Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  Gradually, as she watches over them, Callisto marvels at the sheep.

  “Their matchstick legs hold up round bodies covered in long shanks of dirty white wool. Their necks turn 180 degrees, so they can be facing away from you while looking directly at you, their eyes, surrounded by patches of black, always annoyed. Their tube-shaped ears swivel on the tops of their heads, tuning in sound. For what reason? Certainly not thought.” She draws their heads in her diary, the long high-arching, Roman-emperor proboscis that narrows down to a little mouth that endlessly chews grass, olive leaves, flowers, thyme, oregano, sage.

  Their hooves do not appear to have any grip and yet they can stand on an incline, and make their way up the mountainsides. Some of them move away from the others like a little clique in the schoolyard. Sometimes one of them will suddenly start running. Instantly the rest of the clique, then the rest of the flock follows, running full tilt as if there were some kind of emergency. Alarmed, Callisto scans the pasture, searching for the source of danger. Then just as suddenly they all stop and begin to graze again.

  One day, one of them stands quite near the patch of grass on which Callisto has spread her blanket, watching her. The sheep’s black legs are set together primly under her woollen skirts. The black around her eyes looks like an actress’s face paint poorly applied, and the little tuft of wool on top of her head, between her ears, reminds Callisto of a spoiled little girl who thinks too much of herself.

  “Persephone,” she tells it, “that’s what I’ll call you.” For the silly girl who could not resist the temptation to eat sweet seeds from Hades’ pomegranate, and so sealed the fate that imprisoned her in the underworld for part of each year.

  Soon the others, too, become individual personalities. She names them: Jane, Mr. Pickwick, Fiddlesticks. When Mrs. Beezely lambs, Callisto calls her soft, bright white baby Little Nell.

  She tells Aunt Ioanna, to try and cheer her up, and one night hears through the curtain as Auntie tells Vasilios.

  “That’s fine,” he says, as his voice drowns in a yawn, “as long as she realizes that one of these days, Little Nell is going to appear on her dinner plate.”

  The sun goes on shining. The grapes in the courtyard hang heavy, juicy and purple. The figs ripen. It seems impossible that Europe and Africa, the whole world is being ripped to shreds, that Grandma and Grampa are gone, their beautiful light-filled house nothing but rubble. How could God grant both that and this?

  If she had stayed in Chania she too would be dead.

  Uncle Vasilios has just returned from school when the first German patrol, four young men in Nazi grey, comes up the path. Aunt Ioanna has just put two loaves of bread down on a rack on the courtyard table to cool. The flat paddle she has used to take them out of the oven is resting against the table.

  “Show nothing,” Vasilios tells her. “Go about your business as if they do not exist.” He sits down at the table, in the chair closest to the paddle, and opens his satchel.

  The soldiers stop, peer into the courtyard, apparently attracted by the smell of fresh bread. One comes through the archway.

  Vasilios, who is reading now, does not acknowledge him. Ioanna is in the house, stirring the soup and praying, she tells Callisto later.

  The soldier says something to Uncle then, digging into his pocket, offers some coins.

  Still Uncle does not turn. The soldier speaks again.

  Uncle looks up, gets to his feet. When the soldier comes closer still, pointing to the bread, Uncle picks up the paddle, slides it under one of the loaves, and then shoves the paddle and the steaming loaf too close to the soldier’s face, forcing him to back away.

  “You want it, take it.” Vasilios pushes the paddle at him again, forcing him to back up again, out of the courtyard. “Go on, take it.”

  The paddle so close to his chest forces the soldier to pick up the hot loaf. He drops it back onto the paddle, looks at Vasilios in confusion. He is only a few years older than Georgios, eighteen at most. Outside on the path the other soldiers are jeering.

  “Take it, take it.” Vasilios shoves the paddle again and again until, gingerly, the young soldier picks up the loaf, tosses it from one hand to the other. Says something.

  Turning back into the courtyard, Vasilios ignores him.

  The following week, Aunt Ioanna, who gives thanks every day for her chickens, hears a commotion in the chicken coop. A Nazi has one of her prize roasters squawking and flapping in his hands.

