Beyond the Olive Grove: An absolutely gripping and heartbreaking WW2 historical novel

by Kate Hewitt

  “‘I have not seen Sophia since the war,’” Helena translated. “‘She disappeared right after the bridge was blown up—you know it?’”

  Helena glanced at Ava, who nodded quickly. “You mean the Gorgopotamos viaduct? The Resistance bombed it in 1942.”

  “You’ve been learning the local history, I see,” Helena told her teasingly, and Ava smiled.

  “It’s the least I can do, considering I don’t really know the language.”

  Helena turned back to Agathe, who began to speak again, her Greek rapid, almost agitated. “‘The Nazis came to Iousidous after the bridge was bombed. They were furious—they believed some of the villagers helped the Resistance.’”

  Ava stilled; she could feel the thud of her heart in her ears. “And do you think Sophia had something to do with it? With the bombing of the bridge?”

  Helena repeated the question in Greek, and Agathe shrugged. “‘Who knows?’” Helena translated back. “‘But the Nazis had her name somehow. They were looking for her and her sister too. Angelika. They both disappeared, and I never learned what happened to either of them.’”

  Ava sat back, her mind spinning with this new information. Had her grandmother really been involved in the Resistance? She remembered her grandmother reigning over a tea of weak squash and dry biscuits in her stuffy sitting room in a semidetached house in Leeds and could hardly reconcile the image with a young woman who could help to blow up a bridge.

  “How would the Nazis get her name?” she asked Helena. “Could someone have been an informer?”

  Helena shrugged. “I have no idea. Many villagers helped the Resistance back then. They gave food and shelter to the guerrillas, at least in the beginning. Then the fighting became too ugly and showing loyalty to one side or another was dangerous.”

  “Do you think my grandmother might have been allied to one side or another?”

  “It is impossible to say. But perhaps someone else will know more.”

  Agathe spoke again, and Helena listened intently before translating. “‘I remember it well. One day all was peaceful, or as peaceful as it could be in such times, and the next the bridge was blown up and the Nazis were marching through the main street here, in their jackboots. They dragged out some of the villagers,’” Helena’s voice hitched. “‘Shot them right in the square—’”

  Agathe’s face crumpled and she reached for a tissue, dabbing her eyes. “Apesio,” she said. “Apesio.” Terrible.

  And it was terrible, terrible to imagine the village’s sleepy street filled with Nazis, the villagers dragged out to the square, the gunshots echoing through the mountains.

  Where had Sophia been then? And Angelika? Had her great-aunt died in the square by the fountain?

  Ava shivered suddenly, for while it was terrible, it was also unbearably vivid: Sophia fleeing for her life, her sister dead, her house abandoned and empty…

  Fifteen minutes later she took her leave with Helena and they walked down the twisting road back to the school.

  “At least you have learned more,” Helena said, “even if it leads to more questions.”

  “I wonder if we’ll ever know the whole truth.”

  Helena shrugged with cheerful pragmatism. “There is one more person to talk to. His name is Lukas.”

  “I’ll live in hope,” Ava said with a wry smile. “Why don’t you come down to my house?” she asked impulsively. “I’ve learned how to make a half-decent cup of Greek coffee. If you’re not busy…?” She felt that sudden flutter of insecurity that you often had with a new friend, that such an invitation would not be welcome.

  “I’d love to,” Helena answered, and a few minutes later they were settled in Ava’s sitting room, two cups of thick Greek coffee before them.

  “This is quite good,” Helena told her, sounding surprised, and Ava laughed.

  “Eleni taught me. I’ve actually developed a taste for the stuff, although I’ve never boiled coffee in a saucepan before.”

  “It takes some time to learn to like it,” Helena acknowledged. She took another sip of the thick, bitter brew. “You are well?”

  “Yes—”

  “You do not sound certain.”

  Ava thought of the revelations of the last week: wanting to see Simon, wanting finally somehow to let go of her grief—or at least not clutch it quite so tightly—and then Andreas’s difficulties with his daughter. Andreas and Kalista, at least, seemed to have come to some understanding; they’d come over that morning and talked awkwardly, with Ava acting as an unofficial and decidedly inexperienced mediator.

