“They took Avgustos, the butcher’s son, just a week ago. His mother has lost her mind with grief.”
The boy from the café arrived with coffee as the captain said, “Sometimes they use chloroform to knock the ones they take unconscious. They break into pharmacies to get it. If the abducted ones then refuse to take part or try to escape,” he said, “they’re tortured or even killed.”
His face swam and blurred before me. The next thing I felt was water splashed on my own face as I was lying on the ground. For a moment I didn’t know where I was or why I’d fallen. But seeing Yannoula bending over me made it all come back. Theo and the captain helped me up and got me into a chair. When I thought of what they might do to Stelios, I felt sick and leaned forward, my head in my hands.
“I mean this kindly,” the captain said, “but maybe your friend, he just ran off with a woman. It would be better for him than what we are thinking.” He had a sly grin.
“That’s certainly not true,” Yannoula said. “And not a helpful thing to say.”
“No, no, you are right, of course,” he said, his grin fading. “There have been others taken. We search for all of them. Don’t worry. We’ll find him.” He gave me another of his smiles, a token of reassurance, I thought, but I had the strong sense that in fact he saw little chance of finding Stelios.
Yannoula told him about the fisherman who’d criticized Stelios for not taking part in the struggle. “Oh, them,” the captain said. “I know who you mean. We’ll see about them.”
But when he stopped by the boardinghouse later that day to question Takis himself, the captain told us those fishermen weren’t around anymore. And no one had heard of the daughter who’d supposedly been attacked.
“She doesn’t exist,” the captain said. “People here, they make up stories.”
Who was making up what? How were we to know?
Takis had little to add to what he’d told me. He hadn’t heard any kind of struggle, but the noisy engine of the truck had been running all the while. And it backfired again when the truck drove off.
Theo went to the police station daily for the next couple of weeks, but there was no new information. The captain said that either Stelios had gone off to join the guerrillas or he had been forcibly taken by them. The first possibility was not remotely likely, we said, so it had to be the second. Well, the captain told Theo, there’d probably be a breakthrough at any minute. The government militia was more involved on the mainland, where there was a great deal of active fighting, not just the sporadic sniping and abductions as on Crete. So they tended to leave these matters to local police. They’d begun riding the country buses around the island after several were stopped by guerrillas who robbed the passengers and, in some cases, took hostages.
Yannoula stayed in her room and paced. I could hear her weeping at night and I supposed she could hear me. Without Stelios, there were no more performances so we had nothing to interrupt our despair. It hollowed me out until nothing remained but this vast aching. Wandering the streets in the day, I peered at everyone I passed, going into shops and out again, reading every face as if I might find in it some clue, some hope. In the harbor, the fishermen we’d talked to that night were indeed gone. When I asked questions of those still there, they were evasive or looked the other way.
I went through Stelios’s things in his room, as if something there might help me understand what had happened. Nothing did, but just sitting on the edge of his bed made me feel closer to him. I came across his copy of The Iliad and thumbed through the pages, looking at some of the things he’d saved: the gull feather he’d stroked my hand with the day Takis disappeared, a red ribbon that had been won as third place in an unnamed athletic event, a snapshot of his parents in front of the Zappeion building in the National Gardens, some dried grasses from who knows where. I pressed my nose into the pages, inhaling their dry and dusty scent. Looking at a page with a turned-down corner and a penciled checkmark, I read this:
Clanless, lawless, homeless is
he who is in love with civil war,
that brutal, ferocious thing.
I was sure Stelios was out there somewhere with the lawless and the homeless. But holding his copy of The Iliad made me feel closer to him. He’d probably want me to continue with my reading, so that was what I would do, I thought as I pocketed the book. The next step was to find him and I didn’t know how we would do that. But we had to. I told Yannoula and Takis this the next morning in the lobby.
“Let’s go find the banditos,” Takis said. “I’ll spear them like fish, like in The Iliad!”
