The Lost and the Blind

by Declan Burke

  By now the flames have taken hold, an angry glow visible at the slitted windows, smoke beginning to seep through. Inside the woman continues to scream, although the children have fallen silent. The adults outside claw at the doors, and some of the men slip around the side of the church, desperately searching for another entrance they already know does not exist. I am dimly aware of Richter’s bawling as he instructs his men to restore order, to force the parents back from the church doors, all the while thumbing bullets back into the Luger’s magazine. Finally he rams the magazine home and sets off towards the church, leveling the Luger and taking aim at the milling crowd.

  A harsh chatter. Richter jerks and seems to break into a run, but then stumbles on the cobbles and pitches forward. He lies still for a moment, then attempts to force himself forward and up, his left foot scrabbling for purchase. Then he slumps and is still.

  What happens next seems to happen very slowly. I look to my masked shadow, who loosed the burst at Richter. He looks to be vibrating with tension, his shoulders shuddering, but in his eyes I can see a kind of stunned horror. Did he intend to shoot Richter? Was it meant as a warning? I step towards him and ram an elbow into his gut, and as he lurches back and goes down on one knee I grab for the Schmeisser. Winded as he is, his instinct is to hold on. We are face to face, snarling and grunting, until I relax my grip for a split second. As he pulls away and topples back, I follow through, smashing the butt of the gun into his face. Perhaps the mask softened the blow, but he goes down with an abrupt groan, then lies silent.

  When I turn around the rest of the masked men are staring, some at the prone Richter, others at the church. By now the tinder-dry pews are crackling and popping, and even through the walls the heat is so fierce that it drives the adults back from the smoking doors. I shout across to the man nearest me, waving in the direction of the harbour, telling him that we need to retreat to the boat that brought them in. Hearing me, some of the parents at the top of the steps turn. They might not understand the words, but they immediately grasp the situation. With Richter down and with nothing left to lose, they charge down the steps, faces set hard in masks of their own.

  They were unarmed, of course. And it was not courage that drove them on to the guns but madness, an unbearable grief harrowed into a desire for vengeance and blood – and, failing that, oblivion. For a split second the only possible outcome was slaughter, the villagers massacred until the masked men ran out of ammunition, and then they butchered in their turn, but then came a single hoarse roar, a ‘No!’ ripped from the very heart.

  The Englishman. The Tommy.

  In Greece they celebrate Ochi Day on 28 October, to commemorate the day in 1941 when the hated tyrant Metaxas suddenly covered himself in glory by responding to an ultimatum from Mussolini’s envoy to surrender the country. Metaxas, or so the legend goes, gave a classically laconic Greek one word answer: Ochi.

  No.

  The truth, as always, is a little more prosaic. What Metaxas actually said was, ‘Then it is war.’

  The result was the same, and history records the consequences, but that ochi still resonates with the same power that hums in the word thermopylae.

  No.

  I can’t say that the Tommy’s ragged roar is due the same legendary status as the Spartans’ final stand, or the gloriously doomed defiance of Metaxas. But in his own way, strapped to that chair, a bloodied husk of humanity tortured beyond human endurance, he managed to find something of the same spark. And, in his own way, he achieved what the Spartans and Metaxas also achieved: he bought time, just a few precious seconds, but enough for the masked men and the villagers to realize that they were bound for savage mutual destruction.

  For myself I can only say that I behaved shamefully. My shadow, Richter’s killer, still lay at my feet, moaning now, stretched out on the cobbles. A better man than I might have tried to save him, hoisted him on his back and carried him away. Instead I ran.

  The rest is quickly told. I bolted into the nearest alleyway, hoping the darkness would swallow me up. I had no idea of how many, if any, bullets were left in the Schmeisser, or if I could have used it even had I been trapped. My only goal was the harbour.

  I was too late. By the time I emerged on to the seafront, sixty yards or so from the pier, the masked men were already tumbling into their boat. They had shoved off, and were twenty or thirty feet out, by the time I made the pier. I called to them, loud enough to be heard over the engine but not so loud I might be heard from the village. Whether they heard or not, they did not turn back.

