There’s really no way I could ever describe this to you, but hear me out anyway; and don’t expect me to go about it as usual, one thing after another, just hold on to what you think might be useful. Besides, soon enough you’ll see it all for yourself – you’ve barely gotten here – now you’re going to get all lined up and getting lined up is what counts most around here. Here, everything and everyone has their place in the line, the day is carved up by the clock, and, just as the hands of the clock never turn back, you’ll also need to follow onestraight-ahead line, whatever you do. Take bread, for example: if you can’t get some in the morning, when the time is right, there’s no chance you’ll get it anytime later. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow, when the clock’s hands go back where they were. Each and every thing around here has its place in time, and the same goes for space, mind you, you need to be careful with space as well. On a Saturday, for example, which is the day we stay indoors, and nobody goes out to work and we get to eat at those tables that you see down there, the bread —since we talked about bread —you must make sure to always put it on the left side of your plate. Right now, it probably sounds like you’ll find it hard to adapt, but once you begin to act as you should, it will look as if everything is taking care of itself – that’s the wonder of living inside a joint like this where everything is decided for you in advance, it’s a lot more relaxing this way, you’re really not making any effort at all. And don’t forget that no one here does anything more important than you, when you obey, you’re neither superior nor inferior to anyone else – everyone is the same. A broom, a pencil, a needle – they all are the same. And the same is the dutiful hand that holds them. Understand this and you’ll never have trouble here, because even your thoughts will run like clockwork—without delay and with a steady rhythm. That’s exactly how it will work, and it will lock into everything exactly the way it should and everything will run smoothly and time will flow like a river and you won’t even notice it. That’s what crosses my mind sometimes when I look out the window and down at the river, from high up where we stand – you don’t realize all this water is passing before you and goes out to the sea. Check it out some time, better do it in the morning when you’ve just woken up and the light is just right, everything looks perfectly still, gazing out through the window it’ll strike you as more of a strip of still water than an actual river. All in all, there’s a lot of water around and, true, a great deal of it stagnant, because each time the river floods, it leaves behind some oddly shaped lakes, like broken links of a chain – “ox-bows” is what people call them around here. And they have fish stranded inside them. You’ll pass right by a few of them, and you’ll see it all in the morning on your way to work. And that’s also the reason why it is so hot and humid and at night it’s a bit hard to sleep. Luckily, the cells have no doors and when the wind blows it creates a draft, and the windows are large too, and so, when there’s both air and light, inside and outside feel the same – you feel as if you were outside. And, because the building is circular and all the windows stand open, the wind – if it blows– enters from one side, passes through the cells opposite, crosses the empty space in the middle, and exits here, cooling everything down. Have you noticed how they built this place? From the first day they brought me in, it’s reminded me of a stadium – all that open space in the middle, and below us, and the tiers and cells all around, stacked on top of each other, facing forward without doors, from up here you can look around and see everywhere, the whole place. Of course, they didn’t build it so you could have a view, and I often catch myself thinking about how many glances meet each other inside this very circle. Oh, and look at that round watchtower down there in the middle – do you know what it reminds me of? A lighthouse. The guard sits behind the glass wall you see on the upper side – we call it the Pod, the Surveillance Ring, or simply the Ring. It looks like a lighthouse, doesn’t it? And that’s what it’s for, it’s a lighthouse alright, that’s what it is. At night when it’s on, the light is bright as hell, it shines everywhere. Of course, if there is only one man inside, he can’t be watching everything all the time, that goes without saying; still, you don’t know how many are in there or whether they’re watching, because the glass is a mirror. Whatever. At night it’s as bright as noon, and with the heat, when no breeze stirs at all, sleeping isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but as the warden says, and he loves saying it, when you’ve worked really hard and you’re bone-tired, you sleep the sleep of the just. This is the key he says, no other keys are needed here. And if it gets really hot – on those unbearable nights – he gives the word and they take a few men and put them down there – see that machine with the pedals? You sit and work the pedals on it, all night if they tell you to, and, take a look up there: that huge fan that rotates on the ceiling is driven by it. “Grinding out the wind”, that’s what we call it around here. Anyway, for me it was mostly the heat that bothered me here and for this reason alone I’m glad to be leaving tomorrow, it happens more often than not when it’s time to take a bath after work, it’s like bathing in spit – not water – that’s how hot it is in this place. And you can imagine what it’s like, when you’ve just come back from work and you’re dead on your feet – it goes without saying, it’s a matter of where they send you each time – but, all in all, everyone comes back exhausted, because when the sun is about to rise, you are already outside