To Look on Death No More

by Leta Serafim

  Exhausted, Danae fell asleep almost immediately after reaching the station. But her rest was uneasy and she thrashed around, mumbling to herself and crying out.

  The old woman told O’Malley Danae had been like that since the day she’d found her. Sometimes she was all right and talked like a normal person, other times not. From the beginning she’d had trouble sleeping and would mutter and whimper all night.

  “Baba!” she cried, imitating her. “Baba!” Father.

  “She vomit?” O’Malley asked, thinking Danae might have a concussion. “Her eyes lose focus?”

  “Oxi,” the old woman said, shaking her head. “Einai poli lypimeni.” She has sorrow.

  Later that night, she gave him a pail and asked him to fetch water from the river, saying she wanted to make a broth for Danae, a concoction of grasses and herbs to help her regain her strength.

  The moon was directly overhead when O’Malley emerged from the station, the land before him as bright as day. Pine saplings no bigger than a fist were everywhere, fighting for purchase in the ashy soil. A forest of them, bluish in the moonlight. Miraculously, the fire had released the seeds and blown them here. The scent of them made him think of Christmas and he wondered what day it was, if the holiday had come and gone. Aye, must have.

  He took the saplings’ presence as a sign. Whatever injuries Danae had suffered, physical or otherwise, one day she’d recover just as the forest had.

  Before him, the river glowed like metal, moonlight making a path across it, ripples of light ebbing and flowing with the currant, a roadway almost. Normally, O’Malley would have feared the exposure, but now he took it as a blessing and welcomed it. If the world died, died as it had in Kalavryta, he would aid in its rebirth. It was enough that the moon was there, lighting his way this night.

  Chapter 29

  O’Malley hung a sign outside the depot that said ‘nosokomeio’—hospital in Greek—to keep villagers from thinking he and Danae were up to no good inside. Not that the girl would be up to anything for a long time, not in the state she was in.

  He felt a little drunk, out of breath and jittery. “Grand, us being here,” he told her as he prepared supper that night. “Grand, so it is.”

  At first, the two of them had been formal with each other, asking politely where each had been when the Germans arrived and what they’d done. The way folks in Ireland did when a bridge washed out and they had to go around, had a spot of bother.

  Danae was too weak to sit up and he held her in arms. To celebrate, he’d wanted to prepare a feast for her, roast one of the goats and give it to her whole, but given her fragile state, he thought it would be unwise and had settled on the old lady’s broth instead.

  She had a hard time swallowing.

  “Take your time.” He tipped the spoon in her mouth. “There you go.”

  Between mouthfuls, Danae told him about the old woman. “I would have died if Kyria Anna hadn’t found me.”

  “That her name, Anna?”

  “Yes. Anna Plakotaris.” She studied him. “She said she heard there was a foreign soldier waiting at the train station for me. She said all the women in Kalavryta were talking about it.” Danae smiled awkwardly. Unsure of him now.

  “It was me, if that’s what you’re asking. Lost my wits for a time after you went missing.” He gave her another spoonful of soup. “Why didn’t your Anna speak up? Say that she’d found you?”

  “She was afraid. She didn’t know who you were or what you wanted.”

  He scrapped the spoon across the bottom of the pan. “Eat up, my girl. Everything’s going to be all right. Your hair will grow back and you’ll be yourself again.” He couldn’t stop smiling, buoyed up by her presence.

  “No, it won’t.”

  “What’s that you’re saying? Of course it will.”

  “I’ll never be myself again. She’s gone, Angle, the girl you loved. She got burned up in the fire.” Danae spoke without emotion, as always, simply stating the facts.

  “Nonsense. Aren’t we sitting here together, you and me, same as we ever were? Me wanting to have my way with you, to run my hands all over you, and you having none of it.”

  He worked to keep his voice light.

  “In full bloom, so we are.”

