by Leta Serafim
“Happens. Officers misjudge the distance and back their tanks over their own men. Read a map wrong and order units under their command straight into enemy fire. British were always carping at us about the proper way to address them, never cared a farthing that I could see about keeping us alive. It’s the nature of the thing. Officers stay well back, away from the line of fire, while the poor eejits at the front get destroyed.”
At midday, a train went by, pulling two wooden passenger cars. German soldiers were in both of the cars, looking out the open windows, watching the world go by in a bored way.
Seemed a funny kind of troop train, O’Malley thought. Perhaps they were on leave, the soldiers, taking in the sights. The train slowed a few minutes later, jerking as it inched up the steep grade, its metal wheels clicking like a roller coaster’s.
“Cogs,” Leonidas told him. “That’s how it pulls itself up. Greeks call it ‘odontotos,’ tooth train. The Italians built it.”
The train continued to climb, swaying back and forth as it bore its load up over the mountain. O’Malley could hear its wheels clanging against the metal track long after it had disappeared from view. “Be a good target.”
“You a demolitions expert?”
O’Malley nodded. “Blown up a few things in my time.”
They talked about setting charges and blowing up the train, both of them knowing it would come to nothing. The train was too small and had no military value. Wouldn’t be worth the dynamite it would take to destroy it, the risk to the men.
“The British Army dynamited a bridge on the way to Salonica,” O’Malley said. “Kept the Germans from supplying Rommel for close to six weeks. They’d been running forty-eight supply trains a day on that line. It was a great loss to them.”
He studied the tracks overhead, remembering the sad little train that had passed over them. Nothing like that here. Nothing anyone would ever notice.
“It was a Greek, Napoleon Zervas, not the British, who blew that bridge,” Leonidas said quietly. “Zervas and EDES.”
Surprised, O’Malley stared at him, open-mouthed. Zervas was a well-known right wing guerrilla, one of the few Greeks his overseers in Cairo had trusted.
“I’m neither ELAS or EDES,” Leonidas said by way of explanation. “I am only a patriot.”
“Why are you in this outfit, then? Fighting alongside the likes of Alexis and Haralambos?”
“They were the best fighters at the beginning. More disciplined and better organized than the rest. Now ….” He made a hopeless gesture. “Now, they are different.”
It continued to pour. A proper Irish storm, it was, O’Malley thought, remembering the way the clouds had boiled up over Cork, rain washing down and turning day into night. Not the people, though. No, the Irish people, they were full of light.
Curious how that was. Here, it was the people who were dark. He’d listened to the men complain about their mothers-in-law and the sourness of their wives. A form of combat, it seemed, marriage here, love rarely entering into it. Unlike his ma and pa, who’d laughed and joked always, turning adversity into a kind of triumph.
He pulled the damp flokati away from him, worrying the smell would transfer to his uniform. He sniffed at himself. Damnation, it was there. Eau de bloody goat.
Wasn’t just the smell. Weighted down as it was, he’d have a hard time walking in the thing, let alone impressing the German high command.
“Train’s come and gone. Why are we sitting here? Why don’t we cross?”
“There’s another one due.”
“Bloody hell.”
The other train passed by a few minutes later. “Now,” Leonidas said.
They were about to cross the bridge when the first stone came crashing down. Bouncing off the cliff, it fell into the river with a loud splash. A second stone followed and then a third. They weren’t big stones, but they made O’Malley nervous. Squinting against the rain, he looked up at the cliff.
“Cover me,” he told Leonidas.
Dropping to the ground, he crawled on his belly through the mud. He paused when he reached the path, wiped his face, and studied the cliff again. Aye, someone was there all right, stoning them from on high. Pulling out his gun, O’Malley crouched down and started running toward him.
He stopped dead a moment later. “Christ Almighty. It’s Specky.”
Oblivious to the rain, the boy was apparently on patrol, standing tall and swinging his arms back and forth. He had his suitcase in one hand, a long stick in the other, which he held like a rifle, imitating the men in the camp. When he saw O’Malley, he threw down the stick and rushed toward him.
