Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  Greece’s King George II, accompanied by the country’s president, Emmanouil Tsouderos, who comes from Crete, takes up residence just outside Chania.

  “Safe as the king,” Grampa tells her, “that’s what you are here, my girl.”

  In the city streets, on her way home from school, Callisto does not feel particularly safe. More soldiers have arrived from Africa, “to stop Jerry in his tracks, should he come calling.” In the meantime they want food and drink and someone to dance with. Sometimes she stops to chat for a moment, speaking in English and then watching their amazement. How she and Georgina, her friend at home, would laugh if only Georgie were here. Alone she is too afraid to spend more than a moment with them. If anyone told Grampa she was talking to strange men … Also, she has little time. At school she is behind, and the university entrance examinations are only weeks away. Anyway, she tells her diary, no one but Dimitris back home will ever own her heart.

  Two weeks later Grandma and Callisto are still sitting over their breakfast coffees, an April rain pattering against the windows, when Grampa comes in. His face is expressionless.

  She must leave. His daughter Ioanna’s husband Vasilios will take her to stay with them in the mountains.

  “The news leaves us no choice.” Grampa sits down, a little heavily. Hitler’s next conquest, on his way to Russia, was to be the island of Malta but suddenly that has changed. Taking Crete will both protect his acquisition of Greece and the security of the oil resources in Bulgaria, and keep open his supply lines to the Middle East and to Africa. The British command, which has just arrived on Crete from North Africa, believes that the Germans will strike here, along the north shore road where the airfields and harbours are. “You are no longer safe here.”

  “But what about school? And if I am not safe, what about you and Grandma? What about the King?” Arguing with an elder is rude, she knows that, but cannot help herself. Mummy and Baba sent her here, and she has a book report due next week, and Chania’s almond trees are wearing lovely white blossoms—

  Sad amusement escapes from Grampa’s eyes.

  “Vasilios can oversee your studies, he is the village school teacher. And we are old, Callisto, the Germans will not bother with us. As for the King,” Grampa sighs. “I suspect His Majesty is already packing, as must you.”

  One suitcase, that’s all she can take. Uncle Vasilios, a taciturn tree trunk of a man, says there is room for no more than that. She stands in the middle of her beautiful bedroom, sunlight pouring through the windows, her mind a cacophony of fear, anger, loneliness, pain. What to take, what to leave behind in her trunk? How far away is she going? Will there be a school there?

  Outside the birds darting among the vines, their beaks full of nest-making materials, don’t care about imaginary dangers. Neither does the sea at the bottom of the road.

  “Pack your warmest woollens,” Grandma has come into the bedroom. “And give me any soiled underthings. If we wash them now, they will dry this afternoon.”

  Callisto lines the bottom of her suitcase with notebooks, stuffs Jane Eyre and Tess of the D’Urbervilles and two Dickens, David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby, and her birthday gift, Nicholas Kazantzakis’s Odyssey, A Modern Sequel, also a slim volume of C.P. Cavafy’s poetry between her packed clothes and the inside edges of the case. Her pencils fit into the corners. The diary her mother gave her will travel in the pocket of her coat.

  The sun has not yet appeared when Grandma knocks on her door. Down in the courtyard birds are chirping, flitting among the roses, the yellow hibiscus bushes, and the red-purple bougainvillea climbing the front wall of the house. The large black car belongs to the brother of the mayor of Rethymnon. By the time Callisto has finished one of Grandma’s pastries and a coffee, its trunk has been loaded with sacks of both flour and rice, gallon tins of olive oil, and who knows what else. Uncle Vasilios will return it then load their gear onto two donkeys for the trip south.

  When he picks up Callisto’s case, Uncle Vasilios pretends to stagger under its weight.

  “What have you got in here, rocks?”

  Grandma hurries out with a soft lavender-coloured woollen shawl and a cloth-covered basket.

  “Some food for the day. It will be a long one.” Reaching up, she puts the shawl around Callisto’s shoulders. Such delicate, tender strength she has, smiling always. “You come back, you hear, when this is over.”

  She tries to find words, not to break down. Uncle Vasilios takes the basket.

  “Efcharistó, Mama.”

