by Ben Pastor
“Forgive me, but that’s a rather romantic delusion of what life is, on this island or anywhere else.”
“How would you know? I bet your female relatives drink their tea with their little finger sticking out.”
Bora was amused. “I wouldn’t say so. Great-grandmother Carrick was a middle-aged widow when Graf Zeppelin taught her to fly, and died in Katmandu at nearly ninety years of age. ‘A woman must be able to converse with the crown prince and preserve fine pickles.’ That was her motto. Women in my family look sweet but do what they want.”
“Maybe.” She was sinking into the darkness, disappearing; her voice came as if disembodied. “You don’t look like you know what freedom is. You’re all spick and span and ramrod, conversing in your first-rate English as you converse in your first-rate German. Don’t you think war will end up ruffling you?”
“I hope it does more than ruffle me, frankly. But in the dispute between Apollo and Dionysus, Mrs Sidheraki, you’ll excuse me if I choose order over irrationality.”
She started to massage her left foot. “Does your wife agree?”
“My wife is exactly like me.”
“Ooh, I bet you have fun.”
“Be sure, my wife and I have more fun than you’d imagine.”
And Dikta is nearly young enough to be your daughter, was on the tip of Bora’s tongue, where it stayed.
There was a pause, and then low, throaty laughter on her part. “Are you offended?”
“You couldn’t possibly offend me, Ma’am.”
“Come, give me a light and say something about yourself. Didn’t you have a place like Enchanted Rock in your childhood?”
Bora did not respond at once. She smoked, and the tip of burning tobacco was like a winking red eye in the gathering dark.
“Well,” he chose to say in the end, “when I was twelve, one day my brother Peter and I got it into our heads to ride to a place called Serpenten, for no other reason than the name fascinated us.”
“Serpenten as in ‘snakes’?”
“Right. From the Trakehnen train station you could go north and cross the highway. Leaving the great turf beds of East Prussia to your right, you’d then take any of the lanes intersecting along the banks of the Rominten. We didn’t want to waste time, so we followed the route to Dalneitschen and cut across the field past the crossroads, because there was no track leading west on that side. Where the woods began, the track began again, and we reached the few large farms, estates and country homes that made up the village. It goes without saying our parents didn’t know where we were. Peter felt safe because he was with me, and I just never felt lost. What a disappointment. In Serpenten, fabulous name notwithstanding, there wasn’t much to do. So we decided to take a detour to the river bank. It was then an easy bike ride down the country road to Szirguponen, and along the Rodupp Canal back home.”
“Tongue-twister place names aside, is that all?”
“That’s all.”
“It’s not much of a story.”
It was all Bora was willing to say. In truth, as he and his brother had lazily sat in the grass at Serpenten, out of the blue – having just studied the geological eras at school – he’d lightly commented, “One day this place will no longer exist.” Peter, who was tender-hearted those days, burst out crying at the words. Martin made things worse by adding, with a wickedness he didn’t know he had, “One day we’ll no longer exist, and neither will our parents and our horses and everything.” By which time he felt rather sorry and in need of weeping himself. He’d always tried to avoid hurting his brother. To this day, he couldn’t imagine why he’d acted that way in Serpenten.
“That can’t be all,” Frances Allen insisted. “What kind of a recollection was that? Is that how boring your childhood was?”
Bora drew back his legs, rested his elbows on his knees. “Compared with yours, I think so. The land bordering our place in East Prussia belonged to my stepfather’s family. After the properties were combined, there was no end to the rides, walks and rowing trips we could take then. No wild Indians, of course, but as long as the general stayed behind in Leipzig (or Dresden, or Berlin), Peter and I ran wild. We came within inches of drowning, breaking our necks, sinking in bogs. Our mother and especially our grandmother, if she was there, gave us reasonable advice and let us go. With Father on the premises – well, you imagine the routine, being from an army family. Flag-raising in the presence of the entire family and staff at six in the morning, followed by a prayer for Germany. Barracks – punctual meals, one hour minimum of reading and commentary of Clausewitz’s On War, music practice – Peter threw his violin out of the window twice – plus lessons personally supervised by Father: horse care, dead reckoning, bookkeeping – here I threw the ledger out of the window – and endless tours of barley, rye and potato fields. We largely behaved until he left again. The moment the train moved out of the station, off went shoes and shirts and on came the warpaint. It was – what’s the right word? – blissful fighting with the local boys and playing tricks on their sisters until his next visit.”
