“When the Italians invaded Greece in 1940, I had already decided that I would not run away from Europe. I cannot tell you why. Perhaps it was curiosity, perhaps it was guilt, perhaps it was indifference. And here, on a remote corner of a remote island, it did not require great courage. The Germans took over from the Italians on April 6th, 1941. By April 27th they were in Athens. In June they started the invasion of Crete and for a time we were in the thick of the war. Transport airplanes passed over all day long, German landing craft filled the harbors. But after that peace soon alighted back on the island. It had no strategic value, either to the Axis or to the Resistance. The garrison here was very small. Forty Austrians—the Nazis gave the Austrians and the Italians all the easy Occupation posts—commanded by a lieutenant who had been wounded during the invasion of France.

“Already, during the invasion of Crete, I had been ordered out of Bourani. A permanent lookout section was posted here, and the maintenance of this observation point was the real reason we had a garrison at all. Fortunately I had a house in the village. The Germans were not unpleasant. They carried all my portable possessions over there for me. And even paid me a small billeting rent for Bourani. Then just when things were settling down, it happened that the proedros, the mayor of the village that year, had a fatal thrombosis. Two days later I was summoned to meet the newly arrived commandant of the island. He and his men were installed in your school, which had been closed since Christmas.

I was expecting to meet some promoted quartermaster type of officer. Instead I found myself with a very handsome young man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, who said, in excellent French, that he understood I could speak the language fluently. He was extremely polite, more than a little apologetic, and inasmuch as one can in such circumstances we took to each other. He soon came to the point. He wanted me to be the new mayor of the village. I refused at once: I wanted no involvement in the war. He then sent out for two or three of the leading villagers. When they came he left me alone with them, and I discovered that it was they who had proposed my name. Of course the fact was that none of them wanted the job, the odium of collaboration, and I was the ideal bouc émissaire. They put the matter to me in highly moral and complimentary terms, and I still refused. Then they were frank—promised their tacit support… in short, in the end I said, very well, I will do it.

“My new but dubious glory meant that I came into frequent contact with Lieutenant Kiuber. Five or six weeks after our first meeting he said one evening that he would like me to call him Anton when we were alone. That will tell you that we often were alone and that we had confirmed our liking of each other. Our first link was through music. He had a fine tenor voice. Like many really gifted amateurs, he sang Schubert and Wolf better—in some way more feelingly—than any but the very greatest professional lieder singers. That is, to my ear. On his very first visit to my house he saw my harpsichord. And rather maliciously I played him the Goldberg Variations. If one wishes to reduce a sensitive German to tears there is no surer lachrymatory. I must not suggest that Anton was a hard subject to conquer. He was more than disposed to be ashamed of his role and to find a convenient anti-Nazi figure to worship. The next time I visited the school he begged me to accompany him at the school piano, which he had had moved to his quarters. Then it was my turn to be sentimentally impressed. Not to tears, of course. But he sang very well. And I have always had a softness for Schubert.

“One of the first things I wanted to know was why Anton, with his excellent French, was not in occupied France. But 'certain compatriots’ considered him not sufficiently 'German' in his attitude to the French. No doubt he had spoken once too often in the mess in defense of Gallic culture. And that was why he had been relegated to this backwater. I forgot to say he had been shot in the kneecap during the 1940 invasion and had a limp, unfitting him for active military duties. He was German, not Austrian. His family was rich, and he had spent a year before the war studying at the Sorbonne. Finally be had decided that he would become an architect. But of course his training was interrupted by the war.”

He stopped and turned up the lamp; then opening the file, unfolded a large plan. Two or three sketches—perspectives and elevations, all glass and glittering concrete.

“He was very rude about this house. And he promised he would come back after the war and build me something new. After the best Bauhaus principles.”

All the notes were written in French; not a word of German anywhere. The plan was signed. Anton Kiuber, le sept juin, ran 4 de la Grande Folie.

I noticed one of the sketches was of a theatre, a small amphitheatre. An exotic sickle-shaped apron stage, a canopied proscenium.

“And your theatre.”

“Yes. He was going to come and design for me.”

He let me look a few moments longer, then he turned down the lamp again.

“For a year during the Occupation everything was tolerable. We were very short of food, but Anton—and his men—shut their eyes to countless irregularities. The idea that the Occupation was all a matter of jackbooted stormtroopers and sullen natives is absurd. Most of the Austrian soldiers were over forty and fathers themselves—easy meat for the village children. One summer dawn, in 1942, an Allied plane came and torpedoed a German supply landing craft that had anchored in the old harbor on its way to Crete. It sank. Hundreds of crates of food came bobbing to the surface. By then the islanders had had a year of nothing but fish and had bread. The sight of all this meat, milk and rice and other luxuries was too much. They swarmed out in anything that would float. Somebody told me what was happening and I hurried down to the harbor. The garrison had a machine gun on the point, it had fired furiously at the Allied plane, and I had terrible visions of a revengeful massacre. But when I got there I saw islanders busily hauling in crates not a hundred yards from where the machine gun was. Outside the post stood Antbn and the duty section. Not a shot was fired.

“Later that morning Anton summoned me. Of course, I thanked him profusely. He said that he was going to report that several of the crew of the landing craft had been saved by the prompt action of the villagers who had rowed to their help. He must now have a few crates handed back to show as salvage. I was to see to that. The rest would be considered ’sunk and destroyed.' What little hostility remained against him and his men among the villagers disappeared. I remembered one evening, it must have been about a month after that, a group of Austrian soldiers, a little drunk, began to sing down by the harbor. And then suddenly the islanders began to sing as well. In turn. First the Austrians, then the islanders. German and Greek. A Tyrolean carol. Then a kalamatiano. It was very strange. In the end they were all singing each other’s songs.

“But that was the zenith of our small golden age. Somewhere among the Austrian soldiers there must have been a spy. About a week after the singing, a section of German troops was added to Anton’s garrison to ’stiffen morale.' He came to me one day like an angry child and said, I have been told I am in danger of becoming a discredit to the Wehrmacht, and I must mend my ways. His troops were forbidden to give food to the islanders, and we saw them far less frequently in the village. In November of that year the Gorgopotamos exploit created a new strain. Fortunately I had been given more credit than I deserved by the villagers for the easiness of the régime, and they accepted the stricter situation as well as could be expected.”

Conchis stopped speaking, then clapped his hands twice.

“I should like you to see Anton.”

“I think I’ve seen him already.”

Up on the terrace a petrol engine suddenly sputtered into life. A generator.

“No. Anton is dead. You have seen an actor who looks like him. But this is the real Anton. During the war I had a small ciné-camera and two reels of film. Which I kept until 1944, when I could get them developed. The quality is very poor.”

I heard the faint whir of a projector. A beam of light came from above, was adjusted, centered on the screen. A blur, hasty focusing.

I saw a handsome young man of about my own age. He was not the one I had seen the week before, though in one feature, the heavy dark eyebrows, they were very similar. But this was unmistakably a wartime officer. He didn’t look particularly soft; but more like a Battle of Britain pilot; stylishly insouciant. He was walking down a path beside a high wall, the wall of Hermes Ambelas’s house, perhaps. Smiling. He struck a sort of heroic tenor attitude, laughed self-consciously; and abruptly the ten-second sequence was over. In the next he was drinking coffee, playing with a cat at his feet; looked sideways up at the camera, a serious, shy look, as if someone had told him not to smile. The film was very fuzzy, jerky, amateurish. Another sequence. A file of men marching round the island harbor; apparently shot from above, out of some upper-story window.

“That is Anton in the rear.”

He had a slight limp. And I also knew that I was for a moment watching the unfakable truth. Beyond the men I could see a broad quay, on which in 1953 stood the little island customs and coastguard house. I knew it had been built since the war. On this film the quay was bare.

The beam was extinguished, the engine stopped.

