The Silver Stain

They drove out of the resort and headed east, before turning south on a road that bisected lush groves of fruit and olive trees. The sun was already high in the sky, but they were shaded from its heat and the first half-hour of the trip was a pleasure. Then the road started to climb and the foliage thinned, until soon all that confronted them were the sheer bare flanks of the White Mountains, their summits capped in glinting silvery white. Although they weren’t far from Chania as the crow flies, it was a different world.

‘Don’t be fooled,’ Mikis said, as he slipped into third gear. ‘There are plenty of watercourses that you can’t see from here and villages were built around them, even in ancient times. There’s one of those Mycenaean beehive tombs not far from here. A lot of the villages are deserted now, the people down on the coast fleecing the tourists.’ He laughed. ‘Like my family. Our village is further to the west. There are twelve people in it now, all of them over seventy-five.’

Mavros nodded. It was a common tale in the mountainous parts of Greece. Signs pointed to villages that weren’t on his map. The road was asphalt, the result of European Union grants, but it was badly potholed.

At Karies, Mikis turned to him. ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’

‘Yes. Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll claim that my British grandfather was here during the war with the SOE.’ That way, he might also find out more about Waggoner. ‘Let’s say he was known as Panos, that’s common enough. If we get anywhere with that, we’ll ask if there are any Kondos’s in the village.’

Mikis shrugged. ‘It’s not a very Cretan name.’ He was concentrating on the much rougher track they were now grinding up. The bushes on either side were thick and thorny, but the trees were leafless and bent.

‘True. Maybe her family shortened it when they got to the States — lots of them did.’

‘Kondakis?’ the driver suggested. ‘Kondhylakis?’

‘No, let’s stick to Kondos. If she had relatives in the village, they’d know the family’s new name, wouldn’t they?’

Mikis didn’t look convinced. ‘Wasn’t it some Hollywood guy who said nobody knows anything?’ He swerved as a goat walked across the track with its head held high.

‘Impressive,’ Mavros said, meaning both the driving and the quotation. ‘William Goldman. Have you read him?’

‘No, one of the guys on the crew told me.’ Mikis laughed. ‘I’m a driver. I don’t read.’

Mavros had noticed the corner of a book under tissues and torches in the open glove compartment. ‘So you use this for wiping your arse, do you?’ He held up a new-looking copy of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Kapetan Michalis, remembering that it had been translated into English as Freedom and Death.

The Cretan crossed himself. ‘How can you say such a thing about a book by the greatest modern Greek writer?’

‘I could argue the toss about that for hours.’ Mavros was not a fan of the great man’s work, finding it overblown and under-edited, though this book — the story of a freedom fighter and family patriarch who dies in a final skirmish against the Turks — was better than most; certainly more powerful than Zorba the Greek, which largely owed its popularity to the film. Give him a poet of few words like Cavafy or Seferis any day.

‘Actually, I was only messing with you. I have a literature degree from the University of Crete,’ Mikis admitted. He stared ahead. ‘And now the fun starts.’

Mavros followed his gaze. A pickup truck with massive chrome bull bars was parked across the road, completely blocking it. Two men in high boots, vraka, and mandili, stood in the back, each carrying a shotgun, while another one in the cab spoke into a walkie-talkie.

‘Shit,’ Mikis said, under his breath. ‘You sure you want to go through with this?’

Mavros looked over his shoulder. Another pickup was drawing up behind them. ‘I don’t think we have much choice, my friend.’

‘Play dumb and British,’ said the driver. ‘If that isn’t a tautology.’

From The Descent of Icarus:

It was dusk when I came round, unaware of where I was until I managed with great difficulty to pull myself up from the floor of the ruined house. I stumbled over to the shattered window and looked out on to the small square. What I saw was a scene of unbelievable horror.

The bodies of my fellow paratroopers were now almost completely covered by those of the New Zealanders, gendarmes and local people who had defeated them. I was unable to focus and struggled to walk, so hard had the blow to my head been. But at least I was still alive — not that I took any comfort from that. I could only imagine that either 109s had strafed the enemy to destruction or that our troops on the higher ground to the rear had fired down on them. The place smelled like the slaughterhouse in my grandparents’ Bavarian town in August — iron blood, rotting guts and lacerated flesh.

Leaning on a rifle, I staggered out into the square and started looking for the woman. I was drawn to her and, if she had been killed, I wanted to lay her out and place her arms across her chest as a mark of respect. But there was no sign of her, even though there were several other women in black among the dead. Then I heard a groan from what turned out to be the sole survivor.

It was the squat British tank officer I had seen giving our men the coup de grace — an action I was fairly sure was not within the bounds of the Geneva Convention. Not that we had been observing that either. He was at the side of the street, his legs covered in blood and his face peppered with shrapnel. I dropped to my knees and lifted his head, then poured some water from my canteen into his mouth. He stared at me in amazement.

It wasn’t long before paratroopers began to trickle into Galatsi, initially observing the drills for taking possession of disputed territory and then showing themselves as it became clear there was no danger from the enemy.

‘Identify yourself!’ came a raised voice I recognized instantly.

I slowly hauled myself upright and gave my name and unit.

Captain Blatter came closer, limping from a wound above his right knee. ‘Where are the others?’ he demanded.

I nodded to the square. ‘Underneath.’ I said, provoking a glare. ‘Sir.’

Troops were pulling enemy bodies off their comrades and swearing.

‘Herman! Throat cut!’

‘My God, the lieutenant’s head’s nearly off!’

‘Two men stuck by the same Maori!’ I watched as the sergeant drew his own bayonet and stabbed it repeatedly into the dead New Zealander’s back.

Blatter ignored that. ‘What have we here? A British survivor?’

The wounded man stared up at him. ‘Waggoner, Captain David.’ He stated his regiment and serial number.

‘How many of my men did you kill, Captain?’ Blatter placed one of his jump boots on the Britisher’s legs and pressed down hard. ‘How many?’

‘My Captain,’ I said. ‘You-’

‘Silence!’ he roared. ‘You hid yourself away while your comrades were massacred. Do not think I will forget that!’

Captain Waggoner looked at me, his eyes dull, then turned back to Blatter. ‘Fuck you!’ he shouted. Blatter kicked him hard and he lost consciousness.

The regimental doctor came up to me and examined the side of my head. ‘He couldn’t have done this himself, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ he said to the captain. He was taking a risk, but the medics were a law to themselves after they proved themselves in battle, as this one had in Belgium.

‘They will pay for this,’ Blatter said, limping over to an old woman who had been nearly cut in two by machine-gun fire. ‘Your children and grandchildren will burn in hell!’ he yelled, his spittle flecking the dead woman’s swollen features.

Without being ordered, the paratroopers set about removing our dead from the heaps in the square, treating the bodies of the enemy without the slightest respect. I was glad the woman who saved me had escaped, fearing that her corpse would have been mutilated because of her great beauty.

‘With a head wound like that, you should be in hospital,’ the doctor said to me in a low voice.