Enemy and Brother

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “My instructions in Athens had been explicit: I was to bring you and Webb north for an interview with Markos and afterwards I was to see you returned safely to the Athens government. As a member of the political wing of the movement, I owed my first obedience to that command. Webb knew these instructions to me. So did Markos. What could I do? It was three hours before dawn, three very long hours. And I was exhausted. I had not slept that night at all.

  “The woman was trusted by the General. If Webb had left the camp it was probably with his knowledge. My vigil was meant to keep you from following… such thoughts went over and over in my mind, and there was no answer. The lamp ran out of fuel. I sat in the dark.

  “As you know I woke you when the light of day was commencing. We went to the General’s quarters. You would not have understood me, but I told him that Webb had gone to the woman and had not returned; It did not seem to disturb him. He said, ‘I am glad he availed himself of our hospitality.’ He was in a good mood. I asked him what I should tell you. He said I could tell you Webb was safe. He said that I was to take you to the mess and have breakfast. He would send for me.

  “I had a few minutes then in a fool’s paradise. I ate my biscuit and cheese in confidence that for me everything would be fine. Markos trusted me. It even crossed my mind that the reason the interview was not conducted in English was so that you could be excluded, not me. After all, my function was only to be that of translator.

  “You will remember Captain Demetrios came for me himself. When we went in, Markos was warming his hands at a fire he was feeding with papers. They were about to break camp. It was Demetrios who gave me orders to take you to the crossroads.

  “‘And Webb, Comrade Captain?’ I asked.

  “‘He is a man capable of taking care of himself and no longer your responsibility.’ Markos came from the fire then. Demetrios said, ‘At the crossroads you will leave Emory with a bullet in his head.’

  “I could not believe. I looked at Markos. He nodded it was to be done. ‘Respectfully, Comrade General and Comrade Captain, my orders from my political superior were to return both men safely to Monarchist lines.’

  “Markos said, ‘In the field, Comrade, I am your commander.’

  “Demetrios laid the revolver on the table. When I reached for it he said, ‘My God, don’t you ever wash your hands?’ I was given two hours of measured time in which to accomplish my mission and return. Markos went back to burning his papers. I never saw him or Demetrios again. I did not permit you to go back to the cottage. You wanted to take Webb’s coat to him. It would have been funny if it had not been so tragic, the orders I had been given.

  “So we went down in the blue light before the sun was up. I thought of you: if only he would attack me I would have to shoot him, but you followed me like a lamb the butcher. And I thought, Webb knows that I must do this thing: if the General is satisfied, Webb knows. And I cursed him better than you had the night before. Then I thought about the woman Maria again. How briefly we had seen them, man upon woman, and her thighs naked. Oh, yes, I had seen that much. But how better to deceive the intruder? Maria a camp woman. Who would not have gone back to his bed and thought no more of it than to envy Webb his pleasure? When the camp was still again, Maria would have guided him—she knew well all the trails—to where he was to go. And Markos had known. I had believed that from the moment I looked and saw that Webb was gone.

  “But now we know what neither of us knew then, that by the time we went down in the morning Webb was already dead, his body rolled down the parapet near the crossroads. Did Markos know it? That I do not believe to this day.

  “The sun was up and there was no one to be seen from any direction at the crossroads. It had taken us an hour and ten minutes. It would take me longer to return, uphill all the way. They did not expect me back in time.

  “You begged me not to leave you—little knowing how I had been instructed to leave you. I said it was not safe for me to stay. I told you what I believed, that the woman had brought Webb down, and that he had purposely left his coat to deceive you. I think you believed me.”

  “I had no choice,” I said, “and I knew that I had to go on alone. I asked you if you had a gun and I offered you twenty dollars for it.”