“There. I took other scenes, but one reel deteriorated. Those were all I could salvage.” He paused, then went on. “The officer responsible for ’stiffening morale' in this area of Greece was an S.S. colonel called Wimmel. Wilhelm Dietrich Wimmel. By the time I am now speaking of, Resistance movements had begun in Greece. Wherever the terrain permitted. Among the islands, of course, only Crete allowed maquis operations. But up in the north and over there in the Peloponnesus ELAS and the other groups had begun to organize themselves. Arms were dropped to them. Trained saboteurs. Wimmel was brought to Nauplia, late in 1942, from Poland, where he had had a great deal of success. He was responsible for the southwest of Greece, in which we were included. His technique was simple. He had a price list. For every German wounded, ten hostages were executed; for every German killed, twenty. As you may imagine, it was a system that worked.

“He had a handpicked company of Teutonic monsters under him, who did the interrogating, torturing, executing, and the rest. They were known, after the badge they wore, as die Raben. The ravens.

“I met him before his infamies had become widely known. I heard one winter morning that a German motor launch had unexpectedly brought an important officer to the island. Later that day, Anton sent for me. In his office I was introduced to a small, thin man. My own height, my own age. Immaculately neat. Scrupulously polite. He stood to shake my hand. He spoke some English, enough to know that I spoke it much better than he did. And when I confessed that I was half English by birth, he said, The great tragedy of our time is that England and Germany should have quarreled. Anton explained that he had told the colonel about our musical eveflings and that the colonel hoped that I would join them for lunch and afterwards accompany Anton in one or two songs. Of course I had, a titre d'office, to accept.

“I did not like the colonel at all. He had eyes like razors. I think the most unpleasant eyes I have ever seen in a human being. They were without a grain of sympathy for what they saw. Nothing but assessment and calculation. If they had been brutal, or lecherous, or sadistic, they would have been better. But they were the eyes of a machine.

“An educated machine. The colonel had brought some bottles of hock with him and we had the best lunch I had eaten for many months. We discussed the war very briefly, rather as one might discuss the weather. It was the colonel himself who changed the subject to literature. He was obviously a well-read man. Knew Shakespeare well, and Goethe and Schiller extremely well. He even drew some interesting parallels between English and German literature, and not all in Germany’s favor. I realized that he was drinking less than we were. Also that Anton was careless with his tongue. We were both in fact being watched. I knew that halfway through the meal; and the colonel knew I knew it. We two older men polarized the situation. Anton became an irrelevance. The colonel would have had nothing but contempt for the ordinary Greek official, and I was highly honored to be treated by him as a gentleman and equal. But I was not misled.

“After lunch we performed a few lieder for him, and he was full of compliments. He then announced that he wished to inspect the lookout post on the far side of the island, and invited me to accompany him—the place was of no great military importance. So I traveled round with them to Moutsa and we climbed up to the house here. There was a great deal of military paraphernalia about—wire everywhere and one or two pillboxes. But I was happy to find that the house had not been damaged at all. The men were paraded and briefly addressed by the colonel in my presence—in German. He referred to me as 'this English gentleman' and insisted that my property should be respected. But I remember this. As we left he stopped to correct some minor fault in the way the man on guard at the gate was wearing his equipment. He pointed it out to Anton and said to him, Schlamperei, Herr Leutnant. Sehen Sie? Now Schlamperei means something like sloppiness. It is the kind of word Prussians use of Bavarians. And of Austrians. He was evidently referring to some previous conversation. But it gave me a key to his character.

“We did not see him again for nine months. The autumn of 1943.

“It was the end of September. I was in my house one beautiful late afternoon when Anton strode in. I knew that something terrible had happened. He had just come back from Bourani. About twelve men were stationed there at a time. That morning four who were not on duty had gone down to Moutsa to swim. They must have grown careless, more Schlamperei, because they all got into the water together. They came out, one by one, and sat throwing a ball and sunning on the beach. Then three men stood out of the trees behind them. One had a submachine gun. The Germans had no chance. The Unteroffizier in charge heard the shots from here, wirelessed Anton, then came down to look. He found three corpses, and one man who lived long enough to say what had happened. The guerrillas had disappeared—and with the soldiers’ guns. Anton immediately set out round the island in a launch.

“Poor Anton. He was torn between doing his duty and trying to delay the news from reaching the dreaded Colonel Wimmel. Of course he knew that he had to report the incident. He did so, but not until that evening, after he had seen me. He told me that that morning he had reasoned that he had to deal with andarte from the mainland, who must have slipped over by night and who would certainly not risk going back again before darkness. He therefore went round the island very slowly, searching every place where a boat might be hidden. And he found one, drawn up in the trees over there at the end of the island facing Petrocaravi. He had no alternative. The guerrillas must have heard and seen him searching. There were strict High Command instructions in such a contingency. One destroyed the means of retreat. He set the boat on fire. The mice were trapped.

“He had come to explain all this to me; by this time Wimmel’s Price list was well known. We owed him eighty men. Anton thought we had one chance. To capture the guerrillas and have them waiting for Wimmel when he arrived, as he was almost certain to, the following day. At least we should thus prove that they were not islanders, but agents provocateurs. We knew they must be Communists, ELAS men, because their policy was the deliberate instigation of German reprisals—in order to stiffen morale on the Greek side. The eighteenth-century Klephts used exactly the same tactics to raise the passive peasantry against the Turks.

“At eight that evening I called all the leading villagers together and explained the situation to them. It was too late to do anything that night. Our only chance was to cooperate with Anton’s troops in combing the island the next day. Of course they were passionately angry at having their peace—and their lives—put into such jeopardy. They promised to stand guard all night over their boats and cisterns and to be out at dawn to track the guerrillas down.

“But at midnight I was woken by the sound of marching feet and a knocking at the outside gates. Once again it was Anton. He came to tell me that it was too late. He had received orders. He was to take no more action on his own initiative. Wimmel would arrive with a company of die Raben in the morning. I was to be placed under immediate arrest. Every male in the village between the ages of fourteen and seventy-five was to be rounded up at dawn. Anton told me all this in my bedroom. He paced up and down, almost in tears, while I sat on the side of my bed, and listened to him say he was ashamed to be German, ashamed to have been born. That he would have killed himself if he did not feel it his duty to try to intercede with the colonel the next day. We talked for a long time. He told me more than he had before about Wimmel. We were so cut off here, and there were many things I had not heard. In the end he said, there is one good thing in this war. It has allowed me to meet you. We shook hands.

“Then I went with him back to the school, where I slept under guard.

“When I was taken down to the harbor the next morning at nine, all the men and most of the women in the village were there. Anton’s troops guarded all the exits. Needless to say, the guerrillas had not been seen. The villagers were in despair. But there was nothing they could do.

“At ten die Raben arrived in a landing craft. One could see at once the difference between them and the Austrians. Better drilled, better disciplined, far better insulated against feelings of humanity. And so young. I found that the most terrifying aspect of them—their fanatical youth. Then minutes later a seaplane landed. I remember the shadows of its wings falling on the whitewashed houses. Like a black scythe. A young fisherman near me picked a hibiscus and put the blood-red flower against his heart. We all knew what he meant.

“Wimmel came ashore. The first thing be did was to have all of us men herded onto a quay, and for the first time the islanders knew what it was like to be kicked and struck by foreign troops. The women were driven back into the adjoining streets and alleys. Then Wimmel disappeared into a taverna with Anton. Soon after I was called for. All the villagers crossed themselves, and I was roughly marched in to see him by two of his men. He did not stand to greet me, and when he spoke to me, it was as if to a total stranger. He even refused to speak English. He had brought a Greek collaborationist interpreter with him. I could see that Anton was lost. In the shock of the event he did not know what to do.

Wimmel’s terms were made known. Eighty hostages were to be chosen at once. The rest of the men would comb the island, find the guerrillas, and bring them back—with the stolen weapons. It was not sufficient to produce the corpses of three brave volunteers. If we did this within the next twenty-four hours the hostages would be deported to labor camps. If we did not, they would be shot.

“I asked how we were to capture, even if we could find them, three desperate armed men. He simply looked at his watch and said, in German, It is eleven o'clock. You have until noon tomorrow.

