To Look on Death No More

by Leta Serafim

  “They have a harbor in Mani, boats?” O’Malley asked. He was thinking seriously about leaving the unit tonight and never returning. He’d fetch Danae and go, her father and aunt too, if he had to.

  “Yes,” one of the men said. “Many of the villages can only be approached by boat. It’s a Godforsaken place. Like the gorge, one of the entrances to hell in ancient times. The dead were escorted across an underground lake or river that ran through the heart of it.”

  Recalling the coins the women had placed in Stefanos’ coffin, O’Malley asked if they’d paid the ferryman in the old days.

  “Sure. The family would place coins on the eyes of the dead to ensure their safe passage to the underworld. Without the coins, Charon would refuse to take them and their soul would wander the world of the living forever.” He pulled something out of his pocket. “You go to Mani, you’ll need this.” He handed a coin to O’Malley. “Use it to pay for your passage to hell.”

  A dark story. Still, O’Malley thought he’d keep Mani in mind when he left.

  “They say the largest tree in Mani is a cabbage,” another man volunteered.

  Getting down from their horses, the group rested for a few minutes, the men teasing each other as they stood around. Those from the bigger villages calling the rest vlachoi. Peasants. Keeping at it until the others called them out.

  Although the sparring appeared good-natured, there was an edge to it, a roughness. O’Malley’s cousins had needled him in much the same way, belittling him as a ‘bogger’ and making a show of inspecting his boots for manure whenever they saw him, for no other reason, save that unlike them he’d grown up on a farm. It was the same here.

  He’d noticed other divisions within the group as well. By and large, the men from Messenia in the south were less enthusiastic about ELAS and its teachings than the ones from the north, a few even going so far as to speak out openly against it. That attitude would cost them if civil war broke out. Haralambos and his friends, they’d see to that.

  The Greeks appeared eager to fight, desperate for anything that would distract them from the events of the night.

  Near daybreak, Leonidas led them through a small hamlet. Using the mountains as cover, they’d circled around Kalavryta during the night, O’Malley now saw, and were approaching it from the west.

  Chapter 18

  Ahead lay a ruined watchtower. As they rode closer, O’Malley saw a small hut, constructed out of mud bricks built into the base, a length of burlap across the entrance.

  Pushing the cloth aside, an elderly woman came out to greet them. Her long white hair hung loose on her shoulders, as wild and curly as lamb’s wool, and she had a cane clutched in her hands. She wrapped a dirty shawl around her and asked what they wanted.

  “Refuge,” Leonidas said, making it clear it was not a request, but a demand.

  She nodded, went back inside and returned with a metal ring full of keys. The small door led into the tower. It was made of wood and looked to be original to the structure—a heavy slab of walnut with rusting iron hinges. The woman put the key in the lock and turned it, undid the chain that wound through the handle, and pushed the door open. A pair of teenage boys had come out of the hut and stood watching her.

  One by one the antartes entered the tower, bending almost double to protect their heads. Leonidas patted the lintel with his hand as he passed. “To prevent someone from coming in with a drawn sword,” he told O’Malley.

  Trust the Greeks. Keeping their portals low to protect themselves. Savages to a man.

  In the cellar of the tower were three adjoining rooms, accessed by a stone staircase. Empty now, they were swathed in cobwebs and knee-deep in filth, some of it human, judging by the smell. A flock of chickens were secreted there, pecking at the cobbled floor, the smell of their waste so strong it made O’Malley’s eyes water.

  He climbed back up the stairs. Let the antartes bed down in that prison. He for one would sleep outdoors.

  Haralambos, of course, saw it differently. “You’ve done well for yourself, little mother,” he told the woman. “Living in a castle, keeping chickens when others have none. How’d you come to be so lucky? The Germans lend you a hand?”

  “I inherited it,” the woman said. “ ‘A castle,’ my father told me. I’ll be a princess, I thought. A queen.” She waved a gnarled hand at the tower. “And now look at me. What am I queen of? Chicken shit and rocks.”

  “Count yourself lucky. Many have far less than you.”

