Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  “What could have happened to her?” she asked the mountains, the air. “Adonia said she went back to Athens, so she must have survived the war.”

  Oliver said nothing. She looked at him. “War has a long reach.”

  She turned back to watch the airplay between the wind and the clouds at the mountain top.

  Geratti itself had recently undergone a massive overhaul. New concrete homes overlooked the valley and the mountain range. Only the occasional whitewashed stone house, or rubble stone shed still breathed the life Callisto and her aunt and uncle had known. Inside the doorway of one of them, daylight caught the same kind of stone bench she had seen at the little ruin in the valley. Her mind cut back the weeds, imagined a courtyard, a stable, sheep and chickens, and a donkey named Romeo.

  The old couple’s daughter had arrived to stay overnight at the tavérna. If Cally went back with Oliver to his room in Plakias, she could walk up to Theía Adonia’s house in Myrthios the next day.

  A good, expedient plan. Except for the ghosts: the Cally who had fled in fear; the fact, still between them, that Oliver had not used a condom and she had not asked him to; the life she had turned her back on that was still out there, coming at her through Oliver’s television screen even though it was off, and coming at her through the bald electric light and the grunting engine of a truck backing up in the street outside. Also, Aphrodite had left town.

  “Cally,” Oliver handed her a tumbler of red wine, drank his in one gulp, and then flopped into his chair as if he was exhausted, leaving her to sit on the bed. “There was a second reason I came to find you at the tavérna.” His face was empty of expression. “I wanted to explain why I didn’t follow you when you left the other morning.”

  “You don’t have to.” She looked into the depths of her wine, watching the red reflection of the overhead light, pain echoing. “I didn’t come back here to—”

  “I know. I’m not someone you want to get tangled up with, I get that. But still, I’d like you to know this.”

  He had grown up drinking beer and watching football in upstate New York, he told her. His father ran a brick laying business. He helped out on weekends, but his high-school teachers wanted him to try for a scholarship to college.

  “My Mom had visions of me going to medical school, healing the world,” he looked at her. “There was also my girlfriend, Cathy.”

  She had asked him to take her to the formal. Later, after the photographs, when the music slowed and they were dancing close, he had felt her body give under the silk gown, and she had looked so beautiful, her hair done up with little white flowers, her eyes full of happiness, wanting him, and when a girl gave herself to you, who cared about exams, scholarships?

  “Did you love her?”

  Sitting in the middle of the messy room that was his home a dozen years later, he tried to remember.

  “If love was wanting to dance with her and talk and have sex, then yeah, I guess I did.”

  It was Cathy who had paid attention to the Marine Corps recruitment ads.

  “You know the ones: guys rappelling down cliffs. I would get a free education and we could get married. I hadn’t bothered with the university scholarship applications because even if I got one, how was I going to cover my living expenses?”

  He got up, found a plate, a heel of bread, and some cheese and put it on the bed beside her, then refilled their glasses.

  “I talked my best friend Mikey into coming with me. We’d be warriors for our country and get the hell out of town, travel the world, get educated, and make some serious money. We borrowed my Dad’s truck to drive into the United States Marine Corps recruitment centre in Albany. We were eighteen years old.”

  He paused, gathering a breath, then recalled the day in August 1990 when George Bush Senior had sent Marines into the Kuwaiti desert against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invaders. He and Mikey trudged through a sandy hell of burning oil wells, their breath robot-like behind their gas masks. Until the piece of earth his best friend was standing on blew up.

  Mikey’s head had landed on his chest, a stunned, how-did-this-happen O shaping his mouth.

  “His hair was still attached.” Oliver’s voice sounded like sandpaper now. He took a mouthful of wine.

  Miraculously, he himself had escaped with only a bad concussion.

  “I came to on the hospital ship and thoughts kept running like rats through my brain: what were we doing here? Mikey had sacrificed his life. For what? And finally I woke up to a few facts.” He used his fingers to count them. “One, the only thing that had ever motivated me was my cock; two, I had talked my best friend into enlisting because I was the weakest-willed, most ignorant son of a bitch this world has ever birthed; three, George Bush Senior and General Stormin’ Norman and every value I had been taught to believe in were bullshit. America killed Mikey. Sure, the Iraqis laid the land mine, but why were we walking there? Oil, that’s why — my parents and girlfriend waving proudly when the teenager they loved went off to kill Iraqi teenagers in a desert on the other side of the world.”

  She tore off a chunk of bread, cut some cheese and gave it to him, intuiting that it was easier for him to speak into silence.

  “This was not a World War or a failed state threatening us. There had been no Pearl Harbour, but there I was, wandering around in a bathrobe, looking at the other guys on the hospital ship, most of whom had holes in them or had lost limbs, and seeing dead Iraqis on the television.”

  An oil tanker tied up at the next quay had been loading all week. On the last day, as the overhead cranes were winched up, the hatches battened down, a lineup of men stood waiting at the gangway. When the tanker pulled away on the tide before dawn, Oliver was down in its hold, securing cargo.

