by Leta Serafim
His clothes were unholy, so coated with dirt they were like cardboard; and he could smell the stink rising off him. He ran his hand over his face; his beard was growing apace, his hair, too, stiffening up just as his clothes had, rising out from his head like the mane of a lion. Soon he’d be as wild-looking as his ancestor, Cúchulainn, when he stole the brown bull of Cooley. Aye, a great battler he’d been, Cúchulainn. Not like him, Brendan O’Malley, brought low by a girl.
She was wearing a different dress this time and had washed and braided her hair, tied it back with a ribbon. The braid was as thick as a man’s wrist, the natural curliness of that wild mane of hers barely subdued. Must be an amazing sight when she sets that hair free, O’Malley thought. Rippling all down her back, it would be like the hair of a mermaid, an angry mermaid in a storm-lashed sea.
She had been going back and forth between the two languages for some time now, not sure which was better when she spoke to him. The British had had similar trouble, asking him to speak up and stop mumbling when he gave a report. ‘Enunciate, if you’d be so kind,’ his commanding officer was always saying, openly contemptuous of his Irish accent. O’Malley figured that his Greek must be well nigh incomprehensible.
Sometimes a certain quality crept into her voice when she told him things, like now with the word horta. He’d known girls like her in Ireland, ones who paraded their knowledge around and used it to show off. They usually weren’t pretty, those girls. Being smart was all they had. This one, on the other hand, was lovely. Helen of bloody Troy.
Although they hadn’t talked again about what she intended for him, he’d come to believe she meant him no harm. Sometimes she dozed in the cave, the rifle across her knees. She always awoke with a start at the slightest noise. Spooked, she was. She and her brother both. Like horses pulled from a burning barn.
During the retreat through Athens, a girl of the same age had led O’Malley into a pastry shop, loaded him up with bottles of brandy and kissed him full on the mouth. She’d urged him to kill all the Germans he could, to die if he had to in that killing, and kissed him again and again.
All the Greeks had been crazy that day. A man had wrapped himself up in the Greek flag and jumped to his death off the Acropolis. Another had rigged up a blockade to stop the German tanks, a blockade made of orange crates and dining room furniture. Children had handed beers and cigarettes to the Australian POWS the Germans had captured and were marching away. All heroic, but more than a little mad, given the penalty the Nazis imposed on such deeds.
Perhaps she’s just another one.
O’Malley watched her in the light of the lantern.
Like the others, just one more war-crazed casualty. Perhaps that’s all this is.
Tonight’s bread had a strange texture to it. O’Malley broke off a piece and ate it, wondering what the baker had used for flour. Nothing he was familiar with, neither wheat nor rye.
“Bobota,” the girl volunteered. “Chick peas.”
Famine fare. Like the Irish when the potatoes failed, making soup out of nettles, out of stones.
He handed the bread back to her. “Here, you eat it.”
“No, no. Is for you.”
“Look at you. You’re bloody well starving, you and the boy both. It’s no use pretending. I see how it is. You got no business feeding me the way you been doing, not when you got naught in the larder yourselves.”
He grabbed her by the arms, shook her a little. “I’m a soldier. I can fend for myself. It’s too risky what you’re doing. You got to let me go.”
“Germans catch you, they will kill many people,” she whispered. “They call it Sühne-Maßnahmen—‘atonement actions.’ They burn people alive.”
O’Malley nodded. He was familiar with ‘atonement actions,’ had come upon the gruesome results of one in Crete and helped the survivors bury the bodies. As an explanation, it would suffice.
“Is that why you took my boots?”
She nodded. “Is better you stay. Better for you, better for all the people.”
“Are you with the partisans, the antartes?”
“No.” She seemed surprised by the question.
“What about your folks?”
“We are nothing.” Her voice broke. “Only poor village people. Hungry.”
“You’re not going to give me up? Get me shot as a British spy?”
She shook her head.
“I am saving you, Angle,” she said sadly.
