Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  She grins.

  “I’ll whistle. Like this.” Short bursts, high at the end, sound just like the call of a bird.

  Night falls and the men have not yet been given the all clear to return. She waits until Auntie and Uncle have gone to bed then packs her picnic basket with the whole end of a loaf of bread, olives, cheese, two oranges, sun warmed figs off the tree outside the archway, a skin full of Uncle’s wine.

  To meet him is to risk her safety and his life. Two days ago, news came that a pair of fugitives had been caught south of Rethymnon. The Nazis had spared themselves the trouble of returning them to prison by shooting them on the spot.

  To meet him is also to risk the lives of everyone in the village. How many others all over the island have been lined up and shot, their homes burned for the crime of sheltering a British soldier? Further, if they are caught, the Nazis might twig to the rescue plan.

  If they are caught.

  Morning stretches forever across the meadow. The sheep graze, the sun inches across the sky, baking the land until even Little Nell does not move. Under the tree, Callisto reads, writes, counts the sheep.

  Delays her lunch. Except for a couple of birds too high to identify, nothing stirs.

  Has something happened to him? Was he caught on the way back to the cave yesterday? Or did he hurt himself climbing? Or did someone see him and tell the Nazi patrols? It only takes one informer.

  She can do nothing but sit, feigning normalcy while fear’s talons clutch at her, despair descending with the sun until finally she must go home. The leftover picnic is wrapped and ready to go, the sheep called when finally she hears a bird singing in the rocks.

  “I’m so sorry.” He is out of breath. “Jerry must be nearby because last night they moved us to a different cave. I had quite a hike.” His shirt is drenched, a sleeve torn, the skin of his forearm scraped, his face burnt by the sun.

  “Oh, Robert—!”

  “Shsh. No one saw me. I was afraid I would miss you, and … do you think … would you mind very much if I kissed you?”

  Her life to this moment, tenderly nurtured, carefully sheltered, then shorn of everything she held dear, has not prepared her for what follows. The day Dimitris held her hand after a musical evening at the school, he had also tried to kiss her, a sweet, awkward, rather mismatched moment. Nothing like this. Afterwards, so close together in the rocks’ cool embrace, neither of them speak. Then, in their aerie high above the world’s clashing chaos, while on the other side of the mountain in Geratti the Nazis are conducting a thorough house-to-house search, she and Robert do it again.

  The next day she must change her pasture. Grass is so sparse now. She looks for edible bushes, low leaves, anything green. Again Robert finds a way to meet her. Just long enough to kiss, to hold each other. Apart from all the other risks, if Uncle ever found out, if a lookout saw them and told him, she would be locked in the house for the rest of the war.

  When it is safe for the soldiers to return, village activity and the soldiers’ laughter make it is harder to find each other alone, to hide themselves. Moments have to be stolen in Romeo’s stable, or down in the olive grove below the village before, on a moment’s notice, he is yanked away again to hide in the high caves.

  Still he finds her.

  They are nestled in a rocky cranny one afternoon, shielded by a great spiny bush when six German soldiers go by on the path below them, heading east. Deep in conversation, they saunter along in the heat as if, instead of killers, they are boys out walking.

  “They don’t look very dangerous,” she whispers.

  The soldiers’ voices, laughing now, float up to them.

  “They probably aren’t when they’re not wearing those uniforms.” Close against her, he watches as the patrol, small as dolls now, recedes into the tapestry of terraced mountainsides, rock walls, a carob tree, a donkey laden with cut branches plodding beside its owner out of an olive grove.