  Stephanou nodded. Running his hand along the ground beside him, he found a bit of root and pulled it out, and then began to work the loosened soil between his fingers. “I thought about my orders: Webb was out of my hands, but it was still in my power to return you safely. The sun was warm on our backs, you may remember, as we rested near the shrine. I looked down on the plains. People had worked there recently, the peasant tillers of the earth, my good and beloved people. I thought of Kaléa and Vasso whom I loved then as I am no longer able to love her, and I knew that I was through as an Andarte. I felt only a kind of contemptuous sorrow for you at that moment, that you felt you needed a gun. It was easy for me to give it to you, and I took the twenty dollars though I did not know what I was going to do with it.

  “Where I was going I did not know except someplace to hide and sleep the day. I thought I would go to the woman, Maria. I had known the mountain cottage where she lived and her whole family until the Germans came. After that she lived alone.”

  “Did you find her?” I said. He seemed reluctant to go on.

  “I found her, but hers is a story it is going to be harder for me to tell.”

  20

  THE SUN HAD PASSED to where there was virtually no shade on either side of the wall. I could feel the sweat rolling down my back and Stephanou’s blue shirt was soaked beneath the armpits. We both needed to move in any case. My own tension hung like an iron yoke at the base of my neck. I suggested that we go back to the car and find a place to stay for the night. He threw off my hand when I put it beneath his arm to help him: he had acquired a fine independence. But he stumbled, getting up, and caught the toe of his shoe beneath a root so that he pitched forward. I leaped to catch him but his weight was more than I could hold, off-balance.

  With shocking suddenness both of us went crashing down the embankment. The sandy soil and small stones scuttled beneath me while I clutched at roots, the scrub pines, anything, trying to stay myself. I gradually slowed my momentum, but Paul, with no more self-control than a sack of potatoes, tumbled and hurtled on. I braked myself, reaching the rocky ledge. He had disappeared. I scrambled to the edge and looked down—into the out-running sea some twenty or thirty feet below. A whorled pattern shaped like a moving target from the point at which he had struck the water. I pulled off my shoes while I watched. The moment I saw his head come up, I dived, shouting out to him.

  The water was petrifyingly cold. I touched the scaly rocks at the bottom with my hands before twisting and spiraling up. He was still afloat when I broke the surface. “Tread water!” I shouted. “Just stay afloat!”

  He was trying without success to roll over on his back. I thought of the heavy, crepe-soled shoes he wore.

  I reached him and caught his collar, trying the while to get my land bearings. The face of the cliff rose sheer and perpendicular. So strong was the current it gave me no choice of direction. “Roll on your back!” I cried. It crossed my mind the strength of will it must have taken him not to clutch at me when I had reached him.

  “Keep me up till I kick off my shoes!”

  The pull while he worked at them, one foot against the other, felt like an undertow. I needed desperately to get into motion, to work the numbness out of my body.

  “Now.” He rolled over on his back.

  From then on the sea and I towed him downward toward the bay. How far I don’t know. The cliff fell away into marshes, but I dared not go inland to tangle in the reeds before I was sure of safe depth. I saw a boat in the distance, its masthead like those I had seen in the quay, a fisherman going out to sea. He was beyond hailing distance, but I reasoned he was likely to have come from a dock, possibly deep in the marshes ahead. The current tended from near that point on to carry us out, not in.
I had to swim against it, and I didn’t know how long my strength would last. Paul, sensing the change, tread water. It helped. At my first brush with the marsh grass I ducked my head under water. I could see the bottom. A few yards farther and I could touch it. Then I saw the pier, a thin bridge of timber with an old boat tied alongside. Not a living being was in sight.

  We tried the bottom when the water was shoulder high. The sand gave only a little, then mercifully grew firm beneath our feet; it might have been muck that would have sucked us down. We went inland dragging one foot after the other, I holding his arm to guide him. This time he gave me no resistance. The dock at its terminal was waist high. We pulled ourselves up and lay on the rough warm boards. Paul, after a minute or two, groped his way to the edge and vomited back to the sea its own waters. He just lay there, on his stomach, his head on his arm.

  After a while, my strength returned with the rush of vitality one feels in salvation. I said, “It’s a fine bit of aftersight, but I should never have taken you there.”