  * * *

  Danae closed her eyes. “Sometimes at night I see my father. The dead are more real for me than the living.”

  Earlier that day, O’Malley had been heading off to fetch firewood when she’d asked to come along. He’d hesitated for a moment, afraid the journey would prove too much for her, but then agreed, thinking the fresh air might do her good. She kept up well at first, but then lost her balance and would have fallen if he hadn’t grabbed her. He helped her to sit down on the ground and covered her up with his flokati. The clouds were gone, the sun so bright on her head that he could see her wounded scalp, count each matted strand.

  Noticing the stain on the flokati, she gave him a questioning look.

  “Horse splintered her leg,” he said. “Bled out in my arms.”

  “Elektra?”

  “Aye, Elektra.” He was embarrassed by the thickness in his throat. “Great, thundering savage, she was. Rope couldn’t hold her. ’Twas all my fault, her dying like that, my fault entirely. I should have tied her down better, but I hadn’t the heart. I liked the wildness in her, the spirit. It was like riding the wind, being on the back of her. Glorious.”

  A wave of color overtook him and he blushed furiously. “You think I’ve gone and lost my mind, grieving over a horse in this kingdom of night.”

  She shook her head.

  “What then?” There was something in her face.

  “We are the same, Angle, only for you the hurt does not show. You have no wounds people see.” She hesitated, struggling to find the right words. “But still you hurt. You’ve seen too much death. You can’t get away from it. Day or night, you’re always in the war.”

  O’Malley felt tears start in his eyes. “I hear it in my head, I do. Can’t seem to turn it off. The whining of the bombs and the earth quivering when they hit, buildings caving in and women screaming. See the faces of the men I fought with, hear ’em crying out as they die. Truth be told, I never was much of a soldier, Danae. Couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear the sounds of battle, the purpose of it—men dying at my hand.”

  She reached up and touched his face. Her bandage was leaking and she left a faint skim of blood on his cheek.

  “And still you cry for a horse.”

  * * *

  Danae picked up a walnut and rolled it around. “My aunt and I were out gathering walnuts the day the Germans came. My father had returned from the mountains and we were rushing around, trying to get ready to leave for Coroni. Aunt Toula didn’t think we had enough to eat and she wanted some walnuts to take with us.”

  She looked off for a moment, her face full of sadness. “Remember Stefanos, how afraid he was, how his teeth would chatter? I was like that when I heard the trucks. Still, I thought we’d have time. I never thought they’d get to us.

  “A local woman was bringing water up from the river. I remember the way she paused, the look on her face. Even though they were still far off, we could all hear them. The woman’s clothes were damp, glistening with drops of water from the river. I know it’s silly, but I thought they were crying—her clothes, I mean.”

  Raising her arm, Danae threw the walnut into the river. The movement caused her fingers to bleed a little, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “And then, suddenly, there were soldiers everywhere. How they gleamed, those soldiers with their buckles and their guns—like freshly pressed coins, I remember thinking. That afternoon, they started taking things out of people’s houses, but my family didn’t have much and they quickly moved on. It took them two days to empty all the houses. After they finished, they loaded everything up on the train and I thought that would be the end of it. Maybe they’d hang a few hostages, but then we’d be free of them. But then, when it
was still dark outside, they woke us with bullhorns and told us to go to the schoolhouse.”

  A true winter’s day, all was quiet save the wind, knocking the branches of the trees together. No living thing but us, O’Malley thought. Aye, it was a suitable landscape for what he was hearing.

  “The soldiers were polite at first. They told us to bring food and blankets; we were going to be resettled. One of them said something to my father and waved for us to go back to the house. I think now he was trying to warn us, but my father didn’t understand German and we kept walking. Kalavryta was on fire by then. I stopped and watched it burn for a moment, then ran to catch up with the others.”

  The haunted look in her eyes grew more intense.

