To Look on Death No More

by Leta Serafim

  Dressed completely in black, Danae was barely visible in the darkness. Her voice was husky when she spoke of Stefanos, recalling how much her brother had loved the rabbits. “He called the one with the droopy ear, Foufou, and that one there, the white one, he named Bobo.”

  She and her aunt had gathered up the boy’s things that morning, she told them, and put them away in the closet. “I brought you these,” she said. “They were in his pocket.” She handed O’Malley the carved wooden animals.

  Chapter 19

  The sentry shouted out a warning. Father Chronis was walking toward them, leading a mule with a man laid out across the back of it. A great shout went up in the camp a moment later. “Fotis, it’s your brother! Costas is here.”

  Grabbing the reins of the mule, they escorted the priest into the tower. Father Chronis’ eyes were teary and his cheeks were chafed with cold.

  “We’ll build a fire for you.”

  “No, no,” the priest protested. “See to Costas first.”

  Fotis’ brother was trembling violently, so weak he could hardly stand. Fotis demanded the old woman surrender her mattress and he helped his brother down, cradling him in his arms like a child. He swaddled him in blankets then gathered up wood and built a fire next to him.

  “Slaughter one of your chickens and make him some soup,” Fotis ordered the woman. “I’ll pay you for it.”

  O’Malley was surprised when she consented. Since the arrival of the antartes in Mazeika, food had become increasingly scarce in the village, whatever supplies there’d been slowly dwindling into nothing.

  Perhaps it had been better to throw the POWs off the mountain, he now thought. No one in the camp had eaten anything but trahana for the last twenty-four hours and it was unlikely they’d eat more than that today. Perhaps it was better to fly out into the darkness and come crashing down on the rocks. Better than this slow ebbing away, the life leaking out of you. Scrabbling in the dirt as his ancestors had done, searching for nonexistent potatoes.

  The priest sat down next to the fire and rubbed his hands. “After I told His Eminence, the bishop, that Ebersberger refused to meet with you, he went to the German headquarters himself. He told von Le Suire the situation had become intolerable and that it would serve no purpose to delay the exchange and take a chance on more men dying.”

  The priest was relieved. Drunk with relief.

  “It took some convincing, but von Le Suire eventually agreed and released Costas into His Eminence’s custody as a gesture of good will. I would have brought him here sooner, but he was too weak to walk. I had to find a mule for him to ride and mules are hard to come by these days.”

  “What does von Le Suire expect in return?” asked Leonidas.

  “The prisoners you’re holding.”

  The antartes looked at one another. O’Malley watched them, curious as to how far they’d go, whether they’d lie to a priest.

  “We no longer have the prisoners, Father.”

  “What are you talking about? Where are they?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Dead?” The priest cried, his face full of anguish. “But how can that be?”

  “It just is, Father.”

  “All of them?” He was trembling.

  “Yes.”

  “But this is madness. Von le Suire will retaliate. He’ll burn Kalavryta.”

  * * *

  Fotis’ brother slept for the rest of the day. He was a small man with thinning hair, skin so pale O’Malley could see the veins pulsing in his wasted neck. Gradually, a spot of color returned to his cheeks. However, he remained very weak, barely able to swallow the soup the old woman concocted.

  His story was a simple one. He’d been caught in a raid and dragged off to Gestapo headquarters. There the SS agents had formed a circle around him. Drawing closer and closer, they’d baited him a bit, hitting him with batons and laughing at his terror, mocking him when he wet himself. They kept him housed in a cellar and tortured him until they tired of the game. Eventually they left him alone, apparently thinking he’d die before morning. He’d regained consciousness in the darkness and that’s where he’d stayed until yesterday, living off potato peels and garbage.

  Worst thing about his incarceration had been the hunger, he said, the way the Germans had starved him into submission, throwing rotten vegetables and spoiled meat into his cell once a week, offal their cooks had no use for.