“At the quay I was made to repeat in Greek what I had been told. The men all began to shout suggestions, to complain, to demand weapons. In the end the colonel fired a shot from his pistol in the air, and there was quiet. The roll of the village men was called. Wimmel himself picked out the hostages as they filed forward. I noticed that he picked the healthiest, the ones between twenty and forty, as if he were thinking of the labor camp. But I think that he was choosing the best specimens for death. He chose seventy-nine like that, and then pointed at me. I was the eightieth hostage.

“So the eighty of us were marched off to the school and put under close guard. We were crammed in one classroom, without sanitation, given nothing to eat or drink—die Raben were guarding us—and even worse, no news. It was only much later that I found out what happened during that time.

“The remaining men rushed to their homes—poles, sickles, knives, they picked up what they could and then met again on a bill above the village. Men so old they could hardly walk, boys of ten and twelve. Some women tried to join them but they were pushed back. To be guarantors of their men’s return.

“This sad regiment argued, as Greeks always will. They decided on one plan, then on another. In the end someone took charge and allotted positions and areas to search. They set out—one hundred and twenty of them. They were not to know that they were searching in vain even before they began. But even if the guerrillas had been in the pine forest I do not think they would have found them—let alone captured them. So many trees, so many ravines, so many rocks.

“They stayed out all night on the hills in a loose cordon across the island, hoping that the guerrillas might try and break through to the village. They searched wildly the next morning. At ten they met and tried to make up their minds to launch a desperate attack on the troops down in the village. But the wiser heads knew it could only end in an even greater tragedy. There was a village in the Maui where two months before the Germans had killed every man, woman and child for far less provocation.

“At noon, they came, carrying a cross and ikons, down to the village. Wimmel was waiting for them. Their spokesman, an old sailor, in a last vain lie told him they had seen the guerrillas escape in a small boat. Wimmel smiled, shook his head and had the old man put under arrest—an eighty-first hostage. What had happened was simple. The German themselves had already captured the guerrillas. In the village. But let us look at Wimmel.”

Conchis clapped his hands again.

“This is him, in Athens. One of the Resistance groups took it so that we should have his face recorded.”

The generator sputted to life again, the screen lived. A town street. A German jeeplike vehicle drew up in the shade on the opposite side of the street. Three officers got out and walked in the hard sunlight diagonally across the camera, which must have been in the groundfloor room of the house next to the one they were entering. The head of someone passing blocked the view. A shorter, trimmer man led the way. I could see he had an air of curt, invincible authority. The other two men existed in his wake. Something, a shutter or a screen, obscured the view. Darkness. Then came a still of a man in civilian clothes.

“That is the only known photograph of him before the war.”

An unexceptional face; but a mean mouth. I remembered there were other sorts of humorlessness and fixed stare besides Conchis’s; and much more unpleasant ones. There was a certain similarity with the face of the “colonel” on the central ridge; but they were different men.

“And these are excerpts from newsreels taken in Poland.”

As they came on, Conchis said, “That is him, behind the general"; or “Wimmel is on the extreme left.” Though I could see the film was genuine, I had the same feeling that films of the Nazis had always given me; of unreality, of the distance, enormous, between a Europe that could breed such monsters and an England that could not. And I saw that Conchis was trying to enweb me, to make me feel too innocent, too historically green. Yet when I glanced at his face reflected in the light from the screen, he seemed even more absorbed in what he saw than I was myself; more a victim of the past.

“What the guerrillas must have done is this. As soon as they realized their boat had been burned they doubled back towards the village. They were probably already only just outside it when Anton came to see me. What we did not know was that one of them had relations on the outskirts of the village—a family called Tsatsos. It consisted of two sisters of eighteen and twenty, a father and a brother. But the men happened to have left two days before for the Piraeus with a cargo of olive oil—they had a small caïque and the Germans allowed a certain amount of coastal traffic. One of the guerrillas was a cousin of these girls—probably in love with the elder one.

“The guerrillas came to the cottage unseen, before anyone in the village knew of the catastrophe. They were no doubt counting on using the family caïque. But it was away. Later a weeping neighbor arrived to tell the sisters the news of the killing and all that I had told the village men. By then the guerrillas were in hiding. We do not know where they spent that night. Probably in a cistern. Parties of hastily constituted vigilantes searched every cottage and villa, empty and lived-in, in the village, including the Tsatsoses', and found nothing. Whether the girls were simply frightened or unusually patriotic we shall never know. But they had no blood relations in the village—and of course the father and brother were safely out of it.

“The guerrillas must that next day have decided to split up. At any rate the girls started baking bread. A sharp-eyed neighbor noticed it, and remembered that they had been baking only two days before. Bread for the brother and father to take on the voyage. Apparently she did not suspect anything at once. But about five o'clock she went to the school and told the Germans. She had three relations among the hostages.

“A squad of die Raben arrived at the cottage. Only the cousin was there. He threw himself into a cupboard. He heard the two girls being struck, and screaming. He knew his time was up, so he leapt out, pistol in hand, fired before the Germans could move—and nothing happened. The pistol had jammed.

“They took the three to the school, where they were interrogated. The girls were tortured, the cousin was quickly made to cooperate. Two hours later—when night had come—he led the way down the coast road to an empty villa, knocked on the shutter and whispered to his two comrades that the sisters had managed to find a boat. As they came through the gate the Germans pounced. The leader was shot in the arm, but no one else was hurt.”

I interrupted. “And he was a Cretan?”

“Yes. Quite like the man you saw. Only shorter and broader.

“All that time we hostages had been up in the classroom. It faced over the pine forest, so we could not see any of the comings and goings. But about nine we heard two terrible screams of pain and a fraction later a tremendous cry. The one Greek word: eleutheria. You may think that we cried in return, but we did not. Instead we felt hope—that the guerrillas had been caught. Not long after that there were two bursts of automatic fire. And some time after that the door of our room was thrown open. I was called out, and another man: the local butcher.

“We were marched downstairs and out in front of the school to the wing where I believe you masters live now—the western. Wimmel was standing at the entrance there with one of his lieutenants.

“On the side of the steps behind them the collaborationist interpreter was sitting, with his head in his hands. He looked white, in a state of shock. Some twenty yards away, by the wall, I saw two dead bodies. Soldiers rolled them onto stretchers as we approached. The lieutenant stepped forward and signaled to the butcher to follow him.

“Wimmel turned and went into the building. I saw his back going down the dark stone corridor and then I was pushed forward after him. He stood outside a door at the far end and waited for me. Light poured from it. When I got there he gestured for me to go in.

“I think anyone but a doctor would have fainted. I should have liked to have fainted. The room was bare. In the middle was a table. Roped to the table was a young man. The cousin. He was naked except for a bloodstained singlet, and he had been badly burnt about the mouth and eyes. But I could see only one thing. Where his genitals should have been, there was nothing but a black-red hole. They had cut off his penis and scrotal sac. With a pair of wire-cutting shears.

“In one of the far corners another naked man lay on the floor. His face was to the ground and I could not see what they had done to him. He too was apparently unconscious. I shall never forget the stillness of that room. There were three or four soldiers—soldiers! of course torturers, psychopathic sadists—in the room. One of them held a long iron stake. An electric fire was burning, lying on its back. Three of the men wore leather aprons like blacksmith’s aprons, to keep their uniforms clean. There was a disgusting smell of excrement and urine.

“And there was one other man, bound to a chair in the corner. He was also gagged. A great bull of a man. Badly bruised and wounded in one arm, but evidently not tortured yet. Wimmel had started first on the ones most likely to break.

“I have seen several films—like Rossellini’s films—of the good human’s reactions to such scenes. How he turns on the Fascist monsters and delivers himself of some terse yet magnificent condemnation. How he speaks for history and humanity and forever puts them in their place. My own feelings were of immediate and intense personal fear. You see, Nicholas, I thought, and Wimmel left a long silence to let me think, that I was now going to be tortured as well. I did not know why. But there was no reason left in the world. When human beings could do such things to one another…

“I turned round and looked at Wimmel. The extraordinary thing was that he seemed the most human other person in the room. He looked tired and angry. Even a little disgusted. Ashamed at the mess his men had created.

