by Carl Nixon
‘Next May,’ he explains, just making conversation, ‘is the sixtieth anniversary. There is a contingent of veterans going and I’ve been invited to join them.’ He adds, ‘Daft buggers,’ to show that he is not considering going.
Margaret is suddenly animated. She is eating sushi, dipping a roll in a small plastic tub of soy sauce. She gestures in a broad arch with her chopsticks. ‘But you must go. It’s important.’ Her movements are inappropriately large for the food court where the crowded tables force people to sit closer than is comfortable and where most tuck their shoulders forward as if protecting their plates from looters. Other diners glance nervously across at her.
‘Why is it important?’ he asks, surprised.
‘Because this will be your last chance to go back, to revisit where it all happened.’
He does not know what Margaret imagines happened to him on Crete. Over the years he rarely spoke of the war to his wife and three children, and then only in the most general of terms. Any image his daughter has of his role in the Battle of Crete has not been lifted from his memories. But he does not deny that this will be his last chance. Although he will not confess it to Margaret, he is aware that his body might even now not be up to such a trip. Lately he has been feeling nauseous most of the time and losing weight, and there has been blood in his faeces, which has scared him, though he has not yet sought treatment. He will hold out as long as he can before seeing a doctor. He knows that a diagnosis, once uttered, is as impossible to take back as a husband’s slap. A doorway to a room he is not yet prepared to enter.
Ron is seventy-nine and hopes that he will not see eighty-five. A sudden sniping heart attack is his preferred cause of death — a shot out of the blue. Certainly, on his present downward trajectory, he cannot imagine anything beyond eighty-five that would be worth waiting around for. He tells Margaret that he will consider the trip, but upon being dropped home he slips the letter into the cluttered bottom drawer of his desk and, with the ease of a lifetime’s practice, puts any thoughts of Crete out of his mind.
Margaret, however, is a determined woman. For many years she steadfastly managed a company importing athletic shoes from Japan. Even though she is now almost sixty and has taken early retirement, she habitually wears the brand out of corporate allegiance. Once set upon a course she rumbles steadily forward. She rings her father the next afternoon. She has been in contact with Alan Harbidge from the RSA. Apparently they had a very long and fruitful conversation.
‘Is that right?’ Ron is standing in the hall holding a fried bacon sandwich. The bread is still warm and greasy with oil. But he is feeling nauseous again, his stomach like a scrunched bag. He places the plate on the hall table, the sandwich barely touched.
‘Yes. We sorted out a lot.’
Ron stands in his hallway and listens to Margaret itemise departure dates and travel itineraries. The airforce is apparently putting on a Boeing to fly the veterans to Greece.
‘The prime minister is going,’ she tells him. ‘She will take part in the official ceremony.’ As if pulling a rabbit from a hat, Margaret finally informs him of how much the entire trip will cost. ‘Give or take about five hundred dollars.’
‘It’s not a question of money.’
‘Of course it isn’t.’
‘I’m not sure that I want to go.’
‘I understand. But I truly believe you’ll enjoy it when you’re there, and of course Peter and I will be along to look after you.’
‘Look, there’s someone at the door. I’ll call you back later eh.’
He hangs up the phone and stands to finish his sandwich. There is no one at the door. The lie has gained him a few yards of safe ground. He wipes his fingers on the back of his trousers and goes out through the sun room on to the back lawn. The first autumn leaves sit on the lawn under the maple tree curved upwards like miniature boats, barely touching the grass. He sits in the sun on the wooden bench he made himself.
So. Margaret wants him to go back to Crete and she intends to come with him. Up until now he had imagined her plan involved sorting out itineraries, passports and travellers’ cheques and then driving him to the airport, waving goodbye at the departure gate. But no. She is going to hold his hand. And she wants to bring Peter. Peter, her husband, is a respected landscape artist, established in his field: darkly atmospheric oils of New Zealand bush and mountains. Ron has a lot of respect for his son-in-law’s work but does not have any store of warmth for the man himself. Peter, a lapsed Bohemian, still with a beard, seems at his best when actively painting. In the hours when he is not practising his art, the man has an air of irritability. He is tall and thin and strides round the house like a giraffe with toothache.
