Authors: Penelope Lively
“So—how’s it with you, Ruth? Where d’you hang out when you’re not on an assignment?”
Ruth explains that she seldom is on an assignment of this kind. She says she is a Londoner but does not refer to her personal circumstances. “Where do you live?”
Al is trying to get the waiter’s attention. “Nowhere, really. There’s a pad in London when I need it, and one in New York. Hey! Another of these, please.” He points to the nearly empty wine bottle.
“Oh, gosh—I’m not sure I…It’s going to be quite a long day tomorrow.”
“Nonsense.” He fills her glass. “We need to keep our strength up. Oh gawd—here comes the entertainment.”
The band has moved to one side, to make way for the floor show. The lights are dimmed, and two over-worked but indomitable girls struggle into one set of sequins after another, shimmy around, and belt out songs in German, English, and Greek. “Christ!” says Al. “We certainly need to fortify ourselves against this.” He tops up their glasses. His running commentary makes Ruth laugh. When eventually the show ends and the band strikes up again she is quite light-headed.
The floor has been cleared for dancing. Leather-skinned middle-aged couples are shuffling around, cheek to cheek. Al gets up and holds out his hand. “C’mon.”
Ruth has not danced in years. Possibly she has not danced since she was at college. Peter did not dance, and anyway they never found themselves in dancing situations. How does one do it? Al holds her quite firm and close—he has that warm, toasty, male smell—it is far from disagreeable, in fact it is entirely to be commended, all you do is move. “That’s the girl,” he says, his hand in the small of her back. “D’you come here often?” Ruth giggles. The band changes tempo. “Tango,” says Al. “Now this I can do. I had a South American girlfriend once. Let’s roll…” He swoops her around the floor. The German couples fall aside. Dear me, thinks Ruth, I am getting a taste for this.
It is quite late when they leave. Al escorts her back to the bungalow. “That was great, Ruth. Take care. See you in the morning.” And he is gone, loping off between the hibiscus and the tamarisks.
The next morning, Manolo is already waiting when Ruth arrives outside the main building. Within a minute Al appears, slung about with photographic equipment. He is brisk and professional; the off-duty persona of last night has been laid aside. “Hi, there. Hi, Manolo—good to meet you. Can we get this gear in the back? What’s the program?”
They drive up into the mountains. Manolo has proposed a visit to Arkadi, the monastery that is the Cretan Masada, where a thousand inhabitants blew themselves up with gunpowder rather than submit to the besieging Turks. After that, they will tour some mountain villages to give Ruth material for her piece and to provide Al with photo opportunities.
Arkadi is tranquil, scenic—the mountains all around, the battered honey-colored monastic buildings, monolithic cypresses, a desultory café selling cold drinks and postcards. The place is not unvisited; there is a cluster of the fuchsia pink scooters and the scarlet or powder blue jeeps hired by the more adventurous tourist. Al is immediately drawn to these, and spends much time angling the right shots, with the monastery as background. It is easy to see why: the incongruity, the apposition, the colors.
Manolo gives his account of that fearful day in 1866, his voice hushed, in the ruined central room where the walls are still blackened. The defiant leadership of the chief monk. The cries of the surrounding Turkish hordes, the anguished decision. “Jesus!” says Al. “What a place. And you say these priests—monks—had been fighting alongside everyone else?”
“Of course. The same in 1941. In Crete a priest is a Cretan first, a priest second.” Manolo is as enthusiastic and assiduous as ever now that his seminar has swollen to two people, but is perhaps concealing a certain impatience with the lengthy photographic sessions. He and Ruth sit outside the café while Al prowls around in search of a final shot.
“So tomorrow…” he says. “Tomorrow I take you to the cemetery. And Al also?”
“No. Al will need to go to Phaistos, and that church.”
Manolo nods. “And it is better you are there alone, perhaps?”
“Mmn.” Ruth is not at her best today. She drank too much last night; her mouth is dry, she has a headache. And the evening mood of gaiety has evaporated; indeed, she feels guilty about it. She is not here for gaiety, for enjoyment, that is as inappropriate to the matter in hand as are the sun-baked masses, the warbling girls of the floor show, the tour buses that pound along the coast road. So today she is in a state of self-disgust, and she feels somber.
