by Jane Bow
“Your grandfather would have hiked all this way up, from the north shore, then across there and down to the Chora Sfakion evacuation point.”
She slid off the bike. Her legs, too, were made of wood, but she needed to pee. There was some scrub brush on the other side of the ditch. Squatting behind it, she felt very small in this desolate stone landscape.
She was also different. Her body had grown hard and suppler than it used to be, her senses sharper. Sheltered in her gorge with nothing to do but wander and think and read and cook and make love, her eyes had learned to pick out details of line, subtleties of colour. Scents of earth and growth and her own steaming pee came to her. A panoply of chirps and rustles, silenced when first she had intruded, started up again in the undergrowth.
Oliver, too, had been watering the stones. Now, standing against the enormity of this alien backdrop, he also looked different out here, thinner, more angular. Vulnerable? She came close to smell and touch him, to reassure herself. He put an arm around her shoulders.
“See how it is chilly up here now? Imagine how it would have felt at the end of May.”
“With no coat.” Or even a uniform. On the run, he had probably been given pants and a sweater, Oliver said, or had stolen some from a clothesline.
They found a tavérna on the plateau. She ordered coffee while they waited to order, marvelling that just this morning she had been sweating in the Preveli heat. Oliver sipped a beer.
“The twelve thousand men they took off the island at Chora Sfakion would have come through here after ten days of hell.”
She nodded. She had read about the lack of food, for the Cretans, let alone for thousands of soldiers, and the violence of the resistance all over the island, but especially here in the White Mountains, where Cretans had a long history of rebellion. The Germans had thought victory would be pretty swift. Instead they had found themselves being charged by grandfathers carrying flintlock guns their grandfathers had used against the Turks, by boys hoisting ancient swords, and by grandmothers running at them with pitchforks, axes, hoes. The villagers had succeeded at first, driving the Germans back. Taking prisoners. But what did you do with enemy soldiers who could point to you, when you knew the Germans were coming back? The villagers made it up as they went along. Sixty-one years later, she shuddered. Such cold, desperate brutality. When the villagers thought it was safe to come down out of the mountains, they found their homes, their supplies of olive oil, everything they owned burnt to the ground.
This was the nightmare Grampa MacIntyre had walked through, moving only at night, eating whatever he could find.
The mountains on the south side of the plateau dropped thousands of feet to the sea, the road down a series of tight hairpins. Standing near the top, they could see the roofs of Chora Sfakion, still a small, isolated port where, on this sunny morning, a boatload of tourists was just leaving.
“The ferry will take them to the village of Loutro, and to the Samaria Gorge just down the coast,” Oliver told her. “Your grandfather, looking down from here, would have seen British ships lying offshore and hundreds of little Cretan boats ferrying the soldiers out.”
“But he was too late.” There had not been enough space on the ships. As each company arrived, it registered its number of soldiers, but on the hike down to the port the men walked with one hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him, trying to form an unbreakable chain. There were all kinds of loners who, desperate and starving, would try to break in, and when the company’s quota was reached at the boats, that was it. Whoever was not yet on board was left behind. Why, she wondered, had her grandfather never spoken about this? There was no shame in it.
Oliver knew a campsite beside a creek in the mountains’ lower reaches, where the air around them was sweet again with summer. Lying in the tent, listening to the creek water chuckling beside them as darkness fell, Cally wondered aloud whether this climate and landscape had anything to do with its history. Could Crete’s hot sun and freezing mountains, its clouds raining mud one day, flying away the next, its flowers blooming in April, everything dead by July, could all this have anything to do with its brutal history?
Beside her, Oliver offered no opinion.
Again. Out here in the “real world,” he spoke very little. She had watched him earlier, organizing the campsite, so practiced, economical, so used to being alone. Used to not talking. In the gorge they had chatted about whatever came into their minds, about the characters and plot lines in books, about how the world worked. She moved closer to him now, into the feel of him, his heat and smell, into the place that was home, listening to his breathing, his heart beating.