It is Ron’s belief that as an artist Peter is too used to shaping his own reality. He is always the first to find fault with the details and inconveniences of day-to-day living. Nor have the high prices that his paintings now fetch brought Peter any obvious peace of mind. Ron is glad that he himself had no artistic urges. He had earned a living first as a builder and in later years a building inspector with the council. Both jobs were demanding in their own way, satisfying, but did not take you over. Something like painting could do that, he knew. In the army Ron had done basic training with a writer in the next bunk. A little bloke not much over five foot who everyone called Lofty. Even when they were exhausted from marching all day you could hear him in the dark, scribbling away under his blanket by the light of a torch. There is, Ron reflects now, a very thin line between Muse and Harpy. All things considered, he wishes his daughter had married someone with less of a calling.
Ron suspects Peter of having an affair. Just over six months ago, through the condensation-covered window of a crowded winter bus, he glimpsed Peter in a café in a posture of intimacy with another woman. He said nothing about it to Margaret at the time. He could have been mistaken in his interpretation of the fleeting tableau. It was hard to see properly. The window of the bus was running with water so that the world outside looked almost aquatic. He was past in a flash. With no further evidence, Ron was unwilling to toss suspicion across his daughter’s marriage like poisoned confetti on the steps of the church.
Over the following weeks Margaret’s conversation turns like an only half-felt change in the weather from probabilities to certainties and then swings around in a sudden gust in the direction of definite plans. His own explicit consent for the trip does not seem to be required. The truth is that he is ambivalent. On one hand it is an adventure, almost certainly his last. On the other he is reluctant to stir up old memories that he has been happy living without. Still, Ron never puts his foot down. He never comes out and says to Margaret’s face that he does not want to go back to Crete; that he will not under any circumstances be conscripted into his daughter’s mini echelon. And so equivocation is the means whereby he finds himself assisted aboard an Airforce Boeing by a young soldier in dress uniform who grips his elbow too hard.
The plane is full of old men in new suits. They sit scattered throughout the mostly empty seats, rustling through bags, whispering. There are thirty-three veterans all up. Most of them are accompanied by their daughters, although there are sons and even a few grandchildren. Everyone seems excited and nervous in equal parts.
It is a long flight. They stop at Perth and then in some Middle Eastern country where no one disembarks. Two men come on board and check everyone’s passports. They are very friendly, all white teeth and expensive linen suits. But behind them two soldiers in pale blue uniforms stand by the door with machine-guns casually hanging from shoulder straps. Ron can suddenly feel the weight of his own rifle, the way the strap pulled down across the top of his neck during the long night march through the mountains of Crete. He excuses himself and goes to the tiny bathroom where he splashes water on his face and stays for longer than he needs to. When he returns the soldiers have gone and it is almost time to take off again.
‘I was getting worried,’ says Margaret.
He grunts. ‘So
metimes things take a bit longer than they used to.’
The official doctor talks to Ron several times during the flight. Ron watches him move down the plane from old man to old man like an insect buzzing from ear to ear. The man is too loud and too jovial. He twice reminds Ron to keep his fluids up. When he approaches again they are over the Mediterranean and making their descent into Athens. Ron pretends to be asleep. There is a whispered conversation with Margaret. Her father, she says, is doing fine, considering.
They spend half a day and a night in Athens. Ron hates the place and wants to stay in his hotel room.
‘I saw enough from the bus coming in.’
‘Don’t be silly. You didn’t come halfway around the world to see the inside of a hotel room.’
‘Why not? It’s a very nice hotel room.’
