by Leah Fleming
‘Careful,’ I shouted. ‘If the entrance is loosely covered, one false step and we’ll be thrown in.’
‘Look,’ Alex was racing ahead, ‘there’s a fenced-off bit here. Can I take photos?’
There was a rectangle of barbed wire protecting the entrance. Someone didn’t want their flocks crippled or trapped.
Lois grabbed my arm. ‘You be careful now. I don’t want any broken pelvises.’
‘It’s buried treasure, Mummy, like Indiana Jones,’ said Alex excitedly.
Sarika pulled away the wire, inspected the thick grasses. ‘This looks like it, but it is dangerous for old bones. We mustn’t wake the spirits,’ she said, crossing herself.
‘There weren’t any spirits sixty years ago, unless you mean all the raki the boys swallowed. We hid them down here, and Bruce too, once.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ Lois smiled as she and Sarika made to pull away the scrub. They lowered themselves down gingerly and then their voices came echoing up. ‘It’s amazing, just slabs of stone built on top of each other. Nothing here but rubbish and creepy crawlies, and it smells fusty. If we hold your hands you can come down, but no fancy tricks. We could do with a torch.’
‘There’s a cigarette lighter in the car,’ Sarika yelled.
‘I’ll get it.’ Alex was off like a hare back to the truck. I watched him with envy. Once I had raced down here, back and forth, hauling sacks, now I was putting one foot slowly in front of the other, willing myself not to fall in head first. It was dark but there was a gap of stone slab above us letting in a little light. It was as cold as a fridge. These Minoans built well.
‘I can’t see any boxes,’ said Lois as Sarika flicked the lighter on and off into the crevices. ‘Someone cleared this out years ago.’
My heart sank with disappointment. What was I expecting to find here? A sign saying ‘X marks the spot’? A box would have been checked out years ago and I’d never know what Bruce had wanted me to find.
‘Go round the walls slowly,’ Yolanda yelled down to us. ‘It’s just that I remember reading in the newspaper how a shepherd found a package hidden in the stone walls near his hut, documents left by a soldier. I think they found who they belonged to and sent them back to New Zealand. He came back to thank them with his family.’
Sarika kept up the search but the slabs were solid. No one could stick anything into them. Where did you leave it, Bruce? I was praying.
‘Try the steps,’ Lois suggested. They bent down and shone the light among the leaves and rubbish accumulated there. Suddenly: ‘Look! There’s something under there in the corner.’
We all held our breaths as they ferreted around the corner of the step. ‘It’s only an old tin, not a box, a very rusty cigarette tin,’ Lois announced.
‘Let’s take it up,’ I croaked, hardly daring to hope this was it.
Sarika climbed out first, helped me out, and then Lois came up with her treasure. She held it out for us to examine. It was rusted, the size of a bully-beef tin, battered enough to be what we were looking for. Alex photographed it and all of us standing round looking dazed and pleased.
‘It was tucked out of sight. It looks like rubbish to me but it won’t open here,’ Lois said, taking control of us, stepping up to the mark as she’d done so many times. I felt so proud of her.
‘Thank you, thank you. It looks exactly what a man might carry on him. Light and easy to hide, but who knows what’s inside?’ I was trying to sound casual. ‘I don’t suppose it’s anything special.’
‘Penny,’ Yolanda was clutching my arm, ‘he told me with his last breath to find it. It is for you. We will open it. Be patient, the boys will help us.’
It was hard to contain my emotion. I was impatient, curious and nervous. I didn’t deserve such good fortune. I didn’t deserve respect. I wasn’t worthy of him. All my life I had shut out this time entirely, because I knew I must face the truth of everything, not pick and choose the bits that pleased me.
Yolanda had shared her terrible secret of how she had found the strength to destroy the threat to her future. By executing Stavros, she’d found inner respect, discovered a part of herself she’d not known was there in her ‘eye for an eye’ revenge.
