The Road to Ithaca

by Ben Pastor

  Bora showed on his map the general location he’d been pointed to.

  “So it’s not the nunnery south-west of Krousonas. There’s another place by the same name higher up, about – here. Not easy to reach. I know of it because John Pendlebury built and outfitted a shed there, where we stored equipment and sat to draw during our spring campaigns.”

  “Remote, and with a roof over their heads. If they survived the hike, it stands to reason that wounded men would try to find shelter in such a place. Which way from here?”

  “If you want to avoid Krousonas, we have to keep diagonally along this slope to that saddle, and then I have to figure it out.” Bora must appear newly confident he could accomplish his task, because she hastened to take him down a peg or two. “And who are you going to pretend you are, this time?”

  They’d come a short distance from Meltemi, and already the heat was oppressive. Bora watched the American defiantly blow the rebel curl off of her sweaty forehead, and let her wait for an answer. His lack of attraction for her was at risk of becoming rudeness: she only needed to push him half a step more.

  “If and when I meet Powell, I’ll identify myself as a German.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “As a German with an American hostage.”

  “You’re out of your mind. If they don’t buy it, we can both end up dead.”

  Bora, who preceded her, turned and stopped. His stare was unreadable behind the dark lenses, and so were his spare gestures, the slow precision of his words. “The moment you take me to Powell, you can go.”

  “You’re doubly out of your mind.” Looking up at him, her eyes were grey-blue, he noticed, incredulous and younger than the rest of her face.

  “The fact is, ma’am, I’m in a hurry to wind this up. You slow me down. Killing you wouldn’t appreciably improve my chances of getting back, so, unless you make me change my mind, off you go when I find Sergeant Powell.”

  “I’ve never been told I’m not useful.”

  “Well, I’m telling you now.”

  “You wouldn’t have made it this far without me.”

  “I’m a resourceful fellow, I’d have managed somehow.” Was it possible she felt so piqued by his evaluation of her that she had overlooked (or disbelieved) his promise to let her go? Bora resumed walking. He decided he would not inform her that her husband was a free man, and on the island. His small vendetta in letting her go was just that – keeping the detail to himself.

  The detour needed to bypass Satanas’ rebel stronghold more than doubled the travel time to Agias Irinis. Bora disliked the idea, but had no choice. As it was, some fifty minutes after leaving Meltemi, an incident occurred that could easily nullify his efforts so far.

  A third of a mile or so away, between here and where, far below, Krousonas flickered with its white houses on its knoll, Bora caught a movement and then a worrisome sight. A single file of men was advancing from the right along the dirt road leading down to Krousonas. Against the patched, pale green of a deeply rolling landscape, they proceeded unhurriedly, at a lower altitude than Bora’s, but each in full view of each other. Black vragha and the bristle of barrels on their shoulders promised nothing good. Used to looking for their herds across the mountainous grazing land, even without field glasses Cretan peasants could easily spot two travellers moving on higher ground. Bora recognized MAB 38 submachine guns from their perforated barrel jackets. He told Allen to keep down, and crouched so that his own khaki clothing would melt into the dryness around him.

  Thirteen men. All he needed was for the American to attempt a getaway at this time, or call out to them. Here and now, those must be Satanas’ bandits. Only her husband’s feud with the kapetanios would keep her from pulling a fast one. I have fourteen shots in the Browning, at the maximum precision range for a handgun: if she cries out and they see us, I’d have to hit all fourteen targets to clear my path.

  For now, she sat motionless, with legs drawn up and an unlit cigarette stuck to her lower lip, squinting in the direction of the men. Minutes passed as the line kept its deliberate pace, nothing but wind and heat separating it from the observers. The squad would eventually have to turn around a hairpin bend and lose sight of the slope before regaining it at a lower level, where the road scissored the rocky slope in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, any one of the men could at any time look up and to the left, and see them. Bora felt sweat lace his neck, but wouldn’t so much as wipe it off. His aversion to being trapped, a cavalryman’s habit of pursuing aggressively made him squirm inside. On the outside, he was stock-still. Sergeant Powell, hiding in the brook bed, must have felt the same helplessness before Waldo’s paratroopers, and he hadn’t even been armed.