“Oliver?”
His silence remained as absolute as the darkness. She was about to raise her head to say something more when he squeezed her against him.
“Shshsh.”
“She’s called Esmee, I think.”
“What?” Oliver was stretching a bungee cord over their packs in the sidecar. “Who?”
“The bike.” Even dusty from the mountain roads, its ancient red chassis and round, old-fashioned headlight, and the jaunty, riveted sidecar had a distinctive, perky presence. “She’s like a leftover movie star from the forties, with a faded red skirt and a big hat, and a cigarette holder.” She struck a pose. “Dahling. I’m Esmee.”
Oliver laughed. “Okay.”
The road came down through forests to end on a pebble beach in a village called Sougia. Guest houses and restaurants flanked both sides of the main street. Oliver parked Esmee outside what looked like a government building.
Inside, up a flight of stairs, two high-ceilinged rooms were filled with World War II memorabilia. An elderly man with a shock of white hair greeted them at the top of the stairs.
“Theo, how are you?” Oliver asked him in Greek.
The old man’s eyes were milky with cataracts. He stared for an instant then his face split into a grin.
“Ah, Oliver, poly kaló!” Very good!
They spoke for a few minutes in Greek, Oliver indicating toward Cally. The old man nodded, smiling, and held out his hand.
“Geiá sou, Callisto.” Hello. The rest of his words were clearly meant to welcome her to his museum.
“Theo fought in this region,” Oliver told her. “He was a boy of seventeen. And now he looks after this museum. So that we never forget, he says.”
Glass cases along the walls displayed Allied and Nazi helmets, an SS shoulder flash, a paratrooper’s signature pin, rifles, pistols, leather pouches, remnants of an Allied commando’s radio, a billy tin, record logs, maps. Theo spoke to Oliver. Listening, understanding only the occasional word, she discovered that she could interpret his tone, the cadence and pitch of his words, hear his commitment to the details of this history. To him it was a living story still.
One whole wall was covered with photographs: an elderly woman on a street, wearing the ubiquitous black skirt and sweater, a kerchief over her head, a pan in her hand as if she were on her way to gather some vegetables; a little boy sitting on a stone wall holding his ball, smiling into the camera; a family gathering outside a church—
“Remember the stories about whole villages fighting back? Theo says these are some of the people from this region who were shot at Kandanos and Koustoyerako.” Oliver told her.
A teenaged girl stood looking at the camera. Cally went closer. She looked about the same age as Callisto, with a strong face and thick dark hair. Looking into the camera, her eyes were steady, serious, devoid of innocence. Cally examined every inch of her body, the woollen sweater grown a little short in the arms; her black skirt — how could you run, climb mountains, stay warm in a skirt? — her scuffed ankle boots; her stance, one foot a little ahead of the other, both hands pointing a rifle at something just beyond the camera. Cally looked at the old curator.
“Can you ask him, what is it like to have so many Germans on the island now, as tourists?” She gestured toward the wall. “After this.”
Oliver tr
anslated.
She watched as Theo replied, his voice never wavering, his rheumy eyes free of anger.
“All this was a long time ago,” Oliver translated. “We must never forget what happened. But these Germans are not those Germans.”
The old man asked them to come home with him for a rakí. He lived with his wife Maria in a two-room apartment up a side alley: high ceiling, a single overhead light, a table and chairs at one end, a bed at the other. The walls were decorated with a few family photographs, a cross, a Virgin Mary, a calendar. His wife watched, her face sallow in the room’s gloom, giving nothing until, pointing at her, Theo issued a rapid spate of Greek.
“Ah.” Her face opened, eyebrows rising. She disappeared into the kitchen. Minutes later a plate full of spinach pies appeared.
Oliver translated her appreciation of the tastiest, flakiest spanakópita Cally had ever eaten. Maria considered her, then directed a series of questions at Oliver, who sketched for her what Cally knew of her grandmother’s love affair with a British soldier near Preveli, how he had escaped and she had taken her child to Athens just before Christmas 1945. How there was a gap between then and her grandfather’s return after the war.
