How can you punish a man by death, who doesn’t wish to live?  I then thought the best satisfying revenge would be for me to bring him back to the point of life where it is sweet again to him. I started walking towards him with haste and with the speed and swiftness of the shadow of a moving cloud. Then, I suddenly stopped. Another thought had invaded my head. There is another punishment worse than death: it’s the tormenting, the torture and the suffering.

He came back with the hanging rope

I turned and went back into my cell and came back with a rope in my hand. When I got close to him he looked at me with a smile on his face. That was an ironic smile of a man who was about to win instead of lose. I stood there before him and running my eyes from his feet to his head I saw his knee-high German officer’s boots were shorter than their original length. I assumed he had cut off the top to resole the bottoms. I smiled as I thought that the poor man’s ingenuity had visited upon him. It had visited upon a member of the once proud and mighty German army. I figured then the only way to satisfy my revenge in full was to hear him cry out and moan as his punishment was at full force.” ‘You will take my life but you will lose your soul’, he said to me, with a sardonic smile. ‘You are poor; the only thing you have is my pity for you. Do what you choose,’ continued the German in fluent Greek. ‘Go-ahead sell your share in heaven cheaply. Take my life and you will give yours to the devil. You are free to cast me into hell, but you will cast yourself there along with me. Go on! Finish what you have in your head. I am looking for somebody to take my life, but who is going to take yours? You will live like a tailless snake, too strong to die and too weak to live. You won’t have the courage to kill yourself. Your suffering will only be increased with killing me. You are armed with the rope and the will to kill. I am unarmed with no will to live. What a perfect combination of two condemned men,’ said the German, and reaching into his pocket he took out a wallet. He opened it with one hand and showed me a picture of him, a woman and a little boy. ‘My wife and my son and I are in this picture. They are alive no more. The American bombs which fell from the sky killed both of them and I have nothing and nobody to go back to. After all I’ve told you, if you cannot find pity for me in you, then I have more pity in me for you,’ said the German soldier, putting his wallet back into his pocket with a trembling hand.’ “I was blinded by anger, guilty feelings and self-pity,” said the monk, and there he stopped and looked astonished. “Did you hear what I said, Dimitri? I said that I had self-pity. I didn’t have any self-pity because I had no love for myself; that is why I had no pity for the German. Now I realize, talking to you, that you cannot give anything to anyone that you don’t have for yourself. Blinded by anger, I quickly lashed the rope around his wet neck and pulled it tight and said with clenched teeth: You conniving dog, I whispered to him, now that the end is near and my aim is clear, you are trying to talk me into altering your destiny and setting you free by selling to me cheap philosophy. All of you have performed atrocities with the dexterity and the heart of wild dogs on my people that will go down in history as the masterpiece of all crimes.” “(Finishing my speech of anger, I reached and drew from his pocket his wallet and put it into mine. (And then without losing one more second of time, holding) the rope tightly I began to walk towards the back of the monastery, pulling him behind me as if he were a mad dog, I headed for the tree under which I had buried the young boy several months before. When we reached the almond tree, under which the little orphan was buried, I shoved him up against it. I stretched his arms outward, to resemble the cross, and  secured on his croos, I then walked around with the rest of the rope in my hand and tightened him nice and secure on the thick trunk of the tree, until he looked like a mummy,” continued the sexton.