  “Well! I did not think,” she tells Callisto later, pounding pita dough on the table in the courtyard, “not even for a second, God forgive me. I just took up the pitchfork and ran straight at him. I did think, at the very last second, how awful it would feel to stab him in the chest, and I didn’t want to harm my poor chicken, so I lowered the prongs. They went right through this trousers into his thigh. I felt them go into him. Like a fork into meat.” Even the memory shocks her. Staggering, the soldier let go of the chicken, looked down at the bloody pitchfork as she withdrew it, then at her, aghast, before limping away around the side of the house.

  Ioanna is terrified. German propaganda pamphlets extolling the values of community, of working together toward a brighter future have reached even Geratti, but so have new rules: people are forbidden to sell food or even to meet; men are being taken away to work in German labour camps. Anyone who disobeys is shot.

  Ioanna listens through dinner for the sound of an army Jeep advancing down the road, preparing to sneak out through the back. Just to be safe, she and Callisto sleep next door at Adonia’s house, but two days later still no one has come.

  “The bastard was probably too ashamed of being bested by a woman to report you,” says Uncle Vasilios.

  June gives way to July. One day the Englishman in ragged cotton breeches and the Cretan black shirt returns. He tells them the Allied commanders have whole communication systems hidden in mountain caves throughout the island.

  “Anything we can tell them about Nazi movements, supplies, troop strength is useful. Anything we can do to disrupt and delay the enemy is invaluable.”

  Stories of bravery, risk and sacrifice race across the island on the hot summer wind: in the mountains, both west and east Cretans are supplying the British with food, clothing, information on German supplies, ammunition, movements; in the towns and cities, eyes watch and report every Nazi shift and change while shrugs and misinformation stall their attempts to run the island’s affairs; in villages, Cretans are feeding, nursing, and hiding hundreds of fugitive Allied soldiers who have either escaped from the prison camps or never been captured.

  Every night, all the boys in Geratti who are stealthy, fast, and trustworthy are running messages for the soldiers and the guerrillas hiding in these mountains. Girls everywhere are standing up to their parents, nursing the wounded, or insisting on picking up a gun, or running messages, or taking food into mountain villages where the supply routes have been cut off. Just last week Callisto’s uncle told the story of the girl down the coast who rowed a wounded soldier fifty miles across the sea to the island Gavdhos. His whole side was shredded, and the boat, being machine gunned from the air, was leaking badly, so the girl made the soldier lie with his wounded side in the seawater to stop the bleeding.

  Horror is also circulating: the Nazis have been blanketing the island with pamphlets promising peace, prosperity, community even as they line up and shoot men, women, and children accused of aiding the Allies. Ten Cretans for every traitor to the occupation not turned in. And that is only one of the rules that, if broken, will result in death.

  Cruelty feeds on fascism. Georgios is running along the path through the Kourtaliotis Gorge, taking a message north to Rethymnon for his father, when a Nazi patrol comes into the gorge from the other end. Hearing them before they round the bend, Georgios climbs the steep cliffside, pulling himself up to a goat path that threads through the rocks. There are caves up there. And the cliff is nearly sheer. Who will look up?

  Does one of Georgio
s’ feet dislodge a stone? Is that why the patrol leader stops, calls to him?

  Clowning, pretending to be a boy playing, Georgios tries to climb higher, toward the caves.

  A single shot brings him tumbling down off the cliff to land on the path. A farmer and his family have just come into the near end of the gorge on their way to Rethymnon. Georgios is still breathing. The soldier shouts at them, his patrol partner levelling his rifle to keep them away while the soldier searches Georgios and, finding nothing — the message is in his memory — he swears at him then kicks his broken body over the lip of the path. Watches it bounce like a rag doll off the rocks before disappearing from view below. By the time the farmer and his son retrieve the body and take it home to Geratti, Georgios, always so quick to joke, to tease, has become a filthy pulp of dead flesh, unrecognizable.