Manolo takes them to picturesque mountain villages—small remote places that often appear to be totally abandoned, until a woman flings open a shutter, some children peer around the corner of a house. Al selects the choicest village for a lengthy shoot; it has a small central square, turquoise doors and window shutters, a café whose proprietor sports an impressive handlebar moustache and wears traditional costume of jodhpur-type trousers and knee-high boots. Neither he nor his clientele of three old men appear to have anything more urgent to do than take part in a lengthy photo session, with many pithy asides in Greek. Al hefts his tripod around, stands straddled peering into thecamera, his jacket draped over his head to keep out the blazing sunlight, shoots roll after roll of film. Much coffee is drunk—and beer, and coke, and rakia. Chunks of feta cheese appear, and walnuts. Al rearranges the café’s frontage of flower pots to greater effect, an obliging owner removes the only car parked in the square. At one point, a gravel lorry proposing to pass through the village stops to wait patiently till Al has finished his film; the driver gets out and accepts coffee and a brandy.
Ruth and Manolo sit in the shade and watch. “Words or pictures?” says Manolo. “Which tell the story?”
“Both, I suppose. I can describe this place, but the photos will give the color of the doors. That moustache. His boots. The cat sitting on the wall.”
“For Minoan times we have only pictures, pretty well. You have seen—in the museum. The wall friezes, the vases. Plenty of pictures. What everyone wanted was the words—the language.”
“Linear B,” says Ruth. “I know. You explained.”
“And then when at last the tablets are deciphered they are lists of sheep and oxen. Or records of wheat and oil stores, and an order for bathtubs.” Manolo laughs. “No poetry. No pre-Greek plays.”
“I suppose most of our words are about sheep and oxen, and bathtub deliveries, or the equivalent. Records and communication.”
“Of course. That is how language began. Poetry and plays are luxuries. And history needs to know about the sheep and oxen and the bathtubs.” Manolo turns those Byzantine eyes upon her. Ruth feels less somber.
Al is through. “Good shoot. Now I need some big scenery—mountain stuff. Hold on while I buy these guys a bottle of brandy.”
There are heartfelt farewells all round. The café proprietor presents Ruth with a bouquet of plumbago, with a flourish. They get back into the car.
“Okay,” says Manolo. “So I find scenery for you.” There is a sense of diminished enthusiasm but even so he succeeds in extracting drama from every twisting road, each vista of olive-strewn valleys and majestic mountain ranges. Scenery may be inert, but it is also the backdrop to human activity. Manolo stops the car at a small, ancient church on a bend: “Here was before a Roman temple, and see, here in the wall are stones from the temple, with even an inscription.” He points out an olive tree that has grown up around a Greek column, the gray trunk twined about the white stone. Al sets up the camera and snatches the image.
“And here…” Manolo has picked a new stopping point and is indicating a road which wavers through a valley ahead and marks the route taken by the Allied forces after the defeat, when they began to make their way through and over the mountains to Sphakion on the north coast, where the navy would take them off the island. He conjures up the straggling columns of men, exhausted after days in action, sleepless, desperate with thirst and hunger. “Up into the mountains,” says Manolo. “Higher and higher. Not knowing how far they had to go, or what awaited them. Without equipment, some without boots, even. Imagine.”
Ruth, who has already imagined, is silent. She thinks of Matt’s fellow officer, John Marsh, who wrote that letter to her grandmother. He must have been one of those men.
Al is studying the map. “Christ—they had a hell of a way to go, didn’t they. How many of them?”
Manolo shakes his head. “Very many.”
“Around ten thousand,” says Ruth.
Both men look at her.
“You’ve been boning up on world war two?” says Al.
Ruth finds that she does not want to explain about Matt at this moment. She has had little direct contact with Al all day; all conversation has been about what shots would best complement her article. He has been absorbed in the job. Once, when she refused a glass of rakia pressed on her by the café proprietor, he gave a complicit grin, and also declined.
Manolo looks as though he is about to say something, and then perhaps notes Ruth’s reticence. He talks of how Cretan villagers helped the retreating soldiers with food and shelter, he talks of the resistance, the partisan fighters, the battle of attrition waged from the mountain hold-outs.