  “I knew some German words from school and that was what saved me. ‘Danke,’ I’d say to them, bowing like they were kings. ‘Bitte.’ I took care always how I addressed them. Always spoke respectfully and gave them higher ranks than they deserved. ‘Herr Hauptsturmführer der Waffen-SS,’ I’d say. ‘Herr Oberscharführer der Waffen-SS.’ They fed me potato peels and soup that was mostly water. The guards used to torment me about the soup. Said it was piss, their piss, in my cup.”

  “Drakoi,” Fotis whispered. Monsters.

  Haralambos took notes as the man talked, asked him whether he remembered the names of the Gestapo agents who’d held him, said there’d be a time of reckoning, a day when his suffering would be avenged.

  The antartes stayed up late that night, discussing what they should do.

  “I say we go to their headquarters and engage them there,” Spyros said. “Von Le Suire is expecting us to bring the prisoners. He’ll give us free passage. We should take advantage of it.”

  “Good way to get killed,” Leonidas countered.

  “We can split up, enter the village at night.” He was an older man with a grizzled face, deep–set, angry eyes.

  “What do you stand to gain from all this?” Haralambos asked him.

  “Nothing,” he said, startled by the question.

  “You sure no money changed hands? The Germans aren’t paying you to deliver us to them?”

  Leaping to his feet, Spyros made a great show of being insulted. “I am Greek. Greek, same as you. I’d never sell you out, never. I’d sooner die than see you perish at German hands.”

  He laid particular stress on the last two words, as if saying them aloud dirtied his mouth, as if he were swallowing glass.

  “You betray us, we’ll kill you,” Haralambos told him. “No matter where you go or what you do, we’ll find you and kill you.”

  * * *

  Roumelis continued to raid the old woman’s pantry, serving the men eggs for breakfast and, on occasion, roast chicken for dinner. They supplemented their diet with horta and olives, cans of macerated fruit they’d found in an abandoned cellar. It was never enough and O’Malley often went to bed hungry.

  News from the front was good. Messengers reported ELAS and EDES guerrillas were pushing the Germans back all over Greece. It was only a matter of time now, everyone thought. A month or two and they’d be gone.

  O’Malley alone remained on guard. One of his masters in Cairo had told him, ‘The English always won the most important battle … the last.’ In his experience, the same was true of Germans after a fashion. They never retreated without leaving a river of blood in their wake.

  You’re a cynical bastard, he told himself. Still he wondered what would happen, where the river of blood would come from and what form it would take.

  What Father Chronis had told von Le Suire about the missing men remained unknown. A second ELAS unit had surrounded German headquarters and was shelling it, inflicting heavy casualties. According to reports, von Le Suire was preparing to withdraw before Christmas, a few weeks away. Evidently, the fate of the seventy-seven German POWs no longer concerned him.

  * * *

  O’Malley continued to visit Danae at night. Sometimes he saw her watching for him in the window as he crossed the field, her face visible through the glass. She always seemed to know when he would arrive and wasted little time coming out to meet him.

  She remained subdued, muted almost.

  He’d hoist her up on the back of Elektra and they’d canter as before. For the most part, she hung well back and kept her arms at
her sides, didn’t cling to him as she’d done in the past.

  The horse liked their midnight rambles and would jerk her head, dancing almost as she crossed the river. They spent many hours in the field on the other side—level land without trees. The middle of November, winter was fast approaching and there was frost on the ground, the area a monochromatic wasteland of dead grass and night. The river too had become lifeless, a thin sheet of ice covering its surface. Only Elektra seemed alive to the darkness.

  One evening Danae leaned closer, brushing up against O’Malley. “Faster,” she urged.

  He dutifully drove his heels into the horse’s flanks and spurred her forward across the frozen land. It was very cold and he could feel Danae shivering behind him. He longed to stop and pull her into her arms, but decided against it. Grief still held her fast and he must respect it.

  They’d have another season, the two of them, when the war was over and this was behind them.

  In the meantime, he’d stand by at the ready with his flagship of a horse.

