by Ben Pastor
With a twist of his lips, Preger pushed the shapeless cigarette to one side of his mouth to speak. “You never change, do you?”
“It depends, Waldo. I changed in a lot of things. Did I start it, back then?”
“Of course you started it. You were the master’s son.”
“I don’t think I struck first.”
“I struck first. It was the only way to make you eat your words.”
Smiling was better than raising one’s voice, and more irritating. Bora smiled. “That, I’m sure I didn’t do. What were we arguing about, anyway?”
“As if you didn’t remember.”
“I don’t remember. It can’t have been that important.”
“Of course! And that’s how much you’ve changed.” Predictably, Preger returned to military formality between them. “I’m not my father, you know, standing with hat in hand by the door when the family motors in for the holidays. I stand for, and I stand by, what’s mine. I’m not going to let my men’s actions be censured by outsiders, Rittmeister.”
“But it may be best, Herr Hauptmann, if we figure out things ourselves before the Red Cross comes knocking for answers.” Bora found he could stick to his usual equanimity in the measure his colleague struggled with it. Preger’s repeated use of “I”, a proud vindication of his present role in the world, discouraged further references to their row as boys. Bora could see, as if it were before him, the Trakehnen square where stood a memorial to the war dead. The name of Preger’s brother had been added last, during a public ceremony attended by everyone in the neighbourhood, with then Major General Sickingen in high uniform and all the women (farmers’ and landowners’ wives and daughters, including Bora’s mother) in black.
Christ, he thought, we’re twenty-seven, we’re grown men; both his parents have died since. We earned our medals in Spain. As commanding officer of the unit involved, Preger would resent any outsider butting in; he’s simply lending a particular colour to his indignation because it’s Martin Bora he happens to face. I won’t fall for it, I won’t. Not that I couldn’t belt him again if it came to blows, his street savvy notwithstanding.
Moving his chair aside to leave, Preger struck a leg of the small cafe table. Bora had to grab the water bottle to keep it from falling. “Just don’t expect any collaboration from us.”
Chanià Gate was a wide archway in the thickness of the city wall, manned by German troops. Bora’s habit in Moscow had been to carry permits ready at all times, but here they paid no attention to him. Once past the gate he turned right and left the road. Up the dirt and grass swatch hugging the western bastions, he walked a few hundred paces to the sea.
Elsewhere, litter from the air raids and fighting created a disorderly maze. Here a small section of the shoaly strand remained curiously clear. Not much of a beach, though. Pebbles reached the water’s edge; below the rippled surface, the submerged rocks trembled in a lazy, green transparency. Westward, a spit of land topped by a pyramidal peak jutted out to sea, and the sun would go down behind it eventually; the promontory gave the illusion of a man-made battlement, with a large keep guarding it (it was nothing of the kind, and it had all fallen into German hands). The real keep, still snow-capped, was the massif of Psiloritis further back, where the hinterland could still prove dangerous. Bora picked up a pebble and threw it against the necklace of small waves, toward the crisp-edged islet facing Iraklion whose name he’d read on maps and forgotten.
Preger’s resentment stayed with him. “Waltzing in without a scratch” was a gratuitous insult, but understandable under the circumstances. Less predictable was the fact that their boyhood incident had made the rift deeper, less manageable. Whether he’d been right or wrong on that occasion, Bora felt guilty about it. To him, I’m still the master’s son. And now I may have to confirm that his men not only shot four Greeks, which is forgivable in the eyes of our commanders, but also a ranking Swiss citizen who under no circumstance should have been harmed. It would affect Waldo’s career just as he was poised for glory.
