by Gregory Day
Eventually, with the stew polished off and Uncle True well and truly nodded off at the head of the table, it was clear the long day and night had reached a natural conclusion. I still had to ride home across the dark roads of the island, with only the bicycle’s wonky carbide lamp and my thankfully ungurried overcoat for protection. But there was no question of my lingering or of her coming my way. She said she’d prop with her uncle until the morning and so it was. She waved me off, smiling a trifle fondly I imagined, at the back door of the house at Yellow Rock.
I rode home, as if in pursuit of the beam of milky blue light from the whistling bicycle lamp, dodging wallabies down the unmade avenues of the windy farms and then along the owl-studded tracks of the east. As I pedalled, I reflected how Leonie’s history may have made it hard for her to broach the contents of my pages. It would have been easy, I had thought in those previous days, for her to have come around and for us to have gone fishing at the Naracoopa jetty. Easy then for me to open up more, in the unhurried gentleness that jetty fishing can bring. But she had never come, we never fished, and thanks to Uncle True I now knew more about her reasons. Having gone so far as to get me up on the floor – using the strangest methods of course: dry kindling, family histories, a black eye – she now deferred in the dance. I was to lead from here on in. Well, at least till the end of that tune and the beginning of another.
*
It was around this time that Lascelles found something in one of the new books he was having sent in advance for his planned Memorial Reading Room that brought him out to Wait-a-While on his old man’s Velocette. These were the keen years after the war of course, when a lot of writing was taking place. I might have disappeared from the mainland, tangled myself in Bass Strait knots, but a lot of other chaps were doing precisely the opposite: blowing their trumpets in a national brass band of victory, recovery and justification. The journos and hired hacks were actually to blame, they were typing up the heroes at a furious rate, the acts of endurance and derring-do, the superhuman survival stories, and all with a great moral certainty. They put it all down in such a dignified way, as if immune to the ugly damage in the heart, and theirs was the complete opposite of my renditions, where loss and bitterness drove the pen, drove page after page of Leonie’s cuttle-ink across the prickly hummocks of my catharsis. I do consider myself fortunate here at Naracoopa, in these days of my re-writing, not to have only weeping wounds for posterity, but rather to have had the chance to heave the timber and mark the spot, and then watch it all burn. Hate without love is universally recognised as evil, but equally love without a lineage of hate, or at least of bitterness and regret, is a flimsy thing indeed. A boat without ballast. Thus I believe the life we have built here will survive the squalls and vicissitudes of this our blue paddock.
Despite his interest in me and my condition Lascelles had never before had the gumption or gall to visit my hut. But now he was like a man possessed, and terribly excited. What he had to show me was all in a freshly published book, by a bloke I’d never heard of, a journalist by the name of Noonan. Apparently this bloke’s brother had served with the 2/7th in the Med, and once Noonan’s book was put in front of me on the macrocarpa slab at Wait-a-While, the reason for Lascelles’ visit, and his excitement, became clear.
I read the passage, which Lascelles had already underlined, and leant back on my chair. ‘So?’ I said.
Lascelles was standing eagerly on the other side of the table. ‘What do you mean “so”?’ he said. ‘It’s you isn’t it, Wes?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Not exactly? How many Wes Cresses were there on Crete?’
‘I don’t know this Noonan bloke from a bar of soap. But the stuff he’s described here is rot. What do they call it in your Literary & Debating society in Currie? Fiction.’
‘What, so it didn’t happen?’
‘Not like that.’