“Se vrika!” he crowed. I found you.
“Lord, child, what are you doing here?”
Fotis had shifted the Germans in the camp, the boy reported, and parked them in the field next to the barrel. He’d been afraid, hadn’t liked the sound of men speaking German, and had gone in search of him.
“You should have stayed in the camp, Stefanos. It’s no good, you coming here.”
“Se vrika,” the boy repeated, softer now, tears in his voice.
Standing there in his dripping clothes, he looked like something that had been dredged up from the sea in a net—a damp, wiggling creature. An otter, maybe. Waterlogged and none too steady.
He took his glasses off and wiped them on his sleeve. “Den tha pao mazi sou. Tha pao piso ston patera mou.” I won’t go with you. I’ll go back to my father.
No point in telling him the danger he’d be in. No point in scaring him further. “Aye, home, Specky. That’s the ticket.”
Home.
Reaching for the suitcase, O’Malley steered him down the path. “Leonidas, we have a visitor.”
* * *
O’Malley argued against taking the boy back to the camp. It would only delay them and Stefanos would just run away again. At least this way, they could keep an eye on him. It remained a riddle how the boy had found them in the first place. Seen them from the top of the cliff and rolled the rocks down to alert them of his presence.
Could be he’d underestimated Specky, O’Malley told himself. Maybe he had unknown abilities, was a kind of human bloodhound, able to track people for close to two miles in the pouring rain. Maybe he could see things other people missed through those foggy glasses of his.
The rails of the bridge were slippery, and O’Malley warned the boy to watch his step. He could feel the trestles shifting underfoot, a faint tremor as the wind tore through the girders. The storm was picking up, blinding flashes of lightning erupting from the sky.
“Keravnos!” Stefanos yelled, transfixed.
Yanking him by the arm, O’Malley fought his way forward. A suspension bridge was no place to be in a thunderstorm. A bolt of lightning hit the metal, it’d kill them instantly, the charge running through their bodies and electrocuting them. Leonidas was already across, and he called for them to hurry.
They followed the railroad tracks for nearly a mile, rain lashing their faces. Although it was easier than slogging through the mud, O’Malley didn’t like being out in the open on the tracks, fearing they were too exposed.
“We going to follow the train all the way to Kalavryta? Seems a risky thing to do. German patrol passes by, they’ll spot us.”
“There’s a tunnel up ahead. Once we pass through it, we’ll head down to the river.”
Stefanos didn’t like the tunnel and began to wail, his high-pitched voice ricocheting off the stone walls until O’Malley thought he’d lose his mind.
“Lord above. Will you not stop your yapping? Hear you in Berlin, they will!”
The child quieted down after they exited the tunnel, intent on rescuing a lizard that had fallen into a pool of rainwater a few feet from the tracks.
Leonidas pulled him back. “Oxi! Narkes!” Mines.
That set him off again. “Narkes!”
It’d been a bad idea, bringing the boy along, O’Malley now realized. Lad was going to pieces. He had no business trudgin
g alongside Leonidas and him in the pouring rain, following two soldiers into a war zone.
He wondered what the kid would have been like had the war not come, if he would have been a normal boy. He’d been damaged by it, that much was certain. Broken down entirely.
“Let’s not go near the burnt trucks. The dead festering there along the shore. Boy’s about done in—no need to make it worse.”
He’d no need of a view himself, come to that. He’d seen his share of dead in medical school—skeletons dangling on hooks, their vertebrae jingling whenever the wind blew. Worse still had been in Athens, the piles of bones he’d seen in a cemetery there. The custom in Greece was to disinter the dead after five years and place their remains in a metal box, but the war had disrupted the process and there’d been bones everywhere, femurs, tibias, and skulls scattered across the dusty ground.
If he’d had any illusion about what would become of one’s earthly remains, those bones had dispelled it. He’d seen firsthand the way flesh changes as it decays and surrenders to the earth. The Bible had it right: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and so it was with man.
Be altogether better if he and Leonidas went a different way.
