A Saint for the Summer

by Marjory McGinn

  “I remember that day very well because it started off with rain and a howling wind from the north, even for a spring day at the end of May. After the rain stopped it was dark, cloudy, the kind of day you know will depress you whatever you do. There was no light that day, in every sense.

  “The Germans had arrived in a foot patrol of around eight soldiers, fully armed. They came up the kalderimi from the village below, Ayios Yiorgos, which was no small trip up that steep stone path. It was always perilous and slippery with the rain or snow, and sadly for us they managed it. They came to our house first. Only my mother was there. My father and I had gone to the town of Kambos on the plain the day before to see my father’s uncle and to buy farm supplies. My brother Alexandros, who was 16, was in the village with our grandfather. We had stayed overnight in Kambos and came back late in the afternoon after the Germans had left.

  “We found my mother in a helluva state and the house a real mess, everything pulled apart. The Germans had ransacked the place, looking for a British soldier, they said. Luckily, they didn’t find any trace of him and that’s the way we organised it. Nothing belonging to Kostas was ever left lying about. The few small possessions he had he took out with him in his shepherd’s bag and left his sleeping blanket upstairs in the house. Then the Germans did exactly the same at Orestes’ house, pulled it apart, and his father was beaten up. Four soldiers stayed below while the others went straight up the ridge at the back of the houses. It was as if they knew exactly where they were going and what they were looking for. Kostas was found not far from the mouth of the cave, as if he had been trying to make a run for it. He was shot dead, one bullet in his back, one in the forehead to finish him off,” he said, his voice trembling.

  He stopped momentarily, visibly upset at the recollection, and drank some water from a tall glass that had come with the Greek coffees. I looked around at the others. Polly seemed downcast. Leonidas, who had previously been surreptitiously checking his mobile for messages, was now listening quietly, his head cocked to one side. Angus was slumped in his chair with his arms over his chest, and Pavlos was glumly smoking, half turned towards the plateia, with one elbow on the back of his chair. He probably hadn’t understood a word, yet he picked up on the sombre mood.

  “It would appear,” said Dimitris, with a little more composure, “that someone had seen Kostas one day up on the ridge. It must have been someone who knew the village well enough to know this was a stranger, even with the shepherd’s outfit. We will never know, but this person must have informed on Kostas for sure because of the way the Germans behaved. The path up the wooded hill was not obvious to the casual visitor if you didn’t know it was there.

  “After they shot Kostas, the Germans came back down and the patrol marched into the village and continued ransacking houses, ordering people out onto the plateia. One old guy called Babis made trouble, refusing to line up in the plateia with the other residents, and he was shot in the head. Mercifully, he was the only one killed. It could have been much worse for all of us if the Germans had found any shred of evidence that any one of us had hidden Kostas. Or maybe they didn’t want to discourage any more useful informers by butchering the lot of us.

  “When my father and I got back to the village in the afternoon from Kambos and poor Orestes came to our house to tell my father what he’d seen, my father was real cut up about it. I think he felt he had let Kostas down and had gone off the day before and left him to his own devices. Straight away, he sent for my brother and we went up the hill to find Kostas and bury him and cover up the grave as much as we could. It was the safest thing to do before the other villagers heard anything about him and started asking awkward questions.

  “My father and Alexandros did most of the work. I was taken along as a lookout. They dug a grave near the top of the hill, where the land wasn’t so rocky, but it was hard labour with old farm shovels. They wanted to bury him with his notebook, but it wasn’t with him, so I was sent up to the cave to look for it. I searched about and had a moment of panic when I couldn’t find it. What if the Germans had discovered it first? They would be back in the village again. But I did find it in the end, wedged into a crevice in the rocks at the back of the cave. It was stained at the edge from water seepage. I wanted to keep it, to remember Kostas, but my father said ‘no’ and that it would be better if the notebook was placed with the body for everyone’s safety while there was an informer in the village.

