by Gregory Day
‘I never read,’ she said.
I nodded, from back at the sink, struck by the plainness of the statement. I watched the kettle and spooned in the Robur from the packet.
There was silence, as she was rolling my smoke, hers going out on the ashtray. Suddenly, with a jerk, I needed desperately to climb back out into the light. I looked up, the tea slipped from my hands and I dropped the whole packet. Closed my eyes and swore.
Grabbing the brush from beside the kitchen-tidy, I unfolded The Argus from the bench onto the floor and brushed the leaves onto it. I scrolled the newspaper and poured the tea-leaves back into the box.
‘Thing with tea is,’ she said, ‘it’s hard to pick from mice droppings.’
A droll smile. Even more so given the state of her eye.
‘There’s no mice in this hut,’ I said, defiantly.
‘Yet.’
‘Well, that’s the advantage of a camp, I s’pose.’
‘Of keeping on the move, more like.’
‘That’s probably true.’
The kettle boiled, I poured the hot rainwater into the pot and brought it to the table. Then I dug out the bread from the wooden box I’d made for it and put butter down beside. Then two cups, throw-outs from the hospital, both Mother Mary blue but with one orange and one floral saucer.
She’d finished rolling my smoke. ‘So what’s the story with this bread?’ she asked.
I picked the lumpen slab up and broke off a piece for her with my hands.
‘I learnt how to make it on Crete,’ I said, beginning to put on the butter.
‘There’s rosemary in it?’
‘Yes. Normally you’d make it with thyme, whatever you’ve got really.’
She might have already known where I’d been – I had, after all, relayed bare facts to others on the island – but she didn’t seize it as an opening. A thaw of gratitude passed through me.
I poured the tea. Christening the pot with her company.
‘I lived with a family for a time,’ I said, now buttering my own bread. ‘Well, with a couple of families actually. This isn’t a patch on their bread but they taught me some of what to do, first while we were waiting around for the Germans to arrive and then again when we were trying to get rid of them.’
She chewed, drank her tea. Her eye was looking nasty again, now that I’d readjusted to the inside light.
‘Well that’s one good thing to come out of the war,’ she said. ‘It’s tasty.’
Our eyes met briefly. And in that look something came to me. As if I almost knew how to reach back, to locate the ancient source of wounds like ours.
So I talked. Talked some more there in the hut. About the difference in the breads from one part of the island to the other. I talked about Tassos Kavroulakis and his niece Adrasteia, but not about the night of the evacuation, or what happened afterwards. No, only about the days we spent in sunshine, waiting for the Germans. And then eventually about the day they came falling out of the sky. It felt easy enough to say that it was a bit like a duck shoot for a while there, except the ducks were fighting back, I joked, falling whether you hit them or not. It was even easy right there and then to hint at the days of slaughter that ensued. The disorientation. The cowardice, and the mettle.
Finally I joked how in the end it may have been the homemade bread of the south coast that turned me from an average soldier into something truly useful in the war.
For the first time some of the events of May ’41 comprised a story passing through my lips. Briefly, it seemed natural. The world’s burden was not only mine to carry. It was as if her own darkness had brought mine to the light. She was still in her listening, as if she could have sat there for a thousand years, till I’d told the whole lot, till even her eye and the anguish behind it had healed.
But less than an hour later she was gone from Wait-a-While, down the hill on her bike, riding through the trees like a porpoise through water. Breathing it in and blowing it out.
It was all too much. By eight o’clock I was in bed, utterly exhausted. My guts had begun to churn, any reprieve seemed over. I drifted off into a sleep as porous as flywire and dreamed her black eye had grown worse rather than better. She sat, her smoke going out in the abalone shell, her head in her hands. The black eye was not from any physical blow and it was I who’d made it worse. If I was to continue recounting my story in the same fashion it seemed I may just bludgeon her to death.
