by Leta Serafim
You were beautiful and pure like an angel.
Don’t go away, my child. Come back ….
Unable to stand it, O’Malley left the field. But the sound of the grieving women followed him, seemed to reverberate in his skull and fill it with spiders.
They stayed in the cornfield all that night and the next, keeping the dead company as was the custom. The antartes offered to build a fire for them, but they chased them away.
“Leave us! You killed them!”
Furies and harpies and gibbering fools, they stayed up until dawn, talking to the dead. Sometimes they grieved, their voices heavy with sorrow; other times they shouted out in anger, distraught at being abandoned by their murdered husbands and sons, forced to face the long years ahead alone. At dawn, they rose as a group and set about digging the graves. They had no shovels and had to rely on tree branches and bits of crockery, broken tiles from the rooftops of the ruined houses. A light snow had fallen, and it was very cold.
Again, the antartes volunteered to help. “We’re soldiers. Let us do this for you. Let us dig the graves.”
The same tall woman as before stepped forward. “Soldiers shoot soldiers,” she said. “They don’t put women and children in harm’s way.” She gestured at the wreckage of Kalavryta. “In the path of death. You and those men with you?” She spat on the ground. “You’re nothing.”
* * *
Danae had been in the schoolhouse, a woman told O’Malley. Her aunt had stumbled during the rush to escape and been one of those trampled underfoot. Danae had tried to help her up and that was the last time anyone had seen her.
The inside of the schoolhouse was nearly waist-deep in debris. Part of the roof had fallen in and the charred beams shifted unsteadily as O’Malley climbed up over them. Flecked with ash, the air was so murky, he could barely see.
Toula Papadakis lay half-buried behind the entrance. Three other dead women lay next to her, the lower parts of their bodies burned beyond all recognition.
Half mad with grief, O’Malley shifted the wreckage aside with his hands. “Danae! Danae! Where are you, girl?”
Although he dug for more than five hours, he found no trace of her.
He carried the dead women up to the cemetery and buried them. Even with a shovel, it was back-breaking work. After he finished, he retrieved the body of Danae’s father from the cornfield, dug another hole, and laid him to rest next to his son.
He did what he could to mark the graves, piling up stones and scratching out the date on a charred piece of wood. He recited the Act of Contrition and Lord’s Prayer; scraps of Latin he remembered from Ireland. Psalms and phrases he’d been forced to memorize in school.
“For we must die and are as water spilt on the ground which cannot be gathered up again.”
The clock in the blasted bell tower of the church had stopped at 2:34, the hour of the massacre.
* * *
In the days that followed, the women continued to live in the cornfield, laboring on the graves during the day and sleeping beside them at night.
“The residents of Mazeika offered to take them in, but they refused,” Leonidas said. “They don’t want to leave the dead, not even for a minute. The graves are too shallow and stray dogs will come and dig the bodies up and drag them out.” He said the women had asked for a gun to fend off the dogs and he’d given them one.
O’Malley feared sleep now and took to sitting at the edge of the field, keeping watch over the women in the darkness. Occasionally, he’d hear a gunshot and a dog would start to howl. The women weren’t very good shots, and sometimes it took the animal until morning to die, the sounds of its struggle haunting the darkness.
He’d walked through the cornfield late the previous night, searching for one of the wounded animals, determined to put it out of its misery. It had been an unearthly scene. Hundreds of women and children lying on the ground fast asleep, the earth around them pockmarked with graves. The dog had been there, too, its eyes gleaming in the half-light, blood leaking out of its side.
The next morning he’d given the women a lantern and a second gun and offered to kill the dogs for them if they wanted. They’d gladly accepted. A foreigner, he was but a witness to their tragedy, a bystander. He’d had no hand in it.
They approved of his search for Danae and his loyalty to her memory. One of them tore a strip off her black dress and gave it to him to wear as an armband, a symbol of grief.
