The Road to Ithaca

by Ben Pastor

  Frances translated. “He hasn’t seen anybody unfamiliar pass through here. He saw aeroplanes two weeks ago. He says that if you’re my cousin from Londhra – which means England – how is it that he’s never seen you with me before?” (Actually, the old man said “good-looking cousin”, but she failed to add that).

  Bora stared back at the farmer. “Say that I never had to come inland before.”

  “He wants to know why you’re armed.”

  “Because men travel armed; as a Cretan he should know that.”

  “Says it’s an English gun that you carry.”

  “It is.”

  “Wants you to show it to him.”

  “What? I will not.”

  “It’s courtesy among men to allow your weapon to be admired.”

  Pauses seemed to matter here. Bora did not answer at once, nor did he look away from the old man. In the sun, where he stood, the soil was deeply fissured, and a warm, lulling breath seemed to rise from the cracks. Unhurriedly, deliberately he unlatched the holster. “First the information I want, then he gets to touch this.”

  A negotiation of sorts followed, which apparently led nowhere. The old man kept his eyes on the Browning. Then, as if it were a whip, he lashed the air with the long, pliable twig in his hand. Bora did not openly react. In fact, unprepared for the gesture, he had to master the odd sense of confusion the soft sound, the serpent-like motion, caused him. He was suddenly caught up, cast somewhere else, at another time; it was an instantaneous, fleeting split of the mind. The last one who did this in front of me was Remedios, way up on Mas del Aire. She whipped the air with a willow twig and drew a magic circle in the dust that made me her prisoner.

  “Captain, did you hear me?” Frances Allen repeated something he hadn’t heard at all. “He says my husband wouldn’t like my going around with a cousin, even though he carries an English gun.”

  Bora tumbled back to reality as quickly as he’d slipped away from it. “Does he believe I’m an Englishman?”

  “He does.”

  “Then convince him it’s very important that I get to talk to the Enghlesoi. Will money help?” More dialogue, and all the time the old man watched Bora. He has the advantage. Sinclair must have felt as I feel now, being talked to through someone else. It keeps you dangling.

  “Captain, he’ll take money to tell you where you should go to find one who might direct you. But he won’t accept money to keep his mouth shut about a cousin who walks day and night with a married woman. First chance he has, he’ll tell Andonis.”

  Well, Christ, that’s all I need. Sidheraki may be dead and his wife thinks we have him, but what if he’s alive, hasn’t left the island, and is hiding somewhere around here? If it should reach his ear that she’s with an unidentified “cousin”, I might have that other predicament to face. Bora showed the wedding ring on his right hand. “Explain that I have a beautiful wife of my own, and pay him.”

  Frances pulled out a couple of banknotes from her pocket. Bora noticed she’d divided the amount so that no one would be able to see she had plenty, and now squeezed the paper between her fingers with the careful, avaricious gesture of one who regrets parting with money. She handed the man one bill and waited until he pointed towards the upland, presumably giving directions, before placing the second bill on his open palm.

  All Bora understood was the word mandra, which he’d read in Pendlebury to mean a shepherd’s hut. And by the way in which the man’s fingers paddled the air repeatedly in the direction of the upland, he imagined it meant it was at a good distance from here.

  “There’s a fellow who keeps his goats past Agios Minas, on the south slope of Mount Pirgos. They’ve been buying meat from him lately, so he probably meets foreigners. His name’s Kyriakos, and he’s got vicious dogs.”

  I faced those before, Bora thought. He unholstered the Browning and held it out grip first to the old man. He was ready to react in case the weapon were turned against him, but all the old man did was stroke and handle it easily, before giving it back; then he reached for his crotch, smiling a meaningful toothless smile.

  Bora was provoked. “What did he do that for, what does he mean?”

  “Only that you’ve shown you have what it takes, letting an old fighter, an expert shooter as he is, handle your gun.” Frances’ next words to the old man seemed to flatter him, judging by the way he laughed and shook his head.

  “Now what did you tell him?”

  “That he must have gotten himself a young lover, because his clothes are too well taken care of for a man who lives alone.”

