To Look on Death No More

by Leta Serafim

  I fed it on sugar, gave it balm to drink, O Mother

  It fled its cage and left me, come golden bird

  Where you once drank sweet wine, I now drink vinegar

  On and on it went. Some of the verses were directed to the body in the coffin:

  Stefanos, the earth has eaten your childhood.

  While others gave voice to their own losses:

  I had my child as the sun.

  My child was light to me and now I walk in darkness.

  Their ancestors had probably sounded the same when the news was brought back from Troy, O’Malley thought. Or Jerusalem, as Mary and the myrrh-bearing women prepared Jesus’ body for burial. The eternal cry of the mother, the keening of a heartsick mother whose child is lost—somewhere between a dirge and a howl.

  O’Malley’s people had been stoic, tight-lipped in the presence of death, and the old women’s grieving unnerved him. It was like listening to an animal being torn to pieces in front of him. Out of the Old Testament, this was. Absalom, Absalom.

  In the old days, women used to do similar sorts of things in Ireland when someone died. But it was more prayerful, he remembered, the wailing directed at God, imploring Him to accept the soul of the departed. It wasn’t this angry, animal bleating. He could still see his grandmother, the way she’d rocked herself back and forth the night his grandfather died, chanting and mumbling inarticulately. At times she’d imitated the death rattle, only to give a shriek of triumph a moment later. She’d grabbed a handful of ashes from the hearth and scattered them by the open door of the house, as was customary in Ireland, to exorcise evil spirits that barred the soul’s flight to Paradise. After she’d finished, she’d stood up and cried with great feeling, “God of glory! Have mercy now and open your gates.”

  “Amen,” his mother and father had intoned. “Amen.”

  The priest arrived at the house the next morning. He was older than Father Chronis, with a white beard and a clumsy, palsied gait. The old crones had arrived before him and stood up when he came into the room. Holding a lighted candle, he mumbled some prayers over the body and led them outside. One of the women came forward as the coffin left the house and flung a clay pitcher out the door, taking care to break it on the steps as the body passed. To protect the living, O’Malley thought, same as his grandmother had done with the ashes, to keep evil spirits and death from returning here. Another woman slipped a coin into the child’s lifeless hands.

  There was only a small group of people at the church—Danae, her father and aunt, the men who’d served as pallbearers and the old women who’d chanted the laments. The latter trailed after the coffin in a group, holding aloft a platter of boiled wheat and a bottle of wine. All the women wore black dresses, kerchiefs, and stockings. The father had on a black tie and a black armband.

  Seeing the armband, O’Malley again was reminded of Cork—the black, diamond-shaped patches people sewed on their sleeves and wore for a year following the death of a loved one. We’re all the same, he thought. In death, we are all the same.

  Danae looked over at him and smiled faintly, her eyes glassy with tears.

  He and Leonidas had kept well away from the square as they made their way to the church. Leonidas counseled against attending the funeral, saying it was unsafe, but O’Malley insisted. Seeing how few people there were, he was glad that he had.

  The villagers had drawn back at the sight of the procession, standing in doorways and crossing themselves as the coffin passed by. It had been very quiet. No one in the church turned around when Leonidas and O’Malley entered. The women especially seemed frightened by their presence.

  “They don’t want us here,” Leonidas whispered. “They worry our presence in the village will draw the Germans.”

  Swinging the censor, the priest chanted the service. He spoke quickly, as if in a hurry to be done. “Give rest, O God, unto your servant and appoint for him a place in paradise, where the choirs of the saints, O Lord, and the just will shine forth like stars.”

  After the service, everyone walked behind the coffin up to the graveyard. Again, the priest was hasty, emptying wine over the body in the shape of the cross and chanting, “You shall sprinkle my body with hyssop and I shall be clean. You shall wash me and I shall be whiter than snow ….”

  The aunt stumbled when she reached the grave. Throwing her scarf back, she tore at her hair, yelling, “Xriso mou, xriso mou! Agoraki mou!” My little golden boy.