“We’re not in a book, Takis,” Yannoula said.
“Actually,” I said, “I’ve got a plan.”
It wasn’t a very good one, but just waiting for news would most likely make us crazy. We couldn’t stay in the boardinghouse forever. Theo had been helping us with the rent even though we were no longer making money for him at the café. He couldn’t be expected to do this much longer.
Yannoula was sitting on the sofa, her eyes swollen, while Takis walked around the room so charged with energy he seemed ready to explode. Because he was the only witness to what had happened, he’d become the center of attention.
“We have to learn to perform without Stelios,” I said. “And we have to do it outside Heraklion so we can look for him.”
We all knew the plays except for some of the new bits Stelios had added. So it was a matter of reassigning parts and rehearsing for a few days. With my hoarse old-lady voice, I could take some of the men’s roles, but Takis would have to do the others. And Yannoula could do the few women in addition to singing the opening. Manipulating the puppets on their poles behind the screen was not all that difficult; I’d done it with Stelios and I could teach Takis. When we were ready, we’d take local buses to towns and villages in the interior and perform for them. The bus terminal was nearby and although the buses were ramshackle, they were still running, and police were on board to protect the passengers.
“We can ask around about him as we take buses from place to place. That’s the point of leaving Heraklion. Someone will have seen him or heard of him; I’m sure of it.”
Yannoula and Takis just sat there saying nothing. I hadn’t expected immediate agreement, but neither had I expected silence.
“If either of you has a different plan,” I said, “now’s the time for it.”
They both spoke at once, Yannoula saying that it was too dangerous outside Heraklion (she was right) and Takis saying he wouldn’t be any good as a puppeteer (he was wrong).
“I keep wondering if we should go back to Athens,” Yannoula said. “At least we have a place to live there. But I don’t want to leave Stelios here, wherever he is.”
“We can’t go without him,” I said.
“But what chance is there of finding him or freeing him? We’ll end up abducted ourselves. You can’t be serious, Aliki.”
Takis perked up. “I could be the bait. If they abducted me, I could work from within. I could find him.”
“No, no,” I said, “they don’t take women and children; at least, we haven’t heard of any. If we learn anything useful, there are the police on the buses. We can perform from village to village and ask questions as we go. No one will suspect anything of two women and a boy with puppets.”
“Let’s go!” Takis said.
“It’s naïve,” Yannoula said, “and ridiculous and dangerous.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s all of those. And probably more. So let’s start working out the plays and packing.”
“Now!” Takis shouted.
“I’m not going,” Yannoula said. “And the two of you can’t go by yourselves. You know that.” She sighed and stood up. “I think I need to go upstairs and lie down.”
I had to admit that she was probably right, at least about Takis and me traveling alone. We’d stick out all on our own
with no adult. Guerrillas might not be interested, but if we made money from performances, others would be. As we were setting up the screen and puppets for our first rehearsal, I said that we’d have to persuade Yannoula.
“We could wait ’til she’s asleep,” Takis said, “then tie her hands behind her back and put a bag over her head.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. He was serious. “Of course,” I said, “no one would ever notice a bound woman, her head in a bag, sitting beside us on the bus.”
“Well, we could take the bag off once the bus was out of town.”
“Oh, stop.”
For the next week we rehearsed most of the day most days. Takis was a reluctant puppeteer at first, but I told him what Stelios had once told me, that it was a little bit like being God because you could make the characters do whatever you wanted so long as it was believable to the audience. Then Takis started to have fun with it, taking on the Karagiozis role and that of the sultan. He made up the lines as he went but loosely followed the set plot in general. As he danced the puppets along on their poles behind the screen, he was discovering the other thing Stelios had taught me: shadow puppetry was a lot of fun. When we took breaks, Takis talked excitedly about finding the banditos who’d abducted Stelios, but I knew it was the prospect of the heroic pursuit that excited Takis, not the finding of Stelios himself.
