by Leta Serafim
Ebersberger then approached the Greeks.
A man Leonidas identified as a high school teacher got to his feet and came forward.
Ebersberger continued to speak, a benevolent expression on his face. O’Malley was pretty sure he knew what the German was saying: the Greeks of Kalavryta had no reason to be fear. He and his soldiers meant them no harm. All would be well.
Ebersberger put his hand over his chest when he finished, nodded gravely to the crowd.
Like the scorpion in the story
Leaving the butte, O’Malley inched closer, his gun in his hand. He crawled forward until he was almost directly behind the machine gunners, looking directly down onto the field. Leonidas followed him a moment later.
“Careful with the binoculars,” he warned. “They’ll see the reflection and know we’re up here.”
The high school teacher was standing in front of Ebersberger, evidently translating the German’s words into Greek.
As soon as he finished, the villagers started yelling and catcalling. Raising their arms as if giving the Nazi salute, they turned the gesture into the mountza, the Greek gesture of contempt.
Even now, making jokes, O’Malley thought. Those pungent jokes that so defined them as a people.
Turning on his heel, Ebersberger left the cornfield, taking care to keep well away from the line of fire. Seeing him go, the Greeks began to prepare themselves. A few embraced; others reached for the hands of their sons.
Roumelis was standing in the middle of the group. In a loud voice, he began to sing.
“What’s he doing?” O’Malley asked.
Tears were streaming down Leonidas face. “He’s singing the national anthem of Greece.”
As soon as Roumelis finished the song, he started up again, bellowing out the words at the top of his lungs. Waving his arms like a symphony conductor, he urged the men around him to join in. Fotis was there, O’Malley saw, as was the old man, Menelaos. Father Chronis and the boy from the camp, Grigoris. He recognized others, too, but didn’t remember their names.
He could see them all clearly, almost hear the words of their song. The cook pulled a little Greek flag out of his pocket and waved it over his head as he shouted out the words. One of the young boys took the flag from him and held it aloft, then passed it on to another, each touching it in turn as if it were a religious relic, a holy thing.
Tears stung O’Malley’s eyes. He reached for his rifle, thinking he’d shoot Ebersberger first, then Doehnert. Give the Greeks a few more seconds of life.
He fired off a round, but he was shaking so badly, the shots went wild. Before he could get another round off, Ebersberger shot a green flare in the air. Doehnert raised his right arm when the flare went up and dropped it when Ebersberger fired off the second flare, red this time. It spun as it came down, a thin ringlet of smoke in its wake, and flooded the cornfield with incandescent light.
Roumelis cried, “Zito i Hellas! Zito i Hellas!” Long live Greece.
The other Greeks quickly picked up the chant. “Zito i Hellas! Zito i Hellas!”
They were still yelling when the soldiers cut them down.
Chapter 24
O’Malley lost track of how many rounds the Germans fired into the crowd. After they finished, the soldiers left their machine guns and walked through the pile of bodies with their pistols drawn. Hit in the legs, Menelaos tried to crawl away, dragging himself backward on his elbows.
A soldier imitated the Greek’s crab-like movements, pursing his lips and miming Menelaos’ terrified expression.
He put his pistol to the old man’s head and pulled the trigger. The report of the gun seemed to make time stop. After he shot him, the soldier grabbed Menelaos by the hair and shook his head back and forth, and then, satisfied he was dead, dropped him back to the ground.
In their search for survivors, the soldiers were very thorough. They kicked the corpses aside as they worked their way across the cornfield. A haze of gun smoke hung in the air, the smell of cordite lingering long after the massacre.
Not much to a man once the life has been taken from him, O’Malley thought as he watched. “A generation of leaves, so is it of men,” Homer wrote in The Iliad. And so it was now.
Occasionally, a voice would arise from the pile, a muted whimpering. The sound never lasted more than a few seconds and was inevitably followed by a blast of gunfire. The Germans were taking no chances.
It was close to noon when they finished.
* * *
Kalavryta continued to burn, sheets of flames rising from the town long into the night.
The next morning, the German soldiers formed up and left. Without a second glance, they boarded their trucks and took off at high speed down the road, Ebersberger’s black touring car departing immediately after. The trucks towing the anti-aircraft guns were the last to leave. Rumbling loudly, they were too wide for the road and had a hard time of it, the caissons swinging wildly from side to side.
Belonged to an earlier age, a convoy like that, O’Malley told himself. A time long distant, when men hunted with spears and burned the entrails of animals. Cut out the hearts of their enemies.
He examined the faces of the German soldiers through his binoculars. They had little of the energy or sense of purpose that had marked their arrival, and no one in the trucks was looking around today. No, the men in the trucks kept their eyes resolutely averted.
‘Where were you in the war, Papa?’ their children would ask their grandchildren.
‘I was in Greece,’ those men would be forced to say, ‘in a place called Kalavryta.’
Having been at war for a long time, he had no illusions about himself or the men he’d served with. He’d killed and would kill again. He’d heeded the same call to glory as those men in the trucks, nursed the same wanton desire to carry a gun and fight. He didn’t know the reason. Something vainglorious and wanting in the human heart, maybe. A genetic weakness passed down from one generation to the next.
