Mr. Mani

The Conversation Partners

EGON BRUNER Twenty-two years old. Born in 1922 on an estate near Flansburg, in the north German district of Schleswig-Holstein, to Werner Sauchon and Mariette Bruner.

Admiral Werner Sauchon (b. 1861) was one of the most highly lauded German officers in the First World War, in which he served with special distinction in the great Baltic Sea battles of 1914. In 1916 he and his wife Andrea lost their only son Egon on the Western Front, in the trenches of Verdun. At first they considered adopting an infant born to a family relation of theirs, but to their great disappointment, the child died soon after birth. Despairing of any other solution, they decided jointly, after much debate, that an orphaned young servant girl named Mariette Bruner, whose parents had worked on the Sauchon estate for many years, should secretly bear the admiral a child. It was agreed that the offspring would maintain ties with its mother and bear her name as her child out-of-wedlock, but that it would be raised by the Sauchons as a “candidate for adoption”—which, should it “prove worthy,” would be recognized as their heir at the age of twenty-one.

When Egon was a year old, his mother Mariette left the estate and moved to Hamburg, where she eventually married Werner Raiman, the director of a proletarian theater, by whom she had a second child. Egon grew up on his father’s estate and was encouraged to call his father and his father’s wife “Grandfather” and “Grandmother,” or more affectionately, “Opapa” and “Oma.” He studied both with private tutors who were brought to the house and at a nearby village school. For the most part, his schooling was supervised by his “grandmother” Andrea, who devoted herself to making it as close as possible to the excellent education received by her beloved son killed in World War I. Egon was a slim, rather nearsighted, blond boy of average height who showed a clear preference for the liberal arts. When he was young, he was sent to Hamburg during school vacations to stay with his mother and stepfather, but after the death of Admiral Sauchon in 1935, when Werner Raiman ran afoul of the Nazi police in Hamburg and the Raimans moved to a village in Bavaria, Egon’s contact with his mother was greatly reduced.

In 1940, at the age of eighteen, Egon was called up by the Wehrmacht and inducted into the navy at the request of his grandmother, who wished him to carry on the family tradition. Because of his poor eyesight, he was sent to a medic’s course at a naval base in Hamburg. After completing the course in early 1941, however, he was not posted to a naval vessel, because starting in March of that year, plans for the impending invasion of Russia led to a redeployment of forces in which many sailors and naval officers, who had been relatively inactive, were transferred to the infantry. In April 1941, once again on his grandmother’s intervention, Egon was posted as a medic with the 7th Alpine Division based near Nürnberg, and in May he was attached to the 3rd Brigade, then being augmented in preparation for action in the Balkans. On May 16 he flew with the brigade to Athens, from where he was parachuted into Crete with the special task force of General Student in the second wave of the German airborne invasion that took place on Tuesday afternoon, the twentieth of May. Although Egon’s unit suffered extremely high casualties and was evacuated to Germany several weeks after Crete’s conquest, Egon remained behind on the island with its occupation garrison. In the laconic postcards he wrote to his grandmother, he promised to explain the circumstances of this development when he came home on leave, but his first furlough, which was scheduled for April 1942, was postponed because he ceded his place to a comrade who wished to get married in Germany. A second leave, in January 1943, was canceled in the wake of the disaster in Stalingrad, and Egon did not set out for home until April 1944, when he flew in a military transport plane to Salonika and joined a northbound convoy there. After the latter was attacked by Greek partisans and forced to return to its base, however, he decided to forego the journey to Germany and returned to Crete on a Greek ship. His infrequent letters did not reach his grandmother either, because, from 1942 on, Crete was lumped by the military censors together with the Eastern front and much mail from there was never delivered. Egon himself, on the other hand, received all his grandmother’s letters and even an occasional letter from his mother. He was also sent the copies of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey that he requested, as well as a history of ancient Greece, which arrived via navy general staff headquarters. In late July 1944 he was informed that his grandmother Andrea was planning to visit him — and indeed, she arrived on the first of August in a light aircraft that flew directly from Athens and landed at Heraklion Airport early that afternoon.

ANDREA SAUCHON Born in 1870 in Lübeck, the daughter of a Protestant minister named Kurtmaier. She graduated nursing school in Hamburg in 1894 and went to work in a military hospital, where she met the naval officer Werner Sauchon, who dropped by frequently to visit some sailors of his who had been wounded in a naval exercise. They were married in 1896 and took up residence in the officers’ barracks of the imperial navy, and toward the end of that year their only son Egon was born. Once Werner had risen through the ranks, the Sauchons moved to the family estate in Holstein, where Egon was raised. With the outbreak of the world war, Egon was called to the colors and sent to the Western Front after a short period of basic training. He was only twenty when he was killed. His death affected Andrea more severely than it did her husband, who was involved in fighting the war, in which he served with great merit and won the highest decorations. However, when Werner Sauchon retired from active service after the German defeat and the Versailles Peace Treaty, he too began to feel the enormity of his loss. Before long the bereaved parents started looking for a surrogate son, which they found in Egon Bruner, who was conceived in 1921 in mutual agreement and trust. To spare his beloved wife the slightest embarrassment, the admiral insisted that the boy bear his mother’s name until the age of twenty-one. Although Andrea was over fifty when the second Egon was born, she devoted herself to him like a young mother while making sure he kept in touch with Mariette, who left the estate amicably a year after her son’s birth. Andrea herself was quite content to be called “Grandmother” by the boy.

The Sauchons regarded the Nazi rise to power with a mixture of curiosity and mild sympathy, believing that the situation in Germany could not fail to improve if law and order were imposed. After her husband’s death in 1935, Egon’s upbringing became Andrea’s sole responsibility. She kept in close contact with his unit when he was inducted into the navy in 1940 and received regular reports on his progress from the base commander. When she heard that sailors were being transferred to the infantry in advance of the planned invasion of Russia, she used her influence to arrange for Egon’s posting to a crack paratroop unit. As a result, however, Andrea, whose connections in the infantry were not as good as those in the navy, lost contact with her grandson for a long period. And yet as distressed as she was by this, she was thrilled to hear that Egon had taken part in the daring conquest of Crete in May 1941. His participation in this battle, she felt, in some way made up for the first Egon’s death at Verdun and she could hardly wait for her adopted hero to come home. But Egon did not return to Germany with the 7th Paratrooper Division and remained with the occupation force in Crete, from where his postcards, starting with the winter of 1942, were almost secretively brief. And yet although this made her long to see him even more, she was forced to conclude, after vainly waiting for him three times, that he looked forward to their meeting less than she did. Nevertheless, she wrote to him more than ever and sent him the Greek history and the Homer that he had asked for. It seemed most odd to her that he had stayed in Crete with a rear-line unit instead of moving on with his old brigade, which was now fighting in the East. In the summer of 1944, after numerous German setbacks and the Allied invasion of Normandy had stricken her with the fear that she might never see him again, she used all her connections in the high command to have him recalled to Germany for the coming last stand on its soil. However, although she succeeded in having a transfer request issued by a ranking commander in the Berlin theater, the order vanished in bureaucratic channels on its way to Crete. Now too, though, Andrea Sauchon refused to give up. Taking the initiative again, she organized a group of war widows and wives of high naval officers who had fought with her husband and petitioned the general staff to allow them to visit Athens and its historical sites before these were “returned to the enemy.” Her stubbornness, her resourcefulness, and above all, the renown of the name Sauchon, crowned her efforts with success and the elderly women set out across Europe for Greece, where they successfully toured Athens and its environs. A photograph of them standing among the columns of the Acropolis even appeared on the front page of the Frankfurter Zeitung Andrea’s real destination, however, was not Athens but Crete, where she intended to deliver Egon’s transfer order personally. And so, when her traveling companions returned to Germany, she remained in the Greek capital and persuaded its military governor to fly her to Heraklion in a light craft. Twenty-four hours before her take-off, a wireless message arrived on the island announcing the distinguished old lady’s arrival. Naturally, she was greatly excited by the prospect of seeing her “grandson” again after their three years’ separation. He, for his part, knew nothing about the signed order in her pocket.

Her half of the conversation is missing.

— And even though I know you’re tired, because how could you not be, dearest Grandmother, no, not even if you had steel in your veins, and I’m sure that you do — why, if anyone doubted it, this astounding journey of yours across Europe is proof enough! — yes, even though I know you’re tired, I’m afraid I have to insist. And so before answering all the details of all the questions you’ve brought with you from so far away, some of which you’ve asked already and some of which you haven’t yet, I must insist, dearest Grandmother, that you come with me right now, just as you are, in your marvelous traveling outfit and your boots. Don’t think I wasn’t thrilled to see them the minute you stepped off the plane, your hiking boots from the Schistan Forest! How clever of you it was to wear them. There’s the wife of a military man for you! O most wonderful Grandmother, what a big hug I’d give you if only everyone weren’t looking, because we don’t want to do anything improper. Please, then, let me insist, before we do anything else, on taking you just as you are, in the same high spirits with which we started off this fabulous, this most incredible, this absolutely fateful meeting between us, here in this place and at this time, yes, fateful is the word, to the top of that hill right above us…

— No, no, it’s not a mountain, Grandmother. You were born on the plains of Holstein, and so you think that every hill is a mountain. It’s really just a little hill, believe me. Mountains don’t look like that, and here, on this island, there are some real ones…

— Step by pleasurable step we’ll do our best to reach that round summit that you can see so clearly from here.

— Exactly.

— Exactly.

— Yes, the visibility is magnificent today, Grandmother. I don’t know if you can begin to appreciate the extent of the view that you’ll have. It’s as if the windows of the world have been especially scrubbed for you, and the island rinsed with clear wine, and even the clouds washed down with the finest suds! Because up in our moldy north you never see more than half of the visible world, and here you’ll see the other half, and maybe more. We couldn’t get over this glorious weather all morning. Just see how clear the sky is, everyone kept telling me, it’s in honor of your grandmother Sauchon…

— Everyone knows. Everyone is thrilled by your visit. Our commanding officer, Bruno Schmelling, is even thinking of giving a little banquet tonight in your honor… in honor of the good old, little old Germany…

— Of course he’s expecting you. But meanwhile, Grandmother, please, we mustn’t miss a minute of this most magnificent, this best time of day. Our leisurely climb will take us to five stations, five observation points from which I’ll tell you my story in the order and way it should be told, because nothing can be safe or sensible without order, isn’t that what you always used to say? Well, I subscribe to that wholeheartedly, which means we don’t have much time, only a few hours, of which we mustn’t waste a minute in small talk or childhood reminiscences. We’ve got to get straight to the point and to all of the difficult questions, because it’s perfectly true, Grandmother, that I’ve hardly been in touch for three years, hardly written to you, never taken a single leave, even though I knew how I was hurting you and Mother, because I was afraid that if I left this island I’d never come back. Who knows, perhaps deep down I did it just to lure you here, Grandmother, to this place that soon, yes, indeed, we will all have to leave without ever having bothered to understand it despite our great enthusiasm for it in the beginning. And you can see that I succeeded, because here you are! In fact, Grandmother, believe it or not, from the unforgettable moment that the most delicious news of your arrival first reached me over the wireless, I’ve done nothing but plan this visit! I’ve even written and learned all my lines by heart, ha ha… why, I couldn’t fall asleep all night long…

— That’s quite all right. No one’s short of sleep here. We hibernated the whole first winter, and I’m still withdrawing sleep from that account.

— I’ve put on weight? Perhaps… it’s certainly true that… after all, until recently things couldn’t have been more peaceful here. The local inhabitants were friendly, the British pulled back to their great North African desert and dug in there, the Russians were falling apart — there was no one to make any trouble. And the air here gives you an appetite…

— Yes, Grandmother. First it was Stalingrad that gave us a bit of a jolt. Then came the invasion of Italy, and now it’s the landing on that beach in France… what’s it called?

— Exactly, that’s it. So you see, as remote and peaceful as it is here, we’re waking up little by little. Shall we start out?

— No, it’s absolutely necessary. Please, Grandmother, I’m sure it is. I’m not trying to get away with anything. I’m ready to answer all your questions, and with that dreadful old honesty of ours. You know your grandson: would he insist on this hike if he thought it was possible to get to the bottom of things without a view of them from on top? Because it’s not just a view, Grandmother, it’s a character in my story. And we’d better hurry before it starts getting dark. Not that we’re frightened of the dark, you and I — it’s just that lately there are all kinds of hostile elements around and we have orders not to go out after dark in groups smaller than five… and a quintet, Grandmother, no matter how you count us, is more than the two of us will ever be…

— Yes, it gets dark quickly here. Don’t forget how far south you’ve come, Grandmother. In fact, this is the southernmost point of the Reich, and here, at thirty-five latitude, the twilight is quick and insubstantial. None of your soulful, copper-colored, everlasting sunsets in the bogs and woods of Schlesing that at first I was so desperately homesick for. How I missed our merry little hunter’s lodge!

— Burned?

— And the little bridge? No, don’t tell me… I don’t want to know…

— But why did they have to bomb them? Well, what does it matter… we’ll rebuild them…

— Of course I do. How could I not believe it? But enough! Come, Grandmother, let’s start out. Everything is ready. It’s a good, gentle path, a little winding, to be sure, but with an easy grade. I checked it again this morning, trying to see it through your eyes and judge it by your capacity. I even took a shovel to fill in the rough parts, and pulled out some weeds, and made three special steps, and chose our rest stops. An hour’s walk, Grandmother, and we’ll be at the top, and there’s a bench up there in an old Turkish outpost that you can sit on pretty comfortably — it’s protected from the winds if there are any, but there won’t be — and look out at the sunset… See, I’ve even got a binoculars for you in this knapsack. You yourself said how clear the air is, the view on a day like this is too good to miss. Just imagine, Grandmother, if it wasn’t you but old Opapa Sauchon who had the good fortune to be here — don’t you think he’d jump to his feet, all eighty-three years of him, and be up that hill in no time? Do you think he’d miss a chance for a panoramic and strategic view of the place where our Europe was born? Think of it that way, Grandmother. Tell yourself it’s for Grandfather and try being his eyes…

— Thank you. Thank you, most wonderful Grandmother…

— Yes, Europa. The young maiden. Together with Zeus…

— Easy does it. Yes, I know. I’ve even tied a rope around my waist and made a loop you can easily hold onto to make sure you don’t slip. Oh, someone will yet write about you — if, that is, anyone will want to write about us at all — and tell how, at the age of seventy-four, Frau Andrea Sauchon, the widow of the hero of the Battle of the Baltic, reached the southernmost point of the Thousand-Year Reich — which won’t last a thousand years but may hold out a thousand days, although I’m afraid that each day will be worse than the one before it — and skipped right up a hill by the airport to look down on the Gulf of Heraklion…

— Sunglasses? Of course.

