by Ben Pastor
Once in his room, he filled the tub with cold water, and fell asleep in it. At some point during the night he must have got up and flung himself on the bed, because he woke up there in a daze when dawn was first breaking. He’d dreamt fragments of events of the endless day before, Rifat Bey and the chalk faces, the Jewess in Rhodes, the Sphinxes with breasts like the young girls at the brothel. Sinclair wasn’t in the dream, nor Minos. A distant day with Waldo Preger was.
As every summer, there are seasonal workers from Poland who come for the harvest. Big men and women, tall and blonde. Waldo dares me to “go see the Polacks” in the shacks they occupy at the edge of the Modereggers’ farm. He’s been there before, and knows there’s the risk of being chased off with a stick or a wooden flail. So we go, keeping low behind the hedge so they won’t see us from the fields. We reach one of the sheds and peer into one of the windows. There, a young woman is breastfeeding her child, bare to her waist in a pool of morning light. Waldo nudges me in my ribs but I drop back, because it’s not done. So I sit in the grass with my back to the wall of the shack, while my playmate stands on tiptoes and keeps looking. My heart is in my mouth, because in fact I’m also still looking, with my mind’s eye. I’ve never seen a woman’s breast before, and my head’s on fire. I hardly hear the hubbub that follows shortly thereafter. Waldo has already taken to his heels when I realize the woman’s husband is upon us with a riding whip, shouting in his incomprehensible tongue, and dart off barely in time to avoid being lashed with it. We run through the fields, Waldo and I, zigzagging among the men and women reaping wheat, but only when we dive beyond the fence that borders his father’s yard are we safe. And it’s a good thing Herr Preger isn’t home, or there’d be hell to pay. For both of us it’s the first of many forays “in the Polack burg”. I don’t follow Waldo when he crawls inside to spy, but I can’t let his challenge go unheeded, so I stand between the shacks where clothes hang to dry on long, tense ropes. Unnoticed by me, a woman steps out from behind a wet shirt and gives me a slap across the face that makes me stagger. On the spot I don’t know how to react, but immediately her man comes out and rages at her, not at me, because I am the master’s son. He strikes her, and I shout at him that he’s got to stop it, that it’s really my fault. In his rage he forgets that I’m the master’s son: he lifts me off my feet and tosses me across the threshing floor onto a heap of hulled wheat, where I sit until my head stops spinning.
PART TWO
Wandering
6
THURSDAY 5 JUNE, 6.30 A.M., BORA’S LODGINGS ON ITHACA STREET
I am twelve, and I don’t like girls yet. I am twelve, and every other Sunday I serve Mass at St Mary’s. I am twelve, and I have growing pains. I am twelve and my stepfather takes me downtown to the “Cheka Trial” against communist assassins who plotted to kill General von Seekt. At the Spring Fair Grandfather Franz Augustus buys me and Peter the first Leica cameras ever produced. In the same year Field Marshal Hindenburg, a distant relative, is elected president of the Reich, and my stepfather becomes Lieutenant General. I am twelve and visit with Peter the new Leipzig Planetarium at the Zoo. Next year I shall begin classical studies at a private school, and if I apply myself, I will be allowed to play on Father’s Blüthner piano. I am twelve, and seasonal workers from Poland…
No. No, it wasn’t on account of the seasonal workers. While he shaved, Bora was still racking his brains to remember the reason for the fist fight. It makes no sense to think that it would help me understand what happened at Ampelokastro. Why do I have the impression it will? Here it’s murder, one way or another. It was just boys’ feistiness then. What’s more significant is that I chose to forget.
Disparate, irrelevant details of those summer weeks at Trakehnen floated back to his mind. But those weeks, that day fifteen years earlier continued to escape him. Even the place where it had happened, although it could be one of three or four: the shady meadows along the Rodupp Canal, the edge of the property by the Moderegger land, the old chapel, or the abandoned factory beyond the marsh where Pastor Wüsteritz hanged himself over a rumour about young girls, they said; but most probably because his grandson had drowned the year before.
