by Gregory Day
And yet I squirmed a little where I sat in my chair.
Andreas remained hunched, the scratchy German voice ratcheting on from the wireless barely inches away from his nose. The magali burned. As the room grew stifling, my mind began to feel airless too, crowding with doubts. Could this religious persona be deadly? Was it the perfect disguise for the imperfections of a man? Did he plan to enlist me now, in his other work, his real work? Did his peculiar pent-up moods, his ruthless intellect, his cleverness, all fit with that picture?
Hoping like hell that I was wrong, I leant back in the chair and tried to calm down.
Nevertheless I found myself compiling a quick inventory of the information I’d given to Andreas since my arrival at Agio Dormiton. Manolis and the people of Marmaketo, who had celebrated my mythic status and crowned me with laurels, what if they were now somehow in jeopardy and vulnerable to German reprisals? What about Tassos and Adrasteia? What if their roles as andartes had already been communicated, their villa already been sacked, the two of them stood against the courtyard wall where Mug had plucked the chickens, and shot? Had the children of the villages around Mount Juktas been killed, the women raped and garrotted, because of my loose mouth? And, of course, there was the issue of Theseus and the wireless up at Karfi. As much as I despised the Pom I had chosen not to shoot him because I didn’t want to be responsible for his death. And what of all the villagers of Lasithi who were helping out with the supply drops?
My guts began to churn.
I remained stuck in the chair. With the German voice rasping through the static, my head began to spin like it had earlier in the day. I was sweating. Now I doubted if I could trust any thought, any notion, as my own. Only a few hours earlier I had rung the twilight bell, felt cleansed as never before, but was all that just bulldust? Despite the light in the room, was it still dark after all? Was I still falling? Well, was I ?
Eventually Andreas turned back to me from the radio, his normally pale face flushed, and he furiously rubbed his eyes. I found myself scanning for a weapon somewhere in the folds of his soutane. I mentally checked for my own revolver and realised it was back by the bed in my room.
‘In 1935 we had to bomb Kriti,’ he said, ‘to make people realise the world must move on. Yes, when I say “we” I mean my family, the king, and Metaxas, his government. We were all of a similar mind. But our action back then was just a handful of stones on the roof of a shepherd’s hut. It has taken the Bavarians to do it properly.’
He smiled, and now, in the yellow light of that sinister room, with his blue eyes peering and the jut of his forehead and chin, he even looked like one of the Bavarians of which he spoke.
‘It is for momentum, Wesley,’ he said. ‘The war. This whole war. A predestined leap. It’s natural, don’t you think?’
With the benefit of time, which the weather passing over this island and on through Bass Strait proves is inseparable from space, I see it now from above. A monk is visited on the first night of snow by a lone soldier, a soldier at odds with his own army, a soldier with a weight like bluestone in his heart and with anger roaring like a bushfire in his mind. The monk hears him coming through the snow, waits for the heavy door of his kitchen to open. He knows there will always be those self-divided men, sheared away from their countrymen by the painful truth of experience. The monk, of all people, understands that. He sees it coming.
*
I could not speak to confirm or deny my suspicions. Instead I imagined a time before my arrival, when the monk I had never met, Kiefer, had convinced Andreas that the grand, ambitious sweep of the Third Reich, its historical high-mindedness, was a natural fit, particularly for an intelligent monk such as himself. More natural in fact than the compassion of the martyrs.
Andreas continued now to speak in abstractions, bloodless words he pushed this way and that. Words about Metaxas and the Greek fascists, the pre-war complexities I would never understand but which to him were an entrée, an underlay, the prelude to the battle we’d lost. It became clear he’d decided the time was right to come clean. I would be his recruit. The battle had been won and not lost after all. I’d already learnt on Crete that any object can be made useful, any implement or kitchen tool, and anyone who wields it has something to offer the battle. Women can cook and nurse, seduce, and fight; children can run messages over the crags, and fight; and priests can sidle up to snagged paratroopers with foreign swords, and kill. Or alternatively, and every bit as ruthlessly, a monk could conscript a farmer-soldier’s soul.
What followed was a shocking few minutes of fervent phrases, unintelligible Greek names, and poisonous jargon interspersed with jagged smatterings of German. The monk then looked at his watch and turned back to the wireless, saying: ‘But you will understand this better than I.’
He began to fiddle again with the dial until, in a crystal clear tuning, came plummy tones I recognised, the voice of Lord Haw-Haw . . .
‘This is Germany calling . . . This is Germany calling . . .’
Haw-Haw had given us a good laugh over the raki in Iraklio and, contrary to his intentions, he’d even helped keep up our morale. Such was the bulldust he spouted. His phrase about Hitler having a bullet for every leaf on Crete and a bomb for every olive may have niggled at those in a weakened frame of mind after the hiding we’d copped on the mainland, but the slurring voice had pretty much always sounded half shickered to me, and never more so than now, as he whined on in his nasally plum through the wireless set in the high room of the third terrace at Agio Dormiton.
