Enemy and Brother (22 page)

We tried the bottom when the water was shoulder high. The sand gave only a little, then mercifully grew firm beneath our feet; it might have been muck that would have sucked us down. We went inland dragging one foot after the other, I holding his arm to guide him. This time he gave me no resistance. The dock at its terminal was waist high. We pulled ourselves up and lay on the rough warm boards. Paul, after a minute or two, groped his way to the edge and vomited back to the sea its own waters. He just lay there, on his stomach, his head on his arm.

After a while, my strength returned with the rush of vitality one feels in salvation. I said, “It’s a fine bit of aftersight, but I should never have taken you there.”

His first words: “It was fated. And you finally got your god-damn swim in Prevesa.”

I laughed and embraced the sky with my eyes. A flight of egrets rose from the marshes, their white wings, black-tipped, flashing in the sun. My shirt was already drying on my back. I felt my pocket for the car keys. They were still there. I had locked my wallet and passport in the glove compartment. And it was true, my watch did resist water. I told these things to Paul.

“America the beautiful,” he said without irony.

It was after four when we followed the pier through the tall tasseled reeds to the road. The dust was powdery soft beneath our feet. We waited. I waved at the first car on the road, a small truck hauling empty tomato crates. The driver stopped. His wife gave us a gold-toothed smile as though there were nothing strange in two grown men walking the road in their bare feet. Paul and I rode as I had when a boy, our legs dangling from the back of the truck.

I saw the Vauxhall as we passed the path I had turned up to the Venetian walls, and shouted to the driver to put us down. As I thanked him, he pointed to his own eyes, then to Paul.

“Sand,” I said. “We fell into the water.” It didn’t make much sense, but it seemed to satisfy him. The words were not premeditated. It was my instinct now to avoid attracting undue attention. We stood at the side of the road until the truck had driven off before I took Paul’s arm.

“It is something I had not thought about,” Paul said as I unlocked the car door. “The two of us together have a certain identity. That is why you told me who you were before we got to Ioannina.”

“There would have come the time in any case,” I said. “Wait in the car. I’m going to see if I can retrieve your cane and my shoes.”

I found the cane halfway down the embankment and my shoes where I had dropped them on the ledge above the sea. I stretched out on my belly for safety and looked over the ledge. The tide had fallen perhaps a foot or more and the scabrous rocks protruded like alligators’ backs. Here and there the water bubbled over those not yet emerged. It was very nearly a miracle that we had found a safe depth among them.

“Once more you might have died,” Paul said when I got back to the car and told him.

“We might both have died, and wouldn’t the authorities have had a hell of a time figuring
that
out?”

“It would perhaps have made for the quickest enlightenment of all,” he said.

“Of all except the two principals.”

He thought about that. “You want very much to know, Professor?”

I said, I think with wryness, “It wasn’t only to attend your wedding that I returned to Greece.”

We found lodgings near the ruins of Nikopolis, once a great city. It was built by the Roman Emperor Octavius to commemorate his victory over Antony and Cleopatra in 31 B.C. While we were changing clothes, I reminded Stephanou that his name saint, Paul, had preached there.

We sat in the dappled shade of a Cyprus tree while the proprietress brought us tea and a sweet pastry. Neither of us had stomach for the pastry. I asked her to save it for our dinner.

“We are almost there,” I said. “Tomorrow if we are ready.”

“Then I must finish the story of my betrayal—is that what we should call my testimony against you?”

“How can you betray an enemy?”

“It is so,” he said. “It was my very reasoning, and I was in grave danger then of betraying my friends.

“When I left you at the crossroads—and you see, to have properly completed my assignment where you were concerned I should have watched until I could actually say you were in the hands of the military patrol. I did not watch. Perhaps I did not want to see—so that I wound up fulfilling neither Markos’ command nor that of my political superiors—I went back into the hills and found a place where I could see the campsite. It was already evacuated. What I wanted to do was to wait for the people to come back to the village as was their custom after the
Andarte
had moved out. I camouflaged myself beneath some pine boughs and dead leaves. The sunlight filtered through and felt on my body much like the warmth of a woman. I slept the sun across the sky.

