by Jane Bow
Even if they could find passage on a ship, the sea is not safe. Further, Uncle Vasilios’ resistance contacts — monks, doctors, cheese and orange salesmen who travel regularly between Crete and the mainland — say the people in Athens are dying of starvation, orphaned children roaming the streets, eating even the bark on the trees.
“Why?” Callisto remembers market stalls overflowing with produce, eggs, fish. Even the occupiers couldn’t eat all of that.
“The British have blockaded the ports. No ships have entered or left Greece since the invasion.”
“Not even Greek ones?”
Uncle, who has just come in, hears them.
“You can trust no one, Callisto, how many times do you need to be told? Who says a Greek ship is not really a Nazi supply ship?”
She must stay where she is.
“And the last thing your parents need right now, in the middle of the important work they are doing, is to have to find food for you and the baby,” says Auntie.
A month later she and a midwife from Myrthios help Callisto through the long, sweat-drenching contractions that bring her baby daughter into the world.
“Thanks be to God!” Auntie peels back the baby’s blanket to marvel at her great-niece. “She has beautiful brown eyes. And look how long her legs are! What will you call her?”
“Callisto, of course.” Mummy had named her that for Baba’s and Auntie Ioanna’s mother, Grandma Tittlemouse. She will do the same for this new baby daughter who, snuggling against her breasts, is already bringing such a sweet, blissful sense of peace.
x
In the history books, the years march one into the next on a single page, but living them takes forever and lactating mothers do not make good runners. The winters are cold, even with the fire going all day, and the Nazis continue to scour the countryside for food. Andreas’ donkey, Beelzebub dies but, though they have not had meat in weeks, they cannot bring themselves to roast his flesh.
“Anyway, he’d be too tough,” says Uncle Vasilios. Though there is very little flour for bread, he is often away, traveling to Rethymnon or Spili “for supplies,” or into the mountains “to make deliveries,” returning with information about German troop numbers, supplies and movements for the British espionage team hidden in the mountains, and for the guerrillas planning new ways to sabotage Nazi management of the island. Energy required to keep the Cretans in line cannot be deployed elsewhere, in Russia for example, and hampering Nazi supply lines to Rommel’s war in Africa is invaluable to the Allies.
One evening Aunt Ioanna is darning socks when Callisto, who has just fed her little one and put her down to sleep, happens to pick up her copy of Nikos Kazantzakis’ epic poem The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. Her parents had given it to her on her last birthday, shortly before she left, because Kazantzakis is Cretan. She brings the book to the fire.
“Listen, Auntie.” She begins to read Homer’s ancient Greek stories, spun by Auntie’s countryman into poetry, picking up the rhythm that turns the words into music.
Auntie went to school in Chania and knows how to read, but seldom uses the skill. She loves the poetry. The next day while Callisto and the baby are off gathering hórta for dinner, Adonia comes over to borrow an onion and finds Ioanna reading. Guiltily she puts the book aside. There is always so much to do and so little daylight, in winter. That night, however, she asks her niece to read some more.
“Shall we invite Adonia and Ana?” Andreas is away.
Before the end of the week the reading group is back together, crowding into the house after supper, some holding babies, others mending or knitting, their children sitting at their feet, this time listening to stories as old as time about antics, wars, tragedies and heroics, that were originally written and then re-imagined right here.
Aunt Ioanna is down the road consulting an elderly herbalist on the proper nursing treatment for old Mrs. Magantheris, who has caught a nasty spring virus. When the dishes from the midday meal have been dried and put away, Callisto returns from nursing her baby to find Adonia and Ana in the courtyard. Ana is sitting, her little daughter asleep on her lap. Adonia is wandering around, straightening a potted plant, running a finger over the door of the bread oven.
“Ioanna really should do a better job out here.” Her shoulders do an uneasy little jig. Ana looks away, embarrassed, then finds her courage.
“I want to read, like you.” She smiles timidly. “And so does my mother. Will you teach us?”