To my horror, I found that Andreas was taking Haw-Haw quite seriously. It was as if he intended somehow for the broadcast to wheedle me out, to confirm what he had decided from day one was my own ambivalent, if not treasonous, state of mind. As Haw-Haw bleated his ‘Views On The News’ – I’ll always remember the phrase that Downing Street was like a porter’s lodge to the House of Rothschild – Andreas turned to look at me with happy eyes.
I finally realised then how things would turn if I didn’t take great care to play my cards right. I had a lightning decision to make. So, taking a leaf out of the book of this man who I suddenly suspected of being not only a German sympathiser but perhaps even a German national in disguise – he was paler than most Cretans after all, with the sandy-coloured hair of his youth still showing in places on his head and through his beard, and that concave, almost Nordic-looking face – I corkscrewed inside and showed no sign of incredulity at what he was expecting me to believe. In truth, I sensed my moment of death or survival had arrived and I’m happy to say I recognised it in a flash and reacted with a nimbleness borne of pure fear that a pistol would be produced from within his monk’s costume and I would die yet another pointless death and be left out for the vultures to eat in the field beside the monastery. Like Simmo, I would be brutally devoured. Like Vern, I would be truly missing in action, never to be heard of again.
The problem was that the ability to pose and pretend has never been my strong suit. Once again it was Vern who would have made a more credible fist of things but I had no choice other than to try. As Haw-Haw carried on and on – something now about the despicable methods the British were using to fight the war and how one day their government would be held to account – I feigned sincere interest. Andreas inspected my reactions with the insatiable focus of a sheep dog. My performance was rough as guts, its saving grace being that it was crudely understated – it could hardly be otherwise – but as the minutes went by I was relieved to find it having the desired effect. Andreas seemed to interpret the lack of outright protest as a vindication of his strategy. I’m sure he felt, as I remained largely deadpan in my chair, that he had buttonholed me correctly as a ready-made fifth columnist he could put to great use.
Soon the wireless reception wavered as pulses of interference crossed the signal. Eventually Andreas leant forward and switched off the set.
He turned to me then to begin his own p
itch.
I listened patiently to how the Third Reich offered the first historical opportunity for the human spirit to seize its potential, how for too long we had been drugged by the menial trading of merchandise rather than rising to a destiny superior to the survival techniques of mere animals and Jewry. I swallowed, nodded, and agreed.
‘The true Cretan does not yet realise,’ Andreas told me, ‘how he, as the descendant of Minoans, is far nobler, more efficient, and with purer blood than the cross-bred British. The Cretan has the purest blood in the whole of Europe, even purer perhaps than the German himself.
‘But the English,’ Andreas went on, ‘come south like lords and ladies. John Pendlebury could have told you. The way the British School in Athens, Evans and all that lot, behaved. How they treated the Cretans as their galley slaves. Yet he was out and away, at every opportunity, into the mountains. Trying to shake them out of his hair. A little like yourself, Wesley. Haven’t the scales fallen from your eyes as well?’
I nodded slowly, solemnly knitting my brow. ‘Well, perhaps there’s some sense in what Haw-Haw has to say,’ I ventured. ‘I’ve never forgotten the warnings he broadcast into Iraklio before the brolly drop, that for us Allies Crete would be an island of doomed men and sunken ships.’
Miraculously Andreas took what felt like my ham-fisted bait. An errant sage suddenly stupefied by politics, he almost shouted his agreement.
‘And isn’t that precisely what it has become! For you in particular, Private Cress! Doomed men and sunken ships indeed.’
I nodded again, masking my horror with a sad face.
*
I learnt quickly on that evening. My anguish, which I’d presumed healed only a few hours earlier with the bell-rope in my hands, was as deep as the Mariana trench. Andreas couldn’t touch it, Lord Haw-Haw couldn’t touch it. It was not something I’d worn like a caul from birth, not a festering maniac fury as I imagined Hitler’s to be. It was more a shame at being alive. When others, one in particular, was dead.
As I lay down in my bed that night, not to sleep but just to stare into the darkness, I realised that the condition I was in was now beyond the war. I was cut adrift, from the spirit of my mother and her gifted son in death, beyond region or redemption or progress. I felt truly alone and I know now, from the high sky of hindsight, that that’s what my freefall through darkness earlier in the day had been a presentiment of.
How could I explain all this to Lascelles when he came out to visit me here with all his good intentions? The reasons for my coming to believe that no Australian worth his salt should walk away from a known enemy he could easily kill. Spenser’s revolver was under my pillow, all I had to do was climb back up the terraces and pump one into him as he slept. Technically it was my duty as Private Wesley Cress of the 2/4th Australian Infantry Battalion. But my time on Crete had already put paid both to technicalities and duty.
No, I would not kill Andreas because of duty or rules and regs. I would kill him because he’d shat on my soul. He’d played the holy man to my distress, teased me out, his blasphemies knew no bounds, against God, against God’s mother, against nature, against history, and against me. Like the Devil himself he had colonised wisdom on behalf of his war, used it as his weapon, and as a result – this perhaps is something Lascelles did come to understand about me – like an Australian convict from the days of the old Enlightenment, I would never trust such wisdom again.
