—Yes, it gets dark quickly here. Don’t forget how far south you’ve come, Grandmother. In fact, this is the southernmost point of the Reich, and here, at thirty-five latitude, the twilight is quick and insubstantial. None of your soulful, copper-colored, everlasting sunsets in the bogs and woods of Schlesing that at first I was so desperately homesick for. How I missed our merry little hunter’s lodge!
—Burned?
—And the little bridge? No, don’t tell me ... I don’t want to know...
—But why did they have to bomb them? Well, what does it matter ... we’ll rebuild them...
—Of course I do. How could I not believe it? But enough! Come, Grandmother, let’s start out. Everything is ready. It’s a good, gentle path, a little winding, to be sure, but with an easy grade. I checked it again this morning, trying to see it through your eyes and judge it by your capacity. I even took a shovel to fill in the rough parts, and pulled out some weeds, and made three special steps, and chose our rest stops. An hour’s walk, Grandmother, and we’ll be at the top, and there’s a bench up there in an old Turkish outpost that you can sit on pretty comfortably—it’s protected from the winds if there are any, but there won’t be—and look out at the sunset ... See, I’ve even got a binoculars for you in this knapsack. You yourself said how clear the air is, the view on a day like this is too good to miss. Just imagine, Grandmother, if it wasn’t you but old Opapa Sauchon who had the good fortune to be here—don’t you think he’d jump to his feet, all eighty-three years of him, and be up that hill in no time? Do you think he’d miss a chance for a panoramic and strategic view of the place where our Europe was born? Think of it that way, Grandmother. Tell yourself it’s for Grandfather and try being his eyes...
—Thank you. Thank you, most wonderful Grandmother...
—Yes, Europa. The young maiden. Together with Zeus...
—Easy does it. Yes, I know. I’ve even tied a rope around my waist and made a loop you can easily hold onto to make sure you don’t slip. Oh, someone will yet write about you—if, that is, anyone will want to write about us at all—and tell how, at the age of seventy-four, Frau Andrea Sauchon, the widow of the hero of the Battle of the Baltic, reached the southernmost point of the Thousand-Year Reich—which won’t last a thousand years but may hold out a thousand days, although I’m afraid that each day will be worse than the one before it—and skipped right up a hill by the airport to look down on the Gulf of Heraklion...
—Sunglasses? Of course.
—I have a canteen.
—Yes. It’s loaded.
—You won’t be needing it.
—All right, we’ll take this coat. But let me carry it.
—No, there’s nothing crazy about it, you’ll see...
—Things have gotten much worse this past month. Everyone listens to the BBC. It’s reached the point that you sometimes think that the very earth is broadcasting in English under your feet. Not that the British are in any hurry to get here. Why should they be? If they wait long enough, we’ll leave by ourselves...
—Just to shed more blood, Grandmother? What for? There’s been enough bloodshed here already. Three years ago seven thousand German soldiers lost their lives on this island, and now you want more? No...
—But defend it how, Grandmother? A man sitting naked on his front porch couldn’t be more of a sitting duck than we are. Every little fishing boat that you see down there in the harbor is spying for the enemy. Every little boy playing ball near our headquarters is a secret agent...
—Exactly.
—Every boat ... never mind...
—That little one down there too. Why not? Anything is possible...
—It could be. The local inhabitants are trying to give themselves a clean bill of health to make up for their three years of cozying up to us. Before we’ve made a move, the English already know about it on Cyprus. Which is why, Grandmother, as you can see down there, no, over there...
—Exactly. They’re trundling your little plane off the runway and covering it with branches. Not that it will do any good, because the fishing boats are already signaling each other, and in an hour from now all of Cyprus will know that someone important has arrived in Crete, although the description of her will cause great confusion, ha ha ... What can be the military purpose of such a grandmother? They’ll have to call a staff meeting of all their brigadiers to decide what countersteps to take...
