by Jane Bow
Stones skitter. Not close. A sheep’s bell clangs, stutters in the wind, clangs again on the far side of the meadow.
“Baa—”
Now other bells are clinking as several sheep turn to look toward a crooked pillar made of rock. One of her uncle’s ewes is down on its fore-knees, her haunches raised, tugging, struggling against—
A hand! An arm, pulling its hind leg.
“Hey!” Dropping her diary, she picks up a handful of stones sets off toward it, running. “Stop that!”
“Baa!” Alarmed, several nearby sheep begin to canter beside her, their stick legs so sure among the stones.
The meadow, rising to her left, falling gently away to her right, comes toward her faster, faster, rocks and flowers blurring as her eyes tear against the wind. Her lungs pull the air in as if she were powered by wind, as if any moment now her feet will become wings. And now Callisto can see the ferrety eyes of a boy lying on the ground, reaching out, and his shock at the sight of a young woman running toward him, her hair streaming behind her.
“Let go, you thieving little rat!” She has covered three-quarters of the distance already. He hesitates. A full-grown ewe is a prize. Easy pickings, he had thought, from the likes of her.
Another step and she will launch her stones.
The thief releases the ewe, withdraws his arm, and disappears behind the rock. Stones skid under his feet as he flees.
“Thought I was just a girl, eh?” she shouts after him. “Well next time I’ll put a stone right through your miserable little cranium, see if I don’t!” Not that he’d have any idea what a cranium is.
The ewe struggles up onto her legs, bleating. Callisto tiptoes toward her.
“Easy girl, you’re all right.” She is breathing hard. “Come here, let me see you.”
The sheep eyes her balefully as if she too were the enemy.
“It’s okay, girl.” She puts out her hand, but her heart is pounding loudly enough to hear.
The ewe staggers sideways, finds her balance and bolts. Unhurt, thank God.
The skin on Callisto’s cheeks and arms and legs is tingling. For the first time in how long — since she had left home for sure — she hears herself laugh. Running is not something a girl can do in downtown Athens, or Chania for that matter, not for fun anyway, not after a certain age. Wait until she tells Auntie Ioanna and Uncle Vasilios and best of all, Georgios.
Two years younger, Georgios is an idiot. Where at home in Athens Callisto has her own room, her clothes and books, and all her favourite things, here she sleeps in the bed of her older cousin Pavlos, who is in the army fighting on the mainland. Uncle Vasilios has moved the bed into a corner and strung a curtain across the space, but square-faced Nosy thinks nothing of lying on the floor, lifting its hem.
On second thought, her interests might be better served by keeping quiet about the sheep thief. Squeezing permission out of her uncle to tend the flock for just today, while Georgios is picking up a load of rice in Rethymnon, was hard enough.
“Absolutely not,” he had said before her words even finished their trip across the table. There was plenty for her to do in the house.
“Uncle, I am perfectly capable of looking after the sheep,” she had argued back, “and if I don’t who will?” The boy down the lane, who usually steps in when needed has taken his flock higher into the mountains this week. “I won’t take them far and the sheep know their own way home.”
Uncle was still shaking his head, without even considering the idea — as if she were nothing but a strange fragile collection of unintelligible thoughts, feelings, and ideas, a package to be handled with care, to be returned as soon as possible — when Aunt Ioanna motioned to her to keep quiet, to go into the house.
What would she do without Aunt Ioanna? Her father’s older sister seems to be a combination of Baba and Grandma Tittlemouse. She does not say much but every now and then Callisto catches a furtive glance from her, and when she makes silly gaffes — like letting the laundry blow away because it has not been properly secured to the line, or burning herself on the handle of a cast iron pan hanging over the hearth fire, or showing through her questions that she has no idea how to tell the difference between sheep’s and goats’ milk or between a laying chicken’s guile and the stupidity of a meat chicken, or soaking the embroidery she is working on with tears because she simply cannot bear another moment without her mother — Auntie will invariably say something to distract her and then take over. She does not have the gift of intimacy — she has no daughters of her own — and never asks her niece about her health or personal needs, but still she makes Callisto feel close, safe.
Aunt Ioanna met Uncle Vasilios at a dance during a festival in Chania, she told Callisto one night as they sat doing needlework by the fire. He was in town visiting his brother during a school break, and he was the most wonderful dancer, and a sweet, generous man with a deep laugh. She was twenty-five, on the shelf according to many people’s estimation, preferring literature or a game of chess with her father to the company of most of the dullards who came calling. Her parents approved his request for her.
“So how could I not marry him?” After Pavlos, Georgios had taken a long time to arrive and Callisto can see that, in having her niece with her, Auntie finds distraction from the need, constant as heart pain, for news of Pavlos. For her own part, Callisto appreciates Auntie’s acceptance of her as a person, not a responsibility or a curiosity, but one who needs to be granted her place in the family.
Now if she and the sheep return peacefully and safely home, perhaps next time she will be allowed to take them a little further.
Look though! Her diary and lunch things are back across the meadow where any little delinquent lurking in a gully or a cave, maybe the same boy filled with vengeance—
Callisto sets off running again, glorying in the stretch of her limbs, the beat of her breath, the wind pushing against her, the sun warming her face. Gathering speed, her toes barely touching the ground, she comes as close, surely, as a human can to flying.
