by Leta Serafim
“I couldn’t just be your bleeding nursemaid. No, you had to go and add washerwoman to my duties.”
He draped the pants over the branch of a tree to dry and got ready for bed. Roumelis had insisted Stefanos sleep next to the fire where it was warmer, had even gone so far as to give the child a blanket to wrap himself up in. Although O’Malley was soaked to the skin from the sloshing of the bucket, no such offer had been extended to him. He’d sleep where he always did, with his back up against a rock at the far end of the camp.
He fed Elektra and saw to it that she had water, a fresh armful of hay. Her warm presence gave him comfort. The feel of her hide under his hands was like touching Ireland again, recalling the boy he’d once been, who’d dreamed of racing in the steeplechase and winning a pot of gold.
With a sigh, he returned to the camp and settled down for the night. He could see his breath in the cold air above him, feel his joints stiffen as he lay there on the ground. He feared he’d be covered with frost come morning, ice in his whiskers and hair. His joy at seeing Danae slowly ebbed away as he lay there. He thought about the German prisoners up on the cliff, bound like chickens on a spit, waiting in the dark to die, the dead soldiers in the gorge, shattered by the grenade. He wished with all his heart he could walk away, be done with all this.
He could still hear the guns, the fierce roar of mortar fire rattling around in his head. He remembered the way the men inside the trucks had screamed—the inhuman sounds they’d made when the fire rose up and took them. He wiped the tears from his face, glad for the darkness, relieved that the others couldn’t see him.
“Holy Mother of God, preserve me.”
Chapter 13
One of the Germans had managed to free himself during the night, Fotis said. After which, he’d undone the bounds that held the men on either side of him. They in turn had freed the others.
Alexis and Lakis had been assigned guard duty, ordered to stand three meters back with their machine guns trained on the prisoners. Leonidas had been very clear on that point: three meters back, no more, no less. They hadn’t taken the order seriously and been sprawled on the ground, dozing peacefully, when the prisoners overpowered them, coming up on them from behind and bashing in their skulls. They’d killed Lakis outright. Alexis had survived the attack, only to regain consciousness bound hand and foot, a pair of dirty socks stuffed in his mouth.
Dirty socks. O’Malley shook his head. A nice touch, that.
The prisoners had taken the two machine guns and whatever ammunition the two Greeks had on them. Not wanting to alert the camp, they hadn’t risked firing on them, had resorted to using rocks instead.
They wouldn’t get far, not with the antartes baying at their heels. Still, O’Malley didn’t blame them for running off. He’d have done the same, torn the shackles off with his teeth if he’d had to. Chanced it, same as them.
Alexis was surrounded by the men from the camp, trying to argue away what had happened. “I was awake when they attacked. There were too many of them. I couldn’t do anything.”
The Greeks were angry he hadn’t made a stand, fought harder to save Lakis. “You fucking asshole,” one of them said to Alexis. “You worthless bastard.”
He was done here, O’Malley thought. Judged a coward by his fellows, silenced by a pair of socks. It had been Fotis who’d found him when he came to take over guard duty. Alexis had worked the socks lose by then but hadn’t screamed or tried to alert the camp in any way. Had just sat there, wringing his hands like a woman and waiting to be rescued while Lakis bled out on the ground in front of him.
* * *
“Get the horses,” Leonidas shouted.
O’Malley trailed after them on Elektra, but took care to stay well back. Germans might be preparing an ambush, waiting just around the bend with the machine guns.
“Here,” someone shouted, picking up the trail.
The brush was trampled down, a bit of gray fabric caught on a branch.
“Come on,” Leonidas yelled.
Not a posse, O’Malley thought as he watched them. No, something uglier. He remembered the description of the Spartan women from a book he’d read in school—how they’d given their men a choice when they went into battle. Win or come back on their shields. In other words, ‘victory or death.’ The Greeks had modified this in 1821 during the war against the Turks to ‘freedom or death,’ but it was the same thing: either you won or you died. That’s what this band was about tonight. Hell bent on retrieving their prize. Those seventy-seven desperate men making a run for safety. The Greeks were going to have them or die.