Yannoula watched from the top of the stairs. “You’re not fooling me, Aliki,” she said. “I know what you’re up to.”
Theo interrupted us one afternoon, storming into the lobby. “What is this craziness I hear from Yannoula? What do you think, Karagiozis will protect you out there?”
Takis and I tried to explain what we wanted to do, but Theo wouldn’t hear of it, at least not on our own and not on public buses. He didn’t seem to mind the thought of us leaving Heraklion in general, as the audience for Karagiozis at the café had dwindled. It occurred to me that maybe our problems, first with Takis and now Stelios, had become too much for him. He’d stopped his daily visits to the police station, describing the captain as “useless.” Theo wanted nothing more to do with police. We’d come to Crete because of him, but there was probably not much more he could do for us. Except for one last thing.
“You can’t travel the way you want, Aliki. It’s too dangerous. But look, I have an idea.” There was a friend of his, a truck driver named Thanasis, who drove all over the eastern half of the island, buying and selling fruit and vegetables from place to place. He’d had to stop during the occupation after his wife died in the invasion of the island, but he’d started up again. Maybe he would take us with him. He was always complaining how lonely it was on the road.
“Thanasis will be glad of the company. And he’s a man, a big man. It will be safer for you. I’ll talk to him.”
Takis and I were waiting in front of the boardinghouse when Thanasis stepped out of his truck the next morning. He was the biggest man I’d ever seen. Not fat, just tall and broad. He could have picked us up and juggled us, if he’d had a mind to. Takis looked up at him in awe.
“You’re a tree!” he said.
From behind a graying and shaggy beard, Thanasis said, “And you’re a twig.” Then he noticed me. “Ah, and who’s this sweet plum?”
“My daughter,” Yannoula said behind me. I hadn’t realized she was there. And there was certainly no mother-daughter resemblance. “And as far as you’re concerned,” she said to Thanasis, “she might as well be a bitter lemon. But enough of the flora and the fauna.”
“Hmm, yes, now I see the resemblance.” He winked at me. “May you grow as beautiful as your mother.” To Yannoula he said, “You’ll, of course, sit up front with me. We’ll keep each other company.”
Yannoula didn’t say anything at first but looked him over, head to toe and back. His graying hair and beard framed the deeply creased face of an older man but one who seemed to carry his years lightly. Over the sleeve of his right arm was the narrow black band of mourning. He was taking Yannoula into full consideration too.
“We’ll keep our eyes on the road,” she said at last.
We could get out in any village or town he passed through and stay there until he returned that way, usually a day or two later. In villages, Thanasis bought produce cheaply from farmers—now in April, lettuces and green onions, leeks, beets, spinach and all the citrus from the past winter—then sold it in towns at slightly higher prices. We could eat what we wanted of it, but could we just give him a few coins now and then to help cover fuel, still so expensive since the end of the war? We could, I said, if people had anything to pay us for Karagiozis.
That evening Yannoula came down the stairs to the lobby, saying, “Well now, my cabbages, I think we should have a sip of something to start our new venture.” Clearly she was in a thoroughly revised frame of mind. Sitting down on the old sofa, she brought out a flask from her purse, took the cap off and said, “Respect for elders first.” After she’d drunk deeply, she cleared her throat and then passed the flask to Takis.
“What is it?” he said.
“Just try it.”
He took a cautious sip, then swallowed and coughed violently. “It’s poison!”
“Well, yes. But this one’s called brandy.” She passed it to me. It burned down into my belly. I liked its sweetness but not its bite, remembering the way the stars swayed after I’d had wine that night in Piraeus.
“Here’s to you, Aliki,” Yannoula said. “When you get an idea, you certainly stick to it.”