  The men did seem to be dawdling, the slow gait of either weariness or reconnaissance duty. Out of the corner of his eye, Bora kept watch on his travel companion. It was singular that not even at times like this did they develop any form of solidarity or closeness; only the pragmatic concurrence of behaviour that could allow both to escape danger. She stared at the line and moistened her lower lip with the tip of her tongue, pushing the unlit cigarette to the side of her mouth.

  At one point, the last man in the row broke out, heading at a quicker pace to the front where the leader was likely to be. All stopped. Worse luck, they’ve seen us. Bora unlatched the holster and noticed immediately in his peripheral vision that Frances Allen stiffened in alarm.

  A confabulation took place below. No alarm; the tail man seemed to be asking for a break, right where the entire squad could, by paying attention, see that they were not alone. Flasks or other water containers came out, were passed around. Rifles slid off shoulders.

  Bora spoke under his breath. “When they huddle to drink, start moving slowly to your right, and for God’s sake don’t knock any pebbles downhill.”

  “What’s to the right?” she whispered back.

  “A slight bulge that’ll keep us out of sight. Go.”

  Her first motion – it was awkward, sliding sideways in a sitting position, propping oneself on both hands – caused a loose stone to wobble under her sandal. Bora lunged to catch it with his foot before it started rolling down.

  “Sorry. What do you expect?” she said, irritably.

  In a laborious stretch, he reached for the stone and steadied it. “We have one minute or less: keep moving.”

  The new position, useful as it was, had the disadvantage of blocking the view of the road. Bora crawled on his belly to where he could observe the men by raising his head. Only when the squad resumed its journey and started down the next curve did he pull back and latch his holster. His anger at her clumsiness, bottled while a threat was imminent, risked fogging his lucidity.

  And because it was too much of a risk to start an argument now, he closed himself into the hard-mouthed, hostile silence he’d resorted to as a boy with adults, namely his stepfather, whenever he felt wronged and still had to go along with it.

  Before things grew better, they grew worse. Frances Allen lost her way in the admittedly wild sequence of crags and seamed ravines between Mount Voskerò and the other peaks. They struggled up and down chaotic, repetitious passages that became indistinguishable as the afternoon advanced. Twice they hiked past the same small monument to some massacre by the Ottoman Turks. A dilapidated, ghostly hamlet marked the place, and he wondered why any army would care to come this far to kill peasants. But we do it, don’t we, Bora told himself. We did it here in Crete, perhaps in Ampelokastro as well.

  It became obvious as daylight began to wane that they would not reach Agias Irinis before dark. “There it is, up there.” As a means of consolation, Frances Allen pointed to a cliff still bathed in orange light. “If we hadn’t gone all around Krousonas, we’d have reached it already.”

  Bora had to bite his tongue. “How long will it take, from here?”

  “Another hour, hour and a half.”

  “All right, we’ll stop, then.”

  Below, and in view of, A
gias Irinis, 7.09 p.m. I can see why chaos in Greek also means “deep valley, abyss”. They must have been looking into a place like this when they invented the word. It’s only understandable that the tales of southern brigands we read as children keep echoing in my mind now that we’re out of reach of the squad. I imagined them dark and hairy in those days, and weren’t the Catalans dark and hairy, or Satanas’ black-trousered men? It’s the close of the second day out, and it feels like ages since I left Iraklion, not to speak of Moscow. Agias Irinis is at hand! With the mind’s eye, I can see Powell up there, unaware that his role as a witness is about to be revived. But I can also see the blood-spattered walls of Ampelokastro, worthy of a Greek tragedy yet banal. I see Rifat Bey, rid of his despised neighbour, readying to buy his property for a song. He counts money, pets his ferocious dogs. Kostaridis sits somewhere and wonders whether he’ll have to change his socks one of these days. It was he who mentioned Satanas and Krousonas to me, and made sure the cobbler escaped before I could ask him for directions. I see Waldo Preger anticipating a medal that reads “Crete” on it, and Lieutenant Sinclair, whose entire life and career are determined by his crossbreed nature as much as by his loyalty to the Empire. Does he consider it unjust, or is he proud of being who he is? If I pry into the distance, my mind’s eye glimpses Major Busch guzzling Afri-Cola in his Lublin exile. At the edge of it all, I can make out NKVD chief Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, impatient for his Dafni and Mandilaria wine…

  “Do you have any cigarettes left?”

