The Road to Ithaca

by Ben Pastor

  A roll of bedding cloth sat against the wall, to the left of the entrance, as well as sticks to start a fire and an empty cooking pot. No sounds whatever from within.

  The door gave way under the pressure of Bora’s foot. Instantly, the early sun flooded the interior, revealing an empty space maybe twenty feet square. Pallets lined three walls, enough to have accommodated five or six people when fully occupied. A stack of shovels, spades, trowels, pails and a measuring rod lay on the floor under the small back window. Remnants of medical supplies, mostly bandages, sat on a solid little table.

  Bora’s frustration peaked for a brief angry minute. The shed had been occupied until recently, very recently. So much so that tea in a battered metal cup was cold but not musty, and tea leaves were still wet inside the kettle. Under the table, what at first had seemed to be bundled-up bedding turned out to be a makeshift travel bag. Bora was on the point of undoing it to look inside when Allen’s reaction – she said nothing, but gave a start – alerted him to something that must have come into view through the back window.

  Past the flimsy glass, looking west toward the ruins of the shrine, the ground cover of broom and other flowering shrubs gave signs of life. From the greenness, a single human figure rose as if it had been crouching so far to heed some physiological need, and slowly started towards the shed. Bora stepped back from the window, signalling to the woman to do the same. He doesn’t look like a Minotaur, down there, but may play the part. At every step I take, more and more things and people take the shape of myth: unwittingly, I myself, the Wanderer, with no place to rest my head, here to avenge the dead…

  A gangling man in khaki trousers and a collarless white shirt came forward without haste, visibly unaware the shed had been occupied. Under a receding grey-blonde hairline, his youthful features set him at an imprecise age between thirty and fifty, probably midway between them. He looked down and wiped his hands on a handkerchief as he walked.

  Next to Bora, Frances Allen spoke up. “That’s Geoffrey, John’s right-hand man at Knossos! What’s he doing here?”

  Bora hushed her. Quickly, he pulled the door to, as he had found it, and took his place at the ready just to the side, so as not to be blinded by the sun when it was pushed open.

  Allen’s colleague simply raised his eyes when he set foot inside. He froze, seemingly as surprised to see Frances there as he was to face an armed German officer standing with her. British understatement allowed him to recover enough to exchange a polite, stiff nod with Bora and at once turn to his colleague.

  “How are you, Frances?”

  “As well as can be expected, Geoff. I’m not here of my own accord.”

  In their brief exchange, Bora intuited something he could not quantify for now, and had to ignore at his own risk.

  “Are you alone here?” he enquired.

  The man nodded, still turned to the American. “Half an hour more, and you wouldn’t have found me, either.”

  “Fine.” Bora holstered the Browning. “Captain Martin Bora, German Wehrmacht. I come on behalf of the German Army War Crimes Bureau, and of the International Red Cross as well.”

  “Geoffrey Caxton, MA, assistant to the Director of Knossos Antiquities. Is it fair to ask whether you, too, are alone?”

  Bora latched the holster, careful to let the question pass him by. “I seek the whereabouts of a British Army non-com, reported to have escaped German captivity with a fellow soldier in the Iraklion area on 31 May. Has he been here? His name is Sergeant Major Powell.”

  “Powell? No.”

  “He is about five feet ten inches in height, with a slight build and sandy hair. Possibly from Yorkshire. May have an arm wound due to gunfire.”

  Being addressed in impeccable English did not appreciably modify Caxton’s rigid displeasure. Was he wondering if his colleague had risked her life, or on the other hand had easily been convinced to lead a German to this mountaintop?

  She stood there restlessly. “Tell him something, Geoff.”

  The eagerness of her tone convinced him. “Well, there was someone here answering to that description. But his name was Albert ‘Bertie’ Cowell.”

  “Not Powell?”

  “No. See for yourself.” From his back pocket Caxton produced a British Army identification disc. “If you’re the bearer of news for Sergeant Cowell, sir, I’m afraid you’re eight hours late. I come from burying him. The other tag, I left with his body.”

