To Look on Death No More

by Leta Serafim

  Pulling her close, he crooned the words of an Irish wedding jig in her ear.

  Come haste to the wedding ye friends and ye neighbors,

  The lovers their bliss can no longer delay.

  Forget all your sorrows your cares and your labors,

  And let every heart beat with rapture today.

  Come, come one and all, attend to my call.

  “After we’re done marrying, we’ll spend our days by the sea, throw off our clothes and take to the water like fishes, swimming and frolicking and nibbling each other, scandalize the neighborhood with our nakedness. At night we’ll lie out on the beach and count the stars, catch the ones that tumble. A few we’ll save to adorn you with, to dress up your raven hair. The rest we’ll put back. “

  “You are such a fool.” She was crying openly now.

  “We’ll have sons aplenty. Big, strapping fellows with hair the color of fire and tempers to match. Irishmen, they’ll be, same as their pa. We’ll have a couple of daughters, too, to even things out. Dark-haired girls with faces like the Madonna’s. Beautiful faces.”

  He touched her cheek with his hand, did his best to wipe her tears away. “Your face, Danae. Your holy face.”

  Chapter 21

  “I aim to marry her,” O’Malley declared again.

  Leonidas gave him a long look. He’d been giving him that look for some time now. As if all the idiots in the world were in a great race, and he, Brendan O’Malley, was about to win the gold medal.

  “I know no other way,” he insisted.

  “Germans coming and you talk of love. Ach, Romeo. What am I going to do with you?” Spurring his mount, he drove it into the herd of horses, whistling to the strays and moving them back into the fold.

  Determined to keep the horses out of von Le Suire’s hands, he and O’Malley had rounded up the herd and driven it up into the mountains, intending to pasture them in an abandoned corral near the airfield.

  Unable to contain himself, O’Malley had spoken of nothing, save Danae, on the long ride there, the vow he’d made to marry her. She’d expressed her love, too, he’d said, albeit a tad more reluctantly than he would have liked. Perhaps that was the nature of Greek women. They were understated and quiet in their romantic passions. Still giddy, he’d gone on a bit, he had to admit, recalling every word of the conversation, offering them up to Leonidas like precious relics, a fistful of gold doubloons.

  The Greek had just shaken his head. “Ancient Greeks say ‘marriage is an evil most men welcome.’ You’d do well to heed them.”

  “Irish say ‘only cure for love is marriage.’ ”

  “There, you see? Be sensible and give up this nonsense. Go to Cyprus.”

  The sun was going down by the time they finally reached the corral, light slowly ebbing from the sky. Ahead, O’Malley could see the long line of horses, their shadows dark against the hill.

  Finding a tin basin, he filled it with water from a nearby stream and set it down on the ground next to them. He pulled up armfuls of frozen weeds and laid them out as well. Like the men in the camp, the horses too would soon be hungry. Elektra danced around him, nickering softly, her breath steamy in the night air.

  “Sorry, my lady. Got naught but brambles for your supper.”

  Leonidas continued to chaff O’Malley, mocking him about his domestic arrangements, his misplaced devotion to Danae.

  “Ah, Irlande,” he cried in a falsetto voice, sashaying around like a woman. “S’agapo. Filise me.” Oh, Irishman, I love you. Kiss me. “Ah, Romeo, Romeo!”

  O’Malley started to say Romeo had come to a bad end, but then he stopped. Maybe he knew, Leonidas. Maybe that was the point.

  * * *

  “It might go the way it did in Vysokiotis,” Haralambos said. “Germans rounded up all the men and held them at gunpoint for a few hours before letting them go again. They burned a few houses, but they didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Maybe.” Leonidas didn’t sound convinced.

  After O’Malley had reported von Le Suire’s discovery of the bodies, the Greeks had immediately set to work strengthening their position, digging foxholes at the base of the walls and securing the mortars.

  The antartes had decided as a group not to enter Kalavryta under any circumstances. They might get trapped there when the Germans came and put the residents of the village even more at risk.