  His first words: “It was fated. And you finally got your god-damn swim in Prevesa.”

  I laughed and embraced the sky with my eyes. A flight of egrets rose from the marshes, their white wings, black-tipped, flashing in the sun. My shirt was already drying on my back. I felt my pocket for the car keys. They were still there. I had locked my wallet and passport in the glove compartment. And it was true, my watch did resist water. I told these things to Paul.

  “America the beautiful,” he said without irony.

  It was after four when we followed the pier through the tall tasseled reeds to the road. The dust was powdery soft beneath our feet. We waited. I waved at the first car on the road, a small truck hauling empty tomato crates. The driver stopped. His wife gave us a gold-toothed smile as though there were nothing strange in two grown men walking the road in their bare feet. Paul and I rode as I had when a boy, our legs dangling from the back of the truck.

  I saw the Vauxhall as we passed the path I had turned up to the Venetian walls, and shouted to the driver to put us down. As I thanked him, he pointed to his own eyes, then to Paul.

  “Sand,” I said. “We fell into the water.” It didn’t make much sense, but it seemed to satisfy him. The words were not premeditated. It was my instinct now to avoid attracting undue attention. We stood at the side of the road until the truck had driven off before I took Paul’s arm.

  “It is something I had not thought about,” Paul said as I unlocked the car door. “The two of us together have a certain identity. That is why you told me who you were before we got to Ioannina.”

  “There would have come the time in any case,” I said. “Wait in the car. I’m going to see if I can retrieve your cane and my shoes.”

  I found the cane halfway down the embankment and my shoes where I had dropped them on the ledge above the sea. I stretched out on my belly for safety and looked over the ledge. The tide had fallen perhaps a foot or more and the scabrous rocks protruded like alligators’ backs. Here and there the water bubbled over those not yet emerged. It was very nearly a miracle that we had found a safe depth among them.

  “Once more you might have died,” Paul said when I got back to the car and told him.

  “We might both have died, and wouldn’t the authorities have had a hell of a time figuring that out?”

  “It would perhaps have made for the quickest enlightenment of all,” he said.

  “Of all except the two principals.”

  He thought about that. “You want very much to know, Professor?”

  I said, I think with wryness, “It wasn’t only to attend your wedding that I returned to Greece.”

  We found lodgings near the ruins of Nikopolis, once a great city. It was built by the Roman Emperor Octavius to commemorate his victory over Antony and Cleopatra in 31 B.C. While we were changing clothes, I reminded Stephanou that his name saint, Paul, had preached there.

  We sat in the dappled shade of a Cyprus tree while the proprietress brought us tea and a sweet pastry. Neither of us had stomach for the pastry. I asked her to save it for our dinner.

  “We are almost there,” I said. “Tomorrow if we are ready.”

  “Then I must finish the story of my betrayal—is that what we should call my testimony against you?”

  “How can you betray an enemy?”

  “It is so,” he said. “It was my very reasoning, and I was in grave danger then of betraying my friends.

  “When I left you at the crossroads—and you see, to have properly completed my assignment where you were concerned I should have watched until I could actually say you were in the hands of the military patrol. I did not watch. Perhaps I did not want to see—so that I wound up fulfilling neither Markos’ command nor that of my political superiors—I went back into the hills and found a place where I could see the campsite. It was already evacuated. What I wanted to do was to wait for the people to come back to the village as was their custom after the Andarte had moved out. I camouflaged myself beneath some pine boughs and dead leaves. The sunlight filtered through and felt on my body much like the warmth of a woman. I slept the sun across the sky.

  “When I woke, no villagers had come yet. Nor did they come. I did not know it then but the government was evacuating them entirely into Ioannina, creating a no-man’s land between them and the guerrilla forces. Finally, for I was very hungry, I went into the abandoned village looking for what food might have been left. I found the dregs of milk curd in a pot and ate it. There was nothing more. I went to the cottage, remembering Webb’s trenchcoat which I much admired, but it was gone. If the wilderness is desolate, a village with no people in it is much worse. I took a trail, following the sun toward Zitsa. It was the direction in which Maria lived.”

