by Gregory Day
You must speak. You must speak, because you are here.
*
I began. Perhaps naively I stated straight out that I had been assisting the andartes above Tzermiado as a wireless operator. But things had not worked out and I had struck out on my own. I had crossed the mountains, not knowing the tracks, and ended in such distress and hunger that I slaughtered my donkey for food.
I said this in a tone of sincere confession. Instead of sympathising, however, he asked me whether or not I was AWOL. I said that I s’posed so and then, to my surprise, he said that, given I’ve been with the andartes on Lasithi, I should have heard of his friend, the Englishman Pendlebury. He told me that before the war the archaeologist had stayed with him in the monastery on a number of occasions. He had slept in the same bed as I had the previous night.
The monk smiled at the memory. Then, as if we had this friend in common, I found myself elaborating on the stuff-up with the supply drops and how embarrassing it had been for me to have teamed up with Spenser.
*
We sat often in that rooftop garden during the first few days. I felt free to talk, partly I think due to the reverence I’d been taught to hold for priests back home, but also because of Andreas’ extreme attentiveness. Led along by the quality of his listening, the sincerity of a monk’s attention, I spoke of the mess that had ensued from that last night of the battle. I told him what I had done to Perry Coghlan in the cave, also about snipping Spenser’s moustache, the humour of which did not seem to impress him overly much.
After a few days of such talking, of resting, sleeping and eating, and bringing Andreas well up to date with my war, and even some of my life before it, I began to outline for him the outlandish plans I had for fronting up at Alexandria. I would travel alone, I said, it would be easier to smuggle onto a caique that way, and I would not fall again into the trap of bonding with anyone, villagers or Allies. I would sidestep the official progress of the war and front the brass with a brand of courage based on the facts, and with nothing to lose.
Andreas said little in the course of these descriptions, other than to nod and encourage me to keep telling him how I felt.
At night, alone in my little cell, I would dream vividly, including dreams of further conversations in the rooftop garden. On one occasion, as I was describing our Baby dancing on the bombed-out rafters of Iraklio, I looked up to find that my listener was no longer the monk but the hare which had first led me into Agio Dormiton. I woke from this image with a raging thirst, and on another separate occasion I dreamt of the same hare, a dream in which we compared the birds around the lake at home with the vultures of the massif where I had shot Simmo. I recounted memories to the animal, the taste of plovers and yabbies, the flash of bronzewings and the scuttle of landrails, and how Vern would swim even as an eight year old right across to Vaughan Island, just to count the pelicans’ nests. The hare listened and, as it did, I saw Simmo magically reassembled and healthy, making his way back down the shaley track towards Lasithi. I woke thirstily from this dream too, and drank from the copper mug on the sill above the bed before sliding back into a sleep that felt like the proverbial seventh heaven.
*
During the cold mornings at Agio Dormiton I would often remain wrapped up under the big plane tree in the courtyard, resting my blistered feet, allowing my burnt hand to finally mend once and for all, as Andreas shuffled from kitchen to chapel, from duty to routine among the terraces and deep in the bowels of the buildings above and beyond. For the first time in months I felt safe in the austerity of his care, and my urgency to press on subsided. In time, I took to fixing my own breakfasts on the giant hearth, from where I would hear his chanting muffled by the walls, or I’d hear knocking sounds, or footsteps, as he went about the daily regime. Typically it wasn’t until mid-morning that I ever saw him, and often only briefly as he came back across the courtyard from praying before the icons in the chapel, or went out across the field towards a village in search of food or information. As the weather grew colder it wasn’t long before we abandoned our afternoons on the rooftop garden and would sit, for long hours and into the evenings, in the warmth of the ancient kitchen, where he gave me his attention while tending to various stews and brews cooking on the stove.