— I have a canteen.

— Yes. It’s loaded.

— You won’t be needing it.

— All right, we’ll take this coat. But let me carry it.

— No, there’s nothing crazy about it, you’ll see…

— Things have gotten much worse this past month. Everyone listens to the BBC. It’s reached the point that you sometimes think that the very earth is broadcasting in English under your feet. Not that the British are in any hurry to get here. Why should they be? If they wait long enough, we’ll leave by ourselves…

— Just to shed more blood, Grandmother? What for? There’s been enough bloodshed here already. Three years ago seven thousand German soldiers lost their lives on this island, and now you want more? No…

— But defend it how, Grandmother? A man sitting naked on his front porch couldn’t be more of a sitting duck than we are. Every little fishing boat that you see down there in the harbor is spying for the enemy. Every little boy playing ball near our headquarters is a secret agent…

— Exactly.

— Every boat… never mind…

— That little one down there too. Why not? Anything is possible…

— It could be. The local inhabitants are trying to give themselves a clean bill of health to make up for their three years of cozying up to us. Before we’ve made a move, the English already know about it on Cyprus. Which is why, Grandmother, as you can see down there, no, over there…

— Exactly. They’re trundling your little plane off the runway and covering it with branches. Not that it will do any good, because the fishing boats are already signaling each other, and in an hour from now all of Cyprus will know that someone important has arrived in Crete, although the description of her will cause great confusion, ha ha… What can be the military purpose of such a grandmother? They’ll have to call a staff meeting of all their brigadiers to decide what countersteps to take…

— No, I’m not exaggerating. I still can’t get over their bringing you here. A whole lot of people risked their lives to fly you over the flaming Reich. It’s one more proof of the legend of Opapa, which burns more brightly than ever as night falls. Who knows, Grandmother, maybe someone on the general staff thought that if you were flown over the front you might remember some old battle plan of Opapa Sauchon’s, some secret stratagem he worked out thirty years ago that might stem the tide of the rout we’re beginning to see all around us…

— No, it’s not a name that rings a bell with people my age. But as soon as Schmelling heard you were coming, why, he was so tickled pink that he couldn’t stop screaming at me for never telling him…

— Not a word.

— I didn’t want to. Since landing on this island I’ve even stopped dropping hints about the grand estate that may be mine one day…

— I’m not complaining, Grandmother. You know perfectly well…

— I simply didn’t want to arouse any military expectations that could only end in disappointment or embarrassment since the day I left the storm troopers and was posted to this garrison… and anyway… but look over there, no, more to the right, that’s it, Grandmother, look! That’s the sea over there on the horizon.

— Come stand where I am.

— You can lean on me.

— That’s it… over there… that bit of horizon down there, which will soon light up like a red, glowing heart. Well, then, it was out of that very heart, Grandmother, that we came swooping down three years ago behind the sun, pushing its rays in front of us to blind the British, who were just sitting down to high tea. Yes, through that pinkish aperture slipped fifty airplanes all at once that have since become a legend, making the Australian lookout who was sitting here waiting for the sunset wipe the lenses of his binoculars and wonder why they weren’t getting any cleaner, because suddenly he saw a whole lot of bright little dots. Who but a dedicated suicide pilot could have thought that such a fantastic operation was possible?

— No, Grandmother, we didn’t think so either — that is, the handful of us who could or wanted to think at all. I’m not talking about that pack of young wolves that has been convinced since ‘36 that the whole universe is a playground in which it can kick the globe around like a football. If you had parachuted them into Calcutta to take the English high command there, they would have done it as blithely as they charged into Poland and Holland. But we, I mean the handful of us who still could and wanted to think a bit, sat huddled under our helmets, looking down in horror at the smooth water racing beneath us while asking ourselves what demonic power could be taking us to this strange, distant island if not the wish to see the best of us slaughtered on a self-propelled altar of grandeur and thus scare the wits not only out of the world but out of Germany too. Suddenly, Grandmother, I began to shake with sheer sorrow for my life that was about to be shot right out of the sky. I thought, yes, Grandmother, I thought of Uncle Egon and even envied him for having managed to be dead already…

— Yes, I did think of him, Grandmother, and it so upset me to imagine the fresh sorrow awaiting you that the stretcher strapped to my body began to twitch, and our battalion commander, Oberst Thomas Stanzler, a most wonderful and much looked-up-to man who was sitting across from me with his helmet in his hand, a ray of sunlight from a porthole falling on his bald head, smiled a bit because he must have seen the vibrations, laid a pitying hand on me, and said, “You, Private Bruner,” he said, “look like some strange kind of bird, like Icarus who tried flying over Crete. But don’t forget, Bruner, that your wings are made of steel and won’t melt in the sun like his…” And then, Grandmother, I thought of that story, and my eyes filled with tears of gratitude to our knowledgeable battalion commander, who was soon to be mortally wounded, for having taken the trouble to remind me of the myth of Daedalus and his son, which made me think of that old tutor you once brought me…

— Koch… right you are, Grandmother, Gustav Koch… that old classicist with his stories of Greece and Rome…

— Exactly. Exactly.

— Of course I remember him.

— No, I was not too young to understand. He was the first to call for casting the rusty anchor of German history back into that sea you see down there, because there, he used to say, was the warm, true, blue womb of the German genius. Be more careful, Egon, he would shout at me when I mixed up all those mythical characters, those are your own ancestors, our poor Europe was born from them, if only the Teutonic tribes had pressed on to Greece fifteen hundred years ago instead of stopping in Rome, damn its soul!…

— Don’t you remember how he sometimes used to swear?

— You mean he taught Uncle Egon too? How fantastic…

— True. And so all at once, Grandmother, in that growling, pitching airplane that was losing altitude now, all bundled up with my parachute and my knapsack and my stretcher and my rifle, with my helmet down over my ears, and my glasses, which I was too stupid to stick deep in some pocket, tied to a shoelace around my neck, I suddenly lost all fear and had an actual attack of ecstasy, as if savoring the real taste of war for the first time, Grandmother, and I actually became a physical link in old Koch’s rusty anchor chain that had been flung over the Alps with such marvelous force onto the heads of our mythical ancestors, stirring the moss of black forests and the fumes of Hunnish swamps into those warm waves until the Teutonic dreams haunting us found their meaning in the sculptured white marble of Hellas… And so, when the red light went on, and the bell rang, and the dispatching sergeant began to bark, and the whole pack of wolves jumped to its feet with a great shout and put a bullet in the barrels of its schmeissers and disappeared one by one through the hatch with its legs out, I shouted as loud as I could too, Grandmother, I shouted for old Gustav Koch, that grade school classicist, and I went whooshing out into the space that you’re looking at right now…

— Exactly.

— Right. From up there to down there…

— In a second. Just be careful, because this step is a little high for you. Here, give me your hand…

— By that olive tree, because that’s our first station. Now look carefully at what you see and think of me, jumping with a great shout from the churning belly of that plane and carried off by my own private wind, which was waiting as though just for me, first to wildly snatch away my glasses and then to pull a white chute out of me while tugging at the stretcher that was now sticking straight out like the big, single wing of a strange bird. In no time I was whisked over that very coastline that you see there, floating among my comrades’ cries of pain and surprise, the howls of the wolf pack pinned down by enemy fire between the sky and the earth, and flung sideways over that hill, toward those white houses scattered on the hillsides, those over there, Grandmother, which look like the sugar cubes that Opapa liked to suck in bed at night, and right smack into the branches of an olive tree surrounded by goats that greeted me with an indifferent silence…

— There… over there, Grandmother… those black dots out there…

— Exactly. That same flock of goats, so help me, has been standing there for the last three years. Day and night, summer and winter, it keeps reduplicating itself from the bushes…

— Yes, Grandmother, many men were shot dead in the air, thus saving their souls the return trip to heaven… most of my company, Grandmother, was wiped out in less than two minutes…

— You’d be surprised, Grandmother, what two beastly Australians with one machine gun can do. And where do you think they were, Grandmother? Come on, guess!

— Nevertheless, take a look around you and guess… after all, you’re the widow of a famous fighting man…

— Nevertheless, try to guess…

— Wrong, Grandmother. The answer is: right where you’re standing this minute! Here, their position was right by this rock. If we were to dig a little in the ground, we’d still find three-year-old cartridges. And now you see why I insisted on taking you up here, so that you could understand the whole story, right from the beginning.

— But why should they have told you about losses? It would only have spoiled your good mood and made the Austrian Genius look bad. Just remember, though, Grandmother, that a whole lot of men were killed in the operation. Months went by before we realized the full extent of it — gliders that crashed with all their occupants, dozens of men drowned at sea, parachutes that never opened, or that caught fire, or that got tangled up with each other. It was a miracle that I survived, and maybe I should thank the stretcher, Grandmother, which carried me far away from the rest of them, back behind that hill over there. In fact, if I hadn’t wound up with my parachute straps caught in the branches of that olive tree, bruised all over, half-unconscious, and worst of all, without my glasses, I too, Grandmother, would probably have gone running off to look for some Englishman or Australian to put a bullet in me. But instead I stayed trapped in that thicket of branches, looking out at a soft, round world of bearded black goats whose shepherd had taken to his heels. They lifted their heads to look at me too, with a quiet tinkle of their bells — and I, Grandmother, who had never seen such black goats in my life, was more afraid of them than I was of an Englishman’s bullet or some Greek’s knife, because how did I know they weren’t about to climb that tree and take a little bite out of me, eh, Grandmother?

— No, they weren’t the least bit friendly. They were just stupid animals without the slightest curiosity. Even when I managed to free myself by cutting all the straps and strings with my medic’s knife and climbed down among them, they didn’t pay me any attention. They just went on grazing as if I were some kind of stone that had fallen from the sky — which is indeed how I lay there, Grandmother, like a stone, without moving. My hand was hurting me badly, and worse yet, my vision was as blurred as it was in the fifth grade, that year that you insisted I didn’t need glasses…

— No, I didn’t lose consciousness. I was just in such a state of shock from all that quiet around me that the only conclusion I could reach, Grandmother, as desperate as it was, was that the assault had failed and everyone was already dead or taken prisoner.

— Yes, that’s what I thought, Grandmother. It was getting on toward dusk, and I felt an odd calm, quite resigned to the fact that the Führer had sent his best sons to bleed to death on this distant, rocky island simply to let Europe know that his long arm could reach the roots it grew from. And because I remembered the Ten Commandments we had been given before taking off from Athens, and especially, the sixth one, which Baron Friedrich von Heidte in person had drilled us in, Thou shalt not surrender, thy badge of honor is victory or death, I quickly bandaged my hand, spread my stretcher out between two rocks in a little fortified position I prepared, and, while waiting for someone I could challenge to a fight, an enemy who would be worthy of killing me, I lay down among the grazing goats and listened to the chirping of the crickets, which ever since then, Grandmother, for the last three years, has followed me around day and night without my being able to decide if it’s a sound that I hate or am attracted to…

— Yes. Listen. It’s as though this great cricketing were fanning out across the island, even though, oddly enough, it only makes the silence greater.

— They’re everywhere, here too, among the leaves on the branches of the trees. You can’t see them, but if you stick your head into these branches, you’ll hear them sawing away…

— Exactly…

— It never changes. Just the same monotonous thrumming that saws the silence into dry little chips. And maybe that’s what so hypnotized me, Grandmother, that I couldn’t hear the shots and explosions coming from the airport in Heraklion, which was not exactly, as I later found out, blanketed by the deathly silence I thought it was…

— Later… in prison, when I sat going over and over what I had done that day…

— Yes, for a while… I’ll get to it…

— I didn’t want to distress you.

— Yes. That was one reason you didn’t hear from me…

— But… just a minute… look here, Grandmother, this is my story, it’s the only way I know of getting you to picture what I’ve been trying to tell you since starting up this trail — along which, Grandmother, if you’re not too tired, I’ll have to ask you to continue, so that you can see for yourself, not only the far end of the airport, which was finally captured after several days of bloody fighting by fresh forces that were landed from the sea, but the jump-off point for the private trek of Private Egon Bruner, who was temporarily cut off from history, Grandmother, in order to stumble into prehistory and into the great fan of cricket song that went on all night in deeper and deeper darkness — cut off from my olive tree too, beneath which I buried my white chute, and from the flock of goats, which I dispatched with my schmeisser to keep it from tinkling conspicuously after me… because I had made up my mind, Grandmother, I really had, to follow the sixth commandment and not be taken prisoner if only I could find someone worthy of killing me. And so I began to head south, Grandmother… there, take a good look at those two lovely hills over there, which the Australians, or so the Greeks told us, referred to as “Charlies,” which is a term of endearment they have for a woman’s breasts, although we Germans, having noticed at once that they were not the same size, changed their hames to “Friedrich the Great” and “Friedrich the Small.” And now just picture your Egon the Second, Grandmother, advancing nearsightedly between those two Charlies on the night of May 20, 1941, fully armed and toting a big knapsack with first-aid supplies, three days’ battle rations, and his stretcher, on which no doubt he intended to carry himself once he was wounded or killed, heading south on a moonless night amid the smell of fires burning under a sky like none I had ever seen back home, all fantastically lit up with stars whose names I didn’t know, moving warily through vineyards whose sour grapes I picked and ate, scrambling over stone fences, keeping away from the dark, shuttered huts and avoiding the roads, on which now and then I heard the sound of some speeding car, heading steadily south in my search for a hero from one of Koch’s Greek myths whom I could challenge…

— Don’t rush me, Grandmother Please, I beg you, give me time, let me tell the story in my own way and at my own speed, and above all, trust me to guide you through it. Tomorrow we’ll say good-bye, who knows for how long, who knows if not forever — and believe me, Grandmother, you’re getting the shortest and quickest possible version I can give you, I even have it outlined here on my palm, station by station… so please, be patient with me, because now that we’re starting up the trail again you’ll see that the direction I took that night, which certain individuals insisted on interpreting as a cowardly flight from battle, or at the very least, as a panic-stricken error, was from my point of view a deep penetration, a nocturnal sally into the bright womb that Koch lectured me so brilliantly about. Because now I know that if someday we’re called upon to justify this horrible war that we started with the clearest premeditation, to justify the blood, the suffering, the conflagration that we’ve spread everywhere, we’ll know what to answer and won’t just have to stand there mumbling sheepishly like after the last beastly war, when we were accused of invading France to force our blood on the French and English without anyone, not even us, realizing what we were up to, which was to drive south as we’ve finally done, to ancient Hellas, to this island of Crete, this most wonderful place that has been from the start, Grandmother, in my own humble opinion, the true grail of our German soul, whose deepest desire, to put it most simply, is to exit from history by hook or by crook, if not forward then backward, so that if the French, back then, in the first war, hadn’t insisted on stopping us at the frontier, we would have rushed through their country without damaging it in the least, just like, yes, like tourists of sorts, because deep down we Germans are nothing but the most passionate tourists who sometimes must conquer the countries we dream of in order to tour them unhindered, with the thoroughness to which we’re accustomed…

— No, I’m not joking… certainly not now…

— That could be. Perhaps it’s just a fantasy of mine. And perhaps it’s not. At least let me finish explaining myself before you judge me… Here, hold onto me tight while you take this step. The trail gets narrower here…

— I am not stalling…

— I’m getting to that… just a few more steps, there’s a chair waiting for you up there… this is the second station, Grandmother…

— I brought it up here this morning, just for you.