  After the burial, representatives of every family in the village and throughout the valley bring food to the house, sitting, recollecting Georgios’ spirit with an anecdote, asking God to bring comfort to his parents.

  Aunt Ioanna, who has been wearing only black since the news of her parents’ death, goes through the necessary motions but inside she withers. Uncle Vasilios’s shoulders turn to stone, a crucible for the flame in him that is vengeful now. Silence takes up residence in the house. Alone in the meadows, Callisto puts away her diary, practices running up and down the meadows in the heat, faster, faster, for longer and longer, until she is doubled over, gasping for oxygen, streaming with sweat.

  One week bleeds into the next, the summer grows hotter. The normal flow of life, returning to the household, keeps her aunt and uncle busy. However, the summer evenings are long. Uncle spends them splitting wood for his grill and the bake oven, or meeting people in the storeroom, or taking chairs up to drink wine on the roof of the house where the breeze offers some cool with Andreas and whomever else drops by. Aunt Ioanna sits in the courtyard knitting or mending, but too often Callisto finds the thread slack in her lap, the button she had been planning to sew lying on the ground. Georgios’ memory is everywhere: proudly guarding the storeroom, his shotgun at his shoulder; or crying ‘ouch’ every time his mother plucks another feather out of a dead chicken; or lying on the other side of the curtain asking, inside the safety of darkness, what Callisto thinks of the girl down the road.

  Even in the shady bowls high in the mountains, the sun’s heat has long since shrivelled the flowers. Little Nell has been spared the roasting spit — the other females are getting old and she is a beauty, perfect for breeding — but today, even she does not have the energy that usually sees her bouncing in circles chasing herself or climbing through the rocks after her mother. Spreading her body in any patch of coolness still stored in the ground, pulling at a tuft of stubborn weeds, she allows Callisto to stroke her, to feel the oily beginnings of her wool.

  Please, Mummy, may you and Baba still be safe. There are no more bombs in Athens now, are there? And surely translating English messages and planning strategies take place out of the reach of the Nazi bullies? Callisto looks into the hot white sky.

  What can I do, God, so that you will protect them?

  The sky’s glare is fierce. Callisto lowers her eyes. On the ground the low, tough and prickly, thick-stemmed shrubs are still green. After a moment Callisto nods.

  “You can lie down and die in the heat,” she tells Little Nell, “or you can rail and flame in anger that will kill you. Or you can suck in what energy there is and use it.”

  Her book of Greek poetry has been lying unopened on a shelf in her corner behind the curtain since she arrived. That evening, as the last of the daylight purples the rags of cloud visible through the archway, she brings it out to the courtyard. Auntie is nodding over her needlepoint.

  “Do you know Constantine Cavafy, Auntie?”

  “Hmm. Cavafy?” Auntie is educated, but the only books Callisto has ever seen her read are her Bible and the ledger in which she keeps the family accounts.

  “You remember, he was a famous poet. I could read to you.” Opening the book, Callisto finds the poem “The God Abandons Antony.”

  “Listen Auntie.” She begins to read about the tragic loss of Alexandria, the great city’s beauty captured in Cavafy’s cadences. But do not mourn that which has gone wrong, he says, do not become mired in dreams of the past. Instead, listening to memory’s “exquisite music,” find the courage to say goodbye, and then move forward …

  The flow of words ends. Silence reasserts itself, but Callisto knows her aunt well enough now to read the twitch in her shoulder, the faint, here-and-then-gone glimmer in her eyes.

  “Here’s another one.” Turning the pages, she looks for lyricism, wit, soothing music in the flow of the Greek. But even as she too finds comfort in Cavafy, Callisto knows that she can no longer sit out this war sequestered in a mountain pasture. She is strong, fast, educated, intelligent, and bilingual. She is also her parents’ daughter, and she could run messages for her uncle as well as any boy.

  iv

  Frogs are gossiping in a stone cistern beside a vegetable patch outside the village of Myrthios. Crouched under some olive trees off the path that cuts across the mountainside, Callisto holds her breath. Around her, sharp-shaped olive leaves are whispering in the darkness. Her eyes dart between the trees and the low stone walls that terrace this Cretan mountainside, and the great spiny aloe ghosts, searching for an outline, a movement, the grey glint of a rifle. Her ears are tuned to pick up even the scratch of a beetle. Her run up behind the village of Sellia, nestled on the next mountain, then down into the valley and up again through this olive grove has taken too long, but there is no wind tonight, at least. Down at the far end of the bay, the rocky outcropping known as the Dragon’s Head lies sleeping under a tipped crescent moon.