* * *
She stayed with O’Malley for a long time that night, sitting beside him, cross-legged on the floor of the cave. She told him she’d learned English from her aunt, who’d lived in the United States. “All the time English, English. ‘I am, you are, we are. I have, you have.’ Over and over. She wanted to go back to America, wanted us to be ready.”
“What happened? Why didn’t you go?”
“My father. He didn’t want to leave, be a stranger in America.”
Better to have braved it, O’Malley believed with all his heart. Better to have braved the new world than to be perishing in the old, eating grass to stay alive, eating grass like cattle.
He told the girl how his parents had argued about America, his father wanting to join his brother, who lived in something called a ‘triple decker’ in Boston, and his mother’s tears. “ ‘Heat and hot water all hours of the day and night,’ my pa said. ‘Must be a wondrous place, America.’ ”
Then 1929 had come and photos of the breadlines had appeared in The Southern Star, the weekly newspaper of Cork, the shantytowns Americans were living in. “Pa quit his talking about Boston that year. ‘ ’Tis better to starve among one’s own,’ he told us,, ‘if starving ye be.’ ”
The girl nodded. “My family, we were the same. My aunt crazy for America, my father only for Greece.”
“What about your ma?”
“My mother died with Stefanos.”
Her situation still puzzled him. Perhaps she’d lied about being a partisan, a member of ELAS, the Greek communist forces. There were women fighting all over Greece. One of the most effective intelligence groups in the resistance was run by a woman, Lela Karagianni. Another, code-named ‘Thiela,’ was a legend in Roumeli. Still, he doubted the girl would drag her brother into it, him being the way he was, half-blind and so clumsy he could barely stand upright. In Ireland they called such kids, ‘specky four eyes.’ He’d have a hard go, a boy like that, on the playgrounds of Ireland.
“Where’s your father now?”
“Moving our goats away from Kalavryta.”
O’Malley laughed. “So it was your goat.”
“Yes. He took the bells off so no one would hear and it got away. We were looking for it the night we found you.”
She picked at the crumbs with a finger. “Is bad now, Kalavryta. Everyone hungry, like Hodja’s donkey.”
“Hodja?”
“Foolish Turk. Greeks say stories about him.”
“Tell me one.” O’Malley wanted to keep her talking, didn’t want her to leave.
“I say best. Hodja very poor and he decides to teach his donkey how to live without food. To help donkey get used, everyday he gives it less and less to eat. Donkey doesn’t complain so he keeps going. ‘What happen?’ people ask Hodja after time. ‘I don’t know,’ Hodja say. ‘Donkey, he was just getting good at it when he died.’ ”
Her face was somber. “Germans, they are Hodja now, take food away, and Greeks, they die, same as donkey.”
The little boy was roaring around in the parachute again. He’d found O’Malley’s goggles, too, and was wearing them on top of his glasses. He bent down so his sister could see, but she waved him away.
“He has many problems, my brother,” she said. “He can’t see good. Is no good for school. Looks like boy, but is a baby still.”
“Is that why you always bring him with you?”
“Yes. In village, Stefanos is like a ball they kick.”
* * *
O’Malley dreamed of them th
at night, dreamed he was swimming with the two of them in the sea. It was a hot day and the sky was bleached nearly white by the sun. The wind came up in his dream and stirred the water, making it grow dark and raising huge waves, which carried them away. He swam after them, but the current was too strong and it held him back until it was too late; they were gone. He awoke with a sense of foreboding.
He needed to leave and be quick about it, be gone from the mountain before winter set in. He pulled the blanket around him. The ground was rimed with frost, the air so cold, he could see his breath.
She’d given him back his dagger the night before. It wouldn’t be much use against the Germans, but it was a start.
Venturing a short distance down the trail in his socks, he found an old olive tree and cut off a branch. He skinned off the bark and made a spear, thinking he’d build a trap, catch a rabbit and surprise them with it. He paused, looking down at the spike he was holding. What if it didn’t catch the rabbit proper and the poor creature lingered, nailed to the stake there like Jesus on the cross? The thought made him sick and he threw the branch away. He’d carve a toy for the boy instead.