Was it improbable for paratroopers to have overreacted? They were a tough, ideological lot, steeled on the Western Front. What Bora knew about Waldo’s adult life came from Peter, who kept track of all those they’d once socialized with, seeing as he was the fellow with the most friends and acquaintances on the face of the earth. Waldo Preger had become a Party member early on. In the summer of ’32, he was involved in the Königsberg street fighting; two years later he joined the police force. In this he wasn’t alone: several of the airborne troops commanders were former police officers. The story went around – if Peter hadn’t been telling a flyer’s tall tale – that Preger had punched a man dead during those riots. Rough days, hard to tell where legitimacy stood; amnesty took care of incidents and accidents involving National Socialist hotheads. My stepfather led a conservative Freikorps after the Great War; there was precious little difference sometimes between their crusade and skull-bashing in back alleys. And it’s Preger’s men who are under scrutiny for this murder, not Preger. I will not let hearsay or recollections stand in the way of common sense. He’s a former policeman, and has that and other advantages over me here in Crete. He was a bully, and still is. But I’m even more pig-headed now than I was then.
There where the sea was little more than knee-deep, to the right of some jagged rocks breaking the surface, an object Bora took to be tarpaulin rolled back and forth under the veil of water, without washing ashore. For a tense moment he expected to recognize in it a human torso, still clothed, but the folds floated too loosely for that. Not that soldiers on both sides hadn’t lost their lives by drowning. It would simply take longer for the sea to give back its dead.
Why had he walked to the shore, anyway? He wasn’t much of a sea lover: to him water meant swimming and rowing along lakes and rivers. He couldn’t connect the Aegean to any familiar sight; this wasn’t his horizon. Everyone has his – how did Jack London put it? – “call of the wild”. To a Greek it would naturally come from the sea, evidence (and lure) of chaos around the stifling world of a reduced homeland. To us, born inland in a cold climate, the closest wildernesses are the moors and forests across our monotonous plains. To our nation, traditionally, wilderness is the East, as anyone born in Leipzig could theoretically walk from his doorstep to the Pacific Ocean – or to the Atlantic for that matter, but there’s no wilderness west of Leipzig. Except for Spain, maybe.
Yes, and Spanish wilderness meant Remedios, whom he still thought about four years later. Bora pitched another pebble, far beyond the rolling tar cloth. Remedios had nothing to do with the sea, she was the opposite of the sea, on her mountain perch at Mas del Aire; but she’d been to him (not to others, regardless of that American communist, Philip Walton, and all who’d climbed into her bed) what island enchantresses had been to Ulysses. What drew him to Spain was pure idealism; to Crete, he’d originally come to fetch wine, not to lay the dead to rest. Still, he’d arrived from a foreign land, like Ulysses and Theseus before him, both of whom had from time to time met goddesses and monsters. Preger’s men, inflamed with battle, caked with dust and blood, could well have misunderstood a word, a motion in Villiger’s house, and opened fire. Among his wife’s suitors, Ulysses killed even those who were good lads: wandering, like war, made him mean.
Out in the sea the tarpaulin kept lazily ebbing and flowing: Bora reached for a flat pebble to toss at it, then changed his mind. He’d never seen himself as a wanderer, yet he never stayed put.
There’s no moss gathering on this stone; it keeps on the move, though not always rolling. It’s cast at times, thrown a distance, or sunk. It tumbles, it falls, it is washed ashore… that’s movement, too.
He discovered that he was road-weary after all. The trip had been long, uncomfortable for the most part; there was nothing much he could do to advance his task before the morning. He’d go back to the hotel to sleep if he thought he could sleep while there was still light in the sky. Weariness made him agitated, besides; he’d l
ie there worrying, and that would be all.
Dark, stringy algae and small chalk-white shells dotted the strand under his feet. If he closed his eyes, the rhythm of the swell came like liquid breathing. Deep, unfamiliar. None of this was his own; the closest seashore in his childhood had been hours away, the North Sea when in Leipzig, the Baltic when in East Prussia. He could turn his back to the water and feel none of the regret seafaring men must experience when walking away from it.
A casual glance landward revealed that Kostaridis was watching him from afar. In his irritation, Bora appreciated the fact that he didn’t try to disguise his presence. Under the arching light of the afternoon, the policeman kept to the verge of the strand, so that his sandals wouldn’t pick up seaweed and gravel.
Hands in his pockets, he greeted the German with the southern tilt back of the head, a raising of his chin. And when Bora came within earshot, he said, “Capitano.”
“Epitropos. May I help you?”
“No. I may help you. You wish to go to Ampelokastro, no? I have arranged it. In the morning we can go there.”