One or two sheep, still chewing, raise their heads to watch.
The hens are stamping about in the first rays the morning sun, their combs flopping, their eyes full of loathing as Callisto searches their favourite roosts outside Romeo’s stall. One of them is ruffling her feathers, a sure sign that there is an egg nearby, when a rumble starts somewhere far away, over the mountains to the north.
She finds her aunt and uncle out in the road, scanning the morning sky to the northwest. Where Chania is.
“Callisto,” says Uncle, “go after Georgios, tell him to bring the sheep back home, now.”
The day they have been expecting, the reason for Callisto’s banishment to this mountain hideaway, has arrived. It is Tuesday, May 20, 1941.
The distant roar overhead continues as Ioanna packs a hamper with bread rusks, cheese, a leftover leg of lamb, and two newly filled wine skins. Vasilios drinks a cup of coffee. When Georgios comes into the courtyard, the sheep shuffling up the path behind him, his father takes him by the shoulder.
“My second rifle and a few bullets are in the bedroom. They belong to you now. Use them only to protect your family, do you understand?”
“Yes, father.” Georgios glances at Callisto, as if wondering how such a strange girl could be his family.
“And tell your class you are to finish the history chapter before I return.” He loads Romeo with his picnic and his rifle and leaves the village, heading north.
Callisto and Georgios stay close to Aunt Ioanna as all morning the planes continue, formation after formation, hundreds and hundreds of them crossing the mountains, high as birds.
“Bombers,” Georgios calls out. “Junker 52s.” Planes, both Allied and German, have been crossing Crete for months on their way to and from Africa. Georgios and most of the other boys in the village have learned their makes and markings from old Mr. Giannopolis, who left Crete to fight with the British RAF in the First World War and likes to regal
e them with stories about the early days when a man flew on nothing but a canvas wing and his prayers.
“More Junkers.” From both the northwest and the northeast now. The Stukas, which swoop low, emptying their bellies full of bullets into people the pilots see on the ground, do not fly high enough to clear the mountains, says Georgios. None of the planes is British.
After lunch Georgios takes the sheep into an orchard just below the village. The trees have finished blooming now, the petals lying like discarded pink and white dresses at their feet. Beyond them, the ground drops down through a series of terraced meadows and vineyards to the valley far below, where there is nothing more than a footpath. No one will attack them from there.
Callisto and Auntie are walking down to the fountain by the church for water when the roar intensifies, sounding closer, directly to the north. The ground under their feet trembles.
“They must be targeting Rethymnon.” Aunt Ioanna crosses herself. “God in Heaven please help those poor people. And keep my Vasilios safe.”
Everyone at the pump is asking questions:
“When will they get to us?”
“What will we do, with the men all away?”
No one has the answers.
“Grandfather still has his old rifle from the last war,” says a girl called Maria.
“All we have is a scythe,” says a boy whose name Callisto does not know.
“Sharpen it,” someone tells him.
“Oh, dear God in Heaven—” wails the lady from next door, Ana’s mother-in-law.
“For pity’s sake, Adonia, calm yourself,” hisses Aunt Ioanna.
Callisto is filling their bucket at the pump when the ground under her feet shakes more violently. Instinctively everyone looks up at the mountains, as if they might be tumbling toward them.
Muffled puffs of distant guns reach them.
“Oh dear Lord!” Adonia cannot help herself.
Having dropped their death loads, the bombers fly directly overhead.
“Come Callisto.” Returning home, Aunt Ioanna kneels in front of the oil lamp she keeps burning in front of a statuette of the Virgin Mary with Jesus.
Ten days later, though the sound of bombing and the cacophony of war come close sometimes, still no soldiers have arrived in Geratti. Twilight is draining the colour out of a clump of bougainvillea outside the archway when Romeo’s hooves clip-clip up the path.
“Oh thank You, Lord,” Aunt Ioanna looks up at the lattice of grape vines above the courtyard. “Thank You.” She runs out into the road.
Adonia and her husband Andreas, and Ana and the baby come out of their house, as does everyone in the village. Most families have loved ones elsewhere on the island.
His shirt and pants filthy, his hair greasy, Uncle Vasilios looks old all of a sudden. He comes to a halt beside the church then, staying up in his seat, pitches his voice to be heard.
“The battle is over, my friends.” He bows his head. No one speaks, waiting until he can tell them what lies beyond this safe cranny in the Cretan rock.
“When I reached the north shore road the day the planes came, I found Germans dropping out of the sky, hundreds of them jumping out of planes, floating down like so many flowers in their coloured parachutes. We lay in the ditch, those of us who had rifles, picking them out of the air like so many vultures—”
“Kalá!” Good!
“Not good.” Uncle Vasilios lowers his head, forcing them to wait again. “Bombs were falling and the Stukas were strafing the road and every ditch and gun emplacement. Why I am here is God’s own choice. More planes and gliders loaded with troops, guns, tanks, kept landing. As soon as our side destroyed one, the next one would land. We did the best we could, but … The north shore is a nightmare of broken guns and planes and dead men now. We must brace ourselves, my friends, as once again — God help us — our island is occupied.”
