This short story was published in a little magazine many more years ago than I want to remember. We no longer have visions. Too bad.
THE FIRST VISION.
James Allan Evans
I first saw Anastasios' hands as we sat in a
cafe in Old
Corinth,
drinking gazeuse. It was not easy to see Anastasios'
hands:
he so rarely kept them still. Generally they were
punctuating
a sentence or emphasizing an apostrophe. But now they
lay
still: a restive stillness as if they were ready to leap into
action
at any moment, but at least I saw them clearly and felt
vaguely
surprised. They were large strong hands, although
Anastasios
was not a big man, and they were coarse, with large,
grubby
fingernails, as if he had been digging with them. I wondered
if
he did dig in the earth with them. He talked of digging. Of
late,
he had talked a great deal about digging.
"I saw a vision last night," he
said.
I raised my eyebrows. "So?"
"Yes. It was my name saint who appeared
to me, and St.
Constantine
and his mother St. Eleni. I burned a candle to St.
Eleni
last week in honour of my mother, and then one week to the
day
later, St. Eleni appeared to me. She said, `Anastasios, you
must
dig...'"
"Where must you dig?"
Anastasios looked at me craftily, though it
was an open,
honest
craftiness at that, and he surmised that perhaps I was a
student
of archaeology. Yes, I said. I was. Had I often found buried treasure?
No,
seldom buried treasure. Simply broken pieces of clay pots, and
the
shattered foundations of houses abandoned a long time ago by people
who
were Anastasios' ancestors. And sometimes too, a piece of
sculptured
marble, still glistening faintly with its archaic
finish.
"St. Eleni said to me, `Anastasios, you
are a poor man.' `Pos,
sure,'
said I, `you need not be a saint to see that.' `Anastasios,
I
remember your mother," St. Eleni said, `and her name was Eleni
too,
and she was just like the Eleni whom Paris from Troy of old stole from
the
king of Sparta
called Menelaus. Your mother was a good woman,
and
she went on a pilrimage to Tinos once to ask
the holy ikon of
the
Virgin to cure her husband of a fever.' `Yes,' said I, `she was
a
good woman.' `But the Virgin did not wish to cure her husband,'
said
St. Eleni, `and so she gave her another husband who was good
to
her.' Now that was not true, my friend, for her second hisband
was
not good to her, nor to me, either, her son, but sometimes the
saints
see less clearly than we do, for they are further away.
Still,
it would be wrong to correct a saint. So I said nothing."
Anastasios had once taken me down to the
little cemetery at
Old
Corinth , with
its whitewasked wall and its cypress tress which
in
summer, rose like dark exclamation marks on the brown landscape,
and
I asked him where his mother lay buried. He said she did not
lie
there. Or rather, she had lain there, but after three years, he
had
dug up her remains and since they were well decomposed, as was
natural
for a woman who had gone to heaven, he had disposed of them
and
made room for someone else. I, with my North American primness,
was
a little shocked, but Anastasios added that if the body had not
been
properly decayed, it would have been worse. It would have been
a sign that the devil had taken his own.
a sign that the devil had taken his own.
"And then," Anastasios went on,
"Eleni said to me,
`Anastasios,
you may be a rich man and live in Athens
all the time
if
you listen to me. You know the Turkish walls on the
Akrocorinth?'"
Anastasios' hands became active again, and swept
towards
the great hill which towers above the Roman ruins of Old
Apollo
in the temple which is still marked by a few, thick columns
standing
on broken foundations above the city. The walls of the fortress were purple,
for
the
sun was setting in the west. "`Years ago, there was a pasha
lived
there, and he was wicked. But when the people rose, and drove
him
from his palace, the pasha thought to himself, `I shall not
leave
my treasure for these thieves. I shall dig a hole and bury
it.
Now, Anastasios," said Eleni, `I shall tell you where it is
buried.
When you climb up to the Turkish walls, you must enter the
fortress
by three gates. Just inside the second gate the treasure
is
buried.'"
"Others have looked for the treasure of
the pasha all over the
Akrocorinth,"
I said.
"The others did not have a saint,"
replied Anastasios.
"You will need St. Eleni," said I.
For, I thought to myself,
may
be able to move mountains, but she will not move the
Archaeological
Commission of the Kingdom
of Greece to give
Anastasios
permission to dig in the very middle of one of Greece 's
national
monuments. For that is what the Akrocorinth is. But I was
wrong.
A letter came from the Archaeological Commission and it
said,
Yes, if you have had a vision to dig, then you must dig. But
when
you have dug your great hole, you just fill it in again. You
just
do that whether or not you find a treasure.
So twelve men went with Anastasios, and they
dug a great hole
inside
the second gate of the Turkish fortification. The priests
blessed
the work, and Anastasios' lit a candle every day to St.
on
their parents, for now Anastasios might give them a great dowry,
and
they might make good marriages. People walked out from Old
Coreinth
to see the wonder. I alone left, and returned to Athens .
It was March when I came back, and the kapheneion at Old
coffee,
and he looked no more wealthy than before.
"What happened to the great hole on
Akrocorinth?" I asked.
"We filled it in," said
Anastasios.
"You found nothing?" said I.
Anastasios sat down, and with the thumb and
forefinger of one
hand,
he fished in his pocket and brought out something, and laid
it
on the table. It was a small oil cruet, made of buff-coloured
clay
such as you may still see in the hills along the Gulf of
their
dark plumage around its surface. It might have sat upon a
lady's
dressing-table six centuries before Christ, and here it was,
intact.
"It is beautiful," said I.
"Do you think it would make me
rich?" Anastasios asked?
"Not rich," said I.
"But it is beautiful. Many museums would
be proud to have it."
"Well, I shall not sell it," said
Anastasios. "I shall keep it
and look at it."
"Good," said I.
"It is a lovely thing."
"Who knows?" said Anastasios.
"Do you remember how St. Eleni
had a vision, and she dug and found the
very cross where Christ was
crucified? So I had a vision too, and I
dug, and I found this.
Perhaps it was used by Aphrodite, or St.
Paul, many ages ago."
"Who knows?" said I.
"And perhaps," said Anastasios
sagely, "I shall have another
vision. After all, that was my first
vision, ever, and you cannot
expect too much from these things until
you've had practice."