The light is fading. Al says he will pack it in for the day. There is discussion about plans for tomorrow. Manolo turns to Ruth: “I take you to Suda Bay, okay? I can fix a hire car for Al to go to Phaistos.”
“You’re not coming, Ruth?” says Al.
“No. There’s somewhere else I need to go.”
“Too bad. I’ll miss you.” As they get into the car, he puts his hand for a moment on her shoulder. “It’s been a great day, anyway. I’ll be in the bar later if you want to unwind.”
Ruth gets into the back of the car and sits there silent throughout the drive to the hotel. She is disturbed by Al, and exasperated with herself for feeling this way. When they arrive, she gets quickly out of the car, confirms tomorrow’s arrangements with Manolo, waves to Al, and walks away to her bungalow. She will not go to the bar.
Two hours later, Ruth is in her bungalow. She has her books in a pile beside her and revisits, yet again, the narrative of the 1941 campaign, this story that is now buried half a century deep, set fast, unchanging, over and done with. Churchill sent Allied forces to Greece from Egypt, in anticipation of a German advance across the Greek frontier. The Allied and Greek forces were driven back by the Germans, and Allied troops were evacuated by sea to Crete. Less than four weeks later German paratroopers landed in Crete. After ten days of fierce fighting the Allied commander, General Freyberg, considered that his position was untenable. The surviving Allied troops were ordered to make their way to Sphakion, in the mountainous south of the island, for evacuation by the navy. Over six thousand remained, as prisoners or hiding out, assisted by Cretan partisans. A total of over twelve thousand Allied prisoners were taken; 1,751 were killed or missing, including Matt Faraday.
This is what happened, it is history—but it is not over and done with, Ruth sees, because these writings are a cauldron of dissent. Why did this happen? What caused that? Decisions, actions, consequences. Was Churchill ill-advised to intervene in Greece? Would he not have done better to reserve his forces for the Libyan campaign? Should he have sent Ruth’s grandfather to the desert, rather than to Crete and thus, finally, to a ditch on a hillside above Heraklion? And did General Freyberg underestimate the effect of massed parachute landings, obsessed by his expectation of a seaborne invasion? Did he make a series of seminal mistakes? Was he over-optimistic? Or did he, on the other hand, decide to pull out too soon? Did his errors commit Matt Faraday to his death on that hillside?
People know now what happened when, and where, and—up to a point—why. Historians look down with Olympian hindsight, and make judgments. The
Sturm und Drang
of the moment is raided for evidence—a snatch of eyewitness testimony—but that is all that it is. Those hours, days, are stashed away now, like reels of film, to be replayed at will.
Just as Ruth replays John Marsh’s letter. She takes this out now—the copy that she has made to save further wear on the flimsy original—and reads it yet again, although she knows it almost by heart.
Dear Mrs. Faraday,
I should like to tell you as much as I can of what happened on May 20th 1941. Matt was a fellow officer, and a friend; I mourn him with you.
We were based at Heraklion. A seaborne landing was anticipated, or parachute drops, and we had been on full alert since our arrival. There was bombing of the airport and the surrounding area, where we were dug in, along with frequent Stuka attacks. Losses had not been great, but the conditions were difficult—great heat, and we were concealed in olive and bamboo groves where the slightest movement would bring the aircraft down on us. On the morning of the 20th all was quiet. The skies were clear and we were stood down. It was thought a good idea for some of us officers to do a recce of the surrounding countryside—we were only recently arrived from Egypt and not sufficiently familiar with the layout of the place. Matt and I set off and were a couple of miles above the town, in the afternoon, when a wave of bombers arrived, followed by Messerschmitts and Stukas. We had no choice but to hunker down and wait till it was over, concerned now about being away from our unit. As soon as the attack was done, we began to hurry back down, only to hear the bugle sounding the general alarm—signal for a parachute attack.
The troop-carriers came in wave after wave, and you saw the parachutes spilling out—the sky was full of them. We kept on heading down the way we’d come, to get back to the unit, until we realized that there was a drop coming down all around us. We got into a ditch beside an olive grove, and from there we did what we could. I got one German who had fallen into a tree, and Matt had another. But there were several more around, looking for their weapons canisters, and a couple of them came straight toward us. We got one of them, but the other opened up with his submachine gun.