Enemy and Brother (30 page)

“What did you expect to happen to you?”

He flashed that damned smile of his. “I expected you to come.” It made me furious with him.

“Any number of things might have prevented that.”

“Then when Demetrios came I might have killed him,” Paul said with cold serenity. “I thought: if he shakes hands with me… and he will come alone to a blind man. He will not be proud of having arranged that….”

I cut him off and asked, “When did you expect him?”

“He would not have come until morning. I was given food and water. By then I might have escaped myself.”

“With the sentry on guard?”

“A sentry?” Paul repeated.

“There was a young soldier on duty at the entrance. I knocked him unconscious but his relief comes on at four o’clock.”

“Ah, but you see, Professor, I should not think I was taken there by the entrance you explored. It was a long walk from the car, one such as you and I took finding Maria’s house.”

“I see,” I said, but all that I could see was that the young sentry had had no idea of what I had been talking about. At that entrance to the cave, I had not been able to hear Paul’s shouts. I had said that Colonel Frontis sent me. But would he remember? Would he be able to speak? Of one thing I was reasonably certain: that young soldier and probably his superiors were in no way involved with Paul’s captivity unless I had now involved them. If luck were on our side it might be hours before Demetrios-Frontis knew that Paul was not his prisoner.

I stopped the car on a precipice an eagle might have happily called home. Beyond lay the village and beyond that on the side of another mountain was the convent of St. Sophia. I could see the white wall like a chalk line in the cliff. I helped Paul change into his own clothes and told him of my conversation with the priest in Kalpaki, Father Zachos.

T
HE LAST MILE OF
the ascent to the convent of St. Sophia was to be made only by donkey or by foot. Such retreats for women are rare in Greece. I am aware of one other, among the fourteenth-century pinnacled monasteries of the Meteora.

In the village I hired a donkey for Paul and, as it turned out, for two small kegs of wine and a cannister of coffee which the people of the village sent up with us, as with every pilgrim, as gifts to the nuns.

It was an eerie journey, our climbing higher and higher over what gradually became, with the great pine and oak trees intervening, a green wilderness of vast and timeless proportions. An occasional rabbit skittered briefly into sight and the grey-breasted crows seemed to pass their vigil over us, one flight to another. We did not stop often since it became more and more difficult to get the animal to start again, and we did not talk because the donkey took it as a signal to halt.

We reached the cloister gate just after six. The garden within the court was planted with vegetables and flowers. I could hear the mournful murmur of voices in what I supposed to be the vespers office. Inside the gate I rang a bell that hung there. The chapel was directly opposite the gate, the doors closed, and off the cloisters round were numerous doors, some open—I saw a tool shed, a wood room, a huge grinding stone—and some closed. A lay woman came running, her long grey braids tossing behind her. I thought at once it must be Maria, and prepared Paul.

“
Kali´spéra
,” I said, and Paul said after me, but from then on, as we had arranged, he became our spokesman.

Before us was a skeletonous little woman who had once had beauty and a tongue and now had only a fleeting smile over broken, parted teeth with a hollow behind them, and dark, wild eyes. She made a sound, a kind of welcome.

“We should like to speak to the Mistress Superior,” Paul said. “We have brought gifts from the village.”

She saw then that he was blind. She looked from him to me and pointed from her eyes to her mouth, shaking her head.

“She is showing us that as you are blind, she cannot speak.” I spoke in Greek.

She ran to the gate and looked out to where I had tethered the donkey in the shade. She went out and herself brought in the two kegs of wine. I offered to take one, but she pulled it from me. She set them down and returned for the other gift.

“She will not have recognized me,” Paul said, “and it is better that first we speak to the head of the house.”

Having made sure the gifts were inside the gate, she led us to a room near the chapel and left us. It was bare, save for two long benches along either wall and the icon to the Virgin, a very old-looking one indeed. The one window overlooked the river gorge, hundreds of feet below.