“That’s a little more like it.” She jealously sucked on her cigarette stub to the end. “But it’s hard to see you as someone who made a ruckus as a child.”
“Depends on what a ruckus is.”
“A free-for-all, a brawl. A fracas.”
Bora smiled to himself. But, dear Ma’am, I did. With and without a good reason in the world. If I could only call to mind why once Waldo and I flew at each other, in a roundabout way I’m sure I could even begin to understand why Wimpy Villiger had to die. Out loud, he said only, “Ruckus. I’ll remember the word.”
Minutes later, Frances Allen, tired as she must be, was already lying down, with her head propped on her canvas bag. When Bora quietly reached over for her sandals, she muttered, “I’m not going anywhere,” half-asleep. Around them, the evening was coming to a solitary, exquisite end in the ravine, lead-grey muting into blue.
At night, fireflies came.
PART THREE
Returning
9
SATURDAY 7 JUNE, BELOW AGIAS IRINIS
Dear Martin,
Thank you again for being there at my wedding, brother. Duckie insisted that I drop you a note to tell you that she and I are very much enjoying the gift you and Dikta gave us: Titus and Tilly are on their way to becoming our favourite mounts.
Didn’t you say marriage is fun? I’m head over heels!
Here at the squadron all is well. I have fantastic superiors and colleagues, and we’re in superlative high spirits. Our machines, I’m crazy about, and every day that passes I’m more convinced that I was born to do this job.
But guess what? Given that I’m the only young male in Duckie’s family, her father is dropping hints about my taking over his paper mills after the war. “Having a scientific mind,” he says, “you’re cut out for the position. An excellent aviator has all he needs to lead a large business.” Well, we pilots call it “flying a desk”, short of being shot down the worst fate that a man can meet! He fancies me as chief engineer and partner, eventually proprietor, anticipates grandsons to compensate him for his failure to produce male heirs. Quite the responsibility: he wants a stud and a racehorse at the same time. Duckie plays coy but she’s flattered, anxious to have kids. I think I’ll have to break it to her sooner or later that we had better soft-pedal on a large family until I know what my next assignment will be, same as you and Dikta have done. I’m awfully glad she agreed to go and stay in Leipzig with our parents, because Dikta is there and she’ll be a good influence on her. Duckie needs to learn style-consciousness from your beautiful wife. Her parents kept her on a short leash, as you know (I had to do somersaults to put a hand inside her bra once during our engagement – I was going mad). Her sisters, minus the one who’s a novice, are still years away from marriage. Is it a wonder if my father-in-law already sees me in spats, with a cigar in my mouth, pacing up and down an immense office in Hanover and putting out as much paper
as he did in 1923, “when the government printed 700 times as many banknotes as it’d ever had”?