He wanted no part of it. Turning his horse around, he headed back to camp. All was quiet. Stefanos was fast asleep next to the campfire, his glasses carefully folded up next to him. O’Malley tucked the boy’s blanket tight around him and threw a log on the fire, then walked back to his pallet and lay down. The moon was high overhead and it bathed the camp in pale, blue light.
O’Malley heard a sudden spurt of gunfire. Leonidas must have found them. Hoisting himself up on the rocks, he scanned the gorge, searching for movement. A flash of fire illuminated the trees for a second, the shadowy forms of men on horseback. More flashes followed and then the staccato bark of a machine gun. They weren’t far off, O’Malley judged. If the prisoners retreated back this way, he and the boy would be pulled into it whether they liked it or not.
But he heard no more shots. Perhaps Leonidas had captured them, he thought. Perhaps that part of it was already over. He drew the goatskin tightly around his shoulders. The night was very cold—‘perishing,’ as his pa would say. The promise of snow in the air.
* * *
It was close to daybreak when Leonidas and the others returned, marching the prisoners ahead of them at gunpoint. One of the Germans, a blond youth, screamed something when he entered the camp.
“Skasmos,” Haralambos shouted. Shut up.
Most of the prisoners looked like they’d been beaten. One man’s hand had been broken, the fingers bent at odd angles, his thumb smashed. Leonidas hadn’t killed them, O’Malley thought. No, he’d let the men work off their rage a different way.
The Greeks quickly fenced the prisoners in behind barbed wire. “Shoot to kill, should they try and escape again,” Leonidas instructed the men.
A cry of protest rose from the Germans. Fotis grabbed the ringleader, pushed him hard against the wire, and ground his face up against it.
O’Malley didn’t blame him. Fotis’ brother, Andreas, had been grabbed by a Gestapo agent the week before, a man called Radomski who was well known in the region for his sadism.
They were evil that way, the Germans, truly satanic.
The thought stopped him and made him wonder why he’d ever championed their cause or pleaded with the Greeks to spare them. Sure, they were young, but so was he. So what if they were new to the ways of war. That didn’t make them innocent. No, that didn’t make them innocent.
The majority were sitting on the ground with their backs against the ledge, their expressions insolent, contempt for him and the place they found themselves in unmistakable. O’Malley stared back at them.
“You will be spat on and reviled in every assembly,” he said, quoting St. Patrick.
It would come to that one day, he was sure of it. These men and the cause they served remembered only as a thing of evil. Like Herod slaughtering the babies in Jerusalem, the Nazis black deeds never to be forgotten. To be recalled time and time again as long as there were humans left on the planet to tell the story.
“Your kind will disappear like the froth of the river, a river all fishes hate.”
He’d chosen the right cause, had fought for it and was fighting still. He’d see that the Greeks obeyed the Geneva Convention and did right by these men, even if they were scum, see that they fought a proper war. The idea amused him. A ‘proper’ war? As if there’d ever been such a thing.
One of the Germans pointed at him and said something to the others, who nodded a
nd laughed. Taking the piss, he thought. Having at me because I’m Irish and don’t look like I belong, because I’m pale and talk funny. A cuckoo hereabouts. A cuckoo in a nest of robins.
Must be that the POWs were going on about. They were big on those sorts of things, the Germans. Differences between folks.
“Dry up, you scangers!”
The passageway where the antartes ate and slept was already narrow. The prisoners crowded the space, made getting around nearly impossible. Leonidas had wanted to keep an eye on them and so they would, he thought, morning, noon, and night. There’d be no getting away from them here.
Roumelis produced a watery gruel for them to eat, and the Germans fell on it, nearly drowning themselves in their haste to slurp it down.