Chewing, thinking, Maria rose from the table. Cally saw that her legs were thick as tree branches, swollen no doubt from the hours of standing that would have been necessary to produce these spinach pies. Returning with a tray of tiny Greek coffee cups, she fired off a barrage of emotion, her voice rising.
Theo looked at the table top, nodding. Oliver translated.
“She says whoever told you the story knows what happened. And remember, every time a person was shot or a village destroyed, it was because someone had told the Germans. How else could they have known? Oh yes, we Cretans ourselves have plenty to forgive.” Maria looked at her, her old eyes wise as a crow’s.
Theo allowed silence to draw a line then poured the rakí and offered a toast.
“To Callisto, a brave runner, and her family.” As if they were still here.
When Cally came back from a swim, Oliver was squatting by a small fire on their campsite behind Sougia’s beach, frying a fish they had bought in the market. Behind him, the setting sun was painting the few clouds over the sea red-peach. They could not swim together because someone had to keep an eye on their belongings. Still dressed in his travelling jeans and T-shirt, Oliver looked hot. She sat down beside him to cut up a tomato, a cucumber, and an onion he had laid out for a salad.
“Still,” she said, as if to continue the conversation they’d had with Theo and Maria, “why wouldn’t Grampa ever talk about it?” She thought of his photograph of Callisto. Why did he keep it out of sight in his drawer?
“He probably had his reasons.” The fish pan sizzled.
“Like what?” She heard the edge in her voice but suddenly she was tired of the unsaid, the unspeakable, of silence itself — Oliver’s and her grandfather’s. Hard things wouldn’t just disappear if they didn’t speak of them. “Don’t you think my mother had a right to know her own history?” Not a single photograph existed, in her Canadian life, of her mother as a small girl. By contrast, the albums Cally had grown up with, in the living room back home in Overhampton, had been full of snapshots: of her as a baby being held by Sam; as a two-year old, cheeks puffed as she prepared to blow out her birthday candles; with Johnny in the backyard. It was a life beyond Cally’s memory, in which she must have been loved.
“Maybe she did remember some things,” said Oliver. The breeze off the sea shifted, enveloping him in smoke as he flipped the fish.
“What kind of things?”
Oliver watched the fish, did not reply.
“What things?” she insisted, the salad forgotten.
He looked at her through the smoke.
“Okay.” He jiggled the frying pan to keep the fish from sticking. “Horror. Shame. People clam up about things they are not proud of. Or that have hurt them deeply. Didn’t you hear Maria? Every one of those people in the museum photographs suffered or was killed because someone had informed on them, someone they knew and lived with.”
The August evening was hot, but still she broke out in goosebumps.
“What are you saying?”
“Only that there are as many people walking around with memories of their family’s betrayal of their neighbours and friends as there are victims and heroes.” The fish was done. Oliver put the pan down, rescued the salad while she struggled to make sense of this.
“What does any of this have to do with my grandfather?”
“All I’m saying is to be careful what you wish for,” he went on. “There’s no way any of us can know how we’ll behave in any given moment.” He handed her a screw-topped bottle of wine.
Brother Paul had tried to warn her about the same thing.
Oliver cut the fish in half, slid some onto each plate, and moved with her to sit out of reach of the smoke.
“A group of soldiers gets trapped under fire from a machine-gun nest. One guy shits his pants in the ditch. Another is so scared he can’t stand it, so he rushes forward, gets close enough to take out the machine gunner. They give him a medal for bravery. Really he was just reacting to fear in his own way.” He looked up at her. “People just do what they do. There’s no explaining it.”
She poured wine into two plastic cups, then got up to find her hoodie, and pulled it on. Her grandfather had been living with shame? From following orders. He was her age at the time. What orders?