They were deep in the gorge now. Engorged with rainwater, the river was spilling over the banks, and the air was saturated with moisture. Shivering, O’Malley burrowed down in the flokati.
Stefanos sat down a few minutes later and refused to move. “An ixame to alogo den tha perpatousame.” If we had the horse we wouldn’t have to walk.
O’Malley wanted to throttle him. “We don’t have a horse.”
“Tha itan kalitera an ixes feri to alogo.” It would have been better if you’d brought the horse.
“Enough of your cheek. Get up and start walking.”
A few minutes later, he sat down again. “Yiati den eferes to alogo?” Why didn’t you bring the horse?
“Drive me out of my wits, you will. Get up, you hear? Get up before I skin you alive.”
Stefanos continued to fuss about the horse, the never-ending journey and how tired he was. Finally, O’Malley hoisted him up on his shoulders, thinking it’d go better. At least then he’d be quiet. He was heavy, but not as heavy as he should have been, given his age. The war had cost him there, too.
Delighted, Stefanos reached for the branches of the trees as O’Malley passed beneath them, tugging them down and releasing them like catapults, showering them with raindrops. He thought this a great game and screamed with laughter. The sky was clearing, weak sunlight filtering down to the floor of the gorge.
“Tragouda,” Stefanos ordered. Sing.
O’Malley obediently yodeled “Mrs. Murphy’s Overhauls” in a high-pitched voice, translating the words into Greek as he went along.
“Pantalonosoupa,” the boy yelled, clapping his hands together. Pant soup.
To pass the time, they concocted recipes for even odder kinds of soup—soup with stones, soup with bed sheets.
“Socks,” Leonidas offered.
“Sferes,” Stefanos said. Bullets.
“That’ll do you nicely, that will. A spicy broth, that’d make.”
Giggling, the child sang the Irish song. It was difficult for him to get his mouth around the foreign words, but he kept trying. As always, he was good natured and smiled down at O’Malley, made funny faces.
They were nearing the area where they’d captured the POWs. Heeding O’Malley’s advice, Leonidas led them to higher ground, away from the burned-out trucks. The trees near the vehicles were thick with crows. Tens of them cawed raucously in the branches. There were vultures, too, black and ungainly, perched in the highest branches, drawn as the crows had been by the scent of death. Wings extended, one floated down near a corpse in the river and began pecking at it, pulling off strips of flesh and gobbling them down.
Sickened by the sight, O’Malley pulled out his revolver and aimed it at the bird.
Leonidas stayed his hand. “The noise,” he warned.
The vulture raised its head, watched them indifferently, then returned to its feeding.
It was the ugliest thing O’Malley had ever seen. Hunchbacked, with shiny, black eyes and a tuft of moldy-looking feathers around its wattled neck, it was like something out of a Bosch painting, sinister and grotesque—of this world and yet not.
“What do you call a bird like that?” he asked Leonidas.
“Gypas. Always hungry.”
And so the thing was. As close to an embodiment of death as O’Malley had ever seen. He longed to shoot it. Kill it and all its fellows. Belonged to the devil, a beast like that. God had played no hand in its creation.
“Why didn’t your lot bury them? Be better than this.”
“There wasn’t time. We had to get away.”
“I’ve got a shovel. I’ll bury them on the way back. Can’t leave them like this, Leonidas. Fodder for crows.”
They continued to walk, moving away from the trucks and deeper into the gorge. O’Malley’s shoulders ached and he longed to rest. “Why don’t we stop for the night?” he asked. “Bed down and walk the rest of the way in the morning.”
Leonidas nodded. “There’s a little island in the middle of the river. We can sleep there.”
The clouds were breaking up when they finally halted, a new moon rising over the rim of the canyon. O’Malley heard an owl call from the shadows. Just once, the sound as piercing as a train whistle. Seeing how tired he was, Leonidas volunteered to carry Stefanos across the river. The boy was very sleepy and patted O’Malley’s head as they made the transfer.
“Go on ahead,” O’Malley said, sinking down on the sand. “I’ll be along in a minute. Just let me catch my breath,”
He dozed off and woke up with a start. Disoriented, he looked around, wondering where Leonidas and the boy had gotten to.