  “What do I care what others have?”

  She demanded payment for the use of the space, said she’d have to clean up after them, deserved a few drachmas for her trouble. The Germans had taken all the livestock and grain, even the firewood she had stored. Did the antartes perhaps have some food they could give her? A few eggs, perhaps? Some bread?

  She backed off when they refused, sulked a little. “How do you expect me to get by?” she asked.

  “What do we care?” Haralambos said, giving her words back to her.

  She laughed, nodded. But she was too old to teach the lessons of communism to—the ‘one for all and all for one,’ too old for the era she found herself in. “I prayed and prayed.” She stared off into space, watching something only she could see. “Wore myself out praying. Prayed for the Turks to die.”

  The men exchanged glances.

  The two teenage boys were her grandsons and looked after things for her, she said, protected her from the Germans. She introduced herself as Kyria Demetra and said that she’d lived in Mazeika all her life.

  The oldest grandson, the boy named Kimon, told them there’d been a shooting two weeks prior. He and his brother had been herding goats with their cousin, Theodoros, and blundered into a German patrol. They’d tried to escape into the woods with the animals. The Germans had shouted something at them, but they hadn’t understood and kept running. Their cousin had been shot in the back, killed in the woods not far from here.

  Though the boy did his best to appear manly and describe the killing without giving way to tears, it was hard for him. Cursing the Germans, he vowed to avenge his cousin’s death. “I’ll slit their throats. Murder them while they sleep.” He sounded very young to O’Malley. His voice hadn’t changed yet.

  He was dressed in better clothes than his brother, a man’s jacket that had been cut down to fit him and heavy wool trousers. He had thick features and a pronounced underbite, his lower jaw jutting out like a boar’s.

  Kimon said he and his brother wanted to join ELAS, fight the Germans same as the antartes had done in the gorge. He knew everything about the battle, or so it seemed. The number of Germans killed and how the four wounded men had been taken to the hospital in Kalavryta. He even knew the name of their commanding officer, Reiss.

  As gently as he could, Leonidas declined his offer. “Someone has to defend Mazeika. Protect your grandmother and the people here.”

  Kimon insisted, saying he and his brother were good with guns. Not afraid to die.

  The old woman murmured her approval. Heard it all before, O’Malley thought, watching her. Been hearing it every day since the shooting. None of this comes as anything new to her.

  In Greece these days it was as inevitable as the coming of winter—the haste of the young to die.

  Stomping his foot, Kimon refused to be put off. “Listen to me,” he squalled. “Listen to me.”

  O’Malley decided he didn’t like Kimon much. All petulance and bluster, he reminded him of Alexis. He hoped Leonidas would tell him no. A boy like that, he’d only bring them trouble.

  * * *

  Behind the tower stood a few buildings, a village of sorts. The old woman pointed to the church at the center. “Aghios Haralambos,” she said.

  At the entrance to the church was a metal box with a slot for coins. Pointing to the box, she motioned for the men to put money in, scowled at them when they didn’t. The frescoes on the walls were primitive and blackened with age, the bodies of the saints so elongated and wracked
with pain, they were grotesque. Judging by the name painted on the icon to the left of the altar, the church was indeed dedicated to Saint Haralambos just as the old woman had said. She knew what she was talking about. She wasn’t that far gone.

  O’Malley studied the icon. The saint’s face was dour and full of condemnation, his high Byzantine forehead furrowed with rage. Another one who finds us wanting. Just like his namesake.

  He wondered why Leonidas had brought them here. He didn’t feel safe in this place, exposed as they were on the hill.

  A military strategist of sorts, the old woman offered any number of suggestions as to how they could defend themselves and hold the tower in the event of a German attack. “You can do like the ancients did in Aiges—repel an invasion by tying torches to the horns of their goats, misleading their enemy into thinking reinforcements had arrived.”

  She was far more intelligent than she let on, O’Malley thought. Haralambos had been right not to trust her. This one bore watching.

  * * *

  Searching for something to eat, the antartes spread out and explored the area. “Oh, shit,” O’Malley muttered when he saw Fotis pull a frost-blackened plant out of the ground. “Horta.”