Auntie is all for it, so she does, letter by letter, word by word, using the notebooks she has stashed under her bed and the time after the midday meal, when the little ones are asleep and the brunt of the day’s work has been done. The village grapevine spreads the news. Maria asks to join them. Her brother is at Uncle Vasilios’ school, but she and her friends believe girls need to read. Can they come too?
Callisto moves the girls’ classroom to a patch of empty ground across the road where she can draw letters in the dirt, stringing them together into words. She watches the girls copy her examples, corrects any errors. Some of their mothers sit with Adonia in the privacy of the courtyard, and pick up a pencil. None of them pays attention to the growls of the occasional bomber passing overhead or to the pain in their empty stomachs.
At first her uncle is disdainful. “What does a woman need to read for?”
But Callisto’s relationship with him has changed over the harsh months of his punishment. “Who do you think has been spreading the news everywhere in Greece while the men are busy fighting, dying? Who is writing the Free Press you keep telling me about? Women, that’s who, lots of them school girls!”
He is too intelligent not to concede the point, but reminds her that people are not allowed to meet. She and Auntie have planned for that contingency. If one of the patrols, who think they have a right to poke their prying noses wherever they like, approaches the village, the girls will start sweeping the road, or gathering hórta in the ditch. The women bring darning or knitting, ready to ask Auntie for help with a difficult stitch.
The weather is closing in when, one day in November of 1942, Uncle arrives home with the news that the Allies have taken El Alamein in Africa. It is the first defeat of Germany’s formidable land forces. A few months later, February sunshine has just begun to touch the mountain mornings with the promise of spring when more good news reaches Geratti. The Nazis’ great campaign in Russia has been defeated at Stalingrad.
“Thanks in no small part to us!” Uncle is standing by the water pump in the village square. “If we were not causing them so many problems here in Crete, if they had been able to walk over us the way they thought they could, they would have reached Russia sooner, before the winter snows slowed them to a deadly crawl. Haha!”
Power, confounded, takes prisoners where it can, however. A newly formed Nazi squad, its ranks filled by criminal riff-raff from Crete’s own prisons, combs the island, beating, torturing, and killing, as Communists, anyone with any thread of affiliation to the resistance. Those accused who are lucky are shipped off to concentration camps. Where resistance to the occupation is overt, villages are burned to the ground.
Bravery and fortitude do not collapse. Stories spread by runners, messengers, travelling priests, and tradesmen feed the people’s resolve all over the island. At Koustoyerako, in the mountains north of the port of Sougia, the men, who have been sleeping outside the village, fearing reprisals, come home one morning to find their children and women lined up against a wall. Rifles raised, the firing squad is waiting for the order to shoot when Kostas Paterakís, hiding several hundred meters away, aims his rifle at the head of their commander. Both the Nazis and the villagers hear the crack, watch in amazement as, before he can give the command, the officer’s body crumples to the ground. The firing squad flees. Paterakís’ brothers gather the villagers, escaping to a large cave hidden away in the mountains.
“Can you imagine,” says Auntie, “all those poor people, more than a hundred at least, having to spend n
ight after night with nothing but the clothes they can carry, everything they own destroyed?”
Bestiality feeds on necessity. Several German soldiers are captured in a mountain skirmish, just young men far from home. In order to survive, however, the villagers have no choice but to kill them. Roping the soldiers together, they lead them up into the rocky wilderness, where there is a deep sinkhole the Nazis will never find. They will dispose of their bodies there. When they shoot the first man, he falls into the hole, dragging the others with him. They are not dead. One of the Cretans volunteers to climb down a rope to put them out of their misery. The rope snaps. His legs are broken and he cannot finish the job.
In the spring of 1944, just before little Callisto’s second birthday, British commandos, working with the Cretan resistance, abduct General Heinrich Kreipe, the Nazis’ commander-in-chief on Crete.
“Hijacked his car and drove off, his swastika flag still flying, the general bound hand and foot!” A runner tells the men in Uncle’s storeroom.
“To where?” someone asks.
“Chania probably,” says someone else.
“No!” says the runner. “Into the mountains, to Anogia.” Far from everywhere, inaccessible by road, Anogia sits high on the side of Mount Psiloritis, north-east of Geratti. It is Crete’s highest peak. There is a cave just under the summit, where myth has it that Zeus was hidden as a child.
