by Gregory Day
‘He is lying,’ he said.
‘Lying?’
Tassos shrugged.
‘He can’t be,’ I said. ‘You didn’t see him on the beach.’
He gave the spitting pan a shake. ‘Ohi,’ he breathed. ‘You didn’t lay him in his bed. He wouldn’t stop crying.’
‘I saw the ship going down myself,’ I said.
Tassos turned to face me. I’d been with Adrasteia when the ships had set off, he knew what I had or hadn’t done.
‘From where?’ he asked, threateningly. ‘From where did you see the ship?’
‘From the . . . shore,’ I said, faltering. ‘On the rocks below The Charlies. When I went back to join the embussing. But I don’t know, maybe I . . .’
My voice trailed off. I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d seen, or whether I’d seen anything at all.
Tassos said nothing, turned his attention back to the eggs.
Above our heads the vines hung in silence. He coaxed the eggs in the herbs and oil. He set the coffee pot on the heat next to the pan. When the eggs were cooked through he splashed wine across them before folding the omelette over and then cutting it in half. He slid one onto a plate for me, keeping his half in the pan, which he was accustomed to eating from.
After a few slow mouthfuls he turned to me again and said: ‘All right. I believe you, Wesley Cress.’
He set the pan down, poured the coffee, and said it once more, but with his emphasis changed, perhaps to buttress my dawn-struck mind:
‘I believe you.’
He had branded Perry Coghlan a liar, but as events began to slip from the grasp of any straightforward eyewitness account, he said it again: ‘I believe you.’
As if it were the facts themselves he mistrusted, as if intuitions and myths were his only creed.
*
With the strength of the new morning any bridge between night and day had retracted and folded up behind us. The world was made less of glimmers now, more of hard light and shadow. On the courtyard wall a lizard splayed itself in the rising heat, a prehistoric figure yet at the same time alive. With its right foreleg higher than its left on the stone wall it was making progress but also perfectly still, surviving as if on a substance outside the realm of time.
By mid-morning neither Perry Coghlan, Adrasteia, or any of the other andartes had appeared, and Tassos and I sat on amongst fluctuating tendrils of light-pierced smoke. One might have expected a continuation of the mood of aftermath. Instead the air was full now of a strange portent, the quiet around us filled with the slow echo of the dearth of mercy on the face of the earth.
From time to time, with involuntary shudders, I considered how I’d crowned my own disaster with Adrasteia on the night-slope. The aftershocks were starting up in my body, each tremor cutting right through me. I’d been sober yet out of my mind, with the bold life of the girl. But now her beauty had been displaced by the exposure of the sun, and in her absence what we had shared became like the abandoned ship: a thing adrift, cast off from reality’s secure anchorage.
Like Perry I wanted to wake from a dream but I wouldn’t submit to the sleep that would allow it. And, of course, my host was a champion insomniac. He was waiting for messages, he said, waiting for the andartes to confirm the next step, the course of the days ahead; and as he waited, as if to delve further into the quandary of Perry Coghlan’s arrival on the shore, and my unlikely vision of the Imperial going down, he produced the relic from the mauve rag in his tunic jacket. Pendlebury’s eye. The talisman from the archaeologist kapetan.
It seemed like a key to a puzzle, proof that I had made the right decision in coming back to the villa, that I’d be best served to trust him. Without his power, I had no choice. Without his knowledge, no map. Nor did Perry Coghlan.
As Tassos closed his fingers around the relic, wrapping it away into the mauve rag, his dark hands secreting it back under the serge flap of his pocket, we heard sounds through the window of the upstairs room. Before long Perry appeared in the kitchen doorway like a frightened bird, a spirit squinting in mortal light, self-conscious in the black Cretan shirt and ballooning trousers.
Tassos stood up, and to my great surprise, bowed deeply and ceremoniously in front of the soldier. It was a formality I’d not seen in him before, and with all that I learnt in my subsequent travails, and in all that I have thought about on this other island since the war, I understand now that it was triggered by the informality he witnessed when he’d put Perry to bed the night before. The wild sobbing. With the German reprisals to come, with all that the island and its defenders had ahead of it, it was not the time for losing your nerve. Weak impulses must be ruled out, or at the very least reined in, harnessed into the discipline of dignity.