I had a secret too, one I could share with no one but my own conscience, a secret that had tormented me all my adult life. Must I open that rusty tin hidden in the deepest recesses of my heart before I was worthy of opening the real one?
June 1944
Penny wandered through the streets with Brecht, buying the bare minimum, not wanting him to spend any more of his pay on her: a meal, a few items of essential clothing; that was the extent of her debt to him. But then sporadic gunfire broke out and she had nowhere to stay. She felt so feeble, hardly able to put one foot in front of the other without help. Her limbs were disobedient to her commands as she kept seeing herself flung overboard into the water, and the screams of the dead roared in her ears.
She’d recognized shock many times in others, now she must accept it in herself. She needed rest and shelter, and when Brecht booked himself a double room in a hotel, she’d no will left to refuse to join him there.
It was as if the whole day was leading to the moment when this would happen and for that a debt must be repaid. She’d no energy to protest, to be proud and English about it all. She felt nothing but the urge to sleep away the rest of her life in oblivion.
The next morning she woke alone in the bed. No one had shared it with her. His clothes were on the chair and it was clear he’d slept on the floor. She heard him in the bathroom as she buried her face into the pillow. She didn’t want to see his body. It would be tanned, lean and muscled. It would be in keeping with the rest of him, handsome and strong, things she’d noticed about him from the first time they had met. She wondered how well his wound had healed.
He’d made no demands on her and she was grateful that he respected her enough not to claim his due, but it would come, as sure as night follows day, and she would have to allow him to access her body and take from it what he willed.
Brecht dressed and left to check out the breakfast room, leaving her alone to wash and dress. She’d still not uncoiled her hair. It smelled of the sea, oil, stiff with salt, and she’d slept with it pinned tight around her head. It reminded her of where she’d been and who was left under the sea, steeling her resolve, protecting her.
He came back with fresh rolls and fruit. ‘Where shall we go today, into the hills or to the coast?’
‘This isn’t a holiday,’ she replied.
‘It is for me. Soon I leave Athens. You will find work but first you must rest. You are not fit yet. Did you sleep last night?’
She nodded and picked at her food.
They spent the day out of the city, strolling around, and visited the Archaeological Museum to escape the heat of the day. As they walked around the exhibits, he talked of his visit to Knossos and the excavations. ‘Nothing is harmed, everything is as it was.’
She couldn’t bear to listen. He was polite, respectful and oh, so cunning, giving her what she really needed: clothes, food, intelligent conversation, pretending that there was no war between them. He was biding his time, waiting for the moment. There was an organ recital in a church still standing, a young German organist playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. They sat among the officers listening to the intensity of the soaring music. If she closed her eyes she could be in Gloucester Cathedral.
She slept alone that night, and the night after. He found a train to the coast and an open beach cleared of mines where he swam while she sat watching him racing down into the water. His body was beautiful but the ugly scar puckered his thigh. She had nursed that wound, fingered his leg, taken his pulse, bathed his limbs. She felt a pull inside her she’d not felt before, not since her time alone with Bruce, as if something were coming alive within her, an instinct she didn’t want to disturb. That night she hardly slept for the ache, and the fear she was being watched, the restless tossing and tu
rning, the images of his body diving into the sea, the heat of the bedroom, the whirr of the ceiling fan. She felt her mind’s resolve spinning out of control.
He was always staring at her, his head tilted to one side when she spoke, the flashing warmth in those iris-blue eyes, and there was a scent on him too, of youth and vigour, a dangerous aroma when she’d been starved of comfort for so long.
How could she look with lust on the enemy? Why was she assessing his broad shoulders and slim hips, the solid muscle of his thighs? What would it be like to be crushed between them?
He was aroused by her, she could sniff it like smoke on the breeze, and it terrified her that there was such unspoken fire growing between them.
‘Perhaps you’d prefer to spend today by yourself?’ he offered as they sat having real coffee in the square. ‘Do be careful, there are parts of the city now where it’s not safe for girls or strangers.’
