The Road to Ithaca

by Ben Pastor

  On the scales of Bora’s personal destiny, something did more than tip the balance. Meltemi and the wild Catalans were nothing to the dark men with machine guns and rifles pointed at him from three sides; the boulders of the run’s bed effectively blocked escape on the fourth side. Yes, they were as he’d spotted them marching single file above Krousonas, and next to one of them – the leader of that sombre rank? – bareheaded, stood Frances Allen. Christ, she fell into their hands as soon as she left Agia Irinis. Bora’s anxiety extended to her. I can’t help her any more than I can help myself. Reaching for the holster meant a burst of machine-gun fire from one or more of them.

  Behind the slow wraith of dust, sparkling like a fluid partition where the sun reached, she looked down towards him. She neither wept nor called. Her small figure was remote. Beyond his reach, she seemed as lost as Orpheus’ wife sinking back into Hades. Only when she deliberately, defiantly passed her arm around the man’s waist did Bora understand he had himself tipped the scales of his own fate.

  How wrong could I be? Orpheus has retrieved his wife from the kingdom of the dead! So, that was Andonis Sidheraki. Smiling Andonis, whom she’d known for the last twenty-four hours to be alive and free. She’s known ever since Krousonas, when she pretended not to recognize him, and misplaced a rock. I caught it, but it might have been too late. Then she “lost her way”, and slowed me down. That’s why in the shed she had nothing to say when I let her go. She was confident her husband was in the vicinity, or that they’d find each other soon. The moment they found each other, she led him where he might catch me unawares. In seconds, Bora saw it all. Her fixed attention when they’d spied the men above Krousonas, and – after recognizing her husband – her control over the storm of emotions she no doubt felt, realizing she’d been lied to about his captivity; her coolness of continuing as if nothing had happened while Sidheraki, alerted to her presence by the last man in the row, also pretended ignorance. Surely, he’d simulated a halt for drinking, and then moved out of sight so as to avoid both Satanas’ village and the hostage-carrying German. Following from a safe distance, he must have fallen behind at some point, otherwise he’d have attacked earlier, an easy task, thirteen against one. It was mere chance that Bora had had time to interrogate Caxton.

  Sidheraki’s men were a rough lot; you’d mistake them for heavily armed rustlers or brigands, but sophisticated advisors like Pendlebury had trained them for months. Only a misstep and a slippage of rocks betrayed their approach. If they still kept him under aim, it could only mean they wanted him alive. Bora did not delude himself that gratitude was in Frances Allen’s bones. Or compassion. Her disregard of Caxton, who clearly still felt for her, was nothing to the revenge she must be savouring now…

  How had she put it? “I don’t forgive a wrong, either.” Well, I’m her German taskmaster. Ten seconds into the trap, one frantic thought after the next, Bora was careful not to move a muscle. And her story about lynching, was it a late evening confession, or a cautionary tale? “I don’t forgive a wrong either.” Cretans do mutilate the enemy, and to Sidheraki I’m more than an invader: I’m the man who forced his wife to follow him alone, day and night. Seeking cover seemed impossible, but his only chance to attempt a defence, or disengage. Even if she doesn’t accuse me of anything beyond pushing her forward, he’ll suspect I tried to go for her. And she’s bleeding, too. He ached to do something, but a convulsion of boulders clogging the run was all he could spy to his right, the sole unguarded side. The grotesque quality of his predicament (and all of it for sixty bottles of Greek wine!) made him furious. I should be in Moscow, listening to embassy titbits and avoiding overdrinking, due for leave that will actually bring me to East Prussia for the invasion. I should be in Athens reporting to Busch, or at the very least in Iraklion telling frog-face Kostaridis that I’ve just about solved this case. I should be doing any one of a million things in a thousand different places: kissing my wife, smelling Maggie Bourke-White’s lilacs, reading Ulysses, asking that bloody Waldo Preger what was it, what was it that we brawled about that summer day in Trakehnen. But hell, I’ve got fourteen shots and extra cartridges; I’ll force them to open fire against me, if things turn out beyond salvation.