Straightening up, he said: ‘Come over, Boatman, and have kafe. To start the new day.’
I watched as he thrust his fingers under the flap of his breast pocket once again, retrieving the mauve in readiness, the glass eye wrapped up in its rag.
I remember Perry strining ‘g’day’ to me as he walked over. The greeting sounded odd, like some immensely primitive code. We were comrades by dint of a far-off land, but as our eyes met there was no avoiding the fact that we’d now been anointed, not by flag but by experience, by being left behind.
Tassos put a cup of coffee in Perry’s hand, bade him sit down on the bench, and, calling him ‘Boatman’ again, asked him how he slept.
‘Yairs,’ Perry said quietly, bleary-eyed, unwashed. ‘Fairly well I think.’
Tassos took the marble silica out of the mauve and held it up between his fingers to the light.
‘I want you to look at this.’
Nonplussed, Perry Coghlan blinked, turned to look at me for guidance.
‘It’s Pendlebury’s eye.’
His face screwed up, in disgust.
‘Uncle Tassos was one of the burial party when Pendlebury copped it,’ I explained. ‘He helped carry the body out west of the Chania gate, helped dig the grave in secret. He lifted the eye.’
‘Jesus.’
Perry’s own eyes cleared, re-set, peered again. He was recalling the legends of the archaeologist that were often told in the days of butterflies leading up to the battle. I too remembered the stories of how Pendlebury, officially the British vice-consul on the island but actually working to set up the local resistance networks in preparation for invasion, would leave the eye on the desk of his office in Iraklio, to let everyone know he was away in the hills.
Under Perry Coghlan’s gaze the glass eye now shone in the courtyard with an added lustre. A sealstone from Knossos recovered by Pendlebury himself would have seemed terribly distant by comparison.
Tassos said: ‘You see here, what is left of him. You have survived. A blessing to your family, your life. Your kafe is good?’
Perry sipped, winced again, but without shifting his gaze from Pendlebury’s eye. ‘Did you know him?’
Uncle Tassos smiled. ‘I steal from the dead, not from strangers,’ he said. ‘There are stories the eye cannot tell. Justice comes in the afterlife, the lives of our children. We fight today for peace tomorrow. We will never know it ourselves.’
He clasped his palm shut over the relic. Crow’s feet danced around his grinning eyes.
Eventually he began searching his teeth with a green wick, his open mouth a clutter of wonky teeth. Unsuccessful in the pursuit of whatever was stuck in his gums, he threw the twig into the fire and said: ‘There are days when man becomes half animal. Everything is at stake, we become simple, like plants, with no choice to be other than what we are. You see? To be good requires freedom. You can recognise evil by the way freedom is hurried out of the room, even the hope of freedom. Also the good. Man becomes a plant pushing his head through clay, with no possibility to be otherwise.’
I was smoking then. I’m still smoking now. And listening. Suddenly he s
pits. ‘Who makes the rules, the rules of war? Who makes them really?’
Perry leaned forward on the bench, his face stricken. He looked into the flames as Tassos vigorously prodded them with his stick.
‘The big problem is this,’ Tassos concluded. ‘You carry a god inside who will not put up with a life without choice. This is your feeling here.’ He pointed to his stomach. ‘When good is no longer possible, when the choice you face is between two things which terrify you, the god becomes a prisoner kicking and scratching at the walls. Is that not so, Boatman?’
But Perry was still a shard, just a scrap of jetsam floating on the night water.
Yet I felt the words. With the force of premonition. The hairs on my arms stood on end. The image of God, not as the crucified figure on the walls of the church by the lake at home, but as a figure in a cage, a wild animal kicking at the walls of war, burst through the darkness and printed itself onto my soul.