  “It’ll be like Vysokiotis,” Haralambos kept insisting. “We stay out of it, and no one will get hurt.”

  “Not this time,” Leonidas said. “They are going to level that village.”

  He’d spoken calmly. Only a slight tremor in his hands as he lit a cigarette betrayed his tension.

  A messenger had brought word that morning that Wehrmacht units were being summoned from Aigion and Tripoli in the central Peloponnese, hundreds, maybe even a thousand men to be deployed from the military bases there. Units were also being dispatched to Kalavryta from Corinth and Pyrgos.

  North, south, east, and west. O’Malley wondered how long it would take for the Germans to reach the village. The mountains would slow them down, but not by much. Two days, maybe three. By the end of the week, they’d be in the thick of it.

  Stukas had been flying low over the area for the last twenty-four hours. O’Malley held his breath every time one appeared, waiting for the pilot to strafe the village, but so far they’d held their fire. Conducting reconnaissance was his guess. Von Le Suire was getting ready.

  The antartes had undertaken their defense of the town with a sense of fatalism. They had no hope of repelling the Germans and they knew it. They didn’t speak much and what talk there was concerned the fate of their wives and children, should they be killed.

  “You, there,” Alexis had called to O’Malley at one point. “See to the mortar.”

  O’Malley had ignored him and within minutes they’d gotten into it.

  Grabbing the front of the other man’s jacket, O’Malley had shoved him hard. “Don’t you be telling me what to do, you hear? I’ll beat your face in.” The anger felt good, made him feel alive for the first time in days. “You’re the cause of this, you are. You’re the reason they’re coming. If you’d only left those poor men alone ….”

  Alexis spat on the ground. “British.” He made the word a curse.

  “Be careful,” the other men cautioned O’Malley after Alexis stomped off. “You’re poking a stick at a snake.”

  “I know,” O’Malley said, his rage now spent. “I know I am.”

  * * *

  The following day, December 8th, a messenger from ELAS headquarters brought word that the Germans were advancing, marching out of Patras and heading east.

  The killing started almost immediately. The Germans burned Kerpini first, a village northwest of Kalavryta, and shot all the men there, some forty or fifty of them. They killed eighteen more in Zachlorou, a hamlet high up in the mountains, and threw the bodies into the river. Family members pulled the dead men out of the water and dug graves for them in the sand. The temperature was near freezing and the ground was too hard to bury them in the local cemetery.

  Marching on, the Germans torched three more small villages—Souvardo, Vrachni, and Rogi—before taking possession of the monastery, Mega Spileon, in the gorge.

  Initially, the monks had treated them as guests, serving them lunch and offering them rooms to rest in. After they’d eaten and slept, the soldiers collected the monks and marched them to Kissoti, the highest point of land in the gorge, where they killed them and pushed their bodies off a cliff. One of the monks was severely crippled and being looked after by a ten-year-old boy. When the boy saw what was happening, he tried to intervene, and the soldiers shot him, too. After they finished, they left the bodies where they fell and burned the monastery.

  The similarity between the killing of the POWS and the murder of the monks was not lost on the antartes. Fotis and two other men cornered Alexis after they heard what had happened and accused him of murder.

  “It’s
war,” Alexis said, backing away with his hands up, his bravado gone. “They were the enemy.”

  “What did you accomplish by killing them? Did you retake Athens? Did you drive the Germans into the sea?”

  “They would have died anyway. We had nothing to feed them.”

  “At least Kalavryta would have been spared. At least the people there would have lived.”

  The antartes had been watching the monastery burn all afternoon, the surging mass of black smoke rising from the gorge. O’Malley silently prayed for the soul of the monk in the kalymafki, the old man who’d asked Leonidas what he should do if the Germans came, the one who’d so feared this day.