  Bora looked. On the red fibre disc, suspended by a makeshift cord – actually a bootlace – a few upper-case letters and numbers were clearly impressed.

  “Is there a chance you mistook Powell for Cowell?”

  Not I. But Sinclair possibly mistook the sergeant’s name in the confusion of the moment. Bora tightened his fist around the disc before giving it back. Hiding his great disappointment took an effort, and he only partially succeeded. “I had to see the sergeant on an important matter of military justice. What happened to him, exactly?”

  “Exactly, I can’t tell. At first Cowell seemed no more severely injured than the others. But an infection developed: there was nothing that could be done.” Caxton made a desolate gesture. “Transporting him was impossible. Toward the end, he begged me not to leave him, not even to ask for help. Besides, I’m not sure where I’d have got help.”

  “Other than from us, that is.” Bora critically ran his eyes around the shed. “I understand this was a sort of infirmary.”

  “It’s a campaign shed originally equipped to sleep six; we kept a number of medical supplies in our first-aid kit. I helped build it – didn’t I, Frances? – so it made sense for me to come here when Crete was first invaded. I’m no physician. While excavating in Syria and elsewhere I’d gained some basic competencies as a medic – you know how it is out in the field, you can find yourself weeks from anywhere. In the days following the invasion, supplies ran low and it was mere luck, not my doing, if the handful of men who transited through here survived their injuries. Thank God they’re safely elsewhere now. What we had a surplus of were the digging tools used in our work. Unfortunately, the shovel at least served its purpose this morning.” Caxton’s attention returned from Frances, who nervously drank from her canteen, to the German. “What do you mean by ‘military justice’?” And because Bora didn’t seem inclined to reply, he added, “I have a reason for asking. Sergeant Cowell was – how to put it? – deeply troubled by an incident he witnessed south of Iraklion before his capture. He rather dwelled on it.” Instantly, Bora’s hopes were up.

  “An incident?”

  This time Caxton looked him straight in the eye. “An atrocity.”

  “So.” Bora coldly sustained the stare. “What sort of atrocity?”

  “Civilians gunned down in their own house. The sicker Cowell fell, the more obsessed with the shock of the event he became. He lucidly ruminated over it until last night, when he slipped into his final delirium.”

  “‘Gunned down’ by whom? Did he say?”

  “He did say.” But nothing followed by way of explanation.

  Bora shifted his glance away from Caxton. Frances Allen stood motionless by the open door with her back to the outside, to freedom. She knows that closeness to salvation is no guarantee. When he walked up to her, her eyes focused on him, both hopeful and hostile; his sentiments exactly, for different reasons. He fished out of his pocket and offered her the last ten-pack.

  “Go, now.”

  She grabbed the cigarettes, squirrelled them away and then hesitated, either in fear of a last-minute snare or wondering if she ought to say something. On neither side was a handshake even attempted. Bora impatiently nodded towards the door. “You had better go, Mrs Sidheraki. Don’t make me change my mind.”

  She turned around, and the morning sun seemed to set her ablaze. The Firebird, Bora thought, fleeing the hunter. He watched her walk away, cautiously at first and then gaining confidence, looking around, smelling the wind, truly like an animal set free. She’ll be running soon; Cret
e will once more open like a flower under her steps. She’ll race unscathed past the singing girls, who aren’t meant for her.

  With her gone from the doorstep, inside the shed the sun opened bright fans of light.

  “Mr Caxton, let’s make one thing clear: I haven’t hiked to this remote location to take prisoners. I promise you I have no intention of hindering your withdrawal further inland if you so choose. But I demand a full report of what Sergeant Cowell told you, on the authority of those I represent.”

  Again, no answer. Through the small window, Caxton’s gaze after the woman had a forlorn intensity Bora did not misread this time. Imagine. There’s a story there. Did he pursue her, unrequited? Were they bedmates before Sidheraki muscled in? She didn’t even say goodbye to him.

  “I’m waiting, Mr Caxton.”

