Simon followed my look. He set down his little cup of Greek coffee, and then looked across the table at me.
‘Conscience still active?’
‘Not so active as it was. There’s not so much room. That was a heavenly meal, and thank you very much.’
‘I wondered—’ said Simon thoughtfully, and then stopped.
I said just as thoughtfully: ‘It’s a long walk to Arachova. Is that it?’
He grinned. ‘That’s it. Well? It’s your car.’
I said fervently: ‘It’s not, you know. I never want to touch it again. I – I’ve renounced it.’
‘That’s a pity, because – with your permission which I take it I have – I’m going to drive down to Arachova in a few minutes’ time, and I was rather hoping you’d come, too.’
I said, in very real amazement: ‘Me? But you don’t want me!’
‘Please,’ said Simon.
For some reason I felt the colour coming hot into my cheeks. ‘But you don’t. It’s your own – your private affair, and you can’t possibly want a stranger tagging along with you. This may be Greece, but that’s carrying philoxenia a bit too far! After all—’
‘I promise not to let anything upset you.’ He smiled, ‘It’s a long time ago, and it’s not a present tragedy any more. It’s just – well, call it curiosity, if you like.’
‘I wasn’t worrying about its upsetting me. I was thinking only that – well, dash it, you hardly know me, and it is a private matter. You said it could be called a “pilgrimage”, remember?’
He said slowly: ‘If I said what I really want to say you’d think I was crazy. But let me say this – and it’s true – I’d be terribly grateful if you’d give me your company this evening.’
There was a little pause. The group of Greeks had long since dispersed. Both artist and donkey had vanished. The other English diners had finished and gone into the hotel. Away over the invisible sea the thin moon hung, apricot now among the white scatter of stars. Above us the breeze in the plane trees sounded like rain.
I said: ‘Of course I’ll come,’ and got to my feet. As he stubbed out his cigarette and rose I smiled at him with a touch of malice. ‘After all, you did tell me I owed you something.’
He said quickly: ‘Look, I never meant—’ then he caught my look and grinned. ‘All right, ma’am, you win. I won’t try and bully you again.’ And he opened the car door for me.
‘Michael was ten years older than me,’ said Simon. ‘There were just the two of us, and our mother died when I was fifteen. My father thought the sun rose and set in Michael – and so did I, I suppose. I remember how dead the house seemed when he was drafted off to the Med.… and Father just sat every day with the papers and the radio, trying to learn what he could.’ A little smile touched his lips. ‘It wasn’t easy. I told you Michael came over here with the SAS – the Special Air Service – when Germany occupied Greece. He was doing undercover work with the resistance in the mountains for eighteen months before he was killed, and of course news came very thinly and not always accurately. Occasionally men managed to get letters out … If you knew someone was going to be picked up at night and taken off you did your damnedest to get a letter to him in the hope that he in his turn would get through, and the letter might eventually be mailed home from Cairo … but it was chancy, and no one, in those days, carried any more papers on him than he could help. So news was sparse and not very satisfactory. We only ever got three letters from Michael in all that time. All he told us in the first two was that he was well, and things were going according to plan – and all the usual formulae that you don’t believe, but that just tell you he was alive when he wrote the letter four months before you got it.’
He paused while he negotiated a sharp bend made more hair-raising than ever by the dark.
‘We did eventually find out a certain amount about his work in Greece from chaps who’d been with him here in Force 133, and had been in touch with him off and on through the fighting. I told you he was a B.L.O. attached to guerrillas. Perhaps I’d better tell you the set-up in Greece after the German invasion – or do you know all about it?’
‘Not a great deal. Only that ELAS was the main guerrilla organisation, and was more concerned in feathering its own Commie nest than in fighting Germans.’
‘So you do know that? You’d be surprised how many people never grasped it, even in 1944 when the Germans got out of Greece and ELAS turned on its own country – tried to stage a Communist coup d’état – and started murdering Greeks with the arms and cash we’d smuggled to them, and which they’d hidden safely away in the mountains till they could use them for the Party.’
