Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  “Ah, naí, naí.” Yes, yes. The old woman’s face cracked into a smile. By the time Cally had brushed her teeth, paper packets containing bread, sausage, sheep’s cheese, olives, an orange, and a bottle of water were waiting by her knapsack.

  viii

  The American girl’s jeans had a soft, second-skin feel, and Cally could walk forever in her hiking sandals, but never before, she realized, had she walked any distance alone. She stopped in the shade of a tree outside the fence around the old Moní Préveli to open the bagged lunch the old woman had given her. Below her, shadows of the clouds coming down over the peak at the north end of the valley sailed across the jumble of creases and hillocks. There was the arched bridge and her tavérna and, round the next hill, a little ruin with the church attached. Close beside her, sunlight glanced off the back of what appeared to be a bottle-blue bumble bee.

  Farther up the mountain, a man in a pickup truck, who was delivering wooden cases of something to the monastery, stopped to give her a lift. By the time they passed the turnoff to the parking lot above the beach, clouds were foaming in over the mountain at the northern end of the valley, where the Kourtaliotis Gorge was. Their shadows slid across the high mountain meadows. The wind turned chilly and she was glad she had brought the Giants hoodie and her rain shell.

  The monastery’s stone buildings nestled against a cliff under the Preveli mountain’s summit. Some of the windows in the oldest sections had no glass. The monks’ cells behind them must be so small, spartan, bitterly cold in winter. Inside the gate, small iconographic paintings of saints crowded the shelves of the Moní Préveli museum gift shop. She recognized Saint John the Theologian (thanks to Oliver), and John the Baptist, Saint Paul, and the Virgin Mary. Glass cases displayed ornate, bygone religious garments. Books in several languages at the back described the monastery’s history and its participation in the Allied escape during World War II.

  She was the gift shop’s only visitor this morning. On the wall by the front door, she found a map of the valley below. Numbered symbols marked the churches. There was the little ruin where Oliver had shown her the date, 1941: “Agías Parasksevís, 13 - 15th Century.” The map showed the river that flowed past her tavérna splitting just above the ruin, the tributary she knew coming down from the Kourtaliotis Gorge. The one that joined it came from the east side of the same mountain.

  The lay curator spoke no English. Cally pointed to herself, pretended to open and read a book.

  “I need records.” She pointed to herself again. “About my family.”

  The curator, a plain-faced man in a beige sweater, looked befuddled.

  “Pater familia.” Her Latin — dug up from where? — elicited a blank look. She pointed to herself again, inspiration turning her index fingers, one behind the other, into a machine gun. “A.a.a.a.a. In the war.”

  “Ah.” The curator’s face opened. He raised a finger — just a moment — and picked up the telephone.

  The monk who stooped through the stone doorway a few minutes later was wearing a black Greek Orthodox robe.

  “You here looking for a relative?” His English was fluent, his accent American, eastern seaboard — “here” pronounced “heeah.” His hair was black, cut short. “I’m Brother Pavlos, Paul in English — archivist, librarian. Anything to do with historical records, you can ask me.”

  “Where are you from?” She couldn’t help asking. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, his cheeks pocked by a few acne scars.

  His smile was quick, street smart.

  “You mean what’s a Boston boy doing in a Cretan monastery?”

  After so many days with only herself for company, it felt good to laugh.

  “I was born here, named Pavlos for Saint Paul, who stopped here on his way from the Holy Land to spread the gospel in the north — you remember his Letter to the Corinthians? They say the big cave at Limni Beach was his first altar in Crete.”

  “Really?” She pictured a map: Israel at the end of the Mediterranean, not far to the east.

  “It makes sense. His boat’s crew would have known there was fresh water here.”

  Christianity unfurling right here, two thousand years ago.