  Roumelis scooped up two of the woman’s chickens and cut their throats with a knife, laughing when she protested. “We’re hungry, little mother, and you have food. What can we do?”

  “Thieves!” she bawled, hitting him with her fists. “Thieves!”

  She tried to herd the rest of the chickens into her hut, but it was an impossible task. Still shouting, she pushed the burlap flap aside and disappeared inside. Her grandsons trailed after her, cursing the antartes.

  Roumelis quickly built a fire and set about roasting the chickens. He threw a handful of potatoes into a pot of boiling water along with the horta and whatever else Fotis and the others had scavenged. After he finished cooking, he divided up the food and gave everyone a share. Although he was very careful, there was barely enough to go around, a few mouthfuls maybe.

  O’Malley took his plate and sat in the corner. Chewing slowly, he tried to make the sensation of eating last as long as he could, to hold the taste of the chicken in his mouth. He hadn’t eaten in forty-eight hours and would gladly have eaten mice if he’d had to, bugs. The songbirds in the trees.

  He sang a song from Ireland:

  Oh, the praties they grow small

  Over here, over here.

  Oh, the praties they grow small

  When we dig them in the fall

  And we eat them coats and all

  Full of fear, full of fear.

  Leonidas, sitting beside O’Malley, asked what a ‘pratie’ was.

  “A potato. It’s a song from the famine.”

  After they finished eating, the antartes spread their blankets out on the floor of the tower and prepared to sleep. Drawing on his cloak, O’Malley got up and walked outside.

  Roumelis came out and joined him a few minutes later. “We must celebrate the moon,” he said, pointing up at the sky. “Drink to its well-being.”

  O’Malley reached for the bottle the cook was carrying. “Smoke in me gob and a drink in me hand. What more could a man ask for?”

  * * *

  The cook paused for a moment before speaking again. “Worst thing I ever saw was in a village to the west of here. The local police were working with the Germans and they killed a man I knew in ELAS, cut off his head and left it out in the square as a warning to the others. I still see that man’s head sometimes, the awful pallor of his face. I swear it grows every time I think about it, grows and grows.”

  He and O’Malley were sitting on the ground with their backs to the wall. They’d both had a lot to drink, emptied a full bottle of raki between them.

  “Awful,” O’Malley said with feeling. He’d seen similar things. A woman’s body burned beyond recognition, only the charred outline of her breasts indicating what she once had been. The Australian in the road after the tanks had run over him, barely recognizable as a man. He’d never spoken of these things. There was no way to. They were living things, the horrors. Growing like Roumelis’ severed head, growing and festering inside him.

  “What makes it worse was he was killed by his own people, by Greeks.”

  O’Malley took a swallow. They were getting drunk because of the POWs, though neither of them said it. O’Malley could still hear their anguished cries, thought he’d probably go on hearing them the rest of his life.

  He held up the bottle. It wasn’t Murphy’s Stout, the mother’s milk of Cork, but it had done the trick, provided him with the oblivion he was seeking. He prodded the embers in the fire with his boot. The wood crackled as it caught, a shower of sparks spraying up into the night.

  “War makes you something you weren’t before. The lucky few, it makes better. The rest of us, it ruins.”

  Roumelis nodded. “There was a butcher I knew. Big, red-faced man. Bad-tempered, everyone in the village was afraid of him. One night the Germans caught him in his shop after curfew. I’ll never forget the way he just stood there wringing his hands. ‘In or out,’ he asked as meek as a lamb. ‘In or out.’ Imagine that. Asking the Germans where you should go so they can kill you, whether you should stay in your shop or come out in the street. I’ll never forget it. I could feel his fear. Taste it. Only people he knew how to beat up on were women.”

  “Germans shoot him?”

  “Yes. The wife, too, when she tried to stop them. Left them both bleeding in the doorway.”

  O’Malley could feel the wine turning on him and darkening his mood. In a hoarse voice he described the death of Stefanos, the awful moment in the field when he’d realized the boy was gone. “Lad was like a brother to me.”