  Bora looked over from the diary page. “I’m down to two packets. You’re getting one, and that’s it.”

  “One cigarette, or one pack?”

  “One ten-pack, and that’s it.”

  “Same price as the last one?”

  “I don’t recall charging for the last one.”

  She smiled a little. “I talked to you, didn’t I?”

  Bora was on the point of blurting out that he wasn’t so desperate for conversation. Instead, he retrieved the pack and tossed it to her as he would to an army colleague, with a certain familiar impoliteness. She’ll wait until I finish my entry and then she’ll start chatting. Which I actually don’t mind. After all, optimism aside, I have as many chances of – how does she put it? – “ending up dead” in the next few hours as I do of completing my task.

  The place where they camped was a rugged ravine bottom, wider than a river gorge, much narrower than a valley. Evening shadows filled it, lending a lilac tinge to the air. (Maggie Bourke-White’s blooms, far away in Moscow!) Soon it would degrade into purple, and finally to a leaden grey. High in the pale remnant of sky overhead, a single cargo plane threaded through space like a bright meteor.

  There was water at the low point of the boulder-strewn ravine, a stingy run smothered by grass and reeds which Bora surveyed before allowing Frances Allen to go there and wash. Vegetation granted her some privacy, but no practical chance of sneaking away. When she returned, her dripping hair was a rat’s nest of curls, and the blouse – rinsed and worn as it was – clung to her breasts.

  “Can I have a smoke?”

  Although it was too dark even to reread, Bora kept his eyes on the vanishing lines of his diary as he handed her the lighter.

  “There’s an outcrop in the Texas Hill Country called Enchanted Rock,” she said, “where I used to hike with my father. All granite, bald. It smells dry and clean like this place.”

  There she goes, paying for the cigarettes. “Oh, yes?” Bora meticulously smoothed the blotting paper over his completed diary entry, but would not look up.

  She neared the tip of her cigarette to the flame, and laid the lighter where he could recover it without touching her. “Yes. You may or may not know how it is growing up with a soldier for a father: etiquette, rank, the things you’re expected to do and especially those you’re not. Keeping up the stupid discipline at home as at the army camp, dress code and all.”

  “I have an idea.” Bora put away the cloth-bound book and sat so as not to face her. “Mine is a military family as well.”

  “But I bet we had a very different upbringing: I didn’t grow up in Berlin.”

  “I didn’t grow up in Berlin either.”

  “Then let’s say you weren’t raised in Texas, by Texan pioneers.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t know the frontier, or what borders look like.”

  “Well, France and Belgium aren’t Old Mexico.”

  Memories flowed. Her words, meant to kill time, or to distract him, or to allay her own fears, primed the irresistible time machine this island held in its heart. Blandly at first, Bora became interested in what they were saying. “France and Belgium are nowhere near where we live,” he objected. “When we summered in East Prussia, we had borders all around: Lithuania past the Russ River, and the Polish frontier surrounding us from the Rominte Plain to Marienwerder, Marienburg and the other strongholds of the Teutonic Knights. Westward, the Polish-held Danzig Corridor separated us from the motherland.”

  Memories flowed and had to be cauterized, like a cut vein. What Bora did not say was that his stepfather refused to cross the contended strip of land. The family had to hire a boat from Kolberg or Stolpmünde to Pillau. Or else, averse as he was to fliers and aircraft, the general would pack wife and boys on a train and fly over “the damned Poles”. Nor did Bora add how, during the Great War, invading Russians overran the estate. The general still kept on the wall a map of the Trakehnen countryside printed by the Czar’s Army General Staff, as a reminder that Poland and Russia were the enemy. Bora only spoke of borders in general. “And what about your family?”

