by Ben Pastor
Bora calmly turned back from the square. On the assumption that most hotels have a service entrance in the rear, he retraced his steps to the depot. From there, past the church of Agia Ekaterini (“The best Dafni and Mandilaria in Iraklion,” he recalled hearing from Rifat Bey, “are sold by the Spinthakis widow near Agia Ekaterini”), he covered the short distance to the back of the Knossos, and to a double door leading directly into the basement of the hotel. A few steps from it idled a delivery truck, from which cases of wine were being unloaded under the scrutiny of a German guard.
This was the second incident.
Forty seconds before nine, Frances Allen was escorted to the truck. Bora climbed in after her and was motioning at gunpoint for the captive driver to start the engine, when Rifat Bey trundled out of the hotel basement shouting in Greek. Bora stuck his hand out of the window and flashed the appropriate authorization in front of the Turk. “Diritto di guerra,” he told him in Italian, and “Vai, vai,” to the driver.
The wine grower was still raging as they rounded the corner toward Kalokairinou.
“He understands Italian,” Bora observed. “I don’t know why he addressed me in Greek. Just for the record, what did he say?”
Frances Allen flicked the rebel curl away from her forehead. “You should drop dead if half of it comes true. The nicest thing he called you is ‘bastard son of an infidel German whore’.”
The truck was a Greek-assembled, good-quality American Diamond T with the Petropoulos bell-and-circle brand. So far, Rifat Bey must have kept it hidden to keep it from requisition. Amber worry beads dangled from its rear-view mirror, and it was further personalized by good luck trinkets and bright-coloured woollen tassels across the dashboard.
Once out of the Chanià Gate they drove past the turn-off to Ampelokastro and followed the coast for a time. Bora looked out, toward the blue swatch of water, here and there crisply trimmed in white. We’ll soon leave it behind, he thought, but on an island you never forget the sea, which means you never forget your limits; and yet, within them, every man’s a king, as England goes to prove. In his old school books it was a different story: here live the French, they said; here the Poles; the Danes there, the Austrians, the Swiss. Limits and borders everywhere, and the recurrent, unspoken German desire to break through them.
Whether she wanted to avoid the sight of British vehicles torn apart and the improvised graves by the road, or else refused to engage with those sitting at her sides, the American kept her face low, and her lips tight. When Bora addressed her, she frowned and did not glance over.
“Mrs Sidheraki, which is the closest ancient site of some importance along this road?”
“Týlissos. Why, is that where we’re going?”
Bora spoke looking at his map. “For now, yes.”
“You mean that’s all the driver needs to know.”
“I mean that’s where we’re going for now, Ma’am.”
“Very well.” She pointed to the place on the map. “It’s ten miles or so ahead, on the left of the road.” And she instructed the sweaty, worried-eyed man at the wheel, who chewed on his moustache and hadn’t said a word since he’d been commandeered.
Before long, the road gradually started climbing; it curved over dry slopes of reddish earth, studded with olive trees as Bora had seen in Spain, and in Morocco before Spain. Through the open windows the endless call of cicadas was like the buzz in one’s ears after a sharp blow, as if the world itself had been stunned and now rang with pain. Frances Allen obstinately kept from looking at either man. If she’d looked out of the corner of her eye, on her right she would catch the swarthy figure of the driver anxiously grasping the wheel; on her left, the side of the German’s head, shaven army-style, and a firm, less than friendly profile.
Bora appeared to ignore her as well. In fact, far from dulling his reflexes, service at the embassy in Moscow over the last months had made him nearly overreactive: he kept on the alert for any unexpected motion or secret word whispered to the driver. Whether or not Powell and other runaways had sought Psiloritis, or the foot of Mount Pirgos or the barren sides of Stromboulas, it was here – where town life, such as Crete knew it, ended, and the arid lonely stretches began – that questioning should start. You get into labyrinths in all kinds of different ways, and find they do not necessarily have visible walls. Bora turned the map around, unfolded it on his knees. The spot where the British prisoners, Sinclair included, were gathered when the camera changed hands, was marked in red. It was a gully south-east of Kato Kalesia, on a southbound route that ran more or less parallel, twice removed, to the one they presently followed. In between lay the road that wormed south toward Ampelokastro.
