At the cottage, she found her grandmother dozing in her chair.
‘I thought you weren’t coming, koritsie,’ Maria said. ‘Did you have an enjoyable time last night?’
Angie’s eyes flicked up to meet her grandmother’s. What did she mean? Had she heard about her Viannos party night?
‘Um, yes, thank you.’
‘Good, I feared Matthia had frightened you away.’ She patted the cushion next to her and when Angelika sat, Maria leaned towards her and peered into her eyes. ‘Angelika, what’s troubling you?’
‘Me?’ Angie laughed lightly. ‘Nothing at all, honestly, I’m completely fine.’
‘You can tell me your problems; you know? That’s what grandmothers are for.’
Angie blinked at her grandmother, and then changed the subject. ‘Would you like a drink, Yiayá? I’ve brought a box of loukoumades from the cake shop, they’re still warm.’ She placed a box of small golden doughnuts sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds and slathered with local honey, on the table.
‘Make us a coffee to go with the cakes,’ Maria said. ‘The beans are in the fridge.’
Coffee beans? ‘Yiayá, I don’t know how to fix coffee from scratch. My mother drinks instant and I have a coffee machine.’
‘Then go into the garden, stand under the olive tree, and call “Voula,” as loud as you can, towards the lower village.’
Angie grinned and did as Maria instructed. Outside, she called, ‘Voula!’ while feeling stupid and hoping no one would hear.
‘Pathetic. Shout!’ Maria’s voice came from behind the strip curtain.
Angie hauled in a great breath and bellowed, ‘Vooo-laaa!’ over the rooftops. She blushed, unable to remember ever hearing how loud she could actually yell. On the village’s lower level, she recognised the broad figure of Voula climbing outside steps that led to a flat roof.
Voula cupped her hands around her mouth and replied, ‘What?’
Angie hauled in another breath. ‘Can you make Greek coffee?’ Immediately realising the stupidity of the question. The words flew from deep inside her chest, great cannonballs of voice that left her with a peculiar sense of relief. No wonder these Cretans are always happy, they shout all the time, she thought.
‘What do you think?’ Voula replied. ‘I’ll come!’
Angie laughed, returned to Maria and placed a stack of napkins next to the doughnuts. ‘I enjoyed myself last night, thank you, Yiayá.’
‘You’re very Cretan, Angelika, you say what you believe people want to hear, even when it’s not the truth. Matthia upset you. He has a lot of anger and you remind him of Poppy and your father.’ She patted the seat. ‘You look very like Yeorgo. We all loved him very much.’
Angie glanced at the icon of George and the dragon, before she sat next to Maria. At last. Her father, the man she hadn’t known but never stopped loving. ‘Is it true he died in the army, Yiayá?’
Maria did the Greek down-sideways nod. ‘It’s difficult to accept . . . but let’s not leap ahead. We’re not up to that yet.’
Angie sighed. ‘I’m eager to learn why my mother left here, Yiayá. I want to understand her.’
‘Patience, we’ll get there, Angelika. The important thing is for you to hear the whole story, so that you realise nobody was to blame.’
Blame? To blame for what?
Voula barged through the plastic curtain. ‘Ooh, Angelika, come here you lovely girl, I could eat you.’ She threw her arms around Angie and kissed her cheeks.
‘I brought loukoumades to say thank you for last night,’ Angie said.
‘Ooh, look at that, I’ll get too fat if I’m not careful.’ Voula’s dimpled hand scooped a doughnut out of the box while the other snatched a napkin to catch the dribbling honey. She plopped onto a chair, her muffin-top knees wide apart and her thighs settling with considerable overhang.
Angie caught the glint in Maria’s eye. Yiayá loved her daughter-in-law. After feasting on three doughnuts, Voula gave Angie a lesson on how to make Greek coffee and then left to prepare the family’s lunch.
‘Where were we up to, koritsie?’ Maria said, dipping pieces of doughnut into her small cup.
‘You and the boys had escaped the Nazis and were hiding in the shepherd’s cottage and he came crashing through the door,’ Angie said.
‘Ah, yes, I remember it well . . .’ She sucked the top off her coffee and then her face relaxed with a reminiscent smile. ‘Poor, poor devil . . . I’ll never forget him, Angelika, as long as I live.’