— Why not? Don’t you think you deserve it?

— Of course I’ll return it. But now sit down, please, yes, right over here, and take these binoculars and focus them as is best for you on that broad valley down there… yes, there, on that little woods and the hill behind it… exactly…

— To the right of that village, Grandmother, where the hill grows slightly darker…

— Perfect.

— They’re not rocks. It’s an archaeological site.

— Exactly. Exactly. That’s ancient Knossos you’re looking at, Grandmother, Knossos in all its glory…

— How can you not remember? The legendary Labyrinth… the palace of King Minos… Then did Zeus first father of Minos, protector of Crete

— Homer.

— From the books you sent me. And thanks again for going to the trouble.

— Of course I read them.

— I know, you can’t see much from here, but I wanted you at least to get a glimpse of it. I can’t tell you how much I’d love to take you on a tour of that wonderful place, which I’ve become a student and a patron of these past three years, but Schmelling strictly forbade it. He’s afraid to risk you in a partisan attack, and I couldn’t get him to relent. You have no idea how worried he is about your safety — he almost wouldn’t allow me to take you up this hill. He didn’t rest easy until he had posted those five half-prisoners down there, those ex-Italian soldiers whom you see sitting at the bottom of the hill and keeping an eye on our little excursion.

— Yes, just for us. Why not? What else do they have to do? When we were winning the war, they were too lazy to fight it with us, and now that we’re losing it, they’re too lazy to run away. But enough of them, Grandmother. From here you have a clear view of the route I took that night. South! But I wasn’t, perish the thought, deserting the field of battle, I was simply taking a leave of absence from it until the dead wolves in their chutes were reinforced by some living ones. And in the meantime, Grandmother, having honestly sworn by Opapa’s memory not to be taken prisoner, I decided to penetrate even further, just as I was, all bruised and scratched and aching, and above all, keep in mind, exceedingly nearsighted, into the mountains, to look for some private battlefield of my own that might do until I obtained new glasses. I walked blindly on in the darkness, guided perhaps by the spirit of old Koch, which may have heard itself invoked when I jumped from the plane, making my way over fences and through orchards with the crickets sawing all around me. I must have walked a good five kilometers, although it seemed like thirty to me. And then all at once, without any warning, I found myself in the ruins of that wonderful palace of the Labyrinth, whose immense significance, Grandmother, I sensed immediately even though it was built three thousand five hundred years ago and I couldn’t see it very well, so that I plunged into it faint with excitement, climbing up and down the chipped marble stairs from hall to hall and passing through the reddish columns that divided the rooms, in whose corners, by the dim, flitting starlight, I saw huge clay urns glazed with colors so magnificent that I could make them out even in the darkness. And painted on the walls, Grandmother, were slender-waisted youths and maidens in a long line that followed a beautiful, enormous red bull, whose huge V-shaped horns I already had seen on the roof of some ruin. And it was then, Grandmother, walking as though in a dream in that dark silence, that I suddenly felt very close, but unbelievably close, to the Führer, to our own Hitler, because although I still had no idea where I was, I already had guessed the secret purpose of the bloody expedition he had sent us on from afar. He was not looking to decimate the English in Crete, or for a jumping-off point to Suez — those were just excuses for his generals, so that they would order their army to this place. No, Grandmother, the Führer was obeying old Gustav Koch’s imperative to look for that most ancient source at which, Grandmother, I, Private Egon Bruner, had arrived all by myself, the first German arrow to be shot from that great bow, a one-man conqueror in the night. Which was why, Grandmother, in the spirit of the sixth commandment, I decided right then and there that this was the place I was going to fight and die for…

— No, not to fight for those ruins, Grandmother, but for what might be resurrected from them, for the new man we talked and thought about so much on those long winter evenings back in ‘39 when I was studying for my German history exams. You already knew for sure then, Grandmother, that a world war was unavoidable, and you were worried about being blamed for it as we were for the last one and left without justification while the fruits of victory rotted in our hands… And so I thought that perhaps here, on this island of all places, the rationale that my grandmother was looking for might be found, which is a thought that I’ve been gnawing away at for the last three years…

— I swear.

— But what makes you say I vanished? I never did… how did I?

— But I was simply cut off… I had lost my glasses… and I misread the battle, because I confused south with north…

— How can you say such a thing, Grandmother? You, who pushed for the transfer of a nearsighted person like me to a unit of tigers and wolves…

— Not at all! If I really had deserted, I would have been court-martialed and shot at once… It’s unimaginable that you should judge me more harshly than the general staff of the 7th Paratrooper Division. Why can’t you see that I was saved by a miracle, and that it’s a miracle that I’m standing before you right now? From a purely military point of view, it would have been far easier to die with the thirteen hundred other pack wolves who were killed in the first twenty-four hours on that triangular battlefield you see down below you…

— Yes. One thousand three hundred. It’s a number I happen to know by heart, and you’ll soon see why…

— Soon… if you let me tell my whole story. I’m beginning to think you’d be happier if I were one thousand three hundred and one…

— Because you’d finally think I had something in common with the real Egon…

— I meant…

— Never mind…

— I’m sorry, Grandmother… I really am…

— I’m sorry…

— Because I know that deep down you’ve never come to terms with the basic fact of my existence…

— Sometimes I can’t help thinking that…

— Well, then, I was wrong, and I have to ask you once more for forgiveness, Grandmother. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry: I’ll say it a thousand times before I let this day with you be spoiled…

— How? Why? On the contrary, on the contrary, Grandmother, I never dreamed of dishonoring Egon, far from it, I was acting for the glory of Germany. Who if not I, Grandmother, shared your anguish from the time I was a child over the unfair blame put on Germany for that pointlessly beastly first war, a blame so great that I even imagined it weighing on the soil of his grave in France, in that field full of crosses…

— Of course I remember that visit. I even remember how awful those French peasants were in that village of Mericur, when they saw Opapa standing in his white uniform and saluting his son’s grave.

— But I do… why shouldn’t I? How old was I?

— That’s all? Really?

— You see? And I really do remember it, honor-bright as only a child can be when dreaming of the day when someone in white uniform will come to salute his grave… so that not only haven’t I forgotten Egon’s death, I’ve done everything to make it more meaningful…

— It wasn’t the fatigue, Grandmother It was the isolation that I wasn’t used to. Why, from the day I was drafted until that night, I never had a moment to myself. I was surrounded all the time by the wolf pack, wherever I went I marched in line under some officer’s watchful eye, if it wasn’t one set of orders or superiors it was another, day in and day out, in the end I was even dreaming other people’s dreams… and now, all of a sudden, without the slightest warning, I was totally alone, in a strange landscape, without a single German in sight, and worst of all, Grandmother, without an officer to tell me what to do. And so my first task was to find myself a CO, which I did, for lack of anyone better, by commissioning myself, a promotion that was so successful that I bowed to its authority immediately and ordered myself to prepare a strategic position behind those huge urns that could double as a hideout and a lookout. And since without my glasses my combat capabilities were inevitably restricted, I opened my stretcher, Grandmother, lay down on my back, and ate my first battle rations to the song of the crickets while staring in a trance at the sky, which was full of glorious new stars that you’ll soon be seeing for yourself. And thus, at the end of the first day of battle, on the night between the twentieth and twenty-first of May, 1941, I fell into a deep, almost prehistoric sleep, from which I was awakened in the morning by the whinny of a mule that had been led into the palace by two Greek civilians — whom, on the spur of the moment, I took prisoner at once, jumping out of my hiding place.

— Yes, I had to take them prisoner, and in a minute you’ll understand why. But first, if you’re rested, why don’t we go on to the next station. I promise that from here on the trail is much easier going. We’ll swing around now to the western side of the hill and look down on the city… here, let me help you up…

— No, it won’t get dark for quite a while. We started out at four, and we’ll be back at seven sharp, untouched by darkness and in time for Bruno Schmelling’s dinner…

— Don’t worry… I’ll send one of the Italians tomorrow to fetch it…

— It’s all right… it really is…

— No, I won’t forget. But really, Grandmother, instead of worrying about that wretched chair, why don’t you look at the fabulous view now coming into sight in the special light this place has whose clarity is so great that it sometimes stretches my mind almost painfully. And listen, Grandmother, to some poetry that I memorized: There is a land called Crete amid the wine-red sea,/ Beauteous, fertile and girdled by water,/ Settled by peoples innumerable and boasting of ninety cities / Many are the tongues there spoken,/ And on it is Knossos, citadel of royal Minos,/ Friend of mighty Zeus Nine years did he rule there… etcetera, etcetera… ha ha…

— Maybe…

— Maybe.

— Just like that… I felt like it. But hold on to my belt now and listen to that Greek ship tooting away down there as it enters the harbor. When I hear those ships’ horns in my sleep at night, I sometimes think that I’ve managed after all to board one of Father’s warships…

— I mean, Grandfather… I was thinking of Opapa…

— Perhaps you’re right and I’m purposely dragging out the story. And it may well be, Grandmother, that already then the first seed was sown of what you call my “vanishing” and Schmelling calls my “entanglement,” although I simply call it my POWer play. Because the minute I saw those two Greek civilians, the truth about whom I couldn’t have imagined then in my wildest dreams, coming into that big room…

— I’ll get to that… in a minute…

— No, that’s a surprise… I have to keep you in suspense to make sure you’ll stay with me to the end…

— Soon… soon. Anyway, these two men were leading a mule loaded with two or three saddlebags that they meant to hide up there for a rainy day, because they, Grandmother, hadn’t the least doubt that we Germans would win the battle that was still going on. And knowing the place well, they realized immediately, by the way the urns had been moved, that someone was hiding there. They froze… and before they could run off to tell the English — who, because of the silence, I thought had won the battle — I decided to take them prisoner rather than be taken one myself, and so I jumped out of my hiding place with my schmeisser pointed straight at them, at least as far as my vision permitted, and yelled at them in English to surrender

— Hands up! That’s what they taught us in Athens to say to any Englishman trying to strike up a conversation…

— Kill them?

— But what for, Grandmother? They were civilians, and in May ‘41 killing civilians wasn’t standard procedure yet. No one knew at the time that they were our worst enemies…

— Two, a father and son. And of the two of them it was the son, who was only a few years older than me and looked like one of us, well built and blond with a rather pleasant face, who panicked at the sight of my schmeisser, while the father remained cool and collected, perhaps because in any case he looked like a ghost who had just stepped out of a grave in the palace. He had on a dusty black suit and a thin, striped tie that was knotted around his neck like a rope, and he was bald and wore glasses… which, to tell you the truth, Grandmother, was reason enough in itself for my preemptive strike…

— Of course… although as soon as I snatched them off his nose and put them on my own I saw that I needn’t have bothered, because the same world that had been all big and blurry now became as tiny and far-off as if I were looking through a telescope. Not that I returned them to him, because I confiscated them and stuck them in my pocket for further examination. I could tell from the glimmer of a smile on his face that he realized at once that the black scorpion that had fallen on him was a German paratrooper with the bad luck to get lost and lose his glasses, which seemed so perfectly natural to him that right away, without waiting to be asked any questions, he began chatting politely in simple but quite understandable German. He began by introducing himself as a tour guide to the old palace who had come up there that morning to see if the fighting hadn’t ruined his ruins, to which he added that he would be glad to take me home with him to look for a better pair of glasses… and seeing that I looked doubtful, because I suspected a trap…

— Exactly.

— Exactly… and so right away, no less calmly than before, he suggested sending his son for the glasses and remaining with me as a hostage, which was far too logical and fair an offer for me to turn down, Grandmother… at which precise point my odd relationship with those two men began…

— In a minute… I’m getting to it…

— No, they’re not around anymore… but wait… just wait…

— No, you’re wrong. It wasn’t a trap, and it was no fault of their own that the battle was over by the time I got back to the battlefield. You see, I still was convinced that the island was swarming with English, and although I was determined to put up a fight and not be taken prisoner, how could I fight without my glasses? And so, as I said, I gladly accepted that German-speaking ghost’s offer to be my hostage, although I took every precaution and made him descend to an inner room of the palace, where I tied his hands and legs thoroughly with first-aid gauze and then, seeing as how he was very small and slender, helped him to climb into one of those giant urns, in which I could be sure he would stay put. As for his son, who was white as a sheet and too frightened to move at the spectacle of his father being trussed up so efficiently, I sent him off to fetch the promised glasses, although not before ordering him to bring his mule to a oack room too and to leave it tethered there as an additional deposit…

— Yes, indeed, Grandmother, I was full of grand notions of honor… although for someone who had just met the enemy for the first time, you can see I behaved very sensibly. Since then I’ve arrested and tied many more people on this island, but I can remember my hands shaking as I wrapped gauze around that wrinkled ghost, who actually smiled at me most considerately, as if he couldn’t have agreed more with what I was doing…

— But I really needed them. Because whatever you may think, Grandmother, I have definitely been nearsighted since the fifth grade….

— I wish to reiterate, dear Grandmother Andrea, as patiently as I can, that I did not hear any sounds of battle. That’s one reason I took you up this hill, so that you could see for yourself how far it was from the isolated valley I landed in to where the fighting was going on. The actual battle took place down there, along the coast and right outside Heraklion, which you can see directly beneath you…

— Perhaps I didn’t believe it.