  The Pirgos Massif rose to less than a thousand metres, but from little more than sea level and as abruptly as it did, its name, meaning tower, was well deserved. A saddle joined it to the pyramid of Stromboulas, closer to the coast. Together, they formed the dark rampart Bora had seen the first evening, when he’d walked to the shore by himself.

  The climb started in earnest a few minutes away from the west margin of the olive grove. Before long the canteens were nearly empty, and though she assured him there were wells and troughs ahead, Bora wasn’t optimistic. He watched the American energetically keep up with him and even hike ahead, now that her small size and lighter weight became an advantage. Her vitality irritated him. Damn, does she ever need to empty her bladder? I have to hold it until she holds it, and do everything quickly while she goes behind a bush, keeping an eye peeled if she tries to sneak away with that excuse.

  In case someone were spying on them through field glasses, Bora had to keep safety in mind and avoid wearing his side cap, although spending hours bareheaded in the Cretan sun was less than advisable. Even Frances Allen had resorted to a faded visor cap, of the sort favoured by aeroplane mechanics; the head covering Maggie Bourke-White wore on war fronts, as he’d seen in magazine photographs. This story, Bora thought, began with photographic images, and those who take them. Somewhere Sergeant Powell licks his wounds, thinks himself safe, and wonders (or not) whether the prim Anglo-Indian officer he gave his camera to followed through by denouncing the deaths at Ampelokastro. Villiger, Powell, Sinclair, Savelli, Kostaridis, Busch and the War Crimes Bureau, and soon the International Red Cross: the thing connecting them was photography, for different reasons. Had cameras been available to him, wouldn’t Achilles have shown his fellow Achaeans the gory shots of Hector, dragged by his horses around Troy? He would have, and bragged about it too. Only Ulysses, made now haggard, now splendid by the gods, could get away with not resembling his passport photos. Alois Villiger instead – failed priest, racial photographer, antiquarian, scholar, salesman – had boldly or imprudently used the same photograph on different documents.

  “How do you say ‘bad dog?’” Bora broke the silence, just to let Frances know he wasn’t panting, either.

  She kept her face to the steep climb. “Paliòskilo, but it’ll do you no good if it’s set on you.”

  Animal noises ceased as they left the sparsely treed land below. Cicadas and the rare songbird grew inaudible, hawks – lanners or peregrines, Bora couldn’t tell – silently rode the warm air currents overhead. The click of small rocks tumbling under his feet, or the woman’s, only underlined the quiet. Any other sound, human voice or otherwise man-made, would carry a long distance in such a complete stillness.

  Twice during the ascent, prolonged calls were heard in the countryside: men crying out to one another or to their flocks, two syllables meaningless from a distance or without meaning altogether, sounds recognizable to those they were meant for. Bora pricked up his ears when he heard them. Frances, who presumably understood, pretended nonchalance. They might be following us, following us from the start, waiting to see where we go or just watching us, or else planning an attack. As long as they tell the Enghlesoi, it’s fine with me. I’ll worry about how to handle the situation once I reach them or they take me to them.

  Before the climb turned them away from the coast, Bora looked back to catch a last glimpse of Iraklion and the blue horizon. That was
how he caught the plume of dust racing along a dirt lane down in the valley; more likely than not a military vehicle, speeding inland for whatever reason. Soon the distant, scattered rattle of machine-gun fire, crisp like the drumming on a typewriter, came from the same direction. Infinitesimal, ant-like human figures sprang up half-seen against the pale earth, hunted, as it seemed, by the dust-raising vehicle, smaller than the smallest toy. Frances Allen, too, anchored between rocks, turned at the sound and was looking.

  Peter, who flew a bomber, pragmatically said that distance blunts drama: Bora thought of his brother’s words, and how admittedly there was no taking sides from up here. You just didn’t know. Chased by the bouncing vehicle, the dots ran and fell. A burst followed by a louder sound, like a firecracker going off inside a box, gave away a building hit by grenades, or where explosives had been activated from inside. Flames were invisible in the brightness of the early afternoon. Only smoke billowed white from the demolished building, but it, too, was a diminutive cloud in the landscape.