But Margaret insists that they at least visit the Acropolis and perhaps an outdoor market, and he reluctantly agrees. Peter declines to join them. Apparently he has business at the New Zealand Embassy. At the end of the taxi ride to the Acropolis the driver tries to charge them ten times the standard fare, something Margaret has researched in advance. They are double parked in a narrow road, and while his daughter haggles in cold tones, Ron looks out the window. There are tourists everywhere. They jostle past, heading towards the beginning of the road up to the ruins like a school of impatient fish heading in to the mouth of a net. The skyline is a tangle of TV aerials and power lines. The buildings are concrete, square and ugly, and the sky is the white of bleached bones. While he watches he can feel the heat seeping through the glass of the window. The taxi’s air-conditioning struggles noisily to keep it at bay. He moves back from the window and has a sudden hot twisting pain in his stomach. He hears himself let out a gasping grunt which he manages to half-swallow. He draws his knees up against the pain.
‘I need to go back to the hotel,’ he says quietly.
Both Margaret and the driver are so caught up in their negotiations that they do not hear him.
‘Margaret!’
They both stop and turn, surprised.
‘I’m not feeling well. I need to go back to the hotel.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s nothing. Probably just something I ate.’ He forces himself to smile. ‘But I need to lie down.’
Back at the hotel, the pain gets worse but he does not tell Margaret. He does not want that fool of a doctor examining him, asking questions to which he will have to lie. Instead he goes to his room, insisting on walking unaided. He takes several strong painkillers he has hidden in his suitcase and lies down on the bed. Certain positions, he discovers, make the pain subside for a while. Margaret pokes her head in after half an hour and Ron pretends to be asleep so she leaves quietly. Eventually he does sleep. But he dreams of being shot in the stomach and being left behind by his mates in a steep, rocky ravine from which he knows there is no escape.
The next morning he feels fine. The pain in his stomach is gone, and he eats a good breakfast of yoghurt and honey and even manages a piece of toast. Then they are bused back to the airport. As they are being herded into the plane again one of the old-timers ahead of him bleats like a sheep. It is a very accurate imitation and a ripple of laughter moves through the crowd. Ron smiles.
Less than an hour later he is, after sixty years almost to the day, back on Crete.
Hania is an immediate disappointment to him. He does not know what he was expecting. But not this. Some of the pastel-coloured Venetian buildings still remain or have been reconstructed, he is unsure which. But it is the atmosphere that he finds hardest to reconcile with his memories. There is a commercial bustle, an air of modernity and noisy transience. Tourist buses park two deep on one side of Planteia 1866, the main square. There are neon signs. Family groupings of pale English and Americans march two abreast on the narrow streets, parents followed by children, clutching souvenirs and craning forward to see anything that might be in the least historical. He finds it all hard to reconcile with his patchy memories of curfewed streets and determined men hurrying past in drab uniforms.
There are three days before the official ceremony.
‘Time to look around,’ says Margaret on the morning of the following day. ‘To get reacquainted.’
‘Is Peter coming with us?’
‘No.’
Since their journey began at Auckland Airport, Peter and Margaret have hardly spoken and then only in brief skirmishes, aiming to wound. Ron is a neutral observer to these exchanges. Throughout the flight to Crete Peter had sat apart. He read books on the island, often pausing to scribble in a blue notebook. Margaret has told him that Peter has been given some type of government funding. A grant, apparently, for a series of commemorative paintings which are to hang in the section of the Auckland Museum dedicated to the wars.
Peter left their pension early on the first day in Hania and has not reappeared, and Ron assumes he is on some type of official business.
Margaret and Ron travel on foot, resting often in shop doorways where Margaret browses until she sees that he is ready to go on. They sit on the benches under shade trees and watch people pass. Ron finds himself tiring easily and his daughter is content to blame it on the heat. Without planning their route they make their way naturally down to the water and sit outside a café at a table under a tall elm tree. There is a slight breeze coming off the harbour. They have a view of the water and the old stone wall which circles the harbour and of the small colourful fishing boats nearby. They have ordered bottled water which they sip out of ice-cold glasses.