*
Later that day we heard the first reports of Nazi intentions now they had officially taken the island. Any Cretans known or found to have assisted the Allies would be executed. Adrasteia’s cousin, wiry little Nicko with the enormous ears, came in the afternoon to tell us that such recriminations had already begun. Sixteen civilians had been killed at Tsalikaki, to the west of the town, just because the Fallschirmjaeger were angry. They had also shot Yannis Manolakis, the son of Nickos who had sung for us at the villa, as he made his way along Agiou Mina Street back to his house. Yannis was not armed. They had shot him from a British military car, without even stopping. And a man named Christos Leppas, his wife and her old mother, had been shot in their home behind 1821 Street that morning.
So the punishment for resisting the invasion was already clear. Standing in the courtyard with his young face inflamed, Nicko parroted the words he’d overheard – Christos Leppas’ old mother never hurt a fly. As her son had come and gone with other andartes from her kitchen during the days of the battle, she’d holed up in a room at the back of the house, and that was where the Germans had found her, and where they shot her dead, sitting at her loom in the middle of her spotless stone floor. The old woman’s brains were scattered and caught amongst the strings of the loom. Like oysters hung out to dry. With his already high young voice stretched into incredulity, Nicko said the German soldiers felt no need to justify what they had done, other than to say, in English: ‘There will be more,’ and, ‘This is just the beginning.’
We sat around the fire discussing what to do. Tassos was expecting friends to arrive soon but, either way, for Perry and I the course was set. We would have to leave the villa. As soon as it was dark, Tassos told us.
If we had to leave I needed to see Adrasteia before we went, but in truth I wanted more than that. The wild god caged within me was roaring to touch her all over again, even in the midst of everything. Even a god needs to feel the balm and mercy, the absolution of unhitching the wire of war for a few moments, to suck those honey breasts, her smile shining with pride above them, her teeth sparkling, as she lifts up the front of her blouse like she did on the night-slope. I longed to feel those plump fingers round me again, her lips upon me, coaxing me out of myself, priming me for a role in the island horror.
Meanwhile Uncle Tassos’ voice was lowered. He was discussing our options in the corner of the courtyard with three musty-smelling men I’d never seen before. They listened with grave faces, dark-skinned rural men who seem to be under Tassos’ command. After an intense and, it seemed, satisfactory exchange, Tassos gestured to little Nicko, who’d been watching with Perry and I on the bench by the fire. The boy got up, bursting with pride at being involved, and in smoky whispers the men gave him directions to a meeting point, from where he would be led to a cave further north in the vineyards near Mount Juktas. When the grape farmers had left, Tassos explained that that was where Perry and I would be stowed away. Loyal villagers would bring us food until the right course was set.
While all this was being confirmed my eyes keep darting to the possibilities of the doorway back into the house, until Uncle Tassos turned and told me sharply to concentrate. She and a neighbour had left hours before on his orders, he said, in case the Germans appeared while Perry Coghlan and I were still at the house.
These are difficult truths. As Nazi troops strode angrily on the burning streets, their officers sanctioning a wanton revenge, I spent those last hours in the upstairs room of the Kavroulakis villa pretending to catch some sleep. Lying under a cotton blanket, my tears spilling from the events of the previous days, I shed layer after layer of tension and desire. When I’d rubbed myself raw and was finally done I could hear Tassos downstairs, detailing his strategies in both English and Greek, laying out plans to a still stunned Perry Coghlan and to a small group of andartes.
The sun rode high over the villa. The official battle was over but a new and even more lawless battle had begun, a battle of mongrel leftovers, Allies, locals, shepherds, cave-dwellers, mufti and otherwise, against revengeful invaders, their dark recriminations, their raping and ransacking and set-jaw firing squads; their wild sense of entitlement on an island never won.