  Frances Allen angrily resumed her climb. Bora did not follow at once. He ran his eyes across the terrain until he identified Sphingokephalo, and the monument to Agrali’s dead wife, like a forsaken bit of sugar. Ampelokastro lay behind the hill, invisible from here. It has to mean something that from afar you can’t judge who’s who in a dispute – or in a crime. But if taking sides becomes impossible, your conscience secretly knows.

  7

  5 JUNE, 3.45 P.M., MT PIRGOS, SOUTHERN SLOPE.

  Agios Minas was no more than a square masonry box set on a perch, overlooking a vista of treeless sun-baked ravines, the colour of rust. Like San Martin de la Sierra in Spain, where Bora went to sit and think many times, the chapel stood like a solitary Christian wart on the pagan body of the land.

  Seeking the higher ground, Bora and Frances Allen hiked past the chapel together but apart, without saying a word. Animals travel in the company of others, eat or drink together in the same apparently uncommunicative manner. Bora was annoyed. It troubled him that she wore no underclothes, on principle. In Aragon, Remedios was always naked under her cotton dress; the first time, when she’d squatted behind her door in a fiery blade of sunlight, it had been enough to lift the hem above her parted knees to see. Bora had never forgotten it. It had been more than staring between a woman’s legs, no news to him anyway at twenty-three. It had been glory disclosed, a blooming epiphany beyond specks of golden dust circling. He’d understood what goddesses are about, how they mercifully, on occasion, for no apparent reason, manifest themselves to mortals who then lie with them. At a price. You never think of the price beforehand, busy undoing your breeches or whatever stands between you and entering them. In the middle of it you don’t think at all, your mind glows until it is incinerated, you’re furious muscles and bone and blessed wetness at last. Afterwards, when you’re too blissfully tired to think of the price, it is exacted. When they stopped to refill their canteens, there where a thread of mountain water fell stingily into a stone basin, the travellers neither looked at each other nor exchanged comments, and their hands carefully avoided contact.

  For Bora, it was a natural way of doing things, because he resented being touched. By upbringing and from habit, physical contact was for him an extreme resort, necessarily aggressive or sexual. Frances Allen fitted into neither category (that is, of objects and people to strike or covet), so he rigorously avoided her. To tell the truth, as a boy he’d ardently desired his stepfather’s embrace, an unthinkable expectation from a Prussian general. He still cherished the day and hour of the two occasions – the first when he’d manifested his decision to follow a military career – when the old man had briefly held Bora’s hand between his. There was a single exception to Bora’s rules of contact: at home, his mother Nina occasionally hugged his shoulders while he sat, and leaned her cheek on his head. Neither aggressive nor sexual, they were for him moments of inexpressible joy.

  It was slow going, buffeted by a nor’easter Frances Allen called meltemi. Was it the same Greek wind of the poem, quoted by Heidegger? Bora did feel like the lonely, feisty traveller. Travel enough, and you become a Wanderer. The afternoon reached the midpoint before they came into view of the mandra indicated by the old man at the olive grove. From now on, the heat would take a different character, losing intensity according to the sun’s changing angle.

  Kyriakos’ dog was huge, stiff-haired, blind in one eye. The sightless pupil had the tinge of milky tea, and whether or not the injury derived from a merciless blow, it made Bora feel uncomfortable to the edge of sadness. Around its neck the dog wore a yellow rag and a studded collar with small mirrors hanging from it; clearly it’d been left behind to watch its master’s hut. It raged, pulling the rope that secured it to a ring by the entrance, and effectively kept strangers from entering. The narrow ledge of rocky dirt in front of the hut and the few implements lying around pointed to continuous human frequentation, so it must be that the man was away with the herd. Bora leaned over at his risk to reach for an empty, dark red tin marked Fray Bentos, on the ground just beyond the range of the straining dog. He smelt it and tossed it back.

  “Kyria’kosh!” Frances Allen’s repeated calls and the loud barking had no effect; no one answered or came to see what it was.

  “Damned mutt would wake up the dead. Now what?” Bora was filling a chipped bowl with water for the dog. He pushed the bowl with a stick to within its reach and stepped away from the mandra, signalling to his companion to do the same. The animal relented a little. While it drank, Bora pored over his map, of little help in an area marked as unpopulated. “Are you familiar with this side of the mountain?”