  “Well,” she sighed, “there’s one of the Alamo patriots on Father’s side. Mother’s from New Braunfels in the Texas Hill Country: a Grinke, and friends with the Nimitzes and the Hohmanns.”

  “They’re German names.”

  “Don’t fool yourself. Most of the Hill Country is, but by name only, and maybe by the patois the old folks still talk. Father served at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio with the First US Volunteer Cavalry that gathered there before invading Cuba in ’98 – Teddy’s Terrors, you know, the Rough Riders. Saw action under Colonel Leonard Wood; was at Peking in 1901 and fought the Spanish in the Philippines a year later. A regular American hero.”

  Dusk made it safe to sit in the company of a woman who buttons her blouse over her naked torso. Bora turned to her, stretching his legs. “There’s much to be said for having an officer-rank father.”

  “Do you think so? In 1916, the war hero took me 200 miles by train to watch a lynching. Whose? Oh well, he was a young Negro called Jesse Washington, accused of murdering and raping a white woman. You’ve never seen pictures of it? The ‘Waco Horror’ was attended by thousands. He admitted to the crimes, and Mayor Dollins smelt re-election if he just let the mob do as they pleased. So, they dragged the fellow out of jail and beat him with anything they could lay their hands on. Then they castrated him, poured coal oil on him and cut off his fingers so he couldn’t climb the chain that held him over a slow fire. Oh, yes. Charred bits of his body were sold as souvenirs afterwards, and ladies bought postcards of the scene. Oh, sure, it was much criticized as well as defended throughout the south and the US. As far as my old man was concerned, white Texans aren’t to be messed with, and ‘let it be a lesson anyways’ for a rebellious teenager like me. Wasted breath. I hung over my bed a photo of Elizabeth Freeman of the NAACP, a white woman who took on the Lone Star State by reporting on a Negro’s lynching.”

  “I wasn’t aware there were lynch mobs in Texas as late as 1916.”

  “What do you mean? The last one was eleven years ago.” She extinguished the consumed butt of her cigarette before tossing it into the dry grass. “That’s why as soon as I had the chance I applied to and was accepted by Syracuse University, to get as far as possible from home. After good old ’Cuse and New York State came France. After France, Italy, then Greece. Father can keep his retirement ranch in Stonewall with all his Longhorns, the
‘Sunday houses’, Enchanted Rock, the German patois and the old Comanche trails. I don’t forgive a wrong either, and I’m never going back.”

  Bora played with the wedding band on his right forefinger. He did not voice his reaction to what she said, but felt that in a way he, too, was “never going back”, something he wouldn’t share with her or anyone else: the secret world, the closely guarded skeleton key.

  “What’s a Sunday house?”

  She took off her sandals. “A small residence ranchers built in town so they could spend the weekend and piously go to church.”

  “I suppose that’s what your parents had in mind for you.”

  “Precisely. Why couldn’t I be a good girl and stay close to home, as my father wanted? Why wouldn’t I marry one of his younger colleagues, and keep house as the good officer’s wife Mother had always been? Why did I go east and study, of all things? Studying never helped a woman get a husband, in Father’s mind.” She slipped off her socks and began to massage the arch of her right foot, with strong kneading motions. “He didn’t know his younger colleagues had taken me to bed ever since I was fifteen, and if I didn’t lose my virginity until later, it was only because I didn’t go all the way with them, but did everything else. Does that shock you?”

  “No, no.” The only thing that surprised Bora was the flow of her words. She is afraid. Afraid of me, of what could happen to her. Talking builds a barrier against fear.

  “I’d left home long before leaving Texas. Not that I didn’t feel guilty about it – I did. But when I first came to Crete ten years ago, the scales fell from my eyes. It was like being born a second time, into a world where everything had more colour, more sound, more taste to it. Still, it took me a whole year before I realized that a colonel’s daughter could go barefoot, pee behind a bush, dispose forever of petticoat and hat.” (And not only those, Bora thought.) “In Crete I could do things the free and large way. Eat large without worrying about my figure, drink large, do without all those dumb things even we ‘free girls’ in college back home hung on to, like flirting to get a fellow’s attention. Everything is natural here. It’s corny to say, but in Crete you eat, you make love, you die.”