  The wind kept blowing from the north-east. Meltemi, Bora thought. Der Nordost wehet, said the poem in Heidegger’s essay. The nor’easter blows on the lonely, feisty sea traveller, not to be confused with commonplace sailors. It wove through the ravine and caused a constant, palsied tremor to the few trees clinging to the rocks; specks of dust still twirled in the draught, handfuls of arid dirt rode it in powdery waves. Unmoved, Sidheraki’s men stood or crouched. From his lookout above the place where Bora and Frances had camped the night before, Sidheraki shouted an order Bora did not understand. At once, his wife stepped back. Is she getting out of the way before they shoot? There was no more time. To Bora’s right – glimpsed before but discarded, as it would hardly cushion a fall – a squat cedar-like bush emerged from his peripheral vision, spreading its blue-green limbs a good ten feet below him. Bora literally dived into it, while machine-gun fire swept the rock and shot splinters everywhere. He crashed through a tangle of sharp-smelling aromatic branches, barbed twigs, exposed roots, which bent and snapped before he struck rock, but only for the time it took to roll off it to the next hard place below. No resistance, dead weight, hurts less. It had been the lesson of his boyhood tumbles, never resisted and therefore seldom dangerous. Angry bursts of gunfire pulverized stone, mowed down the wind-tossed heads of reeds and canes around him.

  Bora’s plunge into the run bruised him, nothing more. Only a ribbon of water threaded the bottom of the ravine, where – encumbered and yet shielded by the rucksack – he scrambled on all fours, crawled and slid with bullets whizzing around him. He ran bent double, without looking, at the risk of wedging his foot any time in the slippery jumble of water and rocks.

  Water flows downhill, and that was all he needed to know for now, even though, he warned himself, They’re after me. I’m only delaying the moment and making them more rabid. Sleek moss made Bora lose his footing as he stumbled headlong down the tormented course of the run. Shots, throaty calls followed him from the left bank; shrubs and a rock face impossible to climb loomed to his right. Am I racing to a shelter from where to fire back, or what? They know the mountains far better than I do, and wherever I go they’ll keep up and even outflank me, guessing my next move.

  He hadn’t travelled this way with Frances Allen; any notion of the interior at this stage of his flight was useless. Bora was aware that the stormy nor’easter was picking up, because light dimmed in the ravine; he glanced skyward as a cloud reached the sun and swallowed it like a great fish eating a coin. Just ahead, the ravine opened into a conch-like basin, a motionless tumult of bare rocks and treeless banks, where Bora could not hope to escape capture or death. Had the suitors caught Ulysses alone in his palace, he couldn’t have prevailed, one against many. And I do not exactly have Athena at my side.

  The run became little more than moisture across broad shingle, the banks yawned and flattened on both sides. Am I the same fellow, the same boy, the same child…? Did it all lead here, Serpenten and the house with eyes, Waldo’s dead brother, the beam Pastor Wüsteritz dangled from? A bullet missed him by a hair, though the hair was wide as a gulf, being the difference between death and life. Did I ignore the red-headed girl, the singing maidens for nothing, and still was meant to end here? The stormy wind carried voices, like strident sounds of seabirds caught in the squall. Sirens, mermaids are often portrayed as human-headed seabirds, and so are Sphinxes; their calls aren’t necessarily melodious voices, either.

  Some of the voices, closer in, coming from the opposite direction to that of the pursuing Greeks, told him that more enemies had joined in, and there was really no salvation. They overtook me, or else Sidheraki called the English, or maybe Caxton did. Bora couldn’t make out the words, other than that they sounded full of anger and were ordering him to do something. What
are they saying? I don’t speak their language; why do they shout at me, and what?

  The voices, powerful, from men studding the shingly banks like sailors who hail a shipwrecked brother from the shoals, were bellowing in Catalan.

  “Fuites, angles, fuites!”

  It was as unhoped-for an encouragement as Bora could dream of. Had they been watching over him, his would-be comrades from the Spanish days? They must have, ever since in Meltemi they’d shared bread and remembrance. For all they knew, the Englishman who fought on their side was under attack, and that was enough for them. Wild firing broke out from all sides, and in the midst of it Bora did not stop for the one or the other. He tripped and nearly fell but kept to his staggering flight until a wooded slope provided him a safety ladder up from the shingle. He scaled a cascading incline of pebbles with two of Sidheraki’s men at his heels.