He’d only cried once. It had been snowing and he’d walked up to the corral to check on Elektra, ridden her a bit. Slipping down from the saddle, he’d stood there a long time, watching the sky and weeping. At one point, he’d buried his head in the horse’s mane. Disturbed by the sounds he was making, she’d stepped away, disappointed in him, or so it seemed. Crying over a single girl in this world of grief.
* * *
O’Malley spent his days with the women, his nights sleeping in the train station. The old depot was one of the few buildings left standing after the fire, and it gave him a feeling of momentary peace to be there, to see the yellowing train schedule on the wall, the advertisement for a local circus. Evidence of human life, he thought. A museum exhibit almost. But his dreams were dark, haunted by death and faces eaten away by fire. He awoke screaming and soaked in sweat.
He remained convinced that Danae was still alive. She’d not have died at German hands. Not her, not Danae. Perhaps she’d fled to another village and would return, suitcase in hand. The longer he stayed in the station, the more convinced he became. Aye, it was only a matter of time until she appeared. The train would arrive and Danae would be on it. It’d happen, sure. He’d have to keep an eye out.
The women in Kalavryta stopped what they were doing and watched him, their faces full of pity. “Trelos,” they said, shaking their heads. Crazy.
“Only a fool would stay in Kalavryta,” they told him. “You should leave.”
Concerned, an elderly woman and her granddaughter joined him there one evening. Settling herself on the bench beside him, she rolled down her stockings, complaining that they were tight and hurt her legs.
“I am old,” she said by way of explanation. “Comfort is everything.”
Her granddaughter tugged at her arm. “Who is he?” she whispered, nodding to O’Malley.
“A soldier.”
“Why isn’t he fighting?”
“He’s lost, child.”
And so he was, O’Malley thought. No point in denying it. Lost in every way known to man.
Both of the Greeks were dressed in black. He wondered how many people they mourned, the extent of their loss.
“Was anyone you know killed in the war?” the old woman asked after they’d exchanged the customary pleasantries.
He nodded. “My fiancée’s gone missing.”
“Ah,” she said as if this explained everything. “What was her name? Your fiancée?”
“Danae.”
She cocked her head, bird-like. “Greek?”
“Yes.” He hesitated a moment. “Greek, so she was, the soul of her.”
“From here?”
“Aye. Kalavryta. Danae Papadakis.”
The old woman closed her eyes. “Is that who you’re waiting for?”
O’Malley’s eyes filled with tears. Again, he nodded.
As gently as she could, she explained that Danae would not be finding her way back to him. “She’s not coming. Not on this train or any other.” She was very patient, the old woman, never saying the word ‘dead’ out loud.
Instead, she concentrated on the train itself. “The Germans use it to ferry timber from the village of Zachlorou to Diakofto,” she said. “Now they’re letting the Red Cross use it. There are never any passengers on it. Never.”
She went on to declare that part of the line had been destroyed by a second group of antartes and she and the others were worried the men in ELAS would blow up the rest, further isolating the village.
The Red Cross could still drop food parcels,
but bad weather might prevent the planes from flying and there’d be hunger. Many people were fleeing the area, an option O’Malley might want to consider. “You should leave Kalavryta. Go back to the war.”
“Never. Not until I find her.”
“Not all the women got out alive, you know. A building might have collapsed on her.”
“She was a wily one, was Danae. It’d not have happened that way.”
* * *
The line of destruction stretched to the mountains and beyond. Deep grooves marred the fields to the east, a legacy of the heavy German trucks, and trees were charred for close to half a mile. O’Malley wondered how long the evidence of the Germans’ coming would remain—how many years—and if Kalavryta would ever be free of it.
The old woman at the train station had hugged him when he started to cry. Held him and rocked him. She’d taken off her cross and hung it around his neck, told him it would protect him when he went into battle. “I can’t fight them. I’m too old. You have to do it for me.”
“Einai pethamenoi,” she’d said gently. “Eisai zontanos. Otan teleiosei o polemos, tha pas stin patrida sou.” She is dead. You’re alive. After the war is over, go back to your country. Go home.