“Why risk taking him anywhere?” Andreas jabs the air with a pretend dagger. “Murdering bastard, why didn’t they stick a knife into his heart—”
“He doesn’t have one.”
“Shoot him in the head then!”
“They say he tried to kill himself,” says the runner, “but they stopped him.”
“That’s good,” says someone, “May he rot slowly and in great pain.”
During the next weeks, as the commandos and guerrillas keep General Kreipe out of the clutches of the pursuing Germans, word of his whereabouts percolates down from Anogia, then from Amari, only a day away from Geratti, then from Rodakino down the coast past Myrthios, until the British manage to take him off the island as a prisoner of war.
“So,” someone grumbles, “he’s going off to some cushy internment camp—”
“No, it’s for the best,” Uncle tells him. “If the British announce that they have him, no Cretan can be held responsible.”
The Nazis do not agree. All the men in Anogia are shot in retaliation. Amari is savaged, Rodakino razed. Geratti’s families kneel in prayer for brothers and sisters, cousins, grandparents, but the pall of their grief is rent a little by pride. Brutal oppression notwithstanding, they have vanquished their conqueror.
Summer bleaches the sky, scorches the pastures, and fattens the bees and the few goats that have survived. Wheat and potatoes and the summer vegetables do not know the privations of war. Callisto, however, has changed. Thin, alert, and skilled now in growing, gathering, and preparing food, she is fiercely protective of her little daughter, who sits beside her, drawing in the dust while she teaches. She has had only four letters from her parents in three years, the last one more than a year ago. All she can do is hope and pray and go on, day-to-day, waiting for the chance to leave. Soon now.
By the fall of 1944 the Germans are in retreat from Athens, burning down villages, massacring whole populations to stop the resistance from hampering their withdrawal. But victory and freedom are imminent.
Little Callisto has taken to climbing into Uncle Vasilios’ lap as he dozes on Sunday afternoons, seducing him into loving her. Now he dances her around the courtyard.
Callisto ties her red scarf around her daughter’s neck. Soon she will meet her father. There has been no contact from Robert, but that is to be expected. Only, please God, may he be safe and well. When this is over he will come for them. Callisto knows that as surely as she knows her name, though she says nothing to anybody. Best not to jinx anything.
No one in Crete pays much attention as political divisions between the royalists and the Communists, that have plagued Greece throughout the century, rise to a head in Athens. Britain, a long-standing supporter of Greece, now withdraws from its wartime alliance with EAM, the country’s most powerful resistance group, and its army, called ELAS, which Stalin has been supplying. Terrified of Communism, Sir Winston Churchill reaches a hands-off-Greece agreement with Stalin and then proceeds to back a new government. By the time the last Nazi leaves Athens on October 12, 1944, EAM, the group that inspired and then spearheaded the Greek resistance movement, finds itself frozen out of government.
The people do not recognize the machinations of power, however. For four years, EAM has been their lifeline, their source of strength and food and hope. On December 4, 1944 thousands pour into Athens’ Syntagma Square, in front of the parliament buildings, in defiance of the new government, singing songs of the resistance in support of EAM.
Unfortunately one of the British soldiers on guard fires a shot into the crowd.
Crete rids itself of Nazis the following May, in 1945. Father Nikolaos arrives with a letter around the same time. On seeing her mother’s handwriting, Callisto bursts into tears.
“Mummy?” Little Callisto, who is now three, is horrified.
“Oh, honey, it’s all right!” She picks up the little girl, hugs her. “We’re going home at last to meet your Grandma and Grampa!”
The letter tells her to wait until Athens settles down. Its tone, guarded, careful, stabs her with worry. Her mother will write again as soon as it is safe for her to travel.
“Why?” she asks Uncle.
Athens is a shambles, he tells her. Thousands are being arrested as EAM and the people refuse to accept a government forced upon them.
“When it is safe, your parents will let us know.”