  Father Nikolaos has church business in Rethymnon. Shambling into the courtyard, carrying a small suitcase, he settles himself in the front passenger seat. For that, at least, Callisto is thankful. He married her parents — here. With him she must be safe.

  The car’s back seat windows don’t let in much light, but as they turn onto the main coast road she glimpses, behind the near hills, the snow-covered peaks of the White Mountains.

  Is that where she is being taken?

  “No, no.” Father Nikolaos chuckles when finally she screws up the courage to ask. “Your Uncle Vasilios’ mountains are much kinder and further from this terrible war.”

  “Please, God,” says Uncle.

  Forsythia bushes as tall as trees, their skirts bright yellow with blossoms, line the road, giving way now and then to forest, reminding her of picnic Sundays with her parents, outside Athens. Every now and then a cedar of Lebanon stands like an exclamation point among the jumble of hills and rocks and trees. And look, here on her left is Souda Bay. There are so many more warships now and soldiers everywhere, some working in the water.

  “They’re stringing underwater nets across the mouth of the harbour,” Uncle says, “to stop enemy submarines.”

  Callisto watches as the hook of land she had sailed around slides past. Beyond it, just days away by boat, lie Athens, home, Mummy and Baba, who have no idea what is happening to her, where she is going. Who are living in a city full of enemy soldiers. Are they safe still, do they have enough food? How will their letters find her? She is not at all sure she can bear this.

  Uncle’s donkeys are waiting in a stable just south of the coast road at Rethymnon. They are loaded and ready to ride before the sun has climbed even halfway into the morning. The saddle is wooden, built on slats laid along the donkey’s back, cinched under his girth. Uncle has balanced their loads between deep baskets on each side of the animal’s rump.

  Heads lowered to munch on weeds, the donkeys do not seem concerned, but Callisto has no idea how to sit on a donkey in a skirt. What if it runs away with her? Not that there’s any chance of that for this poor fellow, with her suitcase on one side, two bags of rice on the other.

  “Sideways, like this.” Uncle Vasilios hitches his heel into a stirrup and jumps up. “Hold on and Romeo here will do the rest.”

  “Romeo? From Shakespeare?”

  Dismounting, Uncle gives her the first smile she has seen from him.

  “He’s a bit of a lover, but only of other donkeys.” He takes hold of the other halter and turns the donkey’s head toward her. “This one is Beelzebub. A devil sometimes, unless you let him know who’s boss. He belongs to my neighbour.”

  The road south is a dirt track. The donkeys labour up the hill to wind across the plateau behind Rethymnon, then down through a valley ringed by mountains, yellow crimson white pink purple blue flowers nodding in the meadows, white and lavender clouds of blossoms showing suddenly between cypresses, plane trees, and olive groves up on the mountainsides where sheep graze. When the occasional truck passes, Callisto has to use her scarf to cover her nose and mouth against the dust. Most of the time, however, there is no one else on the path as step by step they plod through hills and valleys toward the mountains behind the south coast.

  By the time the sun is high her back is wet with sweat. The backs of her legs, bouncing up then down on the wooden saddle, feel like one big bruise. Riding ahead on Beelzebub, Uncle does not appear to need conversation.
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  At home her father and the people he brought to the apartment were forever chasing questions with opinions, often outrageous ones, just for the fun of it, or arguing sotto voce or telling stories. Here there is only the thup-thup-thup of Romeo’s and Beelzebub’s hooves on the packed dirt.

  Potted geraniums riot outside doorways in the occasional village: a few stone dwellings circling a church and a kafeníon with two old men sitting outside it playing backgammon.

  “Geiá sou Vasilios, what’s the news?”

  “Hello, Sifis, you don’t want to know.”

  The old men’s faces crease into grins.

  “So, you are a teacher but you know nothing.”

  “I know you will be one day older tomorrow, my friend, God willing.”

  Sometimes they stop long enough for her uncle to jump down, unload a bag of rice in return for a carton of eggs or a chunk of goat meat. Everyone seems to know him.

  “What news, Vasilios?”

  “Ah, Mikalis, I wish I knew.”

  Why doesn’t he tell them what he told Grampa? Isn’t urgent information the reason they are clip-clopping farther and farther away from civilization?