Less than two hours from Villiger’s house, on foot and without rushing, across fields and ridges, Powell must have stumbled into his captors while he sought the shore. With the red pencil Bora had carefully highlighted the road they rode along now. Chosen because it seemed the most promising, it led away from the cultivated plains and orchards, where German patrols hunted for anything and anybody of use to them.
Ten or so miles into the trip, as they rounded a wide curve, Frances Allen opened her mouth. “The modern village of Týlissos is ahead. Ancient Týlissos, instead, is down that way.” Before them, dipped in sunlight, a handful of whitewashed low houses were like a sprinkle of sea salt on a gentle rise. To the left of the road, a steep trail where a breath of sea wind, funnelled into dust devils, sought the lower land; shrubs studded with yellow flowers, dry grass and a fury of cicadas pointed the way.
Bora gestured for the driver to stop, although the man understood enough Italian to get the meaning of “Ferma qui”. Dust hovered around the truck when Bora ordered both his travel companions to get down. The driver feared the worst and looked terrified; Frances Allen squinted in the sun and waited, without shouldering her canvas bag. A quick circle of the German’s hand in the air meant the truck should go back where it came from, and the driver did not wait for the gesture to be translated into Greek. He hopped back on, manoeuvred in reverse just enough to turn around, and sped off. The truck came briefly back into full view as it trundled toward Iraklion, already several curves away and soon to become a speck trailing dust.
“He won’t believe for a minute we came to sightsee. Did you make him get down too because you were afraid he might start back with me?”
Her voice was terse, a flicker away from spite. Without looking at her, Bora opened his rucksack and took out the lightweight items for her to carry. “I reserve fear for better things, Mrs Sidheraki. Please take these and lead the way. I’m curious about the ruins.”
A small quince tree shadowed the site, where it seemed that every cicada in the island had sought refuge. Stonework surfacing from a clean cut in the arid ledge bore embedded shells. Bora followed two steps behind as Frances Allen walked toward the paved area. Metis, he thought, the acute ability of invention, far beyond mere lying, was Ulysses’ talent. He’d always favoured Achilles – bare-faced against the enemy, aware of his own inescapable end – but had to admit that Troy fell to the sinister gift-horse, not to loyalty and brawn.
Piece by piece, behind her back, he quietly began to take off all visible identification. He unbuttoned and removed the right and then the left shoulder board, folded his side cap and drove it inside one of his pockets, along with the identification disc. Soon the unmarked khaki uniform (in part British Army issue or pattern, like his sidearm) was all that tagged him as a military man. And his bearing, his size, his looks. There was no disguising those. But his perfect English, as native as his German, would provide the next level of deception.
Frances Allen displayed no overt surprise when she turned and saw the change, only that nervous gesture of raking back the curl from her forehead.
“If they ask about me, say that I need to reach someone inland. Nothing else.”
“Not that you’d know the difference, if I did or not.”
Bora faced her, straddling the ancient floor w
ith unaffected self-assurance. “It’s best that I get there and back in one piece. Now, since we’re here, please tell me something about this place, what it was, whose it was.”
She drove her hands into the pockets of her dungarees. Half-turned from him, with her white-socked, sandal-shod right foot she pointed to a course of finely joined blocks, and the structures beyond. “Wall,” she said. “More wall.”
“Is that it?”
“Steps, cistern and wall.”
“I see.” Bora strapped his rucksack on. “I understood bronze cauldrons up to fifty kilos in weight were discovered among these ruins.” He took a few steps around, until he reached the place where a recess in the masonry formed a shelter from the wind. “What’s this?” He nodded towards unexpected candle stubs and traces of tapers and candle wax on the stone floor. “Do people gather here at night?”
