by Leta Serafim
With Specky, one never knew. He always brought trouble with him. It was his great gift.
Chapter 15
Stefanos got up before O’Malley and Leonidas made them breakfast, laying out leaves and twigs on the ground, a snail that he claimed was an avgo. Egg.
He reprimanded it when it crawled off the leaf, its little feelers wiggling, chased after it and brought it back, handling it gently as he set it back down.
Sitting cross-legged, O’Malley pretended to gobble up the leaves. He told Stefanos he didn’t like eggs and that Leonidas could have them.
Leonidas picked up the snail and licked its shell. “Poli nostimo,” he told Stefanos. “Mporo na exo kai allo?” Very tasty. May I have another?
The boy shook his head. “Ftani pia.” That’s enough for you.
Although the air was so cold it hurt to breathe, Stefanos took no notice. Lying next to the river, he dipped his hand in the icy water and came running over to O’Malley. “Café,” he cried, pouring it out at his feet.
He then opened up the suitcase, set the carved animals out, and fed them too, chastising the pig when it took too much. He seemed calmer today, less hysterical.
Must have been those long hours alone yesterday, O’Malley thought, him chasing after us in the pouring rain, worrying the whole time the Germans were after him, braying at his heels like a pack of Dobermans.
The water had risen during the night, and O’Malley had to carry him back across the river. The boy kept bouncing around, complaining that he was getting wet.
“Drown me, so you will, you little gobshit, same as the scorpion did in the story. Drown the only one who ever showed you a spot of kindness.”
The sun was up, slatted light filtering down and illuminating the floor of the gorge. He could see tendrils of grass at the bottom of the river, coiling and uncoiling like the hair of a drowned woman. So it was the grass that gave the water its black color …. Not a gateway to hell, he thought sheepishly, only clumps of seaweed, stirring in the current.
* * *
They skirted around Kalavryta and headed west. They climbed a series of low-lying hills and passed through a rockbound valley, eventually emerging on the side of an ancient lakebed.
“German headquarters is on the other side,” Leonidas said, “two, maybe three kilometers away.”
O’Malley didn’t approve of the route. It was too open. They should have come another way. “We’d best be careful. Very soon there’ll be no place to hide.”
They studied the landscape for a moment, then made their way forward and started across the plain. Leonidas was in front, O’Malley and Stefanos to the rear. They spoke idly as they walked.
O’Malley saw now the plain was much larger than he’d originally thought, not a lakebed. The remnants of some vast, prehistoric sea. Looking out across it, he could almost hear the cry of gulls, smell the cleansing tang of salt in the air. He wondered how old it was, when the water had receded for the last time. It was being farmed now, he saw. Furrows were etched in the red earth as far as the eye could see. Long lines of saplings and brush divided the landholdings, forming windbreaks and separating one man’s plot from another. Bare hills rose on three sides, bearded here and there with stunted pines. To the south lay a rocky highland. A large olive orchard covered area in between. O’Malley signaled for Leonidas to head toward it.
Staying well back, the Greek proceeded cautiously. Crouching low to the ground, he entered the orchard first and then nodded for O’Malley and Stefanos to follow. The olive trees were very old, their thick gray trunks as gnarled and lifeless as driftwood. To O’Malley, they seemed in pain, twisted like the body of an Australian POW he’d seen a photo of, caught on an electric fence outside a German prison camp. They seemed to embody the same agony.
A kind of no man’s land separated the orchard from the rest of the plain, a slight rise covered with trees. O’Malley welcomed the shelter the trees would provide. Safer, he told himself.
They stayed in the forested area as long as they could, the yellowing grass underfoot deadening the sound of their passage. No one spoke. Sooner or later, they’d have to move out into the open and cross the plain. There was no other way to go.
Uneasy, O’Malley kept looking around. He didn’t understand it. There were no Germans about. He’d have heard them long before.