  Large drops of rain stung like grapeshot as he scrambled to the top, with just enough advantage to steady himself, fire and not miss, before burrowing into the scrubland above.

  10

  The headwind was fierce. Because of it, or because his pursuers had fallen behind, shots rang less and less frequently after him, and then thunder overtook all sounds. They were probably fighting one another now (Bora hoped the Catalans would win the day). Under a sky convulsed with lightning, he kept climbing among dwarf trees and bushes, into the squall. No rain followed the first rabid drops, and for nearly an hour he wandered uphill, seeking the sheets of rain as they undulated to meet him. Others would keep out of the rain; he had to hide in the storm. From one moment to the next, he entered it as you enter an open floodgate. Instantly, the landscape vanished around him. In the blinding downpour Bora struggled to stand; he had to feel around for tree trunks, rocks, anything; he slipped and lost his footing and was literally brought to his knees. Water swept over him like waves flooding a deck; there was nothing to do but crouch down and wait it out.

  By the clock, the storm did not last long. In minutes it dissolved into a lively shower while the squall rode westward to the massif of Psiloritis, to die there or overflow around it, seeking the Plain of Messarà. The thunderstorm still raged on the higher reaches of the island, lightning struck – huts? Solitary trees? – against a pitch-black sky. Thunder rumbled from one valley to the next. Rain on the parched mountainsides caused a thick sea of vapours, above which Bora now found himself.

  Looking around, he discovered that he’d come to a crest woolly with dwarf trees. A single eye of sunlight through the clouds pierced the rain and a glorious rainbow arched into the sky, right where Agias Irinis was already an unrecognizable cliff among cliffs, like a wave among waves. Too much adrenaline flowed for him to feel tired, but he was drenched, and it kept raining. Lucky that he had kept the paper items in his rucksack inside waterproof slips, as he had done with his diary in Moscow. In his plunge to escape the gunfire, his wrist compass had struck a boulder and was useless. It would be the last of his problems now, except that he still had to keep away from Sidheraki’s men as well as from the well-meaning Catalans, let alone others a shoot-out might have drawn from their territory, like Satanas’ men: if they found him, it would be the end. German patrols might be alerted too, but Bora couldn’t count on it as long as the weather was prohibitive.

  He needed to consult his map – impossible to do without soaking it. Getting away without knowing the direction did not necessarily mean he’d put a useful distance between himself and his pursuers. It was not his plan to climb indefinitely; he had to seek the lowland instead if he meant to regain a safe road leading to the north coast. Frances Allen knows the way we came, she probably told her husband the direction I’m likely to take; she’ll expect me to retrace the steps followed in the past two days, as I’m not familiar with the island and will think twice about trying new paths.

  That was, of course, what he’d have to do. But Cretan rebels would know all the paths, and any peasant or goatherd seeing him might inform them.

  Bora saw no sense in wandering in and out of crags filled with vapours. The run under Agias Irinis flows N–S, so at first I headed south, then I climbed the bank eastwards; after that, I lost track. How far he’d come, he tried to calculate by the sombre massif in the distance. Those were the wild reaches of Mount Psiloritis, to the west. But which side of the massif was he facing? The land beneath frothed with mist like a cauldron; until visibility improved below him it would be close to impossible to orient himself. The rainfall had a tropical quality about it. As it thinned, steam rose from the overheated rocks and earth; if the sun didn’t turn it into a blinding wall when it came out, he’d have a sense at least of where he had to go.

  His watch read – and he was surprised to see it – a few minutes to eleven.