Chapter 13
Crete, 1943.
A GIANT FILLED THE DOORWAY. He grabbed my shoulders with his shovel-sized hands. I struggled to reduce a cry of pain to a whimper, afraid of waking the boys. The man’s goat-stink invaded every corner of the room. I certainly didn’t have to see him to recognise the shepherd.
‘What are you doing here, woman?’ he whispered angrily.
Andreas was a great barrel of a man, all hair and belly. With his bushy beard and long goatskin coat, he seemed more closely related to his own rams than humanity. I threw myself against his wide body, desperate to make physical contact with another adult, even the infamous shepherd. He had earned dubious fame as a local character: dirty, illiterate, and usually drunk.
The Amiras gossips, who could never be relied on to tell the truth, claimed this Goliath could kill a man with one punch, had sex with goats, and that he stole people’s sheep. On the rare occasion he came into the village, children ran to hide. I didn’t care what people said, I felt myself in the arms of Hercules himself.
Mother Nature worked her conniving trick that morphs us women into weak and helpless beings in the presence of strong men. I turned my face into his musty chest to muffle my cries, and my grief gushed like a flash flood. He patted my back clumsily, made awkward shushing noises, and then steered me to the end of the banquette.
Andreas slid the heavy wooden bolt across the door and waited with patience until I stopped my snivelling.
‘I’ve a candle, shall I light it?’ I said, pushing my damp hair from my face and composing myself.
‘Best not, Kiriea, the Nazis are still on the ridge.’
My sight had adjusted to the dark and I saw him fumbling in the nook by the fireplace. When he returned to my side, I realised he had a litre bottle of raki, a glass, and the cracked cup. I dried my eyes on my apron, glad he couldn’t see the state of me.
Nodding at the sacks that covered Matthia and Stavro, he whispered, ‘Who’s that?’
‘My two boys, we escaped.’
He nodded. We were nothing but lonely shadows in the dark. He poured a couple of drinks and passed me the small raki glass.
‘I can’t hold it, my hands are burned.’ I took the cup between my palms. The fiery liquid relaxed me. Its warmth flowed and my anxiety ebbed.
‘All the Amiras men and boys are dead,’ I said. ‘The Nazis rounded them up and shot them to pieces in front of us . . . more than a hundred of them. My baby too – poor little Petro. I still find it almost impossible to believe.’
Fresh tears spilled down my cheeks. ‘Perhaps you’re the last man in Crete, Andreas, and why? I don’t understand . . . old men and children too, madness.’ I steadied the cup in my lap, not having the grip to hold it in one hand while I crossed myself.
He sat next to me, his arm against my throbbing shoulder, reminding me of the moment when Nazi soldiers had snatched Petro from my breast.
‘It’s true, Kiriea – murdered – all of them. Also in the villages of Simi, Pefkos, Vachos, Viannos and God knows how many others. Two thousand Nazis, they say, marched in to kill us all. There’s no news about the rest of Crete. We have no idea what’s happening elsewhere.’
‘How do you know all this, Andreas?’
He threw the raki into the back of his throat and poured another.
‘The midwife told me this very day. When she can, she passes . . . passed information on to the resistance. Poor woman. Oh, the poor woman!’
He made an odd little hiccup noise, rolling his head and wringing his hands. ‘She said I should contact the Andartes in the mountains and explain the situation here, but I can’t find anyone to tell. The rebels seem to have disappeared, like our allies. Where are the British? They must have known what was happening here. Tell me, why did they abandon us? Why have they allowed this terrible murder of innocent people to take place? They could so easily have come to our rescue. You must leave. It’s dangerous here. Go up the mountain with your children, while it’s dark.’
‘They’re killing the men and I am afraid for my boys, but I’m safe, Andreas.’
‘You’re wrong.’ He rolled his head as if in pain and hiccupped again. ‘They’re murdering all the women they find outside the villages.’ He put his raki glass down, blew a gust of breath that hinted of rotten teeth and then rubbed his hands over his face.
My sense of dread grew. What was that he said about the midwife?
‘Two women are hanging from the trees on the Pefkos road, just below here. Can you believe it? What evil possesses those men?’