The man stood there unmoved

and unafraid

‘My lord, are you going to butcher me or hang me?’ he asked.                                                                              ‘Neither the one nor the other, I will crucify you’ I replied. ‘Why do you call me ‘my lord’?’ ‘Because, you are my lord. You are holding my life in your hands. Do you have a lord?’ he asked me. ‘I had one, but no more,’ I said. Even though I had made up my mind to kill him, I extended the courtesy of speaking to him civilly, finding him to be rather calm and intelligent.”                                     ‘How can one live without a lord?’ he asked me.                                                                                                           ‘He can’t. You don’t think I live, do you?’                                                                                                                      ’You said you had one, where is he now?’ the German soldier asked.                                                                ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, while securing him to the tree. ‘He has left this country the moment you German dogs stepped your cursed paws upon it. He has turned everything to your friend the devil,’ I replied louder than before. ‘You are worse than heathens.’                                                                                 ‘If you are a Christian you must read something from the Holy Book before you kill me,’ suggested the German.                                                                                                                                                                                    ‘Why? Did you read anything to the monks and the little orphan you killed, more than a year ago?’ I asked                                                                                                                                                                                                  ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t here; but of course not. We are heathens, or worse than heathens’ said the German soldier still perfectly composed.”                                                                                                           ’Look, you are terrible, you killed the monks and the boy and I must kill you. Now I shall be terrible and useful. Even the Holly Book says ‘a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye’, I said, going around and making sure he was locked in place tight. Having repeated this, now, I remember several times, I recovered my balance with some difficulty— for I became quite giddy walking around the tree with the rope.”                                                                                                                                                                              ‘Do you read the Bible?’ he asked.                                                                                                                                       ’I did’ I replied.                                                                                                                                                                               ‘Now, I know why you’re so troublesome,’ he said.                                                                                                   ’Why am I so troublesome for reading the Bible?                                                                                                       ’‘No, not for reading the Bible, but for misinterpreting it.’                                                                        “Misinterpreting the Bible was nothing new to me about it. I knew and witnessed that many who read the Bible, interpret it the way to benefit themselves. But having no time to waste, thinking he and his tribe were the biggest offenders of the Holy Book, I only gave him a hard look and left and headed for the church where I remember there was a pistol, which was given to arch monk Athanasius to fire three shots in the air to let the National Insurgents know of any trouble at the monastery.” “As I entered the church to get the pistol to him and wound him and let him live for a while with pain, I sensed that the dark dull morning made the small house of worship even darker.”

The sexton reached under the altar and came up with a pistol

“As I reached under the Alter, the sound of unlocking the drawer and the opening door was so mysteriously stronger than expected, it echoed and re-echoed on every nook and crony and on every side; heads of pigeons appeared on every beam, while others took up their usual posts of observation. The church became darker and the wind lifted and roared like passing by monster making every beam to creak, as if it were trying to hold onto its assigned place. The church bell rang three times and the ringing bounced throughout the place of worship and the din of the distant barking dogs came closer. Unaffected by these unusual sounds; I came up with the pistol. I held it in my hands thrillingly knowing its purpose and destiny. I checked its ability and finding it loaded, I turned to leave to go and shoot and cripple the German soldier. Suddenly everything became still and bright. I clearly heard a voice coming from behind me. “Socrates, where are you going?” I turned; saw the vivid image of Jesus, similar to the one in the front of the Alter. Even though it was a dark and rainy day, I saw sunrays coming in through a window and showed Jesus’ face in the light, then in the shadow; and he then disappeared, as quickly as he had appeared. And all the noises began again at their normal pace of sound, before I could say anything. I felt my face grown lividly white with cold sweat coming out from every pore; I picked up the Bible and kissed it again and again, I threw down the pistol and fell on my knees and said, “My Lord, have mercy on me, My Lord. I now realize that I was about to do something very wrong. Please, forgive me.” “Comforting myself with this confession, I rushed outside with intent of releasing my German hostage, but I suddenly stopped a few feet away from the tree and became astonished seeing the scientific rule fighting with the legendary truth. Legend has its truth but is wholly different from the scientific truth. Scientific truth is truth based strictly on fact without imagination; and I say without imagination because it leaves nothing to the imagination. But legendary truth is the invented truth coming from realistic results. I realized science and legend cannot live together; they both fight with one another. In the eyes of the unadventurous science truth is the only truth, but in the eyes of the nonconformist legendary truth it is also a truth,” said Socrates. “Please, Socrates, tell me where are you driving at,” said Dimitri. “I will tell you what I mean, Dimitri; my German hostage had slipped away without untying one knot or cutting one stitch of the rope; that was the scientific impossibility, but it was the legendary truth that could not be explained, and  according to what Einstein said, ‘anything that I cannot explain scientifically I call it religion.’