by Leta Serafim
Still, he was glad of it, remembering the way she’d eyed him that first day by the hutch, when he asked her to help him carry Danae to the station, as if he was the devil incarnate, the red-haired devil Leonidas had warned him about.
Seeing his devotion to the girl, Kyria Anna had softened toward him over time and often kept him company now at the station in the evening while Danae slept. She’d laughed aloud when he said he intended to marry her after the war, rebuild her father’s farm and settle there. Her cousin, Stelios, was a priest, and she said that for a small fee she’d summon him to Kalavryta when the time came and prepare a wedding feast for them.
“Have you asked her yet?” She squinted at him.
“No, not yet.”
“Better to wait. Girl’s no good now.”
A kind of chaperone, the old woman only came in the evenings after the sun went down. She was like his ma in that, didn’t think people could sin during the day.
She didn’t like it when he spoke English and would wave her hand in front of her face as if the foreign sounds were a cloud of gnats. But in the closed confines of the station, the language difference gave Danae and him a measure of privacy, and he often resorted to it when the old woman was around. Not that Danae ever said much. No, he was the one who did most of the talking.
For the most part, Danae acted as if he wasn’t there, the silence between them lengthening and filling him with sadness. Sometimes they’d talk, but never for long. Like spent dandelions was their time together, the fragile chaff he used to blow as a child.
Even inside the depot, Danae kept a blanket wrapped around her, scruffy thing that it was. She’d insisted the old woman dye it for her, loudly declaring that from this time forward she would only wear black, that she’d be in mourning forever. She had only one dress left, the one she’d been wearing the day of the fire, and a single pair of shoes.
Seeing how thin the soles were, O’Malley made a pair of slippers for her out of the skins of the dead rabbits he found in the hutch, laces to hold them on from strips of their hide. Although he took great care, they looked like something a Neanderthal might have worn, clumsy and heavy. However, Danae was greatly pleased. Rejoicing in the warmth they provided she took to padding around the station in them.
Watching her shuffle, O’Malley wondered why ghosts were always portrayed as white when black would have suited them better. For a ghost Danae surely was in that dyed blanket of hers.
A strange kind of backward ghost, who though she walked among the living, was haunted by the dead.
* * *
At night, after she’d fallen asleep, he often lay awake and watch her. A smattering of burn marks covered her forehead and cheeks. Microscopic things, they didn’t mar her savage beauty, only served to enhance it—the way tears sometimes magnified a person’s eyes, intensify the color.
Remembering the words of Yeats, he sometimes recited them over her as a benediction, as a prayer:
How many loved your moments of glad grace
And loved your beauty with love false or true
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
Chapter 31
As soon as the soil was soft enough, O’Malley planted a vegetable garden behind her house, a row of cabbages so symmetrical he could have drawn a line through them—turnips and radishes. He’d found the plants a mile from Kalavryta in an abandoned garden, dug them up and replanted them. The ground was wet and mud clung to his shoes, pulling him down as he walked back through the rain-soaked field. An apt symbol, that mud, the red-stained earth he would never be free of.
Danae grimaced when she saw the cabbages, made a face.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Cabbage is a respectable vegetable. It’s what my people eat.”
“And look at you. Rusty hair and skin like flour.”
He grinned at her. “You’re saying I’m not handsome, so you are.”
“I’m saying I won’t eat cabbage.”
It was the first time he’d heard her laugh since he’d found her. Coming back to him, so she was.
The next day he searched through Kalavryta for other things he could give her, but found nothing. The place had been stripped clean. As in everything else, the Germans had been thorough.
* * *
The Red Cross continued to supply Kalavryta, although deliveries were more sporadic now. The pass through the mountains had opened, and people were abandoning the village in ever increasing numbers. The need for supplies was less urgent as the population declined, and the Germans were in the process of reclaiming the railroad for military purposes.
The last Red Cross supply train was due to arrive the first week in March. A group of antartes rode in on horseback to help unload it, Leonidas among them.
O’Malley was glad to see his old friend, who’d found him working in the garden behind the house. Like Danae, Leonidas didn’t think much of O’Malley’s agricultural endeavors—the tidy rows of vegetables—and teased him about them. “Left the war to grow turnips. British should shoot you.”
“Probably will if they catch me. So far, no one’s come looking.”
The Greek had dark circles under his eyes, fatigue clinging to him like dust. The unit was no longer camped in the gorge, he told O’Malley, and had relocated far to the west. He and the other men had ridden all night to get here.
“Haralambos is the same—the voice of the proletariat. He and Velouchiotis are busy planning the next stage of the war. Everyone’s optimistic. Russians entered Poland. It won’t be long before they reach Berlin.”
