by Tom Remiger
‘I’ll play anything,’ said Clark.
‘Not for me,’ said Granny.
‘Something for money,’ said Clark. ‘But anything. I’m going out of my mind like this.’
‘I’m not much of a gambler,’ said Breen. ‘Let’s make it a friendly. Or do it with matches.’
‘For money,’ said Clark.
‘Clark,’ said Breen. ‘Exactly how much do you like to gamble?’
There was a dull silence. The waves slopped against the side of the ship. They were faster now; the wind was picking up. The porthole was occluded with moving spray.
‘No more than anyone else,’ said Clark. ‘No more than anyone else.’
He was sitting on his bed, and his eager look was turning sullen. The light had gone out of his face the way a dog, eager for adventure, shuts its mouth when told to stay.
‘I might go out for a bit,’ Clark said.
As the door closed, Granny said, ‘There goes the entertainment.’ Then, after a pause: ‘Pass me that phrasebook, won’t you?’ The Greek phrasebook had already lost its cover. They were all sharing it.
Breen took out his black notebook. In his cramped handwriting he had written on the back page: ‘Tiger for Elaine.’ The next line was ‘Brennan for fight.’ The first line was crossed out.
Now underneath them he added: ‘Morrie for shame—Winton—someone you know.’ On the next line he wrote: ‘Clark for money. Did he owe to Cousins? Good treatment.’
He looked at the page for a bit. Then he crossed out the line with Morrie’s name. As with Tiger, it wasn’t enough of a motive.
He would have to talk to the captain.
Greece
14
It was the ninth of April 1941, and Breen could see smoke from what must have been Salonika, far away across the water. It was, he decided, the oil reserves burning. It was a greasy smoke. They had heard three days ago that Germany had declared war on Greece; that day had been the first with the sound of gunfire.
‘Mount Olympus,’ Sinclair had said, coming down to check the positions. ‘Mount Olympus!’
‘I would hardly have believed it myself,’ said Breen. They were on the south side of the pass. Above them were oaks and beeches; below them, the ridges collapsed into dense undergrowth on the way down to the plains. Mount Olympus looked like one of the Southern Alps; the forest going up to it might make a man homesick for the West Coast. One difference was that the forest was full of flowers. They carpeted the banks, and the company’s new and greasy tracks had, for preference, been made through the meadows of them. Lizards crawled beneath them, then poked their heads out to look at the intruders in battledress.
It was the first fine day in a long time.
Immediately below Sinclair’s company was a little village, and they could hear the tinkling of cow bells. The roads below reminded Breen of uncarded wool. They were jammed with an endless stream of vehicles. At night, when the sound carried better, the rumble of the traffic was like tanks. There were New Zealanders from the other brigades moving back from the abandoned defensive lines, English artillery, plodding Greek soldiers retreating from the collapse of the Yugoslav front wearing strips of old uniforms on their feet instead of boots, and countless refugees. Trucks, horses, donkeys, ox carts, and trudging men all mingled. The surfaces of the roads were disappearing.
The trucks drove through without hesitation for the refugees, forcing them to the verges, but they showed a curious deference to the soldiers, waiting for them to get out of the way. There was no way to defend this road, and no other way out once it was—as it had to be—destroyed, so somewhere behind Breen and Sinclair most of the battalion was trying to cut and surface a new road to the southwest. The rest were working on the positions. The wire hadn’t come up yet, so they were digging trenches and foxholes.
There was far too much space to cover, which meant the companies, the platoons, the sections of the battalion were isolated in their single posts. They dug and they wired. Their line, from Olympus down to the sea, marked the last Allied troops left on the continent.
‘There’ll be strife tonight, Christie says.’ The captain was looking at the smoke too. ‘Refugees. Fifth columnists. And the Germans’ll be coming right after them.’
‘About bloody time,’ said Breen. ‘A year and a half is long enough for anybody to wait.’
‘Look,’ said the captain. ‘While there’s no one about.’