With the death of Lakis, the number of Greeks in the camp was now down to thirty-nine, including the boy, Giorgos, whose feet were still healing and couldn’t fight, and Stefanos, who’d shit himself if it ever came to that. Which meant the Germans outnumbered them more than two to one. A fact not lost on Stefanos, who retreated to the barrel and wouldn’t come out.
“They can’t hurt you,” O’Malley said, trying to coax him out. “They’ve no guns and their hands are bound. You’ll be all right, Specky. Truly you will. I promise.”
“Oxi,” Stefanos yelled from inside. “Oxi, oxi, oxi.”
“Why are you so afraid of them?”
“Kremasan ton thio mou.” Sticking his head out of the barrel, he acted out the hanging of his uncle, clawing at his neck with his hands and gasping for breath, doing his best to make his eyes bulge out. It was pretty vivid and O’Malley wished he’d stop. “Pirovolisan to skilo mou.” They shot my dog.
According to the boy, the Germans had been conducting a blocco—one of the lightning raids they occasionally undertook to subdue the civilian population—and a man in a black mask with cut-out eyes, a maskoforos, had entered the house with four of them. The man in the mask had singled out his uncle, who’d been in the kitchen talking to his father, and the Germans took him away. His hands had been all bloody the day they hanged him, Stefanos said. Something bad had happened to his hands. The boy went on to say that though he was sad about his uncle, he was glad it had been him they took and not his father.
“The man in a mask was Greek?”
“Nai, milouse Ellinika.” Yes, he was speaking Greek.
“Did you recognize his voice?”
“Oloi xeroun poios einai.” Yes, everyone knows who he is.
The dog had growled when they entered the house and one of the Germans shot it. It fell to the floor and died a few minutes later, its fur matted with blood.
“Itan kalos, o skylos mou. To onoma tou itan Babikos.” He was a good dog. His name was Babikos.
O’Malley let him be. Perhaps it was better if he stayed in the barrel. If the Germans escaped again, they’d report to von Le Suire and he’d bring in the planes and the heavy artillery. The revenge operation, the Sühne-Maßnahmen, for the dead men in the gorge would take place here, not in some hapless village.
Still, O’Malley felt bad for the child. Seeking to cheer him up, he sang to him that night after dinner, entertaining him with an old Irish standby.
When Mrs. Murphy dished the chowder out, she fainted on the spot.
She found a pair of overalls at the bottom of the pot.
McGinty, he got roaring mad, his eyes were bulging out,
He jumped onto the piano and loudly he did shout,
“Who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy's chowder?”
Nobody spoke, so he shouted all the louder,
“It’s a rotten trick that’s true, I can lick the drip that threw
The overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder.
Stefanos laughed when O’Malley translated the words; and he asked him to sing it again. “Alli for a.”
“Don’t you worry, Specky. You’ll soon be back in Kalavryta with your pa. We’ll build you a tree house down by the river. Fly us some kites.”
“Kai i Danae.” And Danae.
“Of course. She’ll always be with us, Danae will.”
Stefanos asked if they could ride the horse again, and together they spun a great tale about how the two of them would ride the horse to Kalavryta and gallop inside the house, chase around and wreak destruction while the boy’s aunt fought them back with the broom. The boy liked the idea and fell asleep still speaking of it. About what his aunt would say if they set a place at the table for the horse and fed it dinner, taught it how to eat with a spoon.
“Tha tou doso olo to fai mou.” I’ll give it my food.
* * *
A delegation from Kalavryta arrived at the camp two days later. It consisted of a middle-aged priest named Father Chronis and two other men. Village elders, O’Malley judged, noting their air of self-importance. In Ireland, such folk had aligned themselves with the English. Here, apparently, it was with the holy fathers.
O’Malley shook his head. Ah, Jaysus, will you not listen to yourself? Going on as if being rich were an almighty sin, an act of treason. It’s living with all these Bolsheviks, done it to you. Turned you into a red, it has. Ruined you entirely.
“Antonakis,” the older of the two men said, introducing himself. It was a cold sort of greeting, patronizing in its way.