  Up through the Suez Canal and across the Mediterranean. The tanker docked at Cartagena on the Spanish coast. Leaving it was not a decision. Life simply drank in a wounded teenager set free on a day’s port leave, and then spat him out in the small hours of the following morning, in a gypsy campsite at the edge of the hills behind the port. When the pre-dawn chill woke him, one of the family matriarchs had a fire going. His head hurt. The old woman gave him a cup of coffee.

  “Dónde vas?” Her breath was a jet of vapour in the firelight. “Where are you going?” Behind the woman, to the east, the first rays of morning light were tinting a snow-tipped mountain range. The land below, still in deep shadow, had a purple, mythic hue. Oliver finished the coffee and gave her back the mug.

  “Gracias.” He pointed east.

  A few minutes later a sleepy looking boy ran up to him.

  “Señor!” He held out a heavy wool poncho.

  “No, no.” Gypsies did not carry excess baggage. The poncho must have come off someone’s back.

  “Si, señor! Mi abuela dice—” Gestures at the snow-capped mountains, a torrent of unintelligible Spanish, the poncho pushed into his arms.

  He became aware of the late February cold, felt in his pocket for a packet of Juicy Fruit gum.

  “Here.”

  “Gracias, señor!”

  He walked across Spain, stopping in villages to buy bread and cheese, sneaking into barns to nestle with the sheep or cows or donkeys against the cold. The military police might take the time to follow the leads as far as the gypsy grandmother, but the trail and their investment of time would end there.

  One morning, high in the Pyrenees Mountains, all he could see in any direction were old, low mountains, a white-and-black landscape of rock splashed here and there with grey copses edged with green. During the whole day, only one rattle-trap pickup truck came by, and putting one foot in front of the other, he realized that his headache was gone. He could walk forever through these empty barrens.

  “As I lit my little fire in a shepherd’s circle of stones, memories began to waken. I would be frying bacon when suddenly the fire crackling would bring my father sitting at the dining room table shaking his head over a stack of bills, receipts, and invoices, or my mother standin
g in my bedroom doorway, trying to get me to stop playing video games and study, or Cathy … and I wanted none of it.”

  Rain, wind, hail. He welcomed the weather the way molten steel welcomes a new mould, so that by the time he had run out of money and gotten a job laying bricks on a construction site on the French side of the mountains, the lean, curly-haired American bore little resemblance to the Desert Storm trooper. There was joy in brick on brick, the hot meal earned at the end of the day. He criss-crossed Europe, laying bricks, hammering nails, waiting on tables, drinking lattes in a café off Paris’ Champs-Élysées. Slipping across borders in the night was risky but not hard as most countries were not fenced. But then, in Rome, he met a man who knew a man who dealt on the passport black market. Whenever necessary he became Rick Smith, tourist.

  One year flipped into the next, the past becoming a distant rain cloud, a coastal weather system in a part of the world that had nothing to do with him. Only sometimes, when he was tired at the end of a day, the light muted, did snapshots of his old life return, with guilt and the desire to explain to his mother. Most of the time, however, it was not hard to shrug them away because as hard as a turd baked in the desert sun was the fact that all those he missed stood for the real crime from which he was running.

  In the meantime, he was discovering Beethoven in Vienna, Mozart in Salzburg, and was riveted by Michelangelo’s hand of God on the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, by the flying machines Leonardo Da Vinci drew five hundred years ago, by his Mona Lisa in the Louvre. There was a girl in Paris, and walking with her in the Bois de Boulogne, listening to the careful way she shaped her words for him, packing a bottle of red wine, a round of Brie, a baguette for picnics in the countryside, reading and then making love on rainy winter afternoons in her apartment, he had grown new tendrils of hope. Five years later, when her parents and brothers, and the girl herself spoke of marriage, in the spirit of love he told his story. And was broken again. There could be no future for an army deserter.

  There had been one or two girls here in Greece, but part of him lived shut off now. Last year, turning thirty, he had discovered that a man needs a home, a place to store his books and listen to his music. So now he paid for the room he rented by picking olives or oranges, working for a Plakias carpenter, by climbing into Crete’s mountains to help a shepherd friend tend his sheep, or by waiting on tables for some other friends who were turning an isolated, traditional Cretan village into an organic resort for hikers.

  “As for sex,” he stopped chewing the bread to look at her. “It’s not something I’ve been doing lately. At all. So I guess I was a little rusty.”

  She had been weeping for awhile now. So, she saw, had he. Her hand reached across the space between them. He came to lie down beside her.

  “You’re only the second person I’ve told about this since Paris,” he told the ceiling. “Desertion is punishable under U.S. military law by death, not that that happens anymore.”

  His voice stopped.

  She waited.

  “I keep trying not to care.” A long silence. His arm came around her. Moonlight came in through the blind to bathe them. After awhile she began to talk about why she had jettisoned her birth control, about her fear of what pregnancy would do to her future, about the television report of EO’s spillage in India and all those people poisoned, and about the subsequent crumbling of the structure on which she had built that future.