‘They can see us,’ said Breen. ‘We’ve imported the West Coasters down to blast the stones out of the trenches just over there. You must have heard them.’
‘No one to hear, I mean. Clark. I’ve been thinking. You might be right, but I’m not going to say anything to the colonel. It’s unproveable. And you can’t drag a sergeant out just before everything begins.’
‘Are you afraid?’ asked Breen. ‘Worried he’ll shoot us in the back if we accuse him?’ His anger came out as mockery.
‘Don’t talk bullshit. We’re safe.’ The captain smiled. ‘Safe from him, at least. If we assume you’re right, he had his quarrel with Cousins, not with us. And I sympathise with the man, really. Imagine owing all this money to someone you also have to try to control. You can sort of see, if you squint at it sideways, how it might have become a military necessity. You can’t control the platoon with him in it and you can’t get rid of him, and something in you cracks.’
‘You’re saying we can’t have justice because justice is not a military necessity,’ said Breen.
‘A delay isn’t injustice,’ said the captain. ‘What would be unjust is risking the lives of many for the sake of suspicions. I’m telling you—no, Daisy, I’m asking you—we leave it for now, all right?’
‘All right,’ said Breen. ‘For now.’
‘So,’ Sinclair said. ‘We’re going to turf the villagers out. That’s what I came down to tell you, officially.’
Breen had known that this was coming. They wanted to be able to use the mortars in their defence; the whole plan depended on it. And that meant mortaring the village if they had to. ‘Poor old things,’ he said. ‘I’ll take some of the boys down to let them know. They were packing up all yesterday.’ He had watched in awe the way they would push the head and forelegs of a goat through their own legs and, holding it in place, reach through its hind legs to milk.
‘And the refugees,’ said the captain. ‘They’ll be coming in numbers now. Still none through here, Christie says; the Germans played all sorts of tricks with false refugees in France, and even if they’re genuine they’ll clutter things up. Keep sending them off down to the coast road, and make sure they realise we’ll be blowing up the road as soon as the div cav come through.’
‘They all look so tired,’ said Breen. ‘They don’t look sad; they look tired.’
‘You don’t have any French, do you?’
‘No.’
‘I might try to get Christie sent down. Some of them speak French, at least. Bluey says it’s been a struggle.’
‘You want the good news?’ said Breen.
‘Yes?’
‘If the villagers are gone, that means empty houses. No more fucking tents.’ It had been raining for days, with flurries of snow. Everything Breen owned was damp. The smell of damp was on his skin.
‘I don’t think we’ll be staying here long,’ said the captain. ‘The Greek army won’t be able to hold, and when they collapse we’ll be cut off.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Breen. He turned his eyes to the mountains. He thought: ‘I lift my head sometimes, and look at the mountains.’ That is what I do. ‘I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains, from whence help shall come to me.’
Christie never came down. There were refugees causing strife everywhere. That night the company stood to all night in softly falling snow that muffled all sound. The moon was almost full.
Each night now they worked on the positions in the moonlight. Most of them slept during the day. Those with energy came down to the village and found an empty house.
Others slept in the mud at the bottom of the trenches, wrapped in groundsheets and with their gas capes over them. They collected little stones and hung them in tins on the wires to alert them to attempts at infiltration. One or two threw pebbles at one another, but Sergeant Gibson told them to cut it out and the game stopped.
The right flank was overlooked by an arm of the ridge. Breen knew that it needed to be manned, but there was no way to support whoever got the job. Newman volunteered for it. Breen sent him up with a Tommy gun and the feeling that he was murdering him. The corporal dug a solitary pit and carried up three bottles of water.
‘Keep walking up and down,’ said Breen. ‘Make it look like there’s more of you.’
‘And make it more likely they’ll have a shot? Sure, I reckon.’
Grumbling made things easier.