“No.”
“Well, it can’t be ghosts, Mrs Sidheraki.” She didn’t turn around to look, and he did not insist. “Very good, then. Shoulder your bag. We won’t find what I’m looking for by following the north–south routes, such as they are: the slopes seem more favourable, so we’ll stick to them unless we obtain strong alternative leads. Now you’ll start asking questions for me in the village ahead.”
5 June, south-west of Týlissos village, in a spot marked as Chorafi on my map. Noon. We halt for a bite and to get away from the brutal heat.
Thus far, three old people in and around Týlissos have given me a foretaste of what I’m likely to be up against: two of them locked themselves in their huts and there was no luring them out again; the third, who must have been already grey-haired when the Turks lost Crete to Greece, said he’s heard and seen nothing, and would have me believe he doesn’t know the island has fallen to us. There’s no calling them koumpares, either, a sort of endearment they got from the Italians, which means “godfather”, short as I understand it of addressing them as mou derphé, “brother”, which however Miss Allen couldn’t use with them – and they’d laugh if I tried it. I hope to do better the further we get away from the coast, to isolated farms and villages where travellers still receive some hospitality. Maybe. Goatherds on ridges, the moment they catch sight of us, run off, followed by their devil-headed animals with bells around their necks.
I don’t think these peasants have changed much ever since Grandfather was here. One of them at least must have been a young man then. They hate the Turks and they dress like Turks, wear Turkish moustaches and guard their women like Turks. Frances Allen married into folks such as these, letting go of whatever she’d been before. I bet she’d have been a nurse in the Great War, were she five years older. You wonder how Sidheraki proposed to her. While digging for antiquities, leaning on a spade in the hot sun, or sitting by the fire in the evening. I bet she proposed to him. Yes, she’d laid her eyes on him; decided she’d have him. She did all the thinking, all the wooing, and he just said yes. His sisters, if he has any, don’t like her. His mother hates her, calls God’s curse upon her. Gloats and at the same time weeps over the fact that they have no children. Well, Father doesn’t like Dikta either. Nina is too tactful to say. Only Grandmother Ashworth-Douglas is firmly on Dikta’s side, although she puts it in a quizzical way: “She’s exactly what you need at this time.” Grandfather on the other hand declares her the most beautiful girl in Leipzig.
Frances Allen doesn’t smile at those she meets; married women don’t play coy with men. To me, she’s still giving the cold shoulder. She replies telegraphically to a direct question, keeping mum the rest of the time. She might think it annoys me (it doesn’t; I’m indifferent to her moods), and since I am myself rather taciturn, we walk and hike hardly exchanging a word. My stepfather is loud, like most men of his class and profession (Peter takes after him); I’m like Nina, who seldom raises her voice – or needs to.
Frequently in the past two hours, zigzagging across the undulating countryside, we came upon shards, scatterings of material and surface remnants of structures that must be familiar to her. If I asked, “What is this?” she dropped a Minoan or Greek place name and the name of the scholar responsible for the dig. Thus, I heard of Hatzidakis, Manolatos, Pendlebury, and of course the father of them all, Arthur Evans. But never an articulated explanation of the city or palace unearthed, as if I couldn’t possibly – being a German and a soldier – understand it. Never mind. She won’t ruffle me, she won’t. I instructed her to inform those we meet from now on that: a. She is an American, married to a man from the Iraklion nomos; b. She travels with somebody who is seeking a Briton called Powell, and can pay for the information (I gave her Greek currency for the purpose); c. only if and when the contact seems to be promising, she’s to mention that we’re also looking into the deaths of civilians at Ampelokastro.
When I specified that she’s to make sure they pass the word on to others, I prompted the longest conversation we had to date.
She told me peasants will spread the rumour regardless, and it’s only a matter of time before every sheepfold in the region is alerted. “But they’ll wonder why I am travelling with a man who isn’t my husband.”