“He said in English, These men do this for pleasure. I do not. I wish, before they start on that murderer there, that you will speak to him.”

Conchis spoke with quite a good imitation of a German accent. Pauses, to mark the dialogue.

“I said, What must I say?

“I want the names of his friends. I want the names of the people who help him. I want the positions of hiding places and arms places. If he gives me these I give to him my word he will be executed in a correct military manner.

“I said, Did they not tell you enough?

Wimmel said, All they knew. But he knows more. He is a man I have long wished to meet. His friends could not make him speak. I do not think we shall make him speak. Perhaps you can. You will say this. The truth. You do not like us Germans. You are an educated man. You wish only to stop this… procedures. You will advise him to speak what he knows. It is no guilt now that he is caught to speak. You understand? Come with me.

“We went into another bare room next door. A few moments later the wounded man was dragged in, still tied to his chair, and set in the center of the room. I was given a chair facing him. The colonel sat in the background and waved the torturers outside. I began to talk.

“I did exactly as the colonel had ordered. That is, I begged the man to give all the information he could. You will say it was dishonorable of me, because you are thinking of the families and men he could have betrayed. But that night I lived in those two rooms. They were the only reality. The outside world did not exist. I felt passionately that it was my duty to stop any more of this atrocious degradation of human intelligence. And that Cretan’s obsessive obstinacy seemed to contribute so directly to the degradation that it in part constituted it.

“I told him I was not a collaborationist, that I was a doctor, that my enemy was human suffering. That I spoke for Greece when I said that God would forgive him if he spoke now—his friends had suffered enough. There was a point beyond which no man could be expected to suffer… and so on. Every argument I could think of.

“But his expression was one of unchanging hostility to me. Hatred of me. I doubt if he even listened to what I was saying. He must have assumed that I was a collaborationist, that all the things I told him were lies.

“In the end I fell silent and looked back at the colonel. I could not hide the fact that I thought I had failed. He must have signaled to the guards outside, because one of them came in, went behind the Cretan and unfastened the bandage. At once the man roared, all the chords in his throat standing out, that same word, that one word: eleutheria. There was nothing noble in it. It was pure savagery, as if he was throwing a can of lighted petrol over us. The guard brutally twisted the gag back over his mouth and retied it.

“Of course the word was not for him a concept or an ideal. It was simply his last weapon, and he used it as a weapon.

“The colonel said, Take him back and await my orders. The man was dragged away again into that sinister room. The colonel walked to the shuttered window, opened it onto darkness and stood there for a minute, then turned to me. He said, Now you see why I must speak the language that I do.

“I said, I see nothing any more. Wimmel replied: Perhaps I should make you watch the dialogue between my men and that animal. I said, I beg you not to. He asked me if I thought he enjoyed such scenes. I did not answer. Then he said, I should be very happy to sit at my headquarters. To have nothing to do but sign papers and enjoy the beautiful classical monuments. You do not believe me. You think I am a sadist. I am not. I am a realist.

“Still I sat in silence. He planted himself in front of me, and said, You will be placed under guard in a separate room. I will give orders that you have something to eat and drink. As one civilized man to another, I regret the incidents of today and the incidents in the next room. You will not, of course, be one of the hostages.

“I looked up at him, I suppose with a shocked gratitude.

“He said, You will remember that like every other officer I have one supreme purpose in my life, the German historical purpose—to do my duty, which is to bring order into the chaos of Europe. Nothing—nothing!—stands between me and that duty.

“I cannot tell you how, but I knew he was lying. One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true—they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the superego, what you will. They said, You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love. They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

“Unlike most Germans, I believe Wimmel knew, had always known, this. Exactly what he was. Exactly what he was doing. And that he was playing with me. It did not seem so at first. He gave me one last look and then went out, and I heard him speak to one of the guards who had brought me. I was taken to a room on another floor and given something to eat and a bottle of German beer. At this point the experience seemed to me something like that at Neuve Chapelle. I had many feelings, but the dominant one was that I was going to survive. I was still going to see the sun shining. To breathe, to eat bread, to touch a keyboard.

“The night passed. I was brought more food in the morning, allowed to wash. Then at half-past ten I was made to go out. I found all the other hostages waiting. They had not been given anything to drink or eat and I was forbidden to speak to them. There was no sign of Wimmel or of Anton.

“We came to the harbor. The entire village was there, some four or five hundred people, black and gray and faded blue, crammed onto the quays with a line of die Raben watching them. The village priests, the women, even little boys and girls. They screamed as we came into sight. Like some amorphous protoplasm. Trying to break bounds, but unable to.

“We went on marching. There is a large house with huge Attic acroteria facing the harbor—you know it?—in those days there was a taverna on the ground floor. On the balcony above I saw Wimmel and behind him Anton, flanked by men with machine guns. I was made to stand against the wall under the balcony, among the chairs and tables. The hostages went marching on. Up a street and out of sight.

“It was very hot. A perfect blue day. The villagers were driven from the quay to the terrace with the old cannons in front of the taverna. They stood crowded there. Brown faces upturned in the sunlight, black kerchiefs of the women fluttering in the breeze. I could not see the balcony, but the colonel waited above, impressing his silence on them, his presence. And gradually they fell absolutely quiet, a wall of expectant faces. Up in the sky I saw swallows and martins. Like children playing in a house where some tragedy is taking place among the adults. Strange, to see so many Greeks… and not a sound. Only the tranquil cries of little birds.

“Wimmel began to speak. The collaborationist interpreted.

“You will now see what happens to those… those who are the enemies of Germany… and to those who help the enemies of Germany… by order of a court-martial of the German High Command held last night… three have been executed… two more will now be executed…

“All the brown hands darted up, made the four taps of the Cross. Wimmel paused. German is to death what Latin is to ritual religion—entirely appropriate.

“Following that… the eighty hostages… taken under Occupation law… in retaliation for the brutal murder… of four innocent members of the German Armed Forces… and yet again he paused… will be executed.

“When the interpreter interpreted the last phrase, there was an exhaled groan, as if they had all been struck in the stomach. Many of the women, some of the men, fell to their knees, imploring the balcony. Humanity groping for the nonexistent pity of a deus vindicans. Wimmel must have withdrawn, because the beseechings turned to lamentations.

“Now I was forced out from the wall and marched after the hostages. Soldiers, the Austrians, stood at every entrance to the harbor and forced the villagers back. It horrified me that they could help die Raben, could obey Wimmel, could stand there with impassive faces and roughly force back people that I knew, only a day or two before, they did not hate.

“The alley curved up between the houses to the square beside the village school. It is a natural stage, inclined slightly with the slope to the north, with the sea and the mainland over the lower roofs, with the wall of the village school on the uphill side, and high walls to east and west. If you remember, there is a large plane tree in the garden of the house to the west. The branches come over the wall. As I came to the square that was the first thing I saw. Three bodies hung from the branches, pale in the shadow, as monstrous as Goya etchings. There was the naked body of the cousin with its terrible wound. And there were the naked bodies of the two girls. They had been disemboweled. A slit cut from their breastbone down to their pubic hair and the intestines pulled out. Halfgutted carcasses, swaying slightly in the noon wind.

“Beyond those three atrocious shapes I saw the hostages. They had been herded against the school in a pen of barbed wire. The men at the back were just in the shadow of the wall, the front ones in sunlight. As soon as they saw me they began to shout. There were insults of the obvious kind to me, confused cries of appeal—as if anything I could say then would have touched the colonel. He was there, in the center of the square, with Anton and some twenty of die Raben. On the third side of the square, to the east, there is a long wall. You know it? In the middle a gate. Iron grilles. The two guerrillas were lashed to the bars. Not with rope—with barbed wire.

