by Jane Bow
“This pregnancy is not fun, Mummy. I never realized how much you had to bear, carting me around inside your belly! If only I could be with you, hear your dear voice instead of Uncle’s constant haranguing, as if I am either a poor stupid victim or some kind of evil she-devil. But you didn’t have your mother with you either, did you? And at least I have Auntie. She doesn’t say much, but I know that she will look after me …”
“Oh, Mummy, how I understand now what a miracle I was. My Callisto has Robert’s brown eyes and also his smile. Auntie says it’s just gas but I know a smile when I see one. She also has such perfect little pink hands and feet. How strange is life. Birthing her was bloody and sweaty, with such waves of pain and the pushing! But the minute she was out and I was holding her, I was in Heaven. Can a more perfect moment exist on this earth, even in the midst of this war? Auntie is so happy too. I can see it in the way she rocks little Callisto, singing little lullabies. I think having a baby in the house will be good for her. If only Robert could be here too …”
Thank God for solitude because she was a weeping mess. So close now to this girl who was her grandmother.
If only you could be here with me, Mom, reading this.
“There is nothing around me now but scarcity. We milk the goats and the two remaining sheep, but Auntie worries that I am getting very thin, because I am a milk machine too! My little Callisto loves to guzzle, and I love it too. Her sucking pulls something right down inside my body, something sensual, not sexual, and that is so strange. That last day with Robert by the river below the little ruin, I will never forget the intense, explosive feeling that came when he sucked on my nipples. How does my body know which sucking is which? As I said, I know nothing about anything, it seems, not even my own body! Thank God for you, diary, because who else could I talk to about this …?
“Little Callisto turned two today! There is no way to mark the occasion, except with hugs and kisses, and she does love those. But there is so much I want for my little girl. Her father and peace, first. Then fresh vegetables, and cows’ milk, and bread and meat so she can grow strong. And schooling. My own has lapsed for so long, and I am a mother now, but my little Callisto loves the stories I tell her. ‘More Mummy,’ she says when we’re walking home from the pastures, or at night when I am trying to remember the children’s books back home in Athens, my head nodding, so tired. My little Callisto is going to read all the great works in both Greek and English because finally it looks as if maybe, just maybe we can win this war. Robert will take us home with him to the British Isles, home of Shakespeare and Dickens and Winnie the Pooh. Will you and Baba come too, Mummy, for a visit? You will love your little granddaughter. Everyone does, even Uncle, who takes her out to the courtyard to help him knead whatever kind of bread dough he has dreamed up. It will not be so hard in England, and we have been apart for so long. In the meantime I am thinking we should come to Athens. Auntie keeps telling me the city is no place right now for toddlers, but surely at home with you we will be safe …?”
The diary did not end where Adonia’s story had, but the old lady would never have been able to read it.
“Calm December days at sea on the way to Athens leave me with nothing to do but show little Callisto the dolphins playing across the boat’s bow waves, or catch her when the wind turns the deck into a hill she can run down, laughing, into my arms. Stopping at little islands to take on or off-load cheese, olives, goats, people, we see joy everywhere now that, at long last, peace has returned.”
A week before Christmas, the boat reaches Athens’ port of Pireus, where more than two thousand years earlier, Pericles had made his famous speech laying the foundation principles of democracy.
Uneasiness whispers in the streets when they step down off the bus in the Monastirakí market. Callisto holds her little daughter close to her. The calling, singing bustle that has always been the music of these streets is absent.
Mr. Osteropoulos’ shop below her family’s apartment off Omonia Square is not as empty as it was five years ago, but Mr. O. has become old, gaunt in two grey cardigans, one over the other, each full of holes. And there is something not right about his eyes. Callisto cannot remember a time when he was not downstairs, calling “hello” to her after school, slipping her an orange. Now, seeing her, he looks elsewhere.
She must look so different, maybe he doesn’t recognize her. But neither he nor Mrs. O. is pleased to see her. As soon as Mrs. O. unlocks the door to her family’s apartment upstairs, Callisto understands why.
