Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  “I love you.” Maybe.

  But if that were true, Mom, why couldn’t you ever show it? Live it? Our futures are shaped early, before we are old enough to have any say. What had happened between the day her mother’s photograph was taken in Geratti and the day Grampa came back to Crete for her after the war?

  Something, even though her grandfather had kept Callisto’s picture as close as the inside of his everyday desk, that had silenced both him and her mother.

  Outside, heavy with their burden of Saharan mud the palm trees scraped in a new gust of wind.

  The Sirocco wore itself out. The cave was cold, the rock hard. She sat up. It would be a while yet before daylight reached into the gorge. She ate her second orange.

  Imagine what would happen back home if electricity suddenly stopped for good, no more electrons flowing, every coal and gas and nuclear power plant shut down. The whole world would grind to a halt. Without computers, goods would not get to factories, planes would crash into each other, no one would have any idea how much money they had, complicated medical operations would cease. Nothing was immune.

  Billy’s bell tinkled somewhere nearby. He was probably hoping she had left.

  “Don’t worry, boy.” She threw him her orange rinds.

  When she came out into the day everything — palms, shrubs, rocks, oleanders — was coated with a reddish sheen, like an old sepia photograph. She would go down to the beach, then up the headland, reversing the journey her grandfather had taken.

  At the bottom of the cave path, she had just turned to walk down through the palms when someone coming up from the beach began a throaty, off-tune whistle. She crouched low behind the trunk of the oldest, thickest palm. God only knew what she looked like. Rabbit-fear stopped her breathing as a man in calf-length cargo pants and hiking boots passed within a foot of her, his walking poles stabbing the ground.

  Watching his back recede, Cally imagined him sensing her presence and turning. She saw herself baring her teeth, snarling. Joy, blossoming suddenly, made her want to laugh.

  Down at the beach, sunlight glistened on the sea under the ghost of last night’s full moon. The swollen river had widened its channel across the sand. Waves thundered in to wash up against it. She looked around. Here too it looked as if the gods had laid a mantle of red over every oleander flower and leaf, even over the sand.

  The giant boulder, to which the soldiers had tied the guide rope from the submarine, was sitting in the water just off shore. Above it the east side headland rose against the white-blue early morning sky. Rocks tumbling through the millennia had taken at least forty-five degrees off the top of the vertical gradient but, rising in tiers, it was still nearly vertical in spots. It wouldn’t have changed much since that night, sixty-one years ago, when her grandfather had stood under the cliff behind the tamarisk trees.

  She gazed at the fading moon. You weren’t there, she reminded it. You didn’t see the naked men lined up, waiting, their clothes left behind for the Cretans. Had you told my grandmother yet that she was pregnant?

  The river water was salt-free. She scooped some into her hair, using her fingers to comb it. A path, trodden by Billy and his friends, wound up the headland. A steady patter of pebbles bounced down it as she climbed. How on earth had a hundred and one soldiers clambered down it without a sound?

  And why, Grampa, didn’t you ever tell me about it? His sorrow must have been so deep.

  The headland flattened into a shelf. A boulder, carved by some geological accident into a perfect place to sit, was covered in reddish powder. She wiped it clean then sat, the morning breeze kissing her face. Behind her the last ridge of jagged limestone sentinels rose between her and the meadow she had seen from down in the river valley.

  Clouds floating in looked nearly close enough to touch while, hundreds of feet below, rollers clapped against the foot of this headland. Away to her left, the Libyan Sea, aqua and dark blue this morning, was breaking all along the mountain shores, white foam tracing the wild and empty coastline. On the other side of the beach, there was the top of the Preveli cliff, where she had stood the other day. Where the German searchlight had been placed. And now look! Out on the sea, a sudden wind lifted the comb of a whitecap into a plume of spray that danced, just for a moment, making a rainbow.

  The sun rose higher. She peeled off her clothes so the scents of sun-warmed herbs and the sea could play across her skin. Sitting on her boulder, she and earth and wind and sky and sea, and even the blue-backed beetle scuttling through the muddy grass beside her big toe, all became part of the same unfolding day.