“I was halted behind the two lines of men, some twenty yards away from where Wimmel was standing. Anton would not look at me, though Wimmel turned briefly. Anton—staring into space, as if he had hypnotized himself into believing that none of what he saw existed. As if he no longer existed himself. The colonel beckoned the collaborationist to him. I suppose he wanted to know what the hostages were shouting. He appeared to think for a moment and then he went towards them. They fell silent. Of course they did not know he had already pronounced sentence on them. He said something that was translated to them. What, I could not hear, except that it reduced the villagers to silence. So it was not the death sentence. The colonel marched back to me.

“He said, I have made an offer to these peasants. I looked at his face. It was absolutely without nervousness, excitation; a man in complete command of himself. He went on, I will permit them not to be executed. To go to a labor camp. On one condition. That is that you, as mayor of this village, carry out in front of them the execution of the two murderers.

“I said, I am not an executioner.

“The village men began to shout frantically at me.

“He looked at his watch, and said, You have thirty seconds to decide.

“Of course in such situations one cannot think. All coherence is crowded out of one’s mind. You must remember this. From this point on I acted without reason. Beyond reason.

“I said, I have no choice.

“He went to the end of one of the ranks of men in front of me. He took a submachine gun from a man’s shoulder, appeared to make sure that it was correctly loaded, then came back with it and presented it to me with both hands. As if it was a prize I had won. The hostages cheered, crossed themselves. And then were silent. The colonel watched me. I had a wild idea that I might turn the gun on him. But of course the massacre of the entire village would then have been inevitable.

“I walked towards the men wired to the iron gates. I knew why he had done this. It would be widely publicized by the Germancontrolled newspapers. The pressure on me would not be mentioned, and I would be presented as a Greek who cooperated in the German theory of order. A warning to other mayors. An example to other frightened Greeks everywhere. But those eighty men—how could I condemn them?

“I came within about fifteen feet of the two guerrillas. So close, because I had not fired a gun since those far-off days of 1915. For some reason I had not looked them in the face till then. I had looked at the high wall with its tiled top, at a pair of vulgar ornamental urns on top of the pillars that flanked the gate, at the fronds of a pepper tree beyond. But then I had to look at them. The younger of the two might have been dead. His head had fallen forward. They had done something to his hands, I could not see what, but there was blood all over the fingers. He was not dead. I heard him groan. Mutter something. He was delirious.

“And the other. His mouth had been struck or kicked. The lips were severely contused, reddened. As I stood there and raised the gun he drew back what remained of those lips. All his teeth had been smashed in. The inside of his mouth was like a blackened vulva. But I was too desperate to finish to realize the real cause. He too had had his fingers crushed, or his nails torn out, and I could see multiple burns on his body. But the Germans had made one terrible error. They had not gouged out his eyes.

“I raised the gun blindly and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened. A click. I pressed it again. And again, an empty click.

“I turned and looked round. Wimmel and my two guards were standing thirty feet or so away, watching. The hostages suddenly began to call. They thought I had lost the wifi to shoot. I turned back and tried once more. Again, nothing. I turned to the colonel, and gestured with the gun, to show that it would not fire. I felt faint in the heat. Nausea. Yet unable to faint.

“He said, Is something wrong?

“I answered, The gun will not fire.

“It is a Schmeisser. An excellent weapon.

“I have tried three times.

“It will not fire because it is not loaded. It is strictly forbidden for the civilian population to possess loaded weapons.

“I stared at him, then at the gun. Still not understanding. The hostages were silent again.

“I said, very helplessly, How can I kill them?

“He smiled, a smile as thin as a sabre slash. Then he said, Your imagination has… two minutes in which to act.

“I understood then. I was to club them to death. I understood many things. His real self, his real position. And from that came the realization that he was mad, and that he was therefore innocent, as all mad people, even the most cruel, are innocent. He was what life could do if it wanted—an extreme possibility made hideously mind and flesh. Perhaps that was why he could impose himself so strongly, like a black divinity. For there was something superhuman in the spell he cast. And therefore the real evil, the real monstrosity in the situation lay in the other Germans, those less than mad lieutenants and corporals and privates who stood silently there watching this exchange.

“I walked towards him. The two guards thought I was going to attack him because they sharply raised their guns. But he said something to them and stood perfectly still. I stopped some six feet from him. We stared at each other.

“I beg you in the name of European civilization to stop this barbarity.

“And I command you to continue this punishment.

“Without looking down he said, You now have thirty seconds. Refusal to carry out this order will result in your own immediate execution.

“I walked back over the dry earth to that gate. I stood in front of those two men. I was going to say to the one who seemed capable of understanding that I had no choice, I must do this terrible thing to him. But I left a fatal pause of a second to elapse. Perhaps because I realized, close to him, what had happened to his mouth. It had been burnt, not simply bludgeoned or kicked. I remembered that man with the iron stake, the electric fire. They had broken in his teeth and branded his tongue, burnt his tongue right down to the roots with red-hot iron. That word he shouted must finally have driven them beyond endurance. And in those astounding five seconds, the most momentous of my life, I understood this guerrilla. I mean that I understood far better than he did himself what he was. Very simply. He helped me. Because he managed to stretch his head towards me and say the word he could not say. It was almost not a sound, but a contortion in his throat, a five-syllabled choking. But once again, one last time, it was unmistakably that word. And the word was in his eyes, in his being, totally in his being. What did Christ say on the cross? Why hast thou forsaken me? What this man said was something far less sympathetic, far less pitiful, even far less human, but far profounder. He spoke out of a world the very opposite of mine. In mine life had no price. It was so valuable that it was literally priceless. In his, only one thing had that quality of pricelessness. It was eleutheria: freedom. He was the immalleable, the essence, the beyond reason, beyond logic, beyond civilization, beyond history. He was not God, because there is no God we can know. But he was a proof that there is a God that we can never know. He was the final right to deny. To be free to choose. He, or what manifested itself through him, even included the insane Wimmel, the despicable German and Austrian troops. He was every freedom, from the very worst to the very best. The freedom to desert on the battlefield of Neuve Chapelle. The freedom to confront a primitive God at Seidevarre. The freedom to disembowel peasant girls and castrate with wire cutters. I mean he was something that passed beyond morality but sprang out of the very essence of things—that comprehended all, the freedom to do all, and stood against only one thing—the prohibition not to do all.

“All this takes many words to say to you. And I have said nothing about how I felt this immalleability, this refusal to cohere, was essentially Greek. That is, I finally assumed my Greekness. All I saw I saw in a matter of seconds, perhaps not in time at all. I saw that I was the only person left in that square who had the freedom left to choose, and that the annunciation and defense of that freedom was more important than common sense, self-preservation, yes, than my own life, than the lives of the eighty hostages. Again and again, since then, those eighty men have risen in the night and accused me. You must remember that I was certain I was going to die too. But all I have to set against their crucified faces are those few transcendent seconds of knowledge. But knowledge like a white heat. My reason has repeatedly told me I was wrong. Yet my total being still tells me I was right.

“I stood there perhaps fifteen seconds—I could not tell you, time means nothing in such situations—and then I dropped the gun and stepped beside the guerrilla leader. I saw the colonel watching me, and I said, for him and so also for the remnant of a man beside me to hear, the one word that remained to be said.

“Somewhere beyond Wimmel I saw Anton moving, walking quickly towards him. But it was too late. The colonel spoke, the submachine guns flashed and I closed my eyes at exactly the moment the first bullets hit me.”

54

He leant forward, after a long silence, and turned up the lamp; then stared at me.

“The disadvantage of our new drama is that in your role you do not know what you can believe and what you cannot. There is no one on the island who was in the square. But many can confirm for you every other incident I have told you.”

I thought of the scene on the central ridge; by not being insertible in the real story, it finally verified. Not that I doubted Conchis; I knew I had been listening to the history of events that happened; that in the story of his life he had saved the certain truth to the end.

“After you were shot?”

“I was hit and I fell and I knew no more because I fainted. I believe I heard the uproar from the hostages before darkness came. And possibly that saved me. I imagine the men firing were distracted. Other orders were being given to fire at the hostages. I am told that half an hour later, when the villagers were allowed to wail over their dead, I was found lying in a pooi of blood at the feet of the guerrillas. I was found by my housekeeper Soula—before the days of Maria—and Hermes. When they moved me I showed faint signs of life. They bandaged me and carried me home and hid me in Soula’s room. Patarescu came and looked after me.”