  “At the grave, my father said a prayer for him. It was one of the saddest days of my young life. I didn’t think it would end this way, you know. Kostas had such energy and life in him. I was sure he would escape one day and find his way to Crete – and live … ”

  Dimitris stopped to compose himself. His eyes were red-rimmed. I felt my lower lip tremble. I glanced at Angus and saw him rub a hand over his eyes.

  Dimitris picked up the story again. “My father wanted to do the right thing for Kostas and promised at the graveside that after the war he would exhume the body and give him a proper burial and he would have a blessing from a papas. We never spoke to anyone about Kostas. We tried to get on with our lives, such as they were because Greece was a living hell during the war. After that came the terrible conflict of the Greek Civil War. These were dark days, folks. In the 1950s, my father was tired of conflict and the mountain life. That’s when we sold up and left, as I’ve told you.”

  “Tell us, Dimitri, if you believe that Kostas was betrayed by someone in the village, do you have any idea who it was?” asked Polly.

  I sensed the tension around us. Dimitris squeezed his big hands together and said, “It seems clear he was a villager seeking the bounty money and he must have told the Germans where the boy could occasionally be found. Fortunately for everyone else, Kostas wasn’t in the house when the Germans arrived. Also, the informer hadn’t sussed out that we had anything to do with it, or if he had, he decided to leave that part out so as not to incite reprisals from villagers if we were shot. Well, that’s what I’m guessing.”

  “And you don’t know who the informer was?” asked Angus.

  Dimitris shook his head. “We never found out exactly. It could have been one of a number of people. We couldn’t start asking a lot of questions after Kostas died, stirring things up.”

  We all lapsed into a dismal silence. I know Angus was thinking, as I was, that it was the end of the story. No identification. We were no further forward in knowing who poor Kostas really was.

  Leonidas had said nothing throughout Dimitris’s narrative but he suddenly roused himself. “Dimitri, did your father exhume the body of the soldier in the end?” he asked.

  How fitting that Leonidas would ask this, as a doctor, after the rest of us had forgotten it. It would turn out to be the most significant question of the day.

  “Yes, of course. In 1949, after the civil war, my father carried out his promise. Kostas’s body was exhumed and the remains prepared in line with our village custom. For those who don’t know perhaps,” Dimitris said, looking at Angus and me, “my mother and one of her sisters came to help prepare the bones after exhumation, washing them in wine, as we have always done in Greece. The local papas was called and he said the traditional prayers for the dead because, though Kostas wasn’t Orthodox, in our eyes he was one of us. Then we stored his bones in a reliquary box in the ossuary. That was the way we did things.”

  “What’s an ossuary?” I asked Dimitris.

  “It’s the small building that you see beside the graveyard of certain churches. We have one at the church of Saint Dimitrios, too. In the past in Greece there was little room in a village graveyard for everyone, so you would bury someone in the family plot and after a set number of years, usually three, the body would be exhumed to make space for another and the bones would be placed in a wooden or metal box, which usually has the deceased’s name on the outside, and stored in the ossuary. It is a macabre practice to some, and not so common now. As you see, there is almost no-one left in our village to bury
,” he said, with an apologetic smile.

  This was something I knew nothing about. And if Angus had even scant knowledge of this grisly custom, he was as dazed as I was.

  “Dimitri, are you saying Kostas’s remains are actually in that building behind the church?” asked Angus.

  “Yes, they must be. That’s where my father put them in 1949. I hope the box is still there, but so many years have passed and there have been some small changes to the building in that time. Every time I come here for the summer yiorti, I light candles for all my deceased family, and for Kostas too, but I very rarely go inside the ossuary. I’ve become quite American about matters of death, I’m afraid.”

  Angus and I stared at each other with a mix of shock and hope.

  “Let’s go look in the ossuary, Dimitri. At least it will be open today,” said Leonidas, and we all rose, ready to hurry to the church. But Polly, always the more measured of us, said quietly, “Let us go by all means, but we should remember that even if we find the right box, it may not give us any more clues to the identity of Kostas.”