  Coming to her feet, she raised her arms to feel the breeze on her breasts.

  Behind the headland, the valley looked as if an apocalypse had struck, every surface covered with the reddish dust. Exhausted now, her skin tight with sunburn under her clothes, she came down through the meadow her grandfather had climbed on that moonless night and felt closer than she ever had both to him and to the story she did not yet know. She looked up at the flying clouds.

  If Grampa never talked about it, what did you know about all this, Mom?

  The ceaseless Cretan wind shifted to the north. It picked up the reddish dust ahead of her and set it swirling. Like a spirit, visible for only a moment. She thought of the shepherdess in her dream. Had her grandmother Callisto walked down through this meadow too, her little girl dancing along beside her?

  The tavérna was deserted, chairs upturned on the tables, everything covered in reddish dust, the kitchen door locked though it was well after noon. Even the chickens were staying out of sight. She checked the bungalow. Nobody was home. The daughter must have taken her parents back to Rethymnon to wait out the storm. Her room was locked too.

  The hose the old woman used to water her hibiscus was coiled by the bread oven. She turned it on and drank deeply. There were oranges on the tree in the garden, though they too were covered in red dust. Ravenous now, she found a metal pail and started filling it with beans from the trellis, half-grown carrots, an onion from the vegetable patch. And potatoes! She could dig some up to roast. There were matches under the old man’s grill and lots of dried bamboo by the river. She could start a small fire in the pail.

  Feasting on the vegetables, she watched reddish dust trickle down out of the patio’s thatched roof onto the tables, the chairs, the flagstone floor. She would hose them all down. When the old woman came home she would find her tavérna ready for business. The engine up on the road did not draw her attention until it backfired, gearing down. Not until it crossed over the bridge did she recognize it.

  Oh, God. She was squatting over her fire, her fingers and T-shirt and, no doubt, her mouth smeared with soot, her hair hanging—

  The motorcycle came to a halt at the foot of the patio. She stood up. His curls were starting to grow back. Wrecks jumped out of the sidecar and came to her, barking, smiling. She stooped to pat him.

  “Hello, boy.”

  Oliver stayed on the bike.

  “The old woman stopped in Plakias yesterday, hoping I might know where you had gone. I’d heard she had a new helper, a foreigner, but never imagined it would be you.”

  Was he happy? Sad? Angry? There was no way to tell. No words came. If she said nothing, maybe he would go away. Which would be best, for them both.

  “I see you are having an early dinner.” He gave her a smile. “May I join you?”

  She nodded, wanting to reply in kind, but all she could think was that her body was sweaty and dirty. And shaking.

  He sat down on the patio opposite her, the pail fire between them. She passed him a green bean.

  “I’m glad I found you,” he said, taking it, “because you’re going to like what I have found.” After she had left, he had told his friend, Yannis, the waiter in Plakias, about her search for her grandmother Callisto. He told his wife, who helped look after his great-aunt Adonia in Myrthios, and it turned out that she might have known her.

  “No!” She used one of the old man’s
grill skewers to spear a potato in the fire, and offered it to him. He juggled it between his fingers.

  “During the war his Theía Adonia lived in Geratti, a mountain village up behind the Kourtaliotis Gorge—”

  “I know where it is!” The story of her trip to Preveli spilled out. Brother Paul’s name brought Oliver a smile.

  “Adonia says she remembers a city girl called Callisto, from Athens, who spoke English—”

  “From Athens?”

  “That’s right.” He blew on the potato and took a bite. “That’s why she remembers. This girl got pregnant by one of the soldiers and had a little girl.”

  “From Athens.” She tried to take it in. She knew every line and wrinkle, every nuance of expression in the picture. And knew nothing at all.

  He finished his potato and got up.

  “Do you want me to help you clean up a little before your bosses return?” Then tomorrow afternoon, if the old couple could spare her, she should come for coffee with Yannis’ Theía Adonia.