“Patarescu?”

“Patarescu.” I tried to read his look; understood, by something in it, that he fully admitted that guilt, and did not consider it a guilt; and that he was prepared to justify it if I should press for the truth.

“The colonel?”

“By the end of the war he was wanted for countless atrocities. Several of them showed the same feature. An apparent reprieve at the last moment—which turned out to be a mere prolongation of the agony for the hostages. The War Crimes Commission have done their best. But he is in South America. Or Cairo, perhaps.”

“And Anton?”

“Anton believed that I had been killed. My servants let no one but Patarescu into the secret. I was buried. Or rather an empty coffin was buried. Wimmel left the island that same afternoon, leaving Anton in the middle of all the carnage of flesh, to say nothing of that of the good relations he had established. He must have spent all evening, perhaps night, writing a detailed report of the whole incident. He typed it himself—seven copies. He stated that fact in the report. I presume they were all he could get on the typewriter at one time. He hid nothing and excused no one, least of all himself. I will show you, in a moment.”

The Negro came across the gravel and began to dismantle the screen. Upstairs I could hear movements.

“What happened to him?”

“Two days later his body was found under the wall of the village school, where the ground was already dark with blood. He had shot himself. It was an act of contrition, of course, and he wanted the villagers to know. The Germans hushed the matter up. Not long afterwards the garrison was changed. The report explains that.”

“What happened to all the copies?”

“One was given to Hermes by Anton himself the next day, and he was asked to give it to the first of my foreign friends to inquire for me after the war. Another was given to one of the village priests with the same instructions. Another was left on his desk when he shot himself. It was open—no doubt for all his men and the German High Command to read. Three copies completely disappeared. Probably they were sent to friends in Germany. They may have been intercepted. We shall never know now. And the last copy turned up after the war. It was sent to Athens, to one of the newspapers, with a small sum of money. For charity. A Viennese postmark. Plainly he gave a copy to one of his men.”

“It was published?”

“Yes. Certain parts of it.”

“Was he buried here?”

“No. His family cemetery—near Leipzig.”

Those cigarettes.

“And the villagers know that you had the choice?”

“The report came out. Some believe it, some do not. Of course I have seen that no helpless dependents of the hostages suffered financially.”

“And the guerrillas—did you ever find out about them?”

“The cousin and the other man—yes, we know their names. There is a monument to them in the village cemetery. But their leader… I had his life investigated. Before the war he spent six years in prison. On one occasion for murder—a crime passionnel. On two or three others for violence and larceny. He was generally believed in Crete to have been involved in at least four other murders. One was particularly savage. He was on the run when the Germans invaded. Then he performed a number of wild exploits in the Southern Peloponnesus. He seems to have belonged to no organized Resistance group, but to have roamed about killing and robbing. In at least two proven cases, not Germans, but other Greeks. We traced several men who had fought beside him. Some of them said they had been frightened of him, others evidently admired his courage, but not much else. I found an old farmer in the Mani who had sheltered him several times. And he said, Kakourgos, ma Ellenas. A bad man, but a Greek. I keep that as his epitaph.”

A silence fell between us.

“Those years must have strained your philosophy. The smile.”

“On the contrary. That experience made me fully realize what humor is. It is a manifestation of freedom. It is because there is freedom that there is the smile. Only a totally predetermined universe could be without it. In the end it is only by becoming the victim that one escapes the ultimate joke—which is precisely to discover that by constantly slipping away one has slipped away. One exists no more, one is no longer free. That is what the great majority of our fellowmen have always to discover. And will have always to discover.” He turned to the file. “But let me finish by showing you the report that Anton wrote.”

I saw a thin stitched sheaf of paper. A title page. Bericht über die von deutschen Besetzungstruppen unmenschliche Grausamkeiten…

“There is an English translation at the back.”

I turned to it, and read: Report of the inhuman atrocities committed by German Occupation troops under the command of Colonel Wilhelm Dietrich Wimmel on the island of Phraxos between September 30 and October 2, 1943. I turned a page. On the morning of September 29, 1943, four soldiers of No. io Observation-Post, Argolis Command, situated on the cape known as Bourani on the south coast of the island of Phraxos, being off duty, were given permission to swim. At 12:45…

Conchis spoke. “Read the last paragraph.”

I swear by God and by all that is sacred to me that the above events have been exactly and truthfully described. I observed them all with my own eyes and I did not intervene. For this reason I condemn myself to death.

I looked up. “A good German,”

“No. Unless you think suicide is good. It is not. Despair is a disease, and as evil as Wimmel’s disease.” I suddenly remembered Blake—what was it, Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. A text I had once often used to seduce—myself as well as others. Conchis went on. “You must make up your mind, Nicholas. Either you enlist under the kapetan, that murderer who knew only one word, but the only word, or you enlist under Anton. You watch and you despair. Or you despair and you watch. In the first case, you commit physical suicide; in the second, moral.”

“I can still feel pity for him.”

“You can. But ought you to?”

I was thinking of Alison, and I knew I had no choice. I felt pity for her as I felt pity for that unknown German’s face on a few feet of flickering film. And perhaps an admiration, that admiration which is really envy of those who have gone further along one’s own road: they had both despaired enough to watch no more. While mine was the moral suicide.

I said, “Yes. He couldn’t help himself.”

“Then you are sick, my young friend. You live by death. Not by life.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

“No. Of conviction. Because the event I have told you is the only European story. It is what Europe is. A Colonel Wimmel. A rebel without a name. An Anton torn between them, killing himself when it is too late. Like a child.”

“Perhaps I have no choice.”

He looked at me, but said nothing. I felt all his energy then, his fierceness, his heartlessness, his impatience with my stupidity, my melancholy, my selfishness. His hatred not only of me, but of all he had decided I stood for; something passive, abdicating, English, in life. He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm, to convert or detest. For the first time he seemed naked, without any masks; as if all that had gone before had been to bring me to this point, this last confrontation with the black summit of his life. We remained staring at each other. He could say no more to me, and I could mean no more to him.

He stood and picked up the file. “To bed.”

I stood as well. “I’ll wait a little.”

“Very well. But no one will come.”

“Good night, Mr. Conchis.”

“Good night, Nicholas.”

He gave me a last look, grave and penetrating, the eyes of a mathdor after the estocado, then disappeared indoors. I smoked one cigarette, another. There was a great stewing stillness, an oppressiveness, a silence. The gibbous moon hung over the earth, a dead thing over a dying thing. I got up and walked to the seat where we had sat before dinner.

I had not expected such a finale; the statue of stone in the laughing door. I thought again, in the gray silences of the night, not of Julie, but of Alison. Staring out to sea, I forced myself to think of her not as someone doing something at that moment, sleeping or breathing or working, somewhere, but as a shovelful of ashes, a futility, a descent out of reality, a dropping object that dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a smudge like a fallen speck of soot on paper.

As something too small to mourn; the very word “mourn” was archaic and superstitious, of the age of Browne, or Hervey; yet Donne was right, her death detracted, would for ever detract, from my life. Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

55

Ten o'clock. A bright wind, a Dufy day. I woke, jumped out of bed, shaved with extra care, and went down to the colonnade. I caught Maria sitting at the table, as if waiting for me. When I appeared she stood up and bobbed and started to go.

“Mr. Conchis?”

“Kanei banjo. Tha elthi.” He’s having a swim. He’s coming.

By the wall I saw four wooden crates; it was obvious that three of them had paintings inside. I looked into the music room. The Modigliani had gone; so had the little Rodin and the Giacornetti; and I guessed, with a tinge of sadness, that the Bonnards had also come down. The decor was being dismantled.

In a minute or two Maria reappeared with coffee for me. I was drinking the first cup when Conchis appeared in his swimming trunks and water-polo cap. He stood by me, hairs on the dark brown skin still curlicued wet from the water. I saw his scars again; white puckers of flesh. He smiled. The mask was back in place.