  Danae put her arm around her and nodded to the priest to continue. He quickly resumed the service, swinging the censor, the burning incense a white cloud over the open grave.

  “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” He threw a clump of earth down on the coffin. “Let him not be forgotten.”

  After he finished, the others walked by the grave and did the same. O’Malley had taken the lantern and gone back in search of Stefanos’ suitcase the previous night, found it and removed the ball. Lacking flowers, he threw it into the grave.

  He whispered, “May the angels embrace you, child.”

  After the family left, O’Malley retrieved the shovel and filled in the grave. When he finished, he looked down at the mound of fresh earth.

  He didn’t buy the bunk people comforted themselves with when something like this happened, the crap about earthly suffering and heavenly reward. Perhaps there was some rationale for the death of a child, some divine purpose. Perhaps on the day of reckoning, it would all make sense. He didn’t think so. ‘Spare me the explanations,’ he’d tell God when that day came. ‘Spare me the reasons.’

  * * *

  He and Leonidas spent the night in the cellar of Danae’s house. She brought them food at some point. It was a poor meal—hard rusks and glasses of sweet wine, a plate of boiled wheat, pomegranate seeds and nuts, dressed in sugar.

  “Kolyva,” Leonidas said. “Represents eternal life.”

  Together, they ate the food and O’Malley took the dishes back up to the kitchen. Hoping to see Danae again, he lingered there, but she was gone. The house was freezing. Had they run out of charcoal or had the father in his sorrow forgotten to light it? O’Malley went into the front room to check. The brazier was empty.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, ’tis only November,” he swore under his breath. “How are they going to get through the winter?”

  Danae was standing by a window and looking out at the garden. She turned when she heard him, her face streaked with tears. “Angle,” she said softly.

  O’Malley came and stood beside her. The moon was up, lighting the fields around the house and casting the trees into shadow. In the distance, he could see the river glistening in the pale light, beckoning almost, as it had the night the three of them had ridden Elektra.

  He whispered the expression the Irish used when confronted with death. “Sorry for your trouble.” Words he’d heard all his life. Inadequate as they were, they were all he knew. Poor comfort they seemed now.

  She didn’t seem to hear.

  “I should have insisted he go back to the camp. I never should have let him come with Leonidas and me.”

  “It was the Germans who killed him. Not you.”

  O’Malley felt tears start in his eyes. He desperately wanted to be forgiven, absolved for the child’s death, but found that he couldn’t accept it. “No, it was me. It was me who got him shot.”

  She put her finger to her lips.

  They stayed in the cold room, staring out at the moonlit night for a long time.

  Finally, he took her hand and kissed it. She fell against him and started to cry, beating at him with her fists. “Oh, God, I want Stefanos back. Please God, give my brother back to me.”

  * * *

  “I think the Germans know about the camp,” O’Malley told Leonidas. Numb with grief, he felt like he was under water, as if he spoke from some far-off place. Still, he went on, relating what Danae’s aunt had told him, how everyone in town knew of its location.

  “I heard the same thing,”
Leonidas said. “They say a known collaborator was asking whether we were at Mega Spileon.”

  He thought for a minute. “I’ll talk to my sources again, figure out something.” He looked over at O’Malley. “You’ll have to wait here. I can’t risk taking you with me into the town.”

  “That’s okay. I want to stay here. See if the family needs anything.”

  “See if she needs anything. I saw how you looked at her. The hunger in your eyes.”

  O’Malley felt himself redden. “What of it?”

  “She’s a path you can’t take, my friend. In case you’ve forgotten, there’s a war on. And after this war ends, there’ll be another. Forget her. Forget all of us here. Go back to Ireland. Get on with your life.”

  “No. I’ll fight till the end, same as you.”

  “Your end and mine are different.” Leonidas’ expression was hard to read, his voice cold.

  “So it’s back to that, is it? Me being an outsider?”