He’d kept the carved animals Danae had given him and he took them out of his pocket and held them in the palm of his hand, fingering the marks his knife had made. Like Danae and the train, they brought him a measure of comfort, served as a kind of talisman. Foolish, he knew, yet he couldn’t seem to help himself.
As a child, he’d done the same with a rabbit’s ear, thinking if he held it in his hand and wished hard enough, his dog would come back to life, start barking and rejoin the living.
His pa had told him things didn’t work that way, no matter what people said. “That thing you’re holding. Didn’t do much for the rabbit, now did it?”
Still O’Malley had clung to it.
He was retracing the route he’d taken the day Stefanos was killed. Sodden with grief, he didn’t feel like meeting up with the antartes yet, and he wanted to sear every second of the boy’s murder in his memory before rejoining them. Arm himself with it, as it were.
The pile of leaves was still there, and he could see evidence of blood where the child had fallen. The snow had softened it, but he could see the outline of the body in the matted grass.
* * *
Von Le Suire’s shadow did not recede until O’Malley was halfway through the gorge. The area around Kalavryta had been completely destroyed; the trunks of the dying pine trees were red orange, their needles curdled, the cones on the ground beneath them as black as grenades. Farther on, the character of the landscape began to ease. Sometimes a tree bore the scars of the fire on one side, but not on the other, a line dividing the living from the dead. The contrast between the two overwhelmed O’Malley and started him weeping again. He saw a single pomegranate tree in the distance, red fruit weighing down its branches. There might be others. He’d have to tell Leonidas, send some men to claim them.
The Germans had bombed the tower not long after the massacre, forcing the antartes to seek shelter elsewhere. Choking from the smoke, they’d sought refuge in Mazeika, but the residents had driven them away, loudly proclaiming their presence would draw the Germans and more people would die.
Cowed by their fury, the antartes had retreated. A few had wanted to join the forces of Aris Velouchiotis to the west, but the rest had argued against it, saying von Le Suire had marched in that direction and there’d be close to three thousand Germans between them and Velouchiotis.
It had been Leonidas who’d made the final decision. “Von Le Suire thinks he destroyed us, if not in Kalavryta, then when he bombed the tower. We’ll be safe in our old camp in the gorge. He’s finished here.”
Twenty antartes were crowded around the campfire when O’Malley arrived. As usual, Haralambos was going on about something while the rest listened, a barstool warrior if ever there was one. Rolling out his bedroll, O’Malley lay down and tried to sleep, the darkness mirroring his own.
Chapter 26
It snowed intermittently, heavy drifts blocking the pass through the mountains and sealing the village off. The women in the cornfield still labored to bury their dead, but they were growing sick now, coughing up blood-flecked phlegm into handkerchiefs, so weak they could barely stand.
O’Malley tended to their wounds, reassuring them that he was a doctor in Ireland and they could trust him to help them. Finding no sterile dressings for their burns, he used sheets and old clothes, sterilized his tools over the flame of a candle. Every morning he checked for fever and listened to the lungs of the sickest ones with his stethoscope. It had been catch-as-catch-can, but he’d done the best he could. The women called him ‘yiatro,’ doctor, or ‘Kyrie Angle,’ the Greek equivalent of Mr. English.
The sound of their pneumonia-driven coughing grieved him, and he radioed the British agent, begging him to send food. “Medicine, too, if you’ve got it. Most of the women are sick. They’re in desperate straits. You got to help them.”
He’d started out aggressively, describing the massacre in great detail, hoping to shame the Englishman into taking action.
“Children, you say?” the man had asked.
“That’s right. Germans shoot every male over the age of sixteen and a lot of boys who were younger, then endeavored to burn the women alive. Diabolical, they were. Diabolical entirely. Before they burned the village, they stole all the food—sheep, eggs, flour, you name it. Forced people to show them where the food was and shot ’em afterwards.”
