Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  “My mother was British, and the British are behind this government, are they not? You, me, all of us fought together on the side of the Allies.”

  “Sign it.” The officer glances at his watch.

  Callisto stares at him. There is no choice. She puts down the pen.

  Every morning women lying rigid in death are removed. New women and children and grandmothers arrive. What little air there is in the cell hangs heavy with the cloying stench of suffering humans packed too closely together. When finally a roll call includes Callisto’s name on a list of prisoners being transported out of Athens, she hopes that might mean fresh air and some food for her little girl at a work camp. Until Robert comes for them.

  The boat is painted black. Its hold reeks of vomit and illness and human waste. Callisto distracts Little Callisto with stories about Mrs. Tittlemouse and Peter Rabbit and all the others, until the little girl sleeps. Then she too drops off, dreaming of Crete, of flowers and figs and orange blossoms. When the boat lands on the island of Chios, she carries her daughter up the gangway. The healing smell of the sea brings her hope until she sees the guards using truncheons on the weak, the slow, the old, herding them into what looks like an impenetrable fortress.

  Adonia’s tears glistened in the firelight.

  “Enough, Theía.” Georgia held her.

  The old lady’s head shook, stubborn determination making one last feeble stand.

  ii

  Your job, my sweet, is to grow up.

  — Callisto’s last diary entry

  Robert MacIntyre demobilizes as soon as he can after the war. By the time he makes it back to Greece, it is late in 1946. A new government, backed by the British, has just been elected, so the formalities of marrying and arranging visas should not be difficult. Thank God, because the country is in chaos, government troops arresting people everywhere in a purge of the Communist EAM. The balance of world power demands that Greece be kept out of the hands of those who would support Stalin, but in the mountains throughout the country, the guerrillas are fighting back. Having been denied any participation in the formation of the new government, the EAM and its supporters refuse to give up the ideals that sustained them throughout the war, and to hand the country over to a government they consider as fascist as the Nazis.

  Callisto has told him about her parents’ apartment above the Osteropoulos’ grocery store off Omonia Square in Athens. Maybe she will be home by now.

  The young man behind the grocery store counter speaks no English. Robert points to the apartment stairs. “Kastellatis family? British mother?”

  No response.

  “Osteropoulos?”

  The young man spews disdain, punctuates it with spittle, and then draws his finger across his throat, tongue out. Dead.

  An old grocer? Suddenly Robert is afraid.

  The British embassy’s military attaché is an old man whose concerns do not extend to a British woman married to a member of EAM. During the last year, the Greek government has changed five times, he says, at the behest of the British and American embassies. Robert should be warned that the country has gone crazy, burning down whole villages, hanging people in the village squares, inflicting atrocities far worse than the Nazis’ on known resistance members and their families. Robert’s only recourse is to board the ferry for Crete.

  Aunt Ioanna, in Geratti, apprises him of Little Callisto’s existence and of Callisto’s departure a year earlier. Robert MacIntyre takes the next ferry back to Athens. Ioanna’s eldest son Pavlos, who returned home in the summer and speaks English, puts on his army uniform and insists on going along as a translator. Together they storm a series of government administration, police, army and British embassy offices exhorting and demanding, and tracing Callisto and her daughter from the apartment to the prison in Athens, where they see half-dead women chained to walls and mothers feeding their babies what little lifeblood they have left.

  “Callisto is not a Communist!” Frightened now, Robert rages at the prison commandant. “And you do not put babies in prison!”

  The commandant consults his transport records. A woman named Callisto and her child have been shipped across the Aegean to a concentration camp for militant political prisoners on the island of Chios, just off the coast of Turkey.

  The British ambassador tells his secretary he is busy, but Robert pushes past her.

  “Both Callisto and her child have a British birthright.” He forces himself not to shout.

  “The British government cannot intrude—”

  “Intrude? This whole sorry mess is nothing but intrusion!”