‘I’m not a girl and I’m not a stranger. I lived here for years. I worked here. This is my city,’ she snapped.
‘Not any more, this is a jungle. You could visit your old School of Archaeology?’
Penny shook her head. ‘No, too many memories. What are your plans?’ She realized suddenly she didn’t want him to leave her.
‘Nothing much. I have letters to write. It’s been such a long time since I saw my family, I am worried.’ He told her about Katerina and her accident. She told him about Evadne and Zander and her father’s visit. She told him how she ran away to Athens to get out of Mother’s plans for a debutante season and how she’d defied them in staying on in Athens, living a life she could never have achieved at home.
He laughed. ‘I ran away too but into the army to get away from my father’s demands that I run the estate and become a farmer.’ He sighed and looked at her, saying, ‘Perhaps a farmer would’ve been a better choice?’
She did not reply but stared out at the buildings still intact and the bustle of the city.
They walked, and talked all day on anything but Crete and the war. Each day grew closer to the end of his leave. He told her of his decision to go back into active service and the uncertainty of his future, and suddenly she felt afraid for him. Suddenly she knew she cared what happened to Brecht and it terrified her.
That night they ate at Zonar’s, as she had so many times before the war, and walked back to the hotel, side by side, talking about excavations and technical drawing, museums and all their mutual interests, and as they drew closer to the hotel she suddenly knew he was not going to ask for payment in kind. He wouldn’t demand anything other than her company because deep down he was as afraid as she was of the feelings growing between them. This was territory neither of them had trodden before and there were hidden minefields.
That night she couldn’t stand the itchiness in her scalp any longer. ‘I must wash my hair . . .’ but hard as she tried to soap off the lather, it wouldn’t come clean.
‘You need something stronger. I’ll ask at reception.’ Brecht came back with a bottle of detergent.
‘It looks like turps,’ she cried. ‘I shall have to cut all my hair off’
‘Over my dead body,’ he said. ‘Here, let me help you. Dip your head in the sink and I’ll rinse it off for you. I used to do this for my little sister.’
She ducked her head down and let him soap it again and rub the lather slowly around her head, rinsing it. ‘Does it squeak yet?’ he asked.
‘I think so,’ she replied, searching blindly for a towel with soap in her eyes. Then she wrapped her hair in the towel.
‘You need a comb . . . we didn’t buy one?’
‘It will have to dry out.’
‘My mother used to section off each side and comb it out. Katerina used to scream. She has hair like you, golden silk.’
Slowly he untangled the strands until it fell down straight. ‘You dyed it, I see.’
‘I had my reasons.’
‘I know, blonde Cretans are thin on the ground.’
Penny turned round and unwrapped the towel to reveal her nakedness. ‘Is this what you really want from me?’ She had to know.
‘No, it is not,’ he croaked, turning away. ‘I won’t take what’s not given freely. There’s been enough of that. I want no payment from you. Who do you take me for?’ he snapped, angered and shocked by her action.
‘You are a man with needs. It will have been a long time without a clean woman. You bought me everything I have, fed me, sheltered me. How else can I pay you back?’ she replied.
‘I will find another room,’ he said, gathering up his clothes in a hurry.
‘Don’t leave me. I have no other currency to give you. I’m sorry,’ she cried, shocked by her own brazen need of him now.
He paused at the door, turning round. ‘I won’t touch you even though I find you beautiful and brave and the most wonderful woman I’ve ever desired. I’d never dishonour you like that. I was brought up to respect women.’ He sighed. ‘It is late and you are tired. Sleep and I will sit in the chair again.’
‘I’m cold, my hair is wet – how can I sleep?’ She searched his face, seeing the hurt as he tried to look away from her body. Without thinking what she was doing, she walked towards him and touched his face, his cheekbones, the curve of his jaw as she felt her breath quicken. ‘Brecht . . . I don’t even know your Christian name . . .’