  The tail of the storm swung lazily over him as Bora came to a place that resembled what Frances called the Upper Palace – some other such site, mapped no doubt by the ubiquitous British archaeologists but otherwise abandoned until better times would allow new digs. He walked through it in search of any structure that might provide temporary shelter. No wall stood more than four courses from the ground. A square stairwell, with steps leading down to a landing or underground floor, seemed vaguely more promising. The steps sat askew, cleft in the middle as if struck by a powerful giant fist trying to halve them. Why not: earthquakes still rattled the island occasionally; cataclysms had torn it down and reshaped it over thousands of years. The partly excavated stairwell led down to a jumble of collapsed lintels, beyond which gaped a void. It could serve to get out from under the rain, but made as good a trap if discovered as he could think of. Tomb or cellar or treasure chamber, it was all the same to Bora at the moment. It wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last burrow he scuttled into uninvited. I need a dry place to check my map, and that’s all there is to it.

  Peering in, he saw a dark space that looked like a chute. It reminded him of the mildewy air shaft behind the canteen in Iraklion, the one that came down and spewed the customers out into the street. How new to Crete he was then, to Villiger, to all that had happened between then and now!

  Inside you could crouch, sit, nearly stand up; but not see someone coming until he stood at the mouth of the stairwell, by which time it would be too late to save yourself.

  Bora glanced at the quickly receding rain clouds, and decided not to go in. Up the steps, he regained the ledge, where a sound of voices through the windy drizzle stopped him dead. Men out of sight just below the paved shelf were heatedly speaking Greek. He quickly sank back, threw in his rucksack first, climbed inside the hole, and hoped no one would join him to get out of the rain.

  He counted on lying low for the time it would take the Greeks, whoever they were, to move on. As soon as his sight grew used to the dark, a flicker of light – from a fissure among the uneven flagstones above – caught his attention. If he half-stood, hunching uncomfortably, it would provide a spyhole at eye level. With his forefinger, Bora removed enough dirt from the cleft to glimpse a handful of men climb onto the ledge. Their animated exchange made him suppose they were arguing whether to stop here or not, but it was a southern habit to speak loudly, so who knew.

  They did stop. Huddled in the last of the rain, miserable and patient, at one point they must have lit cigarettes under their tarpaulin capes, because Bora made out the spark of matches. No. They had lighters, not matches, and wore pieces of British equipment, dark vragha. In his cramped position, Bora fretted. They could be Satanas’ lot or some of Sidheraki’s men, spread out after him like a pack of dogs. Unless he’d wandered alongside his pursuers without knowing, and without knowing they had all caught up here. The possibility that he’d trapped himself made him furious.

  On the ledge, the mutable light suggested that wide stretches of clear sky had opened overhead. The rain died down, but the men only shook their waterproofs and sat. After sunlight escaped the clouds, and puddles on the ancient pavement seemed to catch fire, they laid out their shirts on the drying flagstones and stretch
ed out to rest. One, armed with a submachine gun, stood vigilantly by.

  Bora gave up watching what they were up to. Only if he betrayed himself would the Greeks instantly assume – or resume – the role of hunters. He crouched in the dark, staring at the red-green dot stamped on his retina by looking through the hole. Still soaked through and hungry, he felt inside his rucksack for the cellophane bag where he’d stored a little zwieback, opened it and munched on a biscuit.

  He’d learnt in Spain that fatalism and boredom, at least as far as he was concerned, were twin brothers. I wanted to read my map? I have time now. He took out his torch, stuck it in the criss-cross of fallen blocks that framed his shelter and turned it on; the light of day would make it impossible for those outside to notice the small glare, unless they got it into their heads to look down the steps. Hunching over the map, Bora pencilled the approximate trail followed after leaving Agias Irinis, down the stony bed of the run. Where he’d wandered next was impossible to trace, but he was high up from the valley. I’m as stuck in this hole as Ulysses in the Cyclops’ lair, except that there’s no woolly ram I might crawl under to escape.

  Bora put away the torchlight and sat, thinking a prisoner’s thoughts. In a place like this – one of the few times when he could say that, unseen by all, he was as if non-existent – the world seemed to him an indistinct immensity marked by a handful of meaningful spots.

  Ampelokastro, Sphingokephalo, Iraklion. Moscow. Anything in between, including Trakehnen, where Dikta summered with his parents, belonged to that indistinct immensity. I carry out tasks and figure things out, precisely because I do see the world as a set of discrete points which can be individually mastered. That’s why today the bloody room where Villiger and his household lay is known to me in its essence – not as it is, sacked and tramped through, but for what it means.