  I heard a flat crack, a sharp whine. When I looked back the village was a hellish sight of shooting flames and twisting shadows. At the opening of the main alleyway stood a man with his legs apart and braced, a pistol – the Luger, I believed – pointed at me. His upper body jerked, and a split second later came a puff of white and another crack. A moment later the man was joined by two other men, who paused to assess the situation. Then all three came on, slow but sure.

  It was swim or be shot. I threw down the machine gun and tore off my boots and turned to the edge of the pier, preparing to dive. That was when I saw the boat.

  You will know, of course, that I escaped. By the time they came to the end of the pier I was far enough out into the lough for the pistol to be severely reduced in its effectiveness. They fired, but I was an impossible target as the boat rose and fell on the choppy swell. Soon I was caught by the current and dragged away, and lost in the darkness.

  It was shortly before dawn the following morning when I beached to the north on the Donegal shore. I was exhausted by then, and sickened, and gave myself up as a German sailor, asking to be arrested and considered a prisoner of war. I sat in the cell of a police station for two days, every minute expecting to be dragged out and hanged by a mob, but eventually I was handed over to a detachment of Irish Army soldiers, who delivered me to an internment camp. I stayed there for two months before being moved on to another camp. I was never questioned about the massacre on Delphi. No one ever asked what I knew about Richter and his raiding party and the murder of those children. It seemed impossible to me that the authorities would not connect me with those events, but as the months went by I began to realize that the authorities – or those in command of the camps, at least – knew nothing of the atrocity.

  You will assume that I wondered why, but perhaps you can understand why I did not. At the risk of being accused of washing my hands of the incident, it was something I had been dragged into, and had no way of influencing. What I understood was that my life was over, or my life as I had once known it. I would be reborn or go mad, for no one who witnessed what I saw could attempt to splice his actions to any future existence, unless he was insane to begin with; and if he wasn’t insane, the attempt would surely drive him mad. When I eventually heard, almost a year after it happened, that my wife and children had died in an Allied bombing raid in 1944, there was grief, certainly, a profound sense of loss that I have never fully overcome; but as time passed there was relief too, because by then I had long been aware that I could never return home, could never again look my own children in the eye, never again allow them to embrace me or kiss these lips.

  Perhaps I will see them again soon. Perhaps by then I will have been cleansed. Believe me when I tell you that I would have taken my own life many years ago if it did not seem too easy, too disrespectful to those young souls lost that night.

  Sometimes I dream of the Tommy, and see him suffer again. In the dreams he is faceless, not from his wounds but because he has become a blank avatar for the task God, or the gods, or a pitiless universe, sets every man, woman and child who has ever lived or ever will: the decision that must be borne, to kill or die.

  Muss es sein? Beethoven wrote. Es muss sein.

  In the dreams the massacre boils down to a contest of will between Richter and the Englishman, one representing death, the other life; and both prevail.

  This is the testimony of Gerard Smyth, formerly Gerhard Uxkull,
and I swear that it is true.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The island of Delphi had a permanent population of just three hundred souls, its main sources of income tourism and fishing. Most of the islanders lived in the village, with tiny hamlets of four and five houses dotted elsewhere on the island, some of them now deserted or converted to holiday-home enclaves.

  So said the Visitor’s Guide to Delphi, a fold-out pamphlet of the kind I’d hacked together copy for on more occasions than I cared to remember. It had a map on the reverse with cartoon illustrations of the various tourist attractions. There was no mention of Sebastian Devereaux, thriller writer and fabled recluse. Neither, unsurprisingly, was there any reference to a Nazi war crime. None of the cartoon illustrations hinted at a secret cemetery or a place of private pilgrimage deep in the woods.

  I checked my phone for the twentieth time, established that it had a signal, and decided that if I sat at that table any longer I’d turn into a coffee bean. Besides, I had credentials to burnish, as Sebastian Devereaux’s biographer, and a legitimate excuse to go poking around in the island’s quiet corners. So I packed up my laptop, slung my bag over my shoulder and got going.