I observed that through the years they must have seen her walk and work with other men, Pendlebury, or his British colleagues. Her reply:
“But you’re not one of my colleagues. You’re a stranger. If they knew who you really are, they’d turn tail all the more and wouldn’t tell me a thing, even those who’re aware I’m married to a Cretan.”
Threats aren’t my style, but I reminded her that her husband’s life depends on it, so she had better find a way to make those we meet stay and talk. “All I want is a clue to where there might be Britons,” I stated. “I’ll take it from there.” And because she insisted that country folks are afraid of me, I added, “I’m alone, am I not?”
“You’re a stranger, and a soldier: alone or not, that’s one too many.”
Bruno told me not to go off at a tangent. A tangent? Passing myself off as – no, letting those we meet believe I’m a Briton or, worse, a German deserter, is the height of recklessness. I stand to be shot by either side unless I tell a credible story. Documents and papers will avail me nothing with illiterates. Out there, hundreds of enemy officers and soldiers are biding their time, waiting for revenge. And that’s leaving aside the mountain men Pendlebury and his pals have been fomenting against us and training for months; they would gladly cut my throat.
Only Major Busch and Patrick Sinclair could vouch for my intentions, and they aren’t here to be asked. Kostaridis, too, unless he intentionally directed me to where I might get killed. I may look neutral from the outside, but everything in my rucksack is German, and my diary – half of it written in English – is a double-edged weapon. Should we fall into the wrong hands, they’ll search me before they search my travel companion, if at all. So – God forbid – like it or not, depending on circumstances, I might have no choice but to lock my diary and give it to her.
Bora thought he’d learnt heat in Spain, and before Spain, in his weeks of Moroccan training for the civil war. Learning and mastering, however, are very different things. Summer was nearly three weeks away and already grass and flowers lay prostrate, dry. Cicadas called to one another from one stunted growth of trees to the other, favouring the occasional dark cypresses and leafy carob trees to the sparse bushes and sun-baked hedges, which granted neither shelter nor safety to insects or birds. It was an archipelago of isolated leafy spots, on dry ridges that mirrored back and forth those clumps of fresh greenness in the faded heat, and the endless buzz of cicadas. Incredible how Spain differed from this, even though the upland echoed Aragon. Here everything was solitary but bore the mark of ancient hands, the imprint of ancient feet. In Aragon the signs were rarer, and solitude more (or less?) profound.
The going became steeper. At one point, a German cargo plane banked overhead as it prepared to land in Iraklion, bringing supplies or coming to pick up casualties. Frances Allen glanced at it as she cupped her hands to drink at a
roadside fountain. Bora prudently stuck to mineral water in his canteen. Through a broken terrain, seamed with dry torrent beds, they reached an olive grove and a single-floored, lonely house in the middle of it. The grove, according to Frances, belonged to a widower distantly related to her husband, one of those who sold shards and metal objects found who knows where. “We’ve met before, he’ll recognize me.”
As it happened, the old man was sitting by the door. A large basket stood between his knees, which he seemed to be weaving or patching up with willow branches or other such flexible twigs.
“Ya sou,” she greeted him from afar, waiting for a response before she entered the speckled grey-blue shade of the trees. Clouds of small insects hovered all around; a sweet scent of wild mint awoke at every step.
The old man interrupted his work and shielded his eyes to identify the newcomers. Bare-headed, he wore a dazzling white shirt and baggy blue vragha that tightened at the knees. He silently tilted his chin toward Frances in acknowledgement. Bora, he surveyed critically and did not greet.
“What’s ‘cousin’ in Greek?” Bora enquired before they drew close.
“Xadherphos.”
“Xadherphos, fine. Tell him in advance that’s what I am to you.”
While Frances Allen rattled off in the local dialect, the old man heard her out, his eyes still turned to Bora. Reserve and mistrust lodged in the deep folds of his forehead, at the whiskered sides of his mouth. His hair was silvery, thick like an animal pelt, neatly cut. He rested a willow twig on his knee and let an interval filled with golden fruit flies go by before answering at all.