  One of the trees, its ancient trunk crooked into a right angle, has the silhouette shape of a beard below the moon smile. Above it, she picks out stars for the nose, eyes: Zeus.

  Please, please, great god, I know I’m not supposed to talk to you. The priest says that appealing to you will take me straight to Hell but the way I see it you have been here the longest so please, great Zeus, will you help the people of Agalini tonight?

  Two mountains farther down the coast, parents and grandparents will be moving quickly now on the news she has passed to the next runner. She thinks of them shaking their children awake, packing yesterday’s bread, some sheep’s cheese, and whatever clothing they can carry, the women binding their babies to their breasts, the men hoisting toddlers onto their shoulders for the trek up into the safety of the wild mountain heights.

  Please make them hurry.

  A new sound, faint, rhythmic, tattoos the air behind the frogs. Callisto slides down behind the Zeus tree. The frog-talk stops.

  Boots, more than one set, crunching. Six German soldiers come down the path toward her. They must have come through the Kourtaliotis Gorge, the opening in the mountains behind this part of the south coast, where she is headed now.

  They are so close now she tastes the dust they are raising, smells the acrid metal of their guns. The Nazis think the village of Myrthios is friendly, but Uncle’s resistance network has friends there, and Callisto knows that up its cluster of alleys people will be lying rigid in their beds, praying that the stomping does not stop. She presses her cheek against the Zeus tree’s rough bark, closes her eyes, and prays not to move.

  The boots beat the path, impressing upon even the ground that they own it, that they have a God-given right to drop out of the sky, take this island, and murder all those who would stand against them. If only she had a weapon or a bottle filled with kerosene, like the little boys in Agalini. They must have heard about the boys north of the gorge who had filled three bottles with gasoline siphoned out of a German Jeep. The next time a Nazi drove into their village the boys had lit a rag tucked into one of the bottles, then rolled all three of them under his vehicle. Waiting around the corner, giggling into their hands, they had had no idea that the bottles,
exploding, would turn the jeep into a bomb, tearing the bodies of both the officer and his driver into fragments and tossing them into the air. Those boys are still in hiding, on the run, heroes. This must be why some of Agalini’s little boys have followed their lead, tossing their bottle of kerosene through the front door of the house the Nazis had commandeered, aiming for the hearth while the soldiers relaxed over dinner. No one has turned in the little Agalini boys either. And that was why tonight news had reached Uncle Vasilios that tomorrow the Nazis will deliver retribution to Agalini.

  Callisto had come home from the sheep pasture to hear voices rising in the storeroom off the courtyard. Someone must be sent, tonight, to warn the villagers.

  She opened the storeroom door.

  “Uncle?”

  “Go inside, girl.”

  “I could run to Agalini, Uncle.”

  “You!” A jet of anger, frightening. Only a month had passed since Georgios had made the mistake of scrambling up the cliff, not wanting to drop down below the path, out of sight, because there were Allied soldiers down there, hidden in a cave by the river.

  Callisto stood her ground.

  “I can run, Uncle. Out in the pastures I have been practicing both speed and distance and I am faster than any boy you will find. Just ask the local sheep thieves.”

  “A girl running alone? Absolutely not.”

  The other men’s faces stayed blank in the candlelight, not to intrude.

  “In the middle of the night in the mountains, who will see me? I can do this, Uncle. Please, let me make my parents proud.”

  And there was no one else.

  The last of the soldiers disappears around the side of the mountain. Bile burns in the back of Callisto’s throat. She looks up at the Zeus tree.