“Coming to an end then, is it? What about after? There really going to be a civil war in Greece?”
“It’s already started. ELAS is negotiating to stop the fighting, but even if both sides agree, the peace won’t hold. The minute the Germans leave, we’ll be at each other’s throats again.”
Leonidas paused to light a cigarette and shook the match out. “I can still get you to Cyprus, you want to go.”
“No. I’m here for the duration.”
“Thought you might be.” He eyed him for a minute. “The women in the village said you’d found her.”
“Aye. A miracle, it was. She was here in Kalavryta the whole time, hiding down by the river in a rabbit hutch.”
“Hurt?”
O’Malley nodded. “Got burned in the fire. Hands mostly. Can’t make a fist to this day and may never be able to. Worse is what it’s done to her spirit. Broken her, it has. Concussion can cause all manner of strangeness. Could be that’s what’s wrong with her.”
“And you aim to heal her?”
“Do what I can for her, yes.”
“And after?
“Marry her. Stay with her always.”
O’Malley walked back with Leonidas to where he’d tethered his horse. Snow white, the horse was, a magnificent creature well over sixteen hands high, skittish and high stepping. Austrian, from the look of her, a descendant of one of those Viennese stallions people were always going on about.
“Where the hell did you get her?” asked O’Malley, drinking in the sight of the beast.
“Belonged to von Le Suire,” Leonidas said with a smile. “I captured her during a raid on German headquarters.”
“Spit in von Le Suire’s eye, did you? Fair play to you.”
“It was a hardship at first, the language difference, but we’re doing better now. I’ll steal a panzer next, drive it straight to Berlin. You’re welcome to join me. Men respect you. There’s a place for you among the comrades.”
Both men laughed.
“No, I’m done with all that,” O’Malley said. “It’s your fiddle now.”
He paused, holding on to the reins of the horse. “There is one thing though.”
“Anything, my friend.”
“Will you explain to Haralambos what I’m about? Tell him to leave me alone? I don’t want to get shot as a spy.”
“Sure.
I’ll take care of it. I’ll tell him, ‘O’Malley’s so love sick, even Churchill has no use for him.’ H agapi ton exei trelanei. ‘He’s lost his mind to love,’ I’ll say. ‘A fool on a crusade, hell-bent on matrimony, the idiot.’ ”
“I am that, Leonidas. A fool entirely.”
“It’ll be hard, this life you’re planning,” Leonidas said, his voice growing serious. “Even if you do find a priest—a living, breathing priest the Germans spared—he won’t marry you. Not with a name like Brendan O’Malley. Along with your homeland, you’ll have to give up your faith and your name.”
“You having me off?”
Leonidas shrugged. “Name has to be Greek. That’s just the way it is.”
“A saint’s name?”
“No. Only a Greek one.”
“I’ll call myself Achilles,” O’Malley declared, recalling the legendary warrior in The Iliad who’d tied the body of his dead enemy to the back of his chariot and dragged it around Troy.
Would that I could do the same. Would that I had a chariot and von Le Suire by the heels, him and Ebersberger both.
Wouldn’t I just.
* * *
Retrieving one of the Red Cross parcels from Leonidas, O’Malley carried it back to the depot, thinking he’d stack the tins next to the bench, the cocoa and biscuits, other luxuries. He’d arrange them so they’d be the first thing she saw in the morning.
He’d bought her a rose-colored scarf in the market that had sprung up in Kalavryta, commerce apparently indispensable to human life, an enduring feature like cockroaches and lice, appearing wherever people gathered.
The scarf was a pretty thing, with little metal coins that jingled on the ends. The vendor had smiled broadly when she saw O’Malley eyeing it, had wrapped herself up in it and shimmied like an Arab woman, her ponderous breasts swaying beneath her loose robe. Salome and the dance of the seven veils.
Gold, the thing should have been—the price he’d paid for it.
Danae refused to put it on. “Why’d you buy me this?” she asked angrily. “You should have saved your money.”
He begged her to try it on just once, even went so far as to drape it over her shoulders. “Please, Danae. You’ll not be wearing black forever.”
She pulled the scarf off and flung it down on the floor. “Why are you doing this? I’m in mourning, can’t you see? All I see are graves. This is who I am, Angle. All I am now.”
She choked back a sob. “I lost everything.”
“Not everything,” he said, picking the scarf up and stuffing it in his pocket. “Not entirely.”
* * *
O’Malley removed the last of the bandages from her hands later that week. “Now lift up your arms and flex them. Keep on flexing them, like a strong man in the circus. Come on, come on. Now your fingers. Curl them.” Holding his arms up, he demonstrated what he wanted her to do. “There you go. You’re doing it. Good girl!”