  “Slipitiria,” Roumelis said in a low voice. I feel sorry with you.

  O’Malley recognized the expression, had heard it countless times at the child’s funeral. The mourners had consoled the family with it. Deeply touched, he nodded. Aye, it had been like that with him and Stefanos. They had been that. Family.

  * * *

  O’Malley sat up, uncertain as to what had woken him. Taking his gun, he walked back through the tower, but saw nothing. He shook Roumelis awake. “I’m going down to the bottom of the hill. Tell Leonidas.”

  Secreting himself amid the olive trees, he kept his eyes on the tower, planning to keep watch until morning. A dog was barking up by the houses. It had heard something, too. Knew there was an intruder about.

  He fell asleep and awoke at dawn, dappled sunlight warming his face. He lay there for a moment, listening to the early morning call of the birds. Barn swallows, they were, like a cloud of arrowheads whirling about

  A group of women in black were filling their jugs from a nearby spigot. One of them pointed at him and spoke to the rest, protesting his presence apparently. They all took flight a moment later, jabbering in Greek. O’Malley watched them go. Crows, he thought to himself. Mazeika was a village of crows.

  It looked to be a poor place, ‘mean’ as they said in Ireland. The houses were built deep into the hill, the entrances as dark as mineshafts. Swallows were living under the eaves and their mud-splattered nests added to the forlorn quality of the place, its overwhelming sense of decay.

  O’Malley picked up a clump of dirt and crumbled it between his fingers. Farming would be difficult here, soil this poor, like tilling sand. Not crows. Chickens. Aye, chickens, scratching in the dust.

  A little girl was watching him from a doorway, her baby brother playing at her feet. She giggled when he waved to her. Barefoot, she was dressed in a torn dress, her dark hair cropped short like a boy’s. Her eyes tilted up a little at the corners; and her smile, when it came, was joyful and innocent. She’d be a beauty one day.

  She whispered something to her brother and pushed him back inside. Her tone, a mixture of exasperation and love, reminded him of Danae’s, the way she talked to Stefanos. Aye, she’d been a girl like that once, Danae, a girl laughter came easy to.
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br />   Hungry, he returned to the tower to see what was for breakfast. He doubted anyone in the town would feed him. The old women hadn’t liked the look of him—that was for sure. He wondered what it was about him that put them off. He’d come with the antartes. Surely they realized he wasn’t the enemy.

  Or maybe he was, come to that.

  They’d been starving, those women—way their clothes hung off them, the cadaverous look of their faces. They’d heard about the chickens and thought he was the same. Just one more thief come to rob them. No wonder they’d fled.

  Roumelis gave him a crust of bread and a cup of bitter coffee. “Horses need tending to,” he said.

  “I’ll see to it.”

  Leading the animals down the hill, O’Malley pastured them in a stony field. It was a sunny day and he could see Kalavryta clearly in the distance. Not far, he judged—an hour’s walk at the most. The town looked vulnerable from where he stood. If the Germans ever succeeded in breaking through, it would go badly for the village, surrounded as it was by mountains.

  Like being in the palm of a hand if the Germans came. A hand about to make a fist.

  * * *

  He stole a chicken from the old lady in the hut and carried it, hidden beneath his cloak, to Kalavryta late one night, intending to present it to Danae—the first of many gifts he planned to bestow upon her. The chicken had objected to the journey and soiled itself, making O’Malley’s entrance less majestic than he’d wished.

  “How will I explain it to my father?” Danae asked, eyeing the chicken nervously.

  “Tell him it wandered in out of the blue, begging to be eaten.”

  “He’ll know it was you.”

  “What if he does? It’ll cook up fine, even if I was the one brought it. It’s meat, isn’t it? Better than the poor scoff you’ve been eating.”

  In the end, they turned the chicken loose in the field, thinking Danae’s father would discover it and congratulate himself on his good fortune. O’Malley’s role would remain a secret.

  Later the two of them wandered over to the rabbit hutch. The animals had caught their scent and O’Malley could hear them moving around inside, thumping excitedly against the wooden floor.