  “Things are coming to a head at the camp,” he said. He told her about the POWs and how their deaths had divided the men, made it a bitter place. “If the Germans find their bodies, it’ll go bad for Kalavryta.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Danae said. “What do we have to live for?”

  O’Malley told himself it was her sadness talking, that she didn’t mean it, that he must count for something. Still, her words grieved him.

  What he wouldn’t give to hear her laugh again.

  * * *

  It snowed later that week, a feathery dusting that started in the mountains and swept down across the plains. O’Malley was out in the pasture with the horses when it began, and he stood there watching it. Settling first on the branches of the pine trees, it gradually overtook the land before him, the forested hills and distant villages, blanketing the raw red clay and softening the jagged edges of the rocks. He leaned his head back and caught a flake on his tongue, enjoying the feel of the snow on his face, the cold touch of it on his eyelids and brows. It made him feel hopeful. In Ireland, white was the color of innocence, purity itself, and so it seemed today.

  Leonidas laughed when he saw what he was doing, called him the Greek equivalent of a caffler, a fool.

  “Away with ya!” O’Malley made a snowball and threw it at him, caught him hard on the side of his head.

  Leonidas quickly retaliated. Seeing them, the other men quickly joined in, gathering up fistfuls of snow and heaving them at each other. Having had little practice, they weren’t very good at it, and the snow kept slipping through their fingers or falling in clumps before reaching its target. There was snow in their eyebrows and hair, chunks of it frozen to their beards. Haralambos could barely see, so thick it was on his glasses.

  Without gloves, their fingers quickly got stiff, and they abandoned the fight. Although it continued to snow intermittently the rest of the day, it never amounted to much, most of it gone before nightfall, melting away.

  It was O’Malley who spotted the plane, circling Kalavryta, it was, as if looking for a place to land. He cursed the British, remembering the airfield they’d ordered him to build, the use it would be put to now. Though the buzzing of the plane lasted well into the night, it never set down.

  O’Malley stayed up long after the others, watching the valley with his rifle in hand. A siren had gone off in his head when he’d seen the plane, was sounding still.

  * * *

  He heard someone walking outside, voices whispering in the darkness. Getting to his feet, he checked the tower, but saw nothing amiss and returned to bed. They were marching west soon to join other ELAS units, and he didn’t want to be tired.

  There was frost on the ground when he awoke the next day. In spite of the cold, the old woman was sitting on a stool outside her hut, talking to herself, something about her grandson, what she’d ordered him to do. “I told him if he was a man, he wouldn’t let it pass.”

  She’d brought a length of knitting with her and was untangling the yarn as she spoke. “ ‘Now’s a good time,’ I said. ‘They won’t be expecting it.’ ”

  She continued talking as before, confusing the Germans with the Turks, using the terms interchangeably. An enemy was an enemy. Xenoi. Foreign. It didn’t matter where they were from or what language they spoke. They didn’t belong here.

  She tended to natter on and O’Malley was only half listening.

  Smiling, she reached into her bag and handed him a dimpled apple from a summer long past, patted him on the knee. She didn’t ask to be reimbursed for it or mention the theft of her chickens. She’s forgotten, O’Malley thought, studying her wrinkled face and milky eyes. Aye, age has wiped the slate clean. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  He was drawn to her in spite of himself. Never still, she was either sweeping out her house or knitting as she was today, seeing to her endless litany of chores. Like the hag in the Irish legend, the mythical crone who presided over the Fort of Shadows in Skye, who built a castle in a single night, chanting and singing as she labored in the dark.

  The old woman would often reminisce, sharing memories of her youth with him. The last few days it had been her wedding she spoke of. The beauty of the crowns she and her husband had worn in the church that day, so delicate they were like haloes.

  Today, however, it was only her grandson she talked of.

  “ ‘You must kill them,’ I told Kimon.” Picking up her needles, she began to knit again. “ ‘Theodoros has relatives there. They’ll help you get rid of the bodies.’ ”

  Not sure he’d heard right, O’Malley bent his head closer. “What’s that you’re saying, little mother? Who’s Kimon supposed to be killing?”

