The Road to Ithaca

by Ben Pastor

  She shrugged. Whether or not she was used to working while smoking, it was clearly her habit to speak without removing the cigarette from her mouth. She said, “If they discover an important site or artefact, naturally they will share none of it with anybody until it’s published under their name.”

  “I noticed that in Pendlebury’s Archaeology of Crete, the accurate line drawings are mostly the work of female colleagues, whom he generally refers to as ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs’. And that, I suppose, regardless of their academic titles.”

  “Is that important?”

  “I’m asking. Rank matters in my profession. What I’m also wondering is whether those two, the Swiss and the Englishman, ever transcended an intellectual disagreement.”

  She looked at him as if curious to know where he was going with this. “Villiger worked for your Race Office, it was a known fact. I told you we didn’t care for his company. Is that transcending?”

  “Hardly. Just for the record, do you mind telling me how you learnt about his death, and when?”

  “We heard that his country house was attacked, and everyone in it killed.”

  “We as in – you and your husband?”

  Her distrust became a hard, dry look. “You’re not going to lead me into a trap. Andonis left home the day you invaded. News of the killing reached town last Sunday.”

  “But by then you were already in German custody, were you not?”

  “I was arrested by that fascist kowtower, Kostaridis, and turned in to your command. Regrettably, German is a language that must be mastered by anyone who delves into archaeology. I overheard two of your men” (“They’re not my men,” Bora commented) “say that paratroopers killed a Swiss citizen at Ampelokastro, and there might be repercussions.”

  “Is that what you heard?”

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  It was news to Bora, in fact. To sound her out, he switched to German. “Actually, Villiger and his household were killed by Italian weapons, such as were found at your place.”

  She fired back in the same language. “Well, maybe the Italians killed him, then.”

  Sure, at that time the Italians were moaning and groaning about being assigned to Ierapetra, clear across the island. And Sidheraki might have left home, but not his activism: Kostaridis says the weapons were new, but not unused, when their house was searched twenty-four hours after the murder.

  “That’s unlikely, Ma’am. Speaking of Italians, there’s another fellow you might have met – a scholar called Pericles Savelli, who used to work at the museum in Rhodes.”

  “Savelli? No. The only Italian I knew of, in spite of his surname, was the late Professor Halbherr. Cretans say that he can still be seen riding his coal-black mare at midday.”

  “They would, wouldn’t they?”

  “I’m sure you have your own superstitions.” She didn’t put out the cigarette this time. She sent the stub flying through the air with a flip of two fingers. “Before you think we ostracized Wimpy Villiger, keep in mind that he never invited us colleagues over, which is uncommon among expatriates. In March, when John and I decided to drop by unannounced, his field hands shouted us away without letting us set foot inside the gate.”

  “Did they set a watchdog on you?”

  “No, there was no dog around. Just those blonde-haired young ruffians. The Turk on the hill next door was much more neighbourly.”

  “Ah, Rifat Bey.”

  “Something like it. Now, he has dogs, which he keeps tied up. We drank wine and raki, and he showed us interesting surface finds from his vineyard.”

  Bora nodded, but was thinking, Which is more – or less – than he showed Kostaridis and me.

  “He told us Wimpy had been crossing the property line to dig for artefacts in his absence, and when he caught him red-handed he opened fire on him to make him quit.”

  “I believe it.”

  “He hated his guts, I think.”

  “But he welcomed two strangers like you into his house.”

  “Well, not into his house. We sat under the trellis outside. In town we heard we shouldn’t take it personally, as he stopped having company when his wife died.”

  “So you see there are reasons why a man might not invite people over.”

  They’d been silent, and Frances was about to consider a third smoke, when Kyriakos’ great-aunt appeared on the threshold of her little house, like the witch in a fairy tale. In the gathering dusk, she summoned the American with a wave of her hand, and Bora came too. They were told how to reach her place outside mesa pharangi. She would join them there, as soon as she had finished her chores and talked to her neighbour.

  “Are you two married?” she asked Frances Allen, who did not translate for Bora. But he understood the word “cousin” in her reply, and the implied expectation that they come across as related, if not exactly familiar.