Were he in a generous mood, Bora would have told himself that such are the epiphanies of the gods, or of the gods’ messengers, appearing when needed in the least probable disguises. “I have meetings scheduled for the morning.”
“But maggiore Voos said they will not be until well after midday.”
“Did he?” Bora wondered when Busch and Kostaridis had discussed things, and why a lower-ranking official should be told what was his privilege to hear first.
“Si. If we leave early, we can get back to Iraklion by noon. And I can show you where Rifat Bey lives, too.”
“I suppose you’ve arranged for transportation as well.”
“No, no.” Kostaridis hedged self-consciously. “Your army will provide a vehicle and escort.”
“It’ll be quicker if you just tell me at what time you’ll be picking me up tomorrow morning.”
“Will five o’clock do?”
“It’ll do.” The studded soles of Bora’s mountain boots captured what sand there was, in from the pebbly shore. He stomped to shake it off. “Well, aren’t you coming back to the hotel? I expect you’ll be holding my hand all the way there, or will happen to be going my way.”
“No. I will see you tomorrow.”
Bora must have seemed slightly surprised. Kostaridis shrugged. “I stay here, I watch the sun go down. It has been rising and sinking thousands of years on this island, on this sea. It comforts me to participate, shall we say, in eternity in a small way. Whenever I can, I stand in this spot and watch the sunset like an old man.”
The sound of the evening swell had been changing ever since Bora walked to the waterline. The rush of small breakers as they started to fringe rocks and shoals came to his ears, but it wasn’t enough for him to want to look back. “Aren’t you afraid someone will pick you off, standing alone and working with Germans as you do now?”
“No better way for a man – not just a Cretan, or a Greek – to die than watching the sea. Surely you’ve thought out what you’d like to be be watching when you die.”
Bora frowned. No. He’d decided, four years earlier, what he’d be thinking of at the moment of death, whom he’d be thinking of. It was Remedios. The place was irrelevant. Even the time mattered little, even though he had so many hopes and expectations these days, in this season of his life, dying in Crete would be most unwelcome. He turned in the direction of the town. “I’ll see you in the morning, then. Five hundred hours sharp, in front of the hotel.”
“The tar cloth out there – it would float if it were empty.”
What else does he notice, what else does he understand? Bora started for the battlements, toward the gate. “Yes. I thought there was a human torso inside it. I think it might be a severed arm instead.”
Busch wasn’t at the Megaron. Bora ate quickly in the improvised mess hall below, then climbed to his quarters. The room was still warm from the heat of day; little chance it would cool off overnight. The bed, too short for a tall man, meant he’d have to lie askew or crumpled on the mattress. Until dark he reviewed the maps, memorizing routes, place names. From the slim dictionary of modern Greek supplied by the major, he spelt and repeated to himself the handful of sentences that might be useful during his stay. Even after dark, with a riot of stars outside, the swelter and a short mattress kept him awake, so he opened the Archaeology of Crete. There was a photo of John Pendlebury MA, FSA, “Formerly curator at Knossos”, on the flyleaf: the sort of fair, athletic fellow Professor Villiger would gladly list among his racial specimens; or had listed, who knows? They could have drunk gin and tonic, ouzo or cognac in the basement of the Knossos Hotel together no more than a month ago. Bora began reading, intrigued by the appendix to the chapter on Crete’s geography, where the author had personally entered walking times between locations. He circled and marked statements and notes there and further into the essay; at Early Minoan III he fell asleep with the book on his chest, and dreamt of losing his way.
He was crossing a field of tall grass – oats? rye? – along a dirt road shaded by oaks, straight like an arrow. The field (a real one, known since childhood) edged the Krumm property and ended at the horse chestnut planted by the Modereggers, whose pretty daughter Peter had fallen in love with – a relationship the general put a quick end to. Everything in the dream was as he remembered near Trakehnen, the soft boggy soil and the phosphorescence of new stalks against a stormy summer sky. Crane nests topped distant chimneys and forsaken smokestacks, a flat horizon rimmed the world on all sides. But where the peat fields should be, the blue line of a mislaid southern sea took their place. Someone waited for him on the shore, so he headed for the sea. But however far he went, up to his waist in undulating green blades, the turquoise-blue swatch of water stayed far away and unreachable. The road, the oak trees went on and on alongside him, even when in reality he should have long ago come to the next village or farm. One thing he was sure of: Waldo Preger was the man waiting for him on the shore of the unlikely sea.