“When I woke, no villagers had come yet. Nor did they come. I did not know it then but the government was evacuating them entirely into Ioannina, creating a no-man’s land between them and the guerrilla forces. Finally, for I was very hungry, I went into the abandoned village looking for what food might have been left. I found the dregs of milk curd in a pot and ate it. There was nothing more. I went to the cottage, remembering Webb’s trenchcoat which I much admired, but it was gone. If the wilderness is desolate, a village with no people in it is much worse. I took a trail, following the sun toward Zitsa. It was the direction in which Maria lived.”

“Byron’s monastery,” I said, remembering Stephanou’s first reaction when I mentioned it as one of my destinations.

“It is so. But I had to cross the highway and when I got near it I saw what was happening: people moving under armed escort toward Ioannina in jeeps and trucks, by donkey. I wondered there were donkeys left them by the
Andarte
who needed them so desperately. They were carrying pieces of bedding, clothes and children, their wonder-working icons. I thought, it is like the Nazis coming all over again, only there are no bombers in the sky.

“When the road was empty and I went down, I found a posting such as I was to see everywhere there was a post to nail it to. It ordered the evacuation and warned that those who did not obey would be considered sympathetic to the Communists and dealt with accordingly. I wondered if it would be possible for me to pass among the refugees,

“I knew that it would not. I went on toward Zitsa, but Maria’s was no longer my destination. Only for food perhaps. If I could reach the river and follow it toward the sea. You may remember that our last night before making contact with Markos was spent in the valley. We rode from there on the mules Markos was waiting for. It does not matter now. I did not get back….”

I glanced at him when he stopped there. His jaw was hard, his mouth taut.

“I found Maria’s hut,” he said, then, tumbling out the words, “and I found Maria. Her tongue had been split like a parrot’s. The parts of it had swollen—horrible, protruding from her mouth. Her eyes wild, and blood everywhere. She was mad at times, I think, rolling on the floor with the pain. What could I do? I made warm water and salt and tried to bathe the wound. I will not describe her any more to you. She could not talk—she would not talk, ever. And she had not learned to read or write.

“I tried to make her go to the road where they would find her and she would be taken to a doctor. She would not. I asked her if she knew me. She nodded. I asked her who had done that to her, the American? She nodded. But I do not think she understood. It was because of the American it happened: I am sure that that was what she meant, for then I asked her where it happened, and she traced the shape of a cross with her finger. At the crossroads? It was so. I asked her if the American was there. No. Was it the Monarcho-Fascists? No. Was it our people? No. The only answer I could be sure she understood was the making of the crossroads sign. I stayed with her that raving night. I spooned water with a little sugar down her throat. But she was gagging in the morning, gasping, she could not breathe. I put wool on a piece of stick, wet it, and cleaned out her nostrils. I had to sit astride her like a beast to hold her down.

“I prayed that night—as only an atheist can pray—challenging God to manifest himself and prove me wrong. No such proof was forthcoming. I made a kind of harness out of a blanket and tried to make her understand that I would carry her to a doctor. She ran outdoors and began digging in the earth beneath the cottage as though she would hide there. I have seen wounded animals crawl into darkness. I did the only thing I could do then: I came up behind her and with the edge of my flat hand struck her hard at the base of the skull. She crumbled into a blessed silence. I carried her on my back to the road and then along its no-man’s land. It was a nightmare such as makes brief what I have suffered since. From the hill above the crossroads I could see much activity there, many people, motorcycles and jeeps. I laid her on the side of the road. She was beginning to moan again. I cupped my hands round my mouth and raised my voice as loud as I could cry. To this day I can hear the echo of my own voice and feel how the cry tore at my throat. Someone down there waved. I waved back, then dropped to the ground out of sight, and behind the shield of the hill I ran. I made it that night to a village where once I had been given shelter. I was given it again but it was dangerous. The evacuation order had not yet been enforced but people were preparing to leave their homes. Patrols came through every two hours. The villagers had been enumerated.