  The balance between youth and middle age on Caxton’s face was imperceptibly, sadly altered by a twist of the lips. “All right. It can hurt no one at this point. Sergeant Cowell said he saw German paratroopers enter the house and shoot everyone in it. Yesterday morning, when he was still in his right mind, he asked that I write the story down.”

  “Did you?”

  “Naturally, I obliged him.”

  Bora held back a sigh. He was in one of those moods when you don’t know if the sensation you feel is pain or pleasure, or a mixture of both. It pinpricked him all over his body. “He actually saw the soldiers cross the threshold and open fire? Show me your notes.”

  From a cardboard folder surfaced a large sheet of graph paper, such as archaeologists use when drawing in scale. Sentences had been pencilled on the back of the sheet, without breaks.

  Caxton ran his eyes across it then turned it over to Bora. “Fourth line.”

  Bora read aloud. “‘I huddled in the brook bed outside, but clearly saw the Jerries enter the garden gate.’ Which is not the same as entering the house. I need to know if Cowell ever said he saw them step inside.”

  “I don’t know.” Caxton shook his head. “I don’t recall him saying those exact words.”

  The account, taken down in a neat, slanted hand, did not differ appreciably from the version Sinclair had given the War Crimes Bureau. Fear, disgust, the decision to conquer both in order to bear witness to the slaughter through photography were all there. Cowell’s anguish came through like a bloody print.

  But often when note-taking one summarizes or condenses. Details judged irrelevant may be left out. Bora angled for minutiae. “Did Cowell mention running into enemy patrols or civilians when he first approached the villa?”

  “No.”

  “What about being confronted by a large dog?”

  “A watchdog, you mean? No, he didn’t. Well – he did speak of a dead dog lying on the front steps after the shooting. Frankly, I found the detail irrelevant in view of the human tragedy, and excised it.”

  While Caxton spoke, Bora had gone ahead in his reading, through a story he knew well by now. Goose pimples multiplied. One element towards the end made him look up from the sheet. “It reads here that Cowell was ‘fired upon and wounded’ as he hastened away from the villa along the road.”

  “Why, yes. That’s right. That’s how he received the injury that killed him eventually.”

  Bora paused. The detail did not match his information that the man was shot by guards while escaping from the queue of prisoners. “There’s no word about the provenance of the shot.”

  “I doubt he saw anyone, Captain. Obviously, he took it to be a German concealed in the brushwood with the intention of eliminating a witness.”

  Frowning came naturally to Bora, as if suddenly the account were in a language he struggled to understand. “What is this about his having halted ‘to take more photographs’ when the shot reached him?”

  Caxton craned his neck to read. “You must understand that Cowell waffled and rambled on. I only wrote down what was directly related to the atrocity. I understood he’d stumbled across the bodies of two British soldiers as he wandered through the area. He didn’t think much of it, given the violence of the fighting up to that day.”

  “Why stop to photograph them on the way back, then?”

  “I believe he referred to it as a ‘scruple’.”

  “A scruple. A scruple implies a doubt, or a moral call. Was there something unusual about the dead soldiers, maybe?”

  Wearily, Caxton poured himself the last of the cold tea into the battered cup. “You ask too much of a secondary source, Captain. All he said is that they were shot at close range, which hardly qualifies as ‘unusual’. My impression is that Cowell assumed they were killed by those who gunned down the civilians. That would explain his decision to have a photographic record of the two bodies as well.”

  Bora swallowed, which was his sole visible reaction. A corner of the shed, where sunlight did not reach and the shade seemed by contrast dark as night itself, fascinated him, as if his inner turmoil were projected and now cowered there. He saw himself, heard his boyhood self running from the “house with eyes”, frightened and thrilled at the same time. “But he did not snap the photos.”

  “No. A bullet fired from the brushwood struck his right arm above the elbow. It made it impossible for him to operate the camera, and surely discouraged him from lingering in the neighbourhood. Seeing how it ended, I can’t say it was fortunate for him that the injury did not hinder his escape from his German captors, a few hours later. Had he remained a POW, who knows, he could have been cured.”