She thought of her own life. Hadn’t she spent it thinking and doing what she had been taught, achieving marks, doing the smart thing, trying to be first in line, her life prescribed by others while she sleepwalked through it?
Until she came to Crete.
“No,” she told Oliver now. “We have choices. Look at you, you chose not to remain in a useless war—”
“Oh? Did I? Choose to condemn myself to a life spent hiding out?” Anger, a nasty little stream of it. “You think I did that on purpose?” Oliver concentrated on his fish. A few mouthfuls later he left his plate to go down to the sea.
She watched him walk away into the gathering darkness, leaving her to eat alone. How could you surrender your whole self to a man, to welcome him into the innermost reaches of yourself and live so closely in tune with him, and still not know about huge wells of feeling inside him?
v
There was nothing at all between their bodies and thin air as Esmee’s sidecar wheels bounced up the mountain track whose shoulder was washed out in places. She could not bear to look or to close her eyes. A hawk cruised the air currents below them. A steepled village church thousands of metres below glinted in the sun. At one corner, where the ledge that was the road disappeared around the mountain, Oliver slowed to a crawl. Her terror must have communicated itself to him.
“Don’t worry,” he called back to her. “It’ll be worth it.”
This morning Cally, whose dreams had been fraught — the people on the museum wall streaming past her down a dirt mountain road while she looked and looked for the shepherdess and her little girl — had awoken to the aroma of coffee. When she came out of the tent, Oliver had handed her a mug, smiling. “I’ve been thinking — enough of the past. Today I’m taking you to paradise.” It was safe, then, to be happy?
Just below the summit, the track ended in a car park. “Milia,” said a sign. Half a kilometre further, up a path, half a dozen traditional Cretan stone houses and a main lodge hugged the mountainside. The steep ravine below it was a cloud of chestnut blossoms. On the other side another mountain ridge climbed to the sky. There was no one around.
The lodge was unlocked.
“Anyone home?” Oliver took her through the beamed dining room to the kitchen, where a stone bake oven had been built into the outside wall, then out the back door and down a path to the chicken house. “Hello?”
Above the lodge the mountainside had been sculpted into a terraced vegetable garden. All kinds of things she could not name were
growing.
“It’s the middle of the week,” said Oliver. “Maybe they went into town.” Stooping, he pulled up a carrot, wiped the dirt off it with his hand and gave it to her. “Try it. I planted it early in the spring.”
The carrot-milk sweetness bore no resemblance to anything she had ever bought at home.
Back at the lodge Oliver put his hand on the bake oven’s humped clay back outside the kitchen. “I helped build this.”
“No!”
He looked proud, his gold-flecked eyes alive and unguarded in a way she had not seen before.
“My father is a stone mason, remember?” A pile of wood was stacked against the wall. Oliver showed her the firebox, how the heat ran up around the sides of the oven.
Several families had built the houses here several hundred years ago, he said, originally to pasture their sheep and goats in the high mountains during the summer droughts. The creek provided water, and the air was cool. Abandoned eventually, the buildings had fallen into disrepair until the war, when the families who owned them came up here to hide. The houses were one room, built into the mountainside, one against the other.
“The Germans never knew they existed.”
When peace returned to Crete, Milia had been abandoned again until a few years ago when the sons of a couple of the families traded in their city careers and gambled everything on turning the crumbling houses into an organic, ecologically sustainable mountain resort.
“Everything eaten or drunk here is locally produced,” Oliver told her. “There are chickens, sheep, goats, a couple of cows, rabbits. The electricity comes from solar power.”
Each of the houses was a guest room, a flagstone terrace connecting it with the path. Oliver opened the door of a small one built back off the main path.
“I can use this whenever I’m around in return for the work I do.” Standing back, he let her pass him into a room walled on three sides by whitewashed stone. The back was the mountain itself, the head of a double bed against it. A fireplace was already laid. In the bathroom the back wall of the shower, too, was mountain stone. Beautiful. Ingenious.