I came in and out of wakefulness appalled, getting up to dry retch into the sink before slugging down pints of water from the tank. What had seemed restorative had suddenly become awful. I should shut up once and for all, as I’d always intended.
What was I thinking, talking about shooting Germans like so many ducks on the lake?
It was madness from right before dawn that next morning, flying in the face of all advance; the increasing buffet of the wind a perverse voice from the east. I sat out on the porch as in some kind of penitential site, before grabbing the bucket and a handline from the nugget box and walking down the long hill to the jetty to fish.
As I say, madness, in a wind like that. But against any reasonable expectations I caught a few whiting quickly and returned up the hill with the morning still new and the wind finally petering out.
I sat back and brooded under the bullnose. In the stillness I considered taking her some fish but almost instantly I was up and out of mind, crazy, gnashing over the clearing in untied boots, the bucket clanging, and throwing those fish into the trees.
I slammed my body back down onto the bench. Facing a world flinging back onto itself. I was an evil wave hissing up onto the sand. Leaving its shadow on the beach.
If she ever returned how would I explain myself? In truth, she could probably cope with what I had to offload but something within me knew that throwing those poor fish away was a blasphemy to her.
And then I was up again, clawing through mildewy trunks, retrieving them one by one.
XIV
Eventually I raised myself up from the headland below the airfield and, not knowing what else to do, turned to cut through the night back to Tassos’ villa. The fatal calm of that night, the absence of killing itself, was frightening. I faltered again. This time it was not a ship in flames but suspicions about the villa, about Adrasteia and Tassos, that filled my head. A puppeteer’s strings tugged at the filth of my uniform. I was not in control.
That’s when the stone watermill sprung into my mind. Where I’d seen the pot-bellied old priest on the battle’s first day, struggling to retrieve the sword he’d driven into the guts of the dangling Kraut.
I headed north, using the looming Mount Juktas behind town as a bearing, but it wasn’t until dawn that I managed to thread my way to the vicinity of that mill. Relieved to find it, and to find it unoccupied, I stumbled down into its cold rocky shadows feeling like I had no friend in the world.
That was a long day, a day of close heat where I hid like a frightened mouse instead of heading out to investigate possibilities. The Stukas came in overhead as usual a couple of hours after the sun, and not long after I was joined by a pair of goats to whom the mill’s old timbers seemed to serve as a regular shelter. All day I stayed cooped up with those goats, unnerved by their stillness as they stood motionless amongst the weedy rubble in the opposite corner of the mill, staring straight at me. In lulls between Stukas they wandered outside, only to return when the sky began to scream again. They’d resume their staring in the ear-splitting noise, as if I was to blame for the violent interruption to their lives. But I was none the wiser, lurching as I was in my mind between doubts about Uncle Tassos back at the villa, and remembering the sweet power of his niece’s body, as we lay together on the night-slope, amongst the silent wreckage of the war, only hours before.
By the late afternoon the Stukas had taken an early exit, the goats no longer appeared interested in me, and it began to seem
likely that there had to be others in my situation, blokes who had missed the RN boats and were now hiding out in the sector. But how would I find them? And would Mug and Vern be amongst them? The local resistance networks were my best bet but, quite apart from my suspicions, I also felt too embarrassed now to return to Tassos’ villa.
As I sat wondering what to do, the goats grew agitated in the stillness. The larger one started to move about, to scratch at the dirt, and to bow his head and dip his nose between the back legs of his friend. As the light of the day weakened around the mill their hooves began to clatter in the dust and they started circling each other in an unmistakeable way. Thoughts of my immediate future cleared, as the big goat grew increasingly excitable, the she-goat alarmed, until amongst the scrabble of weed and gypsum the front hooves of the billy goat rose to clamp down on the hinds of his reluctant mate. The jutting began, she refusing to stay still, he moving them all the time around their end of the mill, her forelegs stumbling, and buckling too, as he thrust and grunted rapidly.
