by Gregory Day
And so, tormented, I became a tormentor, and through the whole rest of that day, and the next, I carried out this task as if born to it, punishing an already punished man until he could bear it no more.
*
Eventually Perry began to plead with me to shoot him dead. At last, after long hours of unbridled wrath, this bald request from a fellow Australian made me check myself. For God’s sake, Perry Coghlan was just a normal bloke, the same as me and Ken and Mug. As a rule, the Australian go is to take things as they come, with the underlying presumption, born from the first days of the convicts, that mankind’s basically a bastard. Once you accept that, everyone can get on with things and feel a sense of common justice in most predicaments. On any farm and by any river in Australia you’ll find men and women whose hard slog and dry humour is driven by such cynical logic. There was something whittled back about Perry Coghlan’s terrible pleading that reminded me he wasn’t any different.
So, with a quick pulse of thoughts by the fire, I told Perry to cut it out, that things would not be concluded that easy.
He fell back on his gear, went silent. Gradually, a tentative mood of mutual reprieve filled the cave.
For the first time then, and not for the last, I began to take myself into the events on the ship, to contemplate having done myself what Perry had chosen to do. We were volunteers, we’d been trained hastily in the desert and were drilled to always commit to the objectives of our companies and battalions, but it wasn’t till we entered the fray that we had any real idea. It was Vevi that had marshalled our alertness to a fine point. Every choice to leave cover, to shed ammo, to help an injured mate, had been taken with the daily hate whistling about the ears, with death summoning us to come. And though some of us were lucky enough to make it down through those deadly passes, it remains to be said that there are plenty of bodgy decisions made in the heat and panic of war, with very uneven consequences.
But, even as I reflected on all this, wincing from the pain of my blistering left hand, I smarted nevertheless at Perry’s decision. To abandon Vern. And the others. For Christ’s sake, just how many other blokes were below deck? Mug, for instance, would surely have been near Vern. And how long would it have taken that little prick Perry to bolt back, squeeze himself down through the hatch, and shake them awake? He would have only had to rustle one of them for the rest to get the picture.
A deep part of me ground with friction against the facts. Vern was drowned, and I’d seen it coming. The vision I’d had of the ship akimbo returned now as reality, his cause backfired, his face got at by a ravenous knot of moray eels.
*
Eventually Costa arrived to find the two of us slewn on our backs about the cave. He came scrambling up the rocks to the outcrop, brandishing the same Mauser revolver he’d left us with, a black cloth cap on his head, another unevenly dyed crimson sack, almost bigger than himself, slung over his shoulder.
In broken English the grape farmer said hello and made straight to Perry, who was suffering amongst his kit. There the little bastard lay, in boofy shorts, a dirty bandage loosening at his gory midriff, his other burns also exposed to abrasive grit riding on the air. The andarte was startled and, through his eyes, I saw how much weight Perry had lost in such a short time.
Costa gestured ‘why?’, ‘how?’, needing an explanation, but Perry said nothing, turning gingerly from his position to ease the pain.
Costa turned to where I sat in the light of the cave mouth. Don’t ask and you won’t need to be told. My look said it all. He was confused, but only for a brief moment. He turned to his sack of supplies and fished deep inside with the whole length of his arm. He pulled out a fig and threw it in my direction. Catching it in my good hand, I took a bite of the sweet fruit. I then watched as Perry Coghlan, fellow soldier, fellow demon amongst men, refused to do the same.
As I sunk into the fig, Costa told us, as best he could, the news he had. Already German reprisals on the villages had been catastrophic. In the nearby village of Skalani terrible vengeance had been enacted. There were rumours that such things were also happening in the western sector of the island.
From his pocket the grape farmer produced a leaflet, dropped by German planes, addressed to the soldiers of the Royal British army, navy and air force, advising us to give ourselves up immediately if we wanted to be treated in an honourable way. It talked of the harshness of the winter to come and was signed by the ‘Commander of Kreta’.
Both Perry and I took turns in reading the leaflet. ‘You must stay,’ Costa said. ‘Stay for one more month here.’
‘What about a boat?’ I asked. ‘A boat to get us off?’