Little Callisto is old enough now to come out the nearby pastures to gather hórta, and to feed the goats they have managed to keep for milk and cheese throughout the war, and the two chickens someone has given Auntie. Hopefully some of the eggs will hatch. Each time she comes home, Callisto looks at Auntie and knows that still no word has arrived.
By December, she can wait no longer.
“The letter must have been lost,” she insists. “You said yourself everything everywhere is a shambles.” A friend of Uncle’s has a dry-goods cart headed for Iraklio, where Uncle’s brother lives, and there is a ferry running from there to Athens’ port at Piraeus. “We can be home for Christmas!”
Little Callisto jumps up and down, clapping her hands, understanding nothing but her mother’s joy.
2002
xi
“So she left.” Theía Adonia stared into the gathering gloom.
“For Athens.” Cally sat back in her chair. The war was all but over, and they had survived. “And then what?”
“How do I know? She left. That’s all.” But her jaw, pushed forward, was making a chewing motion even though they had not yet eaten anything.
When Oliver arrived at the tavérna the following afternoon, she was waiting by the road. During the last two days, serving lunches, dinners, she had felt as if she was walking through a day dream. Adonia’s story was real life, and she had so many questions. Maybe they could stop at the bakery, to buy the old lady a chocolate treat.
Oliver turned off the motorcycle’s engine. Yannis had brought him a message from Georgia. Theía Adonia was too tired to see them today. Maybe tomorrow.
“But if you’ve got a couple of hours, why don’t we take a ride up to Geratti?” said Oliver. “It’s not far from here.”
She should not be disappointed. The old lady was nearly a hundred years old! She lifted Wrecks out of the sidecar, got in and put him on her lap, taking comfort from the warm animal feel of him, his rough fur and floppy, silky ears and tongue-out grin.
Oliver stopped at the entrance to the Kourtaliotis Gorge, and pointed back to a village at the base of one of three seaward headlands behind them.
“Lefkogia. Remember, we drove through it when we went to Preveli
Beach? Before the rescues in 1941, a girl from there took food into the Kourtaliotis Gorge every day to two soldiers — Australian, I think — who were hiding in a cave way down at the bottom of the gorge, by the river. A few years ago one of them, an old man now, returned. The girl had gone to Athens to become a teacher, so he went there and found her.” Oliver smiled. “They were the lucky ones.”
Right after they emerged on the north side of the gorge, Oliver turned off the road onto a steep side track. Cally smelled the air. Her grandmother Callisto had ridden up this same track on Romeo the donkey. At times, as they slowed nearly to a stop on the hairpin bends, she was not sure the bike would make it.
Sheep munching on the rocky cliffs to their left, where purple flowers appeared to have rooted themselves in the rock, would not have looked any different, and down the slope to their right, the little white church that had been built in the hollow between them and the gorge mountain looked a lot older than sixty years. They stopped climbing, finally, on the shoulder between the two mountains, where the little church under a tree still stood at a fork in the track.
One branch of the road went up, the other down along a ridge that fell away to the green valley far below. Lines of grape vines were strung along terraces built into its side. On the far side, removed from any road at all, was an immense triangular-shaped peak, the first in a range that stretched away to the east. Oliver pointed toward its base.
“There’s another gorge down there, with a river that flows through the valley on the other side, to meet the one from Kourtaliotis Gorge. There were no roads anywhere around here during the war. Even through the Kourtaliotis Gorge, there was only a path, but this gorge is still totally wild.”
She got out of the sidecar and started to walk down the mountainside. This must be where Callisto and the girls had watched the boys swimming, where Robert had taken her hand. She thought of the girl in her photograph, could almost see her, feel her, as if a door inside her that she had never even known existed had just opened. Soft grass tickled her shins as she sat down, the breeze lifting her hair just as it must have done to the young girl who, transplanted from Athens, had found herself on this same mountainside. After awhile Oliver came to join her and she started to talk, retelling her grandmother’s story, listening as the words poured out, bringing back to life the half-English girl from Athens whose mother had read her all the English fairy tales, who might have sat right here, so full of homesickness while outside this mountain enclave the world was breaking apart. Who had adapted, becoming a runner for the resistance, and then fallen in love.