  The boat to Chios tosses in black-and-blue waves, the sky overhead storming as Robert comes closer, closer to the truth that will shape the rest of his daughter’s life. Bribing a guard, he and Pavlos go deep inside the prison, trying not to gag on the smells of blood and excrement, down a hallway full of cells. The guard unlocks the one Callisto has occupied.

  Sitting on the concrete floor beside a strange woman, holding the hand of a little boy of about the same age, is a little girl. Her dress is a rag, her hair a mat of lice-ridden tangles, but she is a miniature version of her mother. Around her neck a tattered red scarf is stiff with grime.

  “Oh, my darling.” Robert moves to pick her up.

  She shrinks against the wall.

  Her mother died of pneumonia, the guard tells him.

  “But that is not true.” The mother of the little boy leans close to Pavlos, away from the guard’s and the children’s hearing. “They beat her and beat her with the fálanga until her feet bled so badly she had to crawl to the toilet bucket. ‘You a runner?’ I heard them laughing. ‘Not anymore, Commie whore.’ They beat her until she bled to death.”

  “All of this was my fault.” Adonia’s body was racked by coughs too weak to expel the fluid in her lungs.

  “Shsh, Theía.” Georgia wiped a hand across her own eyes before stroking her aunt’s hair. “How could that possibly be?”

  Cally could not speak.

  “It was.” The old lady’s whisper, all that was left of her voice, was insistent. She turned her eyes, opened wide and opaque with cataracts, toward Cally. “But I did not know it at the time, you must believe that. The war was over and everything was all right now, do you see? Callisto had gone home, that was all I knew. But …” She struggled for breath.

  Ioanna and Vasilios next door were in Rethymnon when a nice man had come to the village one day early in the spring of ‘46. Andreas was working and Ana and her husband had taken the baby to visit her grandmother in Myrthios. The man was polite, wearing an army uniform, so when he told her he was doing a count of the population and just had a few questions, Adonia gave him coffee in the courtyard. He asked for some general information about the village: how many families; was there a doctor, a priest; how many people lived next door? When she named Callisto, he asked if she was a native of the village.

  “I told him no,” Adonia wailed, “that she had gone back to her parents in Athens, and he knew who they were, that Ioanna’s brother was in the EAM. So I thought it must be all right. I was even happy.” The old lady sank back against Georgia, her breath expired.

  Great earthquake tremors were shaking Cally’s body. She tried to control them, to stay silent while Adonia filled her lungs.

  “The man asked if Callisto was a Communist. I didn’t know what that was. He said Communists organized people. I told him about Callisto’s reading to us and the classes.”

  A sob broke free. The old lady looked toward the sound.

  “When your grandfather brought your mother back to Geratti, she was nearly five. But so … broken. Ioanna would take her onto her lap but Little Callisto just sat there, so skinny and stiff, her eyes that used to twinkle with mischief so dull now. We all hoped that time would help her, so Robert stayed on in Geratti, helping with the olive harvest, the pressing of the grapes. Vasilios tried to get his little grand-daughter to help him feed the chickens or knead the bread, like in the
old days, but Little Callisto just stood there. She did not seem to remember anything and would not speak. Finally Robert’s sadness and bitterness were too heavy for him. They both needed a new start, he said. So they left.”

  “And the diary, how did it end up here?”

  “He brought it with him, read it and read it, then finally left it behind.” The old lady was crying now too. “All these years I have kept this secret. They killed Callisto because she taught us to read. Such a gift for many, many years. That is why, when Ioanna passed away I asked Pavlos for Callisto’s diary as a keepsake. And why, now, passing her story on to you must be more important than my shame.”

  Horror, pity, hatred, pain. Sitting there in the semi-darkness, the labyrinth of Cally’s heart tried to contain them while across from her in the bed, Adonia lapsed into sleep.

  2002

  iii

  When she reached the top of the cliff stairs at Preveli, the north wind was wrestling with the branches of the prickly bush at the lip of the Preveli cliff, shaking its red blossoms. Squalling across the sea below, it sent ripples like a fleet of ships out from the base of the cliff.