  “I’m certain,” she told Helena with a wry smile. “It’s just been a bit busy. Do you remember my friend Andreas?” Helena nodded a bit guardedly, and Ava remembered how it had seemed as if Helena had been hiding something when it came to Andreas. She’d told Ava they had been friends as children, but it had almost sounded as if they weren’t friends now. “Well,” Ava continued, not wanting to betray Andreas’s confidence but thinking she could use the advice, “he’s having a bit of trouble with his daughter.”

  “Kalista.”

  “Yes. She bunked off school last week—”

  “Bunked?”

  “Skipped a day. Didn’t go.”

  “Ah.” Helena nodded knowingly.

  “Anyway…” Ava sipped her coffee, wondering how much she should divulge to Helena. “It seems Kalista wants to go to Athens,” she finally said. “See a bit of the city.”

  “A natural desire.”

  “Yes…” Not according to Andreas, though. Ava still remembered the stony look he’d given his daughter when she’d begged to be allowed to visit her aunt. His reaction seemed extreme considering Kalista had been proposing nothing more than a weekend away, but after an hour of back and forth he had, rather grudgingly, relented to a day trip… with one proviso.

  Ava had to accompany Kalista.

  “Well,” she continued, “Andreas asked me if I’d take Kalista to Athens, just for the day. And I thought perhaps you could go with us.” She hadn’t told Andreas this, but she could hardly see how he’d object. Surely Helena, a schoolteacher who had chosen to return to Iousidous, would be considered a safe companion for Kalista.

  Something like pain flashed across Helena’s face and then was gone. She placed her cup of coffee back on the table and shook her head. “I do not think that would be wise, Ava.”

  “Not wise?” Ava repeated. She’d wanted Helena’s company because she wasn’t looking forward to an entire day alone with Kalista, but she’d also thought Helena would get along well with the girl. She hadn’t expected this certain and quiet refusal. “Why not? That is, if you want to tell me—”

  Helena sighed, pain shadowing her eyes. “I told you that Andreas and I were childhood friends, but that was not quite true. Or at least not the whole truth. We were childhood sweethearts—that is the English term, yes?” Ava nodded, and Helena continued. “I was eighteen and he was twenty-five. He wanted to marry, settle down, but I was young, so young…” She trailed off, lost in memories, and Ava waited, not speaking. She’d suspected some sort of history between Andreas and Helena, but not as much as this, not broken hearts and betrayal. She thought of her awkward kiss with Andreas and flushed.

  “I wanted to live a little,” Helena continued after a moment. She took a sip of coffee. “Experience life.” She paused, meeting Ava’s gaze with sober honesty. “I moved to Athens and left him behind. A few months later Andreas married his wife. I think they were happy together for a while, but I know that she grew tired of this country life. She wanted more. She died in a car accident—on her way to Athens.” Helena paused, then added, “She was leaving him.”

  “Oh. Oh, no.” Ava sat back, sifting through all she’d learned. No wonder Andreas was so reluctant to let Kalista go to Athens. If she’d known all that, she would have been far more understanding of Andreas’s strict ways.

  Yet she knew Andreas couldn’t keep Kalista here through rules and restrictions, at leas
t not forever. If she didn’t want to stay, she wouldn’t. You couldn’t force someone to feel the same way you did.

  How many times had she confronted and even baited Simon? She’d been trying to make him feel the same sharp grief she’d been feeling, using methods as futile as Andreas’s. She’d thought that if he’d shared her pain, they would have been drawn closer together; she certainly would have felt some comfort and relief.

  But her ugly jabs and angry accusations had only made him retreat all the more. Stoic Simon, more silent than ever.

  Just as she hadn’t been able to change Simon, neither could Andreas force Kalista to love the land the way he did. He could try, and as her father he could forbid her to leave, but in the end it would only create more bitterness and resentment. Ava realized the day trip Andreas was offering was an olive branch, and she knew she needed to help his daughter grasp it.

