The Road to Ithaca

by Ben Pastor

  Love and terror sat on her shoulders like doves.

  The moment his eyes met the girl’s, Frances Allen came up to him from behind. The pale girl sank back into the room, drawing a blue curtain across the window to shut him out.

  She’s gone. She’s gone. Bora had to fight a demented need to strike the American for approaching. The rage was short-lived, and left him something very much like the bleeding pain of a heartbreak. If he’d been by himself, he’d have taken time to knock on that door, climb those stairs, despite his orders and his hopeless task, to make sure it wasn’t – or it was – Remedios. Because when she comes to me again it’s because I’m to die: her face is to me the magnificent face of Death.

  Startled by his reaction, Frances stepped back, out of his reach. “I’ll ask around for Kyriakos. Are you coming along?”

  Bora poured what water remained in his canteen over his head.

  Wherever they knocked, either no answer came from within, or it was uttered as a brusque denial. Invariably, the female voices sounded old, as if the sole young woman among them were the redhead Bora had seen, or thought he’d seen. She’d never answer the door as long as Frances Allen was with me. More than that; if I was with anyone, I’d walk into her house and find it empty.

  At long last, one of the doors opened. An ancient woman – it turned out she was Kyriakos’ great-aunt, as this was the goatherd’s village – peered from a dark interior. Frances explained that Kyriakos wasn’t at the mandra.

  “No? Well, he must have gone with his goats onto the mountain. Who wants him? What do you want him for? If he’s got the herd with him, he comes back before dark. If he’s alone, after dark.”

  Apopse, this evening. Bora knew the word. Frances reported with her usual concision. Even when he went to sell, Kyriakos returned for the night. “She says that he usually stops by her house before going down to the mandra, but we’re not to meet him at mesa pharangi. She’ll leave word with her neighbour for Kyriakos to come to the hut she has not far from the mandra. At dusk we can go with her and wait for him there.”

  “Should we trust her?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  Bora did a quick reckoning. It made no sense to go elsewhere if Kyriakos was the one with the information. It was now close to seven; the risks were not appreciably lower if they kept wandering until dark. “Tell her we’ll do it. There’s only an hour or so to kill until then.”

  The low wall where Frances had sat earlier seemed to have no other function but to serve as a bench. About twenty feet in length, it ran parallel to the street, dividing it. It was closer to the row of houses facing where the old woman lived; three vigorous fig trees spread over it, and it was as good a place as any to while away the time. Bora reached the wall, freed himself of the rucksack, pulled out his diary and began updating the day’s entry. Finally, he thought with male insolence, the American’s enamel is cracking. I may be tired, but she looks fagged out and under the weather. Almost instantly, though, he regretted his own callousness. Hell, I’m losing my manners. After the heat and the long hike, we could both use a pick-me-up.

  From his supplies, he took out a spare canteen where he’d already dissolved a water purification tablet. He sprinkled instant coffee into its lukewarm contents, sweetened it, and shook it well. He then filled the metal cap and gave it to her, while he sipped directly from the canteen. Frances sniffed the drink, touched her lips with it, and immediately tossed it away with a disgusted face.

  Addendum to daily entry. I’m an officer and a gentleman and don’t use the term lightly, but she’s a bitch, and no mistake. Milder or more erudite terms don’t do justice to my companion’s peculiarly American brand of rudeness. I wonder how Sidheraki tamed her – if he did. Kostaridis may be just gossiping (Greeks probably frown on fellow nationals who marry out of the fold); on the other hand, I can see her setting her compass on the suntanned demigod wielding a pickaxe at the dig. As for Andonis – well, marrying an American is the dream of many a European male. I wonder if she planned to take him back to her parents or disappointed him by deciding to set up house in Crete. Kostaridis described their place to me as little more than a two-room affair with a stable and six Italian MAB submachine guns, in the outskirts of the most famous archaeological site on the island, the Palace of Knossos. A “routine check” according to Kostaridis, but if German soldiers carried it out in the company of Cretan police, it was because the latter had tipped us off about Sidheraki’s political activities. For a Greek national, the find would mean the firing squad. She’s an American, neutral and untouchable (for now), all the more since she was away in Iraklion at the time of our landing. Both Cretan and German authorities took the lenient view that she was unaware of the weapons’ presence. Why? Kostaridis’ uncle Nikolaos sailed to New York from the Cretan village of Rapania some thirty years ago. Having told me so in passing, he denies it influenced his decision to buy into Frances’ innocence. As for us, we needn’t irritate the United States at this time. I simply keep in mind that MAB guns were used to fire the rounds that killed the Ampelokastro household.