  “The day I escaped from the prison camp, I was following this gully up in the hills behind Rethymnon, and there was a dead man, one of theirs, wearing a paratrooper’s uniform. His body was bloated with heat and the flies, but his pistol was still in his belt and I took it. A few hours later I was walking through this orchard, way behind the fighting, I thought. Except that when I came around a bend in the path there, right in front of me, was Jerry. A lone soldier. His mates were standing beside a jeep out on a dirt track. He must have left them to relieve himself. So there we were suddenly, staring at each other. Two guys about the same age, same size, except that I had the gun in my hand already. So I raised it—” She feels him breathe out. “—ready to shoot if he so much as uttered a sound. But it’s one thing to be engaged in a firefight, bullets flying, bombs exploding. We just stood there looking at each other. If I shot him, his whole company would hear it and mow me down. We’d both be dead. Finally, after about a minute, he said ‘I’m sorry,’ in English, and reached for his pistol.” Robert stops, his pain still live as colour. “‘I’m sorry,’ that’s what he said.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “For this moment having come upon us, for not being able to back away, for having to shoot me or force me to shoot him, the whole thing. He was just a bloke like me—”

  “No, he was the one who chose to give you no choice.”

  Robert gazes out at the spot in the distance where the soldiers disappeared.

  “He didn’t see any other way, poor bugger.”

  “He was a fool, then.” Every man who wears Hitler’s uniform is responsible for Georgios’ and Grandma Tittlemouse’s and Grampa’s deaths, and Callisto would relish the opportunity to kill any one of them. Sometimes she fantasizes about what she would do if she ever came home to find one of them harming Auntie, how she would go for the pitchfork, not a knife which has to be stabbed into the right place. “What happened after you shot him?”

  “I ran like hell. There was a ravine on the far side of the olive grove. Halfway down it I found a kind of grown-over crack where the ground opened.”

  There is no more time to talk.

  Inevitably the village grapevine, sensitive as birds’ ears anytime and further tuned by ever-present danger, picks up her interest in Robert. On safe days, the fugitives like to climb down into the wild valley behind Geratti to swim in the river. One Sunday afternoon the village boys join them, cavorting as if there were no war, as if sunshine and the girls they know are hidden in the bushes above, watching, were the only things that matter, as if the possibility of a patrol coming around the corner, of being gunned down did not exist. Robert is horsing around with the others when Maria, who is sitting on the ground not far from Callisto, reaches over to take her hand, examining the palm.

  “Yes, it is written,” she giggles, “like mine.” She holds out her hand. “See the line? I will marry Nikos.” She points down to a boy a couple of years older than Georgios, who is standing in water up to his knees, using the palm of his hand to send up a sheet of spray that, suspended for an instant in the sunlight, flashes a rainbow up the hill in their direction.

  “Oh!” cries Maria.

  They are climbing the path back to the village at dusk, their skin tingling from the water’s freshness, when the girls emerge, as if by accident, onto the path. Robert reaches down to give her his hand. She takes it, just for a moment, before they come into the view of what her mother would call “the Nosy Parkers” above.

  A submarine will take the fugitives off Limni Beach on the night of no moon, just three days from now, in the third week of the month.

  The threats and fears and joys of each day have kept her imagination at bay. Now she cannot eat or sleep or even think. How many times does Auntie have to bark at her to mind that the soup does not boil over, or ask her again, then again, to fetch a pail of water? On the second day, one of the village boys, who has been posted to watch the path, calls out to her as she herds the sheep toward home.

  “Hurry up, Callisto! There is a feast tonight, to sa
y good bye.”

  Tomorrow the soldiers will leave them. She lets out her hair, washes it quickly so it will have time to dry in the sun. Aunt Ioanna keeps dried lavender on the windowsill beside the stove. She is rubbing some into her neck when her aunt comes in from the garden. Following her into the house, Auntie watches her niece take down the Sunday dress and shoes. Coming closer, she picks up Callisto’s hairbrush.

  “Sit.”

  No one has brushed Callisto’s hair since her mother did it back home, so many months ago. Now the tug of the brush unleashes memories: the ray of morning sunshine that would dance across her bedroom, the sound of her mother’s voice, her touch. Callisto is afraid she will dissolve into tears that, once started, will never stop.

  There is a speckled mirror on the wall. In it she sees a girl whose face, framed by wavy dark hair, has been roughened by weather and the summer sun. Her eyes are blue, a gift from her mother. “Like windows full of the sky,” Robert has told her.