It was during one of these afternoons at the table in front of the hearth that Andreas first showed his hand. I was explaining to him the devastation our mother’s death had brought upon our father, how she had been so tender and strong, so spirited and forthright, and funny too, the captain of our team, so to speak, with Dad her labouring muscle and doting deputy. I declared outright to Andreas that I refused to return to Dad in my slouch hat with some bodgy ‘missing in action’ story about Vern. I’d demand answers from the RN, I told him, even if I had to go as far as buttonholing Admiral Cunningham over his gin and tonic in the Shepheard’s Hotel.
The monk listened in his customary fashion before bringing a sudden halt to my frustrated outburst. Waving the beaten metal of the spoon in his hand he declared straight-out that I was a fool.
‘Are you unwell, Wesley Cress?’ he asked, with disdain in his eyes. ‘Are you insane?’
‘Nah, definitely not,’ I fired back. ‘It’s a navy that considers it necessary to torpedo their own when –’
‘Stop it!’ Andreas shouted, his face suddenly explosive with anger. ‘You cannot be so stupid, not here at Agio Dormiton!’
He turned his back on me and stirred the steaming pots. The ferocity of his voice still echoed amidst the stone walls of the monastery, but he said nothing more, so that I began, as if by force of gravity, to slowly comprehend the impossibility of what I had intended to do.
It became clear to me that, after the reprieve I was afforded by Spenser, when he had discovered the mess I had made of Perry Coghlan in the cave, and after my snipping of his moustache and going AWOL, I would most certainly be court-martialled the moment I got off a boat. Wireless contact from Cairo to Crete with an indignant Spenser would ensure, for instance, that my savaging of Coghlan would be brought back to the table. Any chance at redemption through assisting with the wireless at Karfi was now gone. The practical necessities that had made Spenser turn a blind eye to my guilt would no doubt be reviewed.
So it became evident to me that I would be done for on three counts: one, for nearly killing Wireless Operator Coghlan; two, for gross and physical insubordination against an English officer; and three, for going AWOL. And no amount of extenuating circumstances would get me off the hook. My humiliation of their phoney Theseus would see to that.
At the hearth, Andreas ceased stirring his pots, but did not turn to face me yet. The stone room fell silent, until the blinkers of grief fell away there at the long wooden table. I raised my eyes to the heavy rafters of the ceiling and began to sob like a boy.
Now Andreas turned to face me. From deep in the folds of his soutane he produced a handkerchief and handed it across the table. He then placed two stained cups on the coloured squares of the waxed cloth, and pouring thick black coffee for us both, he sat down opposite, saying: ‘Wesley Cress. It is time for me to tell you about John Pendlebury.’
*
‘When he first came here, by chance on one of his many long walks across the island, I cooked him a chicken. We talked. He had good Greek, even our dialects. He was curious about the customs of Kriti and asked me questions, some of which I could not answer, but it made us both happy when I could. We grew to like each other very much. From time to time, increasingly so as the war approached, he would appear unannounced from across the field or come striding up the steep slopes from the coast, katsouna in his hand, to resume our conversations. We talked of the likeliness of the war reaching Kriti, of the possible outcomes when it did so, but also we spoke of his passion: Minoan archaeology. He would sleep in the bed which you use now and in that small copper mug on the sill he would leave his glass eye every evening, as if it was a vanity
of the day which would only retard his dreams at night. In the mornings, like you he would meditate and rest, he would light candles in the chapel of the Dormiton, reflect on the icon of the death of the virgin, and by lunchtime we would sit amongst the plants on the roof and speak. He would stare up onto the mountains, thinking as always about the distant past but increasingly, particularly after Mussolini’s army came over the Albanian border, assessing the possible horizons of tomorrow, next week, the future.
‘Like you, Pendlebury also was suspicious of the British. His own people. But, not only that, he hated the Cretans as well. Yes! My people. Perhaps he had no time for the current humanity at all. But what he enjoyed, perhaps the only thing he loved, was the spirit of freedom in life itself. The spirit, beyond ambition or army, or right purpose or custom. He loved to be free to approach the spirit of truth. Everything else, everybody else, was, in some part of his being I suspect, merely an obstacle to this.