— Perhaps I couldn’t believe it. Don’t forget, in those first few days the whole brilliant operation was hanging by a hair…

— Perhaps I didn’t want to believe it, either… I don’t deny that you have a point there, Grandmother…

— That’s so. I admit it. Sometimes I despair prematurely to avoid disappointment later. I admit it.

— But look here, the minute I try to be nice and take part of the blame on myself, you want to lay it all on me… just like you’ve always done…

— As usual? Automatically, Grandmother? Have I been to blame from the minute I was born? In that case, there’s really no point in going on with my story…

— No, I’ve had enough! Let’s stop this, then… let’s go back down… what’s the point of even trying to explain… let’s stop this right here and now…

— Yes. Of course. I’m angry at you for not wanting to listen to me, Grandmother, because you’ve already passed judgment on me and decided that I ran away from the battle when I didn’t at all and was simply trying to understand it. From the minute I was thrown out of the belly of that airplane, all by myself into the world, with all those bullets whizzing by me and the screams of dying men, I realized that getting killed was easy but that understanding was hard, and I made up my mind to do things the hard way. That’s why, having disentangled myself from that tree, I headed south toward solitude, Grandmother, trusting in the power of the pure reason within me to issue the proper commands, or at least, commands as proper and responsible as any of the general staff’s. And so great was the command for solitude, Grandmother, that I even about-faced and killed a flock of goats to keep from being followed, or from being distracted by the human expression on their dumb faces. And thus, Grandmother, as solitary as could be, I stumbled in the dead of night on the remains of an ancient civilization that stirred and enchanted my soul. But I still had no idea how to connect with it, which made it only natural, Grandmother, that, finding myself with a Greek tour guide in my clutches, I decided to make the most of him. And in fact, he was most generous with his time despite the humiliating position I had put him in and began talking to me not as my foe or captured prisoner, but as a potential intellectual companion, trying his best to converse in the slow, simple German that, so he said, he had acquired leading tours. You have to realize that, although as soon as he saw the sky full of German parachutes he was convinced of our victory and even assumed that there would be among the invaders a few culture-loving humanists who would want a guided tour of the famous Labyrinth once the fighting was over, he had never dreamed that, already on the first morning, he would be facing his first humanist while bound hand and foot…

— Me, naturally.

— At first just to pass the time until his son came back with some glasses. Little by little, though, I began to be fascinated by the story that he was telling me so wonderfully well. His bald head was sticking out of that old urn like the head of some wise snake, and even though his German, Grandmother, was very basic, you could see he had a way with words the minute he began telling me about the men who dug and were dug up at Knossos, whom he described as though they were all one big family, Sir Arthur Evans and his English archaeologists who came here at the turn of the century and King Minos and his royal court who lived here three and a half millennia ago. In fact, I was so impressed that it occurred to me at once that, if all went well, old Koch might get to see at least part of his dream come true, and that Germans would come to the ruins of the Labyrinth from all over the Reich to study their own history and be solaced by another, ancient civilization for the sorrow and disillusionment of our own, which we take so seriously, Grandmother, that it turns to a dragon in our hands. Just imagine, Grandmother, even then I began…

— Yes, while the battle was still raging all around me.

— I plead guilty to that too… Anyway, I jotted down some notes, and I was so carried away that in the end I couldn’t restrain myself, and as evening began setting in and the young man still hadn’t returned, I decided to let my hostage out of his urn before killing him for his son’s absconding, although I was careful then too not to give him his glasses back, so that he couldn’t run away. And so, as nearsighted as I was, he began leading me from room to room and wall painting to wall painting, pointing out all the things he had already told me about. I was determined to pump him for all he was worth, because the more he told me about that ancient world, the more it excited me…

— Because it bore no guilt, Grandmother, and therefore had no fear…

— That’s how he explained it.

— For example, for example, Grandmother, even such details as no fortifications having been found around the palace, which itself is eloquent testimony not only to the inhabitants’ basic peacefulness, but to their taking peace for granted. And the paintings on the walls really do radiate such happiness and calm… even the great bull was so loved by everyone that the young men held tournaments in which they leaped over its back… and except for one double-bladed ax, not a single weapon was found anywhere…

— No. That’s the opinion of all the scholars, whom my guide was merely quoting…

— What?

— What did you say?

— You’re astonishing, Grandmother!

— I’ll get to that in a minute… aren’t you a shrewd one, though!

— In a minute… in a minute… just wait…

— Jewish scholars… how odd…

— I’m getting to it… in a minute you’ll understand everything… although permit me, wisest Grandmother, to congratulate you right now, even though, historically speaking, there were no Jews in the world at the time…

— Not a blessed one.

— They simply hadn’t invented themselves yet.

— Well, then, Grandmother, it would seem that they’re not quite as old as they think.

— I understand… I understand…

— He said the same thing to me that first night while describing the island and the people who lived on it… which was why…

— Of course he did.

— Mani.

— Yes. Perfectly simple.

— Mani nothing. Just plain Mani.

— I don’t think it’s a shortened form of anything… but…

— Maybe of mania…

— Josef.

— Killed him, Grandmother?

— Wait… wait a minute… why are you in such a rush…

— But he did keep his promise. His son was just waiting for it to get dark before slipping out of town unseen, because the Greeks were sure that the English were successfully repelling our attack and might have endangered his father in their rush to get at me, which was the reason he waited. As soon as the first stars came out, though, there was a rustle in the underbrush, and before I could reach for my schmeisser, Grandmother, a short, delicate girl of about my age was standing there, the son’s wife and my ghost’s daughter-in-law, who had come to get the lay of the land. She had brought a pot of hot food and a jug of coffee for the night, and also, as if I had an insatiable lust for glasses, five pairs of them wrapped in a towel. The only problem was that they were all old folks’ reading glasses that must have belonged to the young Manis’ grandparents. They looked just like your glasses, Grandmother, which only used to make me see worse when I tried them on as a child…

— Of course. It was the first thing I did. Don’t think I had forgotten where I was. Mani Senior translated thè news that the young lady and her husband had gathered, because meanwhile, Mani Junior, looking very confused and frightened, had stepped slowly out of hiding too and had joined us shivering all over, holding a child in one hand, a little boy of about three, and a small sack of barley for the mule in his other hand. He was wearing a faded old overcoat, which he took off and gave to his father.

— They indeed had brought me their whole family, perhaps because they thought it best to die together…

— I’ll get to that in a minute… Because Mani Junior was quite beside himself. He began hugging and kissing his father and actually sobbing quite shamelessly in strange spasms, like some sort of mental defective, so that his wife and father had to grab him and hold him to protect him from his worry at seeing the old man stuck in an urn for safekeeping. I myself had no idea then, Grandmother, that this was but my first taste of the sweet-and-sour dish known as Fear-of-the-Conqueror that we’ve been eating ever since then until it’s coming out of our ears. I’m talking about the terror that each of us creates even when he’s just taking an innocent walk and thinking the most humane of thoughts — the stares that follow your every movement as a soldier, though you yourself may be sick of your own self. I could feel it beginning that summer evening, standing there without my glasses but with my cocked schmeisser gun aimed at that family of civilians that kept trying to calm me with all kinds of promises to ward off any sudden desperation that my finger might feel on the trigger, because I had already told them about my firm commitment to the sixth commandment. And so, even though, looking back on it now, the situation of the German forces in Heraklion that evening was far from good, Mani Senior, who stood glimmering like a ghost in the darkness, quite extravagantly promised me an imminent German victory even though his family had just seen English reinforcements moving up a nearby road, because he was confident that the English would never recover from the shock of the German attack. The English, he assured me with a wry touch of Anglophobia, were only in their element when fighting Asiatics or Africans, against whom their Englishness gave them strength, just as barbarism did the barbarians. He knew them well — and against real Europeans, and especially real Europeans with air superiority, they were on much shakier ground. And yet the fact was, Grandmother, that even though I was greatly cheered by what he said, which turned out to be perfectly correct, I was still in a hopeless situation. After all, I could hardly have asked that young lady to take me by the hand and bring me back without my glasses, like a schoolboy who fled, to my platoon…

— Did I say that?

— I meant a schoolboy who failed.

— Perhaps…

— Well, even if it was more than just a slip of the tongue, Grandmother, and the truth of the matter is that I really did flee a little, there’s no need to shed any tears over it, because the story has a happy end…

— First of all, that here I am, standing in front of you, happy and alive myself. And secondly, that I’ve put these three years to use preparing the summation of the defense for the terrible Judgment Day that our poor Germany is in for, compared to which, dear Grandmother, the judgment of Versailles will seem child’s play.

— Soon… that’s a surprise… there’ll be a time to tell you everything…

— But even if you’re right again, Grandmother, and I really did overinvolve myself with that family by capturing it a bit too personally, it was collaborating with me for reasons that I didn’t understand yet, though at the time I attributed it either to its fear of an armed enemy soldier falling myopically out of the sky, or else to, its pity for the same soldier, who was really quite lonely and frightened and in need of some family warmth after many long months without leave, to say nothing of being all scratched and bitten by the wolf pack….

— I don’t follow you, Grandmother.

— But how?

— Killed them? There you go again…

— And the little boy?

— But how could I?

— Maybe…

— Maybe…

— Maybe. Maybe. And again, Grandmother, and only tentatively, for the sake of the argument, I’m prepared to admit that my inexperience with occupied civilians may have made me act irresponsibly, and that I should have stopped such sentimental conduct immediately, nipped it in the bud. I should have accepted a cup of coffee from the jug young Mani’s wife brought and ridden away on my commandeered mule, putting that ruined Labyrinth behind me and galloping blindly off into the night until its silence was broken by a fatal Australian bullet, or better yet, by the longed-for shout of a German officer. But it seemed that Mr. Mani, and perhaps not unjustifiedly, was worried that I might lose my head and come back to kill him as I had killed the flock of goats — and so, believe it or not, O most clever and astute Grandmother, even though he was falling off his feet, the ghost offered his services as a hostage once again, and after eating a bit of his daughter-in-law’s food, embracing his son and grandchild, and even handing me a little tourist’s brochure in German about the antiquities of Knossos, he went back and lay down by his urn, thus taking himself prisoner again, and roundaboutly, Grandmother, according to your logic, me too. Before I could even think, he had signaled his son and daughter-in-law to cover him with that warm old winter coat and beat a hasty retreat — and in no time, Grandmother, they had vanished into one of the anterooms of that ruined palace, which the darkness had turned back into an ancient maze.

— Supposedly, Grandmother, for the same purpose as before, that is, to find me some suitable glasses. And thus began Round 2, which commenced with the man’s taking a candle from his pocket and lighting it without so much as a by-your-leave so that I might have a better view of his jail cell and not, God forbid, do anything rash in the dark…

— Yes, Grandmother, a glum, inscrutable type, but so decisive and efficient that I began to suspect him of having German blood. Right away, with that quiet, submissive cunning that becomes the second nature of all conquered civilians, he tried maneuvering me into spending a peaceful night with him — which he did, Grandmother, just imagine, by suggesting that I wrap him in gauze again so that the two of us could get a good night’s sleep, all in a spirit of mutual trust. It was then that it first dawned on me, although by now I’ve had three years to consider it, that the whole episode of my lost glasses was simply a pretext for him to satisfy a suddenly surfaced whim to be a prisoner or hostage, bound hand and foot, before he died. Perhaps he needed to atone for some old feeling of guilt, or perhaps to pass it on to me, so that I would have pity on his family…

— Yes, Grandmother. Are you ready for the surprise?

— Hang on, I’ve gotten there. He died without any help from me, entirely under his own steam — and to the best of my knowledge, without even a single groan! His heart just mercifully stopped beating, as sometimes happens in books or in the theater but never in real life. First, however, he turned to me in the corner of that ancient room, with the crickets sawing away at the spring night and the flame of the candle flickering over the wrinkled parchment of his face, and asked me if I had any more questions before he went to sleep. To this day, Grandmother, I remember how startled I was by such obsequiousness coming from a man old enough to be my father, and how, in all innocence, I thought he was overdoing it, because I didn’t realize that it was his way of taking his final leave of me and giving death the green light — the same death that was already casting its first beams inside him like the blinking headlight of a locomotive rounding a distant bend. In fact, his submissiveness only made me feel suddenly callous, and without even answering I went off to eat my battle rations in a corner while he turned away and snuggled up in his coat, preparing for his descent to Hades, which before long was well underway. He lay there in a perfect fetal position, all trussed and bundled up, while I went out for a walk about the site and discovered all kinds of little niches I hadn’t noticed before, even getting lost for a while before finding my way back to my prisoner, who, rather oddly, I thought, was as serenely asleep as if he hadn’t a fear in the world. And so I went over and woke him, Grandmother, with a light prod of my schmeisser and asked him who the gods of that ancient civilization had been. He awoke with great difficulty, as if climbing out of some deep well, opened his eyes that flickered like two fireflies, and told me quite firmly that this particular prehistoric culture had had no gods at all, which was why he was so fond of it. I asked him how he knew that, “Didn’t you yourself,” I said to him, “tell me there were no decipherable written remains?” But he wasn’t fazed by that at all, “That’s just it,” he said. “If the people who lived here had had gods, they would have learned to write about them…”

— Exactly…

— Grandmother, I liked that answer so much that I still remember it three years later. It even made me warm up to him a bit and ask him if he was born here in Knossos. For the first time he hesitated and seemed uncertain. He had come to Crete years ago, he told me, because of the English, who had banished him from some small, desert city in Asia whose name would not mean a thing to me… and that, in fact, was the last thing he ever said, because as soon as I stopped questioning him he bundled up again beneath the coat, and sometime during the night, while I was sleeping in my corner, he died…

— In a minute… I’ll get to that too…

— I’ll get to it, just let me do it in my own time…

— But I do insist, Grandmother… because from here you can already see clear into Heraklion, and ahead of us is a chair that was brought up here this morning, waiting for you at the third station — which is where, Grandmother, we’re going to take an English break and pour ourselves high tea from my canteen to wash down our dry English cake with…

— Lately I’ve discovered that there’s something comforting about those English pound cakes. Each crumb that you eat is more phlegmatic than the one before…

— You’ll see in a minute… Anyway, Grandmother, it wasn’t yet light out and I was feeling terribly lonely again. At first, when I noticed how perfectly still he was, I thought that perhaps he had slipped away and left the coat behind as a dummy. When I went over for a closer look, though, I saw that he had breathed his last and that all that was left there on the floor was his lifeless body, which proceeded to pass every test of death taught me in medic’s school. Right away I untied his hands and feet and tried getting him to look a bit less fetal, not wanting there to be the slightest suspicion of any untoward act, because back then in ‘41, Grandmother, war atrocities were still something you swept under the rug, not a flag you raised on high…

— You know what I mean.