“You have slept well?”

“Thank you.”

“I will put on my clothes. Then I will join you for coffee.”

He did not return for some twenty minutes. And when he did, it was in clothes that were somehow as incongruous as if he had been wearing fancy dress. He looked exactly like a slightly intellectual businessman; a black leather briefcase; a dark blue summer suit, a cream shirt, a discreetly polka-dotted bow tie. It was perfect for Athens; but ridiculous on Phraxos.

He looked at a wristwatch—I had never seen him wear one before—and sat down. Smiled at me; and delivered the line like a grenade.

“We have one last hour together.”

“One last hour?”

“At this time tomorrow I shall be in London.” He poured himself a cup of coffee from the new pot Maria had brought. “And wishing I was still here.”

I began to smile. The wind rattled the shimmering vegetal glass of the palm fronds. The last act was to be played presto.

“I didn’t expect the curtain quite so soon.”

“No good play has a real curtain, Nicholas. It is acted, and then it continues to act.” He analyzed my expression, no mercy, enjoying the moment. He added, a deliberate broach, “Lily is coming in a few moments. She wishes to say goodbye.”

“Kind of her.”

“She is coming with me to America.”

“With her sister?”

“No. Alone. As my secretary.” His eyes watched me remorselessly. He had spoken without the slightest suggestiveness, but in that situation the very words were suggestive. There was a pause. I drew deep on my cigarette.

“I shall see you next spring then.”

“Perhaps.”

“I have a two-year contract at the school.”

“Ah.”

“And be the butt again.”

“No more than that?”

“When one’s emotions get involved…”

“I warned you.”

“And also ensured that the temptation remained.”

“Death is the only state without temptation.”

Again I would have liked to pull out my wallet, to face him with my own recent encounter with death. But I was not in the mood to admit to him that I had lied previously about meeting Alison. I stubbed out my cigarette.

“Will she be here next year?”

“You will not see her.”

“But will she be here?”

Our eyes were locked, unconceding, like battling stags’ horns. “You will not want to see her.”

“Why won’t I want to see her?”

“Because you will understand by then how much she has deceived you.”

“I don’t mind being deceived. Especially by a girl as pretty as Julie.”

His eyes hesitated, black with suspicion, a lightning assessment; it was like playing chess with a five-second move limit. He said, “That is not her name.”

“You told me it was.”

“I was deceiving you.”

“And her bank manager?”

He quizzed, uncertain of my meaning. I took out my wallet, found the letter from Barclay’s and pushed it across the table to him. He read it slowly, twice, as if it was difficult to understand, then put it back on the table. For a moment he had a downcast, bewildered look; Lear deceived by Cordelia. Then with a little shrug, a grimace, a wide smile, he conceded defeat.

“I understand. It is I who am the butt today.”

“She begged me not to tell you.”

“You are in love.”

“I know she told you.”

He looked down. “Yes, yes, she told me.”

“She wrote me a letter.” His eyes were hurt; almost reproachful. “I know you haven’t been in Geneva, but that’s all. I’m happy to go on being the butt.”

He made a gesture of dismissal. “This is all I have tried to avoid in my theatre. Now it is theatre—make-believe and artifice.” He waved the infamous idea of the conventional theatre away; tapped his head. “I have tried to be too clever.”

“I’m sorry.”

He stood up, stared down at me. “Well. You are fortunate. That she should really love you. I did not expect it.”

“No?” I smiled back at his slow smile.

“Let us say—I did not intend it.”

“I think, Mr. Conchis, now that at last I have you at my mercy, I’d like to know what you did intend.”

He bit his lips, almost boyishly, his eyes suddenly brimming with good humor. I had an unexpected feeling of affection for him. Julie was right: one could not believe he was evil.

“You must ask her.”

“She doesn’t know.”

“She does know. I have told her the truth. But I warn you it is very strange.” The eyes crinkled. “Very strange indeed.” Then before I could say anymore, he looked at his watch, seemed surprised, and went to the corner of the colonnade.

“Catherine!”

He pronounced it the French way. He turned back to me. “Maria—of course—is not a simple Greek peasant. This was to be another little surprise for you. But now…” He shrugged, as if all was wasted, all a damp fizzle. We heard her footsteps and turned. Maria was still an elderly woman, still had a lined face; but she wore a well-cut black suit, a gilt-and-garnet brooch. Stockings. Shoes with short heels. A touch of lipstick. The sort of middle-class matron of fifty one might see in any fashionable Athenian street. All her old manner was gone. She stood with a faint smile on her face—the big surprise, the quick-change entrance. But Conchis sacrificed the effect.

“Nicholas, this is Madame Catherine Athanasoulis, who has made a speciality of peasant roles. She has helped us many times before.” He moved towards her. “Catherine, tine maiheur nous est arrivée. Queiquechose de tout a fait inattendu.” He took her elbow and led her aside; their backs to me, and a retreat into Greek. She nodded at what he was saying.

She looked at me and gave an open-palmed gesture, whether of resignation or regret, I could not tell. I made a small smile of appreciation at her change. I felt obscurely guilty; a hit of a bull in a china shop; no poetry, again.

Conchis watched her go back composedly towards her cottage, then turned to me.

“Before Julie comes, I have much to say. First of all, I am not deceiving you about America. I must be there next week. I have meetings. Bourani will be shut from today.” He looked at his watch. “And I shall be fetched at noon. I have a plane to catch in Athens. Now, money. There is… Patarescu. And other expenses.” He produced a fat envelope from the briefcase. “Here is a small sum.” He put it on the table.

“I don’t want it.”

“I insist. It is nothing. Ten million drachmai.” I smiled; even allowing for Greek inflation, ten million was well over a hundred pounds.

“I can’t take it.”

He held out the envelope once more, but I shook my head very firmly.

“There is one other thing, Nicholas. For purposes I will not go into now I told you only yesterday that I did not like you. This was merely to authenticate what will not now take place today. So permit me to say, at this unexpected last moment, that I have grown to like you very much. Will you believe me?”

I said, “Of course.”

“Whatever may happen to you in your life, I beg you never to stop believing that of me.”

I bowed.

He caught sight of something behind me, then glanced at his watch; things were carefully timed.

“Ah. Here is Joe. All this was meant as a surprise. What we call a désintoxication.”

It was the Negro. He was strolling through the trees from the gulley, in an elegant dark tan suit. A pink shirt, a club tie. It was still a surprise, this mask-dropping, however much sharper Conchis had intended it to be. The Negro raised a hand as he saw us looking at him. The moustache had disappeared. Conchis went out in the sun to meet him, to stop the pretense again. They spoke a few words, I saw the Negro look up towards me. Then they both came back across the gravel. Conchis looked almost a dwarf, a dapper dwarf, beside him. Joe was about ten years older than I; a hard face, but a mobile and intelligent one.

“Nicholas, this is Joe Harrison.”

“Hi.”

“Hello.”

My tone was so curt that he grinned and gave a little side glance at Conchis. He reached out a hand. “Sorry, friend. Just did what the book said.”

I took his hand, but I said, “With some conviction.”

“Man, I was born in Alabama. In that kind of play…” he gestured back, as if he had left his role in the trees.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Okay.”

We exchanged a wary look. He pulled a pack of American cigarettes out of his pocket and shook one out for me, then he turned to Conchis. “Your bags?”

Conchis said, “They’re upstairs.”

“Fine.” He glanced at me as I lit his cigarette, appeared to search for words, shrugged, smiled secretly and went indoors.

More footsteps. Hermes appeared, carrying two more suitcases over the gravel down to the beach. “Maria” followed him, under the colonnade. She came to me holding out her hand.

“Sans rancune, j'espère, monsieur.” Her accent was heavily Greek. I frogged a small grimace, and took her hand. “Eh bien. Bonne chance.” Perhaps it had not been so difficult for her to play Maria; she was veil-eyed by nature.

I watched her black back descend the path, sink out of sight. And at once, in the same place, Julie rose into sight, climbing up from the beach.