  Down on the beach, time seemed to have become a tornado, whirling her two-day old marriage, the line of naked soldiers huddling under the cliff sixty-one years ago, and her grandmother being beaten to death in a prison cell into a single vortex inside which there was no oxygen. She climbed the headland. Sat on her carved boulder, clutching Callisto’s diary and staring out, wind gusting against her back.

  After awhile, trying to anchor herself to something in the present, she looked around. She knew every stone, every handhold, every prickly bush and flowering shrub here, where Callisto had lain to watch Robert and the others escape.

  A man carrying a knapsack was crossing the beach below. She knew his long stride, his well-developed shoulders. Georgia must have gone down to Plakias to tell him.

  Dropping the knapsack, he squatted beside her, looking out to sea with her. Gradually horror’s hold loosened, letting chaos in. Sensing it, Oliver took a book out of his pack.

  “I was hoping something else would have taken your grandmother, that you wouldn’t have to confront this.” He opened the book. “It’s a collection of journals written by women who, like your grandmother, were thrown into prisons and concentration camps, beaten and tortured because they refused to disown everything they had risked their lives for.”

  “But why ask them to?”

  “Because Stalin had control of eastern Europe and Britain and the U.S. was terrified that communism would spread. Look though.” Oliver flipped to a collection of photographs in the centre of the book:

  Proud women shouldering rifles.

  A grandmother wielding a hoe.

  Women in skirts and worn shoes trekking through the mountains, their backs bent under boxes loaded with supplies.

  “Remember your grandmother for who she was, a war hero — like all of these women — who knew love. She is the reason we are sitting here together. That’s what she’d want, don’t you think?”

  She laid the diary in her lap and took the book from him.

  Poets, writers, teachers, and artists were among those imprisoned and brutalized, some of them for years. Someone had used lumps of charcoal to draw portraits of their companions in the camps: women of every age and size, faces rich with sadness, compassion, determination.

  She turned the pages. More photographs:

  A young girl handing out food in a village.

  A woman sitting on a mountainside with a group of girls, all of them knitting.

  Two ordinary-looking girls in summer dresses and a grey-haired woman hanged from the limbs of a tree, their heads lolling to the side, their eyes staring in death.

  The girl on the next page, standing on a hillside, squinting in the sunshine, was the girl in Grampa’s silver frame: her own grandmother Callisto. Who had ended her life lying in a filthy prison cell, blood pouring from her feet.

  She let the book fall into her lap with the diary and saw Callisto’s little girl sitting in a prison cell surrounded by the sounds of her mother’s torture. Watching her die. Left all alone in that hell, until a foreign man she had never seen came to rescue her.

  The wind blustering down over the headland pushed at her back, as if to drive her into the sea. Clouds flew. Under her feet the beetles foraged through yesterday’s decay. The sun went on shining and the Libyan Sea went on breaking against the base of the cliff until finally her heart broke open: for her grandmother; for little Callisto who, after her mother’s gruesome death, also lost Aunt Ioanna and Uncle Vasilios when her father took her halfway around the world; for the woman Little Callisto had become in spite of all this, who found all the colours of the rainbow, birthed Sam, and then lost them until, shut up inside herself, death had arrived; for herself, her loss of a mother she had never been able to know. Oliver held her hand.

  There was no Right and Wrong in a world that turned yesterday’s allies into today’s oppressors, nothing you could lean against, no structure of beliefs or rules you could rely on to keep your life from being torn to shreds. Hitler was not the only monster who manipulated entire populations, asserting power through degradation, taking pleasure in inflicting slow agonizing pain and then death. Religious ideologies, oil, greed had been doing the same since the beginning of recorded history, smashing buildings, ruining lives, shattering the souls of those left behind. Whether we know it or not, none of us escapes untouched.

  Birthing Cally, this knowledge must have flamed up out of her mother’s blocked memory. Frightening. Love for her daughter would not have been easy to risk. Best — for both their sakes — to mute her colours, to slide through life unseen, untouched.