  “Such pretty red and gold lights you have in your hair, from your mother.” In the mirror, Auntie stops smiling. “But if she were here with us, she would tell you that now is not the time for feelings.”

  Callisto looks up at her through the spots on the mirror.

  “You must guard your heart, Callisto, for his sake as well as your own.”

  As if the heart offers a choice.

  Roast chickens, special sweet breads, bottles of the village’s best wines are laid out in the open place by the church. Vasilios and Adonia’s husband, Andreas, have spent most of the last week harvesting their grapes, bottling a new batch.

  “Bring out your flutes,” Adonia calls to Andreas, who has made a whole collection of them out of the bamboo that grows along the banks of the river, down in the valley.

  Uncle Vasilios accompanies him on the fiddle, everyone clapping to the beat as someone, then someone else, then several of the men together, then the whole rag-tag collection of soldiers dance a Cretan jig. Such a heady, loyal, safe cocktail of joy-terror.

  Still, Uncle waits late into the night, until nearly everyone has gone home to bed, before taking the fugitives into his storeroom. Informers are made, not born. Accident, pressure, pain can turn any man, woman or child, loyal as family yesterday, into tomorrow’s traitor, and nothing must be allowed to hamper the rescue, when the ship arrives in two days’ time. The men will move down into the river valley tomorrow night to make ready for the run down through the last little gorge to Limni Beach.

  Waiting inside the house, she listens for her aunt’s and uncle’s snoring before creeping out into the road. The sliver of a moon that, poised to leave the night sky, is going to take her Robert away, watches her steal through the silent village to the fig tree on the path, where he waits. There is a spot not far beyond it, under a carob tree just below where the ground falls away, that is invisible from the road. The only sound is the river tumbling through the gorge far below.

  Spending the night with a man, she risks damnation in this small Cretan village but the feel of him, his smell, the warmth of his breath, and the sound of his voice are heaven come down to earth on this last night, and Robert is too young and excited and scared not to take her into his arms, to bury himself in the sweetness of her.

  He is also too considerate, too gentle to probe beyond her own enthusiasm and so, kissing, holding, feeling each other, they spend the night telling each other, finally, everything about the separate lives that have brought them to this moment. Robert’s lovely lilting stream of Rs rolling between the pools of his vowels carry her into Scotland’s free, heather-scented mountains. His arms tighten around her unconsciously as he goes on to tell her about joining the army to fight Hitler first on the mainland then here, and what happened next: his flight south into the high western mountains; his heartbreak on finally reaching the debarkation point at Sfakia and looking out at the ships that had no room for him; the generosity of the families in the White Mountains who had taken him into their homes even as the Nazis were shooting their neighbours. Listening to him, smelling the heat of him so close against her, even as the dread of losing him hovers, she falls down, down, out of the brutal quotidian world, into the pillow-rich softness of love.

  She tells Robert all about her English mother and how she chose to stay in Greece with her father, and about her own life in Athens. Crying now with homesickness, she talks about her school and friends and the Dickens and Sir Walter Scott and Charlotte Brontë novels her mother safeguarded through all the years for her. He kisses her, bringing her back into this interlude of joy.

  “Maybe I could stay.” He turns onto his back. “There is work to do here.” The German plan is to move through Crete to set up a supply line for Rommel in Africa. Sending intelligence about their manpower and movements to Egypt by radio is crucial to stopping them. It is also extremely dangerous, the men and equipment constantly on the move, hiding and resting in high mountain caves, depending on the resistance for food, warmth, shelter. “Maybe the commander would let me—”

  “No.” Auntie is right; the safest thing is for her to lose him. “You know what they do to those they catch.”

  “And to those associated with them.” Above them, the stars watch, impervious, ruthlessly disinterested in the hearts of two specks of life all those light years away. Just before dawn she slips back down the path and into her bed. By the time she brings the sheep in the next day, the fugitives and their guides are gone.

  vii

  It is the third week in August. The Cretan sun has been blazing for three months. Even the grasses in the high mountain pastures are brittle brown. It is not hard, the next day, for her to justify packing a bag to take the sheep down through the gorge into the valley below Moní Préveli, where olive, plane, and orange trees near the river bank offer some protection to the grasses, and some foliage still for the sheep to eat. The Preveli monks, who own the land, do not mind.