  The old woman’s hut (she called it kaliva) could be reached by leaving the gorge from the side opposite to that by which they’d entered. Passing in front of the house where he’d seen the red-headed girl, Bora couldn’t help glancing that way. Yes, I have my own superstitions. A candle, or oil lamp, or small fire burned upstairs; the blue curtain let the glimmer through, like a vigilant eye. It wasn’t quite dark yet; an indoor light should not be so visible, but it was.

  Outside mesa pharangi, evening was still to come. A diffuse luminosity filled the air with the transparency of glass. Where the sunrays still reached, yellows took on a sulphur tinge, greens turned golden. A cut-out of sea visible from here trembled like molten lead. The higher massif facing Pirgos to the south – Mount Voskerò – allowed Bora to orient himself even better than his compass. The name, Allen said, had to do with pastureland. If place names didn’t lie, and if Kyriakos hadn’t gone to sell meat, he could have brought his herd to feed on Voskerò. But then he’d already have come back.

  Beyond a chain of rolling hills below, directly to the east, sat Kamari, the village where Savelli said he roomed. North of it, Sphingokephalo emerged, an island from a sea of vineyards, whose greenness the shadow cast by the mountain dulled into grey. The ochre house crowned its top, and just below, on a separate knoll, the white curd of the Sphinx memorial still glimmered.

  “What are you looking at?” Frances Allen enquired, and when Bora told her, she came back with a snub. “That tacky imitation temple!”

  Maybe. Despite the Turk’s hostility and contrary advice from Kostaridis, the day before Bora had refused to leave Sphingokephalo before visiting the monument. At midday, the sunlit whiteness of the marble had made it into a beacon of snowy light, a clump of ice or frozen cloud nesting on its conical height. Lizards zigzagged up the dusty climb, from one meagre stringy-leafed bush to another. Bora recalled how at first sight the four lion-bodied women, crouching towards the cardinal points, had seemed identical to him; their faces, however, showed a progression from serenity to desolation. They guarded a tall, plain sarcophagus under a circular canopy, and he’d sat there a few minutes, staring down at Villiger’s house. The cut just received from Rifat Bey’s grazing shot stung on his temple. So he’d gathered on his fingertip a bead of blood from the broken flesh and left it as a signature on the marble step. Tonight, while dusk swallowed the landscape, the familiar, incomplete film culminating in Villiger’s death still rolled in his mind. In a freeze-frame, the runaway Powell crouched in the ditch and craned his neck to spy on the German patrol; in another, the paratroopers came slogging through, armed to the teeth; in another yet, the garden wall screened from view what happened once they crossed the front gate. Bora recalled how, from his lookout near the Sphinxes, he couldn’t see the window where Kostaridis had first pointed out the monument to him. The garden palms seemed to conceal Ampelokastro altogether, yet from below a gap in the leafage allowed a view of the facing hill. A tacky fake temple? Maybe. When you walk around it, at any point at least one of the Sphinxes looks your way, and everyone knows the Sphinx asks impossible questions; if you fail, you di
e.

  It came to him now that trees and shrubs not only screened the villa from above; they could also, on the ground, conceal others from the patrol passing through. Men lying low in the garden could then go in for the kill. Maybe there aren’t wrong answers: only wrong questions.

  A slippery spot forced Bora to regain his balance by treading on a growth of wild marjoram or thyme, he wasn’t sure. He smelt the spiciness of mashed leaves. Evening made scents – and feelings, and reason – more acute. The slope at this end of the gorge was tricky; soon he and Frances had to watch their steps to avoid falling headlong.

  The old woman’s hut sat on a ledge at the end of a tumbledown trail no wider than two feet. It mostly resembled an oversized kennel built with pale fieldstone. A gnarled almond tree, long past blooming, grew next to it, and the usual scrub of spiny bushes, thistles and burs. Kyriakos’ mandra was unseen but had to be further down; not far, as Bora recognized the incline negotiated on arrival.

  “Wait here,” he told his companion, and slipped the gun out of its holster. He reached the door, which was ajar, pushed it with his knee, and looked in. Only after he was satisfied there was no one hiding inside did he hunch to keep from striking his head on the lintel and walk in. Stepping back out, he found Frances Allen sitting on a flat rock by the entrance, with a cigarette between her lips. She’d dropped her sack on the ground and now motioned for the lighter.