— You know.

— You know perfectly well what I’m referring to.

— Never mind, let’s not argue about it now. Don’t forget, though, Grandmother, that I had never before been so intimately alone with a dead person, because even though I begged to kiss him, you covered Opapa’s face before letting me say farewell to him when I was thirteen. You thought, Grandmother, and maybe you were right, that I was too young for death. Well, by May 1941 I was if anything, like everyone my age, a little too old for death — but still, there in that dawn light, I was facing my first real corpse, which looked natural and intact despite its strangeness, and was mine to do with as I pleased. Since that morning, Grandmother, three years have gone by, and I have seen — and seen to — plenty of dead people, but for some reason that ghost of a Mani has stayed with me, even summoning the other dead around him and making them a part of himself, as he now, lying there among those big urns, summoned an old, familiar sorrow that made me decide that it was time for me to leave. I didn’t want to have to deal with the grief and horror of the young Manis, even if that meant forfeiting the right glasses they had found for me, and so I folded the stretcher, hitched myself up to my medic’s pack, and covered the dead man with that yellowish overcoat, although first I went through his things and took a few candles, plus what looked like a passbook in Greek with an old photo of him that I stuck in my pocket in case I ever had to explain his death. Which just goes to show again, Grandmother, how naive I was then to think that a German soldier in Europe in 1941 might have to explain to anyone what he did to an occupied civilian, much less to one who had died of natural causes! Next I went to the mule’s room and rummaged through the bundles there, which contained some canned food and lots of bags of rice and flour and all kinds of strange spices. The mule itself was standing quietly in its place with its barley bag still tied to it, surrounded by a circle of turds. At first I thought of shooting it like the goats, but I changed my mind and began pulling it by the halter with its feedbag still around its neck, half-blindly dragging it with me in the hope that its instincts might guide me as a farmer guides you through his fields. And that’s exactly what happened. The first cricket was already chirping when I left Knossos, bent beneath my load and all but hidden behind the big hairy belly of the mule. I left the ruins as nearsightedly as I had entered them and headed back north, groping my way through morning mist as thick as breakfast porridge… and thus, Grandmother, most roundaboutly, following the mule’s nose rather than my own, I crossed the English lines not far from the first Greek houses of the city and found myself between the two Charlies again as though in the bosom of an old love. And indeed, just then I heard German being spoken in a juicy Weimar accent, which turned out to belong to two loudmouthed guards from the 4th Brigade, which had jumped the day after we did, who were sitting under a tree so engrossed in philosophic conversation a la Goethe and Eckermann that I was able to creep right up on them without being challenged. They were amazed to hear that there were still survivors from the 3rd Brigade, which had been almost totally wiped out, and suggested attaching me to them at once, although just for the record they advised me to report to what was left of my old unit — which I found in a vineyard, Grandmother, billeted flat on its back. It was only then, carefully picking my way between the wounded and the dead, that I first realized what had happened in history during my twenty-four hours in prehistory, and how lucky I had been. Not that I was indiscreet enough to tell anyone who noticed me about the ancient civilization over the hills. I didn’t even bother checking in. I just put down my stretcher, laid a real wounded soldier on it for a change, opened my medic’s kit, and went to work with my hands up to my elbows in blood, administering first aid and cauterizing and bandaging and snipping and comforting the wounded and putting the dead in body sacks. I didn’t say a word to anyone and no. one asked me where I had turned up from, so that I could have easily, Grandmother, rejoined my old brigade as just another soldier if I hadn’t noticed in the twilight, as I was carrying a wounded officer to a hut we were laying the dying in, a stretcher on top of some stones, and on it, in a heap of blood-soaked rags that had once been a uniform, my dying brigade commander, Oberst Thomas Stanzler, who had jokingly called me Icarus before we jumped from the plane. And then, Grandmother, I couldn’t resist — and in fact, if I hadn’t gone over to that stretcher just then you need never have come looking for me here, because by now I would be a bleached-out pile of bones near Stalingrad and you would have gotten a lovely death certificate to put on the wall beside the first one, where it would have hung perfectly quietly, not talking a blue streak like me. But not only did I go over to my revered commander, I actually knelt by his side, and despite the fog of death he already was in he recognized me at once, although he couldn’t talk and could only listen with his eyes closed, the blood tracing a smile on his face. And since I knew that he was going to die and would never see the Labyrinth of Knossos, or the V-sign of the Minotaur’s horns, or the urns or the double-bladed ax, and would never know about the paintings of the youths and maidens following the bull in a line, I began feverishly describing it all, so that, crushed in the jaws of history, he might at least be gladdened by the comforting nearness of prehistory. And he really did listen to me, Grandmother, with his eyes shut — and the more silently he lay there, the more carried away I became, until finally he opened his eyes, fixed them on his adjutant standing quietly next to him, made a sweeping sign like a crooked swastika, and began to wheeze out his soul. Well, just as I was getting to my feet to pay my respects to death, the adjutant hurried to a tent and came back with two orderlies whose hands were soaked with blood, and as Oberst Stanzler gave up the ghost, the adjutant ordered them to disarm me and tear off my brigade insignia and place me under arrest on the insane grounds that Stanzler’s hand movement before dying had been a verdict of guilty for my having premeditatedly fled the field of battle…

— Exactly. That’s how it started.

— Yes. No one but the adjutant.

— Not a word… just that movement of his hand. The next day, after Heraklion had been taken, I was marched, dazed and humiliated, without a chance to say a word in my defense, with the English and Greek POWs to the municipal museum, which the barbarians of the staff company had turned into a prison. You can see it right down there, Grandmother, that building with the columns that’s covered with green tiles. I’ve set the chair up at just the right angle for you to sit here and look at it…

— No, Grandmother. Try to make out the third window from the right on the second floor. That’s what I looked out on the world from while stewing in my thoughts during the long summer and short autumn of 1941.

— So I guessed right…

— But when did you find out?

— I knew it! I knew it!

— I knew you’d find some way of finding out I was in jail.

— Because I was sure that as soon as you discovered that I wasn’t in the East, you’d wonder why.

— No, I wasn’t trying to hide anything. I just didn’t want to write you about it, because I knew my letters would be read, and I didn’t want to stain the family honor you held sacred. And yet why pretend, Grandmother… I was longing all along for a word of comfort from you…

— I said comfort, not agreement…

— Because no one wanted to get involved… they all washed their hands of it… if the great commander had passed sentence on his death stretcher, there was no possible court of appeal. And that beastly adjutant, who had made it all up in his sick imagination, flew off to Berlin with a planeload of coffins a few days later to represent our brigade at all the funerals, after which he disappeared in the Adjutant General’s office there, leaving me with a sentence that was not only irrevocable and unappealable, but unspecifiable as well. Every week I petitioned the commander of the prison to be told how much time I had to serve, but no one wanted to take responsibility even for that…

— As a matter of fact, I was quite simply forgotten about, Grandmother.

— Precisely. But…

— That’s so, that’s so. You couldn’t have put it any better. You know the mentality of staff officers. But before we go on, here’s the English tea that I promised you, still piping hot and with milk in it, made to perfection by a Scottish prisoner.

— As sweet as could be… and with just the cake to go with it…

— Lately we’ve been training on bland English food to prepare for our rematch with them…

— Who knows, Grandmother, where we’ll meet up with their food again… perhaps in one of their prisoner-of-war camps…

— It’s not a matter of fear. It’s just facing facts.

— Absolutely not, Grandmother. No one intends to shed any blood for this island a second time. Enough of it already flowed like water once. Don’t you want your cake?

— But it’s really a very light and soothing sort of cake…

— Never mind… here, give it back to me, maybe you’ll change your mind later. But do please look carefully at that window, and try picturing me, Grandmother, standing there for hours on end, looking out at the hillside that we’re on now…

— That very room and window. From the twenty-third of May to the ninth of December. Twenty-eight weeks. Look at it. I paced back and forth in front of it for whole nights at a time, totally devastated in the beginning. That’s the very window I sometimes wanted to throw myself out of, especially — when he wasn’t busy saluting and pinning medals on my brigade — each, time I saw General Student appear with his staff to raise and lower the flag… the window from which I saw all the adjutants swimming and frolicking in the sea, the same sea I hadn’t even put my foot in yet, though I would have given anything to do it. One day I heard some English prisoners singing before being shipped off to a POW camp in Germany, and I was green with envy and longing… And there was a night in June when, after the 7th Paratrooper Division had received its orders to fly out of the island and I saw that everyone was determined to forget me, I lost control and began screaming into the darkness at a group of soldiers standing below me in battle gear…

— Yes. I really screamed.

— Because I kept telling myself, it simply can’t be that I don’t mean anything to anyone. No one paid me the slightest attention, because no one knew who I was anymore. My fellow wolf-packers were long dead, the adjutants were all off attending funerals, and the command of the island kept changing too. German units pulled out and Italians began to arrive. The prison guards called me “the paradeserter,” and it all became too much for me. I was even thinking, Grandmother, of telling them who I was…

— I mean, who you are… I thought that maybe the name of Admiral Sauchon would at least get me a hearing. But then, on June 22nd, the stunning news arrived of Operation Barbarossa, and all at once, most ardent Grandmother, I had a change of heart and quieted down completely…

— Not at all. On the contrary, I understood at once, Grandmother, what a dreadful mistake had been made.

— No, Grandmother, no…

— No, Grandmother, no. Old Redbeard doomed the Reich that Saturday once and for all. Because instead of pushing on southward to bathe and cleanse our age-old barbarism in a civilization more ancient than our own, folding ourselves back into the blue womb of the Mediterranean and slowly letting our history slough away from us, we were stupid enough to turn east. What for? What for, Grandmother? Supposedly, to look for living space. In point of fact, however, the only purpose of it all was to encounter other barbarians like ourselves. What were we trying to prove? How superior we were? As if we didn’t know that already… That’s when I realized that Student and his fellow generals had succeeded in bamboozling our Führer, our poor Hitler, who had taken leave of his senses and quite forgotten what that thoroughest of teachers Gustav Koch had taught us all. And that, Grandmother, was when I understood my mission: to point out to the fast-approaching Judgment Day the existence of an escape clause. And all at once I felt at peace, because I knew that something bigger and more important than that beastly adjutant, bigger and more important than Thomas Stanzler’s dying hand, had landed me in jail…

— Even if it’s only in a whisper, Grandmother, and only between the two of us, I don’t mind saying, and lord knows it’s without the slightest arrogance, that it was destiny, destiny in person Or perhaps I should say, a remnant of destiny, a shadow thrown by those famous myths that took place here. From that day on, until my release in early winter, I clung more and more fiercely, right through that window that you’re looking at, Grandmother, to this wonderful island; I studied its sounds, its smells, its shades of light by day and by night, at first in that long, blue summer, whose unexcelled clarity kept getting deeper and deeper, and afterward on into autumn, when the authorities finally gave me the right glasses, which enabled me to refine my observations and take in little details that I hadn’t noticed before, like the hills of the Chaios Range over there, or the outline of the more distant mountains. And all that time I fell back in my thoughts on those first forty-eight hours of freedom, which now seemed to have a mysterious magic… on the memory of that wonderful jump, and of landing in the olive tree, and of hiking like a sleepwalker that night to Knossos, and of the halls of the ancient Labyrinth with their reddish columns and giant urns, and of the mule led in at dawn by the two Greeks I took prisoner, and of my ghost of a hostage all trussed up in his urn while delivering a spirited lecture on that precivilizatory civilization. I thought of his family too, of that blond young man who broke into sobs while holding the little boy’s hand, and of his young wife whose image kept haunting me, stepping silently out of the darkness to shyly hand me a soft towel in which five pairs of old granny glasses were wrapped… and the more I thought about them, Grandmother, day after day, putting two and two together, the more I was tormented by the odd suspicion that they weren’t Greeks at all, but something else — which filled me, Grandmother, with the most terrible wonder…

— I mean, Grandmother… that they were Jews… some sort of Jews…

— Because it all added up.

— That’s so. But still…

— That’s so. I had never seen a Jew in my life… you had never even wanted to discuss them with me… but still, none of us can help thinking about them all the time…

— Well, part of the time, anyway.

— I don’t know. The thought began to obsess me. I actually felt indignant…

— At the thought that I might have been tricked out of fighting by Jews…

— No, none of them wore hats.

— No, no, they didn’t even have those little braids behind their ears. Don’t you think I’m familiar with all those photographs from the encyclopedia too? Anything like that would have put me on guard… No, Grandmother, these were ordinary people, that was the whole point. They were perfectly ordinary. But if you’ve finished drinking your tea, let’s head on for the next station… we don’t want to get caught by the dark…

— No, Grandmother, I’m not skipping any of it, and neither are you. You’ll never have another chance to be in such a wonderful place. In the darkness that is about to descend in Germany, on all of us, this sweet light flowing to the sea will always be a precious memory, and you’ll at least be able to comfort yourself with the thought that for more than three whole years it was ours…

— No, it’s not far, I promise… one or two hundred meters, that’s all, and it’s an easy, pleasant climb. It’s crucial not to miss the view east.

— Yes, for the sake of my story, only for it. If you had come a few months ago, I wouldn’t have bothered to bring you up here. I would have given you some goggles, put you in the sidecar of my motorcycle, and crisscrossed the island with you, making sure to show you every inlet and mountain, every monastery and temple. But you put off coming here too long, and now this island is slipping through our fingers. Soon we’ll have only the flag flying from the military government building to call our own… and so please, Grandmother, hold onto the loop on my belt and let me pull you gently upward…

— Easy does it…

— In a minute… I promise you…

— Everything. I won’t keep a thing from you.

— True

— No. It’s important. Listen. I began to put two and two together… all kinds of things that you felt too, or else why would my story have made you think of Jewish ideas and scholars…

— Exactly. It was the same with me. In the middle of one night I woke up from my sleep and said, but they must have been Jews… which depressed me terribly…

— Maybe depressed isn’t the right word. Maybe upset or disappointed would be better. I couldn’t believe it… here too? Even on a wonderful, special island like this, between the sun and the sea, among all the prehistoric antiquities? Did they have to get here before us too? And just how did they get here anyway?