  “The notebook, Dimitri. Did your father salvage it from the grave in 1949? What became of it?” asked Angus.

  We had all momentarily forgotten the most important piece of information that might identify the dead soldier. Dimitris rubbed his hands over his face. He seemed to be deep in thought, rummaging through the backblocks of his memory.

  “I’m not really sure, folks. I wasn’t in the village in 1949. I had been fighting with the Greek army during the civil war and was wounded. I was in a hospital in Athens for a few months. When I came back to Platanos, I found out that my father had only recently given Kostas the exhumation. As far as I remember, my father said he put the notebook in the reliquary with Kostas’s remains. I asked my father if I could see it, or if I could keep it as a memento of Kostas. He said the notebook had been badly damaged after years in the ground, and it was best to leave it where it was,” Dimitris said, with a weary shrug. “So I guess it must still be there.”

  “If the notebook is in the reliquary, even if it’s damaged, we might glean something of the soldier’s identity. Or we can hope that he was still wearing his army identification discs when he was buried, and if they were salvaged we can identify him that way. Let’s go straight to the ossuary and see,” said Angus, visibly excited at this new lead.

  We all set off briskly towards the church. Angus was walking ahead, huffing and puffing, with Polly, Dimitris and me behind. Leonidas was last, still fiddling with his mobile phone. I suspected he had been speed-dialling Phaedra all day. I glanced round at him and he caught me up, taking my arm.

  “Bronte, you say you have never seen an ossuary. You might find it distressing. If you don’t want to see it, Angus and I will go in.”

  “No, I must. If these remains could possibly be Kieran’s, I want to see them,” I said, with a determined lift of my chin. But who was I fooling? This wasn’t at all what I imagined we’d find. I didn’t expect a box of bones.

  The ossuary was a rectangular building with a metal door that had bars at the top over a frosted glass window. We tried the handle and found it was unlocked. Inside was a long room with a window at the far end. The air was warm and musty. There was deep shelving on the two facing walls, stacked with boxes, as if it were a left-luggage department. Each box was about one-and-a-half feet square, mostly made of wood, inscribed with a name and date of death. Some were padlocked, some were not. Some had photos of the deceased or framed icons nearby. There was a stand for lighted candles and a small table at the front with a chair.

  At the far end of the room was a concrete sink and a flat surface like a draining board. Dimitris told us it was where the women washed the bones of the deceased. It made me shudder. I caught Angus’s eye and he gave me a wan smile. I noticed that Polly had sidled up to Angus and gave his arm a squeeze. Only Leonidas remained impassive in this charnel house.

  Dimitris told us he had no idea where the box would be, so we had to check the names on them all. Leonidas walked along one side of the room with Angus, while Dimitris and Polly went along the other, with me trailing absently behind. The lower shelves were easy to check but the ones at the very top seemed to be reserved for odd-shaped boxes, or old wrecks covered in dust. At one point, I spied a large cardboard box, used once for transporting tins of corned beef with a trade name on the side. A Greek name had been scrawled underneath it and I tried to imagine what kind of person had earned this wretched resting place. At least it didn’t appear to be Kostas.

  Once we reached the back of the ossuary, near the sink, there were only two boxes left to check on the top shelf. They were dusty, hunched together, with no names visible.

  “We will need a ladder,” said Leonidas, and he went outside to look for one, returning five minutes later with a rickety wooden ladder he had found propped up against a pear tree. “This will have to do. I hope it will hold my weight.” No one argued with his willingness to climb. He seemed the most able among us. Angus held it steady for him. Leonidas managed to edge the first box out and turned it slowly. It had Petros Psareas written on the side. The other was a bit smaller, also made of wood but thinner and less substantial, and tied up with thick twine. Leonidas edged it out and slowly turned it around, so he could see each side. On the third side we could all clearly see the word ‘Kostas’ written in a large neat hand and the word ‘filellinas’, which Polly told me meant ‘Friend of Greece’, and the date: May 1941. We all gasped. The story began to seem shockingly real. Leonidas handed the box carefully to Angus and climbed down the ladder.