‘Here at Agio Dormiton we are sheltered in prayer, but we are also terribly exposed by sacredness. We have built a sanctuary amongst the wilfulness of the world in order to approach the truth of the icon, the virgin and her death, a thing both difficult and hard to accept, but also real and beautiful. John enjoyed coming here for that reason, also for the food, but such a sanctuary of stillness and exposure could only hold him for a short time. He was a physical creature, born to move, to scale heights and outsprint danger. And, though he may not have put it in these words himself, I would suggest that his idea was to treat the whole earth as a monastery such as this. All behaviour to the contrary, as exhibited by the Germans, his fellow British, the Cretans, indeed by every race on the face of the earth, was in conflict with this spirit. And nothing, no act of sabotage or defilement, could surprise him. He would become disgusted of course, enraged, and then he would walk the coasts, the plateaux, pursuing his vision on the ridges and down through the throats of the gorges, always drawing nearer to the horizons of freedom.’
Andreas fell silent, coolly pursing his lips. Was he sizing me up, as if still debating whether I was of sufficient quality to hear what he had to say? He took up his cup, sipped, returned the kafe to the table, peering at me as if from deep under his eyelids. Then he smiled, either from the pleasure of the kafe or the tale to be told. He went on.
‘We had an understanding, he and I, an understanding that there could only be one allegiance, whether in a time of war or between wars. This allegiance was not to an idea but to the spirit, and through the self, to God. For John this revelation came in a shard he had found, in the stronghold at Karfi, not long after the Royalists had bombed Kriti for supporting Venizelos. You see, Wesley, like you we have been attacked by those who others think of as our own. But they are not our own!
‘The shard Pendlebury found was just a small thing, a sliver of stone from a dream of the past, and although he found it high on that peak, a long way from the coast, it showed a dolphin in the sea. As it leapt between the waves, the dolphin carried a man on its back, but that was not all it carried. Clinging to the back of the man on the dolphin was a small child. For Pendlebury the shard became the key to the universe. In the garden here he would hold it in his hands and I would see in his eyes – even I suspected, in the one made of glass – that it had entered his soul. As only the truth can do.
‘A dolphin carries a man carrying a child. The chain of relation. The complete story, but without the mother, just as we are here at Agio Dormiton, where the virgin has died. But are we without her here? In the shard the journey of life is caught in midstream, bound in the salt sea of our mother blood, the earth is our womb and daily we dwell within it and live with the threat of our own expulsion, from time and from all possible love. For John, the eternal icon, the relationship at the heart of our human nature, was a dolphin carrying a man carrying a child.
‘For you though, Wesley, the rider of the dolphin has temporarily forsaken the child, he has shrugged him off, he has left him to drown in the sea. His very own child. Returned to the mother. You have been travelling across Kriti not with the key to the universe but with the key to the underworld. And you have suffered greatly for this contortion of nature.’
*
That night, when I went to my cell, the first thing that caught my eye was the small copper mug on the sill above the bed. I imagined the archaeologist, after a day of conversations with the monk, removing the silica eye and setting it aside in the copper mug. I saw him lying down to read one-eyed by candlelight, some periodical from the British School in Athens perhaps, until he was finally ready for sleep. And there, in the months and years leading up to the suicidal descent of the blond young men of the Fallschirmjaeger onto the island, he would dream through the night.