—No, I’m not exaggerating. I still can’t get over their bringing you here. A whole lot of people risked their lives to fly you over the flaming Reich. It’s one more proof of the legend of Opapa, which burns more brightly than ever as night falls. Who knows, Grandmother, maybe someone on the general staff thought that if you were flown over the front you might remember some old battle plan of Opapa Sauchon’s, some secret stratagem he worked out thirty years ago that might stem the tide of the rout we’re beginning to see all around us...
—No, it’s not a name that rings a bell with people my age. But as soon as Schmelling heard you were coming, why, he was so tickled pink that he couldn’t stop screaming at me for never telling him...
—Not a word.
—I didn’t want to. Since landing on this island I’ve even stopped dropping hints about the grand estate that may be mine one day...
—I’m not complaining, Grandmother. You know perfectly well...
—I simply didn’t want to arouse any military expectations that could only end in disappointment or embarrassment since the day I left the storm troopers and was posted to this garrison ... and anyway ... but look over there, no, more to the right, that’s it, Grandmother, look! That’s the sea over there on the horizon.
—Come stand where I am.
—You can lean on me.
—That’s it ... over there ... that bit of horizon down there, which will soon light up like a red, glowing heart. Well, then, it was out of that very heart, Grandmother, that we came swooping down three years ago behind the sun, pushing its rays in front of us to blind the British, who were just sitting down to high tea. Yes, through that pinkish aperture slipped fifty airplanes all at once that have since become a legend, making the Australian lookout who was sitting here waiting for the sunset wipe the lenses of his binoculars and wonder why they weren’t getting any cleaner, because suddenly he saw a whole lot of bright little dots. Who but a dedicated suicide pilot could have thought that such a fantastic operation was possible?
—No, Grandmother, we didn’t think so either—that is, the handful of us who could or wanted to think at all. I’m not talking about that pack of young wolves that has been convinced since ‘36 that the whole universe is a playground in which it can kick the globe around like a football. If you had parachuted them into Calcutta to take the English high command there, they would have done it as blithely as they charged into Poland and Holland. But we, I mean the handful of us who still could and wanted to think a bit, sat huddled under our helmets, looking down in horror at the smooth water racing beneath us while asking ourselves what demonic power could be taking us to this strange, distant island if not the wish to see the best of us slaughtered on a self-propelled altar of grandeur and thus scare the wits not only out of the world but out of Germany too. Suddenly, Grandmother, I began to shake with sheer sorrow for my life that was about to be shot right out of the sky. I thought, yes, Grandmother, I thought of Uncle Egon and even envied him for having managed to be dead already...
—Yes, I did think of him, Grandmother, and it so upset me to imagine the fresh sorrow awaiting you that the stretcher strapped to my body began to twitch, and our battalion commander, Oberst Thomas Stanzler, a most wonderful and much looked-up-to man who was sitting across from me with his helmet in his hand, a ray of sunlight from a porthole falling on his bald head, smiled a bit because he must have seen the vibrations, laid a pitying hand on me, and said, “You, Private Bruner,” he said, “look like some strange kind of bird, like Icarus who tried flying over Crete. But don’t forget, Bruner, that your w
ings are made of steel and won’t melt in the sun like his...” And then, Grandmother, I thought of that story, and my eyes filled with tears of gratitude to our knowledgeable battalion commander, who was soon to be mortally wounded, for having taken the trouble to remind me of the myth of Daedalus and his son, which made me think of that old tutor you once brought me...
—Koch ... right you are, Grandmother, Gustav Koch ... that old classicist with his stories of Greece and Rome...
—Exactly. Exactly.
—Of course I remember him.
—No, I was not too young to understand. He was the first to call for casting the rusty anchor of German history back into that sea you see down there, because there, he used to say, was the warm, true, blue womb of the German genius. Be more careful, Egon, he would shout at me when I mixed up all those mythical characters, those are your own ancestors, our poor Europe was born from them, if only the Teutonic tribes had pressed on to Greece fifteen hundred years ago instead of stopping in Rome, damn its soul!...
—Don’t you remember how he sometimes used to swear?
—You mean he taught Uncle Egon too? How fantastic...