  “Are you okay, Angus? You look pale,” said Leonidas.

  “I’ve never felt paler,” he replied, with a thin smile.

  Leonidas took the box from him and turned to Dimitris, who was standing back a short way from the rest of us, his head slightly bowed. “Well, there can be no doubt that this is the box you were talking about,” said Leonidas, and Dimitris nodded.

  Leonidas carefully carried it to the table near the door and set it down. There was forensic care and delicacy in the way he took charge of it, insisting we all stood in front of the table while he opened the box at the other side. Angus produced a Swiss army knife from his pocket and the twine was quickly cut. Leonidas gingerly pulled the lid up at one side. It made a grating sound. Angus linked his arm through mine. I was glad of it. I felt as if I might faint. Even Polly was losing her usual composure. There seemed to be no air in the room and I began to wish we’d done this outside.

  Dimitris stood against one of the shelves, his hands crossed in front of him. He had obviously seen much worse things in his long life than the rest of us, but he must have been suffering terribly from the memory of how this had all come to be. I could understand why he had avoided the ossuary in the past. Leonidas kept the lid at an angle, with the intention of obscuring our view − and our feelings, no doubt − then he replaced the lid.

  “There are bones inside. But, really, I think it is best if you all wait outside and I will check everything properly. It might be upsetting for some of you,” he said, looking straight at me. I felt a mix of relief and shame.

  “Is the notebook there, or anything else?” asked Angus excitedly.

  “I can’t tell yet.”

  Polly ushered us towards the door. “Leonidas is quite right. He is the doctor. He should examine the remains first.”

  I didn’t need any encouragement to follow Polly out the door, leaving Leonidas with his grisly task. There were some wooden benches outside and we sat quietly. We could hear Leonidas inside, carrying out his investigation, and a hollow rattling sound as he shifted the contents of the box about.

  “This is terrible, isn’t it?” said Angus, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “I am sorry for your anxiety, my friends,” said Dimitris.

  “Oh, not at all, Dimitris. Your story has been invaluable. You may yet be our saviour,” said Angus.

  “You mustn’t speak too soon,” D
imitris replied, glumly.

  We could hear Leonidas walking through the ossuary and then the sound of running water, as if he were perhaps washing his hands by the big concrete sink. Finally he came out, looking rather grave.

  “It is the remains of a young male, I would say, and there is a fracture to the front of the skull consistent with a bullet wound, though I can’t tell now if he was also struck in the back. But it ties in with what Dimitris has told us.”

  “The notebook?” said Angus, in a trembling voice.

  Leonidas shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Only the bones.”

  “Oh, no!” said Polly.

  “Oh my! So my recollections were wrong,” Dimitris said, biting his lower lip.

  “Were his army ID discs there?” asked Angus.

  “No, Angus, nothing. I am sorry,” replied Leonidas.

  Angus looked inconsolable. “Without the notebook or the discs, we don’t know anything. This could be any poor soldier.”

  So we’d come this far and we were no closer to solving the mystery. All this mental anguish for nothing. Even Leonidas looked tired, raking his hand through his hair, and it struck me how much he had done for us lately in this quest, and today of all days. I would always admire him for that.

  Dimitris seemed agitated. He stood up suddenly. “I’m sorry, folks. I know my brain’s not what it used to be, but I’m sure my father said he put the notebook in that box. If not that, then he must have hidden it some place and forgot to tell anyone, and it was left behind after we sold up and moved to Athens.”

  “If he hid the book, we’ll have to turn the village upside down to find it,” said Angus.

  “Something isn’t quite right about this … Maybe it’s been stolen for some fool reason. I’m going to find the papas. He may be able to help us,” said Dimitris, striding off towards the church.

  “Poor Dimitris. He’s taking all this very hard,” said Angus.