  “Byron’s monastery,” I said, remembering Stephanou’s first reaction when I mentioned it as one of my destinations.

  “It is so. But I had to cross the highway and when I got near it I saw what was happening: people moving under armed escort toward Ioannina in jeeps and trucks, by donkey. I wondered there were donkeys left them by the Andarte who needed them so desperately. They were carrying pieces of bedding, clothes and children, their wonder-working icons. I thought, it is like the Nazis coming all over again, only there are no bombers in the sky.

  “When the road was empty and I went down, I found a posting such as I was to see everywhere there was a post to nail it to. It ordered the evacuation and warned that those who did not obey would be considered sympathetic to the Communists and dealt with accordingly. I wondered if it would be possible for me to pass among the refugees,

  “I knew that it would not. I went on toward Zitsa, but Maria’s was no longer my destination. Only for food perhaps. If I could reach the river and follow it toward the sea. You may remember that our last night before making contact with Markos was spent in the valley. We rode from there on the mules Markos was waiting for. It does not matter now. I did not get back….”

  I glanced at him when he stopped there. His jaw was hard, his mouth taut.

  “I found Maria’s hut,” he said, then, tumbling out the words, “and I found Maria. Her tongue had been split like a parrot’s. The parts of it had swollen—horrible, protruding from her mouth. Her eyes wild, and blood everywhere. She was mad at times, I think, rolling on the floor with the pain. What could I do? I made warm water and salt and tried to bathe the wound. I will not describe her any more to you. She could not talk—she would not talk, ever. And she had not learned to read or write.

  “I tried to make her go to the road where they would find her and she would be taken to a doctor. She would not. I asked her if she knew me. She nodded. I asked her who had done that to her, the American? She nodded. But I do not think she understood. It was because of the American it happened: I am sure that that was what she meant, for then I asked her where it happened, and she traced the shape of a cross with her finger. At the crossroads? It was so. I asked her if the American was there. No. Was it the Monarcho-F
ascists? No. Was it our people? No. The only answer I could be sure she understood was the making of the crossroads sign. I stayed with her that raving night. I spooned water with a little sugar down her throat. But she was gagging in the morning, gasping, she could not breathe. I put wool on a piece of stick, wet it, and cleaned out her nostrils. I had to sit astride her like a beast to hold her down.

  “I prayed that night—as only an atheist can pray—challenging God to manifest himself and prove me wrong. No such proof was forthcoming. I made a kind of harness out of a blanket and tried to make her understand that I would carry her to a doctor. She ran outdoors and began digging in the earth beneath the cottage as though she would hide there. I have seen wounded animals crawl into darkness. I did the only thing I could do then: I came up behind her and with the edge of my flat hand struck her hard at the base of the skull. She crumbled into a blessed silence. I carried her on my back to the road and then along its no-man’s land. It was a nightmare such as makes brief what I have suffered since. From the hill above the crossroads I could see much activity there, many people, motorcycles and jeeps. I laid her on the side of the road. She was beginning to moan again. I cupped my hands round my mouth and raised my voice as loud as I could cry. To this day I can hear the echo of my own voice and feel how the cry tore at my throat. Someone down there waved. I waved back, then dropped to the ground out of sight, and behind the shield of the hill I ran. I made it that night to a village where once I had been given shelter. I was given it again but it was dangerous. The evacuation order had not yet been enforced but people were preparing to leave their homes. Patrols came through every two hours. The villagers had been enumerated.

  “It was there I learned that Alexander Webb’s body had been found that morning at the crossroads, shot through the heart. When I had cried out for help for Maria it was to people who had come there concerned with the discovery. Webb dead and Maria mutilated. Something had gone very wrong. I was accustomed to violence, but I usually knew its meaning.