The mustiness of death has crept into the front room, where Callisto knows the names of every book lining the walls. There are silver-framed photographs of her parents and of her at age ten, squinting into the sun the day of a school trip up the hill to the Acropolis. The photos watch as Mrs. O. tells her about December 4th of 1944, a year ago, how her parents went out to join the people singing songs. How the battle, after the army opened fire, spilled out of Syntagma and through the streets, into Omonia Square. Carts picked up hundreds of the dead.
“No.” There must be some mistake.
Government’s troops are now arresting members of the resistance who, only a few months ago, fought side-by-side with them for Greece’s freedom.
“We can thank Mr. Churchill for that.” Mr. O. has stumped up the stairs.
“Sir Winston Churchill?” The British have always been Greece’s saviours. Churchill is the reason Robert came to fight in Greece—
“Who ordered that EAM be disbanded?” The question is rhetorical. “Oh yes, as long as we were risking our lives and dying to support his cause, we were Churchill’s best friends. Now, apparently it suits him to make different friends. High and mighty bastards, these English think they can crook their finger and the whole world will obey. I spit on them all.”
Mrs. O. turns to Callisto.
“Your parents had some money saved in a tin. We used some of it to pay the priest to say a mass for them. The rest, and their safety deposit on the apartment, will buy your ferry tickets back to Crete. You will be safest there.”
“Mama?” Little Callisto pulls on her mother’s hand.
Callisto drops into her mother’s wingback chair. Its brocade upholstery, worn at the headrest, is familiar as a hug. Her mother’s scent lingers in it, brutally close. She pulls her little girl up into her lap and rocks her, hanging on to her for dear life.
Mr. O.’s old grey eyes rest on her for a moment before he turns away.
“You must leave. Take what you want and go. Now.”
“But—” Callisto’s mind, mired in shock, cannot wade through the ideological hoops. Her mother is British. Her daughter’s father is a British soldier.
“Go!” Fear, heartless as betrayal, has shrunk the gentle man she grew up knowing. Mr. O. makes for the stairs. “We cannot risk having you found here.”
She looks around her at the shelves of books that have been with her all of her life, at the framed photographs, the copy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest lying open on the table beside her mother’s chair. Was she reading it that day, did she put it down just for a minute to go out into the square with Baba to sing? When Callisto was little, she would sit with her mother in this chair, listening to the adventures of Peter Rabbit and Mr. Toad. Now, this apartment is all she has left of that blessed life, and she is not going anywhere.
“The war is over,” she tells little Callisto. “Your father will find us here.”
How many times she will repeat those words in the next months.
“Book by book, I have to part with the library my parents built. Every loss feels like a death, but there is a man who will give me enough drachmas for a loaf of bread in exchange for Shakespeare’s plays. Tolstoy’s War and Peace buys us an orange. But the war is over! Robert must come soon, and books can be replaced.”
She saves the children’s stories to read to little Callisto before bed.
2002
ii
“Greece was a nightmare at the end of the war,” O
liver offered when finally she finished telling her grandmother Callisto’s story. They were sitting on the Preveli beach, watching the setting sun paint the bottoms of the clouds, first peach then a deepening rose. “The Germans massacred whole villages as they withdrew.” He turned his head to look at her. “Why don’t you just focus on what you know now, who your grandmother was and the amazing life she led?”
But there was more to Theía Adonia’s obstinacy, something she could not bring herself to tell. Because if Callisto had taken the diary with her to Athens, how had it come into Adonia’s possession?
Over on the wild side of the river, Wrecks started barking at something behind a flowering pink oleander. Growling, his tail a flag signalling danger, he wanted to pounce but afraid.
“What is it, boy?” Oliver splashed across to him. Stopped. “Cally, come and see.” He picked up Wrecks to hush him.
A long greenish-brown snake with black spots on its back stared up at them, a baby frog wriggling between its jaws.