Bora woke up at 4.30 a.m. with a start, wondering why the Russian waiter hadn’t knocked with his morning coffee. For a few confused seconds he didn’t know where he was, or why. He got out of bed, washed and shaved like a sleepwalker.
If I only knew why Waldo and I fought. It would help me understand, it would help me understand – what?
4
WEDNESDAY 4 JUNE, 4.45 A.M., IRAKLION
As a rule, Bora put no stock in Mediterranean punctuality. He was all the more surprised when, at ten to five, he saw Kostaridis – wearing exactly the same clothes, socks and sandals of the previous day – waiting in front of the hotel. It would have been civil to ask the inspector whether he’d had coffee already. If Bora chose not to do it, it was because he had a northerner’s prejudice that showing familiarity to a southerner results in unwanted liberties.
Kostaridis caught him off-guard. “Have you had your coffee? A man can’t start a day’s work without a good cup of coffee.”
Bora didn’t answer. He breathed the unfamiliar sea air and made no effort to look less grumpy than he was. The first blow of the day had come when Busch, already up and about to motor west, told him, “Off to Chanià, see you this afternoon at 17.00. I’m awaiting further data on Prof. Villiger from the head of the Ahnenerbe, SS Oberführer Prof. Dr. Walther Wüst. For your information, yesterday paratroopers from the Third Battalion of the 1st Airborne Regiment carried out a reprisal at a small place called Kandanos, 180 executed. The day before, a similar action was taken by the same unit at Kondomari – and their army reporter immortalized this on film. I’d be careful about rubbing the airborne up the wrong way if I were you.”
Pointless advice for an investigator, whose presence is an irritant per se. Bora watched the sea, pearl-coloured at this hour. He had to admit that the great water surface, so untroubled, so placid, had a calming effect: no wonder Kostaridis would choose it as his last living glimpse. As for Bora, alwa
ys in haste, time was the existential question: how much time would he have to do what he hoped to in life? There were moments (this was one such) when he felt he had 100 years yet ahead of him; in other moments, only a handful of hours. Neither prospect troubled him particularly, although the idea of decades to spend without knowing how made him thoughtful: war as a career had been ingrained in him since childhood, but wars don’t last a century as in the old days. Rubbing Preger’s men up either way sounded irrelevant, an infinitesimal part of a much larger game.
Within minutes, a motorized platoon of Jäger heading for Messarà arrived to pick them up. Fully armed and in battle gear, they’d provide a safe ride to Ampelokastro. “There’s our patrol from Agios Andreas,” the platoon leader informed Bora, showing him the place on the map. “They’re due to come down that way around 14.00. They’ll bring you back to Iraklion after you’re done.”
Under normal circumstances and on good, paved roads, the twelve or so miles separating the city from Ampelokastro could be travelled in half an hour at most. Factoring in dirt lanes and danger, this time might double, or worse. The track inland didn’t seem promising once they left the walls and turned south from the westbound route. The Jäger kept silent and on the lookout – four personnel carriers in all, with Bora and Kostaridis riding in the third vehicle.
On the westbound route, close to Chanià Gate, was where the scholar Pendlebury had reportedly fought and been badly injured. If he’d died of his wounds, Major Busch said, his grave was somewhere at one of the many crossroads. The longing to be hurt stayed with Bora in the shape of guilt. He rolled it in his mind and looked at it from all sides, like an object that must be opened in order to understand how it works. It could be harmless, a dud, or else potentially dangerous and not to be tampered with. How many times had he picked up shrapnel as a child, dug for spent shells, scraped around for relics of the war around Trakehnen… Country boys and unwary farmers lost limbs and eyesight to unexploded devices, a reminder that some objects are best left alone, with their potential for satisfying curiosity still inside.
