The Girl Under the Olive Tree (26 page)

Penny envied the passion she could see flaming out of those dark eyes, dangerous though it might be. When she thought of Bruce, she felt only frustration, anxiety, no longer any excitement or passion. That part of her life was over. She had no energy left for romance. She told Yolanda about her time coming to an end in the convent, how she missed the danger of the field hospital, even in those terrible conditions. ‘I must be mad to miss the caves, and all those hospital trains, but action gets in your blood. Now I feel numb and useless.’ She explained about the convent and the German captain’s interest in her.

‘I think he guesses I am not Greek but he’s said nothing. I hope he’s left Crete by now.’

‘Was he the man in the staff car? He looked terrifying – all Nazis do,’ Yolanda whispered.

‘He scares me, too . . . I don’t want to think about him. I’m so glad we’re friends together again. Knowing you’re safe and with your family is all that matters now. But it’s time for me to go.’

‘You can stay with me here; don’t go yet,’ said Yolanda.

‘I have to. My escort, Sister Irini, is waiting in the square. I think they fear I’ll be converted overnight,’ Penny laughed. ‘I must go inside to thank your family for their hospitality.’

She made her farewells and Yolanda walked her down the rubble-filled street.

‘You’ve set me thinking. I promised Bruce I’d go native, go into the mountains. It sounds as if I could be useful there but I need a guise, identity papers and somewhere to take me in. A stranger in a village is soon news. I haven’t even got a map,’ Penny confessed.

‘Let me ask Andreas when he returns. He’ll know what to do,’ Yolanda replied.

‘Bruce told me to dye my hair. How can I do that?’

‘Leave that to me, we’ll do it one night.’

They paused at the harbour end and hugged. ‘I envy you, Penny. You have the riches of freedom and choices, I have only this,’ she sighed, pointing to the broken buildings.

Penny shook her head and waved as she left. ‘You have a loving family, deep roots, a vocation and a lover in your heart. From where I’m standing, you are the wealthier one of us by far.’

The market was emptying. Dogs scavenged for scraps among the litter. The smell of the pork
souvlaki
was tempting as I sat daydreaming of dear Yolanda and that last supper in Chania with them all. Finding her again kept me sane during that first hot summer. War had a habit of separating people, dividing families and friends, tearing lovers from each other’s arms.

Those who could, fled into the hills, took refuge in caves and stone huts like animals seeking shelter from the heat or the snow. Others, like the Markos family, huddled in basements undercover. There was safety in numbers – or so they thought . . .

‘Aren’t you glad you came back?’ Lois interrupted my thoughts. ‘Was that school you pointed out the one where you stayed in Halepa?’

I nodded. ‘It’s a college now. I’m glad it survived.’

‘Were you really a nun?’ Alex was looking at me intently.

‘Yolanda asked me that,’ I mused, still stuck in past thoughts.

‘Will we meet her too?’ the boy asked.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ Alex could be so insistent.

I shook my head. ‘Let’s not talk about all that on such a lovely day,’ I said. ‘Take me home.’

All the good things of the world are written in ink

But Freedom asks for a script written in blood from our own heart.

A Cretan mantinada from
The Leaden-Sky Years of World War II,
Kimon Farantakis, translated by P. David Seaman

The taxi drove Rainer east along the old road to Heraklion and Rethymno, turning into the hills at Vrisses, climbing up into the mountain passes and onto the Askifou Plain along narrow winding metalled tracks gouged out of the rocky landscape. It was all so different from the mule tracks, dusty riverbeds and gorges that this old veteran had once struggled along. ‘You have to see the
Kriegsmuseum
in the hills,’ he was told in the hotel. ‘Georgos makes everyone welcome and there’s nothing like it in the whole of Crete.’

As they turned down the narrow lane from the village of Kares, he wondered just what he was coming to. It was indeed a unique war museum, judging by the rusting machinery cluttering up the entrance of the old house. A man in a black shirt and jodhpurs introduced himself as Georgos Hatzidakis, owner of a motley collection of weaponry and armaments.