‘But there were other guerrillas who did an honest job, surely?’
‘Oh, yes. To begin with there were quite a few groups, and it was Michael’s job, among other things, to try and bring them together in a more or less coherent plan of campaign. But it broke his heart as it broke the heart of every BLO in Greece. ELAS set to work and smashed every other guerrilla organisation it could get its filthy hands on.’
‘You mean actually fought its own people during the German occupation?’
‘Indeed, yes. Smashed some groups and assimilated others, until eventually there was only one other important resistance group, EDES, under a leader called Zervas, an honest man and a fine soldier.’
‘I remember. You said he was in the Peloponnese.’
‘That’s it. ELAS tried hard to liquidate him, too, of course. Don’t mistake me, there were some brave and good men with ELAS, too, and they did some damned good work, but there was rather a load of …’ he paused fractionally, ‘infamy … to counteract the better things. It doesn’t make good reading, the story of the resistance in Greece. Village after village, raped and burned by the Germans, was thereafter raped and burned by ELAS – their own people – for whatever pathetic supplies they could produce. And the final abomination was the famous battle of Mount Tzoumerka where Zervas with EDAS was facing the Germans, and ELAS under Ares (of all the damned arrogant pseudonyms for one of the most filthy sadistic devils that ever walked) – ELAS waited till Zervas was heavily engaged, and then attacked him on the flank.’
‘Attacked Zervas? While he was fighting the Germans?’
‘Yes. Zervas fought a double-sided battle for several hours, and managed to beat off the Germans, but he still lost some of his valuable supplies to ELAS, who stored them away, no doubt, against the end of the German war and the day of the New Dawn.’
There was a silence, underlined by the humming of the engine. I could smell dust, and dead verbena. The autumn stars were milky-white and as large as asters. Against their mild radiance the young cypresses stood like spears.
‘And that brings me to the reason for my visit to Delphi,’ said Simon.
I said: ‘Michael’s third letter?’
‘You’re quick, aren’t you? Yes, indeed, Michael’s third letter.’
He changed gear, and the car slowed and turned carefully on to a narrow bridge set at right-angles to the road. He went on in his pleasant, unemotional voice: ‘It came after we had had news of his death. I didn’t read it then. In fact, I never knew Father had had it. I suppose he thought it would bring the thing alive again for me, when I’d just got over the worst. I was seventeen. And later, Father never talked about Michael. I didn’t know of the letter’s existence till six months ago, when Father died, and I, as his executor, had to go through his papers. The letter …’
He paused again, and I felt a curious little thrill go through me – the inevitable response (conditioned by tales told through how many centuries?) to the age-old device of fable: the dead man … the mysterious paper … the frayed and faded clue leading through the hills of a strange land …
‘The letter didn’t say much,’ said Simon. ‘But it was – I don’t know quite how to describe it – it was excited. Even the writing. I knew Michael pretty well, for all the difference in our ages, and I tell you he was as excited as all-get-out
when he wrote that letter. And I think it was something he’d found, somewhere on Parnassus.’
Again that queer little thrill. The night swooped by, full of stars. On our left the mountain loomed like the lost world of the gods. All of a sudden it didn’t seem possible that I was here, and that this – this ground where our tyres whispered through the dust – was Parnassus. The name was a shiver up the spine.
I said: ‘Yes?’ in a very queer voice.