— Because, Grandmother, it was elementary logic that if two Greeks rose early on the first day of the fighting to load a mule with bags of sugar and flour and spices and canned goods, they were doing it to prepare a hideout. And why would two Greeks prepare a hideout unless they were Jews who knew, not only that we would win the battle, but exactly what they could expect once it was won…

— What they could not expect, Grandmother, was tender loving care.

— Yes, rumors of the clean sweep that had begun in Eastern Europe had reached us here too. And then I thought, Grandmother, of how terrified they were when they first saw me, and of how quickly they chose to collaborate, and of how oddly eager the father was to offer himself as a hostage, and of how he stood there in that urn enthusiastically lecturing me about his fearless, guiltless ancient culture, getting history and prehistory all mixed up with each other… to say nothing of his confession that he wasn’t born in Crete but in some small, barbaric town in Asia whose name he didn’t want to reveal… and maybe, Grandmother, it was that secret, which he insisted on keeping to himself, that killed him in the end…

— In a minute… I’ll get to that too… there are still more surprises for you…

— Well, Grandmother, the thought kept tormenting me that it was Jews who had gotten me into trouble, and that if anyone ever found out about it, I’d be in even worse trouble. And so I made up my mind that I wouldn’t leave this island without finding out the truth and doing something about it if necessary… and it was just then that Major Bruno Schmelling and his police force arrived in late November to bring our amateur army up to snuff — the first step toward which was moving the prison from that ridiculous museum to a larger, more private building that had lots of cellar space, such as that winery down there, no, there, more to your right, at the far end of that square…

— Yes… the budding with the little windows…

— Exactly. Until a few years ago it was a large, active winery, but with Schmelling’s arrival it became the central prison. Not, Grandmother, that it ever stopped pressing, fermenting, and distilling… it just doesn’t use grapes any more. Anyway, as I was on my way from the museum to the winery in a long line of prisoners, totally alone and forsaken, I was suddenly discovered, a fighting paratrooper, by a true German soldier — who, as soon as he heard that I had never had a trial and was serving an unfathomable sentence, took me aside and began questioning me. It didn’t take him long to realize whom he was dealing with and to free me at once for restoration to my element, that is, to the Sixth Army on the Eastern Front — which, now that the weather had turned cold, was using up soldiers as a hungry fire burns wood. At which point I — and once again I plead guilty, Grandmother — hastened to ask for special consideration as an orphan and to be allowed to stay where I was…

— No, as a war orphan. I explained to him that my platoon had been wiped out, that the 3rd Brigade was demolished, and that Oberst Thomas Stanzler was dead, and I implored him to have me transferred to a normal, living unit instead of sending me on a wild-ghost chase to the East — which could be most simply and least time-consumingly done, I suggested, if I were attached to his own police force. After all, on such a wonderful island the police must be wonderful too…

— Yes, Grandmother. Joining the police was my own idea.

— But why a betrayal? That’s going a bit far, Grandmother!

— But how was I dishonoring our good name? How can you say such a thing? To say nothing of the fact that no one here even knew I was connected to that name…

— Don’t the police fight too, in their fashion?

— To be honest, it’s not quite the same… but still… in their fashion…

— But it is combat… in a minute you’ll understand…

— Schmelling may not have had the authority to attach me to him, but he didn’t hesitate to use the authority that he didn’t have, with the full confidence of an officer in the secret service who has temporarily come in from the cold and will soon go back out to it…

— I really don’t know. Maybe he took a liking to me, Grandmother, or maybe it was the very weirdness of my story. Perhaps he thought that my propensity for abstract thinking could be useful to the police, if only to raise their cultural level. But in fact, Grandmother, he was probably only doing what any sensible officer would have done, which was, spotting a certified medic with his equipment intact, to grab him immediately. My stretcher and knapsack were located in the warehouse of the museum with my name, serial number, and date and reason for imprisonment neatly written on them… and in that same knapsack, dearest Grandmother, which I had never thought to see again, I discovered, besides some rather moldy battle rations from the month of May, the forgotten passbook that I had filched from Father Mani’s overcoat before he gave up his ghostly ghost. And believe me, Grandmother, although I have subsequently checked no end of passbooks and birth certificates on this island and become such a great expert on them that Schmelling jokingly calls me his “birth-and-identity sergeant,” no document has ever given me the pleasure that I got from that one, because I saw at once, Grandmother, what a brilliant hunch I had had.

— No, his kind of passbook didn’t say if you were or weren’t a Jew, but it did state the date and place of birth, which is how I discovered the name of that barbaric little city in Asia that our Mr. Mani was born in…

— Guess.

— Oh, come on, Grandmother, it’s not that hard…

— But it’s a name you know well. In fact, before you joined the death-of-God crowd, you even used to sing it now and then…

— How stubborn you can be, Grandmother… suddenly you don’t know or remember anything…

— Baghdad? Why on earth Baghdad? Since when did you ever sing hymns to Baghdad?

— No…

— It’s so obvious, Grandmother… guess again!

— But what else could it be but Jerusalem, Grandmother! What else could it be?

— Of course I knew that. It didn’t mean he had to be a Jew. He could have been an Arab or a Greek or a Turk or an Englishman or anyone else born in Jerusalem. But I also knew that these weren’t our real enemies, that at most they were obstacles in our way, whereas the Jews were the underlying reason for the whole enterprise, the bull’s-eye flickering behind every target in this war. And so, Grandmother, how could I have sat quietly a minute longer when I was already contaminated by my contact with them? If there were any Manis still left on the island, I had to find out who they were, because how could we possibly purify ourselves in the ancient womb of our ancestors, as old Gustav Koch desired, with a lot of beastly Jews running around and demanding with their typical insolence to be our partners here too, to share our most primeval myths…

— I am? I am, Grandmother?

— Maybe it’s you who are…

— Yes, you back home in the fatherland. You’re the really crazy ones, drunk on your army that went galloping off to Moscow… No, there was nothing crazy about me… all I wanted, all I still want, is the salvation of Germany…

— I’ll walk slower. Just hold on tight.

— No, Grandmother, there’s no turning back now. That would be depressingly defeatist… and it’s such a nice path… the air is so invigorating… we’ve already come most of the way, and best of all, we have some spectacular views still ahead of us…

— Jerusalem?

— From here?

— No… we can’t see that far, ha ha… that’s a good one…

— No. Even though between Crete and Palestine there’s only a smooth stretch of sea that the ancients crossed without difficulty, it’s still too far from here to see Jerusalem, not even with eyes as sharp as yours… No, my dear grandmother Andrea, my sights are more modest, and more faithful to my slowly unfolding tale — all I want to point out to you in this panorama of pinkening light is what was once the house of the Manis, which is the same house that I arrived at a few days after my release from prison, riding free and easy on an army motorcycle like the one you once refused to let me buy with my savings, despite all my tears and pleas to you…

— Too young? Still? Well, perhaps… but it’s odd how my youth seems to have evaporated all at once. Most likely, without noticing, we stuffed it into our kitbags in boot camp along with our civilian shirts, and it simply faded away there. You won’t find any youngsters here, only soldiers, whose helmets and battle gear make them all look the same age in life and in death. But here, take a look down there… farther east, Grandmother, farther east, down in those vineyards… even if you don’t see it, take my word for it, their house is hidden in there, along the road from Knossos to Ios. It was the first house that I entered, Grandmother, as a conquering soldier in the Year of our Lord 1941. Since then, Grandmother, I’ve entered many houses uninvited, turned closets and beds upside down, broken into drawers, made sieves out of mattresses with my bayonet, and learned that if I want to keep my sanity, I mustn’t be too polite, which means that as soon as I kick in the door I blame whoever is on its other side and march firmly, with no may-I’s or apologies, into rooms that enrage me by the very presence of closets, drawers, pantries, and even walls, as if a conquered house were expected to be a single, undivided space that you could charge through at the drop of a hat. But that winter evening, which was caressed by a thin, fragrant rain, I was still a novice, Grandmother, and so I stepped gently up to the door, even wiping the mud off my boots, and murmured “Excuse me” to the young woman who let me in without even recognizing me, not just because it was dark in the house, or because I had exchanged my paratrooper’s uniform for a police outfit, or because I was wearing glasses instead of a helmet, but because on that night back in May, apparently, she hadn’t realized that I was a human being with a soul and mind of my own and had simply taken me for a military dragon that lunged at her from the depths of the Labyrinth and left her husband’s father stone dead. But her husband, Mr. Mani Junior, who hurried into the room when he heard my voice, still dragging his little boy after him like a big kangaroo whose pouch was ripped, recognized me at once, Grandmother, and all that terrible anxiety flowed back into him, as if he saw the ghost of his father spread-eagled on my back with its passbook in its hand. And for a moment, Grandmother, I was on the verge of shooting him just like I shot the flock of goats, because I was still innocent enough to believe, back in 1941, that fear was a sure sign of guilt. But although I still didn’t know then that there is a fear that is pure, guiltless, and utterly sin-free, I controlled myself and turned to him without anger or threats, I just looked him straight in the eye and said very slowly in the simplest, easiest German I could think of, “So you are a Jew, sir…”

— Yes, Grandmother, without any of those cat-and-mouse tricks from the detective stories. Because not only didn’t we share a common language in which to beat around the bush, I had decided in any case that direct shock tactics were the best way of showing him and his wife that I knew everything, even if I didn’t yet know what to do about it. And then, Grandmother, Citizen Mani squared his shoulders, threw a desperate glance at his wife to see if she understood what was happening, looked brightly back at me, and said (I’ll never know, Grandmother, if he thought it up on the spur of the moment, or if it was something he had prepared well in advance, perhaps on the morning he came across his father lying dead by those big urns, and had now finally found the occasion for), these were his very words, Grandmother, which came out in a kind of stammer: “I was Jewish, but I am not anymore… I’ve canceled it…”

— I know, Grandmother… just a minute… I know…

— I know, Grandmother… hold on a minute… for God’s sake… can’t you listen for just once…

— Yes, Grandmother, yes. He even said it again in the same broken, embryonic German that he had learned during the six months of occupation, which were the equivalent of a few days of Berlitz lessons in Berlin. At first, Grandmother, I must admit that I was so stunned by his answer that I couldn’t get a word out. I just stood there, like you, fuming and indignant. But then, Grandmother, I remembered what you taught me yourself whenever we listened to his speeches on the radio, that a fool is frightened by absurdity while a wise man finds something to learn from it, and so I just smiled at him, and took his dead father’s passbook from my pocket, and opened it, and put my finger on the Greek word, and asked in the same easygoing German, “And have you canceled Jerusalem too, sir?” That was already too much for him. He stepped toward me clumsily with the little boy in his arms and grabbed the passbook away from me, as if now that his father had shrunk to the size of a small book he could finally free him from my clutches, looked desperately at his wife again, and then turned back to me, waved his arms in search of the German words, and said in much the same vein, “We have been in Jerusalem, but no more…” At which point, Grandmother, are you listening, I felt almost blissfully happy…

— Yes, yes… to the point that I actually bowed my head to Citizen Mani in grateful acknowledgment, made a little circuit of the room, a kind of pantomime house search, saluted the whole family, and left at once…

— An ordinary salute, like any well-mannered policeman would give a family of law-abiding citizens…

— I was happy for two reasons, Grandmother, the first being that my intellectual diagnosis had indeed been razor-sharp, and the second, that the infection had already cured itself, so that the blue womb that we had returned to was as pure and uncontaminated as ever…

— I assumed, Grandmother, that sooner or later I would hear that nasty word from you, and I’ve been bracing for it for the last half-hour…

— But you know perfectly well that I’m not that type.

— Because I’m not stupid, Grandmother, I simply am not and never was, neither in your opinion nor in anyone else’s…

— If that’s so, we should investigate how and when I became one, but it isn’t…

— But for God’s sake, Grandmother, will you listen to me…

— I hear you.

— Fine. I hear you.

— Fine, go ahead…

— I’m listening.

— Yes…

— Yes…

— Yes…

— Yes…

— Can I say something now?

— Hold on there…

— All right.

— I hear you.

— Now listen carefully, Grandmother. No, just a minute. I heard you out quietly, now you hear me out and tell me if it isn’t ludicrous and in poor taste to talk like that, in such biological or zoological terms, about people and even whole nations. Why, it’s humiliating even for us Germans… as if we were all different strains of dogs or monkeys. No, Grandmother, please, that was never the intention of our Daemon, because the word “race” was an allegorical reference to another, more respectable word, namely, nature, which is what counts, and what is nature if not character, both human and national, which can be described and changed… Why, didn’t Hider himself speak of the danger of the Jew in each one of us?

— He did, I swear… he did too… in the youth movement, in Flansburg, there were those who knew his every word by heart…

— Of course… of course he did… which is why Citizen Mani Junior’s answer made me so happy, because I understood that if that stubborn, beastly essence of Jewishness can cancel its own self, then there’s hope for us too, Grandmother…

— Once more for two reasons, Grandmother. The first is that we won’t have to hunt down every last Jew in order to destroy him, because each Jew will cancel himself. And the second is that, when the time comes, we’ll be able to do the same thing…

— Because suppose there’s another Judgment Day, Grandmother, and they’ll want to make us pay like after the first war, when they caused you such aggravation. We too will be able to say then, “We were Germans but we are not anymore… we’ve canceled it…”

— But hold on there, Grandmother, hold on, you’re losing your temper for no good reason. You’re angry and you keep calling me names as if I were attacking you personally, but I’m not that stupid and I’m not that crazy… it’s true that sometimes, I admit, I have strange ideas, but reality has always been kind enough to put them into practice for me…

— No, I’m not pulling your leg, heavens, no. Far from it, I’m simply telling you my story in proper sequence, and who knows, it may cause you pleasure in the end… perhaps even joy… because wait, I haven’t come to the last surprise yet…

— In a minute… I’m getting to it… but first let’s walk a few more meters to that big white box over there, in those trees up ahead of us… over there, do you see it?

— Yes, over there… that white box… which is… come on, Grandmother, guess…

— Never mind, just say the first thing that comes to mind…

— A mailbox? That’s a good one, ha ha… No, Grandmother, who would come all the way up here to mail a letter? It’s got to be something else…

— But here, Grandmother, take a look: it’s simply a miniature little church, a pocket church, with a glass wall, and a tiny little altar behind it, and a teeny dish of oil for the dead, and a little doll of the Virgin holding her baby Savior who’s no bigger than a needle. The Greeks put these sweet little churches everywhere, Grandmother, to prevent travelers and passersby who are in a state of ecstasy from the sun, or the sea, or the sky, from backsliding to the paganism of the ancients and going down on their knees, God forbid, before trees and stones. It keeps them honest and faithful to the religion of their forefathers… but don’t look at me, Grandmother, look at the sky, because now begins its grand moment, just look at it blushing for you…

— If you’re tired again, we can sit for a while on this bench. It’s here for the faithful. Would you like to pray a little?

