Enemy and Brother (2 page)

We traveled by water and by land, mostly at night, and we were sheltered and fed clandestinely by
Andarte
sympathizers. Only once, in Prevesa, did we stop in anything that to me approximated civilization. Webb and Stephanou hit it off well together from the start. They did not exclude me: the barrier was my own ignorance. I knew little of modern Greek history and less of Marxism. The very word seemed to stunt my capacity to understand. Occasionally, to draw me out, or perhaps to explain me, Webb would speak of his wife’s regard for me: the young knight errant of the press. He had trouble explaining that to Stephanou whose flashing smile acknowledged both what he understood and what he misunderstood. But for years I believed this to have been his only lead to the charges he later fabricated against me.

It was toward sunset of our tenth day traveling that we halted at the fork of a mountain trail while Stephanou and someone at a distance off exchanged a whistled signal. We proceeded across a mountain ridge to a village abandoned by its people to the rebels. The men who came out of the schoolhouse to meet us seemed much happier to see our mules than ourselves.

Markos was barely civil. His second officer, a Captain Demetrios, had the decency to take us in to the fire and help us off with our coats.

Eventually Webb and I were billeted by ourselves in a hut where the simple wares of its owner still hung on the wall and the sheepskins used as a bed were piled on the floor. Webb paced or watched at the window while I tried to get a fire going in the grate. I do not want to dwell on this right now. He scarcely spoke to me, and when Markos sent for him he went alone. Then I wondered truly what in hell I was doing there.

I got the fire and an oil lamp going, and went over my own notebook. The entries were few, Stephanou having forbidden us to make any mention in our journals of places or of people who had helped us. It was understandable.

I was brought bread and rancid goat’s cheese. My one venture out-of-doors brought a bearded guard to watch over me while I urinated. The night by then was as black as a tar barrel.

By the time Webb returned I was asleep. I woke and saw him looking down at me. He took off his trenchcoat, rubbed what I supposed was dirt from the collar and threw the coat down. He sat by the lamp and began to write.

I conquered my pride and asked: “How did it go?”

He looked around those great hunched shoulders of his and growled: “Like the path of true love.”

I went back to sleep. Sleep is the refuge of wounded pride. I had expected to be included in the interview. When I woke up the fire was out and Webb was gone. He had thrown his coat over me. I had to get up and hold my watch to the lamp to see what time it was. Ten minutes to two. I stepped outside. The darkness was itself a wall until the beam of a flashlight was trained on my face. I pushed it away. The man was Stephanou.

“Where’s Webb?” I asked.

“Not far. Go back inside.”

I was about to obey when I realized from the chimney black that Webb had been gone longer than Stephanou implied. I don’t know what I said but I demanded that he take me to Webb. He shrugged and motioned me to follow. The huts we passed lay as mute as burial mounds in the vast mountain stillness.

We found Webb, even as Stephanou subsequently testified at my trial, intimately engaged with a woman. I was outraged: I did not deny it at the trial. I made something of a commotion, and I probably swore the soldiers’ oaths as Stephanou avowed. But I have never remembered bringing out the name of Margaret Webb that night, although admittedly I thought of her at once. If, as I have intimated, I held Webb in doglike worship, I venerated Margaret. I did not covet her. She might have been not much older than myself, but married to Webb she was… removed. And the kinder she had been to me, the greater the height to which I had exalted her.

I did not see Webb again after Stephanou’s and my intrusion. I returned to the hut, bitter, angry, but with one feeling uppermost: complete and utter loneliness. And, curling in on myself, I slept until Stephanou awakened me and said that the comrade general would see me. Why, God knows. He could have sent the message as easily that Webb would be waiting for me when I left the camp. I breakfasted with Stephanou and the other
Andarte
, understanding not a word spoken among them. The fear grew steadily in me.