He pulled Stefanos behind him and motioned for Leonidas to get down. They waited like that for a few minutes before continuing. Still worried, O’Malley kept an eye out and gestured for Leonidas to stop again. Ahead, he saw a lighted opening, the place where the forest gave way to open ground. Afraid to go forward, they stayed in the trees, whatever had bothered O’Malley now affecting the other two.
Suddenly, a flock of birds took flight and filled the sky. There was a copse of poplar trees on the far side of the plain. Whatever had startled the birds had come from there.
The boy dropped immediately to the ground and set about burying himself in the leaves. Aside from the screeching of the birds, all was quiet.
A crack of gunfire broke the silence, set the birds in motion again. “Is it the birds or us they’re after?”
Leonidas already had his revolver out. “Gun’s big, nothing a hunter would use.”
“Germans, then. They see us?”
“I don’t know.”
O’Malley looked down at the boy, the leaves he’d mounded around himself for protection. “Any chance we can get away?”
“They’re close. I don’t think so.”
“A white flag then?”
“Can’t. Not with the boy.”
Aye, he was right. Even if they surrendered, Stefanos would go to pieces in German hands. He wouldn’t stand a chance.
A volley of gunfire ended the discussion. The bullets tore up the red earth in front of them.
“Back,” O’Malley urged.
Stefanos didn’t move. He just lay where he was, buried in his little pile of leaves. O’Malley grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him away, deep into the trees. As soon as he let go, the boy burrowed down into the leaves again. He was trembling all over.
“Come on, Specky! We’ve got to get out of here!”
The boy was crying softly, trying to muffle the sound with his hand. O’Malley didn’t want to grab him a second time, afraid the movement would alert the Germans if it hadn’t already. He could see Leonidas crawling through the underbrush on his belly, heading to a stony rise to the left. There were stones piled at the top of it, what looked like the ruins of a house. O’Malley pointed them out to the boy. “There” he whispered. “It’s our only chance.”
Motioning for Stefanos to follow him, he began inching toward the rise on his hands and knees. He fumbled to get his gun out, to get ready.
“Perimene me!” the boy cried. Wait for me.
The Germans fired again, the bullets tearing chunks of bark off the trees.
“Perimene me!” Stefanos cried again.
Getting up, he began darting in and out of the trees. He started running toward O’Malley, but then seemed to change his mind. Pausing for a second, he picked up a handful of leaves and threw them over himself.
“Specky, stop, stop! They’ll kill you!”
The boy didn’t seem to hear. He just stood there rooted to the ground with leaves in his hair.
Getting to his feet, O’Malley raced toward him, thinking he’d throw him to the ground, anything to keep him still. But the boy scampered off before he could reach him. In a burst of speed, he turned and lit out across the lakebed.
“Christ, child, stop your running! Get down!”
Stefanos almost got away. He was moving that fast. But then two soldiers emerged from the copse of trees.
Stefanos hesitated for a moment, then turned and started back toward where Leonidas and O’Malley were hiding.
For a moment, O’Malley thought he was going to make it, but then, sensing movement, one of the soldiers raised his gun and fired. The shot hit Stefanos in the stoma
ch. Clutching his bleeding gut, the boy staggered and fell.
Then like vultures, they descended.
Without saying a word, the two soldiers ran to where Stefanos was lying and rolled him over. They hadn’t been expecting a child and looked around nervously when they saw what they had done. Both of them had dead rabbits slung over their shoulders. Hunters.
O’Malley held back, afraid that if he fired at them, he’d hit Stefanos and wound him further. The Germans hastily retreated, backing away and disappearing over the hill.
A child, he hadn’t been worth a second bullet.
Disturbed by the noise, the birds wheeled around in circles, shrieking and cawing.
The child lay crumbled up on the ground like a broken toy. While Leonidas kept watch, O’Malley gathered him up in his arms. He tried to stop the bleeding with his hands, pressing his palms hard against him, all the while knowing it was useless. He could feel the life ebbing out of him, see it pooling there on the ground.
The frames of his spectacles were shattered, the glass ground into his eyes. O’Malley wondered if he could even see him. “Specky,” he whispered.