  In spite of his veil and prayerful existence, he’d seen the world after all, that monk. Seen it as he stood on the edge of the cliff waiting to die, seen it in all its gory magnificence. His precious God had not intervened, had not in fact saved him. O’Malley wondered what the monk had thought about during his last moments on earth. If like Jesus, he’d sought forgiveness for his tormentors—if his belief had been strong enough and he had welcomed the coming of paradise.

  Somehow he doubted it. The monk wasn’t Jesus. He was a man same as him, and men feared death. It was one of mankind’s most defining characteristics. Christianity had been built on it, the idea of heaven and hell—a kind of answer.

  The wind was up and it made an inhuman sound as it tore through the cracks in the tower.

  Sounds like the wailing of a banshee, O’Malley thought, remembering his mother’s tales, how banshees wore cloaks of cobwebs and could change their shape, appearing sometimes as washerwomen and cleaning blood off the armor of those about to die. But always they howled.

  * * *

  The first German motorcycle appeared at dawn on December 9th. It was immediately followed by others, an ever-widening stream, hundreds of them converging on Kalavryta.

  The sound was deafening in the early morning stillness, the stench of diesel fuel heavy in the air.

  O’Malley and Leonidas were lying on top of the butte, watching the advance through binoculars. They were very close to Kalavryta, less than a quarter of a mile by O’Malley’s estimate. He could see the motorcycles clearly.

  After a messenger from ELAS had reported the Germans were closing in, the two of them had gotten into position. Their plan was not to attack, but to count the soldiers and determine what weapons they carried. The rest of the antartes were higher still. They had been ordered by Leonidas and Haralambos not to fire on the soldiers. Their mission was only to watch and keep track of the number, to alert ELAS headquarters once they knew.

  A long line of trucks soon followed. O’Malley counted each truck as it passed and did a rough calculation. Twenty men per truck. At the very least, well over three thousand men. Half the trucks were towing heavy artillery as well, self-propelled mortars and rocket launchers—ten-centimeter siege howitzers on metal platforms.

  He grew more and more distraught. Only other time he’d seen an onslaught like this had been the day the Germans invaded Athens. These soldiers seemed to have the same sense of purpose. He could see them peering out of the backs of the trucks and looking around curiously. All were dressed in battle gear and carrying assault rifles—outfitted for war. Some of the guns had small searchlights on them. Vampirs, he realized with dread. Even at night, there’d be no getting away.

  St. Patrick had transformed himself and his followers into a herd of deer to flee their tormentors. Would that he had this gift and could do the same, clothe the village in fur and hooves and spirit it away.

  The parade of vehicles continued the rest of the day. The motorcycles separated from the trucks when they reached the village, the former entering the town directly, the latter forming a tight circle around it.

  Immediately after the trucks stopped, soldiers jumped down and set up roadblocks, barring all access.

  At noon four more vehicles arrived in quick succession, huge, cumbersome trucks with anti-aircraft guns in tow. The drivers sped up as they neared the village, waving and egging each other on. As if this was Le Mans and they were racing, jockeying to be the first across the finish line. Soldiers were visible through the windshields, their faces young and intent. Like the others, they wore helmets and were carrying StG 44s.

  “ ’Tis only a village. What do they need guns like that for?”

  Leonidas’ eyes were bloodshot. “To blow holes in the buildings.”

  “So they’ll be taking it apart then, same as they did in Crete?”

  He nodded. “Right down to the ground.”

  Watching the trucks maneuver, O’Malley prayed Danae had already left, that she and her family had escaped what was surely coming.

  “Ahortagos,” Leonidas said. “That’s what they are. Cannibals, cannibals in search of prey. Hitler said, ‘When swine are housed with women and children, you must put the house to the torch.’ ”

  “We’re in for it, you’re saying,” O’Malley said.

  Leonidas shook his head. “No,” he pointed to the village, “they are.”

  * * *

  O’Malley fiddled with his binoculars, working to bring Kalavryta into focus. He could see a German soldier standing on top of a truck with a bullhorn, shouting something, a second standing off to the side, probably translating the words into Greek. So far the residents were staying in their houses. Poor fools. He wondered if they’d locked their doors.