  “I’m like those marble and bronze statues at the Parthenon in Athens, you know? Athena and Alexander the Great and the others.” She told him about learning that those statues were originally painted with bright, fantastically detailed patterned robes and hunting suits and caps, and blond hair, the pupils of the eyes coloured with semi-precious stone or glass, reflecting light just like real eyes. She’d seen the painted recreations in a book. “And you should see the difference!

  Even the pictures of them spring to life off the page.” She looked up at him. “And it seems to me that’s what I’ve been doing here. Trying to colour myself a life. My mother and the world I know, where I grew up, it’s all gone now, but my grandmother came from Crete and my grandfather met her here and loved her, and my mother was born here. So I figure, if I can open myself enough, maybe I can somehow know what my mother could never tell me. Maybe that’s why she wanted me to come.”

  She could hear his heartbeat.

  “Well,” he volunteered at last, “When you think about it, what is imagination? The making of images, your mind communing with more than you know that you know. Have you ever heard of Jacques Lusseyran?”

  “No.”

  “He was a French guy who lost his sight when he was eight, before the Second World War. But he could hike for miles across the French countryside. His other senses could tell the size, shape, and type of every tree along the road by the sounds they made and the feel of the air near them. He could see in his imagination what he could not see with his eyes. When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Lusseyran was a teenager. He helped found a youth resistance group, relying on his senses to test the trustworthiness of new recruits. Guilt, lies, love all carry their own sounds, he said.”

  “Really? What happened to him?”

  “One day he overrode what his senses were telling him and let someone he knew into the group. The fellow turned out to be a traitor. Lusseyran and his group were rounded up by the SS and imprisoned in Buchenwald, which was hell on earth, a hundred thousand starving men forced to do hard labour until they dropped dead.”

  “Not a great place for a blind man.”

  “No, the Nazis were incredibly cruel, but Lusseyran wrote that what was hardest of all was the way some of his fellow prisoners preyed on and tortured each other for no reason other than the pleasure of doing so. But, the reason I’m telling you about him is that he became deathly ill. They dumped his body in the area where the injured and sick were left to die, and lying there, he watched his organs begin to shut down one by one. But then one day this surge of light came into him. He said it was like a miraculous, irresistible river of joy. He recovered. Got up one day and walked back into the main camp. He must have radiated that life force, he said, because no one stole his bread anymore. People came to him asking for comfort. And finally he understood that joy could be found even in the hell that was Buchenwald, by revelling in a patch of sunlight, or feasting on any mouthful of food or water that came his way. By appreciating the quality of every moment, whatever was happening. He was blind and only twenty years old but this joy kept him safe and centred, he said. He wasn’t the only one who became strong, he said. There were thieves who gave their food to those who needed it more and brutes who nursed the sick. In the end, he thought, people are helpless in the choices they make, even the SS. They are just living out the forces at work in them.”

  “Hmmm. And I guess he survived?”

  “He did. In the last days of the war, when General Patton and the US forces were approaching, the Nazis gave the prisoners the choice of marching east with them as they retreated, or staying in the camp, where they were certain to be shot. Hitler wanted no concentration camp witnesses left alive. Lusseyran chose to stay. The eighty thousand who left with their guards were machine-gunned to death a few miles away. The order arrived to shoot the men left in the camp too, but Patton got to Buchenwald before it could be executed.”

  Oliver shifted away from her to get up. Squatting, he ran a finger down the tower of books beside his chair, found the right one, and somehow dislodged it without toppling the pile. A good looking man with a rich head of wavy dark hair looked out of the cover at her.

  “Jacques Lusseyran is my hero,” said Oliver.

  xii

  Theía Adonia was failing.

  “It’s strange,” Georgia told Oliver, “when she told the story, she looked so bright, younger even. But it took a lot out of her, I think.”

  Returning to the tavérna, Cally used the mornings to record her grandmother Callisto’s story in her journa
l. To write it was to savour every detail, using her imagination to put meat on the bones of fact, losing herself in the gap between what she now knew and what was gone. She knew now that everything that happens, in every moment, directs the chemistry within us. The shape of her grandmother Callisto’s life had made her daughter, and through her, Cally herself. This truth felt solid, something she could lean against.

  On Sunday she recognized the motorcycle’s backfire as soon as she heard it up on the road. Nothing beyond conversation had evolved between them, but she did not deny her pleasure.

  They took a picnic lunch down to the little ruin. He had not read Flowers of Rethymnon, so she traced the route her grandfather had probably taken, then showed him where she had started her swim the day of the sirocco. The water was a little lower now, the current slower, the float down to the sandbar much easier to control.

  Lying on the sandbar, eyes closed as they dried themselves in the sun, she was careful not to touch him.

  After that he turned up whenever he was free, often early in the morning. She kept hoping it was with an invitation from Theía Adonia, but when it was not, they swam in the sea before the tour boats arrived with their morning load of tourists then breakfasted on the sandbar.

  “What are you doing to me, Oliver?” she asked him finally.

  No answer came for a long time. Then: