Mr. Mani (16 page)

—In a minute ... I'll get to that too...

—I'll get to it, just let me do it in my own time...

—But I do insist, Grandmother ... because from here you can already see clear into Heraklion, and ahead of us is a chair that was brought up here this morning, waiting for you at the third station—which is where, Grandmother, we're going to take an English break and pour ourselves high tea from my canteen to wash down our dry English cake with...

—Lately I've discovered that there's something comforting about those English pound cakes. Each crumb that you eat is more phlegmatic than the one before...

—You'll see in a minute ... Anyway, Grandmother, it wasn't yet light out and I was feeling terribly lonely again. At first, when I noticed how perfectly still he was, I thought that perhaps he had slipped away and left the coat behind as a dummy. When I went over for a closer look, though, I saw that he had breathed his last and that all that was left there on the floor was his lifeless body, which proceeded to pass every test of death taught me in medic's school. Right away I untied his hands and feet and tried getting him to look a bit less fetal, not wanting there to be the slightest suspicion of any untoward act, because back then in ‘41, Grandmother, war atrocities were still something you swept under the rug, not a flag you raised on high...

—You know what I mean.

—You know.

—You know perfectly well what I'm referring to.

—Never mind, let's not argue about it now. Don't forget, though, Grandmother, that I had never before been so intimately alone with a
dead person, because even though I begged to kiss him, you covered Opapa's face before letting me say farewell to him when I was thirteen. You thought, Grandmother, and maybe you were right, that I was too young for death. Well, by May 1941 I was if anything, like everyone my age, a little too old for death—but still, there in that dawn light, I was facing my first real corpse, which looked natural and intact despite its strangeness, and was mine to do with as I pleased. Since that morning, Grandmother, three years have gone by, and I have seen—and seen to—plenty of dead people, but for some reason that ghost of a Mani has stayed with me, even summoning the other dead around him and making them a part of himself, as he now, lying there among those big urns, summoned an old, familiar sorrow that made me decide that it was time for me to leave. I didn't want to have to deal with the grief and horror of the young Manis, even if that meant forfeiting the right glasses they had found for me, and so I folded the stretcher, hitched myself up to my medic's pack, and covered the dead man with that yellowish overcoat, although first I went through his things and took a few candles, plus what looked like a passbook in Greek with an old photo of him that I stuck in my pocket in case I ever had to explain his death. Which just goes to show again, Grandmother, how naive I was then to think that a German soldier in Europe in 1941 might have to explain to anyone what he did to an occupied civilian, much less to one who had died of natural causes! Next I went to the mule's room and rummaged through the bundles there, which contained some canned food and lots of bags of rice and flour and all kinds of strange spices. The mule itself was standing quietly in its place with its barley bag still tied to it, surrounded by a circle of turds. At first I thought of shooting it like the goats, but I changed my mind and began pulling it by the halter with its feedbag still around its neck, half-blindly dragging it with me in the hope that its instincts might guide me as a farmer guides you through his fields. And that's exactly what happened. The first cricket was already chirping when I left Knossos, bent beneath my load and all but hidden behind the big hairy belly of the mule. I left the ruins as nearsightedly as I had entered them and headed back north, groping my way through morning mist as thick as breakfast porridge ... and thus, Grandmother, most roundaboutly, following the mule's nose rather than my
own, I crossed the English lines not far from the first Greek houses of the city and found myself between the two Charlies again as though in the bosom of an old love. And indeed, just then I heard German being spoken in a juicy Weimar accent, which turned out to belong to two loudmouthed guards from the 4th Brigade, which had jumped the day after we did, who were sitting under a tree so engrossed in philosophic conversation a la Goethe and Eckermann that I was able to creep right up on them without being challenged. They were amazed to hear that there were still survivors from the 3rd Brigade, which had been almost totally wiped out, and suggested attaching me to them at once, although just for the record they advised me to report to what was left of my old unit—which I found in a vineyard, Grandmother, billeted flat on its back. It was only then, carefully picking my way between the wounded and the dead, that I first realized what had happened in history during my twenty-four hours in prehistory, and how lucky I had been. Not that I was indiscreet enough to tell anyone who noticed me about the ancient civilization over the hills. I didn't even bother checking in. I just put down my stretcher, laid a real wounded soldier on it for a change, opened my medic's kit, and went to work with my hands up to my elbows in blood, administering first aid and cauterizing and bandaging and snipping and comforting the wounded and putting the dead in body sacks. I didn't say a word to anyone and no. one asked me where I had turned up from, so that I could have easily, Grandmother, rejoined my old brigade as just another soldier if I hadn't noticed in the twilight, as I was carrying a wounded officer to a hut we were laying the dying in, a stretcher on top of some stones, and on it, in a heap of blood-soaked rags that had once been a uniform, my dying brigade commander, Oberst Thomas Stanzler, who had jokingly called me Icarus before we jumped from the plane. And then, Grandmother, I couldn't resist—and in fact, if I hadn't gone over to that stretcher just then you need never have come looking for me here, because by now I would be a bleached-out pile of bones near Stalingrad and you would have gotten a lovely death certificate to put on the wall beside the first one, where it would have hung perfectly quietly, not talking a blue streak like me. But not only did I go over to my revered commander, I actually knelt by his side, and despite the fog of death he already was in he recognized me at once, although he couldn't talk and could only listen with his eyes closed, the blood tracing a smile on his face. And since I knew that he was going to die and would never see the Labyrinth of Knossos, or the V-sign of the Minotaur's horns, or the urns or the double-bladed ax, and would never know about the paintings of the youths and maidens following the bull in a line, I began feverishly describing it all, so that, crushed in the jaws of history, he might at least be gladdened by the comforting nearness of prehistory. And he really did listen to me, Grandmother, with his eyes shut—and the more silently he lay there, the more carried away I became, until finally he opened his eyes, fixed them on his adjutant standing quietly next to him, made a sweeping sign like a crooked swastika, and began to wheeze out his soul. Well, just as I was getting to my feet to pay my respects to death, the adjutant hurried to a tent and came back with two orderlies whose hands were soaked with blood, and as Oberst Stanzler gave up the ghost, the adjutant ordered them to disarm me and tear off my brigade insignia and place me under arrest on the insane grounds that Stanzler's hand movement before dying had been a verdict of guilty for my having premeditatedly fled the field of battle...