He found himself in a small living space taken over with exhibits: posters and field equipment such as he hadn’t seen for sixty years, radio sets, medical instruments, binoculars, helmets of all nationalities, caps, guns; a collection that Georgos and his family had put together since 1941 when the Battle for Crete passed his door as a boy of ten.

They had watched the British retreat, the German pursuit and the capture of the remnants as they stumbled back over the mountains as prisoners of war.

‘Me see everything,’ he explained in broken English to a visiting English couple.

They all browsed among the memorabilia, stunned at the comprehensiveness of this collection: motorbikes, iron crosses, even a set of dental instruments, all sorts of hardware had found its way here. ‘This is my family and no favourites,’ the curator smiled as he gave them all thimble glasses filled with raki, and biscuits. ‘And you, my friend, were here?’ he asked.

The veteran nodded. ‘Not during the evacuation. No, I was wounded,’ he said, slapping his hip as if to excuse himself from anything the man might relate of that time. ‘But later, yes. There were no roads then, just tracks down to the port of Sphakia and the south coast.’

‘It used to take two days for us to travel from there to Chania, now it’s just an hour. The island has shrunk, but memories are still long,’ Georgos said.

‘Many bad things happened,’ he replied: better to say this first.

Georgos shrugged in that Greek way. ‘Here we take no sides. These are just witnesses and I am a living bit of the history.’ He pulled back his
sariki
to show a big scar. ‘Shrapnel from a bomb. It killed my uncle and my brother . . . Boom, boom, out of the sky. Come, my friend, another raki and another biscuit. ‘
Siga, siga
. . . go slowly in the heat. Many soldiers come here to remember.’ He walked away, leaving the visitors to read the testaments on the walls, the newspapers and photographs, the tragic human detritus of such a hasty scramble for freedom. There was too much to take in at one sitting.

He felt the raki taking its effect and needed to sit down in the shade. His driver would be in the
kafenion
waiting for the return journey. As he sat on a bench overlooking the plain and the hills, memories flooded back again.

Kares looked so peaceful: fields of crops, neatly painted houses, gardens full of geraniums and roses. He must have passed by this spot in those early months, tense, uncertain, still shocked by their struggle to hold the island. It was an unsettling time; so many bad memories to settle. He looked across at the pile of rusting weapons, once gleaming with menace.
Why does it always come to this?

The late summer campaign into the hills was to flush out the stragglers, knowing many were being sheltered in the villages higher up in the White Mountains. How shocked Rainer was to discover the primitive conditions in which these proud Cretans lived: often in one room with an earth floor, cooking over an open fire, drawing water from deep stone wells underground. His men assumed they were ignorant peasants and treated them with contempt.

Yet these people were handsome, strong and hardworking, with rich traditions and deep superstitions. The gangs of men and women they rounded up for road work bent their backs without complaint in the arid heat of the day, at least to their faces. They had a proud stare, often singing at their work, strange rhymes and folk songs; mantinades that defeated his basic Greek, words that changed from day to day. Judging by the looks and laughs in their direction, his men were the butt of their words, though he couldn’t prove anything.

The further into the hills they pushed, the less he felt secure among the overhanging rocks and narrow gullies, slipping on gravel sharp as razors. The threat of an ambush was ever present, making sun-soaked men tetchy, ready to shoot anything that moved.

Spotter planes swept over the mountains and plains, while armed patrols scoured the bridleways, searching for fugitives. They had secured the services of dubious local men who knew the best hiding places and the tricks of secreting stores against the order not to hoard goods. But there must be places known only to goatherds and shepherds that defied anyone discovering. Rainer didn’t trust the turncoats, willing to sell their fellow neighbours for a few drachmas, but in war you took help where you could.

It was on the Askifou plain that they scented out a trail leading up impossible scree. Dogs and troops scrambling up gave a warning and a flurry of men in rough costume began to run for cover. The grim fight that followed left two of Rainer’s men dead, and wounded some ragged soldiers. Schiller, one of his patrol leaders, wiry and short-tempered at the best of times, was incensed by the resistance and took his men up into the caves, flushing out at gun point some pathetic remnants of the British Army, dressed in rags, half starved, with wounds and on crutches. They surrendered without any fight left in them.