  It was the sound of food cans hitting the ground that made Bora look up from the page. He turned around, only to see Frances Allen busy groping through his rucksack.

  “Hey! What are you doing?”

  She continued to dig. “Have you got a spare undershirt in here?”

  Bora wrested the rucksack from her hands. “Leave my things alone! What in the world has got into you?”

  “Not into me: I just got my period, you dolt. I need something for it. I’m looking for an undershirt, or anything else cottony. Give it to me. Come on, give it to me.”

  Bora did not move. “Why?”

  “Oh, cripes! You wear a wedding ring, you know what a period is, don’t you? Have you got a goddamned spare or not?”

  “I have.” Rolled into a neat cylinder, the undershirt came her way.

  “Is there any string, too?”

  “Only extra bootlaces.”

  “They’ll do. Give me.”

  Bora did as he was asked. “Here. Don’t bother to say thank you.”

  “Later.” She straddled the wall and clambered out of sight between two houses, over a dry hump of rocks. “I’m in a hurry.”

  Bora carefully rearranged the contents of his rucksack. Such small privacy was granted in the army; he was protective of the few belongings he carried along from time to time. Objects didn’t feel the same to the touch after someone else intruded. He replaced the canvas-bound diary out of reach at the very bottom, with letters and his family snapshots inside it.

  Of course he knew what a period was. But privacy surrounded his wife’s and his mother’s lives at certain times of the month; a look or a word was enough to exclude men automatically from those indispositions. It took him nearly two minutes to realize that it might all have been an excuse; that his guide could be running like a mountain goat out of his reach. He scrambled to reach the back of the house, ready to chase her. When he saw her squatting a few paces off, fumbling with the makeshift sanitary towel, he sank back. He waited around the corner without spying but at hand, in case she took to her heels.

  She found him sitting on the low wall when she returned. “I’m afraid the undershirt won’t be much use to you when you get it back,” she plainly informed him.

  As if I’d want it back after you’d used it, you hag. Bora couldn’t find a reply unkind enough, so he said nothing.

  “And I’ll take some coffee now.”

  “Not if you have to waste it.”

  “I won’t.” She drank this time, not one but three capfuls. “Well, what do you want me to say? That I owe you?”

  Bora had to bite his tongue. He screwed the cap back on and put away his canteen. “If it’s any consolation, Ma’am, I don’t like you either.”

  The words had their effect. Confirming their mutual aversion was useful, as truces can only be declared after you agree that you’re in conflict. Frances Allen surveyed the r
ucksack, safely between Bora’s knees. “I noticed you’ve got cigarettes in there.” She chewed a cuticle off her thumb’s fingernail. “What’ll it cost me to have a pack?”

  Bora fished out a ten-pack, which he laid on the surface of the wall between them. “They’re army issue, and I’m not venal.”

  “Matches, too.”

  He handed her his lighter, “But I’ll need it back.”

  She lit herself a cigarette and for a while took slow drags, looking at the line-up of houses and closed doors across the street. Partly turned from her, Bora resumed writing his entry, locked his diary, capped his pen and put everything away in the rucksack.

  “You’re the orderly type, aren’t you?”

  “Very orderly.”

  “And very organized, I’ll bet.” When she sneered, a web of small wrinkles crowded the outer corners of her eyes. “That’s why you presume you’ll find your man in three days, out of the hundreds who’re dead set on eluding your army.”

  Bora buckled the flap of his sack “I may not find him. As they say, I’m giving it my best shot. God had better be on my side in this one.”

