by Leta Serafim
O’Malley finally exploded. “Listen, you feckless son-of-a-bitch, don’t you be telling me what to do! If you know what’s good for you, you’ll go back and tell those bastards you serve under, those bloody bastards in Cairo, that I’ve made contact, you hear? That Brendan O’Malley, code name Barabbas, has made contact.”
Before signing off, he asked the officer’s name; threatened to cut his balls off if he saw him in Cairo.
The Greeks nodded approvingly, even offered to help him castrate the officer should the opportunity arise, making scissors with their hands and using a host of Greek expressions, all of them vulgar.
“Tha ton evnouchisoume!” We’ll make him a eunuch.
* * *
Unlike other units O’Malley had served in, this one was casually organized without a discernible hierarchy or chain of command. He estimated around forty-five soldiers were housed in the camp, though it was hard to tell. The men came and went as they pleased, disappearing back to their villages for days at a time. They did follow a routine of sorts, keeping their weapons clean and organizing guard duty, feeding themselves and the horses twice a day, but they did so with no sense of urgency, casually even. There was no military discipline, no daily inspections or latrine duty, there being no latrine. No obedience was asked for or given.
They slept under the stars, urinated off the rocks, and defecated in the tall grass on the far side of the camp. Having gone exploring, O’Malley had found this out by accident his second day there. He’d done his best to clean his boots afterward, washed them like a man possessed. Not that it mattered. By and large, hygiene was nonexistent in the camp. No one shaved or bathed that he could see. If the Germans came calling, the stench alone would kill them. Worse than mustard gas, it was.
They didn’t know what to make of O’Malley and enjoyed teasing him. Leonidas even went so far as to lift up a lock of his hair one morning at breakfast. “You should shoot your hair dresser, my friend, your kommotiria. Execute him as a saboteur.”
O’Malley patted his head self-consciously. “ ’Twas a woman did it. Dyed my hair so I’d look Greek. Did me up proper, so she did.”
The men took to calling him ‘Samson’ after that. ‘Samson’ as in ‘Samson and Delilah,’ a man like O’Malley who’d been ruined by a woman with scissors.
A makeshift kitchen occupied the center of the camp; and supplies were stored in two locked chests there. The area was overseen by the cook, Roumelis, a wall-eyed giant with a belly that hung low over his pants. He resented O’Malley and always chafed him when he ladled up his dinner.
O’Malley nicknamed him Cyclops and did his best to stay out of his way. Food was plentiful. The stew the cook prepared was a luxury after his days starving in the cave. He had no idea where the meat and vegetables came from, whether they had been donated to the cause or the men had stolen them—looted the farms for provisions just as the Germans did.
A filthy young boy named Giorgos helped the cook and ran messages back and forth. He was a little older than Stefanos, eleven or twelve, and had a cheerful, open way about him, smiling as he peeled the potatoes or washed the pots, laughing and telling jokes. They usually involved shit and the smells attendant with it, be they his or someone else’s. He liked to play cards for money and cheated unashamedly, stuffing aces down his shirt and pulling them out, cackling with glee as he raked up the coins the others had anted up. He smoked cigarettes—which he stole, running off with whole handfuls of them—and drank wine he siphoned off from a jug. Sometimes he stole food, too, grabbing a chicken leg or a sausage from the pan and eating it while the cook shouted at him.
Once or twice, he shared his food with Stefanos, bullying him a little and making him beg for it first. He enjoyed showing off and bragged to the boy of his exploits, claiming he’d fired mortars at the Germans. Killed more than anybody.
O’Malley doubted that, but let him be.
After the precision of the British unit in Cairo, the saluting and ‘yes, sirs,’ the whole partisan operation seemed a little, well, loose to him. More like a summer camp than a military installation.
Most of the men were local, less driven by ideology than by the desire to free their country, to protect their crops and keep their livestock out of German hands. When O’Malley questioned them, they laughed and said they were kleftes, bandits like the ones who’d battled the Ottomans in the nineteenth century, living in the limeria or lairs of their ancestors. They denied political affiliations, claimed to be neither ELAS Communists nor right-wing members of EDES.