The boy turned his head, reached out his hand, feeling feebly along the ground for him.
Remembering how the boy had loved Elektra, O’Malley told him the horse was coming for him now.
“With wings, lad, huge white wings beating the air to carry you home. It’ll be the ride of a lifetime. Up through the stars you’ll go. Horse will be wild, battling comets and dancing on the rings of Saturn. Higher and higher you’ll go. Her mane will be on fire, sparks flying from her hooves. She’ll guide you to the heaven, she will, lead you safely through the darkness, the long, endless night.” Choking back tears, O’Malley continued, “It’ll be grand, lad, you’ll see. Grand.”
The boy gave a weak smile. He died a moment later.
Grabbing his hand, O’Malley held it up to his face.
Stefanos’ mouth was open, a new tooth breaking through the gums. Sobbing, O’Malley clutched the child’s shattered body, repeating his name over and over.
“Ah, Specky, Specky. Would it had been me. Lord God, child, would it had been me.”
* * *
Leonidas crossed himself when O’Malley told him Stefanos was dead. The Germans had vanished, and all was quiet again, save for the clamoring of the birds.
“I’ll take him back to Kalavryta. Bury him there.”
He picked up the body and raised it onto his shoulders, held Stefanos by his lifeless arms. He stopped about halfway across the plain, thinking he’d felt the child stir, but it had just been the shifting of the body, the dead weight of it.
Chapter 16
Later, O’Malley didn’t remember much about the journey. The body of the boy stiffening on his back, the screeching of the crows overhead. Worse was the cold, the terrible cold that seemed to come from within. The day was overcast, the fields by Kalavryta drained of color. Borne by the wind, dead leaves whirled around, skittering and clawing at the ground by his feet. O’Malley walked heedlessly, not caring what became of him.
He occasionally talked to the boy, telling him the things he’d do when he grew up, where he’d take him and what they’d see. But mostly he wept.
Leonidas accompanied him, saying he’d never find his way back to Kalavryta on his own.
O’Malley had cleaned Stefanos up as much as he could, removing the broken shards of glass from his face and eyes, not wanting the child’s family to see what had been done to him. He’d wetted his cap and used it to wash the congealed blood off the boy’s clothes and hands. He’d been wounded terribly, O’Malley saw, the bullet catching him at an angle and ripping him apart. The Germans hadn’t known how to kill a kid. They’d made a mess of it.
O’Malley made no effort to hide himself or his ghastly burden on the trip to Kalavryta. Although Leonidas cautioned against it, he did it on purpose, hoping to provoke the Germans, wanting a chance to bloody them the way they had the child.
The streets were empty when they reached the town. This surprised O’Malley. Somehow he’d expected shouting and screams to greet them, for the village to give voice to his grief.
“Where is everyone?”
“Sleeping. It’s early.”
Again, he felt that same sense of surprise. Sleeping? Yet Stefanos was dead.
They crossed through the field where he and the boy had flown the kite. Parts of it still hung from the tree, string tangled in the branches, the rest scattered on the ground below. The newspaper that made up its body was waterlogged and a remnant of the yellow tail was awash with mud. O’Malley had to stop then, couldn’t see for his tears.
* * *
Danae screamed when she saw the body. She’d been hanging up laundry outside and had smiled at first when she saw O’Malley approaching, singing out ‘Angle’ and laughing a little.
But now she was on her knees, bent nearly to the ground, keening and weeping over her brother’s lifeless form. “Stefanos! No! It can’t be! It can’t, it can’t!”
She yelled for her father to come. Hearing her distress, he rushed out of the house a few seconds later, her aunt close on his heels. They knelt down beside the boy’s body and began stroking his face, his arms and legs. They smoothed down his matted hair, brushing their hands against him and pulling back quickly as if the boy’s icy flesh stung them.
O’Malley helped the father carry the body into the house and lay it out. The father then left with Danae to alert the priest and prepare the grave.