I heard first the shuffle of feet, then six or seven sandaled, black-garbed women passed the open door without looking in. I wondered if it were the entire community. I went to the door for a brief, surreptitious glance. They were, one and all, observing the gifts. I told Paul.

“How terrible if we had come empty-handed,” I said.

“We should have been as welcome.”

Paul had taken the letter from his pocket, the one given to the shepherd to tell of Maria’s death. When the woman I shall call the Mother Prioress entered, Paul spoke to her as Mother, and I followed his example. She was an elderly woman, but of a high and serene bearing, and her face was of great refinement. If she was ill at ease in our presence there was no sign of it.

“We are privileged to be visited,” she said, and thanked us for the gifts.

“They are from the people of the village,” I demurred.

“But you have brought them.”

“We have come after talking with Father Zachos,” Paul said, “the priest in Kalpaki.”

“He is a friend,” she said, but with rather more reserve. “Please be seated if you wish. Maria will bring you a small repast.”

“Thank you, Mother,” Paul said. “We wish your permission to speak with Maria.”

“You will know that she cannot speak, blind one.”

“She has not recognized me, but it was I who tried to help her, who stayed with her the night after the terrible thing was done to her.”

“I know nothing,” the nun said. “I wish to know nothing.”

Paul offered her the letter. “You will have written this, Mother, and for reasons of the woman’s safety as Father Zachos has told us. It is not to harm her we have come. I am blinded by the same hand.”

“The letter was written by one of the others who knows the shepherd’s language, but I know its message. You do not need my permission, but I will tell you there are moments when a madness overcomes her and she must be locked away from this side of the cloisters lest she jump from the windows. If it is not necessary, I would ask that you not make her relive whatever obscene thing befell her.”

“It is necessary,” Paul said brusquely.

I said, “But you will please stay with us, Mother?”

“If you wish. But let us go from here. Perhaps the garden. Our community will be in the refectory.”

We sat beneath an arbor where Maria brought a tray with bread and cheese and preserves. When the prioress tried to detain her, she went through some extraordinary grimaces which the nun interpreted: “It is the donkey—she wishes to take water to it.”

“It is very kind,” I said.

While she was gone, Paul and I ate the preserve. The bread was fresh and delicious, the cheese, to me, rancid. The nun explained the community routine. They wove and prayed and grew most of the food they needed. At one time they had painted icons after the ancient masters but, on discovery that their work was being sold as antiques, discontinued the practice. Now they worked entirely on native costumes for which there was a market.

Maria returned. The nun told her that the blind man wished to talk with her.

“Come and give me your hand,” Paul said. “I am a friend. I am Paul Stephanou.”

The woman approached him very slowly, step after lingering step, but she did not take her eyes from his face from the moment he said his name. Nor did she take the hand outstretched to her. Instead she touched his face, his eyelids, ever so gently with her fingers.

Paul lifted his face. “I too have known Demetrios,” he said.

Maria, with utter indifference to the presence of the nun and me, bent over him and put her lips to one eye, then the other. Paul caught her face and held it until his lips had touched her mouth.

I clamped my own mouth shut to keep from crying out. I did not look at the nun.

Maria dropped to her knees at Paul’s feet, and sat back on her haunches. He took her hand in his and said, “You will press my hand once for yes, twice for no, to the questions I am going to ask you. Do you understand?”

He then spoke to me: “Professor? You will come close to me also.”

I sat on the ground beside his chair. The nun remained in her chair.

Paul said, “This man was with me, Maria. He was Mr. Webb’s friend. Do you remember?”

I saw the single pressure of her hand on his.

“First of all, do you have the book Mr. Webb gave you that night?”

Yes. She turned and pointed to the nun.

“We have kept a book handwritten in English for her,” the nun said.

“It is well,” Paul said. Then to Maria: “Hold my hand. Did you speak in Italian with Mr. Webb?”

Yes.

“And then told the General what he said?”

Yes.

“I want to ask these questions right. Help me, Professor.”

“Did they talk about Demetrios?” I prompted.

Yes.