My throat closed. No! Why hang defenceless women? The Amiras wives and mothers were not freedom fighters or terrorists. We were uncomplicated people who didn’t know or care about politics. My only ambitions were to bring up my children, grow vegetables, and harvest enough olives for a year’s supply of oil. I took pleasure from simple things: laughter, a word of praise, the grunt of satisfaction from my husband, and attending church on Sunday.
I couldn’t make out Andreas’s expression in the dark, but his voice dropped. He gulped raki straight from the bottle and made a strange mewling sound. After a moment’s silence, he slapped his big hands over his face and rocked back and forth. He sobbed. I realised he was struggling to speak. Then his torment gushed out. The lump in my throat hardened and I found myself sharing his grief.
‘Why?’ I asked, the word only a whisper. ‘What reason had they to hang women?’
Consumed by his own horror and rage, Andreas didn’t hear me. He shuddered and then his sorrow erupted. ‘God forgive me, I watched. I couldn’t look away,’ he said, sobbing between the words. ‘The Nazis . . . Blessed Virgin Mary . . . I saw . . . I saw, but there were twenty soldiers with machine guns so I crouched in the bushes. What could I do? They’d have shot me before I got near.’
His breath caught, he swallowed hard and then swigged the raki again. ‘I failed to help them – useless – I hid like a coward. A stinking dog with my tail between my legs. I recognised the older woman and did nothing to save her. I’ll never forgive myself. I watched for a chance when I could rescue them.’
‘You said one was familiar to you?’ I knew everybody and couldn’t be left wondering. Desperate for my suspicions to be incorrect, I awaited his answer.
Andreas nodded, understanding my fear. ‘Yes. It was the old midwife, Kiriea Kiriaki . . . we had spoken not half an hour before. She warned me to stay hidden. The other woman, I don’t know, young, sixteen or seventeen, so beautiful, so utterly terrified.’ He groaned, pushed his hands up into his mass of long matted hair and, keeping them on the back of his head, he hunched over his belly as if speaking to his knees.
I realised it must have been the platoon that almost found us under the fig tree. My stomach churned to think what might have happened to me and my boys.
‘They fought hard, the midwife and the girl . . . hitting out and kicking the soldiers. The midwife spat in one of their faces,’ Andreas said. ‘May they find peace in heaven, poor creatures. The Nazis tied their hands behind their backs, tore all their clothes open and poked them with their guns – taunting them. Pitiable sight, the humiliation of them; a woman should not know that shame. Filthy men, sneering at their exposed preciousness.’
I remembered the grunting pig who had raped me and, hearing of the terrible thing Andreas had seen only an hour before, something changed inside me. It took away a little of my own pain and disgrace. I had survived and that Nazi who sullied me now seemed like nothing but spit in the dust – a worthless disgusting memory to discard. Andreas continued to bawl out his tragic story.
‘They put ropes around their necks and hoisted them up into the trees.’ He whimpered, shook his head and kicked the heels of his boots rhythmically against the stone banquette, trapped in reliving the nightmare.
He had forgotten my presence. In his mind, Andreas crouched in the bushes and saw the defilement and murder of two innocent women.
‘The commandant and his men shone their torches on them, watching. They . . . they shit themselves, the women, shit, it flew out of them as they kicked and struggled and choked. God, I’ve never seen anything so awful. Their tongues poked from their mouths like strangled chickens and their eyes bulged while they thrashed in the air, mad dancing puppets. It took so long . . . minutes. Why didn’t they just shoot them? Poor Kiriaki, poor old mother . . . she brought so many babies into the world yet she left it in that terrible way. Those evil malákas laughed!’
I knew Kiriaki: she had delivered Petro.
The shepherd clenched his fist and slashed with an imaginary dagger. ‘I want to kill every single one of those Nazi bastards with my gutting knife.’
Silent for a moment, his broad rounded shoulders shuddered as he battled to overcome his emotion. Then he spoke with a leaden voice. ‘I’ll never forget them. God forgive their sins, poor women. When it happened, I couldn’t do anything, do you see, Kiriea?’
‘I understand, Andreas. You can’t blame yourself.’