The farmer shook his head firmly. He had this one order and was determined to issue it. ‘Tassos says stay.’
Perry turned his hips and groaned quietly. I found myself speaking for him. ‘Coghlan here might have to see a doctor,’ I said. ‘A doctor,’ I repeated for the Greek.
Costas shrugged his shoulders, as if there was nothing, given the precarious circumstances around the village, that anyone could do.
‘A yitroz,’ I said, suddenly remembering the word from when Adrasteia and I had nursed the wounded at the villa during the battle. ‘Tell Tassos Kavroulakis the Boatman needs a yitroz,’ I said. ‘Ne?’
Now the andarte nodded keenly. ‘The Boatman,’ he said, with a broad smile. And then in English: ‘The Boatman needs doctor.’
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Yitroz. The Boatman needs a doctor.’
*
Perry slept, with his arms behind his head, as if tempting me to shoot him in the same state in which he last saw Vern. In the late afternoon, I walked from my post by the burnt-out fire to the new food and began to pick amongst it.
With the cool skin of an orange in my burnt left hand I looked over at where he slept, not six feet from me. His face was pained, and I could see how badly his bandages needed to be changed. There was even, I fancied, a smell coming from his wounds; before long he could be in strife without the right medical attention.
For a brief few moments I sat on my haunches amidst the pile of provisions and considered shooting him after all. I had not been brought up to sit idly by and watch a creature suffer and that’s how, in this disturbed hour of my existence, I viewed the situation. I was back on the lakes smithereening an injured eagle. I got up, went to the rifle where it lay against the bough-seat I had dragged in near the fire, and took it back to where Perry lay asleep. I stood over him, looking down and breathing hard between saying Hail Marys, would you believe. Raising the gun to my shoulder, I sighted his head, leaning slightly to one side with his unburnt upper arm as a pillow. Peering down the barrel, I pointed it right into his downy little earhole.
When she was sick our mum used to joke that our ears keep growing even after we die . . . so Vern, if you can hear me: I looked right into his ear, so pink and young, muttering fragmented prayers whilst that Corangamite eagle kept skelting above your shot-up ship.
Coghlan was half Boatman, half eagle, a bandaged bird . . . and then the next thing I just buckled, my legs went out from under me and I tumbled to the ground, quivering and calling out indecipherable things, bawling for my brother, my mother’s Baby, for the smell of her dying bed and for simply being where I was, so far from what was real. And I sobbed out a version of the whole history, of us and all mankind, I reckon, all wrapped up in myself in that hideaway where all veils shields stalls drystone walls drywitted tarps against the truth of man had been removed.
I don’t know how long this went on for, time itself had changed its mask in the cave, until I heard a voice, a consoler, a gentle consoler, and my own racket of anguish was penetrated.
Slowly the terrified clamps the cave walls seemed to have on my brain began to loosen, the awful weight on my heart was whispered to. I calmed, slowly breathing, until I felt a touch, a lightness on my shoulder, and I turned and peered out of my w
ildness at Perry Coghlan from Tumut stroking my arm with the tenderness of a girl and speaking softly, soothing as best he could in his youngest and oldest voice.
My wailing had woken him. He may well have wondered if it was safe to ever fall asleep again as each time he woke the world was a stranger place, with his enemy mate and jailer in hoarse distress, calling insensate from deep in his loins. Yes, the Boatman must have wished the whole world back to sleep, to where sleep reigned in quiet over Vern and to where I’d almost banished him before collapsing. Mustering himself into compassion for his likely executioner, and indeed signalling he wanted to live again, he reached out his unburned fingers and touched me.
I think, looking back on it all, that I had come so close, in the heightened state of what I’d lost, to death or madness. But soon I was sitting, my gob agape, slack-jawed, exhausted, a pile of fresh food about me, as Perry resumed the pained adjustments of his trunk.
XVII
Even these days, I still say the words to myself to keep the demons at bay: ‘How shall I be contented with the divine administration?’