  “Don’t be a fool. I’m talking about Greek against Greek, civil war. You don’t want any part of what’s going to happen here after the Germans leave.”

  * * *

  Seeing O’Malley in the kitchen the next morning with Danae, her father drew him aside and asked him to leave. “You don’t belong here. Leave us and go back to the camp.”

  O’Malley begged him to reconsider, but the Greek was adamant. “We’re done with you and the antartes. Take your guns and get out of here.”

  “Leonidas asked me to wait here for him.”

  At first O’Malley thought the man’s anger came from seeing Danae and him sitting together there at the table, the way he kept looking at her, but then he realized it was something more.

  “Not in this house,” the man said, “not any longer.”

  “Where will I go?”

  “Wherever the antartes take you. It’s no concern of mine.”

  O’Malley retreated to the river. The day was overcast and the wind was cold. Even in his goatskin, he could feel the dampness rising from the earth. To pass the time, he pulled the broken bits of kite down and wound the string around his hand, weeping a little as he did so. He longed to return to that day when he and Stefanos had run the kite out before the rainstorm, to hear the boy laughing beside him. Danae’s father had been right to banish him. He had nothing to offer any of them now.

  Leonidas returned that afternoon. “People in Kalavryta say the man who was asking after us is not to be trusted.” He lit a cigarette and inhaled, his fingers stained with nicotine. “They say if he knows where the camp is, von Le Suire does, too, and that he’ll be coming for us. Any day now. It’s only a matter of time.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “You willing to go back to the camp by yourself? Warn the men?”

  “You coddin’ me? ’Course I’ll go.” O’Malley looked back toward the house. “Nothing for me here. Her father ran me off.”

  “I’ll meet with von Le Suire in the meantime. Draw the negotiations out as long I can. Give you a chance to get well away. He won’t bomb the camp as long as he thinks his POWs are there.”

  Reaching over, he patted O’Malley’s cheek. “Don’t worry, Casanova. You can come back to Kalavryta afterwards. See to the girl.”

  Chapter 17

  O’Malley visited the cemetery before he left the next day. Although it was still dark out, Danae was already there, sitting beside the grave. She pushed her hair back when she saw him and rose to her feet.

  They stood there awkwardly. It had started to rain again and the ground was muddy, water puddling on the ground around them.

  “He had no chance, my brother,” Danae said, shaking her head. “No chance—ever.”

  O’Malley had to look away, remembering the child’s final moments, his crippling terror. “Lord God, how I wish this hadn’t happened, that I could have saved him.”

  “And I wish the Germans hadn’t come and there’d never been a war.” Her voice was shrill. “It makes no difference what we wish.”

  Sitting back down, Danae touched the grave with her hand. “He was afraid of everything, my brother. He had no business with antartes.”

  Here it comes, O’Malley thought. Her lambasting me for the boy’s death.

  But it wasn’t him she was angry with. “I told my father to keep him at the house, that the camp was not for Stefanos. ‘He’s just a boy,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t belong there.’ But he insisted.”

  “Your father didn’t do this, Danae. It was the Germans who killed him.”

  Danae went on as if she hadn’t heard. “Poor Stefanos, all shut up there in the dark. I lit a candle, but the wind took it. I’ll buy him a lantern. That will be better. A big one, made of glass. He’ll be able to see if he has a lantern. He won’t be afraid.”

  She touched the mound of earth tenderly. “I’ll keep it lit always, I promise, Stefanos. I’ll never let it go out.”

  “The antartes have lanterns,” O’Malley said quietly. “I’ll bring you one from the camp.”

  Looking up at him, she seemed to see him for the first time. “The camp?”

  “Aye. The Germans learned its whereabouts and I have to warn the men.”

  Touching his face with her muddy fingers, she whispered, “Panagia mazi sou.” May God protect you.

  O’Malley choked back a sob. Stefanos had once said those words, blessed him in exactly the same way.