On the eleventh it was Good Friday. That was their fourth night of standing to, waiting for the attack. The retreating transport through the pass sounded more and more like tanks coming towards them. The village was finally empty, and the positions were done, and there was nothing to do.
Breen had watched the villagers leaving. They were almost all women and children. The men were in Albania. The women loaded the donkeys and led the pigs on pieces of string, and staggered under unbearable loads. Breen looked in the other direction when some of his men abandoned work to help them. The posts were almost ready now. They were good, but there were so few to man them. No one had ever defeated the Germans. They had won every single battle.
Breen’s batman, Moohan, found an abandoned puppy in the village. He adopted it and named it, for inscrutable reasons, Zebediah. Breen found him playing with it. The dog growled and whirred at one end of a piece of rope, towing his new owner about the hungry grass.
‘Gidday,’ Breen said. ‘How’s it?’
‘Pretty good. He’s a beautiful wee thing.’
Zebediah had a lovely body to him, lithe and powerful. Most pups are fat and clumsy but this one wasn’t.
‘I reckon.’
Moohan surprised Breen by passing him the rope. ‘Give him a tow.’
The rain kept coming down. The mist swirled about them. They would watch the wind pick up; as the mist cleared they would see a few hundred yards, and then once again visibility would diminish. The scrub would fade into shadows.
‘Perfect weather for infiltration,’ said Breen.
‘But it’s a good country to die in,’ said Gibson.
The next day Sinclair came down to tell them that they were part of a new Anzac corps.
‘Bloody sentimentality,’ said Gibson.
‘You know what General Blamey said to the bloke with the message,’ the captain replied. ‘You know what I’m saying to you? There you are, sonny, you’ve only got to live till six o’clock tonight to be a fucking Anzac.’
‘Here’s to us,’ said Breen.
‘They reckon they’ll blow the road day after tomorrow,’ said the captain.
15
Breen and the captain took the afternoon off. What else was there to do? There was an electric thrill to the unspoken prospect, a live-wire tautness that threw Breen back. They followed the creek that ran behind their ridge to find the waterfall they had been told was there. It would be good to have a swim. You got to feel dirty after a while.
The ground went up steeply. There had been a slip over what was left of the track. They left the riverside and went up the steep slope, scrabbling with their fingers in the damp earth and dry leaves. The creek was flowing past noisily and the cicadas were buzzing like an army.
The roots were a ladder. A border of rough leaves to each branch, the pale and the green. A heavy rotting log balanced just on the ridge line, set in the dry suck of earth, that took their weight. Then down a narrow edge with the cliff on their right and the water visible below.
As they rounded the corner to the waterfall, they stopped. Breen saw something indistinct between the rushing waters. The captain looked ahead for a moment, then turned back to him.
‘You saw?’ asked Breen, the image of the woman’s round breasts suspended indistinctly in the spray as she reached for her clothes.
‘I only saw the one man,’ the captain said. Breen looked again. Under the waterfall, fine silt filled the gaps between the stones, dropping slow out of the agitated water. The foam below the waterfall bubbled white, and mist coated the leaves of the trees and dripped down, any sound suppressed by the hammering water. The river was running high, and the spray came down heavy as stones. There was no one there.
‘Christ,’ said Breen. ‘My nerve’s going.’
‘What did you see?’ the captain asked him. ‘It was a funny trick of the light for us both to see something.’
‘I saw a man there, and a woman, and they were naked under the waterfall.’
‘I saw one man hiding there and he was bleeding.’
In silence they walked closer to the base of the waterfall. Droplets touched their faces like tears. Breen’s eyes skirted the white, looking for human forms that had never been there. It was freezing but they hadn’t had a chance to wash for a long time. The water was white where it was agitated; further down it had the milky blueness of snow melt.
The captain began to strip. His chest was smooth and flat. His nipples were small and dark, and between them was a dark ocean of hair. On his shoulder there was a tattoo. Breen could see a crescent moon and faded blurs that might be stars. He averted his eyes, unsure why, and when he looked back the captain was placing a tobacco tin on his folded shirt.