“Oh!” She had never seen a snake outside a zoo.
“It’s a dice snake,” Oliver whispered, “harmless to humans. He — or she — doesn’t want to drop lunch in order to escape from us.” He backed away. “Let’s leave it.”
“What about the poor frog, can’t we—?”
“Too late, I’m afraid.”
She was sitting under a palm tree, soaking her feet in what was left of the river and writing in her journal, when Oliver came up the path. His curls, long since grown in and bleached by the sun, were gone. All that remained was a half-inch brush cut.
“Oh,” she said. His gold-flecked eyes looked bigger, starker somehow, his cheekbones and jawline sharper.
“You didn’t like the bald look so …” He rubbed his head. “But never mind that.” Digging into his backpack, he presented her with a new blue-and-white cotton sarong and a blue cotton tank top to match. “I thought we could take a trip, get out of this oven for a few days. I’d like to show you a few things in places where you can’t walk around naked.” Wrecks was with Yannis and Georgia.
She was so used to spending her days wearing nothing more than bikini bottoms now. The tank top felt constrictive, but when she modelled it and the sarong Oliver looked happy. So Cally sashayed over to where he was sitting, two Styrofoam containers of food from Yannis’ restaurant in his hands, and started belly dancing, brushing the bottom of the sarong against his face.
They would be gone for several days, maybe a week. She should bring everything. Repacking, she found Brother Paul’s book, Flowers of Rethymnon, in the bottom of her suitcase. He must be thinking she was such a jerk! And a thief.
“It’s okay,” said Oliver. “We’ll return it in the morning, before we leave.”
iii
A man in an old straw hat was crawling in slow motion toward the rocks piled into a circular machine gun nest when they reached the top of the cliff stairs. Oliver started to laugh.
“Brother Paul?”
“Shsh!” Holes in the brim of his hat made patterns of sunlight on the monk’s face as he turned, still on his knees, to look at them. Laden with packs, they were both dripping with sweat.
“Oliver.” Brother Paul came to his feet, grass and dirt sticking to the knees of the old black pants he was wearing. “Just the man I need.” He did not recognize her until she extended her hand.
“I have your book.” She wondered why they were whispering. “I’m hoping you won’t have to kill me.”
Above him in the meadow, the monastery’s sheep were grazing, some just a few metres away.
“Well, bless me, I thought you’d be a thousand miles away by now.”
Brother Paul looked from one to the other of them.
“What is this, Bro?” Oliver asked. “Some kind of crawling penance?”
She watched them laugh, clearly close friends.
“Shsh, no.” The monk pointed into the machine gun nest. A shiny white baby lamb was watching them, a mix of militancy and terror in its eyes. “At least, I had not thought of that, but maybe that’s exactly what it is.”
Cross-eyed from research in some of the monastery’s oldest records, Brother Paul had volunteered to come down and check on the sheep. “And guess who decided to go exploring on the watch of the one monk in this monastery who’s afraid of heights. Every time I get anywhere near it, the blessed thing scrambles up the other side.”
Small as a stuffed animal, the lamb was impossibly cute, no more than a couple of weeks old. Its toy legs were tensed, ready to flee, but Cally took a step toward it.
“Don’t—” Brother Paul put a hand on her arm.
Too late. The lamb’s legs started churning against the stones, propelling it upwards, to the top of the stones on the outer edge, where it teetered uncertainly against the sea hundreds of feet below.
“Oh!” She backed away. “I’m so sorry!”
Murmuring, so low she could hardly hear it, started behind her. The lamb’s ears twitched toward it. Crouching low, Oliver moved past her, gentle as the breeze, a piece of lettuce from their grocery pack in his hand. The lamb did not move. Brother Paul drew her further away.
Eyes locked with the lamb’s, Oliver moved closer, murmuring, closer again, stopping each time the lamb’s legs tensed, soothing it with his voice until he reached the near side stones. Sitting then, he became one of the stones, a murmuring one. Time passed, bells from the other sheep tinkled. The breeze cooled her and Brother Paul as silently they waited.