He continued to coax her, tickling her under the arms when she lagged. “Now curl them under. That’s it. Smashin’. You can play the piano, you choose to. Do anything you please. Just like before.”
After she finished the exercises, he led her outside toward the river. The cold had eased, and it was a beautiful day. New grass had appeared, blanketing the red earth and camouflaging the fire-ravaged fields. The clouds had become fleeting things, shadows passing swiftly over the greening plain. O’Malley had been surprised to see fresh shoots emerging from the charred trunks of the olive trees, the world giving way to spring even here.
The banks of the river were wet with snowmelt, and wildflowers carpeted the soggy ground. There were tiny, star-shaped daisies—margaritas, Danae called them—irises and anemones, the color of water. Poppies were in evidence, too. So red they seared the eye, they’d overrun all of Kalavryta as the weather warmed, blooming between the cracks in the walls and on top of the heaps of ash. They gave the ruined town a jaunty air—festive, yet off somehow—Christmas tinsel hung by a drunk.
O’Malley couldn’t get over the sight of them. They filled him with joy, hope even, and he gathered up a handful and gave them to Danae.
“You should never pick poppies,” she said, letting them drop to the ground. “They don’t last.”
“They’ll last,” O’Malley said, losing his temper. “As will every good thing, Danae. Winter’s come and gone. Take a look around you.”
She walked ahead of him for a few minutes. Then, as if she’d come to a decision, she turned back and picked up the flowers. She stuck one in the buttonhole of her dress and placed another behind her ear. Her hair had grown out a little, the curls soft on her head like a child’s.
She gave the rest to O’Malley, who put them between his teeth and sang her a song.
For want of a better game, they played hide and seek for a time, unwilling to go back inside. O’Malley ducked down and secreted himself behind the leafy trees by the river. Danae knew the hiding place and came chasing after him. Her cheeks grew redder and redder as she sprinted across the grass, the skirt of her dress fluttering in the wind. A haze hung over the water and it filled the glade with diffuse, milky light.
When she reached him, he jumped out and grabbed her around the waist, spinning her around and around. She was so thin, he needed only one arm. Pulling her closer, he recited the most famous passage from The Song of Songs:
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
“I thought the Germans shot you,” she said, clinging to him for a moment after he put her down again. “I thought I’d lost you, too.”
It was the first time she’d addressed him directly, acknowledged she cared for him and that his passing would grieve her.
O’Malley was careful when next he spoke. “And yet here I am, standing before you. Same as I always was. You kept me alive, so you did, Danae, only you. I’d have died, save for the thought that you might still be alive.”
He moved to take her hands, but she jerked them away, hid them in the folds of the jacket.
He gently pulled them free and kissed them.
“No, no. They’re ugly,” She flexed her fingers, grimacing. “I can do nothing with them.”
“Of course you can.”
“What?”
“You can hold me.”
She started to cry then, soundlessly at first, then louder.
Pulling her close, O’Malley stroked her hair and drank in the smell of her. “There’s nothing ugly about you, Danae. You’re perfect in every way. They tipped the sun and its light spilled down upon you, so it did, and caught in your raven hair. You are an angel brought to earth, Danae. You’re the lyre the heavens play.”
He could feel her pulse beating in his hands.
“Ach, Angle. What’s going to happen to us?” she asked.
He stopped for a moment, struck by the way she was looking at him—a seal breaking the surface of the water to breathe.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,” he said. “We’re going to get married after the war is over. I’ll summon my folks from Ireland. My pa and me, we’ll rebuild your house and make it better than before. Raise sheep, same as we did at home. Goats, too, if you insist. They’ll take you to heart, my folks, and you won’t be alone anymore. You’ll have a family again. We’ll sit around the fire in the evening, swapping stories, cook ourselves a meal. The simple thing, done right.
“We’ll see the winter through and watch the spring come in. And next year we’ll do the same and the year after and the year after that. And when the weather warms, the two of us, we’ll take to the fields when no one is looking and gambol about, rolling around and kicking up our heels, come home with grass in our hair and smelling of clover. Nothing will stop us, Danae. You and me? We’ll be like wild horses running f
ree. You hear? Wild horses running free ….”
He bent down and grabbed a fistful of dirt, closed her fingers around it. “Love is like the earth, Danae. You’ll see. It endures.”
* * *
Leta Serafim is also the author of the Greek Islands Mystery series: The Devil Takes Half and When the Devil’s Idle. She has visited over twenty-five islands in Greece and continues to divide her time between Boston and Greece.
You can find her online at www.letaserafim.com.