There was great activity in the camp as we left. We walked, sometimes ran at a jog, Stephanou urging me to hurry. We came within sight of the main road at sunrise. We reached the shrine at the crossroads without sight of man or animal. Even the birds were silent. I asked where Webb was supposed to meet me. Stephanou did not know. He pointed to the town of Ioannina in the distance. The Greek government patrol would come up the road soon and I could meet them. He asked me if I was afraid. I said I was. He said that he was too and that it was not safe for him to stay. I asked him if he had a gun. He had and sold it to me for twenty dollars. We shook hands and parted.

But when some time later I saw the armed and uniformed patrol approaching, I panicked. I feared to be found with a gun provided by the guerrillas. I buried it in the dark-red soil near the crossroads shrine, and waited for the patrol with my hands in the air.

I was taken to Ioannina where I told my story to the police in the presence of the American advisers to the Greek military. They disclaimed any knowledge of Webb’s whereabouts. I did not tell of seeing Webb with the whore. But when the information was elicited from me later as a result of Stephanou’s testimony, my reticence seemed a concealment of motive rather than a matter of delicacy.

The next day Webb’s body was found in the ditch a few yards from the shrine. I was asked to make the identification and did so. The gun was found later, but by then the tenor of the interrogation I had undergone so alarmed me that I denied all knowledge of the gun—foolishly, so foolishly: the scrapings of red earth from beneath my fingernails bore immediate witness to the lie.

The doctor examining Webb’s body could not place the time of death within eight hours. The cause was discovered at once, a bullet wound in the heart. There was one bullet missing from the revolver I had buried.

Stephanou accepted the government’s offer of political amnesty in coming in to testify against me, establishing as motive my covetousness of Webb’s wife. Margaret’s testimony was taken by affidavit. Ioannina was too perilously close to guerrilla-held territory to require the presence of secondary witnesses. Nothing in my conduct, she swore, had ever suggested more than a very young man’s infatuation. She stated that she had not known her husband’s destination or his companion until receiving a letter posted in Patras three days after his departure from Athens. The letter was produced in court and the critical sentence read aloud: “I decided to take young Emory with me. I wonder how that will strike you, my dear.” I have wondered my life since. The jury construed its meaning to the prosecution’s pattern.

Nor was the camp woman produced by either defense or prosecution. Since I had admitted her existence it was of indifferent value to the prosecution that she be called. Stephanou swore ignorance of where she might be found. But then, having seen only the flash of her nude body before our hasty retreat, I could not possibly have identified her myself.

I have said that I was found guilty. The sentence was death by shooting. When I asked for them I was given pencil and paper with which to write to my mother. I had not been told that she was dead. I do not know to whom among the Greeks it was known. The American press, I learned later, mentioned it.

An Orthodox priest visited me the night before my scheduled execution. It is ungrateful of me to tell it, but all I remember of him was that he, poor man, smelled worse than the prison drain, and in my giddy state I cried and laughed aloud at what I thought an excellent joke for one about to die. “Take him out,” I kept shouting. “He stinks to high heaven!”

I composed a litany of stenches: Greek justice, Greek lawyers, Greek juries, Greek revolutionaries, Greek reactionaries. Then I started on my own compatriots who, for all their observers and advisers, had turned not a word on my behalf. I surpassed The Man Without a Country in my renunciation.

An English doctor was admitted to give me an injection. He complimented me on my invective. I did not think I slept. Yet I have no recollection of leaving the jail, only the dull sense of walking over rough terrain, stumbling, being helped, half-carried. Nor could I see. Afterwards I knew I had been blindfolded. A jolting ride in some sort of motor transport followed, timeless, then the sickening swell and swoop of a small boat. My first moment of real comprehension came shortly after sunrise. The blindfold was removed. When my eyesight cleared I saw what my nose had already told me: I was then aboard a fishing vessel.

A swarthy, gold-toothed man with eyes that twinkled like his teeth in the sunlight was grinning at me.

“Where you want to go?” The accent was Italian.

“America,” I said.

He laughed heartily. I had not heard laughter in a long time. It sounded good.

“You don’t like the Greeks?” He nodded toward the distant shoreline.