I felt sick at the sight of it, as if a cruelly unadorned version of my own crime was being acted out before me. On and on the billy goat thrusted, the female beginning to yelp from the savagery, until my throat became tight, my breathing shaky, my pores oozing sweat, and I could bear it no longer.
With true night descending I scrambled out from the mill, desperate for air. I stood, in the clearing where the paratrooper had been run through with the sword, gasping, completely at a loss. Finally, as the agitation in the mill behind me quietened, my own breathing slowly levelled.
Once again I took stock. With no solutions I made my way through the bed of the creek and up towards the villa.
*
On the lookout for Krauts, I stood in the bushes by the lane opposite the villa but couldn’t bring myself to go in. I watched as a group of four men came and went through the same gap in the courtyard wall where Adrasteia and I had left. Andartes. Was it possible that these people had planned for me to miss the boats? Was it they who’d cast some kind of magic over me?
I didn’t know, but despite, or perhaps because of what I’d shared with Adrasteia in the groves of the new moon the previous night, I felt incredibly naive. Virginal in fact. Stupid too, and lost.
Paralysed by confusion I waited in those bushes for hours. Eventually it was the smell of food cooking on Tassos’ fire that got me moving. But not towards the house. I went back down into the creekbed and made a beeline for The Charlies and the airfield, where I knew there were rows of orange trees newly ripened by the sun. I found the trees, peeled the fruit and ate it hungrily, looking around at the breech blocks and other destroyed equipment our boys had left behind. I could see now the barbed wire of The Charlies hanging limply down off the nipple closest to the town but the whole episode of us wiring the booby-trap, including the feather the commanding officer had placed in Vern’s cap for having come up with the idea, seemed to reassume its prior status as a dream.
Stuffing extra oranges in my kit I walked further on towards the water. I popped out by the charred Junkers fuselage on the headland where I’d been the night before. There was no one around. Or so I thought.
I sat down on the rocks and ate two more oranges, thinking of how we were warned against too much citrus back in Palestine. Well, there was no stopping me now. I looked across to the streets of Iraklio sloping down towards the harbour to my left, the cordial factory still burning under starlight.
I began to revisit the eerie visions I’d had on the rocks the night before, remembering the flames somehow crazing upwards from the water. My head fell into my hands once more as I felt the burning at the edges of my nostrils, though this time the smell of Adrasteia had been erased by the juice of the oranges.
I heard a sound at the water’s edge below. I raised my face, instinctively hopeful rather than wary, and listened out, like you might for chestnut teal.
But this was a human sound, a cursing.
With what now seems a senseless disregard for the fact that the island was officially German-occupied, I called out as if for a native companion.
Coo-ee!
The silence grew even thicker as the call died. The darkness curdled around me like black yoghurt. Until finally there came a reply, barely audible, a weak voice from the beach below.
Even now I can just make out the glow of the shore’s edge in my mind. I switch off my lamp, but the memories continue to glint. I put down my pen and close my eyes. I am heading for the water. Scrambling through the bushes until I find the towpath down.
*
There was a small and narrow lump on the shadowy grey beach, a soldier, bootless and foot-bright, wet to the bone, sitting compact by the edge of puny waves, his shivering arms bunched around drawn up knees.
Up close he was blowing hard. In the dark his face, like his feet, was whiter even than the waves.
He was muttering to himself. ‘Gawd,’ or something like that. ‘Gawd.’
I sat down, to his right. We knew each other, by sight, before Greece. We’d sat smoking with other blokes on the stone of unction in Jerusalem, we’d passed each other in the chaos of the previous ten days too, might even have seen each other taking hurried shits in the roadside flowers, carrying moaning stretchers on ghost-strewn paths, but neither of us knew the other now.
I offered him a smoke. He was grateful but didn’t look at me as he put it to his lips. The toking calmed his breathing a bit. Eventually he uttered his name, but strangely, in the rote cadence of reveille, as if I was an officer, as if having found him qualified me as somehow in charge.