‘Blame myself? Of course I blame myself! There had to be a way to stop it from happening. I’ve gone over and over it. I’m not being boastful but I’m very strong, Kiriea, I don’t believe there’s a stronger man in Crete, but I paid for my strength with intelligence. There is a balance in these things. I’ve been called stupid.’
‘You’re not stupid, Andreas.’
‘You’re kind, but I know what I am.’ He sighed, his shoulders falling forward and his chin dropping to his chest. ‘Now I think . . . now that it’s too late!’ He made a piteous howl. ‘I could have started a bush fire; they would have run from that. Why couldn’t I have thought of that earlier? They died because I am a slow, lumbering fool. I want to go and cut the innocent women down, it’s my fault they hang there, but two soldiers with guns are standing guard.’
He shook his head violently, all the emotion returning. The torture in his voice was so intense that, afterwards, I realised it would be impossible to bear. I could say nothing to wipe the atrocities from his mind.
Andreas broke down, went on and on, blaming himself. ‘Please, dear God, forgive me . . . I should have saved them. Why did he give me this great strength if I can’t even save a helpless little old woman and the other, hardly more than a child? Tell me, Kiriea, why am I so strong? What’s the point?’ He knocked back the raki and threw his glass across the room.
With the shattering, both boys jumped from their sleep. ‘It’s okay,’ I said, patting the sacks, trying to keep the pain from my voice. ‘Andreas the shepherd is here, we’re safe. Close your eyes and rest.’
‘Sorry, Kiriea, I shouldn’t have told you those disgusting things. I hadn’t intended to, it just poured out of me. Forget it. But of course, you can’t forget it, it’s impossible. You see, I am stupid.’
He sniffed hard. ‘You have to look after yourself, and your boys. That’s the important thing,’ he said. ‘My best dog is tied to a tree. If he barks, you must all leave this house, fast. Go up the mountain and hide. Me too, but I’ll take a different way, better we are not together.’
I nodded in the dark. Gaia prodded me into the role of woman. ‘Have you eaten, Andreas?’
He sighed, shook his head. ‘Not today, nor yesterday, plenty of carobs but not proper nourishment. My goats are on the hillside. The Nazis will see me if I go there. I fear they’re watching the flock.’
‘We have food hidden between here and the road.’
Andreas
hauled his bulky frame from the edge of the banquette. ‘Tell me where and I’ll fetch it.’ He swiped his arm across his face, blew the glutinous contents of his nose into the palm of his hand and then slid it down his trouser leg.
I imagined him crashing through the olive grove to the fig tree, alerting every creature of the night and our goat too. She would kick up a racket if taken by a stranger. A sentry, half a kilometre either way along the road, would surely hear the ruckus.
‘Better if I go. Guard my sons with your life, Andreas.’
‘Kiriea, what’s your name?’ he mumbled.
‘Kiriea Kondulakis Maria, school mistress, wife of the soldier, Vassili, daughter of The Teacher.’
‘You belong to Kondulakis Vassili, and these are his children?’ His head jerked towards the boys.
‘Yes, why?’
He grunted. ‘Fuck the Vir— ’
‘Andreas, my children!’
He swallowed the blasphemy and continued in a dramatic whisper. ‘Sorry, Kiriea, but I’ve dreamt of smashing my fist into that ugly man’s face.’
‘Why, what did he ever do to you?’ I knew my husband had his moods but, in general, he held a good reputation as a peacekeeping member of the community.
‘Kondulakis beat me six times straight at tavli – go to the devil – and me the best until he started playing. Malákas.’ He snorted. ‘My one chance to prove I wasn’t an idiot and he took it from me. Now I have to guard his sons?’
Suddenly, I recognised the pretend anger in his voice, a decoy from the atrocities. I blessed him for trying to counteract the effect of his outpouring and realised this man would be a lifelong friend.
I had an urge to laugh, cry, and explode with hysterical emotion. I wanted to hit somebody, beat them cruelly and scream until my lungs burst. Tears rushed back. Life before yesterday. My dear Vassili was always crazy to play backgammon before he left with the army. He spent hours each evening drinking raki and throwing dice across the tavli board in the kafenion.
Island of Secrets Page 13