  Bora stretched it her way. “Here, but it’s the last smoke of the night. I don’t want anyone to smell us without even seeing us.”

  “Any other orders?”

  “Yes. If you have to do any grooming, please do it while there’s still light.”

  Whatever snide comment Frances might have had on the tip of her tongue, she kept from making it. She returned the lighter and put away the cigarette. She was about to shoulder her sack when Bora intervened. “Leave it here, if you don’t mind. Take whatever you need, but not the sack.” She irritably fished out toilet paper and a handful of white cloth, which was how Bora knew his ill-fated undershirt had been cut into strips. It also meant she owned scissors, or a utility knife. He’d worry about that later. He was tempted to suggest that blood – menstrual blood, too – was sure to attract dogs, and she had better dispose of what she’d finished using. But he felt that would be too much. He handed her instead a full canteen and a bar of soap in its neat Bakelite box. On her return, they ate a quick meal. Afterwards, under her scrutiny, Bora rinsed the food tins and put them back in his rucksack along with the forks they’d used. He’d flatten the containers with a rock and bury them in the morning. Frances did not offer to help. She sat circling her knees, and as he’d given her permission to smoke the last cigarette of the day she seemed better disposed towards him, or else the waning light mitigated the scowl on her face.

  Bora took advantage of the possibility for a new conversation. “Just for the record, do you suppose Dr Villiger could have been trafficking in archaeological finds?”

  “You ought to know if he was. He worked for you. Or do you really believe photographing peasants is what he was really doing?”

  “I wouldn’t be asking if I knew.”

  “I told you how the Turk opened fire on him. And John was furious after hearing reports that Wimpy paid peasants to bring him things from remote burial sites.”

  Both circumstances would make Villiger jittery, not to speak of his three passports and whatever else he was up to in Crete. In retrospect, his cover as travelling scholar smacks of those we call kaltgestellt, dormant agents waiting to be activated. Is it a coincidence that he was “planning a trip”, as he told Savelli, and looking into sea travel two weeks before our invasion? If he was ours, he had good reason to stay away from the Brits. If he also worked for the Reds, he had good reason to stay away from us and from the Reds. Bora contemplated a handful of dim lights trembling into existence across the fields below. Iraklion was a distant scatter of dots, half-seen twinkling by the invisible sea. The photos of ancient artefacts in the roll seized from Savelli – it might be worth showing them to Frances Allen tomorrow. He crouched on his heels, feeling in his muscles the weariness of the day.

  “I imagine there can be valuables, easily moved, found in such remote sites.”

  She leaned her back against the stone jamb of the door. “If you mean those that can easily be pocketed, the most desirable are gold-leaf jewels and such. Many were discovered in Mokhlos, quite a distance from here, to the east. Early Minoan, mostly, 2500–2200 BC. The votive, toy-shaped double-axes in gold, too. Faience plaques. And then seals for signet rings, in agate or haematite, representing animals fighting or flowers – coveted by museums and private collectors. But you have to know your seals; it’s their antiquity and not their semi-precious material that makes them valuable. Farmers and shepherds – call them unscrupulous or ignorant or simply in need of money – will grub in the their backyard or pasture, messing into holes or through masonry to get them. They’ll do it on commission, too. There’s no teaching them that an object removed from its original site loses its documentary value, not to speak of the wanton demolition of ancient structures.” She made her smoke last, judging by the frugal draws that revived the tip of her cigarette. “Is that why you pretended to be interested in antiquity – because you wanted to know about Villiger?”

  “That, too. But assuming that being German means being dense is – what did you call it? – a skewed idea. My grandfather encouraged Arthur Evans when he first started his archaeological work at Knossos.”

  “Your grandfather encouraged Evans? Right! You’re just pretending.”

  “I’m not. Grandfather lived in Chanià at the time, knew him and eventually published the four volumes of his Palace of Minos in German. He still tells of how upset Evans was that his old man gave him a sister at seventy years of age. In fact, she’s only a year older than my mother.”

  “You could have read all that in books.”

  “Save the family details, I could have.”

  “But it doesn’t change a thing. For all your standing up when I stand up and all your good manners, culture doesn’t make you better.”

  “Forgive me for saying it, Mrs Sidheraki, I believe it does.”