  “In any case,” Helena resumed quietly, “Andreas and I parted badly. I said some things… they were unfair. Unkind. And it has left this,” she waved an arm through the air, as if to encompass a yawning and empty space, “distance,” she finally said, “between us. Even though I have been back in Iousidous for years, we haven’t seen much of each other in all that time. Kalista had already started secondary school in Lamia when I began teaching here. In truth, we have little reason to see each other any more.”

  “Maybe this could be a way to change that,” Ava suggested, although considering how set in his ways Andreas was, she didn’t hold too much hope.

  Helena shook her head. “If I thought Andreas would be open to such a thing, I might agree. But accompanying his daughter to Athens would only anger him, I know. And his temper can be short.”

  “Yes, I know… although I think he’s trying to change that.”

  Helena smiled sadly. “We’re all trying to change, aren’t we?” She paused, gazing down into the dregs of her coffee. “I sometimes regret the way things happened,” she admitted in a low voice. “And my own stubbornness.”

  Ava nodded, felt her insides twist with her own regret. Had she been stubborn with Simon, insisting on trying to change him in ways he couldn’t be changed?

  Maybe she should have just accepted him and his reaction, or lack of it, to the death of their daughter. Yet even as she considered this, she dismissed it. Such a thing would have been impossible for her then, caught in the throes of deepest grief.

  And now? Was it possible now? What did you do when your supposed soul mate disappointed you?

  23

  October 1942

  An hour after Velouchiotis rescinded his execution order, they began a long, exhausting trek through the mountains in heavy snow. Once Sophia tried to ask Dimitrios where they were going, but he merely grunted. She wondered if he even knew.

  The Englishman Alex walked next to her for most of that exhausting journey, chatting in his halting Greek or sometimes slowly in English, and when she didn’t understand, he’d act out the words with rather ridiculous gestures that made Sophia laugh. She knew he was trying to distract her from her own fear, and despite everything, the cold and the snow, the hunger and the terror, she found she enjoyed his company, and she felt a tiny, surprising flicker of disappointment when they reached their destination, a makeshift camp at the foothills of Mount Oeta, only a few kilometers from Iousidous.

  One of Velouchiotis’s men dismissed her with a kind of rough indifference once they’d reached their new destination, and Sophia hurried away through the darkened forest, tripping on tree roots and fallen branches, the space between her shoulder blades prickling as if she expected one of the guerrillas to shoot her as if she were a deserter.

  She arrived home near dawn, cold, wet, and utterly exhausted. As she crept into her bedroom, Angelika rose from her bed with wide, frightened eyes.

  “Oh, Sophia! You’ve been gone for so long!”

  Sophia stared at her sister and said nothing; she was too tired to address the reproach in Angelika’s voice or remind her that the only reason she’d gone at all was because Angelika had stupidly brought Dimitrios into their house, into their lives. She just shook her head and with fumbling fingers undid the knot of her wet shawl.

  “Where were you?” Angelika asked. “What did you do?”

  Sophia glanced at her sister’s childlike face and felt a weary resignation that Angelika would never understand the danger she’d been in, the danger she herself had put her in. “Go to sleep, Angelika,” she said, and sulking a bit, her sister turned over on her side and tucked her knees up to her chest.

  Sophia did the same, her back to Angelika, her whole body throbbing with exhaustion.

  As she tumbled into that thankful oblivion, she thought, in the moment before sleep finally claimed her completely, of Alex.

  Sophia woke up slowly just a few hours later, blinking in the morning light, listening to the familiar clump of her father’s boots on the staircase. She should be downstairs, Sophia knew, making the coffee, starting the bread. Her eyelids fluttered closed again and she slept.

  She woke when the sun was high in the sky, although the room was still cold. Angelika was gone, and Sophia could only hope her sister was making herself useful. She dressed and washed quickly, found that the fire downstairs had burned dangerously low and the bread, clearly begun with the best of intentions, had been left to rise for far too long.