As I dampened the coals in the magali and lay down myself to sleep I felt my course had been altered. Yet again. I drifted off like Pendlebury in that plain timber cot between stone walls, knowing well why the shard of the dolphin carrying the man carrying the child was so important to him. Simply put, neither the dolphin nor the man was struggling with its burden. The child that they carried felt safe and free. At any moment any one of the three could be torn asunder and thrown apart, by a rogue wave, or the insatiable demands of human tragedy. But in the heart’s eye of the man who had scrabbled and scraped into the grey schist of Karfi to uncover the shard, none of that need ever have happened. As a piece of pottery, a scrap of hope and truth, it had endured. As an idea, it still persisted. And now, perhaps because Andreas himself had seen the shard and because I now lay in the archaeologist’s bed, it became a fresh and living thing to me, a shard not only of ancient times or of yesterday but an aspiration for today and tomorrow.
Drifting off into a dreamless sleep, I felt in need of no other image. No nightmare could touch me. For once the waking hours of life had given due recognition to the deeper desires of my being.
*
The next day after lunch Andreas resumed the account of his friendship with the archaeologist, but this time taking a surprising slant.
Once again sitting over two coffee cups on the table, he began to tell how in the days before the war he had shared the duties and rituals of monastic life at Agio Dormiton with two other monks, Kiefer and Dimitrios. As rumours increased of the war’s approach, as Pendlebury and others brought news of the invincible march of the Nazis through Europe, the three monks found themselves divided in their response. Kiefer was of German extraction. He had made a pilgrimage as a young man to Greece, and ultimately to Crete, where he had been compelled to take vows as an Orthodox monk. Dimitrios, on the other hand, was a native Cretan, from Galatas, in the north of the island, near Chania. According to Andreas, as the likelihood of conflict grew greater through ’38 and ’39, the German monk Kiefer began to struggle with his allegiances. And when finally the staunch neutrality of Greece’s fascist government was overcome by the Italian and then the German invasion, the blood in the German’s veins had proved stronger than the prayers in his heart. Dimitrios and Kiefer began to bicker and then to argue vehemently until finally one morning the two of them clashed in the chapel, right at the foot of the virgin’s icon. They came to blows. Blood was spilt on the sacred floor.
Within days of this catastrophe they had departed for their respective homelands: Dimitrios to his family in Galatas, and Kiefer to join up with the German units as they pushed south towards Athens on the mainland.
Andreas was left alone at Agio Dormiton. On Pendlebury’s first visit after the departure of the two monks, on a field trip to the south coast for the purpose of arranging efficient networks against the coming invasion, Andreas and he discussed their decision to leave, and also that of Andreas to stay behind alone. By this stage the archaeologist had been fitted out in a British captain’s uniform and issued with an army car, but he preferred to walk when he could and also to maintain one or two Cretan flourishes in his uniform, such as the Turkish sword-stick he wore slung from his bandolier. Every i
nch of him was ready to fight but as Andreas put it, ‘not for the British against the Germans, or even for the Cretans against the invaders, but so that the child would continue its journey on the back of the man who rode the dolphin.’
Both Andreas and John Pendlebury had agreed that the other two monks’ transition from meditation to war amounted to an eviction of the possibility of truth in their lives. It was clear that only Andreas had remained steadfast in his vocation, only he had laid sufficiently deep roots in the ground of his spiritual life not to be swept away by the war as if by rain gushing down the Arvi gorge.
‘But Pendlebury too was a fighter, no?’ I challenged Andreas. ‘Surely he would have seen the logic in Kiefer and Dimitrios wanting to join in the war.’
Andreas was unimpressed by this remark. ‘John Pendlebury was unhappy,’ he replied. ‘Unhappy that the monks he had admired in more meaningful days here at Agio Dormiton could suddenly change direction. He viewed their monastic pleasures then as mere stylisations. The blood spilt before the icon represented to him an unnatural rifting caused by an evil wind. The dolphin was knocked off balance and the man and child were thrown into turbulence. It was the severance of the connection. Something akin to the Mycenaean invasion. And, in my own way, I agreed with him. The dolphin has a predestined leap, from which comes its natural grace. It is the fragility and uncertainty of man which requires assistance through meditation, it is we who need to be supported and shown the way to such grace, so that in turn the child of man is not cast into the sea before it has even learnt to swim.