Roads outside Heraklion were mostly deep ditches and ruts cut by the German tanks and trucks when they’d all retreated to the western part of the island. Takis and I grasped each other, trying to remain upright as we lurched along. Many of the villages we passed had been burned, but we didn’t know what destruction had been done by the Germans and what by guerrillas fighting the government militia or police. Other villages looked untouched, smoke rising from chimneys, sheep grazing on a hillside. Thanasis stopped at these, buying whatever was for sale.
Waiting for him beside his truck in one of the villages, Yannoula said, “Such a lovely man, if you don’t mind the smell of garlic.”
He sold his first big load of produce in the seaside town of Agios Nikolaos. It was a sleepy little port known mostly for its prison camp, Thanasis said, where captured guerrillas were interrogated and sometimes sentenced to other camps or prisons on remote islands. We saw none of this in the central market area beside the sparkling sea where townspeople bartered with merchants and farmers. I would see the town differently the next time I passed through.
Farther on at Ierapetra, a larger seaside town on the south coast, we decided to stay over and give performances. Thanasis said the town had been attacked by more than a hundred guerrillas a few weeks earlier. They’d raided warehouses for sacks of flour, sugar, rice and pasta and forced local residents to give them blankets and clothing. Then they’d disappeared back into the mountains. As a result, the town was now heavily patrolled by the militia. Soldiers checked our identities on the outskirts and we saw them standing guard in front of the bank and the city hall.
“You’ll be safe,” Thanasis said, unloading his oranges and lettuces in the main street, “unless the locals eat you.”
“They do that?” Takis asked, eyes wide.
“It’s just that they’re fierce around here. And don’t take much to strangers.”
As we went around town tacking up posters, we could feel everyone watching us. In cafés or shops, people asked who we were really. No matter what we answered, they’d ask why we were really there. Takis went into a taverna and described Stelios to several customers on the off chance that he might have been with the guerrillas who’d invaded the town. The customers didn’t respond.
“They stared at me and said nothing,” Takis said of the men in the taverna. “One man shrugged his shoulders then turned and stared at the wall. The wall. As if
even that was better than talking to me.”
Thanasis vouched for us, telling his customers that we were just traveling players who’d come with him. But in spite of this, neither of the two local cafés would let us set up there. So the first evening, we performed Karagiozis the Baker on the half-moon beach that curved around the bay in front of the town. Our audience was small, a few children and their parents who had to sit on piles of fishing nets or overturned boats. This was our first show without Stelios and we were nervous, skidding in the soft sand and muffing our lines. Takis, however, carried the show, handling multiple puppets on poles, changing his voice for each, laughing maniacally as Karagiozis, sneering as the sultan. He seemed to be enjoying himself so much that it was difficult to believe this was the same boy who thought trees and fish talked to him. Even when the balmy April wind gusted off the water and blew out our candles and kerosene lamps, erasing the shadows on the screen, Takis incorporated it into the play until we could get them relit.
KARAGIOZIS: All is black. I’ve gone blind. You put a curse on me!
SULTAN: The sun is behind a cloud, you fool. Here it is back again.
Ierapetra had no hotel or boardinghouse, but at the far end of the beach was a smaller version of the Venetian fortress of Heraklion. Facing the sea, its crumbling stone walls would protect us from the sea wind. So there we carried our things when the performance was over and built a small campfire of driftwood to take off the night chill. Yannoula and I bedded down in what had been the fortress courtyard while Takis wandered off to hunt for more driftwood.
“I can’t live like this,” Yannoula said. “Oof, I’ll look like death in the morning. When’s Thanasis coming back?”
“Day after tomorrow,” I said.
“I’ll be dead by then. Too bad. Such a nice man, and a widower too.”
He’d told her that his wife had died in the invasion of Crete, one of the many townspeople who attacked the German parachutists as they landed. She and other neighborhood women had rushed out with only kitchen knives as weapons and had been shot. Thanasis was on the road at the time and didn’t find out until later. It had been almost four years, but he was still stunned, still wearing the black armband.
My Last Lament Page 18