‘Shall we have some lunch?’ Margaret asks suddenly.
‘Why not eh.’ He has lost track of time. He guesses that it is three or even four o’clock and he has not eaten anything all day except a small sweet pastry at breakfast, but the truth is he is not hungry. His stomach feels small and bitter and hard like an apricot from which the sun has sucked all the moisture. Margaret has a salad of olives and bright-red tomatoes and a fillet of soft marinated fish served cold. To keep up appearances and not worry her, Ron orders a chicken breast. But it is stuffed with strong-smelling goat’s cheese and he can eat only a small fraction before admitting defeat. He sees her watching him and forces another mouthful.
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘No, it’s good.’
‘You’ve hardly touched it.’
‘I guess I’m just a bit jet-lagged. My stomach doesn’t know if this is breakfast or a midnight feast.’ She smiles with him and relaxes, but Ron knows that he will not be able to fool her for much longer, not Margaret.
When he finally gets back to his room, it is evening and he is totally drained. The room looks out over a rear courtyard where bags of refuse are temporarily stored. The smell of decaying food soaks the air outside, forcing him to keep his window closed. There is a knock on his door.
‘Don’t worry. It’s just me.’
Margaret comes in and sits on the edge of his bed. She wants to know his response to being back on Crete. The truth is that Ron feels as if he has come to somewhere entirely new. The only sights which have stirred his memory are the Mediterranean itself, laid out at the foot of the town like blue-glazed ceramic, and the occasional glimpse of old women dressed from head to toe in black. There is little sense of return. He knows he could, if he wanted to, uncover buried memories, unearth his mates’ faces and moments of laughter or pants-shitting fear. But what would be the point?
‘It’s certainly interesting,’ is all he says.
Margaret seizes upon this crumb, smiles and nods. ‘Yes. It is.’ She starts to talk about small things they have seen that day and the arrangements for the ceremony down at the old landing field over which the PM will preside. He watches Margaret’s hands as she speaks. She is biting her nails again, a habit she gave up when she was much younger but has recently resumed. He contemplates the vertical wrinkles at the top of his daughter’s upper lip and reflects that surely it is unnatural for parents to live long enough to see their children mo
ve through middle age into the gaunt, infertile landscape beyond. People could be forgiven for mistaking them for an older brother and sister.
After Margaret leaves him he dozes but is woken in the darkness by Peter’s footsteps on the marble staircase. Ron lies in his bed, staring up at the white ceiling, grey in the near darkness, and the silhouette of the slowly turning overhead fan. The only light comes in from the streetlights and is filtered through the wooden shutters. Margaret and Peter are in the next room and the thick plaster wall only muffles their sibilant fighting. As he listens Ron remembers the way that Peter leaned towards the woman in the coffee shop — arm extended, hand draped lightly over her upturned wrist as though caught in the act of checking her pulse. He wonders how much longer his daughter’s marriage can hold out, who will be worn down into submission first? If it is Peter who leaves Margaret, then there is almost undoubtedly another woman. He knows from experience that, once dug in, men seldom fall back without first preparing another position. He lies awake in the darkness and listens long after the fighting has stopped: dogs barking; drunken shouts in English that quickly pass; and much later the noise of the tour buses coughing awake like chronic smokers before the first cigarette of the day.
It has been prearranged that the next morning all three of them will drive inland along the route that the retreating Allies took to the evacuation point at Sphakia. Peter wants to takes some photographs and to draw some preliminary sketches. He drives a rented Fiat quickly down the narrow roads. He hunches behind the wheel and scratches nervously at his beard when unsure of which way to turn. Next to him Margaret half turns her body towards the window. Ron is relegated to the back. As if, he reflects, he is a child or the family dog. From there he observes that the temperature in the car is far below that which the primitive air-conditioning could ever hope to provide.