‘You must understand,’ he said, ‘that when I read that letter in the end, I read it against a background of information picked up after the war. We’d found out, my father and I, just where and how Michael had been working, and we’d talked to some of the fellows he’d met here. We were told that he’d been sent up into this area in the spring of 1943, and, for over a year before he was killed, he was working with one of the ELAS bands whose leader was a man called Angelos Dragoumis. I couldn’t learn very much about this Angelos – that was the name he was generally known by, and I gather that it was desperately inappropriate – only one of the other Force 133 chaps had actually met him, and the few inquiries I’ve made here in the last day or so have been quietly stone-walled. The Greeks aren’t proud of men like Angelos. I don’t mean that his group didn’t do one or two brilliant things: they were with Ares and Zervas when the Gorgopotamos viaduct was destroyed in the teeth of the Germans, and there was the affair of the bridge at Lidorikion, where they – oh, well, that doesn’t matter just now. The thing is that this man Angelos seems to have modelled himself on the ELAS Commander, Ares, and he made himself felt in the country hereabouts just as Ares did.’
‘You mean he plundered his own side?’
‘That and worse. The usual beastly record of burning and rape and torture and smashed houses, and people – where they weren’t murdered – left to starve. The extra unpleasant touch is that Angelos came from this district himself … Yes, I know. It’s hard to take, isn’t it? He’s dead, anyway … at least, that’s the assumption. He vanished across the Yugoslav border when the Communist putsch failed in December 1944, and he hasn’t been heard of since.’
‘I imagine that in any case he’d not dare reappear in these parts,’ I said.
‘True enough. Well, anyway, that was the man Michael was working with, and, as I say, they did get some pretty good results in the military line – but then the Germans arrived here in force, and Angelos’ band scattered and went into hiding in the hills. Michael, I gather, was on his own. He evaded capture for some weeks, hiding somewhere up here on Parnassus. Then one day a patrol spotted him. He got away, but one of their bullets hit him – not a bad wound, but enough to disable him, and with no attention it might have proved serious. One of his contacts was Stephanos, the shepherd from Arachova that we’re going to see tonight. Stephanos took Michael in, and he and his wife nursed and hid him and would, I think, have got him out of the country if the Germans hadn’t descended on Arachova while Michael was still here.’
Along the road the young cypresses stood like swords. They had come along this very road. I said: ‘And they found him.’
‘No. But they’d been told he was here, and so they took Stephanos’ son Nikolaos out and shot him, because his parents wouldn’t give Michael away.’
‘Simon!’
He said gently: ‘It was a commonplace. You don’t know these people yet. They stood and let their families be murdered in front of them rather than betray an ally who’d eaten their salt.’
‘The other side of the picture,’ I said, thinking of ELAS and Angelos.
‘As you say. And when you think harshly of ELAS, remember two things. One is that the Greek is born a fighting animal. Doesn’t their magnificent and pathetic history show you that? If a Greek can’t find anyone else to fight, he’ll fight his neighbour. The other is the poverty of Greece, and to the very poor any creed that brings promise has a quick way to the heart.’
I said: ‘I’ll remember.’
‘Perhaps we’ve forgotten,’ he said, ‘what poverty means. When one sees … ah, well, never mind now. But I think that most things can be forgiven to the poor.’
I was silent. I was remembering Philip again, and a beggar under the ramparts at Carcassonne; Philip saying ‘Good God!’ in a shocked voice, dropping five hundred francs into the scrofulous hand, and then forgetting it. And now here was this quiet, easy voice, talking in the dark of past infamies, expressing as a matter of course the sort of enormous and tolerant compassion that I had never met – in the flesh – before …
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you …?
It came to me with a shock like an arrow out of the dark that – mystery or no mystery – I liked Simon Lester very much indeed.
He said: ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing. Go on. The Germans shot Nikolaos and Michael left.’
‘Yes. Apparently he moved out again into the mountains. After this point I know very little about what happened. So far I’ve pieced together the bare facts from what we were told after the war by one of the other BLOs who was over here, and from the priest at Delphi, who wrote to my father some time back, when he was making his first inquiries.’
‘Didn’t Stephanos write?’