The waterfall was white and cold. It fell like a broad-headed hammer on your head and shoulders; if you dived through it the thrumming vibration against your white back would fall away, your head would break through a damp space, and you could look out at the world through a veil.
Hands pushed Breen under the waterfall, and it came down like blows on his hunched shoulders. His own brown hands found the unresisting figure of the captain, his white shoulders. But Breen was not strong enough to push him all the way, and the captain’s white body twisted in the green water.
The captain was sensitive and gentle. He was far more of a mind than the others around were.
Breen remembered the placid warmth of swimming too long in the cold salt of the sea, once the cold had numbed him. They swam together. ‘We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.’ Montaigne? But watch a fish. You place it back in the cool green, deep green water and the flick of a tail drives it away into darkness. Imagine the feeling. The slide into comprehension, that searched-for feeling.
Or maybe it is not like that. Breen did not know. How could he know?
It is the feeling of your face being too close to the fire, so that you feel burning and freezing at the same time, the two extremes joined by the bridge of your body.
Breen had a vigour in him, as the captain would remember him: a 1939 appeal in his smile, as if there were still possibilities out there.
Moohan had stirred up the ashes of a fire and put the kettle on. He and Breen were sharing the biggest house in the village with Gibson. It was the only one with glass windows. Breen drew something in the frost-touched glass, then brushed the palm of his hand across it.
The captain came down to sleep in a nearby house, a single room with a bed made out of sacking. One morning he did not emerge and Breen took a cup of tea across. He looked at the captain sleeping. His face in repose looked younger, open and trusting. Breen put down the tea on the shelf that served as a table. He put his cold hand on the captain’s cheek to wake him up quietly. He was thinking of that erased drawing. Breen drew his hand back and forth as the captain’s eyes opened, marvelling at how in one direction it glided smoothly, and in the other, when he drew his hand up, there was a rustle of stubble, a stiff resistance in a thousand tiny parts.
The captain’s blue eyes opened. He had, thought Breen, the most beautiful eyes, with full dark lashes like a gir
l. They were coloured against the black just like the pansies that sprang up under the trees.
‘You’re being gentle,’ Sinclair said, in a way Breen didn’t quite understand. He sat up like a child to drink his tea. ‘Thank you, Daisy.’ He was brusque, but there was a hint of apology he did not know how to express.
He got up to shave, gruntingly. A fly buzzed by, heavy and slow, and Breen noticed the smell of stale cigarettes among the room’s smell of leather and metal, mud and stone.
The thirteenth of April was Easter.
It was raining, softly and persistently. Looking out from the lean-to attached to his house that morning, Breen saw a stoat dancing. It left small trails across the grass. They were like a sort of writing he couldn’t read.
There was a cough behind him and the stoat vanished into the glossy weeds underneath the trees.
‘Morning,’ Breen said. ‘A damp one.’
‘The best time to go out,’ said the captain. ‘If it’s fine, then the weather’ll change to rain. If it’s raining, then the weather can only change for the better.’
‘You’re a real joker, Sinclair.’
Father Emmet could not reach them; no one could, but the Anglicans held a church parade behind the battalion headquarters. The men looked past the chaplain to the plain below. The view was like home. The Catholics huddled apart under the supervision of Breen, Tiger, and Sinclair, watching but not partaking. The Presbyterians blended themselves in.
Breen found some lines of verse running through his head: ‘That we continue watchful on the rampart / Concerns no priest.’
There was nothing to do but wait. On the fourteenth they could hear more guns than before, and early in the morning the vehicles went back before the road was destroyed. They had not been able to finish the new road. There hadn’t been a new issue of cigarettes, or food, come to that, but it was easier to do with only a little food.
16
Later that afternoon, Moohan came up to Breen. ‘Gibsy sent me,’ he said. ‘There’s some refugees come through who won’t move along. He wants you to come down and talk some sense into them.’