Taking off his boots, he stepped into the dark water, thinking he’d head for the island. He inched toward it one step at a time, afraid he’d lose his balance and get swept away by the current. The ancient Greeks had been afraid to enter the Styx, Danae had told him, believing its waters could dissolve glass, silver, and gold—all manner of things. Only a horse’s hoof could withstand it. Old people were still afraid of it. Her grandmother had called it Mavroneri until the day she died, Danae said. The black water.
“Can’t tell if my feet are dissolving,” O’Malley muttered. All sensation was lost to the cold. “But my balls are sure having a time of it.”
He stumbled ashore and called out to the others. “Leonidas! Stefanos! Damn it, where are you?” But all was quiet, the undergrowth deep in shadows. He took off his pants and wrung them out, then put them back on and laced up his boots. His legs ached as sensation returned to them, tingling painfully as if someone was sticking hatpins in them. He looked back at the river. It was indeed a black thing, winding sluggishly around the rocks like a snake. Here and there a flicker of moonlight caught the water, furthering the illusion of movement, of scales.
The reeds around him rustled in the wind, creaking and groaning in a way that was eerily human. Yelling for Leonidas, he pushed his way through the thicket, the sharp edges of the reeds raking his face and cutting into his skin. He tripped a moment later and went sprawling. The ground was frozen and he hit it hard. Cursing, he stayed where he was for a moment, spitting dirt out of his mouth.
Something was moving on the ground next to him. A scorpion crawled out of the reeds a moment later, its barbed tail jiggling slightly as it came toward him.
O’Malley looked around for something to kill it with. It was then he noticed the others. The reeds were alive with them. He must have fallen into a nest. He lay very still, forcing himself not to flinch as the insects crawled around him. The sound of their scrabbling filled him with terror. “Oh God, Leonidas, help!”
The Greek came running. He stopped when he saw the scorpions and took a step back. “Don’t move,” he cautioned.
He set one of the reeds on fire with a match and waved it at the bugs, sto
mping them to death as they ran. In a few seconds, he had burned a wide circle around O’Malley. The smoke made the bugs sluggish, their bodies slowly curling up as they died.
O’Malley got to his feet and brushed himself off, unable to shake the feeling he still had bugs crawling on him. “Put the heart crossways in me, so they did.”
“You’re lucky they didn’t sting you.”
Leonidas continued to wave the smoldering twig back and forth. “It’s an evil creature, the scorpion, can poison even in death.”
To illustrate his point, he recited a story he claimed was from Aesop:
“A scorpion and a frog met by a river. The water was high and the scorpion knew he couldn’t get across, so he begged the frog to carry him.
“ ‘Please,’ the scorpion said. ‘Please.’ ” Pretending to be the insect, Leonidas spoke in a squeaky voice.
“ ‘But you’ll sting me,’ the frog said.”
Raising his arm over his head, Leonidas curved it, imitating the tail of a scorpion. “ ‘I would never do that,’ ” he said in the same squeaky voice. “ ‘If I sting you, we will both drown.’
“The frog thought this over and agreed, and the two of them set out across the river. They were almost to the other side when the scorpion reared up and stung the frog.
“ ‘Why,’ the frog croaked as he sank beneath the water. ‘Why?’
“The scorpion shrugged. ‘It is my nature.’ ”
Stefanos loved the story and clapped his hands. “Skorpios! Skorpios!” Brandishing a stick, he re-enacted the fiery battle against the scorpions, stomping his feet and shouting, “Psofise! Psofise!” Die, die.
O’Malley smiled. “ ‘It is my nature,’ that’s good, that is. You’re a man of many talents, Leonidas. You make a fine scorpion.”
“Been fighting the Nazis a long time. Had to learn their ways.”
The three of them bedded down for the night on the island. O’Malley shook out the boy’s blanket, picked him up, and deposited him down on top of it. “Now don’t you move, you hear? You stay on the blanket.” He was afraid the boy would kick over his gun in his sleep, accidentally blow a hole in him.