— But you’re here all alone… no one will see you… and it’s the same Virgin as the one in the Lutheran church near our estate, even if she is so tiny…

— If you don’t want to, you don’t have to, it doesn’t matter. If you’d like, I even possess the vested authority to commandeer that little doll with her baby and make you a present of them, so that you can have them as a souvenir of this hike and this wonderful view, and even of me too perhaps, because who knows…

— What I’m saying, Grandmother, is who knows if I’ll ever come home again…

— What?

— Go on!

— What makes you so sure?

— But how? Who?

— That’s ridiculous. I’m being transferred to Germany? Who even knows that I’m on this godforsaken island?

— But what do you think? Tell me this minute…

— I want the truth, Grandmother. Was it your doing? The truth, Grandmother… have you been meddling again?

— But what can you know about it when you don’t even understand what happened? I have to stay here… I have to find them… ach, damn you, why did you have to go rushing off again, Grandmother, without even asking me first…

— I’m sorry… I’m sorry…

— The two of them… the woman and the child…

— Playing games with Jews? Games? On the contrary, you’ll see in a minute… just the opposite…

— But it’s not for them, it’s for us, Grandmother… for Germany… the Jews here, and everywhere, are simply guinea pigs on whom we can perform an experiment that we’re still afraid to perform on ourselves. They even like being experimented on, they’re so used to changing shapes and jumping from test tube to test tube. Just look at all I’ve learned these past three years, at what an expert I’ve become… even if you don’t agree with my train of thought, you can’t accuse me, Grandmother, of superficiality. Don’t you remember how many exams I flunked in school because I refused to give superficial answers to superficial questions? Surely you don’t think that just because the idea pleased me, I let myself be innocently carried away by it, or excused myself from the necessity of checking and double-checking it to see if young Mr. Mani’s astonishing confession rang true, if it was at all plausible! I was so beside myself, Grandmother, so on fire with new questions, that that same night, when my shift at the prison was over, I climbed onto my motorcycle instead of into bed and went racing off at the crack of dawn to that house outside of Knossos, where I knocked loudly on the door. This time I didn’t wait to be let in. I climbed through a window, went right to the back room, which happened to be their bedroom, shone my flashlight on the pile of blankets under which those canceled Jews were lying, and shook them out of the last of their sleep for another interrogation, shivering from cold, the woman all soft and wild-haired in a flannel nightgown embroidered in red, and the man in the same overcoat that had been worn by his father. I could see from his calm look that he wasn’t surprised by my appearance, as if he had realized that one night was not enough to digest his confession but only to throw it back up at him…

— I thought I would search their house, Grandmother, for something Jewish that they took out at night, something that might refute his declaration, although in fact, I had no idea what anything Jewish might look like or how to go about finding it, because I was still so naive, Grandmother, that back then, in the winter of ‘41, I didn’t know what was already clear to me by the spring of ‘42, that is, that there’s nothing Jewish that a Jew can’t do without…

— I mean that a Jew’s identity, Grandmother, can exist purely in his own mind, which is why there is reason to believe it can be canceled there too…

— But that’s precisely the point… that’s the point, O wisest and most perspicacious Grandmother, that I keep trying to get across to you, so that you’ll understand how difficult, how profound, how almost absurd is the war that the Führer has declared on them…

— No. I never said a word to Major Schmelling.

— Because I knew, Grandmother, that it was too subtle for him. Who is this Schmelling, after all? An elderly police officer of the old school who knows about Jews from the newspapers and hysterical speeches and slogans on the walls, which is why he takes them so literally, so that he thinks the world is like the Berlin Zoo, in which you can go from cage to cage comparing the animals until you find the Super-Ape… No, I wouldn’t want to confuse him with an idea that I myself haven’t finished working out yet…

— Have I gotten to the point? Not yet… not yet… especially since young Mani himself only sank to the bottom of the sea some eight weeks ago… although on the other hand…

— I’m getting there… in a minute… in a minute you’ll understand…

— Of course, Grandmother. After all, I could simply have told myself, as you keep telling me, “He’s just putting one over on you, this beastly Jew, he’s just trying to dodge his fate.” But I knew that was the easy way out, the answer you give when all you have patience for is blasting away with your schmeisser, and that, perhaps because I was helped to arrive on this island by a gentle push from above, I should first tune in to my surroundings, not for the sake of Mani Junior, but for our own sake, for the sake of Germany and the Germans, to see if one couldn’t return to the starting point and become simply human again, a new man who can cancel the scab of history that sticks to us like ugly dandruff and put the dark, moldy rooms full of worm-eaten books, the faded oil paintings, the grotesque sculptures, behind him for the sunlit aperture, Grandmother, that you see spread out before you in all its glory, chorusing away in the crickets that won’t, I’m afraid, let us hear ourselves think unless we get up and move on… Come, Grandmother, let’s go…

— No, there’s not much more… I promise… I beg you…

— No, we still have time before dark… and we’re not far from the top now… Even if this story of mine only irritates you, the fantastic view that you’re about to see, with its radiant expanse of air and water, will reward you for all your aggravation…

— Exactly… exactly… you see, you do understand me, Grandmother…

— Thank you, Grandmother, thank you…

— I know…

— Of course you’ll have the right of reply…

— I promise you… for as long as you like… I’ll listen to you all evening…

— Yes, exactly. That’s what I told myself too, “Even if he’s trying to put one over on you, you’ll make him stick to his word,” and so my first order of business was making sure he didn’t take to the mountains, which meant that every day or two, Grandmother, I paid him a surprise visit just to check that he was still canceling away…

— At first just house visits, Grandmother, because we’re still talking about the winter and spring of ‘42 when I was at the bottom of the ladder, an ordinary guard working the night shift in that big, dry winery that Schmelling turned into a prison. As soon as my shift was over, with the first light of dawn, while my brain was still on fire with the screams of tortured suspects, I would climb on my cycle and speed off from Heraklion to Knossos along roads still silenced by the curfew, which in those days was dutifully honored by the inhabitants, to pay a call on my own private, secret suspects, who began leaving the door open for me once they realized I wasn’t going to leave them alone, so that I could step right into their bedroom without bothering them, two heaps of blankets that my flashlight played over as it looked for something Jewish whose name, shape, or nature I hadn’t the foggiest notion of. In those days I still believed that, if only it existed, it was bound to emerge from the bedclothes at night and cancel the cancellation

— No, Grandmother. Because by the early summer of ‘42 I had finally managed to persuade Schmelling to take the palace of Minos under our constabulary wing and even to maintain a small guard post there for whatever high police officials, aboveboard or undercover, wished to run their hands over the new map of Germany and delight in how big it had become by visiting us from the far ends of the Reich. Meanwhile, promoted by Schmelling to Feldwebel, I was appointed to be our guests’ escort, and the first thing I did with them, Grandmother, was take them to the top of this hill to tell them the fabled story of our air drop and of the magnificent battles that followed. Then, when I had won their confidence and enthusiasm, I would convince them to come along with me to Knossos for a look at its ancient Labyrinth, which I tried getting them to see not just as an ancient ruin repainted to suit the whims of a fanatical British archaeologist but as a possible goal, a holy grail for all Europe, for the European of the future who will be free of fear and guilt… and there, by the entrance to the antiquities, not far from the statue of Sir Arthur Evans, I sometimes found my citizen, my canceled ex-Jew, standing in his little shop with his child next to him as usual, busy with his herbal jars and medicinal bottles and souvenirs for the tourists, little figurines of the Minotaur and miniature earthenware urns and tiny bull-horn V’s, and since he still had his father’s concession to the site, I went and bought half-price tickets from him for my party of guests, or sometimes from his delicate young wife if he himself was inside the ruins guiding some group of Greek tourists, who, back in ‘42 or ‘43, were still coming from Athens and Salonika to vacation on this island and even giving us Germans a friendly smile, as if we were tourists like them and the rifles slung over our shoulders were for hunting in the mountains. And so now I no longer had to keep a nightly eye on him, because I had him in my sights every day, my ex-Jew who had become, or so I tried convincing myself, an ordinary human being, pure unadulterated homo sapiens, at home in an ancient, blissful civilization that, free of the self-invented contamination of Jewry, had lived without guilt or fear, safely ensconced in its unfortified temple that had no protective walls, its marble steps cascading down to reddish halls in which youths and maidens walked happily behind the quiet bull. Sometimes, Grandmother, I would run into him by the huge urns where his father was bound and died, and the sight of him standing there and smiling peacefully back at me gave me no end of faith that a man could remake his own self by himself, and I must say, Grandmother, that if you’re right and he was only playing a part, he played it to the hilt, he couldn’t have looked more natural pulling that little boy after him, because he took him everywhere to keep him out of the way of my officers — who, in the gleaming leather boots they all wore, both those in black uniforms and those in civilian clothes, listened to me lecture on the ancient civilization that knew neither guilt nor fear while smiling mysteriously to themselves… ach, those gorillas with diplomas, those supermurderers, those geniuses of destruction — the scum, the scandal of Germandom!…

— Yes, yes…

— You know, you know very well, Grandmother…

— Yes… you know… you know… we all know, even those of us who think that we don’t…

— Yes!

— Yes, yes, yes! Don’t be so innocent!

— All right, I’ve calmed down.

— All right.

— I’ve calmed down.

— Fine, I beg your pardon…

— Soon… one more minute… here, we’re already at our last station. We have finally arrived, Grandmother, at the old Turkish guard post that has been standing here since the last century. Come see why they put it here, the vista you have of the sea… of the sea and nothing but the sea. Yes, the Turks sat up here a hundred years ago, on the lookout for pirates… here, have a seat, Grandmother… please, sit down… I’m sorry I shouted at you…

— Who am I to be blaming anyone? After all, I’m part of it myself, even if, when I first arrived on this island, I was inspired by the belief in a new way, national and individual — because my canceled Mani was just an allegory, part of a much bigger philosophy, which, by the autumn of 1943, I knew would have to be put to the test…

— I’m getting there…

— Italy fell, and the same Italians who had been semi-allies now became semi-prisoners who had to be disarmed and guarded. We suddenly felt such isolation… and the more it grew, Grandmother, the more enemies we made, which meant we had to corral them and count them twice a day, morning and evening, to make sure we had caught them all… except that we didn’t really believe that ourselves, which made us look for still more enemies, whom we found immediately, although since we didn’t believe that they were all there were either, we tortured them to lead us to more enemies, and so on and so forth… And thus we were kept busy all day long, guarding and counting and hunting and searching and interrogating, which led to still more hunts and searches, so that by the time the midnight shift came on we discovered that our isolation had grown even greater and that by now we were the prisoners of our prisoners. It was at that point that we called for help. And so early last spring two experts came from Athens and at once scolded Schmelling for accumulating too many prisoners, which would never have happened if he had killed more of them and locked up less, which was why their first command was to round up all the Jews and ship them off to wherever Jews were shipped. You can imagine my shock, I who had naively thought that if the one Jew I found had been canceled all of Jewry had been canceled too, at being handed a list of still more Jews — who, it turned out, had been living all along in and around Heraklion, although some had already managed to escape…

— No, Grandmother, his name was not on the list, not because anyone higher up had accepted his cancellation, but because no one knew of his existence. His father was not a native, having been born in Jerusalem and banished to Crete by the British at the end of the last war, and since all those years he had kept his distance from other Jews, he was now beyond the pale of any non-Jewish informers. Of course, had I wanted, I could have canceled that distance and returned the Manis to the fold in no more time than it takes to write a name on a list, but precisely this, I realized, was the great test, not only for him, but for me, Grandmother, because I had to decide on the spot, all by myself, if his cancellation was real or even conceivable, not only for himself but for anyone anywhere, or if we both had simply been playing with words for three years. And without thinking twice I decided… well, what do you think? What? Guess what I decided, Grandmother!

— Right you are! A most accurate guess, although I didn’t do it for the reasons you think I did, that is, out of sheer innocent stupidity, but on the contrary, after profound meditation, and especially, in loyalty to you, Grandmother, and in the spirit of our conversations on those winter evenings back in ‘39, when I was studying for my history and literature finals and you knew that the war was on its way. You asked me then to pray to the God you no longer believed in that the havoc and destruction wreaked by Germany should lead to a better future — which was why, accompanied by a soldier I took along to guard my clarity of mind, I went straight to Mani Junior, because I knew that many of the names on the list had already made themselves scarce. And it was a good thing that I got there when I did, because the mule was already tethered behind the house, loaded with sacks that no doubt contained flour and sugar and spices, which meant that he too had heard the rumors about the list in my possession and was preparing to take off. He was caught in the act, pale and bewildered, and so I said to him, “Mr. Citizen Mani, I’ve come to tell you that you needn’t worry or run away, because you’ve canceled yourself and now you’re null and void and nothing but a man, a pure homo sapiens living in the ruins of the ancient civilization of Knossos, which wouldn’t have known a Jew if it saw one, because the Jews hadn’t invented themselves yet. And now,” I said to him, “is the ultimate test to find out if you believe in me as I have believed in you…”

— Aha… it’s about time you paid me a compliment. So you do admit it, you admit that you see my point…

— Thank you, Grandmother, thank you.