Bora perfectly remembered instead the Pregers’ living room, with the hunting trophies of six generations of Pregers (and Boras, and Sickingens). There was a mantelpiece clock, and embroidered doilies everywhere. There was Herr Preger, with astonished and guilty eyes even though the young culprit was apologizing in front of him. And there was Frau Preger, who twisted her hands over the kitchen apron, because they’d come unannounced. Waldo wasn’t there; only the black-edged photograph of his brother, who had died in the Great War.
His stepfather had instructed him along the way and now, after a grumbled greeting to those present, he did not say one word. It was up to him, Martin, to explain and apologize.
I should at least remember the apology, if not the explanation; but I only recall the surroundings to the smallest detail, the scent of oiled furniture and the waxed floor, the milky froth of embroidered curtains against the windowpanes, the low beamed ceiling, the adults’ hands. And the looming presence of his stepfather behind him.
The latter had seemed to him then – but no, only after the fact, now that he reviewed the scene in his mind and judged it as an adult – a metaphor of his life from now on: the weight of his family name, of his birth, of army honour and tradition behind him; in front of him, those for whom those burdens belonged elsewhere, while they were what he was: those to whom he was apologizing even though – he was sure of this, and Waldo confirmed it – he hadn’t been the first to lift his hand. But perhaps he’d started it verbally, for all that he was in the right.
I was in the right, whatever “right” was when I was twelve. But I shouldn’t have gone from words to blows to defend my ideas with Waldo Preger. With an equal in rank it would have been a glorious fist fight, an acceptable settling of scores. With Waldo, instead… What was the transgression for my stepfather? “Dirtying my hands”? “Lowering myself” to someone else’s level? Haven’t I been arguing with him for the past ten years about all of this? He can no longer take me by the scruff of the neck and call me back to order, but I can trespass as before, and more than before, in an army that is not egalitarian, and yet light years away from his views of the officer corps. In his time an officer could never marry a girl as uninhibited as Dikta (he and his colleagues laid her easy great-aunts, but marriage was out of the question); in his time, it would be obligatory to use a nobleman’s title on his documents and in conversation. I have a good memory; I can’t understand why I don’t recall the argument. Did I put it out of my mind for some reason? Clearly so. Later that summer Peter broke a leg falling from his horse, and we were all very worried for him: that’s the only incident that sticks in my mind. I could ask Waldo directly, if I wanted. But I don’t.
Bora prepared to leave his lodgings, thinking of the reflection of water in the canal, the summer insects, the festive bliss of scuffling with his cousins or swimming or climbing, doing everything with ferocity and excess of energy. Which was after all what he did in bed with Dikta, an unbridled parenthesis in the otherwise severe routine of his life. Yes, back then – imperfectly – he’d felt that outmoded things and behaviours stood behind him, not yet questioned but to be questioned soon, today no longer a matter for doubt but heated confrontation. If he could, General Sickingen would wrest me from her the same way, by the scruff of my neck. But I need some disorder in my order; I need to escape with my imagination at least from the iron-clad rules with which I grew up. My natural father – the Maestro – did it with music, travels, with the scandalous relations he had with strong and sensual women, and not only in Russia. I do it with Dikta and in the solitude (much more shadowy than the banks of the Rodupp) of my mind.
The army depot, where he’d secure what he needed for the next three days, hadn’t yet opened. Bora was still chiselling away at his mental block when he reached the square overlooked by t
he Hotel Knossos. By the fountain, a gloomy Kostaridis was making it obvious he was waiting for him. “I wash my hands of you,” he said, concisely repeating his opposition to a trip inland. “Here are the prints from Savelli’s roll of film. Should you revise your plans, you know where to find me.” Does he ever change his shirt? Bora impatiently took the envelope from the policeman. “Anything of interest?”
“Look for yourself.”