“The bishop has been approached by General von Le Suire, who demands you release the German POWs you are holding. The bishop is afraid if you don’t comply, the Germans will attack Kalavryta just as they did Komeno. They killed over three hundred people there, many of whom were women and children.” All of this was said in a reasonable voice as if they were discussing a routine matter, the paving of the streets, say.
Leonidas interrupted. “It was Roser who ordered that raid, not von Le Suire.”
The man started again. “The bishop is afraid—”
“Den eixei tharos,” Alexis cried, pushing his way forward. The bishop is not courageous.
The man continued on as if he hadn’t heard. “His Eminence requests your cooperation. He is convinced that if you do not surrender the prisoners, von Le Suire will massacre the people of Kalavryta. They will be the ones who suffer, not you.”
Perhaps it was the man’s condescending tone or the fact that he represented the bishop, but Leonidas and the other men refused to listen.
The next day, the priest returned alone. He described how he’d been mobbed by the residents of Kalavryta when he returned to the village the previous day. “Women were crying. Everyone is afraid.”
“The Germans will never attack Kalavryta,” Leonidas said. “It’s of no strategic importance to them.”
“The situation has changed. The resistance has stepped up its attacks. They dynamited two railroad bridges and attacked a convoy of German engineers in Tripoli. Two days later, they blew up eleven trucks. Eleven trucks! And now this: eighty-one German soldiers captured.”
He searched the faces of the Greeks. “Sooner or later, they’ll retaliate. Kalavryta is known to them as a center of resistance activity. It’s where they will go.”
He was a commanding figure in his black robe, dignified and polite. He had a heavy beard, touched with gray in places, and deep-set, intelligent eyes. “I urged everyone to leave. I told them, ‘the Germans are going to kill you. Kalavryta will be erased from the map.’ ” Fingering the cross around his neck, he spoke with infinite sadness.
“They’ve warned us and warned us. Three months ago they ordered everyone to come to the square, and they read a decree from Major Ebersberger, von Le Suire’s second-in-command. It was very clear: if the village continued to support the resistance, they would level it. They warned us again last week. Twice, we’ve been warned. Twice!”
“The prisoners are a negotiating tool,” Leonidas said. “They’re the only negotiating tool we have.”
“I’m asking you to consider the village. I beg you, do as the bishop says. Negotiate with the Germans. Give up the POWs.”
Leonidas lit a cigarette and inhale
d. “With all due respect, Father, how would we go about negotiating with the Germans? We turn up at their headquarters, they will shoot on sight.”
“Rope the POWs together and march them there, then let go of the rope and tell them they are free to go. It can’t be that difficult.”
* * *
“Von Le Suire refused to meet with us,” Leonidas told O’Malley later that week. “His aide, Ebersberger, said he has no desire to negotiate with kommunistischen Verbrecher. Communist scum. The general will ‘impose his own terms.’ All the prisoners are to be returned to him unharmed along with their weapons.”
“Their weapons, too.” O’Malley whistled. “What’s he giving you in return?”
“Nothing.”
The priest, Father Chronis, had brought word of von Le Suire’s refusal. He was close to tears. “The situation’s hopeless,” he said. “The Germans are the winners and the Greeks are the losers.” Gathering his robes, he started down the path to Kalavryta, saying he needed to warn the villagers. Silhouetted against the cliff, his black cloak billowed in the wind, lofting out like the wings of a great bird.
O’Malley thought it might be a good idea to start cleaning his gun.
The stalemate continued for the next few days, the men in the camp arguing back and forth about what to do—whether to release the Germans as von Le Suire demanded or march them to their own headquarters many miles to the west.
Sick of it all, O’Malley decided to pay Danae a visit.
“Out with you, boyo,” he said, rapping on Stefanos’ barrel with his knuckles. “We’re going to see your sister.”
Stefanos emerged a moment later, blinking rapidly and shielding his eyes from the sun. He’d been cooped up for days now, so long, he’d begun to grow pale, his movements slow and crab-like. He was fast becoming a creature of the dark, the boy, a mole.