At the back was a bearded soldier covered in mosquito bites, dragging a wounded leg. Rainer examined them. Some had made pathetic attempts to pass themselves off as locals. This lot would be better off in a camp. The food they had left was little more than water bottles and a bag of snails. They wouldn’t survive much longer in this condition. How could you not feel sorry for proud soldiers who had come to this sorry state?

The Cretan sun showed no mercy on any of them as they slid their way down to the track, to march them on to base for further questioning.

It was going to be a long trek and the prisoners begged for time to rest. Schiller was not happy; he wanted them to push on in front in case there were any snipers hiding in the olives or pines. He wanted to torment them and punish them for the death of his friends. But Rainer knew that soldiers under pressure explode, so he insisted everyone be rested under the shade of the olives where even the sheep were nestling under a cloud of flies. The prisoners were given water.

Rainer strolled away to relieve himself, smoke a cigarette and wonder what the hell he was doing halfway up a mountain when his skills were needed in Egypt or on the eastern front. This was all part of his rehabilitation to stretch his weakened muscles, get his fighting strength back for long marches.

As he stood up to return he heard a gunshot. He hurried back to the olive trees where the prisoners stood around the body of a man, shot in the head. There was bruising where he’d been kicked around in the earth.

‘Who did this?’ Rainer stormed.

‘Sir, he wouldn’t get up. It was time to go. He refused,’ said Schiller with a look of utter contempt in his eyes.

‘He was sick, you bastard,’ shouted one of the British, actually an Australian by the sound of him. ‘He was sick!’

Rainer looked closely, realizing it was the poor bugger from the cave, ginger-haired, covered in bites and wounded. Uncontrollable anger rose within him at such an act of cruel vengeance reaped on a defenceless man. Schiller had been waiting for a chance to beat the daylights out of his enemy. The look of triumph on his face turned to a smirk and then surprise as Rainer pulled him aside.

‘What are you thinking of? The man was unarmed,’ he spat.

‘These pigs shot my comrade.’

‘Not this man, as well you know.’

‘They are all pigs!’ Schiller ranted.

‘Speak when you are spoken to, Corporal!’ Rainer ordered, but Schiller was unhearing.

‘We should shoot the lot of them, murdering bastards.’ Schiller pulled out his gun.

‘And you, Corporal, kill a man in cold blood, sick and unarmed. I will not have this behaviour under my command.’

In one smooth movement he pulled out his Luger and shot Schiller in the temple. His body hit the ground like a felled tree and then there was a stunned silence.

‘That goes for any of you,’ Rainer shouted, looking slowly round at his men, seeing the shock on their faces. ‘We are German soldiers, not a rabble. Bury these men now,’ he ordered.

It was only when they had marked the spot with stones and helmets, and the patrol was marching back to base in silence alongside shuffling prisoners, that Rainer realized what he had done in killing one of his own men. But it was too late for regrets. Was it fear, frustration and the fury of knowing he would have to explain his actions that had made him mete out such a punishment?

There had to be standards of behaviour in a conquering army; decency, humanity. Hadn’t a British medic rescued him in the heat of battle, given him a chance of life on that street in Galatas? At least now he had repaid that mercy. He would make a full report, knowing his behaviour would not go down well. Strange as it was, he had no regrets.

Mack was becoming a regular visitor to our villa, escorting Alex and Lois on jaunts to the beach and suggesting we make a day trip up into the hills to the ancient Roman village of Lappa, finishing with lunch at the waterfalls at Argyroupolis. We were getting used to the heat and wanted to make the most of our remaining time here, but I was nervous of making my way back into the hills, even as a tourist.

I was beginning to like Mack, but anxious that his obvious attention to Lois might be his habitual ploy with single women. Was he on the make? I hoped not because Alex was warming to his presence. Mack was divorced, with children in the UK; that much I had gleaned from his eagerness to show me his children’s pictures. He mentioned his father had served in the Royal Navy on submarines in the Med during the war. He was the youngest of four boys and had hardly known his father, who had died many years ago. It had left him with a fascination to trace his father’s journey and Crete was the perfect harbour to make his base.