Leonidas was the only constant. Although the others came and went on a regular basis, he never left the camp. A dark bear of a man, he was stoop-shouldered and walked with a heavy, shuffling gait, favoring one leg over the other. His black hair was shaggy, his untrimmed beard as thick as fur. He reeked of cigarettes, and the front of his uniform was gray with ashes.
Judging by the way the other men deferred to him, he was the officer in charge, though he rarely gave orders or pushed himself forward. If something needed to be done, he’d nod at one of the men and it was taken care of. No fuss or saluting. No, ‘yes, sir’ or ‘no, sir’ with him. He rarely spoke, and when he did, he chose his words carefully, took his time and made sure everyone understood.
“I’ve no home to return to,” he told O’Malley one night. “The Germans took everything. Burned us out.”
Having drawn guard duty, they were sitting high up in the rocks, watching over the camp.
“Shepherding the wind,” the Greek called it.
“I watched the houses burn from the mountain,” he said. “The Germans had been looking for us, settled on the village instead. Thought that if they destroyed it, they’d deprive us of food and we’d have to surrender.”
He showed little emotion as he described the death of his parents, the people he’d grown up with. Sitting there on the ground, he might well have been made of stone.
“What’d you do?”
“What could I do?” His voice was quiet, whatever pain there’d been long since leeched away. “I fought.”
“Aye. Freedom or death, all that.”
They both laughed.
Leonidas always kept him close during maneuvers and bedded down next to him at night. O’Malley had come to believe the Greek did this to protect him, to keep him from getting murdered because of his British masters, the language that he spoke. Without Leonidas, he’d be lost in the camp, he was sure of it.
“Who were those men the first day?” he asked. “The ones all festooned with knives.”
“Another group of antartes. Different from us.”
‘Right wing’ was left unsaid. In Ireland, they called folks like that ‘blue shirts.’ O’Malley wondered what they were called here.
“What were you doing with them?”
“Nothing that concerns you,” Leonidas said in English.
Leonidas knew some English, O’Malley had discovered, though he refused to speak it with him, preferring always to speak Greek. This time had been an exception. A warning.
O’Malley went on as if he hadn’t heard, “Seems a whole lot of people pulling in different directions. What’s going to happen here after the Germans leave?”
“That group you saw the first day, the men here. We’re going to kill each other.”
* * *
He looked out at the darkness, thought of Danae and the boy. It was a clear night, the stars like a swath of gauze across the sky. It was so quiet he could hear the river coursing through the gorge, the wind in the pines. Throisma, the Greeks called it. They had a name for most everything, the Greeks, their speech staccato and precise.
A fog was drifting in and it slowly enfolded the rocks, the soldiers asleep on the ground. Made the camp look as if it were inhabited by ghosts.
O’Malley thought again of Danae, her words about the region, its proximity to hell.
He wanted to ask after her, but he wasn’t sure of her last name. All those weeks and he hadn’t thought to
ask. She’d just been Danae. Not enough, not hardly enough.
He’d noticed the area close to the ledge was warmer than the rest of the camp. The limestone provided rudimentary shelter, a windbreak as it were. He often stayed there with Stefanos, huddled down in his cloak with his arms wrapped around the boy. Occasionally, one of the Greek partisans would join him, a light-hearted fellow named Lakis. He had lived in New York for a time and had befriended O’Malley. Neither was completely fluent in the other’s tongue and it was a challenge sometimes communicating with Lakis, the two of them relying on hand gestures to make themselves understood. Almost like a game of charades.
“I met someone in Kalavryta who lived in the States,” O’Malley told him late one night. “Maybe you know her. Toula? She lives with her brother and his two children.”
“Sure. Toula Papadakis.” Lakis drew a woman’s figure with his hands, laughed in a crude way.
“That her married name?”
“No. The name she was born with. I never knew her husband.”
Danae Papadakis. O’Malley breathed a sigh of relief. Worse came to worst, he could find her if he had to. Ask where she and her family might have gone.