  Sighing, Sophia began to set things to rights, wondering where Angelika had gone. Surely not in search of Dimitrios? Now that he was firmly in Velouchiotis’s camp, Sophia had even less desire for Angelika to chase after him.

  She wondered what the Englezoi soldiers were doing, when they might blow up the bridge. And if they did…

  Alex might die in the explosion, or at the hands of Italians or Nazis. She shouldn’t think of only Alex of course, but he was the only one of the Englezoi she’d talked to, the only one who had told her she was brave and made her laugh.

  How would they blow up the bridge? She wondered now. There were guardhouses with armed soldiers on either end of it. Would they attack the soldiers? Kill them?

  She knew she was being naïve and maybe even stupid in not knowing the answers to these questions; she had not even known to ask them until now. But she was out of it, she told herself; Velouchiotis had no more use for her, thank God, and she had no idea where Perseus was, or whether he was even involved in the operation any more. Perhaps Velouchiotis would now claim it for his own.

  She had two days’ reprieve, and then, as she was fetching water from the fountain in the square, Kristina approached her.

  “You have not been to the coffeehouse.”

  Sophia hoisted the heavy wooden bucket, her back already aching. “Do you need me?”

  Kristina eyed her in that calm, deliberating way that made Sophia look away. “Yes, but not to serve drinks or wash glasses.”

  Sophia’s hand clenched on the bucket’s rough rope handle. “I’ve done my part.”

  “Is the war over?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That is when your part ends, Sophia. Not before.”

  She shook her head, a sudden desperate fury rising up in her. “Do you know he almost killed us?” she demanded in a hiss. “That butcher Velouchiotis—he ordered our execution!”

  Kristina’s bland face remained unimpressed. “You are here, are you not? You are still alive.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then you do not complain,” Kristina said fiercely. “Very little is asked of you, Sophia. Only to bring food.”

  “Why can’t someone else—”

  Kristina shook her head contemptuously. “Do you think you are the only one helping? The men would have little hope, then, if they relied only on you!”

  Stung, Sophia nearly replied that she’d saved all their lives once already. She said nothing, for she saw the grief as well as the anger glittering in Kristina’s eyes and knew the older woman was right. She had no cause to complain. She would do what was asked of her.

/>   She worried at first about finding food for the soldiers; there was little enough to go round as it was. Yet nearly every day since she spoke to Kristina, there was some anonymous gift left for Sophia: a wrapped cheese by the door, a loaf of psomi left by her washing mangle. Sophia was strangely touched by these gifts; they made her feel less alone, knowing that others were helping, were giving out of their poverty just as she was acting even in her fear. You could, she supposed, rise above your circumstances, above the events and emotions that so often dictated the crooked course of life, and she was humbled by the villagers who gave and risked so much, so silently. Another kind of bravery.

  The air was sharp with cold when Sophia set out one evening three days after her return to the village, to deliver food to the camp. As she tramped through the heavy, wet snow that had come even to the foothills, the forest dark and quiet all around her, she realized, with a jolt of something almost like alarm, that she was looking forward to seeing Alex again.

  She’d been afraid she wouldn’t find the little camp again, but as she continued deeper into the forest, a soldier emerged from the shadows and, after seeing the food she brought, silently led her the rest of the way to the makeshift camp, no more than a few miserable tents around an abandoned stone hut once used by goatherds. A single fire sputtered and smoked; the wood the soldiers had used clearly had been damp.

  More of Velouchiotis’s men appeared behind her, emerging from the shadows like wraiths, their rifles drawn. Her heart pounding, Sophia held up the basket. “Bread. Cheese.” The man who had led her to the camp gave a brief nod of approval, but even so one of the men prodded the basket with the butt of his rifle before he let her pass, tearing a hunk of bread off for himself. Sophia saw Alex rise from where he’d been sitting by the fire. “You’re saving us once again, Sophia,” he said in clumsy Greek, and she smiled, ridiculously pleased.