He’d completed two pieces by the time they got there, a horse and little pig, part of a set of barnyard animals he intended to make. They were crude things, clumsy and lifeless, four legs and misshapen heads; but the boy was thrilled when he saw them and dragged them back and forth across the floor of the cave, neighing and snorting in turn.
Over the next few days, O’Malley carved other animals for him. People, too. A chimney sweep with a ladder he blackened with soot from the fire, and a farmer leading a cow. He was also at work on a corral—pieces of wood looped together by scraps of fabric torn off his clothes. At first, he sang to himself while he worked:
They passed around the whiskey and they passed around the ale
And if the glasses weren’t big enough they used a wooden pail.
Everyone was feelin’ good, no one was feelin’ dry.
All around the glory and the glory it was high.
Someone asked Clancy, “Would he sing a song?”
Clancy said he would, but his voice was gone.
Up jumped Maloney and he gave a recitation
All about the kind of wood that grew in every nation.
That was the signal and they all began to fight and the women hollered, “Murder!” and they said it wasn’t right.
All kinds of wood went flyin’ through the air.
Brady hit O’Grady with the round of a chair.
Murphy took Sullivan and threw him on the bed
Stabbed him with a clothespin and left him there for dead.
But the sound of his voice bouncing off the walls of the cave depressed him, and he stopped. By his calculation, it was Sunday, September 30th, and he’d been in Greece two weeks.
His mother had probably gone to mass that day. She’d been a great one for prayers, his ma. Always after him about it when he was young, she’d given him a rosary the day he shipped out. Blessed by the pope, it’d been—one of her life’s great treasures. He’d left it behind, taking care to hide it so she wouldn’t see. He was off to war. What need had he for rosaries, women’s things?
He was sorry now he’d done that. Sorry he’d been young and so bloody full of himself.
“Ah, ma, where are you now? You with your piety and your hope, your cupboard full of saints.” St. Jude had been a favorite of hers. St. Jude, the patron saint of desperate cases.
“Remember me to St. Jude, Ma, Oh God, Ma, remember me to St. Jude.”
With a sigh, he picked up the knife and attacked the wood again. He wondered if he’d ever see his mother again.
Somewhere off to the west, he heard an owl and frantic rustling in the rocks below. He hoped whatever it was had been quick enough and not been swept away by the beating wings.
He shook his head. “Friend, you are brother to dragons now and the companion of owls.”
* * *
The little boy occasionally acted out stories about the carvings. They didn’t amount to much, his little vignettes, hunger being the prominent feature—the pig eating the cow’s share and the like, barnyard wars between those that had food and those that didn’t. Sometimes O’Malley would join in, entertaining him with nonsense rhymes he remembered from childhood.
The girl would listen in the shadows. “Irish, foolish people,” she’d say. “Silly with words.”
Laughing, O’Malley would chant,
Lord, confound this surly sister
Blight her with blotch and blister
Cramp her larynx, lung and liver
In her guts, a galling give her.
until the girl covered her ears with her hands and begged him to stop.
He told himself beguiling her was part of his plan; he’d lull her into complacency. As if anyone could lull this girl into anything—complacency least of all. He knew he was strong enough now to overpower her and get his rifle back, yet he held off. He welcomed their time together and on occasion would sing to her, ‘The Rose of Tralee’ and other romantic ballads. The songs brought Ireland closer and made her seem a part of it.
One night the little boy began to sing, too. “Tralee, tralee.”
“Stefanos, right?” O’Malley made it a question.
The boy smiled, nodded. “Nai, eimai o Stefanos.” Yes, I am Stefanos.
“I’m Brendan, and you’re Stefanos. And she’s ….” He gestured to where the girl was sitting.
“Danae. Einai i Danae.” She is Danae.
Danae.