  “Were you the one who extracted the bullet?”

  “I was, for better or for worse. He thought it could be a proof of sorts, and asked that I keep it.”

  “May I see it?”

  Caxton put down his cup, dug in his back pocket for the lead fragment. “I’m no judge, but I dare say it comes from a handgun.”

  Bora nodded and gave it back. A paratrooper who means to bring down somebody does not use a handgun, and does not let the wounded quarry go. He read the last line. “‘I wandered in a daze until the afternoon, at which time I was spotted by Jerries by a gully near Kato Kalesia and was taken prisoner.’ The notes end at this point. Did Cowell add anything else?”

  In Caxton’s hands, the cup showed rusted chips through the enamel. He turned it round and round, staring at it. “There’s nothing else of interest. Cowell said that while in a queue with other prisoners, he reported what he’d witnessed to the only man among them who held officer rank, also enquiring if he should surrender his camera to the German authorities or not.”

  “And…?”

  “The officer – a first lieutenant, I believe – assured him he would take over. Cowell was considerably relieved to hear he could entrust another with the account and its documentary proof. Evidently, the officer must have followed through with the German authorities as promised, given that you’re here and know the story.”

  Bora found that he could evenly split himself between his query and a private observation of the man before him. Did he ever bring her here? He hoped – for a moment, he hoped she was here for him. Even with a gun in my hand, I surprised him less than Frances Allen, now Sidheraki’s wife. She was cruel to him, I can tell.

  “There’s still the detail of Cowell’s escape, Mr Caxton.”

  “The escape!” Bora’s words stirred the archaeologist out of proportion. “Now, there’s something you should report to the International Red Cross! I heard it told by the soldier who came here with Sergeant Cowell. No, he was only grazed during the getaway; he was able to move on after medication. The two had survived by the skin of their teeth and were indignant about the whole matter. I am indignant about it. No sooner did the lieutenant volunteer to take over from Cowell, than he overheard the German guards mutter of a plan not to transfer the prisoners but machine-gun them en route to the prison camp. He translated for the men, so Cowell – wounded as he was – and others in the lot didn’t waste time and decided to make a run for it. It’s what they did, and the guards did open fire.”

  “
On the runaways or on the entire group of prisoners?”

  “On the runaways, to be sure. But maybe the others were executed as well, we don’t know.”

  “Well, the lieutenant in question is very much alive.” Bora studiously folded the graph paper, slipped it into his chest pocket and buttoned the flap over it. Either Cowell or Sinclair, or both, were confused about the circumstances of the escape. Unless one of them, or both, had lied.

  “Please walk me to the grave.”

  Once they had started toward the scruffy area, the compact, rocky soil in between made Bora newly suspicious. “It cannot have been simple, digging a grave on this hilltop without help.”

  “I was spared the effort, Captain. There’s a Middle Minoan shrine down there, which we excavated over two campaigns. I made the most of an underground deposit for cult-related objects, a favissa, technically speaking. Once poor Bertie Cowell lay inside, it was only a matter of heaping dirt from a pile over the hole. Dragging him inside a blanket across this distance was the strenuous part.”

  Through the ground cover, they reached a clearing invisible from the shed. Low walls, little more than foundations, criss-crossed it; remnants of steps, pillar bases; here and there gaped the round mouths of buried jars. The heap over the grave, scattered with shards, was marked by a cross of white pebbles. At its foot, the shovel was still stuck in the dirt. Prudently, Bora took it out and tossed it where the Briton would not be tempted to wield it, though Caxton kept his arms folded tightly and did no more than stare into the distance.

  She’s gone by now; he must know how she clambers when she wants to. A kind of male affinity, less than sympathy but not by much, caused Bora to relent his own harshness. “You’ve been helpful, Mr Caxton. Soon you’ll be free to go.”

  “Yes?”

  “Just answer a few more questions as we walk back.”

  “I reported everything Cowell told me. You have the written account. I don’t see what else —”