  When they stop, Callisto finds a place to pee and then pads the saddle with a blanket rolled behind it. She has been watching Uncle, how his body flows with the donkey’s haunches, as if it were an extension of the donkey. She tries to keep her lower back supple, do the same.

  The mountains draw closer together, throwing into shadow long stretches of the winding track. They stop to eat in a patch of sunshine beside a stream, where an almond tree is in full blossom. A few meters away a lilac tree blooms purple above buttercups, daisies, and red poppies. It is like sitting in the middle of a fairy tale. She unwraps one of Grandma’s sandwiches.

  “Why does everyone think you have news, Uncle?” she dares to ask. “And since you do, why don’t you tell them what you know?”

  Uncle Vasilios has drawn a knife out of a leather sheath on his belt to cut a piece of cheese. He arches an eyebrow thick as a caterpillar.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “So everyone else can know the danger too, and prepare!”

  Her uncle goes back to the cheese.

  “Every message has both a source and a destination, Callisto. The smart messenger keeps his cargo close, discharging it only where it will do the most good.”

  The sun, dropping behind the tops of the high mountains toward which they have been travelling, makes the shadows of the two donkeys and their loads long and gawky thin before they disappear altogether, taking with them the colours, and the day’s warmth. The near mountain is so close now she can smell the rock. She hugs Grandma’s shawl close to her, holds onto Romeo and tries not to think. Just jogs along repeating Mummy and Baba would want this. Mummy and Baba would want this, in time with Romeo’s hoofbeats.

  A narrow gorge opens like a portal between two mountains, but they turn left, off the track, to cross a bridge made of logs, onto a path up the next mountainside, the donkeys’ hooves finding purchase on the stones. Straining under their loads, they climb nearly vertically, first in one direction then the other up the switchbacks toward the mountain’s shoulder, where the last of the daylight splashes the walls of a church. A few late sheep are following their leader up another path toward it, their baaing a strange kind of lullaby.

  Uncle Vasilios is singing under his breath, verse after verse, the melody — such as it is — climbing, pausing, then sliding down again as they turn finally around the last bend. Stone houses behind the little church shelter on this ridge below the mountaintops. On the other side of a valley, the peak of an even higher mountain is the first of a whole range leading away to the northeast. Truly she will be hidden here.

  Orange and lemon trees beside the church are heavy with fruit. Splay-leafed fig trees reach out of clefts in the wall of rock behind them. The houses, made of rubble stones covered in lime, are about the size of one large room, sheep or goats penned against them. Chickens cluck in the dirt. Callisto pulls the shawl closer, her stomach jittering as ahead of her Uncle Vasilios calls, “Whoa.” Dismounting, he comes to help her.

  “Welcome to Geratti.”

  Beside them one of the houses has a courtyard decorated with hibiscus and geraniums between it and a stable. Hearing Vasilios’ voice, a tall, well-built woman hurries out to them.

  “Oh, my niece!” Aunt Ioanna takes both of Callisto’s hands. “I remember as if it was yesterday the day my brother Markos brought us his beautiful English bride. Come!”

  She has laid a table for dinner in the courtyard. A vase in the middle of it is full of wildflowers. Vine leaves trained along twine make a ceiling above it. Beyond it on the house side, the humped back of a brick and clay bake oven juts out of the wall. A boy a little younger than Callisto, solidly built like his father and covered in dust, comes out of a door across from it, behind the stable.

  “Georgios, come and say hello to your cousin.” His mother’s smile is very much like her father’s. “First, though, go and wash.” She points him toward a bucket in the backyard.

  When he comes back, his face shiny, cocky, awkward, Callisto tries to look friendly.

  ii

  Crete’s spring wind chases cloud shadows across the mountain pastures. “… and the flowers! Oh, Mummy—” Callisto has to anchor the flapping diary page with the heel of her hand in order to write. She has decided to make all her entries as a letter home in English. To practice and so that, if the chance comes to send one, she’ll be ready. Also, English is private. Not even Uncle Vasilios can read it. “There are so many plants whose names I don’t know but Auntie is teaching me, also about all the different kinds of hórta, which I am supposed to be looking for right now. She has given me some sample leaves and a bag to fill for dinner, and the way she cooks it, with a little oil and lemon, is truly delicious. Last week on May Day, we filled bottles of flowers for the tables in the courtyard and in the house, and Uncle roasted a whole lamb on the outdoor grill, and the neighbours came over. They have a girl about my age, but she already has a baby and a husband—”

  Callisto stops writing. Listens.