‘But the bloke he’s describing, it’s gotta be you. How about this bit:
Though he was from western Victoria, Cress seemed to have prior knowledge of war, and of what was required in working with the Cretan andartes, that the rest of the men didn’t. He was fearless for a start, with a pretty black sense of humour, two qualities which the locals loved in him. Once, when my brother Bob was waiting in a cave with a small group of Bandouvas’ followers to ambush a convoy of Krauts near the road between Iraklio and Retimo, Cress took matters into his own hands. The news had come down the line that the jeeps were approaching but that there were Anzac POWs on board. Hearing this Cress set off for the open road with Mausers blazing, as if bullet proof. We presume he shot the tyres first but then he stuck those jeeps up all on his own. By the time the rest of the boys arrived, including the andartes and a Pom under an SOE codename, the diggers on the jeeps had darted off to freedom. Nobody had seen anything like it and no one could quite work out how it was achieved. Bob used to say Wes Cress was the wild colonial boy himself but amongst the boys in the POW camps at that time he gradually became known as the King of Crete.’
What I wanted to tell Lascelles was that although, yes, the fella who held up the jeep was me, the story would mean nothing at all unless you knew its undersong, what had happened beforehand, the terrible events and betrayals, the morbid emptiness that eventually saw me capable of such cavalier and so-called heroic behaviour. I wanted to tell him right there and then about the shock, about Vern, about Perry and even Simmo, I wanted to tell him about my anger, about how nothing mattered anymore, about how your own country can betray you, your own king’s navy, and how you can betray the whole show too, when all bets are off and all things become possible.
But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say any of that. I fell silent right there at the table and I stayed that way for far far too long.
Three
Death of the Virgin
XXIV
The bell was silent now but through a tangle of foliage I saw a gentle golden light. With a click the light went suddenly out. There was shuffling, footsteps crackling through fallen sticks, and finally the sound of liquid hitting against the ground. Someone was pissing.
The sound was heavy and went on and on, surely for longer than any man could possibly need to empty his bladder. It stopped abruptly and I heard the shuffling footsteps again. A door opened with a rasp, the golden light reappeared, and then with another rasp the door was shut, the light went out, and I was alone in the darkness and cold.
I moved forward, carefully over the slippery stones. I skirted the shape of a large tree and under my feet heard the crackling I’d heard under the pissing man. Eventually I came under a shelter of sorts where the paving had not been snowed on and where I could proceed more easily. Steering as faithfully as I could towards the light I smelt food being cooked. The rich, slightly musty smell of tomatoes, marrows, and dittany.
Cold stone walls with a coarse gnarl of vine climbing upon them. I crept sideways, a crab in a cleft, feeling the structure of an open corridor. I seemed to leave my body and saw myself as if from somewhere back high up on the massif. Had I imagined everything? Was this whole predicament a dream I wouldn’t have to explain to Dad after all, when I woke up in my bed on the lake? Or was I still perhaps in the upstairs room of Aunty May’s pub in Manly, where it could all be washed out in the surf? What about the unhooking of the war’s barbed wire from her Charlies on the night-slope? Was that too some kind of ruse?
Slowly my fingers found their way along the wall and onto the cold jamb of a door. I heard movement on the other side. I waited. Nothing. With palms flat I frisked the wood, found a handle, turned it, hearing the click I’d heard before from out in the snow. Then, startlingly, I was exposed, staring into the light.
*
I stood at the top of three broad stone steps, with a long heavy table set down below me, a massive hulk of oven with an enormous dented copper flue. I was frozen, my boots heavy and damp, my hair a wet nest of running dye
and melted flakes. A wiry hand with long fingers beckoned me from below, at the same time gesturing to shut the door.
I did as I was told, instinctively replacing a black fabric sausage over the draught. Enclosed now, at the top of the three broad steps, I peered down into a large kitchen where a monk leaned over a table sparsely arranged with bowls of food. He wore a long charcoal soutane and the square Orthodox hat. He looked at me as if I was no surprise at all.
Waving me down from the steps, he said, in perfect English: ‘You must be cold and hungry.’
Unnerved, I managed nothing in reply.
‘Leave your bag, come down the steps to the fire. I have some clothing.’
I did as he said. As I hefted off my filthy kit, he shuffled off through a door at the far end of the cavernous room, beyond a giant cope and hearth. I noticed a large red dish on the stovetop, with steam pouring off it. In the bowls on the table were cooked marrows and sauce.