His ma had no use for guns or the men who carried them—be they IRA or their English counterparts, the RIC—and she had never allowed them in her house. The memory of the look she’d given him when he told her he was off to war still scalded him. “I’ll not cry over you, Brendan O’Malley, idiot that you are, bringing your mother such grief,” she’d said. “Learned nothing here, have you? Now you’ll go off and learn nothing elsewhere. Think you’d have seen where it gets you. But no, not you. You’ll not rest till you’ve got blood on your hands. Think being a soldier justifies it, that you’ll be able to wash it off once you get home, but you won’t. No, it’ll mark you, stay on you forever.”
His ma was right. War left an indelible mark, dirtied all it touched, stained a man’s soul forever.
No matter how long the men in the trucks lived, that stain would remain. A scourge, they’d been and would come to know it, a pestilence like no other.
Would that a wave would rise up as it had in Exodus and engulf them. Would that God would make his displeasure known and destroy them as it had Pharaoh’s army.
* * *
“Eimaste Ellines,” Leonidas cried. “Osoi iste zontani fonaxete mas!” We’re Greek. If you’re alive, speak.
The antartes were in the cornfield, searching for survivors of the massacre. Leonidas staggered as he worked his way through the dead, his hands streaked with dried blood. He rolled over one body after another and inspected them.
“Eimaste Ellines,” he cried again.
O’Malley doubted they’d find any survivors. All those bullets fired at close range. No one could live through a barrage like that, least of all children.
Haralambos was counting the bodies and logging them in with a pen. He’d been sick twice and his uniform was flecked of vomit. Leonidas had ordered the boy, Nikos, to stay in the tower, not wanting him to see the body of his uncle, the mess the bullet had made of his head. As for Alexis, he hadn’t made the journey down to the killing field.
They slowly untangled t
he corpses and began laying them out in rows. Judging by their clothes, the dead had been poor men, their pants worn thin in places, and only a few had on proper leather shoes. What was it Yeats had said? “An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.” The food they’d brought with them—their last supper as it were—was equally humble. Onions mostly, random crusts of bread.
O’Malley held one of the onions in his hand. Hard to believe the Germans had stripped the land of all save this. The murdering had begun long before, begun with famine and its attendant diseases. Today’s shooting was only the culmination. The older men had tried to shield the boys with their bodies, he saw, reached out to cover them as they died. The faces of the boys were soft in death, babyish. He couldn’t bring himself to touch them.
Haralambos was determined to enter every name in his notebook, along with the date and manner of death. Initially, this proved impossible; many of the dead had sustained terrible wounds and were so soaked in blood as to be virtually unrecognizable.
Taking off his coat, Leonidas began to wipe the blood off the dead men’s faces, calling out their names while the school teacher wrote them down. He began to weep when he came upon the body of Grigoris, his poor feet still covered with bandages. The priest was there. Fotis, too, and his brother, Andreas. Other men O’Malley recognized from the unit. Roumelis was lying near the bottom of the heap, a deep wound in his chest.
O’Malley bent down and gently closed the cook’s eyes with his hand. He felt numb, as if he too were riddled with bullets.
The Germans had shot 1,252 people, Haralambos said, almost the entire male population of Kalavryta.
Piled ten deep in places, the dead were everywhere. The grass was drenched, slick with blood. Haralambos must have miscounted, O’Malley thought, looking around him. A million people must be lying here—the population, not of a single village, but of the earth itself.
Twelve people had survived the attack. Three said they’d fallen to the ground a split second before the Germans fired. The remaining nine had been buried under the dead, so bloody the soldiers had taken them for corpses and let them be. It was all too random for O’Malley. Snake eyes, a man lived. Snake eyes, he died.
The young boys had all been killed, torn up in the blasts of gunfire, and one man had been shot twice—once in the stomach and once in cheek.
Working feverishly, he and Leonidas covered the survivors with blankets and did what they could for them. In spite of their efforts, nine of the wounded men died within hours.
O’Malley paused to wipe his brow, his hands encrusted with dried blood. “Who’s that there?” he asked Leonidas, nodding to a body a few feet away.
The Greek didn’t answer, just went on with his work.
A small man was lying sprawled on the ground. He was dressed in a knitted gray vest, pristine in its newness.
“Can’t be.” Kneeling down, O’Malley turned the man’s head toward him.
The dead man’s lips were drawn back, exposing his teeth, a single gold incisor. Aye, it was Danae’s father all right. Danae’s father, lying dead in that field.
O’Malley buried his fist in his mouth. “No! No!”
* * *
The donkey they’d heard braying was lying on its side in a burned field, its open eyes scalded and white. Chained to a gutted tree, it had been unable to get away.
The Germans had burned every square inch of Kalavryta. The smoking debris was four feet high in places. Borne by the wind, charred bits of wood spun in the air, so sharp they bloodied O’Malley’s face. For the most part, only objects of metal or stone had survived—door knobs and faucets, dented tin pans. He came upon a cast iron stove in the ruins of one house, looming like a primordial beast in a sea of ash. The local hotel had been leveled by mortars, as had the church.