“Toula took to America,” Lakis said. “I didn’t. Cold people, Americans. Money’s all they care about.”
“You’re saying they’re capitalists?”
“Yes, yes. That’s what I’m saying. Capitalists.”
Slapping his knee, Lakis laughed and laughed.
As leftists, most of the men were like Lakis, not too far gone, their focus mainly on ridding Greece of the Germans. Oh, there were one or two fanatics. A dour, bespectacled school teacher named Haralambos was the worst. A thin, praying mantis of a man, he had a mouthful of crooked teeth and constantly lectured the others. Basic Marxist cant. ‘Capitalists drink the blood of the working class,’ and the like.
Him, O’Malley dubbed ‘Spittle.’
“Be careful of Haralambos,” Leonidas warned O’Malley one night. “He thinks you’re a spy.”
“Who does he think I’m spying for? The Germans?”
“No. Churchill.”
“Hell, I’m just a hapless bastard deceived by the British, caught up in a web of their lies and deceit. A fool, I might well be. But a spy, never.”
“I told him that, but he doesn’t believe me.”
A handsome young man named Alexi often accompanied Haralambos on his rounds, striking poses in his ELAS uniform and seeking to call attention to himself.
Leonidas had little use for him either. “Alexis licks where he used to spit. Before the war, he was fascistas, now he’s ELAS.”
“In Ireland, we call men like that ‘slinkeens.’ Folks you can’t turn your back on.”
“Here we say, ‘His word isn’t worth the fart of a donkey.’ ”
“A grave insult, that.”
The Greek nodded. It was one of the few time O’Malley had ever seen him smile.
“Watch out for him, too,” Leonidas said, growing serious. “He thinks hurting people makes him a man.”
* * *
Uncomfortable in the camp, Stefanos dogged O’Malley’s every move. They ate together, cleaned guns together, even unbuttoned their pants and pissed off the cliff together. O’Malley made a bed for the kid on the ground close to where he slept and spread the flokati over him when he saw him shivering at night. Seeking warmer clothes, he’d opened the child’s suitcase, but found nothing useful, only the carved animals and his terrible ball. Ripped in places, the latter was falling apart, sodden with mud. O’Malley smiled. Aunt Toula had had no hand in this. Stefanos must have packed for himself.
To pass the time, they played soccer with the ball. O’Malley’s pa still called soccer ‘football’ and followed it religiously, recalling with pride the time the Cork team, the Fordsons, won the cup in 1926. O’Malley played it well. So well, that he’d once dreamed of a place on the national team. Still did sometimes when he’d had a pint or two.
“Balla?” the boy would ask.
“Aye, Specky, balla.”
When the muddy ball gave out, O’Malley made a second one out of his parachute, hacking up the silk and wadding it up, tying it together to form a rough sphere. It never amounted to much, the games they played. Stefanos would inevitably miss when he went for a goal, knock himself off balance and fall down. He never cried, even when he hurt himself. No, with him it was only laughter—crazed, hysterical laughter. His joy to be playing the game was so profound, it was like madness.
Family members appeared at the camp on a regular basis, a seemingly endless stream of them. An old woman in black turned up one day, leading a donkey laden with blankets, jars of honey secreted in the folds of the cloth. The men called her yiayia, grandma, and kissed her on her withered cheeks, made as if to carry her off. Smiling a toothless smile, the old woman joked with them good naturedly for a time before she left, leading her donkey back down the footpath to the village. O’Malley wondered how old she was, how far she’d traveled to get there.
Most of the people came at night, led as he’d been by men in the camp. A young Jewish couple from Athens arrived late one evening, identifiable by their city clothes, the story they told. The Grand Rabbi of Athens had fled the city, they said, after the Nazis demanded he give up the names and addresses of the Jews there. He’d urged other Jews to flee as well.
“The Germans have sent two officers to Athens now to organize the deportations. They’re the same SS men who were in charge in Salonika. They said the Jews there were being resettled, but no one has ever heard from them again. The SS just put them on a train and they disappeared.”