  “I climbed to a site near Gonies, further up. There are no towns, if that’s what you mean.”

  “The odd house, maybe? Any place where we may ask about the goatherd?”

  She pointed to a sharply profiled rock higher up. “There, where it narrows into a bottleneck. No name to the place; locally they refer to it as mesa pharangi, ‘inside the gorge’.”

  A perfect place for runaways to forage, Bora considered. It wouldn’t be worth our army’s while to scale the mountain to find them, but until yesterday at the latest the Fray Bentos tin contained ‘prepared beef’, Commonwealth issue. Kyriakos sees foreigners, and how! His eyes returned to the map. Krousonas lay forty-five minutes away by serpentine trails, maybe two miles as the crow flies. Mesa pharangi was already Satanas’ turf, but there was no backing down at this point.

  Maybe thirty crumbling houses sat in rows facing each other along the rock-strewn passage, where the meltemi did not reach. Due to the crags looming opposite each other, at this hour half of the hamlet sat in the blinding sun, half in the shade. Bony mongrels, forewarned by Kyriakos’ watchdog, trotted around announcing visitors. A handful of women dressed in black seated by the doorsteps disappeared inside; doors drew shut after them, or faded cloths were pulled across to hide the interior. It was even worse than in the Spanish mountains, because here women didn’t spy on you from behind the louvrework.

  No sign of men; not even boys, not even elders. Soon the mongrels made themselves scarce. Emptied first by emigration, now by war, such dying places were unlikely to shelter runaways from outside the island, or outside the region, even. Rebels, freedom fighters, bandits, sphakiotes might come and go from here, but to Bora’s judgement the English kept to the rugged cliffs above. Of course, the injured Powell could have avoided the high road to escape, and made off in the valley, seeking the impervious defiles of the south or the Libyan Sea. No. No, he’s out there, Bora tried to convince himself. And without knowing, he’s waiting for me. Frances Allen finally gave a sign of weariness, the first since they’d started out. She sat on a low wall, removed her sandals and turned her socks inside out to dispose of burs, pebbles and dust collected during the climb. Meanwhile, Bora walked down the uneven strip of land bisecting the village.

  Right and left, doors and all other openings remained shut. Bora acknowledged the denial as h
e went past. Small, flat-roofed, no doubt heirs to the ancient dwellings of Crete, the whitewashed house fronts had blue, deep blue, light blue doors – the same hues as the eye chart in Villiger’s house. It was less hot than it had been, but he was overheated. After hours under the pitiless sun, blood roared in his ears – the stunned, not unpleasant sensation of one who is about to pass out. Now and then colours floated and swam before his eyes, and quick movements caused him to lose balance.

  Bora walked, counting the doors that watched him and said no. Closed doors and windows, he knew, could be unnerving. In Trakehnen there was a vacant farmhouse with dormers set in the slope of its front gable; the dormers, not uncommonly for the region, had eaves that curved like beetling brows over them. As a child, he was afraid of it, “the house with eyes”. All the more he’d forced himself to walk past it, with a trembling heart. Once, with the late sun striking the small windows like eyes that flashed wide open, he’d run off and never stopped running until he reached the family gate. Seldom closed, the gate was closed that evening, and he’d frantically scaled it to gain the safety within. When the farmhouse mysteriously burned to the ground two or three years later, he’d breathed easily, but not without a feeling of guilt. He’d secretly imagined that his own fear, and his own will, had caused the blaze.

  The doors of mesa pharangi said no to him. To his right, on the upper floor of a house in no way distinguishable from the rest, only a solitary, narrow window remained open. A bone-white girl looked out from it.

  The narrow chin, the cloud of red hair, the low-cut cotton dress: there were no two in the world like her. Across the fiery air, suddenly Bora knew her. No two in the world like her, no two in the world like Remedios… “Shepherd girl, outside Gonies”… Gonies is somewhere, not far from here. What did Kostaridis say? “Surely you’ve thought out what you’d rather be watching when you die.”