“And Mr. Webb’s wife, did they speak of her?”

Yes.

“After we see the journal, Paul, we may not need to ask Maria any more questions on the subject.”

“It is so,” he said. “Maria, did the General ask you to guide Mr. Webb down from the camp?”

Yes. Without his asking it, she drew a crossroads in the dust beside her, forgetting perhaps that he could not see it.

“To the crossroads,” I said. “She has drawn the sign.”

“Did you see Demetrios kill Mr. Webb?”

No.

It was the first “no,” and the only one where “yes” was imperative. Paul repeated the question. The answer was the same. Maria was pointing frantically at her ears.

“You heard the shot?” I said.

Yes.

“And ran away?”

Yes. She again made the grimaces and the terrible breathy noise of inarticulation.

I could not think of the word in Greek for “scream,” “shout.” I said it in English and Paul translated.

Yes.

“Did you go back then?”

Yes.

“And then you saw Demetrios?”

No. She pointed to the sun and shook her head. Darkness.

“There was darkness,” I said.

Again the grimace of screaming, the motion of finding Webb’s prone body. By a terrible series of trial and error pantomimes and questions we learned that she had herself been caught from behind as she bent over Webb, and then thrust upon the ground. Finally, while the thumbs were on her throat forcing open her mouth and the protrusion of her tongue, she had seen the face of her assailant, and had recognized him. Demetrios.

There was only one more question I wished to ask, at least until we had seen the journal, but how to ask it? I said to Paul, “We must know to whom Webb instructed her to give the book, and why she did not do it.”

The answer was very simple: to me, Jabez Emory. If anything had happened to Webb, she was to find me when I reached Ioannina and give the book to me. She had not been allowed to return to her cottage for many months and it was there she had buried the notebook, I think as a symbol of the evil that had befallen her.

A few minutes later the nun, with Maria nodding consent, gave the notebook into my hands.

There were pages of notes on Webb’s earlier observations in a shorthand of his own. I give here a paraphrase of what I read to Paul since I cannot remember it verbatim. It commenced:

Dear Emory,

You sleep there like a child. I look at you and ask by what right such innocence? It is not enough to say you are an American. I hope you will never read this, but if you do I am counting on you to place its information—where? You must decide. Then you will not be a child any more.

I have been sent here to my death, I do believe. I carried the instructions on my own person, neatly sewn in the collar of my coat by a loving and treacherous wife. Knowing this I hope to escape. My reluctant host has provided a guide to whom I am confiding this notebook, and which I shall take back if I am safely delivered.

I met Margaret two years ago in Iran. Several foreign nationals were being held by the Iranian Communists and their Soviet advisers, charged with cooperation with the Germans before the Allies moved in. For a reason then obscure to me the Soviets named me as a satisfactory intermediary between them and the British-American authorities seeking the return of one of these prisoners, Margaret Clitheroe. My own government urged me to serve, an irony I hope will not be lost if this is to be my epitaph.

Among the other “prisoners” was a Greek army captain, Alexis Frontis, whom we have met today under the name Demetrios. These prisoners, I am now convinced, were one and all trained Soviet agents. Their Iranian captivity was their training period. I can think of no other reason for Demetrios to have been in Iran.

It was sheer chance that I met him. I had come to the internment camp (actually a converted resort-hotel) for a preliminary interview with Margaret herself. A guard was present. The Greek walked in on us. He apologized, but lingered at the door. The guard did not order him out. Margaret introduced him, a man liberated from Auschwitz, but not at liberty. The Russians had charges against him. Margaret told me afterwards that he had been permitted to teach her Greek. I remarked on the leniency of her jailors. She said that all the prisoners were people of some distinction. She was herself the daughter of an Anglo-Persian Oil official, and she believed herself to be more a hostage than a prisoner, held to the Russian purpose of achieving political concessions in exchange for her release. This did prove to be the case—on the face of things. I now remember wondering when I met him if there was a personal relationship between Margaret and the Greek, for him to have been curious about me. Still unanswered.