‘Rainer,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d never ask that of me . . . I’ve called you Penelope in my mind for many years.’ He was standing over her now. ‘Thank you for your offer but I can’t do this if . . . you fill my thoughts but . . .’ He was looking at her with such longing, like a man who is in love with a woman. She felt a surge of desire rising from her limbs, from her arms, her heart thudding like nothing she’d ever felt before. She could no longer deny such feeling.
She took his hand and sat on the bed. ‘I have no experience of this.’
‘All the more reason why I should leave now,’ he said, pulling away from her.
‘No, please stay. I need you. I want to thank you. You saved my life, saved me so many times, why I don’t know. Why me?’ The tears began to flow and with them such a desire to be held and comforted, to be kissed, and when she found his lips nothing mattered but the taste of wine on them.
He held her and his lips touched her throat, her ears, giving her a jolt of desire. His breath warmed her as he whispered into her ear. His hands felt for her tiny breasts, cupping them as if they were precious china. She smelled the spicy soap on his skin as she buried her face in his chest. They fell down and she let his hands slowly explore her body, stroking her, soothing her loneliness. He fingered her, gently waiting until she responded; the ache inside growing into such a powerful surge of longing and excitement. He slowly slid his body so close to hers and there was no stopping their bodies joining together.
In those never-to-be-forgotten moments when his tenderness met her passion, she knew the power of being a woman. Her body was satisfied even if her mind was emptied of all consequences of this seduction.
In this moment Bruce was forgotten, her pain deadened. She knew in her heart that this had always been going to happen the moment she stepped into the hotel room, but not as she expected in sullen passive resignation. Without her signals and persuasion Rainer wouldn’t have forced himself upon her. This was her doing and hers only.
They didn’t leave the hotel the next day but lay in a cocoon of cotton sheets, exploring their bodies, finding the pleasure places she hadn’t known existed, giving and receiving. Here there was no war, no uniforms, no past or future, just the sensual delights of lovemaking. She was drunk with sensations, nakedness, relaxing in a far-off place where nothing mattered but the now.
2001
I had sat many nights reliving these memories. Logic accused me of sleeping with the enemy, giving into base instincts, betraying Bruce’s memory. When his leave was over, Rainer left me, promising we would be together one day when the war was over, and I believed him. I waited for the lette
r that never came.
That was when I woke up to the cold reality of this brief wartime affair. I cut off my hair as was done to all female collaborators, claiming it was infested. I applied to become a nurse but no one wanted me. I was destitute and begged for help from the Swiss embassy, which sheltered me and eventually shipped me back home where I collapsed. My father had died and Bruce was dead.
Evadne told me the news one day as we walked through the rose garden. By then I was a living ghost with no feelings or tears, drifting in a nothingness state like a rudderless boat in a sea haar. I don’t care to recall much of that dark place.
Now, sitting under the olive tree, I felt a strange sense of calm as if waking from a long dream with a sigh. I wasn’t a mad woman. My lips would stay sealed. There are some things so private you can never share them. You carry them alone all your life. Suddenly I understood that grief is a lonely journey but sometimes needs a physical outlet. Ours was a passionate coming-together. I was not coerced. I sought my comfort and gave it too. There was tenderness in our passion, not degradation.
He too was wounded by his time on the island. Rainer was my crime and my punishment, for I have thought of him all my life, wondering if he survived and found his own form of forgiveness. It’s hard to be in love when you’re on opposite sides. We were two of a kind, and perhaps in another age, had we found each other, who knows? Love has its own landscape and it was in Athens that ours blossomed and withered. That was all.
There comes a moment in your life when you can forgive yourself for your weakness. It came for me when I realized there was more to me than two weeks in Athens with Rainer Brecht. I could forgive myself for not being the perfect upright nurse. I sleepwalked into an affair, exhausted, fragile, in need of protection. The shell I’d grown round myself was torn away, exposed by war. I could’ve died, but didn’t, because of him. I was alive when so many were not. This had to serve some purpose.