  I angled up through the village following the wooden signposts, out along a grassy track and across a rough pasture towards the forest. It was easy going until I entered the trees, and the path became a stiff incline. By the time it intersected with the trail winding up from the shoreline, I was maybe fifty metres above sea level and blowing hard. No breeze now. Here and there was a beech or alder, a clump of holly, but it was mostly pine, the trunks soaring overhead in a conspiracy to blot out the sky. The light had thickened faintly green, as if I was drifting along undersea, all sound deadened bar the soft crunch of the tinder-dry brown needles that lay carpet thick on the track. Whenever I stopped for a breather the midges swarmed.

  The entrance to the sanctuary was marked by tall stone columns either side of the path, mossy on their lower halves and stained on the upper with the streaky yellow-white of guano. There was a double gate between the columns, a vertically barred rusting white affair that gave easily at a push, but no fence or wall either side. Soon the quiet grew livelier. Rustlings in the undergrowth, some skrees and skwaus from further up the hill. A trombone honk that was answered in kind. A fierce chittering from the far side of a dry stream bed gave me a start, and then five or six birds, partridge-like, went waddling Indian-file across the path at a fair old clip.

  There came a dull boom that sent the partridge-like birds skittering away and then, a moment later, a spattering so light it hissed. A summer thunderstorm, I guessed, but when I craned my neck the sky was as clear as it had been all morning. I slogged on, flapping in vain at the midges, until I came to another fork atop a gentle rise. Here the sanctuary trail crested and meandered away and down to the left, following the contours of the slope. Another path led upwards, curving out of sight beyond the jagged roots of an ancient pine torn up long ago. A sign in English, Irish, German and French announced that this path was Private Property and that trespassers would be prosecuted. To reinforce the threat, or perhaps to protest it, someone had treated the sign to a shotgun blast, the tiny holes puckered and rusting.

  Twenty yards further on a heavy wooden gate between two solid stone pillars blocked the way, five-barred again but this time horizontally, with another spar running diagonally down across the bars. Beyond the gate was a shallow incline that broadened out into a tiny valley, the far wall of which erupted almost vertically. Steep steps, steep as those of an Aztec pyramid and numbering well over a hundred, had been cut out of the rock, or had been laid in. As an engineering project it was as architecturally impressive and pointless as any Victorian folly, disused and forlorn, littered with leaves and needles and twigs. Beyond the last step hunched one last little peak of grey rock and then there was nothing but clear blue sky.

  I sat myself down on a flat stone and sipped on a bottle of water and acknowledged that the prudent thing to do was to keep going along the sanctuary path and look to bump into some of the staff and introduce myself, Tom Noone, a freelance journalist researching the life of Sebastian Devereaux. Smile and shake hands and then return to the village and the hotel room and Kee, the justification for further snooping established and, hopefully, humming along the island’s grapevine.

  Except here I already was, and in exactly the kind of place I’d want to sniff around. If proof of Gerard Smyth’s story was to be found – if it was to be found – then it wouldn’t be anywhere near the village or the harbour, or lying offshore and fathoms deep in a rusting submarine. The islanders might have gone to great lengths over the years to keep the massacre buried, but I found it hard to believe that such a small community wouldn’t have marked the death of so many young children for themselves. A memorial, a Celtic cross, say, or even a small cemetery, a long way off the beaten path taken by all the hikers and diggers and twitchers. A private and sacred place forbidden to outsiders, with its Private Property sign pocked by a shotgun blast to further dissuade the casually curious tourist.

  I cut off the track and worked my way up the hill, east away from the Private Property sign, before cutting back north. Soon I was scrambling on hands and knees around vertical outcrops and sheer rock faces, the weight of the laptop in the shoulder bag not helping. Dirty, hot and sweating, I finally emerged on to a knife-blade ridge that curved around back towards the top of the steps. The breeze was refreshing but the stony path looked like it had been designed by goats with ambitions to join a circus high-wire troupe, and I felt suddenly exposed, acutely aware that I would be sky-lit from below. When the path finally opened out on to a crude table of rock I was tempted to sink down to kiss the grey stone. Instead I made my way across to a wooden bench that had been lashed together from salt-bleached driftwood and sat to get my breath back.