—Exactly. That's how it started.

—Yes. No one but the adjutant.

—Not a word ... just that movement of his hand. The next day, after Heraklion had been taken, I was marched, dazed and humiliated, without a chance to say a word in my defense, with the English and Greek POWs to the municipal museum, which the barbarians of the staff company had turned into a prison. You can see it right down there, Grandmother, that building with the columns that's covered with green tiles. I've set the chair up at just the right angle for you to sit here and look at it...

—No, Grandmother. Try to make out the third window from the right on the second floor. That's what I looked out on the world from while stewing in my thoughts during the long summer and short autumn of 1941.

—So I guessed right...

—But when did you find out?

—I knew it! I knew it!

—I knew you'd find some way of finding out I was in jail.

—Because I was sure that as soon as you discovered that I wasn't in the East, you'd wonder why.

—No, I wasn't trying to hide anything. I just didn't want to write you about it, because I knew my letters would be read, and I didn't want to stain the family honor you held sacred. And yet why pretend, Grandmother ... I was longing all along for a word of comfort from you...

—I said comfort, not agreement...

—Because no one wanted to get involved ... they all washed their hands of it ... if the great commander had passed sentence on his death stretcher, there was no possible court of appeal. And that beastly adjutant, who had made it all up in his sick imagination, flew off to Berlin with a planeload of coffins a few days later to represent our brigade at all the funerals, after which he disappeared in the Adjutant General's office there, leaving me with a sentence that was not only irrevocable and unappealable, but unspecifiable as well. Every week I petitioned the commander of the prison to be told how much time I had to serve, but no one wanted to take responsibility even for that...

—As a matter of fact, I was quite simply forgotten about, Grandmother.

—Precisely. But...

—That's so, that's so. You couldn't have put it any better. You know the mentality of staff officers. But before we go on, here's the English tea that I promised you, still piping hot and with milk in it, made to perfection by a Scottish prisoner.

—As sweet as could be ... and with just the cake to go with it...

—Lately we've been training on bland English food to prepare for our rematch with them...

—Who knows, Grandmother, where we'll meet up with their food again ... perhaps in one of their prisoner-of-war camps...

—It's not a matter of fear. It's just facing facts.

—Absolutely not, Grandmother. No one intends to shed any blood for this island a second time. Enough of it already flowed like water once. Don't you want your cake?

—But it's really a very light and soothing sort of cake...