and you don’t return until it has set. In the morning, I don’t remember if I told you, as we go out through the gate, there’s bread on the right side, it’s inside these oil drums and you have to rush and grab some right away, while they’re still full. It’s kind of funny: as people keep taking and taking, their arms can’t reach the bread anymore, and the last ones dive in to get the last pieces and, of course, the bread at the bottom is also filthy. Then comes the walk to work, depending on where they take you: if they take you to the fields nearby, the road isn’t long, if they take you to town, it’s much farther, I’d reckon an hour away, give or take. Around here in the fields, there are animals and crops and what not: wheat, okra, onions, all kinds of stuff, even strawberries. Speaking of strawberries, you’ve got a bit of blood on your ear, why don’t you wipe it off. You’ve got some behind your ear as well. It turned an odd color, like you’ve got a wooden ear or something. Whatever. We do all kinds of work around here, there’s plenty to do, and you never stop, but as you keep moving – like I was telling you earlier – it’s as if you stayed still, as the river surface reflects the tree standing above it. If you come to think about it, we are much the same. Like we’re inside a motionless sea splashing and making waves – and that’s how they want us to be, those up above, they see us through the waves each of us raises around himself, and the wave of one breaks against the wave of another. And above, a sun glares down upon you, its rays are like needles, so many and so fine they touch every point of your body; a sun like a wheel whose spokes rotate around its center. This is the Sun of justice. The whole blessed day, you will go out with this sun, come back with it, and at last lie down under the beams of the lighthouse, which is the Sun of night. Sun, river – now it dawns on me that these two things I’ve been talking about all along are the very essence of this place. The sun is doing the watching and the river is doing the work, if you looked upon us from high above when we go to work in the morning and return in the evening, you’d see a river, a river of hoes and yellow poles on our shoulders, but it never spills to the sides, it stays in its riverbed – nothing escapes. And on either side you are guarded, men marching beside you so no one can stray. We call them the “Freemen”, those freemen keep you within the set limits. Lately, they’ve been taking us further out, there’s a site in town and that’s where we’re building. All kinds of stuff, raising scaffolding, hauling stones on our back, and they call what’s being built down there “the third house”, that’s what they named it, that’s what they told us, because they say they’d built a couple of them over there beforehand, but others tore them down on them and now they’re building a third one. They call it a house, but it’ll be big, they’re building it ‘for the one who built them’ –but I never got the meaning of that. They also say there was once a threshing floor there and they built on it twice, and both times others tore it down on them, the second time they uprooted it from its very foundations and now this is the third. This work is the worst, sometimes I come back at night dead on my feet and my legs ache so bad that when I fall asleep, it all goes on almost the same, as if in a dream. There’s a kind of vertical ladder, a high-reaching rope-ladder, I can’t make out in the dream where it leads, only that I must climb upwards three vertical miles. And then I wake up and I realize I see this because my legs ache. Other times the dream goes on and I see that I’ve climbed high up and can see the entire expanse around here just as it probably is in reality; barbed wire all around – wire, not walls – a thick barbed mesh with another, finer one inside it, like a sheer cloth beneath a coarse-knit sweater. And it’s all in a haze from the heat and humidity, and everything is like nets inside a blue space, and you can’t see them that well, I don’t know whether a fish sees the nets the same way, as if in a dream. Later, when I give it some thought, I wonder how in a place where everything is so clear and precise, how come dreams always remain faded, as it were, as if the mind deep down never changes at all. How can that be, since here you’re meant to have learned everything perfectly, as we said you would do, every inch of space and time, and put it in order as well. But this is the thing – you may be putting in order whatever is here, but you get to see only one part, you never see the whole thing, and no one will ever do you the favor of describing to you where you are or what lies outside. On the way, when they bring you during the night, it’s as if you were swimming in some sort of black paint, later, when you arrive, you see the glowing sign: Eastern Sector and the Y you saw at the gate. It goes without saying, they mentioned nothing about where they will take us tomorrow, I have no clue about that. Yesterday, they said “tomorrow”. They just said tomorrow, but they never said where. Maybe to the West, if that is the plan, I have no clue. We go wherever we’re taken, the fish always follows the water. That is its law, and if the lake where it’s stranded runs dry, only time will tell.
From Until the Victim Becomes our Own Used with permission of the publisher, Il Saggiatore. Copyright © 2025 by Dimitris Lyacos.
Translated by Andrew Barrett
Andrew Barrett is a translator and musician, who lives in Detroit, Michigan. He translates from the ancient Greek, modern Greek and Latin. He is currently one of forty translators, under the helm of Stanley Lombardo and William Levitan, who worked on a new translation of the Dionysiaca of Nonnos, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2021. He teaches, as an adjunct instructor, ancient Greek mythology at Wayne State University.