I looked back tentatively, far less confident than Lot’s wife. The whole of rockbound Greece seemed to be sinking into a golden sea. I did not know or care then how much of myself was vanishing with her.

Another seaman sat straddling the prow of the boat, his eyes on the waters ahead, binoculars in hand: the waters were still mine-infested.

My benefactors spoke very little English and I no more Italian, but it was plain in any case that such questions I should ask pertaining to my escape would be answered with a shrug. I had no money, no identification. I assumed I still bore resemblance to existing photographs of myself. And I did have a large brown birthmark on my left arm. Sometimes in the many days at sea that followed, I found myself looking at it as though it were a link to my source as well as a mark of my being, a sort of auxiliary navel.

Four nights and two boats later I was put aboard a freighter,
La Stella
—I think off Sicily—bound for New York. I asked no questions. I was given a change of clothes, GI suntans included, a toothbrush and a safety razor. The American maker, no doubt with me in mind, had patented it under the brand name
Pal.

A U.S. Coast Guard cutter met us where we came into American territorial waters and I was turned over to their officers. If they had any foreknowledge of my identity or my nationality, it was not communicated to me. Very little was. Even when I asked one of the men how the Chicago Cubs were doing, I got no more than a cynical grunt. But then, the Cubs might have been in last place. Slightly ahead of myself.

At the office of the chief immigration inspector I asked for a lawyer. I gave only my name and as port of embarkation “somewhere in Greece.” In those days, so soon after the war, “somewhere” had the ring of geographic validity.

Before the question of whether or not I was to have a lawyer was settled, a Mr. Redmond of the State Department came to interview me. He was a big, affable man whose very presence made me realize I was at last in America. I told him everything I could of my fantastic story. He asked no questions but, from his occasional pulling of a long face, I sensed surprise but never disbelief.

He sat in thoughtful silence for a long moment when I was through. It was a warm day. I began to sweat. I resented the cool immaculacy of the man opposite me.

“And yet,” he said finally, “our every report indicates you had a fair trial. Our people followed every word.”

“But the testimony was false!”

“In plain English, you were framed. Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“What do you think your chances are of proving it?”

“Somewhat more than if I were dead,” I said.

“I wonder.”

I threw up my arms. “Right now I’d have trouble proving I’m Jabez Emory without help.”

He looked at me solicitously. It occurred to me that word of my escape might have been suppressed.

“Oh, we knew you were at large. The story is that you broke jail with the help of Communist sympathizers. Supposedly you were taken into their territory.”

“And what were they supposed to have done with me, converted me?”

“Do you think they converted Webb?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Nothing in your conversations pointed that way?”

“I wouldn’t be the best judge,” I said, and he could not possibly know how much of an understatement that was. “But I’d say no.”

“Would you say his story might have favored them, assuming he had lived to write it?”

My sweat turned cold. It was the leading question again. “I cannot say.”

“It was unfortunate that his notebook could not be produced. You would have told at the trial, of course, if you had any notion where it was.”

“He carried it in the inside pocket of his coat,” I said. “But he did not take his coat when he went out to the woman. It was still in the cottage in the morning. I thought of going back for it to take to him, but I was not permitted to.”

“A pity. Possibly it might have exonerated you.”

“I hope to be exonerated now—at home at least.”

He sighed as though pained at what he now had to say. “Your government is in a very delicate position.”

“So is one of my government’s citizens.”

He smiled. “Something you said a moment ago—about Jabez Emory—let’s talk in possibilities for a moment. Suppose he had actually vanished behind the Iron Curtain. Let me be frank with you—I know quite a lot about him. Good army record, a young man of several talents. In school he was torn between journalism and drama, wasn’t it? Maybe he still is. Maybe he could still go either way. He has no immediate family, no responsibility except to himself….”

It was the nightmare again, the man saying patently false things about me as though I were not present. I shook my head violently, trying to stop the automatic talk.

“My mother!” I shouted. “I’ve got a mother!”

His face became a mask of shock, and to this day I do not know whether his reaction was true or feigned. “My God, man, weren’t you told that? It was in the newspapers. I am sorry….”