The Officer and the Spy, page 23
But that was all that first day was: the start.
Too quickly, the story began to change.
Eleni could never fully grasp how it happened herself, nor even when the precise point was that the Allied forces flipped from being on the winning side, to the losing one.
Ben helped give her some idea though.
She saw him often, before the moment came for her to disappear.
Not back at the villa. She didn’t return there; for the first time in her life, it didn’t feel safe, not when it was so isolated, so close to Souda, around which the fighting only intensified. She remained in Halepa with Maria, and a sincerely spooked Tips – whom Ben had helped her to manhandle into his motor before they’d left the house (and, oh, but the image of him, square-shouldered and uniformed, fighting to contain pudgy Tips in a headlock, wasn’t one she’d soon forget) – setting up residence in the garden-facing room she’d used to take her childhood naps in. The New Zealanders who’d been boarding at the house had left, off to fight with their unit (Maria worried about them, constantly. ‘Such good boys,’ she kept saying. ‘They always made their beds so neatly.’); Yorgos and Spiros were gone too, working around the clock at the hospital, defying their age to help with the inundation of casualties flowing through its warehouse doors. Eleni spent every day there as well, Maria with her – rolling more bandages, washing endless vats of linen – but each evening, once they’d walked home, weaving through the troops and supply trucks jamming the dark roads, Ben would call by, sometimes to snatch a wash, or change his clothes, always keeping Eleni and Maria appraised of the unfolding nightmare.
It was the airfields that were at the root of it. Even as early as the first night of the invasion, he was concerned about them falling. Once the Germans had gained a runway, he said, they’d be able to land their troop carriers with ease – not to mention keep their Messerschmitts and Stukas up in the air for longer, since they’d no longer have to fly them back to Athens to refuel and rearm them. The Allies needed to hold the bases at all costs, but they still had too many of their own troops standing idle at the coast, on standby for the seaborne invasion General Freyberg was adamant must also be on its way.
‘Is it?’ Eleni asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Ben said, ‘but we’re in the middle of an airborne one, so it feels fairly counterintuitive not to be prioritising that.’
Eleni was inclined to agree.
No invasion fleet did arrive across the water, but, the next day, more paratroopers arrived, countless transport planes too, swooping overhead, sending men swarming for Maleme airbase, where the Allied troops fought determinedly to hold them off (‘For hours,’ said Ben), but couldn’t keep going forever, not when the Germans kept coming, managing, eventually, to overwhelm them.
‘They took a lot of prisoners,’ said Ben, who stopped at Maria’s that night only long enough to break the news. He refused Maria’s offer of a meal. He didn’t even remove his cap. His sun-darkened face was grim, sober. ‘We’re told they forced them to clear the runway so they could keep it operational to land reinforcements. Shot anyone who refused.’
‘But, the Geneva Convention,’ said Maria.
‘I suspect they were feeling even less inclined than normal to respect it, after yesterday.’
‘And now they’ve got Maleme,’ said Eleni.
‘They have.’ He turned for the door. ‘We need to take it back. We need to have done it hours ago. It’s madness that no one’s given the order. Freyberg’s obsessed with keeping men at the coast… ’
The order to launch a counteroffensive was eventually issued the next day.
‘Too damned late,’ said Ben.
The forces allocated to it were too few as well. They stood no chance against the might of German troops who’d by then landed on their repaired runway, consolidating their defence. And, although Cretans did come out in support of the Allied Army – ‘Women as well as men,’ said Ben, ‘we’re seeing it everywhere.’ (Eleni pictured them in their headscarves, rifles raised to their shoulders) – the attack failed.
Almost immediately, the inauspicious rumour spread that the royal family had fled Crete.
It was Yorgos, not Ben, who brought that particular piece of news to Eleni’s attention, the following afternoon, seeking her out in the hospital scullery, where she was boiling more bandages.
‘They’re gone,’ he said, craggy brow furrowed.
‘The Germans?’ she said, without any hope.
‘No. Our king and his family.’
‘I suppose that’s not much of a loss either.’
He told her how they’d left: of the armed escort that had taken them over the white mountains to the port at Sphakia, then the naval one that had carried them to Alexandria.
‘Perhaps your papa was involved.’
‘He’s in the Atlantic.’
‘He wouldn’t want you here anymore.’
‘Probably not,’ she conceded.
‘If it makes sense for the king to leave—’ he wagged his finger with each syllable ‘—it makes sense for my granddaughter.’
‘I don’t have blue blood,’ she pointed out.
‘Neither do they.’
‘Nonetheless, they’re the ones who’ve been whisked away.’ She heaved the bandages from the vat, into the basket for the mangle, barely noticing as another distant explosion puckered the air. They were all long past that. ‘How do you suppose I could get to Sphakia, Papou? Shall I walk there on my own? And what boat am I meant to get on?’
He didn’t have an answer for that.
‘No, you see,’ she said. ‘It’s not time for me yet.’ She turned her attention to the mangle, unwilling to face him for any more of her deceit. (A terrible way to live, really.) ‘When everyone else evacuates, that’s when I’ll go. But let’s not give up just yet, please.’