Anyhow, as you can tell I feel like the luckiest dog around. I’m even catching a concert now and then or a lecture: I don’t want you to be the only intellectual brother (ha)! I’ve seen a grand film I recommend to you. Its title is Riding for Germany, and tells the story of Captain named von Brenken, a champion horseman who is reunited with his horse Harro after they both gloriously served on the Russian front in the Great War…
At second reading, after a quick browse during take-off from Moscow, Peter’s letter appeared to Bora the merry product of a world he less and less belonged to. Superlatives, expectations of civilian life, things to do after the war… He could sit in the clean-scented ravine under Agias Irinis with the thickly written page in hand and wonder whether the two of them, the seal brown and the sorrel, had anything in common with the children they once were. Peter had gone from being an overly sensitive boy to sunniness itself. The testily compliant Martin was evolving into a stoic with his own mind, as self-directed as he was outwardly restrained. Frances Allen had asked what disguise he’d be wearing next, and it was true that he’d travelled across Crete like a modern-day Ulysses. None of those he met – saving perhaps Waldo Preger – knew who he was, deep down. Waldo himself remembered another Martin Bora, and his view was outdated. What mattered now was the impression he’d make on Sergeant Powell, who was elusive in spite of himself. He has to bring me closer to solving Villiger’s death. He has to trust me enough that he’ll tell. Bora did not look beyond the meeting, as sure it would take place that very day as if it were part of his destiny to confront a British non-com in a place called Agias Irinis.
By the time his travel mate awoke, he’d thoroughly washed, shaved, and made coffee on a small fire of twigs, already doused. She took the hot tin he handed her and said, “What happens if we don’t find Powell?”
“To you, you mean?”
“Right.”
Bora sipped his coffee standing, visibly ready to go. “I’ll find Powell.”
The route to Agias Irinis, a cliff where according to the American nothing existed but a place name and Pendlebury’s tool shed, consisted of a narrow track carved into the rocky flank. There were spots where, in the flood of dawn light, the way ahead resembled a nearly perpendicular ladder.
She adjusted the visored cap on her head. “If you don’t lose your grip, you can reach it in half an hour. Are you afraid of heights?”
“No. Are you?”
“No, but I’m wearing sandals.”
“That’s true. Is there another way to the top?”
“Around the northern slope. That’s why I said ‘an hour, an hour and a half’ last night.”
If I were alone I’d already be climbing. Bora understood what was on her mind. “I’m not willing to let you go just yet, Ma’am. We’ll do as you say.”
As they started out, Frances Allen – already short of cigarettes – reverted to the talkativeness she had left over from the previous evening.
“You know,” she said at one point, “one of the sites in the photos you showed me is in the highland that extends behind this cliff. A mountaintop shrine dating to the Middle Minoan period. In a layer of ashes and black earth we discovered clay figurines of girls in bell skirts and fellows in codpieces.”
Bora was moderately interested. “Is that why Pendlebury built the shed here?”
“…Yes.”
Her sudden hesitation, no longer than a wink, made him suspect that Agias Irinis could have also served the young vice-consul as a rallying place for would-be partisans, even before Crete was invaded. Britons had long been currying favour with the locals through OSS operatives.
Were the shed still used as a redoubt, guards would have been posted on the cliff, and the alarm would have already been given. It made more sense that, as the Catalans had reported, only wounded runaways would call it home now.
Bora led the way out of the ravine. This far into his task, he effectively blocked unrelated considerations regarding the aftermath, as he’d done in combat. One step, and then another: only the certainty of success mattered, largely unfounded as it was. What he’d tell Powell once he met him remained a nebulous sketch. I’ll find the words; I’ll make myself credible. There’s no alternative. Ulysses stepped into the hall where the suitors caroused and slaughtered them to the last: the bloodshed at Ampelokastro was nothing to the sea of gore in which the avenger waded up to his ankles once he had finished killing. I’m not moved by vengeance, so my future actions stay vague until I carry them out. Far from being weakness, it’s readiness for anything.
Now at his side, Frances Allen cast a long undulating shadow as she walked. It occasionally merged with Bora’s own taller shadow, and both gave the impression of pointers, racing to mark time across a sundial made of scattered rocks.
It took them close to forty minutes to negotiate the seamed, cleft terrain skirting the bottom of the cliff. Once out of the ravine, they faced an incline in full sun, hairy with drying grass and like the hump of a great albino bison. It was from this north side that Agias Irinis could be reached, by a natural ramp that sloped gradually into baldness; its foot instead was bushy, filled with cicadas, pristine. A scent of wild thyme rode the breeze from it.