*
Deep in the night, surrounded by the iced hush of the slopes of Agio Dormiton, I sat propped up in the bed cradling Pendlebury’s copper mug. I had listened for Andreas’ nightly piss against the plane tree and finally it had come, its steady force more that of a bull’s than a man. I heard him stomp across the flagstones and push open the door of the chapel. That was unusual. He would hardly be paying his respects to the virgin at this time of night.
Or would he? A pissing bull amongst the icons, his dick in his hand as he lit a candle for the loss of my innocence.
After an hour or so he came out again, stomped back over the stones and climbed the steps towards his room.
*
I packed my kit, went outside and across the courtyard into the kitchen and stole some dried bread, two marrows and some olives. There would be no one at Agio Dormiton to eat it anyway. I put the Smith and Wesson in the pocket of the car-coat and dampened the glowing magali. And then I waited, drinking clear winter water before I made my move.
Some time later I lit the taper of the storm lantern and climbed the terraces. At the top I looked for my bearings, memorising exactly where the door would be in the dark. I snuffed the lantern, set it down on the ground, and walked slowly towards the room.
The door made a loud click as I opened it and I heard Andreas’ body shift in the divan. I froze. Waited, with the door ajar.
There was no more movement. I stepped in and turned to the left. Stood there, listening to his breathing. It sounded smooth, restful. Unexpectedly, I changed my mind. I would not shoot him in the dark, asleep. As if he was nothing, something thrown out, someone who’d never thought or lived.
I wanted him to know.
Heading back out through the door onto the cold night terrace, I stood shaking in the night air. The contrast was sharp, between the round warmth from the magali in the room and the thin chill of the island night.
I found the lantern where I’d left it, lit the taper with a match and walked in a moving spangle of soot-streaked light through the darkness of the terrace and back into the room.
Quickly I registered the outlines: the bookshelves, the wireless, the paper piles and sheaves, the two chairs. Then I turned to find him staring at me.
His head was flat back on the pillow, as if something was pinning him down. His eyes horrified. He knew all right. He had seen Spenser’s pistol in my hand.
I fired shots. I dunno how many, but I emptied the bullets into him. At the first blast his body sprung up where it lay. The next split him in the throat and blood began to jet as if from a broken mains. The last shots were because I wanted it to end. I’d seen too much, done too much already. When the final shot rang out he was still. The blood was still running brightly but it was over.
I stood there grinding my jaw against what destiny had demanded. I don’t know for how long.
Next thing I remember, I was sitting in the orange chair with a sense that the storm lantern was no longer needed. Through the patterns of the curtains on the window of the southern wall light had begun to seep into the room.
Dawn arrived, like another whack. It appalled me. The way things just continued.
I left the room quickly, knowing I’d have to get as far away in as short a time as I could.
As I stepped off that highest of the three terraces to descend the stairs and gather up my kit, I glanced across the damp stone of the high railings to my left. To my surprise, over the treeline of the slopes below, I saw the horizon of the sea. It had been there all along but Andreas had never dared, or bothered, to show me.
XXVII
She looked happy, unconcerned with her uncle’s obviously riotous and ramshackled state, quite used to it no doubt. They ambled along on the patchy lawn, Uncle True in full verbal swing, and her a blonde sliver of graceful attendance next to him. Immediately with this apparition (not to put too fine a point on it, but an apparition she was, given I’d jettisoned all hope, like a cormorant throwing his tucker out of his gullet before flying away from danger) the admissions I’d made in the pages quickly became entangled with what felt now like a distant memory of a phrase:
I will love you with the power . . .
The phrase may well have been painted on a tin sign perforated by the shots I’d fired. My mind, any music in it, grew slipshod. As she took her Uncle True’s arm and they stopped to listen to the band it occurred to me that she already had her world of broken men, a pair of brothers no less, and somehow
like Vern and I, two halves of a sorry whole.
So despite the deliverance of her, and the look of her: in a green dress, a crimson hat with a sparkling clip, her sea-foam tendrils falling behind her pleasing, fine-boned face, her figure slim and her gaze so independent and conscious-seeming; despite all that, and also despite what she knew about me, things that by the rules of courtship were surely unwise to tell, things I hardly knew myself until they appeared in her cuttlefish ink as if she was leading me by listening, leading me out of the labyrinth on a thread, so that with her I could vanquish the beast; yes, despite all that, I clenched the tube of the programme tighter in my fist and made a fast beeline around the back of the bandstand and on up to where the Robinsons were perched like gang-gangs in their geniality on the hill.
It seemed I could no sooner face her appraisal as back a winner. But, of course, from the vantage up there I could see her only too well. And not only that, Brian and Rose and Annie could as well.
‘Oh look, there’s Leonie and True,’ Rose said, almost as soon as I’d sat down with the ticket. ‘We’ll have to call them up after the trot, won’t we, Brian? Won’t we, Wes?’
Oh why did I ever come to these fucking races, was all I could think. Cocooned in the written words of Wait-a-While, and sending them off like hidden confessions, I’d felt safe. Better than safe even. The pages were unleashing what had been crammed in me for so long, my shadows lightened into words and then packages of words, each word a bead of sweat from the pores of my skin, carrying salt and poison. It had been a purification without a reckoning, until now.