At home, Uncle Vasilios sits with the three of them at the table in the courtyard. Reaching Rethymnon on Tuesday, he had distributed his food to some British and Australian soldiers he could see were starving.
“Where were their rations?” asks Georgios.
No supplies could reach them apparently, if there were any. The main road was being mercilessly strafed, bombed without resistance.
“Where was the British air support?”
Uncle shakes his head.
“Why did the British not see this coming?” Callisto cannot help asking. “They knew. That’s why I had to leave Chania.”
What about Chania? The question hangs like a death pall in the sweet spring evening.
Vasilios takes Ioanna’s hand.
“No, Vasilios.” Her free hand goes to her mouth. He does not need to speak the words. Her head shakes. “No.”
But he keeps talking. When his ammunition ran out he turned west, keeping to paths behind the road. Three Germans lay in a gully, still attached to their parachutes. Vasilios jumped down, relieved them of their rifles, hand guns, knives, boots. They were dead. And enemies. And some of the Allied soldiers he had seen did not even have rifles. In the next village, where he stayed the night, he distributed the weapons. The gullies and back roads were full of dead bodies, so the next day and the next, he did the same thing. Soon though, the Nazis were showing up everywhere, coming up from the beaches and the airfields where plane loads of them kept landing against less and less resistance.
“Our side did what it could, but with no air support and so many of our own men away still …” It was as if he were trying to make sense of it for her. “When the enemy reached the villages, I saw women, children younger than you, Georgios, running at the Nazis with pitchforks, spades. I saw children lying like rag dolls.” He stops to breathe, to look around at his home. “I kept going, Ioanna, as fast as I could toward Chania, but I kept having to stop, everywhere there were explosions, gunfights. So much death.”
Before his eyes the whole north shore became a horror of corpses left to bloat and rot in the sun, of crashed planes and burning buildings, of increasingly aggressive Nazis. Until the Allies had no choice but to raise the white flag.
“Chania was the worst, Ioanna.” He starts to cry. “Bombed over and over since the first day.”
Grandma and Grampa would have been sitting at breakfast when their roof fell in. Uncle Vasilios enlisted the help of a neighbour and, finding their bodies, buried them in the rose garden.
iii
The mountains are so steep, Mummy, and the paths only as wide as a donkey, but the moonlight is silver so I can see.
— Callisto’s diary
There is a storage room off the courtyard, behind Romeo’s stall, where Uncle Vasilios keeps flour, rice, and other staples. Late one night it becomes a meeting room. Georgios, who seems to have shed his boyhood during these last weeks, serves as lookout in the courtyard. When a man wearing ragged cotton breeches and a Cretan black shirt appears in the archway, Georgios levels his gun.
“Shoot me if you must,” the man says, “but first please summon your father. I am a friend.” He is a member of a newly formed resistance network, working with the British.
Allied troops have been evacuated by ship from Iraklio in the east, he tells the men meeting with Uncle. In the west, a company of New Zealand troops successfully fought off Germans paratroopers, some so close in the air that they could see their faces, long enough to escort King George over the White Mountains — “his royal feet bleeding, poor fellow” — into the safety of the Samaria Gorge, a deep crack in the wild south-coast cliffs that leads down to the sea. A British ship rescued him from there. A long line of Allied troops followed, across the mountains to Sfakia where Cretan boats of every size transported them out to the waiting rescue ships. Thousands more Allied troops are interned now, the man says, starving in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps along the north shore.
“But there are still others who are escaping or who have never been captured and are roaming the mountains.” They need food, a place to hide, a way to get off
the island.
The Nazis meanwhile are not finding occupation easy in Crete. The people of Galatas on the north shore have inspired people everywhere. Armed with only gardening implements, a sword, and an ancient flintlock, they had helped their New Zealand defenders by charging the oncoming Nazis. Stunned, the invaders retreated from Galatas that first day. In another village, after the Nazis turned a family out of its home, the owners waited until late at night when the evening fire had died, then dropped a nest full of bees down the chimney.
“The battle may be over,” the man tells Uncle and his compatriots in the storeroom, “but our resistance is just beginning.”
Uncle nods.
“Already, the fight we have put up has cost them thousands of men, and that is something we can keep on doing.”
“Trust no one though,” the man reminds them, “not even your closest neighbours, unless they give you good reason. As you know, there are always those who welcome fascism.”
Life in the house changes. With Georgios spending more and more time with his father now or, mysteriously, out of the village “on an errand,” Callisto takes the sheep out regularly. She is safest in the high pastures, her uncle reasons, where no one has any reason to molest her. He puts a sharp hunting knife in her lunch basket however, after showing her how to hold it, how to strike upwards, into the soft spot under the ribs, toward the heart.
Callisto’s diary becomes her lifeline.
“I wonder every day what you are doing, dearest Mummy.” The worry is so hard to bear. “Auntie says you must be safe, otherwise we would have heard something, but I don’t know. How I wish I could be with you, doing something to help instead of hiding up here.”