O’Malley had been expecting recriminations, questions as to how he’d let the boy die, but there’d been none of that. Only grief, this solid wall of grief, sealing them in and shutting him and all he represented out.
Shaking out a tablecloth, the aunt stretched it out over the table in the kitchen and set out plates and glasses, preparing for the mourners she said would come.
“I thought he’d be safe. His father told me, ‘You don’t have to worry about Stefanos anymore. He’s with the antartes.’ ‘Where?’ I asked, ‘at the top of the gorge? Above Mega Spileon?’ ” She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.
“Everyone told me he’d be safe there, everyone.” Her voice was petulant, as if she were the one who’d been betrayed, the child’s death a broken promise.
O’Malley said he needed to get some air and stepped outside. If Toula Papadakis knew the location of the camp, others did, too. He’d have to warn Leonidas. Warn him the Germans probably knew, too, and would be coming for them, that they needed to shut the camp down and be quick about it.
He could hear the aunt weeping inside. He had no desire to comfort her. “Bloody fool.”
Danae and her father returned a few hours later. “The man who takes care of the cemetery won’t dig the grave,” the father said wearily. “We have no money to pay him and he won’t do it for free.”
“I’ll do it,” O’Malley volunteered.
Grabbing a shovel, he followed the father to the cemetery. Close to the river, it was a far poorer place than the graveyard he’d hidden in with Danae and the boy that first day.
There were no crypts to speak of, only mounds of earth surrounded by little, gilded fences. Serving as headstones, metal boxes held oil lamps and books of matches, faded photographs of the deceased edged in black. A few had wreaths on them, the flowers gone nearly white from the sun.
Picking up a stick, Danae’s father drew a long oblong shape on the ground and told O’Malley that’s where he wanted it. At first, O’Malley didn’t understand his haste, but then he remembered: the Greeks buried their dead quickly, within twenty-four hours if at all possible. The grave was to face east, the man said, as was the custom.
Damp with rain, the soil was soft and malleable, and O’Malley quickly dug a deep trench. He cried as he worked, wiping his eyes on his sleeve of his jacket.
Danae appeared at some point and stood watching him. Dry-eyed, she didn’t speak.
Keeping his head down, O’Malley continued to
labor. “ ’Twas all my fault, this,” he said after a time. “Every bit of it.”
In a dull voice, he described the child’s death to her. How the Germans had seen them and Stefanos had panicked and ran. “I tried to stop him, but he was going too fast. Trying to get home, he was. Back to Kalavryta.”
Climbing out the grave, O’Malley came and stood beside her. “I tried to stop him,” he said again. “I’d have gladly traded my life for his. I didn’t want this, Danae. I didn’t want this.”
* * *
Someone—the aunt, O’Malley guessed—had dressed the boy’s body in new clothes and combed his hair. The clothes were far too big, the fabric shiny and cheap. She’d probably purchased them in the laiki, the open-air market, that morning. His shoes were the ones O’Malley knew, freshly polished.
He helped the father lift the boy and settle him in the little coffin. How strange Stefanos looked without his glasses, he thought, those grandfatherly goggles he always wore. His coffin was a small pine box, so short they’d had to struggle—bend the boy’s knees and tuck his head down—in order to fit him in. It was lined with purple cloth, and the top was flimsy—light as cardboard.
The father propped the boy up on a pillow filled with earth and placed a small wooden icon on his forehead. A group of elderly women arrived shortly after, dressed entirely in black. They filed past the open coffin and kissed the icon, then pulled up chairs and sat down in a circle around it and talked for few minutes, recounting the news of the village. Finally they sat back with their hands on their knees, and one of them began to chant in an angry tone, her voice rising to a crescendo as she complained to God in Greek. After a long moment, the cry was taken up by a second woman. The call and response continued until each of the women had had her turn, singing out in protest at the death of the child, mourning him in a kind of rough poetry.
When they finished, they paused for a moment, then started up again, wiping their eyes as they chanted:
I had a little bird in a cage and it was tame, O Mother