She didn’t want to.
No one wanted to.
The rumours kept coming though, two-a-penny, of more ground lost and retaken and lost again, ricocheting them all from their hope, to despair. As the third day of the invasion gave way to the fourth, Ben said they were struggling even at HQ to keep track of what was going on; the rudimentary wireless system kept going down, cutting communication between the far-flung towns and battle grounds, and they were having to resort too often to guesswork about what ground was in which hands. As more troops were shunted from crisis to crisis, Crete’s roads – which should have been widened, but never had been – became more blocked than ever, the vast jams making easy pickings for the circling Luftwaffe.
The noise of the planes, the bombs, and the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns, simply never stopped, not even in the dead of night. Ammunition dumps and fuel supplies went up in flames, filling the already stagnant air with even more smoke, so that by the morning of the twenty-fourth, when Eleni walked with Maria to the hospital, the stench of burning had obscured almost everything else: the sea, the flowers, the thyme (‘Will we ever breathe such things again?’ said Maria); only one scent penetrated the acrid haze – a ripe, sickening scent that Eleni had never smelt before, and never wanted to again: of the dead, drifting on the breeze from the battlefields.
At the hospital itself, they’d long since run out of room in the old warehouse for the endless waves of wounded, and stretchers had had to be placed on the surrounding pavements, with nothing to shield the men from the sun. Eleni heard them groaning, even from down in the scullery, and hated how little she could do to help them, other than fetch them pans of drinking water, and wash their dressings.
She was desperately worried for Yorgos and Spiros as well. They were by now on their fifth day of constant service at the hospital, and for each one they’d spent there, setting breaks, irrigating wounds, assisting the surgeons in theatre, they looked to have aged twice as many years. They refused to stop though, or even discuss returning to Halepa for a night’s sleep.
‘So you’ll sleep when you’re dead,’ Maria had snapped, at both of them. ‘It won’t be long if you keep this up. You are seventy years old.’
They simply wouldn’t be told though, not when there weren’t enough doctors to go around, and always more lives to be clutched back from the edge.
It wasn’t only men from their own side that they did it for.
They cared for Germans too.
There weren’t many of them at the hospital, not in comparison to the rest. They were kept in an area of their own, at the very back of the converted wards, sectioned off by surgical screens. Sometimes, when Eleni had found herself close by, cleaning the floors, she’d heard them rambling, delirious, talking of their homes, their friends, and especially their mothers, weeping because they wanted them so much.
It had been beyond her, when she’d listened to them do that, not to let that pity she’d felt back on her terrace – watching those gliders burn, those stickmen fall limp – rise in her again, regardless of what they’d all been brought here to do.
She’d never felt any urge to go to them though.
She didn’t think she could bring herself to offer them comfort.
Until, on that morning of the twenty-fourth, her papou asked her to do just that.
He found her this time outside, in the shaded rear courtyard, where she was filling buckets at the pump. He’d come from theatre. His white jacket was stained with blood. There were deep shadows beneath his sagging eyes.
‘Papou,’ Eleni began, ready to insist that he get some sleep.
‘Eleni-mou,’ he interrupted, waving her wearily down, telling her of the young man who’d been brought in the night before with bullet wounds in his stomach and shoulder. They’d removed the bullets, he said, but the boy had been lying out in the open for too long, and sepsis had already set in; in all likelihood, he didn’t have long.
‘He’s just a baby,’ he said, sitting heavily on the courtyard’s crumbling wall. ‘He doesn’t understand anything we’re saying to him.’ He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead, as though to push the hideousness of it away. ‘Sit with him, will you? Pretend he’s your German boy.’
Otto was still so distant from her mind, it took her a second to realize who he meant.
‘My German boy, Papou?’
He exhaled a short, sad laugh. ‘You think I was born yesterday?’
‘You knew?’
She felt no panic as she asked it, no worry. Not like she would have, that summer.
War, if nothing else, afforded tremendous perspective.
‘I got there in the end,’ he said. ‘I raised your mama, before I got to you, don’t forget.’
‘She didn’t tell you about Dad?’
‘She didn’t tell me about a lot of things,’ he said, which wasn’t quite answering her question, but it was hardly the time to press him on it. ‘I know she’d be kind to this child now though, so please, can you?’
She didn’t want to.
Even whilst they’d been talking, more German troop planes had flown overhead.
Less than an hour before, she’d bent to give water to a man on a stretcher, only to find he was already dead.
The last thing she wanted to do was go and be kind to a Nazi.
But, at the same time, there really wasn’t much that she wouldn’t have done for her papou, had he asked.
‘I’ll try,’ she told him.
‘Thank you,’ he said, and ushered her inside, on to the stifling, chemical stillness of the ward.
The boy hadn’t been put with the rest of the Germans, but in a small, screened cubicle of his own.
‘Like I said,’ Yorgos sighed, ‘he probably doesn’t have long. Kindness, Eleni-mou, yes?’
‘All right, fine,’ she said, and, far from confident of being able to manage it, nonetheless slipped behind the screens.
She did manage to be kind that morning though.
In the end, it came very easily.