  “You’ve been down to the beach?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “It could be the Garden of Eden, don’t you think?” He smiled. “So how, you are wondering, does a boy from the Garden of Eden wind up in America? Well, school was very easy for me and I have an uncle there, so I went to study at Boston University. But,” he shrugged, “my God and this Cretan light missed me, and Boston is so cold in winter!” He turned his attention to her. “How can I help?”

  She told him about her grandfather, a soldier who had been rescued from Crete after the German invasion, probably after the evacuations because he had met her grandmother and had a child.

  Brother Paul nodded.

  “There were many who couldn’t get onto the ships, or who escaped from the Nazi prison camps and had to spend months hiding in the mountains. Come on, we’ll go to my office.”

  Engraved marble plaques just inside the monastery’s courtyard were dedicated, in Greek and English, to the memory of the Preveli abbots’ heroism as again and again they had stood up to persecution by invaders of Crete. Brother Paul ran a hand over the top of the plaque dedicated to World War II.

  “If your grandfather was here, he likely would have taken part in one of the two Limni Beach rescues.”

  “There were two? I thought the Germans raided the monastery—”

  “That was after the second one.” Brother Paul smiled. “They thought they had the cove covered because they had built a concrete pillbox in the meadow and circular stone machine gun nests at the top of the cliff above the cove — have you seen them? — and they had installed a searchlight just behind where the stairs are now, but still a second submarine took a load of men off the beach.”

  “How?”

  “By climbing down the headland, between the searchlight’s sweeps, in absolute silence — you’ve heard the sheep bells, how sound travels on these mountainsides? The sub was lying about two hundred yards offshore with only its coning tower above water. They strung a rope from it to a huge rock in the shallows below the headland and, one by one, nearly a hundred men swam along it right under the Nazis’ noses.”

  Chirruping birds were flitting into the branches of a giant tree whose needled canopy spread out above the other end of the courtyard, beyond the monastery’s church. Brother Paul turned to watch them. “This time though, as you said, the Nazis found out.”

  “How?” she asked again.

  His shoulders lifted. “Informers. The Nazis stormed in here.”

  Chanting was coming from the church. Brother Paul shook himself out of the past.

  “Would you like to see?”

  He opened the church door just a crack. Monks wearing tall black headpieces moved silently between tableaux of painted saints that glowed gold in a candlelit world that seemed the antithesis of treachery and war. This was, however, a monastery, a private place of worship.

  On the far side of the courtyard, the giant tree full of birds turned out to be a cypress, rooted in the ground a storey below, its trunk curving up over the courtyard wall between the church and a newly whitewashed building that must be the monastery’s offices.

  “It’s a hundred and ten years old. Look down there.” Brother Paul pointed over the wall, “See the coins? People throw them to make a wish.”

  The tree must have been planted as a break against winds from the sea. The summit of the mountain into which the monastery was built shielded it from the north wind, which was bringing the clouds in faster now, their grey-lined undersides riding low above the sheep that munched the herbs and grasses in the meadow between the monastery and the sea cliff. They stood for a moment, listening to the symphony of their bells.

  If she did not have a single religious bone in her body, why, Cally wondered, was every one of her cells quivering?

>   “Come.” The library and archive were housed in the whitewashed building. Brother Paul’s office — fluorescent bright, with a computer, a printer, a telephone/fax — cartwheeled her back into the world of PowerPoint and business plans, television news, security scans. Suddenly a little dizzy, she held onto the edge of the desk.

  The monk was routing through shelves where books leaned against dog-eared records, cloth-bound account ledgers, and rolled manuscripts, some of them very old: a people’s story recorded through facts, notes, and anecdotes, unfiltered by the historians who write the books. If only she could read Greek.

  “There are some awful gaps,” said Brother Paul. “When the Nazis broke in, they looted the library.”

  “Why, in a monastery? What possible purpose could it serve?”

  “Revenge, married to power, has no religion.” The monk’s smile was not saintly.

  “Did the monastery ever find out who had informed on them?”