  * * *

  O’Malley paused as he left the cemetery and stood watching her. Sweet Jesus, she was lovely, even now all shrouded in grief.

  He opened the gate and called to her. “Walk with me a bit, Danae.”

  Taking her by the arm, he led her toward the river. It would be light soon and he didn’t have much time. At some point she stumbled and he grabbed her to keep her from falling, held her for a moment before letting go. She smelled of winter, he thought, of cold earth and damp. Underfoot, the fallen leaves were stiff and beaded with frost. An abandoned nest clung to the branch of a tree, the twigs that formed it slowly unraveling in the wind.

  Danae moved mechanically, putting one foot in front of the other, her eyes dull. Respecting her grief, O’Malley let her be. They sat down and watched the water for a time. It had receded over the last few days, a line of muck marking its passage on the rocks.

  “You going to be all right?” he asked.

  “What choice do I have?” Her voice was muffled, seemed to come from far away.

  “I know this isn’t the right time, but something’s been preying on my mind, something I need to ask you.”

  She shrugged. “Ask.”

  It was wrong doing this now, O’Malley told himself. Pestering her when she was all stove in with grief, but soon he’d be back in the thick of it, might get killed and never have the chance. He wanted to help her before he left, to bind up her wounds as she’d once done his, give her something to hold on to. A bit of light amidst all the darkness.

  Not knowing where to begin, he stammered a few words about what she meant to him, his face slowly reddening. Then he remembered a poem he’d had to memorize in school. Yeats, it had been. “The Cloths of Heaven.”

  Softly, he recited the part he remembered:

  But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

  I have spread my dreams under your feet;

  Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

  And so he would, spread all he was beneath her and all around her. Enfold her in it now and forever. Not gold and silver maybe, nothing heaven would have any use for, but true nonetheless, his yearning heart.

  He wouldn’t always be poor. Aye, one day he’d be able to take proper care of her, to make sure she had enough to eat, decent frocks to wear. He’d not be standing here as he was today, empty-handed, with nothing but words to offer her.

  “I love you, Danae,” he said.

  She didn’t react.

  “I love you,” he said again in a louder voice.

  Not knowing what to do, he picked up a stick
and began to dig furiously in the ground. “Will you have me when all this is over? Will you marry me and be my wife?”

  “Marry you?” She stared at him.

  “Aye. In a church with a priest and whatnot. Doesn’t have to be a Catholic priest. I care naught about that. All I care about is what we say to each other.” Taking her hand, he repeated more words he remembered from Ireland. “By the power that Christ brought from heaven, mayst thou love me. As the sun follows its course, mayst thou follow me. As light to the eye, as bread to the hungry, as joy to the heart, mayst thy presence be with me, oh one that I love, ’til death comes to part us asunder.”

  Gathering courage, he rushed on. “I’ll do right by you. I’m good with my hands. I’ll build you a house, a proper house, with little boxes under the windows where you can plant flowers and heat you can turn on and off with a switch. It’ll be grand, I tell you. We’ll eat roast beef every day, puddings we’ll set on fire—way the English do on Christmas. You’ll want for nothing. I swear. Love least of all. I’ll sing to you and laugh with you and love you till the day I die. You hear, Danae? I’ll love you till the day I die.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “I’ll take care of you. Give you every shilling I have.”

  “I’m Greek, Angle. What need have I of shillings?”

  There’d been a flicker of something in her eyes, something in her voice as she’d said it. Hope, O’Malley thought it was. Aye, hope that her life, instead of ending in this place, might be beginning.

  “Will you not call me Brendan? Just this once? Will you not say my name?”

  “Yes, Angle.” she said with a hint of spirit. “I’ll do that. After we get married, I will call you ‘Brendan.’ ”

  And then she laughed.

  * * *

  O’Malley pondered that laugh all the way back to the camp. Whether it had been a ‘yes, I’ll marry you’ laugh or something else. When he got back, he’d have to ask her again, get it clarified.