  She looked up at him, surprised he hadn’t understood. “The wounded Germans. The men in the hospital in Kalavryta.”

  * * *

  Leonidas frowned. “You’re sure you understood? Your Greek ….” He rocked his hand back and forth. The local gesture for a little this, a little that. In other words, not so good.

  “Aye, I understood her all right.”

  O’Malley had let loose a torrent of abuse on the old woman after he understood. “Brought the wrath of God down upon us, so you did, flicking that forked tongue of yours.” The old woman had chuckled. She’d thought he was playing.

  He was still so angry he felt like flames were consuming him; he was giving off heat.

  Leonidas got to his feet, O’Malley’s rage beginning to stir his as well. “I’ll go after him,” he said. “Kimon’s on foot. Maybe I can head him off.”

  “I’ll come.”

  The Greek put a hand out to steady him. “No. You’ll kill him.”

  “Aye, I will. Come to that.”

  Leonidas quickly saddled his horse and took off at a gallop. He was whipping his steed mercilessly, spurring it on as he raced down the hill.

  The old woman was still sitting outside her hut, knitting placidly. “You needn’t bother,” she called after him. “Kimon will have finished by now.”

  * * *

  Darkness was falling when Leonidas returned. He was riding slowly, letting the horse find its way on its own. He had a cloth bag with him, stuffed with soiled sheeting.

  “The doctor was beside himself when I got there,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “He said he tried to stop them, but Kimon had a knife and forced his way in. The doctor refused to tell him which room the prisoners were in, but the nurses were scared and they showed him.”

  O’Malley noticed the Greek’s hands were flecked with blood. “The burned men, they’re dead, aren’t they?”

  Leonidas nodded. “I didn’t get there in time.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Kimon killed three of the Germans in the ward. The fourth had been shot in the lungs and was having trouble breathing. To keep an eye on him at night, the doctor had moved him out of the hospital and into his house. He is still alive.”

  He offered this up in a hopeful voice. As if all we
re not lost.

  “I demanded to see the ward. Though the mattresses had been stripped, there was blood everywhere. ‘Get rid of this,’ I told the nurses. ‘Burn all the evidence there were German patients here.’ The women hurriedly fetched mops and began to clean up the room, their hands trembling as they wrung out the bloody water. He slit their throats. It was a mess.”

  He imitated a woman’s voice. “ ‘They were asleep,’ the nurses told me. ‘They didn’t know. They didn’t know.’ ”

  As if it made any difference.

  “What’d he do with the bodies?” O’Malley asked.

  “There were two men with him and they helped him take them away. They told the nurses not to worry, that they were going to throw them down a well. The women were all crying by then.”

  “A well? That’s the first place the Germans will look.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe they won’t find them.”

  Throwing his cigarette down, Leonidas ground it out under his heel. “Trust me, they’ll find them.”

  He had retrieved the bloody sheets from the hospital and told the men to burn them immediately. Roumelis made a fire in a metal barrel and stuffed them in, poking them down into it with a stick. The mattresses they buried in a pit outside the town. Everyone who’d witnessed the attack had been warned to keep silent, that their silence was a matter of life and death for the village.

  As a precautionary measure, Leonidas set up a twenty-four hour watch on Kalavryta. The antartes needed no urging and quickly spread out on the hills above the town.

  That evening the bells of the church in Kalavryta began to ring. They continued to ring on into the night. Father Chronis must have heard, O’Malley thought, and was sounding the alarm.

  * * *

  Leading donkeys laden with household goods, people began leaving Kalavryta the next morning, passing through Mazeika on their way south. The village was in a state of panic, they reported. No one knew what to do, whether to stay or go. It wasn’t just the murder of the three wounded prisoners in the hospital they were worried about; it was the seventy-seven other soldiers who’d gone missing in the area. They blamed the antartes for their troubles, the long journey they now faced.