  “I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. Every country has its fascists. What many people don’t like to remember is that though the Cretan resistance was without parallel in courage, there were also those who collaborated with the Nazis because they really believed the propaganda flyers that dropped out of the sky. Then there were those who were so afraid and trying to save themselves and their families, God help them.” He sat down at the desk. “It can be hard to know what to do when you are living in the middle of history unfolding, and like life, history can sometimes be hideous.” He shot her a smile then started tapping his keyboard. “Just warning you because you know what they say: ignorance is bliss.”

  “It’s also an empty place to live.”

  Brother Paul glanced up at her. She caught the compassion in his look.

  “Okay, then.” He started reading his computer screen. “Let’s see what we can do about that. Your grandfather’s name?”

  “Robert MacIntyre. He was fighting with the British army.”

  Nothing came up.

  “That doesn’t mean much. There’s a lot that’s not online yet.” He looked at her over the screen. “And people as far away as Australia remember the Allied rescues from Preveli. Soldiers and their families have sent us information, and there are books.” He got up, looked into a cabinet. “Ah, here we are.” The slim, cloth-bound account book smelled mouldy when he opened it. Ink faded to rust brown listed names. “This is a record of the soldiers who got off on H.M.S. Thrasher, the first Limni rescue, in July.”

  Her grandfather was not among them. There was no list of the second group.

  “Probably because they were not sheltered here.”

  She tried to contain her disappointment.

  “There definitely was a second rescue, though?”

  “Oh, yes, a month later. When the August moon left the sky the H.M.S. Torbay came for Commander Pool, who was doing British intelligence work here, and it took a load of escapees. Coffee?”

  Preveli was a cloistered monastery but its archivist did not seem to be in any hurry for her to leave.

  “Naí, kafé me gála kai záchari, parakaló.” Yes, coffee with milk and sugar, please. She grinned. The old couple at her tavérna were teaching her Greek.

  Brother Paul disappeared into an adjoining kitchen. She eyed the computer the way an alcoholic looks at a bottle.

  “Are you sure your grandfather was able to leave Crete?” Brother Paul called.

  “Yes, he would never talk about any of it, but what I know is that my mother was born here in 1942, that her mother, my grandmother, died, and that Grampa came back here after the war to get his daughter.”

  “Well, if he wasn’t evacuated at Chora Sfakion or Iraklio, your grandfather probably had to walk over the mountains. Do you know how terrible that would have been, through the high passes?” Her host carried in a tray with two steaming mugs of filtered coffee, “What I can tell you for sure is that many of the soldiers who were caught like your grandfather did make their ways down here. The Nazis were thickest in the north shore cities, and this coast was pretty remote.” He handed her a mug. “So if he wasn’t evacuated and he wasn’t on the Thrasher, but he was rescued, then your grandfather must have been part of the second Limni rescue. No other submarines came to the south shore.”

  “The old couple at the tavérna said you might have photographs from the war?”

  “Boxes of them. The British Intelligence officers were always taking pictures. These were returned to us after the war, and the good news is that they’re organized by region.” He got up again to go into what looked like a storeroom behind the office, and came back to put a wooden carton on the desk. It was stuffed with old black-and-white and sepia photographs: booted men sitting on mountainsides or leaning on shepherds’ crooks, many with the traditional Cretan moustaches; boys on roadsides smiling for the camera; old, middle-aged, young women. So many pictures from this valley, many with names and dates on the back. They sat, one on each side of the desk, randomly searching.

  Brother Paul said something in Greek. Cally looked up to find him staring at her, then at the snapshot in his hand, then back at her. There, smiling outside the doorway of a stone mountain hut, a younger version of herself was squinting into the sun. The name on the back, in faded ink, was written in the Greek alphabet.

  “Callisto Kastellatis, Geratti 1941.” Brother Paul handed her the picture.

  It was the girl in Grampa’s photograph at home! She was so young, a teenager in a printed skirt and scuffed shoes, a bit of a tomboy maybe, smiling a little shyly for the camera.