‘Stephanos can’t write,’ said Simon. ‘What happened next we can only guess at. Michael went off back into the hills after the tragedy of Nikolaos’ death. His shoulder wasn’t fully healed, but he was all right. Stephanos and his wife wanted him to stay, but Nikolaos had left a small son and a daughter, and … well, Michael said he wasn’t risking any more lives. He went. And that’s all we know. He went up there—’ a gesture towards the shadow-haunted mountain – ‘and he was caught and killed there, somewhere on Parnassus.’
I said after a minute or two. ‘And you want to talk to Stephanos and find out where he is?’
‘I know where he is. He’s buried at Delphi, in a little graveyard not far from the studio, above the shrine, of Apollo. I’ve been to the grave already. No, that’s not what I want from Stephanos. I want to know just where Michael died on Parnassus.’
‘Stephanos knows?’
‘He found the body. It was he who sent Michael’s last letter off, together with the other things he found on the body. He got them smuggled somehow to this other BLO, and we got them eventually. We didn’t know who’d sent them until later we were officially told that Michael was buried at Delphi. We wrote to the papa – the priest. He told us the simple facts, so of course my father wrote to Stephanos, and got a reply through the priest again, and – well, that seemed to be that.’
‘Until you saw Michael’s letter.’
‘Until I saw Michael’s letter.’
We had rounded a shadowy bluff, and there ahead, pouring down the mountainside like a cascade, were the steep lights of Arachova.
The car drew gently in to the side of the road and stopped. Simon switched the engine off and reached into an inner pocket for a wallet. From this he took a piece of paper and handed it to me.
‘Wait a moment till I get my lighter to work. Would you like a cigarette?’
‘Thank you.’
After we had lighted our cigarettes he held the little flame for me while I unfolded the flimsy paper. It was a scrawl on a single sheet of cheap paper, smudged as if with rain, a bit dirty, torn here and there along the old folds, and dog-eared from being read and re-read. I opened it gently. I had the queerest feeling that I shouldn’t have been touching it.
It was fairly short. Dear Daddy, it began … why should there be something so very endearing about the thought of Michael Lester, a tough twenty-seven, using the childhood’s diminutive?
… Dear Daddy, God knows when you’ll get this, as I see no chance of its getting taken off in the near future, but I’ve got to write. We’ve been having a bit of a party, but that’s over no
w and I’m quite all right, so not to worry. I wonder, do you find this code of army-slang clichés as bloodily maddening as I do? At the best of times I suppose it has its uses, but just now – tonight – there is something I really want to say to you; to record, somehow, on paper – nothing to do with the war or my job here or anything like that, but still impossible to commit to paper and how the hell can I get it across to you? You know as well as I do that anything might happen before I see anyone I can send a private message by. If my memory were a little better – and if I’d paid a bit more attention to those classical studies (oh God, a world ago!) I might send you to the right bit in Callimachus. I think it’s Callimachus. But I’ve forgotten where it comes. I’ll have to leave it at that. However, I’m seeing a man I can trust tomorrow, and I’ll tell him, come what may. And all being well, this’ll be over some day soon, and we’ll come back here together to the bright citadel, and I can show you then – and little brother Simon, too. How is he? Give him my love. Till the day – and what a day it’ll be!
Your loving son,
Michael.
The signature was a scrawl, running down almost off the page. I folded the paper carefully, and gave it back to Simon. He snapped the lighter out, and put the letter carefully away. He said: ‘You see what I mean?’
‘Well, I didn’t know your brother, but I take it that wasn’t his usual style.’
‘Far from it. This reads very oddly to me. Queer, rapid, allusive; almost – if I didn’t know Michael so well – hysterical. A feminine type of letter.’
‘I see what you mean.’
He laughed, and started the engine. ‘Sorry. But it’s my guess he really was under some strong emotion when he wrote that letter.’
‘I think I’d agree. Of course he was in a tough spot, and—’
‘He’d been in dozens before. And then all that about a private message, and “getting it across”. He really had something to say.’