  She takes Georgios’ hunting knife for protection. Not from Cretans. No islander would dishonour a shepherdess, and Cretan girls are venturing outside their homes to do all sorts of jobs now: running messages like she does, taking food into outlying villages where supplies are dwindling, setting up centres to help care for orphaned children. Callisto will be in no danger in the valley and will put no one in danger. She just wants to be as close to him as possible. And who knows, maybe she will see something useful.

  Coming down the goat path out of the gorge she scans the knolls, dips, and creases that stretch like a giant’s rumpled picnic blanket between her and two mountain headlands. Behind them is the Libyan Sea. Of course there is no sign of the escaping soldiers. But they are there, somewhere, waiting for tomorrow night.

  Driving the sheep over a little cobblestone bridge just above where her river meets the one that comes down through the Kourtaliotis Gorge — both of them little more than trickles down here — she follows a path south, around the shoulder of a hill, toward a small ruin she has seen from above that overlooks the valley floor.

  She must, at all costs, not draw attention to the escapees, but there is no sign of anyone anywhere.

  The ruin sits on the edge of a little plateau. Her sheep graze outside while she makes her camp inside its stone walls. Hand-hewn wooden beams no longer support a roof. This must once have been a mansion with lovely stone archways and wide windowsills. Could it, too, have belonged to the Preveli monks whose original, thousand-year-old monastery overlooked this same valley? Looking west, she can see it from here, hugging the shadows on the side of the mountain. Roofs gone from all but its chapel, walls crumbling, it too looks like a ruin, but on the night of the first Preveli rescue a month ago Uncle attended a final dinner there, put on by the Most Reverend Abbot Lagouvardos for the escaping soldiers and their Cretan helpers.

  Inside an interior room, a hearth built into the corner is still supported by a charred crossbeam. Nettles crowding toward it have been beaten back, and a pile of sand sits on the ground beside a pile of kindling and small
logs. Someone, a shepherd probably, has left a metal bucket inside the doorway. She rolls out the blanket she has brought then goes exploring.

  Behind the ruin’s network of rooms, a long stone storage house has no front wall. It is, however, still roofed. Inside it, what look like stone benches line each side, no doubt to keep fruit and vegetables and other perishables off the ground. Livestock could shelter here in the winter.

  A tiny chapel standing intact at the front corner of the ruin is unlocked. Inside, faded paintings of the Virgin Mary and St. John the Theologian preside. Crossing herself, she kneels to pray: for her parents, for Uncle Vasilios and Aunt Ioanna and cousin Pavlos, from whom there has still been no word. For all the people in Crete whose homes are gone, whose olive oil urns have been smashed, the oil set on fire, who are trying to stay alive and out of sight in caves. For those whose houses, in the cities and towns, have been taken over by the Nazis. And those who have been taken prisoner and taken God only knows where. For Robert and the others.

  Where are they hiding now? Will they reach the beach tonight? Will the submarine arrive? Uncle Vasilios says the Nazis have installed a searchlight up on the cliff beside Moní Préveli. And where there are searchlights there are always machine guns. So many things have to work out for the rescue to work.

  Please Mother of God, help them.

  The evening darkens. Outside the sheep huddle together. There is no moon. She lights a fire in the hearth to boil some of the herbal tea her aunt had given her to drink with her bread and cheese, and after the long day’s walk soon falls asleep inside her blanket.

  Voices startle her awake. Germans! Crawling toward the outer wall, she stings her hands on the nettles. The voices are coming from below this plateau, by the river, and now she can see the beam of their lamp. They must have been waiting on the beach, at the mouth of the river! Had someone betrayed the escapees?

  Please, please, God in Heaven—

  Passing by below, headed inland, up the valley floor, they sound relaxed, chatting, cursing as if this moonless night was nothing more than their misfortune, as if tonight they have encountered nothing but boredom.