They said that the Greek archbishop, Damaskinos, was personally signing thousands of false baptismal certificates in a desperate effort to save the Jews. He’d filed a formal protest with the German authorities against the deportations, but they didn’t think it would do any good and were determined to flee Greece.
The couple kept to themselves, speaking to each other in a language O’Malley didn’t understand.
“What do you suppose happened to the people they spoke of?” O’Malley asked the antartes after the couple slept. “The ones the Germans put on the train in Salonika.”
“They’re dead,” Haralambos said flatly. “They were supposed to go to work camps, yet they deported everyone—persons over ninety, amputees, children and pregnant women, people who would be of no use to them. The driver of one of the trains is a cousin of mine. He said the Germans stopped the train at one point and threw out the bodies of the children who’d died along the way. The people inside the train didn’t have food or water and beat against the wooden sides, screaming and crying. The Germans gave him a handful of watches to keep quiet about it.”
Leonidas had been listening to the discussion. “Kolasmenoi,” he said in a low voice. “Means ‘condemned to hell.’ The Germans aren’t resettling them, no matter what they say. They’re killing them.”
O’Malley never saw the Jews leave, had no idea how the system worked, how word was passed or where they went. He searched for Danae’s father whenever a new group arrived, but didn’t see him, not then.
A short while later, a young Jewish boy from Lefkada was brought into the camp, having recently escaped from a German transport. “We were all standing together on the quay in Patras,” he said, “hundreds and hundreds of us. A friend of mine from school saw me and told me to wait there while he brought me some food. While I was waiting, the Germans cordoned off the area where my family was and I lost track of them. I didn’t know what happened to them, where they were, and I started to search. But a stranger took me away, saying it wasn’t safe. Germans were moving people away, killing them.”
The boy started to cry. O’Malley wanted to comfort him but didn’t know how. Neither did the rest of the men, judging by the bleak expressions on their faces. Lies wouldn’t help, not in the long run, not with a thing like this. Besides, he couldn’t do it, couldn’t stand there and tell the kid everything was
going to be all right when it wasn’t. They were gone, his folks. Gone to whatever heaven Jews believed in. There’d be no reunion with them in the future. No joyful scene after the war. They were dead, or soon would be. Dead, and with them, the boy’s dreams, his vision of a benevolent universe and his place in it. Just thinking about it made O’Malley’s eyes well up. The boy looked to be the same age as Danae, and already the best part of his life was over. He just didn’t know it yet.
He, too, was gone by morning.
Sometimes the visitors contributed food or clothing to the camp. O’Malley couldn’t establish whether the parcels they brought were given in payment—demanded by the soldiers for the service they rendered—or if they’d been freely given. Leonidas took offense when he asked about it. Said neither he nor any of the others would take payment for rescuing a person, no matter who they were or what their religion was. It was their duty to save people from the Nazis; it was a matter of filotimo, honor, and required of them as men.
“An ELAS unit fought to save the Jews in a village in northern Greece and smuggled their leader in Athens, Rabbi Barzilai, out of the city. They’re Greeks, same as us.”
Local Greek villagers also arrived at the camp with sacks of potatoes, olives, and walnuts. Most were related to the partisans, their generosity less patriotic than familial. Occasionally, one of the men would share his bounty with O’Malley and Stefanos and give them fistfuls of nuts or a boiled egg. O’Malley wished he had cigarettes to share in return or chocolate, a way he could repay them in kind.
Most nights the soldiers made a fire, always in the same place in the deepest part of the trench, laboring to make sure that smoke wasn’t visible from above. They purchased sheep and goats occasionally from farmers, paying with gold sovereigns. Leonidas kept the money in a leather pouch and was tightlipped about where it had come from, doling it out coin by coin to the team making a run for food. O’Malley had gone on one of these forays, standing by while the men negotiated with the farmer then helping them drive the purchased animal back to the camp for Roumelis to slaughter. He’d hated that part—the choked bleating of the animal when the cook grabbed its throat, the pool of blood darkening the ground afterward.