For the short time she spent with that boy, she forgot her hate, forget her detachment, and felt nothing but the compassion Mr Wood had warned her against.
A baby.
She saw immediately that Yorgos had been right. This boy, lean and slight beneath his thin sheet, with his tufts of hair, and smooth cheeks, couldn’t, she guessed, have been much more than sixteen. He was whimpering, when she first went to his side, but stopped when he saw her, and stared up at her, his gaze wide, terrified. He was trembling with his fever. His skin was waxy, yellow with loss of blood. She could smell his sepsis, smell his fear.
‘You’re safe,’ she found herself whispering to him. ‘You’re safe.’
His eyes filled with tears. ‘You speak German.’
‘Shhh.’
‘I’m so scared, fräulein…’
‘I know.’
‘I don’t want to be here.’
Did he mean in the hospital? Or in Crete?
She didn’t ask.
‘It’s all right,’ she told him. Then again, ‘You’re safe.’
‘I am?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She perched on the bed beside him, and, without thinking, pulled his hand into hers. She felt his fingers flicker, flailing to grip onto hers, hot, and so very weak, and held them tighter. ‘I’ll sit with you.’
‘You won’t go away?’
‘Not for a while.’
‘Please don’t.’
‘I won’t.’
His fingers flailed again. ‘Thank you.’
He didn’t ask for his mother.
He continued to stare up at her and said nothing more at all.
Within no time, his eyes started to droop. It was as though now he felt secure, he could let them go.
His hand in hers went limp, entirely trusting, and he fell asleep, becoming more of a baby than ever.
He was still fast asleep, when, eventually, she stood to go.
She stopped just once at the screens, glancing back at him before she left, such a heaviness in her chest. She watched his lips move, how his eyelids flickered in a dream. Perhaps of the battle that had brought him here.
Pretend he’s your German boy.
She hadn’t done that.
She hadn’t needed to.
She’d forgotten, she really had forgotten, whilst she’d been holding his hand, what he was doing in Crete.
She wanted him to be all right.
It startled her, how much she wanted that.
She didn’t ask after him though, once she’d left him.
She spared him not another single thought.
Within just a few short hours, the compassion she’d known had left her entirely.
Because that afternoon the Luftwaffe did the unimaginable, and carpet-bombed Chania, demolishing the Venetian town, setting it – with its palaces, its streets of wooden balconies, and wooden roofs, ablaze – burning homes, burning families, burning everything, breaking all of their hearts, and shattering, for Eleni at least, the last lingering shred of hope she’d been clinging to that the invasion was going to end any other way but the one she’d been most dreading.
She wasn’t immediately able to absorb her own conclusion, not whilst the raid was going on, nor for the hideous hours that followed.
She was too busy.
The hospital was, at least, far enough from the town not to be touched. She remained there for the raid’s entirety, so saw none of it, but she heard it: the throbbing planes, the bombs, as bad as any of the worst nights of the blitz. She felt it. With each new explosion, the metal beds crammed into the wards shook; dust scattered from the ceiling, and the warehouse’s loose glass windowpanes trembled. As she helped drag the patients away from under them, and ran, at the orderlies’ commands, to ready the triage room, she pictured the inferno in Chania, and wanted to weep.
Not here, she silently begged the droning planes, please don’t do that to here.
But they did.
They kept on and on and on doing it.
Then, the casualties came, cramming into triage, jostling to be seen by the too-few doctors: toddlers wailing and staring in horror from their blackened faces, carrying burns that would be with them for the rest of their lives; a pregnant woman, having her baby too soon, clutching at Spiros from her stretcher as he tried in vain to assure her that they’d do their best; countless others with broken ribs, more burns, concussions, sobbing in shock, calling for their families. Then, a little girl, about the same age as Esther, who was silent, and couldn’t be helped, but whose mother had brought her in anyway, because she just couldn’t bear the truth of it; she simply couldn’t bear it.
‘Why not sit with her?’ Eleni heard Maria tell the mother as she passed them by, on her way to fetch more gauze. ‘Just sit here now, together, for as long as you like.’
Seeing the mother do just that, amid all the noise, the smoke and fear, Eleni stopped, stilled by the unimaginable pain she must be feeling. She thought too, like she so often found herself thinking, of Esther’s mother, back in Berlin, and had to bite her cheeks to contain her grief.
She couldn’t let herself break down. She realized it would be appalling of her to do that, on many levels.
She didn’t.
She took a breath, then another, and, leaving Maria to care for that poor woman, and her poor little girl, went to get the gauze.
She carried on like that all through the rest of the night.
Everyone did.
It was close to dawn before she and Maria returned home.
Relieved as they were to find it, like the rest of the suburb’s streets, intact, they did both cry when they got there, slumped beside one another on the garden steps, breathing in the town’s charcoal fumes, not looking at the brightening sky, because the smoke had obscured it, just leaning against one another for support.
‘I keep seeing that little girl,’ said Eleni, pressing her fingers to her eyes.
‘I know,’ said Maria. ‘I know.’
‘I hate them. I hate them for doing this.’
‘We all do.’
‘They didn’t need to… ’
‘All of this has been unnecessary.’