— I’m listening, of course I am…

— Well, he listened to me very carefully, even though, after three years of occupation, his German was no better than before, a bloodless excuse for a language, and exchanged looks and whispers with his wife, who, three years after the night on which I saw her for the first time, still seemed the same age as me. She gave him a wise, thoughtful nod, and he went over and unloaded the mule, which I killed at once with a single bullet to relieve him of the need for any second thoughts. Then I said good-bye to them both and rode off to ferret out of their holes all the other Jews who either couldn’t or didn’t want to cancel themselves…

— By then there weren’t many of them left… we had gotten off to a late start… by deportation day, the entire island had yielded only two hundred seventy of them…

— I’m almost done… in a minute, Grandmother, I’ll be done… why, you’re as eager to get to the end as a small child…

— Of course I had my doubts. Let me say once more that I’ve never been naive. In fact, the following night, which was the night of May 20, the third anniversary of my jump, I returned. I found a free moment amid the bedlam of registering all the prisoners, jumped on my trusty old cycle, which was old and scarred by now, and raced off to see him, even though this meant taking my life in my hands on the roads between the villages, because a special east wind had carried the smell of German blood from the steppes of Russia, and like a subtle spice it had put some backbone in the Cretans and a new impudence in their eyes. But that didn’t stop me, because I had to know if he had stayed behind and trusted me as I had trusted him, if he really believed his own words about canceling his superfluous non-essence. When I got there I almost jumped for joy, because there was light behind the lowered curtains. And yet when I knocked on the door and entered the house, which I had gotten to know every detail of over the years, I could tell at once from the restless motion of his hands as he rose to greet me that something had happened, or was missing, and at once the thought crossed my mind that the woman and child had been spirited off to the mountains, which made me so mad that I pointed my schmeisser at his stomach, intending to kill him with a single long burst. But just then he let out a bitter cry in the shadows, and, grabbing hold of the barrel of the schmeisser to deflect it, he blurted out the plea, the explanation, the rebuke, that it was precisely the mutual trust and understanding between us that had made him send the child away with its mother, since he could not possibly demand of his son, who was too young to cancel himself, what he was able to demand of his own self, so that for the time being the boy had to remain an uncanceled Jewish child…

— I knew you would say that.

— I knew you would say that… I give up…

— But it was just the opposite… just the opposite, Grandmother… listen… if he himself had stayed behind, that could only mean that he had faith and confidence in what he had done… that much is undeniable… we had both passed the test, he had passed mine and I had passed his…

— I saluted him again and returned to Knossos, which was completely dark by then. I looked up at the sky full of stars and thought of that night three years ago, back in ‘41, after I had come floating down from the sky like Daedalus in Gustav Koch’s myth, and then I stepped into the little guard post near Mani’s store not far from the bust of Sir Arthur Evans and telephoned Schmelling, who was very upset about the disappointing number of Jews rounded up so far. “It can’t be,” he kept telling me, “there must be more of them, there has to be, you simply haven’t looked hard enough.” and so I said, “I’ve found all the Jews I can, but is it all right with you if I arrest a citizen who helped a Jewish mother and her child escape to the mountains,” and he said, “Of course, of course, bring him in,” and so I went back to the house, wondering if Mani Junior still was there or had taken to his heels too, and there he was behind the curtains, which were drawn because of the blackout, faithful less to his promise to me, Grandmother, than to the insidious idea that had gripped him in a vise, which is why I startled him so by coming back to tell him that he was under arrest for helping Jews escape, for that and nothing else. He began protesting and putting up such a fight that I had to fire at the walls to calm him down, after which I handcuffed him, sat him in the sidecar of my cycle, and sped back along the empty roads to reunite him with his imprisoned brethren whom he thought he had renounced… But now look, Grandmother, look over there to the west, how quick and subtle the sunset is…

— Exactly. That’s the surprise I promised you… you see, you needn’t have worried…

— Well, then, don’t. In the end he was thrown into that dry winery with all the other Jews who had been brought from all over the island — and since there weren’t enough of them to suit the experts from Athens, our addlebrained Schmelling decided to add four hundred Greek prisoners, and since that still proved too little, he also threw in three hundred of our ex-Italian friends, who were now simply so many detained nuisances. On the sixth of June there were whispered rumors about a big enemy landing in France, and so we moved as quickly as we could and loaded all the deportees that same day on a small ship that was commandeered in Heraklion harbor. We clamped a curfew on the city to keep people away from the pier, but even then, when the deportees were marched from the prison, the rooftops and terraces were so lined with onlookers that we were ordered to fire in the air. And I, Grandmother, the birth-and-identity specialist, seeing how worried everyone was that the ship might be waylaid on its way to Greece, suggested to Schmelling and his officers that we change its name and give it a new identity. I even found an appropriate one in the books you sent me, Danae, which was the name of the daughter of Acrisius, King of Argos. Old Koch would have been proud of me! And indeed, the sailors painted over the old name, and that evening the ship set sail for Santorini. It didn’t get far, however, before a British bomber flying innocently overhead noticed an unfamiliar vessel and sank it not far from the point where our sun is about to disappear…

— Citizen Mani was on it too. Where else could he have been? He went down with the ship.

— Just once. Very briefly, as he was standing in line for his supper. I promised to have him freed if he told me where his wife and child were, but he wouldn’t answer me, and I had no time to determine if this meant he had abandoned the logic that had spun the two of us around in its closed circle, or if, on the contrary, he had realized that this logic meant not only freeing him, but arresting his wife and child and sending them off with the other deportees…

— Of course.

— Of course. Why not? I was perfectly serious…

— Why not? It was only natural, wasn’t it?

— If you, for instance, just for the sake of the argument, had been born a Jew…

— Now don’t get angry…

— I’m sorry.

— All right… all right…

— Right, we’ll start back down soon, Grandmother. As I told you when we started out, the twilight here is very short, not at all like in Germany…

— That was the end of it, Grandmother. This happened two months ago, and since then we’ve opened a new corral that’s filled up amazingly quickly, even though there’s not a Jew left on the island — except, of course, for that woman and her child, whom I would gladly hunt down in the mountains if we weren’t forbidden to leave the town limits of Heraklion, so that all I can do is come up here every evening before dark, to this old Turkish guard post, and look to see if they haven’t snuck back home… if the lights aren’t on in their house again…

— The woman?

— What makes you ask?

— But I already described her…

— I’d say average height… nice-looking… what more can one say?

— Why do you ask?

— No, no one in particular… maybe…

— Maybe… but why do you ask?

— At first I did think there was something… in the expression or the smile… maybe some old photograph we had at home… but little by little the resemblance seemed to fade…

— Not of Mother… not of her… of you, actually, Grandmother… a very old photograph…

— I’ll go on lying in wait for her here. Perhaps I’ll catch her and her little boy after all… because the thought that we’ll soon have to leave this place for the swamps and the fog again, and that they will continue to look out at this brilliant bay through these ancient, enchanting olive trees — that thought so aggravates me, Grandmother, that I’m ready to go on sitting here forever until I lay my hands on them.

— Why?

— When?

— What are you talking about?

— Since when?

— But since when? Who told you?

— I’m fighting for Germany right here… that is, until the English come…

— How? Since when?

— Tomorrow?

— What are you talking about?

— No transfer order will ever get here…

— I don’t get it… what order?

— But how can that be? Who gave it to you?

— But whose signature is on it? Who had the authority to sign it?

— Let me see it. I don’t believe you…

— You went all the way to the top, didn’t you? All the way… but why didn’t you ask me first? Ach, what have I ever done to you, Grandmother, to make you keep meddling in my destiny?

— But I don’t understand whom it’s meant for. Whom do you intend to show it to?

— Let me see it, I don’t believe you…

— Show it to me… it can’t be…

— No, there’s enough light…

— But let me see it. What are you afraid of?

— His own signature is on it? It’s impossible… you’re out of your mind, Grandmother… you went to him? I don’t believe it…

— What does the name of Sauchon have to do with it?

— I don’t wish to make a mockery of anything.

— But how? How, Grandmother? I give up… you didn’t understand my story… you missed the whole point… why, it’s just the opposite… all along what I’ve been talking about is our freedom. We can’t go on hunting down every one of them until the end of history… we have to let them cancel themselves… my one worry is for our poor Germany… for our despairing Führer… for the future…

— You musn’t say that… it isn’t true…

— No, now I understand. You want me to be killed in a final, lost battle for Germany… just like you sent Egon to his death in the first war… I was right after all… you still don’t accept my existence! I thought you had come to see me because you loved me, I thought you might even stay with me here, but now I see that you’ve come to take me away… it’s out of the question… I don’t agree to it… I won’t go… no, Grandmother, don’t show it to anyone… don’t give anyone that order… I beg you, don’t give it to anyone…

— But what honor? For the love of God, what honor? Whose honor?

— No, I will not give it back to you… not until you promise me to destroy it… it’s a poindess, an unacceptable piece of paper…

— In that case I’ll tear it myself… you can have his signature back, and I’ll tear the rest and scatter it to the winds…

— I will too dare… I won’t give it back… I won’t… I swear to you by all that’s holy, I’ve seen the dead and I don’t want to join them… you can’t decide that for me… you have no right to… you have no right… you didn’t kill God to take His place… you’re not Zeus’s great-grandson Minos…

— Then I’ll give up both the name and the honor. I was born as a compensation that didn’t compensate anyone. As far as you’re concerned, Creation itself was a mistake… the whole world is a mistake… deep down you’re one of them… your despair comes from the same place…

— I don’t want any part of the estate… I don’t want a single speck of it… because I don’t want any part of the insane suicide that the Führer is planning. I’m staying here, and I’m not leaving this island until the English come. No, Grandmother, you are not Minos, the great-grandson of Zeus… you can’t judge me… you have no right to…

— No, listen… listen…

— Yes, listen, you must, it’s from the Homer you yourself sent me…

— No, wait, here, listen… how beautiful The Odyssey is… There I saw Minos, great-grandson of Zeus,/ In his hand a golden scepter, as he sat speaking to the dead,/ And they gathered round him, the destiny-decreeing governor of their fate,/ They who sat and stood in the dwellings of broad-gated Hades…

Biographical

Supplements

EGON BRUNER The news that his grandmother’s plane had crashed into the sea took a few days to reach Corporal Egon Bruner, who grieved greatly for the old woman, both because he had been deeply attached to her in his fashion and because their farewell had been traumatic for them both. Nevertheless, Egon felt certain that he had been right to tear up the transfer order.

Despite the increase in Greek partisan attacks on the German army in Crete, Egon remained determined to discover the village or monastery in which Mrs. Mani and her child were hiding, but he searched in vain. In October, in response to a British breakthrough, he was transferred with his unit to northern Italy, and from there, via Austria, to the raging Eastern Front. In January 1945, in the midst of a particularly hard winter, he was stationed in an abandoned manor house not far from the Polish town of Oświ[ecedil]cim., where he served as a medic in a support unit for the garrison of a nearby concentration camp. In February 1945 he was taken prisoner by the Russians, who held him until January 1946. Upon his release, he returned to his grandparents’ estate, which, in the postwar confusion, he took possession of as if it were his own. However, when the family attorney returned from a prolonged internment in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia and opened the Sauchons’ will, it came to light that Egon was mentioned there as no more than a possible heir, nor was anything said about his being the admiral’s son. Consequently, several nephews of his father laid claim to the property on the grounds that Egon had failed to prove his right to the title. Not wanting to reopen the episode of his “desertion” during the invasion of Crete, especially because he feared revealing the purpose of his grandmother’s trip to the island, Egon agreed to an out-of-court settlement that deprived him of the estate’s northeast quadrant.

Meanwhile, he had begun studying at the University of Hamburg. At first he thought of majoring in ancient Greek history, but classical Greek proved too hard for him and he switched to twentieth-century history. In the 1950s he taught history at a high school not far from his estate, and being a bachelor, he had plenty of time for his political activities in the Liberal Party. His relations with his mother and stepbrother were correct but little more than that.

In the 1960s, when the Social-Democrats came to power in Germany with Liberal backing, Egon was appointed to direct the Goethe Institute, in Athens. It took a few months for him to gather the courage to visit Crete — where, concerned he might be recognized, he went about with a beard and dark sunglasses. But no one recognized him, not even the proprietress of the grocery store in Heraklion where he had bought tobacco during his three years on the island. He was able to establish that the Mani house in Knossos was lived in by an unfamiliar Greek family, but he did not dare approach and ask about its former inhabitants. Eventually, he rented a motorcycle and took to roaming the mountainous back roads of the island, knocking on the doors of little monasteries and asking about the Jewish woman and her son. He was unable to come up with any information, however, except for the standard assurance that there were no Jews left in Crete, because they all had gone down with the Danae. It surprised Egon Bruner that no one sounded at all sorry about it.

Egon visited Crete several more times during his term at the Goethe Institute in Athens, and once, in 1963, he even continued on from there to Israel, where he spent an interesting week as a guest of the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv. One day, while waiting there in the office, it occurred to him to ask his colleague’s secretary to look up the name Mani in the telephone book. When asked by her how to spell it, he confessed to having no idea, and so she gave him a list with all the possible variations; yet seeing how long it was, and that it included families from all over the country and even one Arab, Egon Bruner gave up and did not pursue the matter further.

After the generals’ coup in Greece, Egon Bruner returned to Germany, but in 1973 he went abroad again to direct the Goethe Institute in Istanbul. Subsequently, he left his work and retired to his small estate in northern Germany. Although occasionally he took part in the Jewish- and Israeli-German dialogues that were organized by the Liberal Party-sponsored Baumen Institute, he reacted with distaste to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and discontinued his participation in these meetings.

ANDREA SAUCHON The old woman was so shocked and upset by Egon’s tearing up of his transfer order on the hilltop in the Cretan twilight that for a moment she literally lost the power of speech. Even when she regained it, her indignation and sorrow were such that she resolved not to say another word to her grandson until she had thought the matter over. They descended the hill slowly. Although it was clear to her that she had failed miserably in Egon’s education, she could not put her finger on what went wrong or what lapse in Egon’s moral code could explain (if indeed there was any explanation) his behavior over the past three years in Crete. When they reached the army base after a slow hour’s walk, dusk was already falling and an impatient Bruno Schmelling was waiting worriedly for them. At once he informed them of the banquet he was giving in honor of Admiral Sauchon’s wife, but to his astonishment, Frau Sauchon begged off, pleading a headache and the need to rest up for her trip home. Schmelling turned red and was mortified. The meal, which he had prepared himself, meant a great deal to him, yet the old lady stubbornly stuck to her guns despite all his remonstrances.

Andrea Sauchon could not fall asleep that night. At first she was kept awake by her grandson’s pacing outside her locked door, and later, by the premonition that she would never see her native land again and would die on her way back to it.

It was with this feeling that she ate the breakfast that Egon, who had spent a sleepless night too, brought to her room in the morning. He managed to address her in a way that did not demand any answers, and although she was willing by how to talk to him, she could not think of a way to break her silence. And so at 7 A.M. Egon brought her, still not talking, to her light plane, which took off at once for Athens. Near the island of Phorus it was detected by two patrolling British Spitfires that sought at once to intercept such easy prey. Sighting them, the pilot called to Andrea Sauchon, who, unlike him, was not wearing a parachute, “I’m sorry to inform you, meine Frau, that you must prepare for the worst.” “That’s exactly what I have been doing for the last seventy-four years,” was her answer. In another moment she was astonished to see the face of a young British pilot looking down at her. For a split second, before his machine gun opened fire, he reminded her of Egon.