  The island fell away on three sides, a fuzzy carpet of deep green tented on a crooked central ridge, the forest sweeping down on both sides all the way to the sea. Far below on the western flank, tucked into the curving embrace of the humped headland, the little cubes of the village were so many white diamonds fringing a turquoise mantilla. The sun was a-tremble directly overhead. I could almost hear the crackle of twigs shrivelling up dry. Even the midges had surrendered to the deathly heat. The breeze too had died away, leaving the air thick and druggy with sleep.

  But it was the view behind that proved more interesting. What I had thought was solid rock was two vast boulders, roughly thirty feet high, the right collapsed in on its twin at close to a sixty-degree angle to create a narrow cleft. Perhaps they had once been a single massive eruption, split aeons ago by a lightning strike, but maybe that notion was suggested by the sign nailed to the rock on the right-hand side. An old metal black tin plate of a white skull and crossbones with a pair of lightning flashes either side of the head. As was the case with the sanctuary sign further down, and for all I knew every sign on the island beyond the village limits, it had received a shotgun blast, its leering grin punctured with hundreds of tiny rusting holes. In the circumstances, the Achtung! above the skull and the Verboten! below the crossbones seemed superfluous.

  The cleft beckoned, dark and cool, and I had come too far to be put off by a sign that was more than half a century old, but that wasn’t what made me hesitate. The image, the words, seemed to undermine Gerard Smyth’s story. Would a people that had suffered a massacre of their children at the hands of German soldiers really have employed such a sign anywhere on the island? I couldn’t imagine them using it ironically.

  Time heals, of course, even if it can’t cure. Memories fade, generations come through, and World War II was as long buried on Delphi as it was everywhere else, an event as remote in time, as half-glimpsed in the lengthening shadows, as the Battle of Clontarf or the Flight of the Earls. You make your peace with history or you fight a pointless rearguard action, a losing battle, forever.

  But somebody, at some point in the past, had had a good reason to tack that sk
ull and crossbones sign to the stone, and no one had had a good enough reason to take it down since.

  I ducked into the cleft in the rock. Not quite holding my breath but half-convinced, as I always am, that a structure that had stood for maybe half a million years would suddenly collapse. Once inside it grew cool, a faint breeze filtering through the gap at the far end, and it took a moment or two for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. The walls were coarse to the touch but the floor was smooth, the rock coming together a couple of feet overhead. The passageway was about forty feet in length and narrowed sharply near the end, which made my lungs constrict. When I emerged into the sunlight, dazzled, I stood for a moment and breathed in deeply, soaking up the heat. It was just as well I did. When my eyes readjusted I was standing about three feet from the edge of a precipice. Now I understood the warning sign on the other side of the passage. There was no barrier. A stride or so more and I’d have pitched headfirst off the cliff, gone windmilling down into the valley below.

  The valley was nowhere near as impressive as the view out across the island – it lacked the sheer scale of the raw beauty on the other side of the cleft – but it was easy to see why someone might want to claim it as private property. It was a broad-bottomed bowl, its wide floor and the gentle incline of its lower slopes a patchwork, almost a chessboard, of low hedge, terrace and manicured garden, with vivid splashes of yellow, red and violet blazing either side of a wide and arrow-straight path that bisected the floor from directly below where we stood to the foot of the steps that rose towards what looked like a Georgian mansion in russet brick set foursquare at the head of the valley.

  The path down to the valley veered out around an abutting shoulder of rock, then cut back sharply behind the cliff. When I took a step forward to peer down from the precipice there was a man sprawled on his back, basking, on a wide flat rock maybe twenty yards directly below. Beside him, within easy reach, lay a shotgun broken open. A pair of binoculars on his chest.