—True. And so all at once, Grandmother, in that growling, pitching airplane that was losing altitude now, all bundled up with my parachute and my knapsack and my stretcher and my rifle, with my helmet down over my ears, and my glasses, which I was too stupid to stick deep in some pocket, tied to a shoelace around my neck, I suddenly lost all fear and had an actual attack of ecstasy, as if savoring the real taste of war for the first time, Grandmother, and I actually became a physical link in old Koch’s rusty anchor chain that had been flung over the Alps with such marvelous force onto the heads of our mythical ancestors, stirring the moss of black forests and the fumes of Hunnish swamps into those warm waves until the Teutonic dreams haunting us found their meaning in the sculptured white marble of Hellas ... And so, when the red light went on, and the bell rang, and the dispatching sergeant began to bark, and the whole pack of wolves jumped to its feet with a great shout and put a bullet in the barrels of its schmeissers and disappeared one by one through the hatch with its legs out, I shouted as loud as I could too, Grandmother, I shouted for old Gustav Koch, that grade school classicist, and I went whooshing out into the space that you’re looking at right now...
—Exactly.
—Right. From up there to down there...
—In a second. Just be careful, because this step is a little high for you. Here, give me your hand...
—By that olive tree, because that’s our first station. Now look carefully at what you see and think of me, jumping with a great shout from the churning belly of that plane and carried off by my own private wind, which was waiting as though just for me, first to wildly snatch away my glasses and then to pull a white chute out of me while tugging at the stretcher that was now sticking straight out like the big, single wing of a strange bird. In no time I was whisked over that very coastline that you see there, floating among my comrades’ cries of pain and surprise, the howls of the wolf pack pinned down by enemy fire between the sky and the earth, and flung sideways over that hill, toward those white houses scattered on the hillsides, those over there, Grandmother, which look like the sugar cubes that Opapa liked to suck in bed at night, and right smack into the branches of an olive tree surrounded by goats that greeted me with an indifferent silence...
—There ... over there, Grandmother ... those black dots out there...
—Exactly. That same flock of goats, so help me, has been standing there for the last three years. Day and night, summer and winter, it keeps reduplicating itself from the bushes...
—Yes, Grandmother, many men were shot dead in the air, thus saving their souls the return trip to heaven ... most of my company, Grandmother, was wiped out in less than two minutes...
—You’d be surprised, Grandmother, what two beastly Australians with one machine gun can do. And where do you think they were, Grandmother? Come on, guess!
—Nevertheless, take a look around you and guess ... after all, you’re the widow of a famous fighting man...
—Nevertheless, try to guess...
—Wrong, Grandmother. The answer is: right where you’re standing this minute! Here, their position was right by this rock. If we were to dig a little in the ground, we’d still find three-year-old cartridges. And now you see why I insisted on taking you up here, so that you could understand the whole story, right from the beginning.
—But why should they have told you about losses? It would only have spoiled your good mood and made the Austrian Genius look bad. Just remember, though, Grandmother, that a whole lot of men were killed in the operation. Months went by before we realized the full extent of it—gliders that crashed with all their occupants, dozens of men drowned at sea, parachutes that never opened, or that caught fire, or that got tangled up with each other. It was a miracle that I survived, and maybe I should thank the stretcher, Grandmother, which carried me far away from the rest of them, back behind that hill over there. In fact, if I hadn’t wound up with my parachute straps caught in the branches of that olive tree, bruised all over, half-unconscious, and worst of all, without my glasses, I too, Grandmother, would probably have gone running off to look for some Englishman or Australian to put a bullet in me. But instead I stayed trapped in that thicket of branches, looking out at a soft, round world of bearded black goats whose shepherd had taken to his heels. They lifted their heads to look at me too, with a quiet tinkle of their bells—and I, Grandmother, who had never seen such black goats in my life, was more afraid of them than I was of an Englishman’s bullet or some Greek’s knife, because how did I know they weren’t about to climb that tree and take a little bite out of me, eh, Grandmother?