Conchis said, “Let us pretend for a few moments.”

She was wearing a white linen suit, a navy-blue shirt, town shoes; and the shock of seeing her in contemporary clothes was the greatest of the three.

She was walking quickly, lightly, in a way that made me realize I had never seen her move naturally before. She came across the gravel and I stared at her and she stared at me. Running up the steps, a glance at Conchis, she came, fficking her hair back, with a sort of cool impudence—I was sure the whole entry had been rehearsed—and stood some six feet in front of me; her back to Conchis; then winked, to invalidate the part she was playing.

“Good morning.” Her voice was louder than usual; formal.

“Hello.”

She gave another glance, a tiny smile, back at Conchis, who stood by the table, then looked boldly back at me. But hidden from him her left hand was against her ribs, and two fingers were crossed

“Maurice has told you? About America?”

“Yes.”

“I am sorry.”

I said, “All you’ve told me was… not serious?”

She put a touch of sharpness into her voice; turned half away. “I can’t discuss it. I’ll write. I’ve got to get away.”

Conchis came up beside us and looked at her so long that she frowned.

“Not very convincing, my dear. From an actress of your caliber.”

She sensed at once that something was wrong; flashed a look at me, saw me smiling; then back at Conchis.

“Has… ?”

Her eyes accused mine.

“My dear Julie, I asked too much. I miscalculated. Nicholas has made me understand how much.”

She said to me, “You haven’t—”

“No. Nicholas has done nothing. Our little final plan—we forget it.”

I reached out a hand and she took it hesitantly, still bewildered.

“But you said…”

“Never mind. It is better so.”

Joe appeared in the music-room door, with two heavy suitcases.

Conchis said, “Hermes will help you.”

“Aw come on. You know that joke about the white man’s burden? They make it, we carry it.”

I watched Julie’s face. She gave an almost indignant look at Conchis, then frowned again; then smiled, ruefully; then glanced at me. Joe was grinning at her.

“Sorry, baby. There were times I could have said worlds.”

Conchis said, “Joe is a very promising young actor from America. I’m afraid he played his part rather too well.”

She said, “I’m afraid he has.”

Joe put down the cases. “No hard feelings?” He put out his hand and she shook it, though like myself, tentatively. She kept on looking at me, with a vague hint of hurt suspicion in her eyes, as if I might still be in the conspiracy.

“Well, one thing,” said Joe, “now you both got the same person to hate. Nice for you.” He picked up the suitcases and started dowrt the steps. But he paused a moment and grinned goodbye back at us.

Conchis came forward.

“Well. I will say no more. Julie, you will stay… as long as you wish. I have told Hermes.”

She looked at me. “Maurice has lent me his house in the village. That was the surprise.”

I smiled at him. “A very nice one.”

Julie said, “I’m so sorry, Maurice. I’ve ruined everything.”

“My dear, perhaps this year… perhaps I hoped for too much. But next year. Who knows? There may be an English master at the school who has newly married?” His dark eyes fficked momentarily at me. “And we shall see. I have an idea that requires… but not now.”

He put his hands tenderly on her shoulders, gave her a long look. “I am forgiven?” She smiled, and he leant forward and kissed her on both cheeks and patted her avuncularly.

There were more footsteps on the gravel: Hermes coming back from the beach. Simultaneously I became aware of the till then unconsciously heard sound of an airplane. He called to us in Greek, “It is coming.” Julie came beside me and I put my arm round her and kissed the side of her head. Conchis was moving, speaking in Greek to Hermes, giving instructions.

She breathed something I hardly heard. “Oh I’ve so missed you. You got my letter?” I chueked her shoulder. “Why’s he canceled—”

Conchis turned, as Hermes walked back to the cottage. “Now, Hermes has lunch ready for you. Then he is going to lock up and if you wish to go back in the boat…”

“I’d rather walk.”

“He can carry your case then. And I will telephone June.”

Julie said, “Oh please do.”

I could see the plane, a seaplane, coming in to land off Bourani; an echo.

“The colonel’s arriving.”

Conchis smiled. “No. But Greece’s only air-taxi.” He faced me. “Nicholas. After all.” It was not an adverbial phrase.

Taking me by one hand and Julie by the other, he raised his eyes with a sort of tender irony. “'Look down, you gods, and on this couple drop a blessed crown.”

Then he let go of our hands and started down the steps.

We followed. But he turned quickly and pushed us back with his hands, both upraised, forbidding, though with a smile—he had his briefcase in one hand and the hieratic gesture was guyed.

Julie called, “Next year.” He lowered his arms then, and made a kind of openhanded final-curtain bow before turning and going on. We let him drop out of sight, then we went down to the seat beside the path. We saw Maria and Joe were already sitting in the boat. Conchis and Hermes appeared. The green seaplane was taxiing back slowly towards the land. A man in khaki dungarees clambered down onto the port float and got ready to hold the boat as it came alongside. We saw the three passengers wave. Maria went into the cabin, then Conchis, then Joe, and the suitcases were passed up as well. Then boat and seaplane drifted apart, and the latter swung round into the wind. The engine roared, twin white trails, and in a very short time it was airborne, heading first southeast, then climb-banking steeply to the left, Athensward.

I turned to Julie. “What was the last scene that wasn’t?”

She gave me a grave, searching look. “You didn’t know?”

“Look, I’m the victim. Not you.”

She stared at me, then she pointed at the disappearing plane. “I was to be on it, you were to think I’d decided to go to America. You would have left here feeling… a little miserable?” I kissed her hair again. “But the plane would have landed the other side of the island. I was to go to the school. Perhaps wait in your room. You’d have come back—”

I smiled. “I almost wish he’d done it.”

“I’d love to have seen your face. But what’s happened? What did you say to him?”

I pulled her round. She had a pale lipstick on, her tilt-cornered eyes had been accentuated by a pencil; and she was wearing a bra for the first time. I had yet another Julie to discover.

I said, “Later.”

56

We saw Hermes climbing the path towards us. Julie sat up and smoothed back her hair. Every time she had tried to speak I had stopped her. Now she stood and looked down at me, almost sullenly, a strange new face.

“What’s wrong?”

“You.”

She turned away. I stood behind her and put my hands on her hips; kissed the side of her neck.

Hermes came toiling up the path in his methodical peasant way. We stood apart. He said he would lay the lunch “Maria” had left, and passed on. Slowly, hand in hand, we followed him back towards the house.

“Come on. I hear he’s told you the final, ultimate, absolute truth.”

She looked amazed, then teased, then amused; bowed her head with laughter. I jerked her hand.

“What’s so funny?”

“Can’t you guess?” Her bright eyes sideways on mine.

“He…”

She nodded. “He told us you would be told everything last night.”

I looked to the east. “The last laugh. I might have known.”

“Perhaps he’ll tell June.”

“Where is she?”

“In Athens.”

“You must have had more confidence in Maurice than I did.”

“She’s waiting to hear from me. We’ve agreed on a code. If I say Emily it means, Everything’s fine, wait till I write. If I say Charlotte, it means, Come at once. If I say Anne, it means, Stay where you are till I come.”

“Emily?”

“Emily.”

Her fingers laced into mine. I told her about the episode on the ridge, about what had happened that morning. We wandered through the vegetable garden and sat on the ground in the shade of the two loquats at the end. She took off her coat and lay back.

“Maurice has been sweet these last two or three days. He’s letting us keep our contract money.”

I kissed the palm of her hand. “Was he really disappointed?”

“I felt… well, he did say. We were only just beginning the real play when we stopped.”

I looked down at her, at the shadows on her throat.

“Are you disappointed?”

She looked at me, smiled, and shook her head.

I said, “And now?”

She sat up. Her hair hid her face from me; silk-pale strands on the navy-blue shirt. “June’s going to fly back to England.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Do you really need one?”

I smiled, stroked her hair, then pulled her to me; turned her head and kissed her. After a moment she sank back and I lay beside her. Her shirt had rucked up and I bent and kissed her stomach, then touched her navel with my tongue, and she pressed my head down against her bare skin.