  She owned the whole story now. Every chapter, every ripple of its energies was part of the mosaic that had her name on it. Her hand tightened around Oliver’s because, knowing all this, how could she and their baby possibly hand him over to the machinations of a country that also had so much blood on its hands?

  Messages between lovers must travel through the cells, because now Oliver turned his head to look at her, the wind whipping his hair forward, flattening it against his head as he picked the book out of her lap.

  “About going back,” he had to shout to keep his words from being torn away. “Would you think me a coward if I changed my mind, if we cancelled our flight? For now, anyway.” He looked so worried. “Because I’m thinking, what a baby really needs in this crazy world is a home with a father in it.”

  V

  April, 2013

  Dear Slee,

  Imagine this, a real letter, written on paper! I’m sitting on the grass, leaning against my favourite wall at the little ruin I took you to, beyond the arched bridge and the tavérna. It’s fenced in now (though Brother Paul gives us the key to the gate whenever we come down here) because a couple of years ago four separate fires broke out in the Preveli valley. Vandals or idiots playing with firecrackers lit them and wind spread the flames right up onto the Preveli headland, too fast for the firefighters. The monastery lost olive groves, animals. They thought even the buildings would go up but then, thank God, the wind shifted. Our precious palm trees behind the beach, a rare species different from any others in the world, according to Brother Paul, are mostly black skeletons but enough survived that they’re restoring the forest. You would not believe how quickly nature regenerates in this part of the world.

  We always stop here for a picnic on our way to Iraklio, and I am writing while Oliver takes Dad and Paul, who is ten now, and our little Callisto on a tour. I can hear him telling Grampa MacIntyre’s story as I write. Paul keeps interrupting him to add bits Oliver has forgotten. I love to visit while the valley floor is covered with spring flowers. Two hawks are circling overhead on a breeze that is bringing me the scents of the herbs, oregano, sage, and thyme, and the sound of the bees. If only my Mom could know what that cruise she sent me on wound up producing! Maybe she does. I try to conjure her spirit. M
ostly though, I am full of gratitude.

  Dad has been coming to us every year since I came home, after Paul was born, to show Grampa my grandmother’s diary. My grandmother’s story, and what it did to my mother, seems to have softened our attitudes to each other, and Dad loves the kids. He also seems to enjoy Oliver and the life we have built, and for the first time in my life, I think he even appreciates who I am.

  I wish you would come to visit us too, Slee, although from the way you describe it, keeping your teenagers in school and out of trouble is a full-time job. My children, on the other hand, will always be perfect angels. This is because I kiss and hug them every day in both Greek and English. Little Callisto is in school now, with Paul, in Vlatos. She loves to learn, but Oliver is dreading the day the hormones kick in as she’s going to be a knock-out! These pictures were taken outside our Hidden House, just down the road from Milia. See, she has Oliver’s blond curls and my blue eyes.

  The house is perfect. High above the valley, you can’t see it until you’re almost at the driveway. It’s also fairly modern, made of concrete which we have painted turquoise, to remind us of the sea. There are rooms for each of the kids and an office out of which Oliver and I run our organic vineyard-and-fruit-and-vegetable-and-herb-growing-and-bread-making business, supplying mainly Milia, though the other day a restaurant near Chania placed an order for our herb bread. We call our business Aphrodite’s Gifts. LOL

  Ten years ago, Oliver traded Esmee for a purple van (circa 1975) and painted the name on the side. Every morning while he drives it down to deliver the children to school and the produce to market, I pray the brakes will hold. Then he spends the rest of the day in our vineyards below the road, or with me in the orchard or the vegetable patch, or stoking the bake oven we have built, or helping out up at Milia. And living here, close to the earth, the tough impenetrable skin of the soldier who believed for all those years that he was responsible for Mikey’s death is softening. He begins to accept that his friend joined up because he wanted to. Oliver was an influence, but Mikey’s choice was his own.