—No, they weren’t the least bit friendly. They were just stupid animals without the slightest curiosity. Even when I managed to free myself by cutting all the straps and strings with my medic’s knife and climbed down among them, they didn’t pay me any attention. They just went on grazing as if I were some kind of stone that had fallen from the sky—which is indeed how I lay there, Grandmother, like a stone, without moving. My hand was hurting me badly, and worse yet, my vision was as blurred as it was in the fifth grade, that year that you insisted I didn’t need glasses...
—No, I didn’t lose consciousness. I was just in such a state of shock from all that quiet around me that the only conclusion I could reach, Grandmother, as desperate as it was, was that the assault had failed and everyone was already dead or taken prisoner.
—Yes, that’s what I thought, Grandmother. It was getting on toward dusk, and I felt an odd calm, quite resigned to the fact that the Führer had sent his best sons to bleed to death on this distant, rocky island simply to let Europe know that his long arm could reach the roots it grew from. And because I remembered the Ten Commandments we had been given before taking off from Athens, and especially, the sixth one, which Baron Friedrich von Heidte in person had drilled us in, Thou shalt not surrender, thy badge of honor is victory or death, I quickly bandaged my hand, spread my stretcher out between two rocks in a little fortified position I prepared, and, while waiting for someone I could challenge to a fight, an enemy who would be worthy of killing me, I lay down among the grazing goats and listened to the chirping of the crickets, which ever since then, Grandmother, for the last three years, has followed me around day and night without my being able to decide if it’s a sound that I hate or am attracted to...
—Yes. Listen. It’s as though this great cricketing were fanning out across the island, even though, oddly enough, it only makes the silence greater.
—They’re everywhere, here too, among the leaves on the branches of the trees. You can’t see them, but if you stick your head into these branches, you’ll hear them sawing away...
—Exactly...
—It never changes. Just the same monotonous thrumming that saws the silence into dry little chips. And maybe that’s what so hypnotized me, Grandmother, that I couldn’t
hear the shots and explosions coming from the airport in Heraklion, which was not exactly, as I later found out, blanketed by the deathly silence I thought it was...
—Later ... in prison, when I sat going over and over what I had done that day...
—Yes, for a while ... I’ll get to it...
—I didn’t want to distress you.
—Yes. That was one reason you didn’t hear from me...
—But ... just a minute ... look here, Grandmother, this is my story, it’s the only way I know of getting you to picture what I’ve been trying to tell you since starting up this trail—along which, Grandmother, if you’re not too tired, I’ll have to ask you to continue, so that you can see for yourself, not only the far end of the airport, which was finally captured after several days of bloody fighting by fresh forces that were landed from the sea, but the jump-off point for the private trek of Private Egon Bruner, who was temporarily cut off from history, Grandmother, in order to stumble into prehistory and into the great fan of cricket song that went on all night in deeper and deeper darkness—cut off from my olive tree too, beneath which I buried my white chute, and from the flock of goats, which I dispatched with my schmeisser to keep it from tinkling conspicuously after me ... because I had made up my mind, Grandmother, I really had, to follow the sixth commandment and not be taken prisoner if only I could find someone worthy of killing me. And so I began to head south, Grandmother ... there, take a good look at those two lovely hills over there, which the Australians, or so the Greeks told us, referred to as “Charlies,” which is a term of endearment they have for a woman’s breasts, although we Germans, having noticed at once that they were not the same size, changed their hames to “Friedrich the Great” and “Friedrich the Small.” And now just picture your Egon the Second, Grandmother, advancing nearsightedly between those two Charlies on the night of May 20, 1941, fully armed and toting a big knapsack with first-aid supplies, three days’ battle rations, and his stretcher, on which no doubt he intended to carry himself once he was wounded or killed, heading south on a moonless night amid the smell of fires burning under a sky like none I had ever seen back home, all fantastically lit up with stars whose names I didn’t know, moving warily through vineyards whose sour grapes I picked and ate, scrambling over stone fences, keeping away from the dark, shuttered huts and avoiding the roads, on which now and then I heard the sound of some speeding car, heading steadily south in my search for a hero from one of Koch’s Greek myths whom I could challenge...
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