The place was no lonelier than others Bora had crossed ever since arriving in Crete. Its shape, however, arching in a single line against the brilliant sky, set it apart from all others, and assigned it to the realm of sights and objects both unknown and familiar.
Bora had never come this way before, of course; he doubted he ever would again, in future travels. He’d seen no photographic images of the rise. It surprised him, when he reached its threshold, to feel something like a thin surge of energy run through him from his feet upward, rooting him there, as if a substance lodged in the earth were sending delicate, pervasive roots into his body.
On the swell of the incline stood three peasant girls. Outlined against the sheen of the sky, far enough so that their features could not be clearly made out, they lingered waist-high in silvery grass, which the wind caused to rise and fall around them in waves. They were singing, and seemed unaware of the coming strangers.
They sang in unison a tune unknown to Bora, with harmonious drawn-out incomprehensible words. The sound, God knows why, reminded him of places so remote and different from this, only a predisposition of his mind could justify the nostalgia awakened by those mournful young voices.
Seeing him, the girls interrupted their song. Unlike those who in past days had fled like sparrows at the sight of strangers, they stayed. Looking back at him, as if in recognition, they hailed him from afar. White kerchiefs on their heads, they resembled one another like sisters, floating over the grey-blue shiny billows; the invisible lower half of their bodies, dark skirts no doubt, could be scaly fishtails or feathers for all Bora knew.
“They want you to go over and talk to them,” Frances Allen said. “They want you to climb the ridge and join them.”
Ah, there’s home here, their soft wave of arms said. What you’re looking for, what you’ve been trying to recall, what you wondered about and wished-feared to know ever since Spain, ever since Remedios foretold your suffering and death. Join us, and it will be revealed, though we’re only girls singing and standing in the tall grass. Home is here, though you don’t see it: childhood and love sought-lost, the sound of fists striking, the green wet plains and the river, the burning cities, the thing like an arrow that is called Destiny. We no longer sing, but you hear us: aren’t you weary, four years into the war? Will you go on, and have to stand four years more? Stay, and it all ends here. Why, so often, is not doing things more painful than actually doing them, even though they would hurt you?
They’re only girls, Bora reasoned, only girls, while the lure of their voices told him otherwise. Didn’t old Professor Lohse teach us of the Sirens, “Three seabirds, three half-goddesses, three half-maidens…”? Ten times, in the bri
ef space of time since seeing them, he had to restrain himself from heeding the call on the strength of their song. Rationality alone held him back, by a tendril that rooted him fast and would not let go.
“They want you to climb the ridge and join them,” Frances Allen said.
“I don’t think I will.”
The northern rim of Agias Irinis was reached by a last moderate climb. No ancient shrine was recognizable where Allen indicated, only a blooming spread of low bushes like a green herd. On the opposite cliff side, the shed lay instead in full view. Bora halted long enough to snap his shoulder boards on, pass the string of his identification tag around his neck, and put on his German officer’s side cap. Doing so before making sure only the wounded occupied Agias Irinis was risky, but he’d gone past considering risk. Frances Allen watched his every move; when she tried to lag behind, he gruffly called her back to his side. “We’re not done yet.”
The shed, built with stacked fieldstone and strips of corrugated iron, stood at the eastern end of the tongue-shaped hilltop, in a field of rocks and sparse grass. Between it and the scruffy area where the shrine Allen spoke of must have existed once, only a careful eye would notice signs of treading back and forth.
No evidence of activity from the outside meant little; the day was young and it was not a given that runaways would be watching out for intruders in this remote location. They could still be asleep. A lack of openings on the north side meant that one could approach unseen. This was what Bora did, Browning in hand, keeping his travel companion half a step ahead of him and slightly to his right, where he could fire and not miss if he needed to. She walked, surly under her visored cap, hands in her pockets.