There was a long silence. Finally, the man said he’d work with the Red Cross and perhaps step up the delivery of supplies. “Securing a plane might take some time. I understand there’s a railroad line that connects Kalavryta to the town of Diakofto. Shipping the food in by rail might work better.”
“Be foolhardy. Germans still control the northern part of the line. ELAS is talking about dynamiting it.”
“Counsel against it, Barabbas. As long as there’s a train, the Red Cross can get food to you. Winter’s closing in and you’re in the mountains. Landing a Dakota under those conditions may well prove impossible.”
O’Malley fought to keep his voice down. It’d do the women in the cornfield no good if he gave out on this caffler.
“We’re living on grass. Grass, you hear? Got no potable water either. Most of the wells are contaminated. Another week and we’ll all be dead.”
The man went on as if he hadn’t heard, “We cannot risk sending a plane in bad weather. Visibility is limited. It’s too dangerous.”
“I repeat: we will die.”
The two of them stayed in radio contact, O’Malley eventually wearing the man down and convincing him to arrange the drop.
He didn’t want the plane to land anywhere near Kalavryta—no reason to bring the wrath of God down on the village a second time—and insisted the pilot use the airfield he’d constructed high above the gorge.
“Tonight. I’ll set out flares and wait for you.”
* * *
The journey to the airfield took O’Malley and Leonidas by the burned-out husk of the monastery. Although nearly two weeks had passed since the Germans lay siege, the rocks where the monks had died still stunk of cordite and death. Vultures were circling overhead, occasionally floating down like black kites cut loose from a string and landing next to a lifeless form on the ground. The birds turned and watched them, their gazes neutral, indifferent to their passing.
O’Malley turned away, not wanting to see what the bird was feeding on, the scraps of black cloth that seemed to be everywhere. He couldn’t stop thinking about the monks flying off into space, their robes fluttering about them like failed parachutes, crying out to God as death rose up to meet them.
The airfield was as he remembered it, a faint sheen of snow covering the runway. After tethering their horses, the two of them dug holes in the icy ground with their hands and set out flares. They had very few and decid
ed to hold off lighting them until they heard the plane approach.
Eager to be off, Elektra pawed at the ground with her hooves. Warmer than the cold night air, she was a hazy vision in the darkness, steam rising from her flanks and pouring from her nostrils. The whites of her eyes glowed faintly in the darkness and made her appear otherworldly, mythical even. A horse a goddess might have ridden.
“Pulling the devil by the tail, are you?”
Horses were the grandest creatures on earth, O’Malley thought. Hadn’t Jonathan Swift himself said so? At a gallop, freer than all, save the birds.
In the old days, the English had forbidden the Irish from owning decent horses. Nags, the Irish had been forced to ride, mules broken by the plow and not long for the knackers. Perhaps that was why the sight of Elektra stirred him so. It was the Irish in him, the ancient yearning of his people to possess such a creature, to race through the countryside and take a fence at a gallop.
Cupping his hands, he lit a cigarette and handed the pack to Leonidas.
They spoke of the coming drop, carefully skirting around the massacre, the horrors they’d witnessed.
“She’s alive, Danae is,” O’Malley said after a time. “Irish say you can sense such things, that a person knows when a soul’s departed. I’d feel it, I would, Leonidas, if she were dead. A little ripple of sorrow passing through the universe.”
Leonidas started to say something, but stopped.
A moment later, the moon appeared. Breaking through the clouds, it bathed the plateau in light. Elektra had stopped her rambling and was staring up at the sky.
“Will you look at that? She’s Pegasus, she is. Mark my words, she’ll be leaving us for the stars one day. Leaving this sad earth behind.”
* * *
The Dakota came in from the east. Breaching the mountain, it dropped straight down until it was almost on top of them, its huge propellers stirring eddies of snow on the ground. It touched down a moment later, rocking back and forth as it lumbered across the field.
The men on the plane waved, threw out the boxes and took off again, eager to be gone from the mountains before the clouds closed in again. O’Malley and Leonidas retrieved the boxes, strapped them to their mounts and led them back down the path to Kalavryta.