The mere phrase reminds me of the scale of things, the island set amidst the voluminous banking, carping, howling and receding sea, a small solid thing amidst the ocean of emotion and the mind swelling and rearing up. ‘The divine administration.’ It’s Epictetus. I like it, not only because it reminds me that King is small and mortal in metaphysical waters, but because it makes me laugh to think of the gods all corralled into desks in a shared building, calling and adjourning meetings, shuffling paperwork, as if the world is being run like a shire office. By holding the phrase between the thumb and forefinger of my mind, lightly like a pen as the sun goes down over the island, my submission is renewed.
At the end of three days and nights of constant writing on Wait-a-While, I coasted down from the brow of the hill on the bike and walked the ribbed sand of the beach, with epic old testament rays in the cloudy sky and red–purple groundsel shrivelling and turning into fluffy seed pom-poms all around me. At the high-tide line muttonbirds, like rags of ash, marked my progress alone in a dark coat of haunting. Dead, bedraggled, exhausted muttonbirds. Those that didn’t quite make it back to their burrows after the long Aleutian flight. Some were almost coffined in sand, others protruded with a wingtip, or simply from the way they’d fallen, or the way the waves had tumbled them over and abandoned them. Some lay with their black-hooked beaks ajar, as if they’d died mid-gasp from the effort, others had wings spread almost in imitation of their flight, but wind-combed now, salt-and-pepper journey birds gone to ground.
I walked dazed from my recollections, sitting as marks on the page back at Wait-a-While, an empty longneck beside them on the table in the hut. I carried the revisited burden on the moody beach. The ocean never stopped. It never stopped here on King, turning and hissing as if full of the tiger snakes of New Year Island, and it never stopped in the bay off Iraklio where it thoroughed its way like a medical dye into every nook and cranny of my dead brother’s body, left to lie in those waters where the word for ‘seduce’ was the very same as the word for ‘destroy’.
I consoled myself with the thought that I was following Lascelles’ instructions, shaking all this out of myself by writing it down, so it wouldn’t kill me, and so I wouldn’t have to bring it to Leonie; but nevertheless everywhere I looked the wrecked birds poked up from the sands like despondent memos. Also the beach, the coast, age old and rightly worn by the constancy, the dogged persistence of tragic tides. The whole island, sometimes so fresh and shining to behold, seemed as exhausted as the muttonbirds. And so the place wrapped around me as I walked. If it wasn’t for the feelings of umbrage and desire that would rise with every alternate beat of my heart, I might have figured once and for all that that beach under Fraser’s Bluff was a perfect place to die.
By the time I climbed the hill back home the idea had sprung and I went straight to the pages. I decided that rather than read them aloud or copy out again what I had already written for her, which is what I’d imagined I’d do, I would simply take them into Lascelles as the bundle they were, with the marks and corrections, the occasionally unintelligible ink-smear, the raw narrations as they occurred to me, and with nothing held back for insurance. Was this love I was feeling, or just the benefits of three nights and days of hard work? I was still unwashed, for god’s sake, but quite happily so. Or was this the digger’s solution, as Lascelles came to believe, a way of telling without having to speak, of getting it off the chest, a gift I could give because I didn’t want it in the house, my rotting soul made material, wrapped in brown paper, tied with string, and sent out from me like an exorcised demon?
In truth, what I had in mind, and also in my heart, dare I say it, was something unconditional. Here I am, I would say, in the only version possible. Not a copy, nor a copperplate rendition, a record of events, yes, but from the midst of it, and with my heart’s ear still lying close upon the saltwater grave.
A strange type of wooing it was, looking back, this courtship of lancing wounds and weeping sores. It wasn’t a rose I would be sending her after all. I could never have known, though I did have an inkling, how the woman she was, born in the way she had been, in a sky-climbing storm signalling her mother’s death, would forever after be looking to send the bolts of her own native lightning down into the ground. Daughter of her latitude, she would be at peace only in high drama, free only in the sanctuary of the earth’s terrible power. To give her a rose or to pretend there was no blemish would be a uselessness which the western fronts would soon obliterate to grit. And so it was I gave her my boxthorned pain, the faith in my lonely grief instead.
XVIII
Around midnight in the cave we listened to dogs barking in the valley below, followed by a closer noise and muffled voices. It was much to our surprise and relief that Tassos himself appeared, scrambling up the side of the outcrop with two other andartes. Behind them came Adrasteia, wrapped in the brown head-shawl and pointing the unmistakably crisp beam of a German torch into the entrance of the cave.