The photographs were disappointing. Routine shots of what seemed to be Cretan ruins, of clay figurines, long-beaked ewers and other artefacts, they could have been taken by the Italian scholar just as well as by Villiger. To be sure, Savelli had got into trouble in Rhodes on account of antiquities. One image stood out among the rest, the stolen snapshot of a showy blonde woman among flowerbeds, on a terrace or promenade overlooking the sea. Bora turned it towards Kostaridis. “Is this a local Aryan, or the housekeeper Siphronia?”
“Neither. That is Signora Cordoval.”
“The Jewess from Rhodes?”
“Savelli’s girlfriend, right. It must be true what he told me, that the roll of film is his, and he’d been carrying it around in its sealed container for a long time.”
Possible. Or not. We don’t know when Signora’s calling card came into Villiger’s hands. Bora studied the photograph. Just like the books at Ampelokastro, which were Savelli’s after all. I took him for a liar because I was prejudiced, but he may be far worse than a liar. “This terrace she’s standing on – is it Crete or Rhodes?”
Kostaridis shrugged. “Could be either. Remember she was here four years ago, when they argued about the heirloom brooch.”
“I don’t see why Savelli would take a picture of her at that time.”
“If you look closely, there’s the jewel pinned on her blouse. Maybe the professor captured her on film without her knowing, so he could have – shall we say – a proof of her fraudulence. Or else the picture was taken in Rhodes, when they still got along.”
Bora pocketed the photographs. “I’ll keep these for now. Just to make sure, can you call Savelli in and have him confirm the story?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
This morning Kostaridis was more than a little testy. Bora saw him in a different light, and it was annoying that he had no means of reducing the policeman’s resistance at the moment. “Why not?” he insisted.
“Because I have more important things to do.”
He’s right, and I deserve it. Christ, I must really come across as arrogant. I haven’t even thanked him for saving my skin last night. Bora hid his embarrassment by glancing across the square, toward the graceful Italian loggia where shadows were blue at this early hour. “Thanks for intervening last night, by the way.”
He fully expected Kostaridis to repeat his advice and say Don’t go to Krousonas, or something of the sort. The policeman did not. He tilted his chin as he walked away, as curt and disinterested a leave-taking as a southerner can manifest.
In the modest lobby of the Knossos – cleared to allow for the transportation of office furniture – there was an odour of dust being swept from one place to the next. Along the wall crates of empty liquor bottles waited for removal, some of them betrayed by their labels as leftovers from British occupation. Bora showed his papers, and didn’t have to wait long for Frances Allen to be escorted from her room.
When he eyed her across the floor, the first thing he noticed was an unruly brown curl on her forehead.
Like in the English nursery rhyme, he thought. I wonder if it means that when “she’s good, she’s very good, and when she’s bad, she’s horrid”.
Tanned, petite, wearing dungarees, from where Bora stood her face seemed plain, even unfeminine: someone’s ordinary cousin, with a man’s watch on her wrist. Bora felt none of the shivers of self-control needed to interact with handsome women. He’d seen army nurses wear the same look of disenchanted, controlled lack of emotion. As a citizen of a nonbelligerent country, she could not be held as a prisoner. It was her marriage to a Greek suspected of being a guerrilla, and the weapons found at her house, that justified the prohibition on her leaving the premises.
According to Major Busch she’d been told she was to meet with a German officer and put herself at his disposal. As she returned Bora’s look, the absence of coquetry was fully in order, yet there was something off-putting about her too. Not antipathy exactly but resentment (She believes we wounded her husband and have him in hand). Lack of fear, to be sure (She’s a scholar in the field, travels and is used to roughing it. She looks like a woman who has a temper). Bora had the impression she’d be interesting to confront in a rage. Good. Friendliness from or towards one he might be forced to kill was not advisable. And in general he much preferred not to be found attractive by women. As introverted as he was judged desirable, he maintained a wall of impenetrable courtesy around him, wholly polite without giving any impression of being partial to the one facing him. He could afford it. He’d never had to pursue girls, except (maybe) Dikta, because Dikta had immediately taken him to bed and then disappeared for weeks.