‘Private Peregrine Coghlan, 2/4th. Wireless Operator.’ Then he added: ‘From Tumut, sir. On the Murrumbidgee. Shit scared of the sea.’
I lit up as well and managed to congratulate him on surviving whatever it was he’d been through. But before I could question him about what the hell had gone on, he was into it.
‘What in blazes . . . why’re they tryin’ to kill us . . .?’
A pint-sized bloke, even smaller drenched to the bone. A whippet’s bow to his back in the tight hunch where he sat, narrow-gutted from recent deprivations, a long Riverina face. It was clear by his whine that even in his anger he was no hero, no hard nut or man well met, just a shy soul the world had washed up. He took a fierce drag of the Players.
‘Noise, sir . . . like you wouldn’t . . . woke up in the . . . smelt somethin’ . . . looked around . . . no one, sir, the whole bloody ship to meself.’
Perry Coghlan sucked air of razor blades back through his nose and turned now to take a good sighting of me. As he peers through the night I open my eyes again here and feel for my pen in the darkness. Out in the strait the winds are searching. I sit for a while, thinking about him, until I flick on the light. I see him twig. He starts to shiver then, a badly idling engine about to stall.
‘Launched meself up onto the deck . . . our own guns . . . boom! . . . bloody right at us! The whole front ’arf hit an’ the fuckin noise . . .’
With the help of the cigarette his voice steadies, though it’s more like a wave of clarity has come over him, in order to register astonishment at his own courage.
‘I was up the back, in me socks. Been sleepin’ off the grog we got into while we were waitin’. Looked over the side and shit meself. I just bloody jumped. Can you credit it? This horrible screaming of metal, and hissin’ . . . started listin’ then . . . one side fucked and goin’ down. Then split, an almighty noise, almost clean in ’arf. Didn’t stop to look back. Just bloody got a wriggle on.’
He flicked his glowing butt, lowered his head. There was a pause before his narrow shoulders began to jut up and down. He was sobbing.
I remember looking away, out to sea, half out of respect and half from a terrible mixture of embarrassment and guilt.
XV
With the whiting in a box on the rack at my back I pedalled west along the middl
e road, letting my muscles revivify me further. Gangs of pheasants, feathered twos and threes, made way for me as I passed, in a way the wind didn’t. The wind had changed of course, as it always did, tilted and twisted in instants and moments, a trauma suddenly normalised and coming from the west. Just a headwind like I was used to, not that inverted mocking easterly which the morning had dished up.
I travelled between the woolly paperbarks. Up ahead a dark blob across the bright strip where the light hit the road. A stray jersey cow which, unlike the pheasants, remained unmoved as I approached, though somehow seemed perceptive of my state of mind. It stared while I rounded with my wheel among the stones, it was watching me with a mixture of sagacity and disdain: a crouching spirit, with legs going up and down too fast, borne away on a clattering contraption, not touching the ground either, not bothering to walk, too pent up, a scarred stick in a flapping coat.
As I rattled on beyond the cow I looked back to see it still regarding me, silently chewing on the folly of motion in a world that’s never still.
Pulling up in the main street I leant my bike against the co-op wall. I felt gaunt, like my cheekbones were driftwood sticking out through my face. Were they catching the light? I wondered.
She was there and I must have looked as if I needed to see her because she put down the big squash she was preparing for the scales and came straight out from behind the counter.
Her shiner was barely noticeable now, just the faintest custard colour in the underlid, and I sensed she almost wore that proudly, as if enough time had passed to prove that once again the future would be brighter than the past. She certainly moved that nimble way as she came out onto the shop floor proper, and with a confidence too, not even a hint of challenging why I came.
When I mentioned the fish she laughed like I was local. By that, I mean she knew me well enough for my traits to seem repetitive and incorrigible, and the laugh was unfettered, in its openness as full and replete as the wet brown stare of the jersey cow.