  Mount Pirgos, after 8 p.m. I write this final addendum as long as I can see the page. The place where we wait, and might spend the night for all I know, has been appropriated by Kyriakos’ great-aunt, but – I have this from Miss Allen, who just heard it from her first-hand – it used to belong to the town whore. Porne is the polite Greek word, though I’m sure there are less friendly local terms for the profession. She’s reportedly gone up in the mountains with the Enghlesoi, or to town with the Yermanoi. Understandable: there are no males left at mesa pharangi! The advantage, as I see it, is that inside there are pallets (mattresses would be a big word) for the women to sleep on. I don’t want to catch fleas or worse, and besides I mean to keep an eye on the door, so I sit outside. If Kyriakos is told by the old woman’s neighbour that he’s to stop here before he returns to the mandra, I’ll be the first to hear him approach. I’m willing to bet he’s long known the way here, and that there have been a few scuffles among customers in front of the porne’s door. Didn’t Philip Walton and I fight like dogs over Remedios in that Spanish cemetery? We did. That brawl, its reasons and its outcome, I remember full well. But with Preger, it was before girls.

  After darkness overtook slope, mountains and valley alike, a welcome cool breeze rolled from the interior. Still parched from the day, Bora wished he could take his clothes off to enjoy it fully. But he crouched there, dressed and watchful instead. As planned, he let the two women sleep inside, in a windowless inner room, and he stood guard on the threshold. The door was ajar: at any time he could step in to check on things. He did silently remove Allen’s sandals from her side, to discourage her from trying to sneak away.

  Waking was no chore. A few minutes at a time, with his eyes closed, were all he needed to recover from the day. Shepherds, warriors, wandere
rs had kept watch for thousands of years in places like this, maybe in this very place. The waxing moon, four days away from fullness, was already high; it weeded out the crowd of stars and mitigated the dark. According to Frances Allen, the transparent air and the moon’s paleness indicated a change in the weather, of rain coming. If so, there was no other sign of it. Beyond the dimly perceivable landscape of ridges and dales, an irregular mountain range, higher at its southern end, rose in the distance to separate the Iraklion district from the eastern third of the island, which the Italians were meant to administrate. It seems peaceful, but the moment the village dogs bark, we’ll be in for whatever comes down the mountain. It could be Kyriakos, or someone else entirely. Bora couldn’t have slept even if he had wanted to. As usual around this time, he passed the blade of a safety razor over his cheeks and chin to keep a perfect shave. Habitual gestures, which could be interrupted any time. The night before their death, Villiger and the others at Ampelokastro were as steeped in routine as he was now – unless the battle for Crete, drawing to a close, kept them alert and fearful. Who knows, by then, the two British soldiers Kostaridis spoke of could already be lying dead and robbed of all identification not far from the villa, a reminder that war reaches everywhere. Who killed them, and had the household heard those shots? Unless the field hands, with orders to keep strangers away… Stray, exhausted soldiers can be surprised and overwhelmed. Yes, Villiger’s field hands, or Rifat Bey’s thugs, could have ambushed the two Britons. Or else they were additional victims of Siphronia’s in-laws, ready to take advantage of the convulsed situation to settle the score with her. They were shot point-blank and robbed, Cretan style.

  Losing one’s honour is a sensitive subject, not just for women, and not in Crete alone. Hadn’t he gone with Waldo Preger to see where Pastor Wüsteritz hanged himself, beyond the marsh and past the “house with eyes”? The suicide was no longer hanging from the noose but the overturned stool he’d used still lay there, as did his shoes. In the gaping void of the abandoned factory, the boys were startled by a flight of doves that sought the paneless windows to escape. “It’s the devil,” Waldo had superstitiously said, and Martin had answered, “God won’t let the devil use doves.” We were both wrong that time. Crouching by the porne’s hut, Bora didn’t fall asleep, he simply went from an image to the next as the mind does, wandering so far that it might as well leave the body. If he closed his eyes he no longer imagined himself in Moscow; Moscow and Russia were at the opposite edge of the universe: it seemed impossible that God willing he’d soon ride across its borders with an invading army. This was Crete, where time stood still. This island is like a wheel, where time circles round. Crete is a time machine where recollections keep churning, and wherein I’ve fallen at my own risk.