  But there is only the sun coming and going, and the flowers, tufts of grass, and the prickly shrubs and rocky outcroppings that stand here and there like sentinels on the slope above her, and her uncle’s dozen sheep scattered in bunches across the meadow, heads together as if they are nattering about someone out of earshot. Their bells clink as they lower their heads to munch. Callisto shades her eyes, scanning the mountain above her and the one across the valley, and the gaping black mouths of caves cut into steepness apparently impassable to anything but wild goats. Lower down there are other caves, nearly hidden by clumps of brush, but you have to know where to look—

  There it is again. A rolling sound, stones.

  The clouds and their shadows sail on, swift as ships, across seas of waving grass on the mountain opposite, then down through the olive groves. The wind tosses the heads of the trees, shakes the vineyards in the valley before escaping out through a gorge. She has not been down there yet, but they say it leads down through another valley all the way to Crete’s south coast and the Libyan Sea.

  “Beyond it lies Egypt, Africa, imagine! Oh, Mummy, if only you and Baba could be sitting here with me.” She strokes the red silk scarf knotted around her neck, wonders what her mother would think of her sitting here, or picking herbs, or chasing lambs.

  The only daughter of a British colonel, Callisto’s mother had come to join her parents in Athens after graduating from school. The colonel was negotiating the division of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War and thought the trip to Greece would finish her education. “And introduce me to some eligible young British soldiers,” Callisto’s mother had laughed.

  Instead she had met a Cretan lawyer. Markos had sailed for Athens with Eleftherios Venezilos, who would become Greece’s Prime Minister, and had seen the blonde English girl at the market, “he
r arms full of pomegranates.” Baba had winked. “And we know what happened to Persephone when she ate Hades’ pomegranate.”

  But Greece was poor, Athens small and shabby by British standards, and the colonel had refused the young man entry to the house. “So he would sing to me from the street,” said Mummy.

  “Romeo without the balcony,” Baba laughed.

  They met secretly in the garden. Mummy’s parents found out and packed her trunks. Venezilos lost the 1920 election and went into exile in Paris. Baba had no choice but to return to Crete. Mummy looked at her petticoats and lace-up corsets and pretty gowns, and told him she wanted to go with him. “So we ‘stole away for a year and a day by the light of the silvery moon,’” said Baba.

  Father Nikolaos married them in Chania.

  “And we had the most glorious honeymoon in the mountains under the stars,” said Callisto’s mother. Here. By the time Callisto came along, four years later, Venezilos had returned from exile, and they were back in Athens, living in the little apartment above the Osteropoulos’ grocery store off Omonia Square, where Callisto has grown up surrounded by books, conversation, ideas, and the lovely lilt of her mother’s English.

  How sweet it is to be alone in the sunshine, released at last from her aunt and uncle’s poky house in the poky village where, even as she tries to be helpful by hanging the laundry, or feeding the chickens, or chopping vegetables for the stew pot kept bubbling in the corner hearth, people glance surreptitiously in through the archway. As if she is some kind of strange species. Why? Her eyes are blue like her mother’s, but she has her father’s black Cretan hair, and what her mother calls “his golden skin.” Her skirts and sweaters are city prints though.

  Almost everything here is homemade. Men, women, and children, as soon as they are old enough, work in the fields or the olive groves or the gardens or the kitchens or the yards, feeding chickens or slaughtering a lamb or harvesting crops or cooking or cleaning or carding wool. Some women cook up coloured dyes then weave the wool. Even small girls knit. Boys and some girls go to school at first, but by the time they reach Callisto’s age, they seem to be more interested in getting married, like the girl next door with the baby. Ana, she is called. Her husband is away in the army. Her mother-in-law runs the house and, out in the courtyard you can often hear her calling out: “Ana, do this, Ana, where’s that?” What a life.