  Behind them, where the western ledge rose high, the arc of the sun dipped slowly. It already grazed the stony rim, so that only the houses at the foot of the opposite ridge were still bathed in orange light. Over the wall where they sat, and across the width of the street, there pooled a warm blueness; the interlacing branches of the fig trees no longer cast a shadow. Like a shrinking cloth, sunlight withdrew to the threshold of the house right in front – where Kyriakos’ great-aunt lived – and began to creep up its front. Bora sat easily, stretching his legs, but his shoulders were unrelaxed and his pistol holster was unlatched.

  “Are you sure?” She spoke with the cigarette in her mouth (she did have a smoker’s mannerisms, and a smoker’s dusky voice).

  “About what?”

  “That God would even consider being on your side. I mean, everyone knows yours killed the folks at Ampelokastro.”

  Bora stared ahead, at the margin of sunlight inching up the facade, hemming whitewash and blue door as the pharangi gradually sank into shadow. Her house further down, the house of the red-headed girl has long been on the evening side. It is evening itself. She’s just a redhead, a Greek girl, but had another woman not been with me, had I journeyed alone, she would have been Remedios, and I’d have been lost. Being saved by the presence of this rude fellow traveller is nothing to brag about.

  “‘Everyone knows’ is hearsay,” he pointed out. “With five people dead, I’m seeking proof.”

  Again that sarcasm, that web of fine lines around her eyes. “Oh, a humanitarian.”

  “Anything but, Mrs Sidheraki. I attended with profit four military schools.”

  Inside the houses, fires were being kindled for the evening meal; the scent of burning twigs and leaves escaped somehow, perhaps from back windows or chinks – no chimneys were visible. To Bora’s nostrils, it overlay the acrid whiff of cigarette smoke next to him. By and by, the limpid air grew fumy. When a rifle shot lost in the countryside rang across it, like a rock thrown into a pond, the sound created ripples; it travelled in rings and circles of echoes.

  Bora paid attention, and waited. The message of an isolated shot can be construed in many ways: but whether it kills, misses or simply warns off, it seldom partakes in an integrated relay of information. Musically, it equals a single, sharp note from which no melody can be learnt. Two, on the other hand, or three… A second report, like a pebble of sound sinking in a pond further away, was followed by a fainter third one, which overlapped its echo. They’re not hunters, they’re signalling to one another across longer distances, which voice alone cannot bridge. Who, what about? Those who eyed us from the ridges and shied off, the old man with the immaculate shirt in the olive grove, those who frowned and said they know nothing… It could be any or none of them. Recurrent calls, rifle shots – it is Allen and I who are notes: they provide the stave.

  Frances ignored the gunshots, like a native accustomed to weapons being discharged for any mundane reason. She’d removed her visor cap and leisurely savoured each breath she took from the army tobacco, looking up at the opaque intricacy of fig leaves above. “Most foreigners have a skewed idea of Crete and what Cretans are like.” She thought out loud. “They see the dilapidated mountain villages, the bare feet, the sheep coats, the occasional drunk sleeping in the sun, and they forget that their ancestors ruled the Mediterranean.” Like her attitude, her speech was also unhurried, full of round vowels, no doubt a feature of southern upbringing despite her college education. “When Ulysses wanted to impress his audience he pretended to be a Cretan prince. Words so identified with Greece by lovers of the Classics, like ‘cypress’ or thalassa, the sea, are in fact Cretan in origin.” She glanced over and flicked ash from the tip of the cigarette, a gesture Bora found mannish in her. “But you wouldn’t understand.”

  The sunlight was now reduced to a ribbon edging the roof, as if a blue tide were about to submerge the house across the street, and those on either side. Elsewhere on the mountain, the advanced day must still be radiant, vistas enormously clear into the distance. Here evening had the advantage. Bora sat up and straightened his back. “Well, we Germans haven’t forgotten Crete’s greatness, apparently, if we seek to count it among our ancestral homelands.”

  “Ha!” She pinched the cigarette butt between thumb and forefinger to smoke it to the last. “That’s why you sent Wimpy Villiger here, with his unfailing camera and hare-brained hypotheses. He wasn’t welcome, you know.”