  By the time the daughter’s car came down the track, the tavérna, patio, and Cally were clean and dry. The old woman got out first, exclaiming in pleased surprise. Seeing Oliver with her lodger and waitress, her voice took off into what sounded like prayers and castigations and threats and, taking hold of Cally’s hands, also concern. The old man must be feeling better because five minutes after his daughter helped him out of the car, he came out of the kitchen waving a plastic bottle.

  “Rakí!”

  x

  Yannis surveyed the tanned woman swinging her jean-clad leg off the back of Oliver’s bike in the street outside his restaurant.

  “Did I not tell you to stay away from this man?” He clapped Oliver on the shoulder then took her hand, drawing her to him to kiss her on both cheeks. “Come, try my new Cretan saganaki while I tell you.” He seated them at a table by the kitchen door and poured them each a glass of wine. “This great-aunt of mine is ninety-eight and I think she might live forever. After her husband died and her daughter Ana married and left Geratti, she came to Myrthios to live near my side of the family. She is blind now, but this old Theía has a brain like the lizard. When I asked if she remembered someone called Callisto who had a baby girl with one of the soldiers, she said, “Of course. How could I forget that? She was half English, from Athens—”

  “Half English?”

  “Yes, and in Geratti, Theía Adonia lived right next door.” Yannis disappeared, reappeared to put a hot earthenware dish down between Cally and Oliver, and then watched as she lifted a spoonful of what looked like a soufflé with slices of tomato running through it and melted cheese on top.

  “Oh my God, Yannis, this is delicious!”

  He affected a shrug. “A new recipe, taken from the very old, but with a few adjustments.”

  “It’s a winner, man.” Oliver’s mouth was full.

  “Of course it is!” Trying not to beam, Yannis turned to her. “So, when you finish this, Oliver will take you up to meet my wife Georgia in Myrthios. Theía says if that girl was your grandmother, she would like to meet you because it was this Callisto who taught her, and half the women in the village, to read.”

  Where Yannis was a playful extrovert, Georgia was all business. A smile had to be earned and Cally was too apprehensive to do anything but follow her. Myrthios’ stone houses, built one into the next up the mountainside, were connected by a network of flagstone stairs and alleys just wide enough for people and donkeys. Theía Adonia’s house was at the confluence of two alleys. Behind its tiny triangular terrace, chipped blue shutters were open, showing the darkness of a single room. Just inside a wrought iron gate, the old lady was bent over a basketful of freshly harvested herbs she was laying out on the terrace stones to dry in the sun.

  “Chamomile,” Georgia whispered. “It grows all over this mountainside.”

  She wore the typical Cretan woman’s black boiled-wool slippers, an apron over her black skirt and cardigan, a kerchief over grey hair knotted at the back of her head. Born in 1904, she would have been thirty-seven when the Nazis landed. She was humming to herself. Now she stopped, straightening her back to gaze out toward the sea far below.

  “She can see very little. She tells which plant is which by feel.”

  At the sound of Georgia’s voice the old lady turned. Suddenly Cally was overcome with nervousness because the gate they were about to open would finally take her into the place from which the little girl who had been her mother had never recovered.

  II

  1941

  i

  Standing at the deck rail, seventeen-year-old Callisto holds on to a red silk scarf knotted around her neck. The boat’s engine rumbles, slowing. A March wind stings her cheeks, chops the sea, tilting the deck. Most passengers in the women’s cabin have spent the trip on their bunks, their seasickness souring the air, so Callisto has stayed out here among crates and machinery parts and bags of mail from Athens. A phalanx of rollers breaks against rocky outcroppings on Crete’s north shore, throwing up fountains of spray. Behind them, looming, snow-covered mountains tell her how insignificant she is. How inconsequential is the love of those who want to keep her safe.

  Gearing down again, the captain chooses a path between grey British warships tossing at anchor outside the port at Souda. A cluster of trucks, mule carts, and people wait on the wharf.

  She doesn’t even know what her grandparents look like. Will they like her? How will it be to live with them? For how long? She tugs on her scarf. Please, God, may some of my mother’s courage come to me now.