Soon the monk returned, a smile playing on his lips. He handed me a bundle of garments. ‘You may dress in the corner,’ he said, ‘but first you must bathe.’
From an ancient-looking recess in the wall between the stove and the door he dragged a large tin tub and placed it on the floor near the end of the large table. He began to fill it with hot water from three cast-iron kettles on the enormous hearth. After emptying each kettle, he walked to a far corner of the room where, under long ladles and spatulas hanging from a horizontal beam, he pushed an iron tap to one side and filled the kettle in his hand with silver water.
When there was enough water in the tub for me to wash I took the hard soap from the monk and stepped up to the tub.
Neither of us said a word. Soon the water in the tub was dotted with dead fleas and, once I was washed, I dressed in the clothes he gave me: a pair of boofy pantaloons, a blue shirt, and a rough goat-hair jacket edged with black. Long green socks reaching up my calves to the bottom of the pants completed the costume. All I needed was for my moustache to grow and I would have passed as a freedom fighter from the days of the church made of milk. I felt warm, grateful, but quite ridiculous all the same.
Removing the tub and gesturing for me to sit at a chair in the middle of the long table, the monk resumed his position: crouching forward, his weight balanced on long splayed fingers at the other end of the table.
He offered his name: ‘Andreas.’
I introduced myself as well. ‘Private Wesley Cress,’ I said. ‘Second AIF.’
His narrow shoulders hunched, his fair features and concave face pointed slightly to one side, he now looked disgusted by something. I wondered if I’d been mistaken to offer my details. But he turned his face to meet me and smiled, saying, ‘You are lucky, Private Cress. Winter has arrived. Yes, a lucky man. You should eat.’
The meal was nourishing and when I’d finished one bowl of stewed marrow he pushed another across the table. There was so much of it, it was as if he knew I was coming. But he told me he was alone in the monastery and had been since just before the war. ‘There are many monasteries on Kriti,’ he said, ‘some are now empty. But I grow my food and I wait and see.’
‘Your English is good,’ I said, by way of a question.
He looked again to one side, as if down some far isthmus inside himself, and replied cryptically. ‘I learnt this from old friends, a long time ago.’
As we talked it became apparent that, despite his isolation, he was well abreast of the progress of the war. It was in fact from Andreas on that first night at Agio Dormiton that I first heard something of the German perspective of their pyrrhic victory on Crete. How Hitler had been dragged into Greece by Mussolini’s one-upmanship. Andreas was also the first to inform me about matters I have heard a lot about since. A battle was raging around Rostow in the Crimea that would set the stage for more terrible human slaughter in the months to come.
Eventually, when I had eaten and also finished the thick coffee he served after the meal, the monk damped the stove and led me back up the three stone steps and out of the kitchen, across the cold exposure of the open corridor surrounding the courtyard, and into a warm stone cell where a small iron brazier was burning. A narrow bed sat in the corner.
‘I keep this room alive in the winter,’ he told me. ‘The magali is always alight. Just in case.’
Placing a beaten copper mug of water on the sill above the bed he crossed himself lightly, said goodnight, and left the room.
*
The next morning I woke to a fierce yet cold sunlight, as if someone had tampered with the thermostat of the earth. The magali was all but out, the walls were icy white. Looking outside through the window where the copper mug sat, I saw the snow fixed to its spot over the courtyard and also over the field beyond, as if, as I say, by the force of an inverted sun.
Draining the mug of water I slumped back onto the bed, disoriented but nevertheless relieved at the comfort of my situation. I promptly fell asleep again and didn’t wake until well into the morning.
When eventually I did rise and dress (in what seemed an even more ridiculous get-up in the light of day) I heard the homely clucking of hens and saw that the snow had begun to melt from the courtyard and field.