  “Geratti is just the other side of the Kourtaliotis Gorge, hidden up in the mountains behind it,” said the monk. “It was a gathering point for the Resistance. There was a school teacher, I’ve forgotten his name, but he was a leader in this area.”

  She could not take her eyes off the girl. Her grandmother, the mother of her mother, who had fallen in love with Grampa, had a child, and then died.

  “How old do you think she was, sixteen? Seventeen at most.” Too young, surely, to raise a child.

  “Well, how old was your grandfather in 1941?”

  She had never thought about it, but now she did the math. He would have been twenty, five years younger than she was now.

  “Things were pretty tough all over in Greece in 1941, especially during that winter. In Athens they were starving.” Brother Paul started handing her pictures of skeletal children and then of young, smiling, fresh-faced Allied soldiers in ragged uniforms, on mountain slopes that could turn into hell any minute. Then he got up to scan the book shelves, coming back finally with a slim paperback called Flowers of Rethymnon.

  “It’s the story of the second rescue at Limni Beach, your grandfather’s story probably.”

  “Oh!”

  “How long are you’re here for?”

  She did not know what to say. “A while.”

  “I’m not supposed to lend books, but …”

  “I’m just down the road at the tavérna. And I promise to return it.”

  “If you don’t, I might have to kill you.”

  She glanced down at the photograph of her grandmother, still in her hand.

  “Keep it.” Brother Paul gestured at the box. “There are plenty of others in there to tell the stories.” He gazed at her for another moment. “There may be someone who still remembers Geratti. I will make inquiries for you. Do you have a notebook where you can write down your thoughts? When I am searching for something, I have always found that useful.”

  Outside, the clouds were racing. When the road down the mountain rounded the bend above the cliff top parking lot, the north wind whistled around her ears. She put on her rain shell, pulling up the hoods of both her sweatshirt and the shell, then turned down the track to the parking lot where she and Oliver had stood.

  The Nazis’ spotlight that had been trained on the headland opposite, where Grampa MacIntyre had climbed down, must have been positioned here. There, far below, was the sand where he and a hundred others
had waited, immobile as the rocks.

  The wind, gusting, tried to push her over the edge. She planted her feet and, turning to face it, saw the curtain of rain travelling toward her across the high meadows to the north, bending in the wind. There was nowhere to go, no shelter anywhere nearby. She sat down, hunching her shoulders, waiting.

  Had she done something incredibly stupid? The rain, needle sharp against her cheeks, beat a tattoo on her hood. The wind howled. Water came in under both of her hoods and trickled down her neck. There was nothing to do but wait. Except that now, on this headland where she and Oliver had stood, this power that did not care what it destroyed seemed to have burst a dam she had built inside herself too. The trouble with burst dams was that there was no way to contain the torrent that was streaming in white water rivulets around her now, toward the cliff.

  The rain curtain passed. She looked up. Another one arrived, drumming on the rocky sentinels along the mountain ridge above her, splattering the ground, beating on her hood before sweeping past her, out to sea.

  When the rain stopped and she got to her feet, her hood was plastered to the side of her head. She peeled it back. On the headland across the gorge, something moved, small as a large speck from here, visible only because of its movement through the outcroppings of stone: a shepherd, looking for a lost lamb?

  Walking down the road, she hugged the mountainside. Clouds continued to pour over the peaks to the north, where Brother Paul had told her Geratti was, where her grandmother had lived. Their shadows raced down the mountains’ upper reaches and across the high pastures, some large, some small, rendering the mountaintop invisible one minute then, after you blinked, bathed in bright sunlight. Moving on, the shadows turned the sea’s armada of whitecaps from blue to gun-metal grey. No wonder the Cretans had dreamed up the gods.

  When the mountaintop tore open another cloud and another great sheet of water arced toward her, she pulled up her sodden hoods again. The rain tack-tack-tacked on her head, stung her face, soaked her jeans and feet. She heard herself laugh. What was wrong with being wet?