  The boat putters toward the wharf, its floorboards shuddering under her feet. Passengers push out onto the deck, heaving suitcases, jostling each other, and now here is Father Nikolaos. His round black priest’s hat rides above the crowd, opening it for her and the boys carrying her trunk down the gangway.

  “At last!” Grandma’s brown eyes are bright with pleasure. Grampa, a porcine man in a grey suit, kisses her on both cheeks.

  Her shoes echo on the tiles in the front hall of her father’s family home, a white-washed, two-storey house set behind a garden full of roses. Only two old people live in all these rooms?

  “Here you are, dear.” Grandma opens a bedroom door on the second floor. A cross on the wall protects the head of the bed. In a painting above the dresser a haloed young woman strolls through a field full of wildflowers, three companions slightly behind her.

  Callisto puts down her suitcase, looks more closely. It’s not the Virgin Mary.

  “Agía Sofía,” Grandma tells her.

  Fresh, sea-scented air spills in from the trellised courtyard behind the house. Birds chirrup among the grape vines. Down at the end of the street the sea glitters in the sunlight.

  “Such joy you bring to me.” No taller than her shoulder, Grandma reminds Callisto of Mrs. Tittlemouse, in the Beatrix Potter story her mother used to read to her.

  The glimmer of a new possibility, gossamer as fairy dust, comes to her. “You will be happy in Chania,” her mother had told her, tying the scarf around her neck while they waited on the Athens wharf. Could she be right?

  On a night in early April, Grampa comes out of this study to tell them that Hitler has taken mainland Greece. Exhausted and starving, even with the support of Allied troops, the Greeks were not able to withstand the German onslaught. Just as her father had predicted.

  Callisto cannot sleep or eat or think for worrying. In the days that follow, more British ships chug into the harbour. The streets fill with bedraggled-looking Allied troops who, having survived the battles in Albania and Macedonia, have been evacuated to Crete. An officer arrives at their door with the news that EAM, Greece’s main resistance group, has gone underground. He hands Grampa a letter for Callisto.

  “My darling …” Sitting on her bed, Callisto gobbles the news then rereads each word, each pen stroke made by her mother, who would have written the letter at her desk under the window above Mr. Osteropoulos’ store. When Mussolini’s Ita
lians had marched down through the Balkans into Greece last October, a people’s resistance movement had sprung up overnight to help the Greek army and the forces the British had sent to push them back across the northern border. Hearing the news, the whole of Athens had crowded into the streets cheering, and Callisto’s life — school, studying for university entrance, holding hands with Dimitris — had gone on relatively unchanged. Five months later however, the Germans have taken over the conquest of Greece.

  “Our soldiers did not have enough left to resist them,” her mother writes. If the British navy responds by blockading Greece’s ports there will be very little food in Athens. Mr. Osteropoulos’ shelves — where wine and cheese and every kind of olive used to share the aisles with mountains of pistachios, cashews, chickpeas and raisins, oranges, lemons, tomatoes — are already nearly empty, and the Germans will take whatever is left. “Thank Heavens you sailed when you did, my darling, because the harbour is closed to passengers now.”

  She had fought the decision with everything she could muster. If Mummy and Baba and her friends had to stay, so should she. She was going to university in the fall, remember? To study literature. And then someday, her mother had promised, to England, home of Wordsworth and Shelley and Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist since the ancient Greeks. Chania has schools, her father replied. She could finish the year there. The rest would have to wait. They had filled her trunk with books, notebooks and pencils — paper was scarce in Crete — and a special leather bound diary so she could write down whatever she felt, as if her mother were there with her. But when it came time for the boat to sail away, all three of them had cried.

  “Don’t you worry though, my dear one,” her mother says now in her letter. “Armies have been invading this country for thousands of years. Why?” She imagines her mother’s smile. “Because it’s the best place in the world. And in the end, we’ll send them packing. Your father works at EAM headquarters, planning strategies, and I am acting as liaison between the British and us, translating. So we are both safely out of the line of fire.”