  “They separated us when we got to the schoolhouse. ‘All males over fourteen,’ the soldiers said, but they took a lot of boys I knew who were younger. Two old men from my neighborhood were clinging to each other like they were drowning and all around me people were crying—even the men—crying like girls. They took my father away with the rest. He embraced me and told me to be brave. They marched them off and shut the rest of us up in the schoolhouse. Then the guns went off and the women all around me started screaming. They went on screaming for a long time. I put my hands over my ears. I didn’t want to hear.”

  Holding a wake, she is, O’Malley judged. A wake with neither whiskey nor laughter, with only me in attendance.

  “I was standing next to a window, looking out, when the shots came. It was very strange. Inside, the women were screaming, and outside, everything was the same—the mountains and the fields, just as they had always been, places my father would never go again.”

  Migrating birds had appeared in the valley the previous day, hundreds of them, rising and falling in fragmenting clouds of wings and chatter. They’d settled in the trees by the stream and O’Malley watched them for few minutes, not knowing what to say to Danae or how to begin to console her.

  “I was about a quarter of a mile away,” he finally said. “Watched the whole thing through binoculars. Germans herded them into a cornfield and killed them. Went fast, Danae. Soldiers were efficient; they didn’t linger at the task.”

  There was more he longed to share with her, but he held his tongue. What good would it do to hear how the men had sung as they died, showed the flag as the Germans shot them down.

  “Went fast,” he repeated.

  Danae continued on as if she hadn’t heard. “One of the women pushed past the soldiers and started running. They caught her, dragged her up the steps and threw her in again. Another woman was holding a baby, and the soldiers knocked the baby out of her hands. The baby cried for a moment when it hit the floor, but then it went quiet, and I didn’t hear it again. A soldier who’d been guarding us picked up the baby and handed it back to the mother, made a gesture as if to say he were sorry. It had been the others who had done it, not him. Then he shut the door again.

  “The fire was very close by then. I lost sight of my aunt. I looked around and tried to find her, not wanting to be alone.” Her voice was hoarse. “But everything was burning and my aunt was lost. Everyone started pushing against the door and somehow we got out. My aunt fell down and they trampled her. I tried to get her up, but a burning piece of wood fell on me and set my hair on fire. Anyway, it didn’t matter. My aunt was dead. Outside, it was chaos. You never heard such sounds.

  “I was afraid the soldiers would come back, and I looked around for a place to hide. The hutch where my father kept the rabbits would be big enough, I told myself. No one would think to look for me there.

  “When I got there, I opened the door and crawled inside. It was a flimsy thing, good only for rabbits, rough wood and wire only. I caught my dress and jerked it free. There was a big rip where the nail had snagged it. I was upset at first, afraid of what my aunt would say, but then I remembered she was dead.

  “There were eight or nine rabbits in the hutch. They didn’t like me being there and they fussed for a moment, thumping their hind legs and making noises in their throats, but after a while they settled down again. I turned so that I was against the back wall of the hutch and had the rabbits in front of me, hiding myself behind them. The hutch was filthy, full of rotten vegetables and droppings. It smelled bad and made my eyes water. I could feel the noses of the rabbits, wiggling, and their whiskers working against my skin. They felt warm against me—like a blanket almost—and I felt safe lying there with them.

  “It wasn’t bad. I just lay there, feeling the hardness of the wood, the warmth of the rabbits. Fighting not to feel anything else. Not to cry. My head was bleeding and my hands hurt, but that was all. Then I heard someone making choking noises and I thought for a moment it must be the baby in the schoolhouse, the one who’d fallen on the floor. It was a helpless sound, a bleating almost. Then I realized it was me. I was the one making the sounds. In the distance, I could hear women screaming. After the soldiers finished at the schoolhouse, they turned on the animals, bringing out oxen and mules and shooting them, too—animals that were too big for the trucks.

  “I saw a group of soldiers joking in the field behind our house. It was easy to see through the wire and they were nearby. One of the men was holding up something he’d stolen, and the others were teasing him about it. It was the chalice from my church.