Finally the lamb took a hesitant step down, another, and disappeared from their view. Oliver reached down. When he turned toward them the lamb was cradled in his arms.
It was so soft, new, clean, its body trembling as he passed it to Brother Paul.
She wondered how it was possible to love a man this much.
Brother Paul held the lamb against his chest to walk with them. Oliver’s motorbike was in the parking lot.
“Where’s Wrecks?”
“With Yannis.” Oliver stowed their packs beside his tent in the sidecar. “We’re going to do a road trip.”
Brother Paul said nothing, apparently pre-occupied but not with the lamb. She sensed concern. Finally Oliver acknowledged it.
“It’s okay, man.” He sat on the bike. “Cally knows my story.” He kicked the bike to life.
She looked from one to the other of them, recalling Brother Paul’s kindness the day she had visited him, his willingness to suspend everything else to serve her, and Oliver’s story the night he had returned to the tavérna: “You’re only the second person I’ve told since Paris.” Brother Paul was the first. He turned to her.
“So you know what you’re getting into?”
She swung her leg over the back seat on the bike.
“Sure. I’m riding with a lamb whisperer.” She put her arms around Oliver.
Brother Paul found a smile, raised a hand as if to wave, then brought it down again.
“What?” Oliver turned off the motorbike. “Let me have it, brother.” Brother Paul stroked the head of the lamb with his free hand, mumbling to it:
“They think because they come from North America our myths don’t apply.” He raised his head to Oliver. “You’ve read Jung, man, and you know better than anyone that the energies of all the gods live in here.” He tapped his chest. “There’s a reason King Minos’ poor Minotaur had to be walled up in a labyrinth.” Brother Paul’s concern spread to Cally. “So be careful, okay?”
iv
The Kourtaliotis Gorge was a portal, its northern entrance overhung with rock. On this side were the tavérna, the ruin and the monastery, her cave, and her grandparents’ story. On the other side, the road led to the outside world. Cars, buses, tractors, trucks passed each other with inches to spare, spewing exhaust. Their bike wove in and out, the wind pasting her eyelids open, the sidecar full of gear rattling. She clung to Oliver, her brain fabricating catastrophes — the sidecar flying off, Oliver losing control — until finally he turned off the coa
stal highway onto a road that climbed to the southwest, through green mountain valleys and villages sleeping in the midday heat, where a few elderly men played cards in the shade of vine-covered patios.
They stopped to picnic beside an olive grove just outside a village. One of the books Oliver had brought her from the Plakias library, so that she could get a feel for her grandmother Callisto’s world, was called The Cretan Runner. In it, there was a story about two boys who, convicted of setting fire to a plane, were to be shot in this village square. When the guards removed their chains and asked if they had any last wishes, one wept. The other asked for a glass of wine and the chance to sing a Cretan song. He started to sing then took off running. His executioners ran after him firing, but he zigzagged through the alleys and they could not hit him. When he got to the edge of the village, he couldn’t risk being seen in the open so he climbed an olive tree.
She looked around her. One of these? He was probably about the same age as her grandmother’s cousin Georgios. The Nazis had searched all night for him but because they didn’t look up, they didn’t find him, and he escaped and left Crete to join the war. The other boy was shot.
So many memories slept in all these villages.
The road twisted higher, then higher still, above the tree line, into rocky mountain barrens. The air became thin, cold until, even shielded behind Oliver, her face felt wooden. And her bottom hurt. Her legs chafed inside her jeans. She tucked her hands into Oliver’s armpits for warmth.
A flock of wild-maned brown and white goats, two females, a male, a young one, were crossing the road at the top of a pass, where there was nothing but rock. Oliver stopped.
“Kri kri, they’re called.” Above them were traces of snow on the mountain peaks even now, in August. Below, in the distance, a green plateau between the mountaintops was punctuated by the red tiled roofs of several villages.