The first of the two other andartes was Dimitris, the burly, sallow-faced giant whose music I had danced to in the villa’s courtyard the night before the invasion. I recalled now that he was a doctor as well as a musician, also that his brother’s son had been shot in the first reprisals. By pointing at the fire and speaking directly to Tassos, wiping sweat from his brow as he did so, Dimitris made it clear that, after the strenuous and dangerous journey he’d just undertaken, he required coffee and a restorative cigarette before he attended to the patient.
The other man was not an andarte at all, but a black-haired English officer dressed in Cretan garb named Spenser. His disguise was so complete that he even sported a flourishing moustache in the local style and Tassos introduced him to us proudly, explaining that Spenser had worked with Mister John before the war. Like Pendlebury he spoke fluent Cretan dialect and he too had an intrepid history of combing the island by foot – a skill which appeared to have been an unofficial prerequisite for pre-war archaeological investigations, tailor-made also for the circumstances of the occupation. Spenser had been evacuated from Sfakia at the end of May, and had now been dropped back into the aftermath by Britain’s Special Operations Executive to set up wireless communication with Cairo. SOE agents on the island travelled under Greek codenames and Spenser was to be known as Theseus.
As soon as this Pommy Theseus stood by the fire, pulled out his pipe and opened his mouth, to assure us in a plummy tone that ‘all was in hand’, a deadly shiver went up my spine.
If all was so well in hand, why was my brother lying like a fucking pufferfish at the bottom of the sea?
*
Adrasteia avoided my gaze and stoked the fire, her brown hair falling out of the folds of her shawl as she leant into the smoke. The viciousness of the job I’d done on Perry was exposed to me by her presence. She cast not even one furtive glance in my direction and I instinctively un
derstood the shame she felt, not for the pleasures we’d taken on the night-slope but for my missing the evacuation. She would also have been only too aware of the reprisals that were being dealt out to anyone suspected of harbouring or assisting Allied soldiers. We were in danger, all of us, the islanders burdened terribly by our presence. She and I both knew, that as far as I was concerned, it was a burden that could have been avoided.
We stood in the mouth of the cave, in a broken circle around the fire, as the Pom Spenser declared through the pucker of his pipe that, given Perry couldn’t travel, I was henceforth required as his assistant wireless operator. This he stated with the confidence of his rank, although he was obviously suspicious enough about my moral character, and nervous enough about my state of mind – the state of mind that would burn a fellow Aussie soldier half to death – to allow Tassos, who actually had the genuine authority between the two, to assess my condition.
So before I could react to this declaration of my new role, Tassos directed me out through the cave mouth onto the outcrop, to see whether or not I’d lost my marbles.
The night had cooled. We stood without speaking at first, our attention caught by the dotted light trails the villagers were making in the valley below as they collected snails to eat. I remember they reminded me of the perforated lines on ration tickets I’d seen in Manly just after the outbreak of the war.
Then, at his beckoning, I told Tassos calmly what Perry had told me, reassuring him, and myself too, I s’pose, that my outrage against the Boatman was excessive, yes, but logical also, that I hadn’t quite gone mad. Of course, a Cretan like Tassos Kavroulakis will make up his own mind about such things, and so he did. Extending his arms, he clutched me to him, his sympathies evident in the tears in his eyes, before he walked back to the fire in the cave.
When I returned Dimitris had finished his coffee from my tin cup, and after pensively smoking a Korfu Rot from Costas’ red sack, he began inspecting Perry’s condition by fire and torchlight. Adrasteia mopped Perry’s brow with a sponge as the poor little digger was turned on his tummy and onto both sides, prodded and pushed, swabbed and stung with ointments, and stuck with herb poultices. In the doctor’s deep undertone, Perry was declared to have broken ribs and severe burns, some of which had become infected. It would be best if he stayed where he was, with Adrasteia as nurse, rather than risk putting him on a mule and taking him back to a house in the village. When his condition improved, he could be moved along south through the zone, but not until then.