—Never mind ... here, give it back to me, maybe you'll change your mind later. But do please look carefully at that window, and try picturing me, Grandmother, standing there for hours on end, looking out at the hillside that we're on now...

—That very room and window. From the twenty-third of May to the ninth of December. Twenty-eight weeks. Look at it. I paced back and forth in front of it for whole nights at a time, totally devastated in the beginning. That's the very window I sometimes wanted to throw myself out of, especially—when he wasn't busy saluting and pinning medals on my brigade—each, time I saw General Student appear with his staff to raise and lower the flag ... the window from which I saw all the adjutants swimming and frolicking in the sea, the same sea I hadn't even put my foot in yet, though I would have given anything to do it. One day I heard some English prisoners singing before being shipped off to a POW camp in Germany, and I was green with envy and longing ... And there was a night in June when, after the 7th Paratrooper Division had received its orders to fly out of the island and I saw that everyone was determined to forget me, I lost control and began screaming into the darkness at a group of soldiers standing below me in battle gear...

—Yes. I really screamed.

—Because I kept telling myself, it simply can't be that I don't mean anything to anyone. No one paid me the slightest attention, because no one knew who I was anymore. My fellow wolf-packers were long dead, the adjutants were all off attending funerals, and the command of the island kept changing too. German units pulled out and Italians began to arrive. The prison guards called me “the paradeserter,” and it all became too much for me. I was even thinking, Grandmother, of telling them who I was...

—I mean, who
you
are ... I thought that maybe the name of Admiral Sauchon would at least get me a hearing. But then, on June 22nd, the stunning news arrived of Operation Barbarossa, and all at once, most ardent Grandmother, I had a change of heart and quieted down completely...

—Not at all. On the contrary, I understood at once, Grandmother, what a dreadful mistake had been made.

—No, Grandmother, no...

—No, Grandmother, no. Old Redbeard doomed the Reich that Saturday once and for all. Because instead of pushing on southward to bathe and cleanse our age-old barbarism in a civilization more ancient than our own, folding ourselves back into the blue womb of the Mediterranean and slowly letting our history slough away from us, we were stupid enough to turn east. What for? What for, Grandmother? Supposedly, to look for living space. In point of fact, however, the only purpose of it all was to encounter other barbarians like ourselves. What were we trying to prove? How superior we were? As if we didn't know that already ... That's when I realized that Student and his fellow generals had succeeded in bamboozling our Führer, our poor Hitler, who had taken leave of his senses and quite forgotten what that thoroughest of teachers Gustav Koch had taught us all. And that, Grandmother, was when I understood my mission: to point out to the fast-approaching Judgment Day the existence of an escape clause. And all at once I felt at peace, because I knew that something bigger and more important than that beastly adjutant, bigger and more important than Thomas Stanzler's dying hand, had landed me in jail...

—Even if it's only in a whisper, Grandmother, and only between the two of us, I don't mind saying, and lord knows it's without the slightest arrogance,
that it was destiny, destiny in person
Or perhaps I should say, a remnant of destiny, a shadow thrown by those famous myths that took place here. From that day on, until my release in early winter, I clung more and more fiercely, right through that window that you're looking at, Grandmother, to this wonderful island; I studied its sounds, its smells, its shades of light by day and by night, at first in that long, blue summer, whose unexcelled clarity kept getting deeper and deeper, and afterward on into autumn, when the authorities finally gave me the right glasses, which enabled me to refine my observations and take in little details that I hadn't noticed before, like the hills of the Chaios Range over there, or the outline of the more distant mountains. And all that time I fell back in my thoughts on those first forty-eight hours of freedom, which now seemed to have a mysterious magic ... on the memory of that wonderful jump, and of landing in the olive tree, and of hiking like a sleepwalker that night to Knossos, and of the halls of the ancient Labyrinth with their reddish columns and giant urns, and of the mule led in at dawn by the two Greeks I took prisoner, and of my ghost of a hostage all trussed up in his urn while delivering a spirited lecture on that precivilizatory civilization. I thought of his family too, of that blond young man who broke into sobs while holding the little boy's hand, and of his young wife whose image kept haunting me, stepping silently out of the darkness to shyly hand me a soft towel in which five pairs of old granny glasses were wrapped ... and the more I thought about them, Grandmother, day after day, putting two and two together, the more I was tormented by the odd suspicion that they weren't Greeks at all, but something else—which filled me, Grandmother, with the most terrible wonder...