Bora gestured for the guard to leave the American. Close up, Frances Allen wasn’t ugly, she simply wasn’t attractive. Whatever Major Busch meant by “looker”, with her wiry bobbed hair, narrow mouth and tan she did not fit the bill. And she showed all of her forty years.
Exposure to the sun had aged her skin, freckling and spotting her cheekbones. She wore no bra, a fact that – even without paying particular attention – Bora couldn’t help noticing.
Dikta’s bras (all her underwear, in fact, lace, silk and satin) set off her nakedness like bezels do to gems. The lack of such an undergarment struck him as slovenly, not at all attractive. But, he found himself thinking, she wears nothing under her blouse, because, after all, a woman without a bra does set a man thinking.
Rightly supposing she wouldn’t shake hands, he gave her a military salute and wasted no time in introducing himself. “My name is Bora. How do you —”
She interrupted. “Ah, like the late US senator who didn’t want us to enter the Kaiser’s war.”
“Minus the final H, and no relation.”
“Is there a first name to go with it?”
Bora was taken aback. “Yes, Martin. And how do you wish to be addressed? Ma’am, Dr Allen, Miss Allen…?”
“My name is Mrs Andonis Sidheraki.”
“That’s a bit unwieldy. Would you settle for Mrs Sidheraki?”
“If I must. What do I call you?”
“You may call me Captain Bora, or Rittmeister Bora.”
Small, no bra, no make-up. Broken nails. That sun-crisp layer of skin and the rebel curl. She had to raise her face to speak to him, but did it only halfway so she wouldn’t have to look him in the eye. “Where’s my husband?”
Bora repeated what Busch had instructed him to say. “On the continent, under our care.”
“Where exactly?”
“On the continent, under our care.”
Between her eyebrows, a deep furrow endured, one of those expression lines unlikely to leave a face after a number of years. She must be used to frowning, either in concentration or because her nature was bent on disapproval. “I believe I will do nothing unless and until I have proof that my husband is alive.”
Bora had imagined she’d say something of the sort. “Well, Mrs Sidheraki, I don’t have time to give you such proof, but I have time to inform my colleagues on the continent that you refuse to collaborate.” The tranquillity that came from feeling no attraction made things easier, Busch was right about that. “My schedule is tight, so please let me explain what I plan on doing with your assistance over the next three days. If you satisfy, it will be to your husband’s advantage. Have you had breakfast?”
“Why?”
“I thought we might discuss things over coffee and canned gingerbread, which is the best I can offer.”
“I don’t think I want to have breakfast with you.”
/> “But you will.”
In the hotel basement hall, the German brew was bad, the gingerbread a step below passable. Bora hadn’t eaten a full meal in over twenty-four hours and found both excellent. Frances Allen took only black coffee. If she was wondering about Bora’s mastery of the English language, she gave no sign of it. Between indifferent sips, she kept her hands in her lap and looked elsewhere in the room. When Bora addressed her, she replied briefly in her south-western lilt, without seeking eye contact.
Like most foreigners in Crete, she’d heard of Villiger’s death. No comments came from her in that regard, but there would be time to sound her out for an opinion. Bora brought the cup to his lips. I need her: she criss-crossed the island many times, speaks the dialect like a native, and surely knows farmers and shepherds along the way. Her husband is from the Iraklion region, so she is familiar to those she’ll ask.
Not one to waste time or sugar the pill, he told Frances Allen what he expected: for her to play a role in the solution of a possible war crime. The challenge, if anything, was to enrol her as a guide without revealing how little he knew about the island. It was evident that Busch had only partly briefed her: news of a trek inland (Bora didn’t pronounce the word Krousonas) to seek contact with a British runaway caused the line between her eyebrows to deepen.
“When do you plan on leaving?” she said.
Bora glanced at his watch. “It’s eight o’clock now. In an hour’s time at most.”
“Fine.”
Physically, she reminded him of Maggie Bourke-White. She’s like Maggie minus the lilacs, and her writer husband. But less feminine. She’s angry because she misses her husband and worries about him, that’s understandable.