In the village square, only a single tree was left standing. Even this proved to be a mirage; the tree was not a living thing, only a column of ash that collapsed instantly when he touched it and left a sooty mark across the palm of his hand.
More than three quarters of the houses had been destroyed outright, the rest so damaged as to be completely uninhabitable. Holes large enough to crawl through riddled the walls still standing, bullets having gouged out pox-like patterns in the stone. Like a stage set, a wrought-iron balcony hung off a wall with a carved façade and banged in the wind, the building it had once been a part of almost completely demolished. O’Malley found odd things as he searched for survivors—a Singer sewing machine and a set of keys, a woman’s locket with a broken chain. All the windows in the town had been blown out, every door.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
A vortex of gritty air swirled around him. Somewhere, a dog barked feebly. Like the donkey, it had been trapped in the wreckage and was dying. O’Malley wanted to scream but didn’t dare, afraid once he started, he’d never stop.
He kept thinking he’d turn a corner and everything would be as he remembered it. The air would be clean, flowers and grass living things.
He felt something crunch underfoot and looked down. Beneath his feet, the street was littered with cut-off chicken heads. The birds’ eyes were melted and runny, throbbing with flies.
O’Malley swallowed hard. “Christ Almighty.”
Evidently, the Germans had raided a chicken coop, killed the birds where they found them and thrown the heads out into the street. Afterward, the fire had passed over them and seared them where they lay.
A strange silence hung over the village, the only sound the buzzing of the flies.
Chapter 25
The women could barely stand and held on to one another for support, their skin greasy with smoke. Their faces bore cuts from falling glass, and O’Malley could smell smoke on their clothes. There must have been close to eight hundred of them, standing in front of the wreckage of the schoolhouse. Crowded together, they silently watched Haralambos and the rest of the antartes approach, their eyes full of accusation and grief.
“Now you come!” a woman yelled, picking up a rock and throwing it. “Where were you when they were killing us?”
“Cowards!” another woman cried. “You left us to die!”
“You should have protected us! You were soldiers. You had guns.”
Feverishly, they surged forward and pelted the men with rocks, fistfuls of dirt, anything they could find. “Murderers! Murderers!”
The antartes endured the assault, wiping the spit off their faces and trying not to flinch when a rock found its target. The women continued to claw at them, screaming abuse, until gradually their rage was spent.
Holding up a hand, Haralambos made a placating gesture. “We need to document what happened.”
After conferring with the others, a tall woman eventually stepped forward. Dry-eyed, she described how the Germans had summoned them to the schoolhouse in the night and separated them from their husbands and sons.
“My boy was only twelve and they took him. I kissed him goodbye and told him I’d see him in a few minutes. I couldn’t stop crying. I knew what it meant.”
The soldiers had then locked them up in the schoolhouse. “It has been a prison under the Germans, and there were bars on the windows, so we couldn’t see out. We could feel the heat of the fire and we were afraid we would burn to death. Everyone was screaming.
“We kept pounding on the doors, begging them to let us out, but they ignored us. In minutes, the inferno was upon us, the smoke so thick we couldn’t breathe. Fire was everywhere, in the air, on our clothes, everywhere. Then the roof burst into flames. My daughter’s dress caught on fire and I put it out with my hands.
“Again and again, we cried for the Germans to let us go. I felt like I was suffocating and began to push against the door. The others helped me. We pushed and pushed, shoving and hitting each other as we fought to escape. A couple of old women fell and were trampled underfoot.
“I stepped on the face of a person who was dead. I tried not to, but everyone was crowding me and I
couldn’t go any other way.
“Under the pressure of our bodies, the door of the schoolhouse was forced open. I don’t know how, whether the Germans unlocked it or the lock broke. All I know is one minute we were inside and the next minute we were running down the street.”
* * *
The women began to keen when they saw the bodies in the cornfield. Leonidas and the other men had worked hard to clean the blood off the faces of the dead, but it had been a hopeless task. There’d been too many and too many shots fired. A cold mist was rising and it leeched into the hollow and collected around them.
One woman’s seventeen-year-old was still alive, clutching his stomach and whimpering next to the bodies of his two brothers. O’Malley didn’t know how the antartes had missed him. Perhaps the boy had been unconscious when Haralambos and the others had gone through the cornfield.
“Mana,” the boy cried. “Mana!” Mother.
The rest of the women were not so lucky and fell on the bodies of their dead, screaming and crying. Unlike the old crones who’d sung at Stefanos’ funeral, the keening of these women was animal, torn from viscera, their living flesh. He’d never heard anything like it. It was as if the tortured figure in Munch’s painting, The Scream, had been given a voice.
One woman took off her scarf and wiped the blood off her son’s face, moaning for the antartes to kill her, too, that her life was over. Eventually, the older women organized themselves and began to sing dirges.
My child, alone I raised you.
My comfort, with my own hands I raised you.