*
It wasn’t for nothing that the mystics of yore liked to dwell in caves such as the one our grape farmer guide led us towards through the dusk and into the night. Costas spoke in rasping whispers and had little English – he knew the word ‘dog’ I remember, as there was constant barking far off in a village below. After farewelling Nicko and trekking inland for most of the night we climbed through the bushes of a creekbed, scrambling at last up to an outcrop where Costa showed us the cave entrance with the aid of a salvaged Fallschirmjaeger torch. Tassos had informed us that, because the road from Iraklio to Knossos had been captured by the Germans early on, the area immediately south of there was already a Nazi stronghold. We would have to be very careful as we travelled but we would be safe in this cave, he had said, looked after by proud pallikari.
Any doubts we had about being hidden near a region controlled by the enemy were erased when Tassos told us about the church made of milk. In the days of Turkish rule local villagers had found a holy relic on a lower slope of their town. They had applied to the sultan for permission to build a Christian church on the site. The request was granted, with the condition that they were forbidden to use the village water in the church’s construction. It was a sarcastic decree, typical, according to Tassos, of the disrespectful Turk, for how could you build a church without water for mixing cement? The villagers, however, found a way. Instead of water from the village cisterns they had used milk from their goats and sheep. And the church was built, much to the sultan’s displeasure. That was the calibre of the andartes in the area, Tassos told us. They were also the best winemakers in Kriti, he added with a grin.
I slept surprisingly well that first night in the cave, despite the smoke from the badly ventilated fire. I dreamt too, of bright milk running over grass so green it nearly blinded my eyes to look at it. There were lake reeds glinting in the dream, lake water marbling in the daylight at the edge of the milk stream, the smell of silage from our childhood paddocks by the lake was in the air and herons were browsing in the swales beside Dad’s glowing Polwarth lambs. It was the kind of heightened rural reprieve that a fair dinkum life on the land almost never provides, until gradually the blinding green of the grass became the strange acidic colour of my vision of the ship in flames. Now the pure white milk seemed to run with the express purpose of washing the violent colour out, and I watched fascinated in the dream as if at a battle between my prior and present selves.
Perry hadn’t slept as deeply as I. When I eventually woke to the determined Cretan light reaching into the mouth of the cave he was sitting in the cut of the cave mouth like a bag of bones, his rusty curls backlit by the morning. I managed a husky greeting but got no reply. The poor bastard was still out of sorts, there was nothing about his mood that inspired me to get up for a chat, and so I
rolled over and just lay there, my mind running back over events, trying to make sense of how on earth I’d ended up marooned in this badly ventilated island cave.
I saw the Junkers again, the German troop carriers from the battle’s first day, coming in formation over the sea towards Iraklio. Plane after plane caught alight from our fire, exploding in midair. I saw a Kraut paratrooper dangling from the tail of a plane, until it droned back out over the water and shrugged him off and into the drink. But soon enough the sky had filled with hundreds more of them, falling at the mercy of Iraklio’s regular afternoon sea breeze.
Rolling back over in my kit in the cave I looked out past Perry’s huddled figure towards Mount Juktas. They say the profile of the mountain represents the face of Zeus looking skyward from his tomb, but I was no more successful in making it out from where I lay than I was at fathoming how I’d come to be there. Suddenly my throat seemed full of razor blades. The prospect of a hot drink had me out of the swag of cold shadows and joining Perry in bright, circulating air.
We sat on our packs for a time, letting bones thaw. The heat was beginning to rise, and I for one was thankful the coolness of the cave seemed guaranteed by stone and the trickle of water that fell constantly onto a slimy rock in a recess at the cave’s back-end. Relighting the fire, we began discussing our prospects, agreeing things were delicately balanced between our duty to get off the island and back to our unit at the first reasonable opportunity, and the already impending consequences of what threatened to be savage reprisals against the villages. Removed as we were from immediate danger we would rely on intelligence from Tassos, Costas the grapefarmer, and the local networks. For now there was nothing we could do but wait for the next morsel of info.
In the mouth of the cave, and with nothing to be done about our immediate future – unlike Vern and Mug and the rest, who I was hoping would have been issued with new orders in Alexandria by now – we were condemned to reflect on the hell we had just experienced, the battle that had been botched and somehow lost; free also to darn our socks and to wash our hair in the mineral trickle, and, in my case, to think of Adrasteia.