  “In your British-led midst? I expect not.”

  She let some time pass before answering. As if squashing an insect, she put out the bit of consumed paper and tobacco on the surface of the wall. Mechanically, she pushed the bottom of the straw-coloured pack to extract another cigarette. “Oh, it wasn’t even politics.” She seemed to be weighing whether or not she’d give in to a second smoke. “John – Pendlebury, that is – argued with him over chronology, because Villiger held on to the old dating system created by Aberg, no longer acceptable. Villiger was an amateur.”

  “Of the bungling type or of the Schliemann type?”

  The question suggested some familiarity with her field, which she chose to disregard. “He didn’t discover Troy, if that’s what you mean. He knew his Early Minoan ware, his Middle Minoan frescoes. But he had a ready-made thesis rather than a hypothesis, which got in the way of his scholarship. That’s how John saw it.” The first-name basis with Pendlebury was interesting. Bora took one of his mental notes. “They had a couple of rows, after which your champion understood he was persona non grata, so he stayed away from us. The times he came to the Knossos he drank at a table on his own, reading or taking notes to look less conspicuous. But he stood out anyway, as all of us – locals and foreigners – were all jolly and pretty loud. John definitely spooked him. When British officers first came from Souda last winter and offered a round of drinks over something or other, he crawled out of the room. That’s the last we saw of him at the Knossos. Never mind that some of them physically matched his northern ideal!”

  “Why Wimpy Villiger?”

  “Oh, well, I called him Wimpy, because he reminded me of the comic strip character – you know, Popeye’s oafish friend, big body, small head. The name stuck among us.”

  Bora nodded. For whatever reason, she’s talking to me. He could feel heat leave his body as the temperature around began to slacken, a sensation between pleasure and discomfort. That’s how embers inside a cooling furnace must radiate what remains of their fire. I doubt it’s gratitude for the undershirt or the cigarettes I gave her. In shadow, the lime-based wash on the house fronts turned azure. No. The right term was glaucous, the colour prevalent underwater. Mesa pharangi was a sunken village, much as the palaces along the coast were swallowed millennia before by seaquakes. Maybe it’s because women become difficult before their period comes, and then they mellow out? Useless information so far, excep
t for the report that Pendlebury “spooked” the victim.

  He said, “But you lent Villiger at least one book. I saw your name on a text in his library.”

  “Did I? I don’t recall.” She placed a second cigarette in her mouth and solicited the lighter from him with a half-curl of her fingers. “Thanks. It must have been before John put him in his place.”

  Pressing her for details might make her silent again, so Bora let her go through half of her smoke before skirting the subject. “I gather that yours must have been exclusive drinking parties at the Knossos. But it can’t be a state secret, chatting about archaeology over brandy. Of course, your Greek husband participated with the rest.”

  “Andonis is not the drinking type.”

  “And you are?”

  She defiantly blew smoke through her nostrils. “I could outdrink you, Captain.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Ma’am.” Bora didn’t show that he was amused, much less what he was thinking. I wouldn’t advise you to try it: after the stint in Moscow, I can drink men twice your size under the table.

  “What’s the use of talking, anyhow? Both John and Villiger are dead.”

  “We have no confirmation about Pendlebury, but Villiger is definitely dead. At least one of the two is beyond reproach.”

  “You’ll know whether you killed John Pendlebury; he had a glass eye.”

  “Really? I wasn’t aware we killed him. No business of ours, shooting scholars who stick to scholarly business.” Bora checked the time on his watch. Kyriakos was late; he must be returning without his herd, which meant he wouldn’t arrive until dark. If he was anywhere on this slope, however, no matter how far away, he’d have heard the rifle shots. And he might decide to stay away. It’s difficult, getting down to business with her. She strings me along with the hope that we won’t harm her husband; she doesn’t believe me, much less trust me. “I’m no expert,” he decided to add, “but I have the impression that archaeologists – whether or not lit with a sacred fire – are competitive prima donnas.”