  “The fire soon reached me and it was very smoky in the hutch and I couldn’t breathe. I was afraid the Germans would hear me coughing and I grabbed one of the rabbits and buried my face in its fur.” A tear rolled down her face. “I clutched it so hard I broke its back.

  “After the soldiers left, Kyria Anna found me and gave me some food. She wanted to take me back to the shed where’s she was staying—they burned her out, too—but I didn’t want to go. She told me I was lucky, that the Germans had killed over a thousand people that day and burned all the houses. She kept saying how lucky I was.

  “I didn’t feel lucky. I stayed in the hutch. It was very cold, but I didn’t care. I thought about my aunt and my father, the baby I’d seen die. I tried to remember them, to hold on to everything I knew about them. Every word they’d said. How they’d looked. My father most of all. I didn’t cry.

  “After the food she brought me gave out, I lived on things I found. Berries and leaves. It was all right. I didn’t care about eating.”

  Chapter 30

  Nightmares continued to plague Danae, and she often woke O’Malley with her cries. ‘Battle fatigue,’ the medics in Egypt had called it, a misnomer if ever there was one. ‘Fatigue’ played no part in what was wrong with those who suffered from it. ‘Battle shock,’ more likely. Like touching a live electrical wire, being in war was. It left no part of a person untouched, the sights and sounds of battle blistering their insides, a kind of emotional gangrene.

  Some people never recovered, and he feared Danae might be one of them. Like the Dada artists, who used paint to work off the horrors they’d witnessed in the trenches during World War I, who drew men with gas masks instead of heads all their lives, amputated arms and hands with no fingers, limbs that were weapons.

  Danae would do the same now, if you gave her a pencil.

  She’d jerk around for hours at night, talking to herself and crying out for her father.

  Hearing her, O’Malley was reminded of the terrible lines from Richard II, when they’d brought word to the queen that her grandsons were dead. “Oh, let me die, that I may look on death no more.”

  It filled him with despair. In her weakened condition, Danae needed to rest. It was imperative. She wouldn’t make it otherwise.

  Unable to stand her crying anymore, he’d woken her up the previous night and tried to comfort her. But the minute he turned her loose, she got into his medical bag and seized one of his scalpels.

  “Spartans cut their hair before going into battle!” she yelled, grabbing a fistful of her hair and sawing it off, then another. “I’m a Spartan and I’m going into battle! I’m going to kill all the Germans!”

  “T
hat’s crazy talk,” O’Malley said. “Put the scalpel down.”

  He thought she was going to commit suicide and tried to wrench the scalpel away, but she fought him for it, screaming and clawing his face.

  It took him until dawn to subdue her. Forcing her down to the floor, he wrapped her up tightly in a blanket, swaddling her like a baby. “Hush now,” he kept saying, stroking her ruined hair. “Hush now.”

  O’Malley had learned the technique in a hospital ward, the ward where they kept schizophrenics, people irretrievably lost.

  * * *

  Two days later, O’Malley followed the river back to the place where he’d seen the quail and shot eight of them. Threading them onto a stout branch, he rigged up a spit and roasted them, When the birds were cooked, he cut strips of meat off and fed them to Danae, who devoured them eagerly.

  He glanced over at her and smiled. “Good, huh?”

  She was gnawing contentedly on a bone. Putting the bone down, she smiled back at him. A fleeting thing it was, that smile. Sunlight on water.

  He retrieved the two goats from the field where he’d left them and turned them over to the old woman, who made feta out of the milk, pouring it in a vat and sprinkling salt on it, leaving it by the fire to ripen.

  Well pleased, the old woman did a little dance when the chore was done, clapping her hands together and whirling around unsteadily. Reaching for O’Malley’s hand, she endeavored to dance kalamatiano with him, humming off-key a song from the region. He’d gone along with it, blushing furiously.