* * *
O’Malley continued to plead with the girl to give him his boots back. “You got to understand. I’m a soldier. ’Tis tough work, soldiering. Takes a lot out of a man. Got to be properly dressed if you’re to do it right, especially when battling Germans. Can’t be taking on the Wehrmacht in bare feet, no ma’am. Be undignified, that. Be a thing of laughter.”
A proper son of Ireland, he was a shy man, poor when it came to talking women into doing things. Oh, he’d had a few in Athens, urged on by the Australians in his unit. But they’d been sows, those women, greasy and fat, with the smell of men on their skin, cigarette smoke in their hair. Scrubbers. He’d had to wait in line for them, pay his money and take his turn. Nothing like this one, this savage beauty before him.
He looked over at her, studying her face in the yellow glow of the lantern. He was warming to her. Aye, no doubt about it. Could feel his cheeks grow hot just looking at her. So beautiful she was. Solemn. Like a Madonna in an Italian painting.
He didn’t understand it. She wasn’t even a proper girl, one you could put your arm on, soft and smelling of flowers. No, she was a dirty twig of a thing, mulish. Like one of the elements on the periodic table. Zinc, iron. Basic-like. Everything reduced to its essence. In her case, eyes. Aye, it was the eyes with her.
“You’re a fool, O’Malley,” he muttered. “A different kind of fool than you were in Cairo, but a fool just the same.”
Still, he felt something when he heard her voice, her footsteps outside the cave. A quickening, a sense of being more alive.
He shook his head. And him a soldier.
Chapter 4
The kid had had a bath since O’Malley had last seen him and been barbered within an inch of his life. “Geneia,” the boy said, bowing his head so O’Malley could feel.
“Geneia” Whiskers.
O’Malley dutifully ran his hand over the child’s scalp, praying it wasn’t nits that had generated the shaving, another form of vermin. “Aye, little friend, the barber’s been at you good, given you a proper going over.”
Standing there in his glasses, his little head clipped so closely it gleamed, he looked so forlorn that O’Malley took pity on him, hoisted him up on his shoulders and began to spin around with him.
The child squealed with delight. “Peta!” Fly!
O’Malley continued to swing him around, but his weight tore open the cuts on his shoulders; and he began to bleed again
.
The girl gasped when she saw the stream of yellowish liquid soaking O’Malley’s shirt. “No good, no good this.”
Worried, she brought him charcoal and a box of matches the next night, a bowlful of stringy mutton. She wiped his wounds with a cloth soaked in brandy and bandaged him up as best she could. O’Malley sucked on the cloth after she’d finished, praying there was enough left in it to deaden the pain.
He began to run a fever, his wounded shoulders streaked with all manner of colors.
“ ’Tis nothing,” he told her. “A spot of bother.”
But she wasn’t fooled. “Ach, Angle.”
Angle.
O’Malley turned away. He no longer had the strength to correct her.
* * *
He lit some of the charcoal and buried himself in the blankets. Although it smoked up the cave, the fire took the edge off the cold and he was able to sleep. He was no longer afraid of starving to death or being killed by Germans. It was being carried off by gangrene he feared now. His own rotting, suppurating flesh.
He wished he’d ask her to bring some paper and a pencil. He wanted to get his specifics down. Who he was and where he was from, how to get word to his mother and father, should he perish. Perhaps if he told the girl, she’d remember.
“I’m Brendan O’Malley,” he said hoarsely when she reappeared. “Brendan O’Malley from County Cork.”
“I know. I know who you are.”
“Irish.”
“Yes, yes. ‘Irish in point of fact.’ ” She had tears in her eyes.
O’Malley threw the blankets back and tried to stand, but found his knees had gone all rubbery. Sinking back down on the blankets, he watched while Danae loaded his pack, carefully stowing the carved animals he’d made inside. He liked the way she moved, the deftness of her fingers and her prideful stance. He longed to touch her, to run his fingers along her collarbone and her neck—that long neck like an Egyptian queen’s. She was in a red dress, a proper girl’s dress this time, with a little buttons down the front and touch of lace. If he never saw another woman, if he died on his way down the mountain, the vision of her this night would suffice.