Soon I was venturing out to find Andreas. From my rough introduction in the darkness of the previous night I had imagined a very different monastery to the one I now found myself in. The corridor I had thought was open to the snow was actually behind a half-wall at hip height, which was entered through an arched opening opposite a large and thriving plane tree which, although almost bare of its summer leaves, dominated the courtyard. I could see now that it was the combination of fresh snow and the enormous fallen leaves of this tree that had made the crackling sounds underfoot the night before.
A single wooden chair sat alone on smooth stones at the courtyard’s far end, before an uneven white wall of stone. Beside the chair a narrow series of stone steps, bowed by centuries of treading feet, led up to a higher level, which in turn gave on to another set of steps leading to a higher level again.
I walked up the first set of steps towards the early winter sun where it shone invitingly against the higher half of the kitchen’s outside wall. At the top of this first flight of stairs I saw the monk, kneeling among the plants of a terrace garden set on the kitchen’s rooftop.
Hearing my approach, he got up slowly from his knees and made a brief solemn bow of his head. He said, ‘You must be hungry,’ just as he had the night before, and then turned to peer off into the tangle of dead plants beyond. With that one look-away he seemed to be assessing each and every effect of the first onset of winter on his kitchen garden, and also every possible culinary solution to the fact that I was a hungry soldier desiring food. I nodded, as humbly and gratefully as I could, and he told me to follow him to the kitchen.
Again I sat at the long table, which was now covered with a waxed cloth patterned with colourful geometrical shapes. Andreas fanned the stove, stooping and blowing loudly into the mouth of the fire, before cooking me an omelette without any talk.
As I began to eat, the monk resumed his stance of the previous night, which I recalled now like a forgotten dream. His shoulders crouched forward, he bore his wiry frame on those long fingers splayed downwards into the coloured shapes of the table. With his face set askance from mine, he narrowed his eyes into an expression quite peculiar in its blending of wise reflection and immense distaste.
Was my unannounced visit keeping him from something? I wondered. Well, yes, obviously from the upkeep of his winter garden; but was there something else in his mood, something other than the preoccupied air of a religious man presumably devoted to the habits of his solitary life?
As I chewed the omelette I watched him clean the pan and heavy iron of his stovetop with oil and paper. I wondered if it was the haphazardness of my turning up, astray in the middle of the night, and my unannounced entrance from the war into an existence
more orderly than the military life itself, that was the cause of the conflicted atmosphere of the monk. It was a feeling I had, a hunch our mother would have said was just in my waters, and yet later I realised that quite the opposite was true. My arrival in that first snow of the winter had in fact been a sign of predestination for Andreas, and as such a confirmation of his duty, in both its happy and burdensome aspects.
When the omelette was finished he raised his fingers from the table and announced rather formally that he wanted to speak with me out in the sunlight.
‘And I will make us kafe,’ he said.
A few moments later we were back up in the rooftop garden, where a bitter breeze had picked up, blowing down off the massif. From a garden box near the open trellis wall he took a brown shawl and wrapped himself in it. He handed me a grey English-style car-coat from the same box.
We sat down on a low stone bench amongst the bareness of his staked winter stocks.
‘You must speak. You must tell me your trouble,’ Andreas said.
At my desk here, at the other end of the world, the eye of the needle widens for a moment and I see it clear. In a war of destruction, of hollowing loss and repetitious suffering, a solitary monk and a soldier gone AWOL sit together on a cold garden bench. The garden is full of the previous summer’s dying plants. With a shiver the soldier wraps himself tight in an English car-coat, against the cold north wind coming off the raw mountains he has traversed. The monk wears a black hat, and a brown shawl folded in against the wind around his long grey beard. The soldier is lost, and in his mind he hears the words of a Cretan girl saying: ‘You are so far from home’. He carries injustice in his heart. Injustice and shame. He carries these things heavily. The monk is still, not with repose but like a child’s toy-top spun so fast it appears not to move at all. His back is straight as a sword, his pale concave face peering into the soldier’s, waiting with an active acceptance that deep pain and harrowing sorrow is humanity’s inevitable and shared burden.