“It was there I learned that Alexander Webb’s body had been found that morning at the crossroads, shot through the heart. When I had cried out for help for Maria it was to people who had come there concerned with the discovery. Webb dead and Maria mutilated. Something had gone very wrong. I was accustomed to violence, but I usually knew its meaning.

“I was almost caught that night. It would have meant death to those who sheltered me. They asked me to leave before the next patrol came through. And so it would have been everywhere until someone killed me to protect his own family.

“A man on the run is not a hero. The minute he turns back everything inside him goes into reverse, starting with his self-respect. A little of it goes forever when a man, for whatever reason, deserts a cause he once believed in with all his heart. It is the utmost in humiliation to think only of one’s own safety.”

“It is also our first instinct,” I said, though I had not thought myself about to give him solace.

“I do not consider instinct the measure of a man. But… it was my measure then. You are right. Word came that you had been arrested and I thought, thank God, thank God. The gun had been found buried near where Webb’s body had been rolled down the embankment into the long grass. Had you confessed? That was not clear. If not, you would accuse me, of course. The gun had come from me. You would already have accused me.

“If Webb had died of a bullet wound from that gun either you had killed him or Captain Demetrios had: of this fact only I felt certain. But I did not think it would be Demetrios whom you would accuse—or against whom a case could be made by anyone in a government court. They would not want a suspect in absentia at a time like that. If you saved yourself at all, I knew, it would be by accusing me.

“Word was broadcast over the radio that night that political amnesty would be granted to any
Andarte
who could give evidence in the murder of Alexander Webb. And if I were captured, having refused the amnesty, God help me. It would be far better for me to go in voluntarily and give what evidence I could against you.

“I spent the night hiding beneath the skirts of God—under the altar in the village chapel. In the morning a notice was nailed on the door of the very church where I was hiding: it confirmed the promise of political amnesty. I took the paper in my hands and surrendered to the next patrol.

“In Ioannina I was questioned by the police in the presence of the military and their American advisers. I was questioned in Greek naturally, but it was strange to hear—someone else translated for the Americans, and one of them said to the other, speaking of Webb’s death, ‘The son of a bitch had it coming to him.’ It was a point on which they all—Greeks and Americans—agreed.

“I was questioned many times. I told a simple story in the beginning and never changed it—how I had been sent by Markos to invite Alexander Webb to the north in the hope of his telling the true story of the revolution. I told—what I told at the trial. I did not mention Demetrios except as the translator of the interview. You had told them I was the translator.”

“So I believed.”

“They did not question me about him—which in a way frightened me.”

“Why should they? You had not told them of his orders concerning me.”

“I would not have been believed in that: you were alive. I simply said the gun was mine—and waited for something to happen where I might have been compelled. They knew about the woman in the camp—we had both told that and I had told that I thought Webb left the camp with her—and they must have known by then that a woman had been mutilated. Yet neither of us was asked to identify her—or her to identify us.” He groped for his cup and sipped the last of the now cold tea.

I said, “I did not know about the mutilation—not until today. I was persuaded by the lawyers that unless I could positively identify the woman I had seen with Webb, it would be useless to seek her—and cruel to any woman so much as summoned for questioning.”

“Cruel,” Stephanou repeated with bitterness. “Their silence frightened me. I was their tool. It was proposed that there was no substantial proof of political motive in the case so far—unless I had information which I was concealing. Was it not true, as the government intelligence had learned, that Markos was at odds with his political comrades on the conduct of the war, that he in fact now felt that armed revolt had been premature and that the continued guerrilla war would prove disastrous? Or did I think it was possible that Markos had given Webb a message for the legal government of Greece, setting down the terms of his own surrender?