  The village was like a field mouse he’d once seen in the claws of a cat. The little creature had stood idly by as the cat batted it back and forth, let it go only to recapture it again, stoically enduring the torment that preceded its death. It hadn’t tried to flee, hadn’t fought to save itself in any way. A chemical was released in its brain that numbed it, his pa had said. Made death bearable.

  Standing there, watching Kalavryta, O’Malley desperately wanted to believe there was a human equivalent.

  Danae must have left, he told himself. It had been four days since he’d seen her and told her to go. She and her people had to have reached Coroni by now. He’d wanted to visit her house to make sure, but Leonidas had begged him not to, saying his presence would bring the wrath of God down on the village, should the Germans discover him there.

  “The wrath of God is already on its way, unless I’m mistaken,” O’Malley argued. “What difference does it make?” But in the end he’d obeyed. Danae was safe in her cousin’s house by the sea, the little waves—the kymata, as the Greek called them—washing up on the shore at her feet and keeping her company. He smiled, thinking of it. She was well out of it; that was the main thing.

  A large black touring car arrived a short time later. A convertible, it had red flags with swastikas that snapped in the breeze as it made its way forward. Two men were riding in the back, one in a military uniform, the other in the black garb of the SS.

  “The one to the left is Ebersberger,” Leonidas told him, watching the car through his binoculars.“The man on the right is Walter Blume. SS, he’s well known to us: rounds up civilians during bloccos and interrogates them. The driver’s name is Doehnert. He speaks Greek, which is probably why they brought him. They’ll need him to translate once things get started.”

  Raising his binoculars again, O’Malley followed the car’s progress through Kalavryta. Ebersberger was waving a plump hand at the village, smiling at the people in the street as if on parade.

  Blume’s face was harder, marred by deep cuts on the right side of his mouth and across the bridge of his nose. Not as disfiguring as shrapnel wounds, they probably came from dueling. Such things were a sign of prestige in Germany.

  O’Malley didn’t like his sharp, neutral gaze, the way he was inspecting the handful of villagers who’d dared show themselves. An IRA renegade had once passed through his parents’ farm, and he’d never forgotten that man’s appraising glance. Blume’s expression was exactly the same, as if he were measuring people for coffins.

  * * *

  The antartes remained holed up in the
tower, the assumption being they’d be safer there, have the advantage of high ground should the Germans attack. None of the men had any illusions about what was about to happen. They’d been at war long enough to recognize a German reprisal operation when they saw one and a reprisal operation was what this was. All they dared hope for was that the Germans would confine their killing to the men and leave the women and children alone.

  They’d been overwhelmed by the number of men von Le Suire had dispatched to drive them out and the weaponry they wielded. The situation was hopeless and they knew it. After much debate, Leonidas and Haralambos ordered the men not to engage the enemy in defense of Kalavryta. “To attack a force of this size would be foolhardy and suicidal,” Haralambos told the assembled antartes. Such action would only further the destruction, the firestorm about to engulf the town.

  Fotis begged them to reconsider, arguing they should try and defend Kalavryta no matter what the cost. They should be like Spartans in Thermopylae, he kept saying. “With only three hundred men, they held off an entire Persian army.”

  “The Persians didn’t have siege howitzers,” Haralambos said.

  Fotis refused to give up, his eyes bleary with tears. “We brought this on the village. We are responsible.”

  “So what if we are? We can’t do anything. Not against those guns. The best we can do is bear witness. Care for the survivors after the Germans leave.”

  “Diloi!” Fotis shouted. Cowards.

  He abandoned the unit immediately after, taking his brother, Andreas, and about thirty other men with him. He spat on the ground as he left, cursing the antartes and the cause they served.

  “Prodotes!” Traitors.

  Roumelis pulled Leonidas aside after Fotis left. “My mother lives in Kalavryta. She’s all alone and crippled with arthritis. She’ll need help if the Germans march them to Patras. I need to be with her.”