The Oracle, page 21
One of the priests stands at the foot of the open grave and offers a benediction as the others lower their heads and close their eyes. Karl can’t bring himself to close his eyes. He fears that if he closes them, they’ll never open again, and like Sophia, his life will end in darkness among the rugged mountains of Greece.
Looking at Sophia’s body lying at the bottom of the grave, wrapped in white linen, Karl struggles to reconcile the sight before him with the exuberance and passion with which she lived. Death is incongruous with life. It isn’t the opposite of life so much as an insult to life. Although the white cloth provides Sophia with some dignity, it feels as though her death is being hidden from view. Karl would love nothing more than to see her face one last time, but he knows death has changed her. The brilliance and effervescence of life that once animated her body is gone.
Like the philosophers of old, Karl wonders about death. The Greeks believed in the continuation of the soul in the afterlife, being set free from the limitations of animating a single body. Plato believed death was a form of liberation. Being raised as a Christian, Karl’s not so sure, with concepts of heaven and hell dominating his thinking, but he finds it strange that so short an existence here on Earth should determine all of eternity, as that seems grossly disproportionate. Now, looking down at Sophia’s body lying in the grave, he doubts death is anything more than a tragic loss of something wonderful and beautiful and unique.
Back in Germany, in the depths of winter, Karl would walk to the dormitory after school as the sun was setting. As he attended a boarding school in Berlin, he could go home on the weekends, but during the week, he was confined to the school grounds. Snowflakes would fall from the moody sky. If a storm had blown in from the south, the snowflakes would be big and fluffy and ornate. He’d catch them in his hand and marvel at the way they glistened in the dying light of the sun. Young Karl was fascinated by the ornate patterns of snowflakes, their symmetry and repetition, and the unique geometric shapes that formed something so light and fragile. And then they were gone. They’d melt. He’d marvel at the beautiful crystal structures with their six arms and hexagonal shapes that repeated with seemingly infinite variety from one snowflake to another, only to watch them warm and form a droplet of water in the palm of his hand or a muddy puddle in the gutter. For Karl, snowflakes are life and death in a microcosm.
Niko sinks his shovel into the pile of dirt lying beside the grave and lifts it over his sister’s body. Rather than dumping it, he tilts the shovel, allowing the dirt to tumble into the shadows. Like Niko, Karl lifts a shovelful of dirt and sprinkles it over Sophia’s bound legs. Neither of them has the heart to cover her head or chest. After offering one shovelful each, they sink their shovels into the pile and leave them for the priests to fill in the grave. Both men walk away. Neither of them can stand there watching as Sophia is buried.
“This way,” the nurse says, leading them out of the graveyard with its low stone wall. She leads them to a gardening shed at the rear of the monastery. The priest with the lantern stays by the graveside, casting an eerie light over the hole in the ground. Long, dark shadows lead away from Sophia’s resting place. Karl can’t resist looking back. The priests aren’t in a rush. Two of them take their time, slowly filling the freshly dug hole in the ground.
The nurse opens the shed and pulls out one bicycle and then another.
“Are you sure you won’t stay the night?”
“No,” Karl says.
“We can’t,” Niko says.
Another priest approaches, exiting the monastery through a low wooden door in the stone wall. He’s carrying the Mauser rifle and a rucksack.
“Here,” he says, handing the rifle to Karl and the rucksack to Niko.
Niko opens the canvas bag and looks inside. He reaches in and pulls out a thick, heavy bronze cross. The metal is polished. The glass beads glisten in the starlight. In the low light, it looks priceless.
“Thank you,” Karl says, straddling the bicycle with the rifle slung over his shoulder. Niko wraps the bronze cross in a cloth and returns it to the rucksack.
“And there’s the gun,” Niko says, pulling the bloodied Luger out of the bag and offering it to Karl. Niko holds the gun by the barrel so it is pointing back at him.
“Keep it,” Karl says.
Niko nods, but Karl notes he doesn’t slip the pistol into the small of his back. Instead, he places it back in the rucksack and slings the bag over his shoulder.
The nurse points. “There’s a track down there. It leads to a church on the edge of the valley. From there, you can follow the road. Kirra is no more than two miles away.”
Karl says, “Thank you.”
“God go with you,” the nurse says.
“And with you,” Niko replies as Karl pushes off and rides along the path next to the monastery. The bike lacks any suspension, meaning each bump reverberates through the seat into his body, so he stands on the pedals, riding the bicycle as though it were a horse and he was standing in the stirrups. As they’re heading downhill, there’s no need to pedal. The brakes are built into the pedals themselves, allowing him to lean back to slow down.
Niko follows. Karl can hear the tires of his bike crunching on the gravel behind him. They turn into a gully, following a pebble path through the trees and scrub. In the distance, lights mark the villages and towns on the plain. Mountains descend into the pitch black ocean.
Karl is tempted to look back. He’d love nothing more than one last glimpse of the monastery, the orchid and the cemetery on the hill, but he can’t. He needs to remember Sophia as she was, not as she now is, not as she forever will be. It’s her life he’s honoring, not her death.
Checkpoint
It takes twenty minutes riding down the rocky, winding path to reach the lower church and the open plains in the valley. Niko looks back at the monastery from the road running south toward the coast. Karl doesn’t look. He can’t. He rides up next to Niko, who’s stopped by a telegraph pole.
“You need to lose that,” the Greek says, pointing at him.
“What?” Karl brings his bike to a halt. He looks down at his torn singlet and the dirty bandages wrapped around his chest. His Erkennungsmarke hangs from a chain-link necklace slung around his neck.
“If we’re going to do this, they can’t know you’re German.”
Reluctantly, Karl nods. He gets off his bicycle, leaning it against the telegraph pole. Karl pulls the Erkennungsmarke over his head and clutches the metal identity disc in his hand along with the chain, bunching it up in his palm.
Niko is quiet, which Karl finds interesting. For all the animosity between them, they’re similar—predictable. They’re both tribal. Neither of them is inherently good or evil; they’re simply from different tribes. Oh, the Germans are the aggressors, but all nations have their day in the sun. It’s what they choose to do with their time that matters. Pericles sought to found the first democracy in Greece. Hitler only wants to destroy. Knowing that, Karl finds it fitting that he’s throwing away his Erkennungsmarke.
Karl hurls his Wehrmacht ID tags away from the road into a patch of open ground between the trees. As he watches it kick up dust as it lands in the dirt, he wonders if anyone will ever stumble upon his identity tags. And when. Will they report them back to Germany? What will his family think if he doesn’t return? That he died on the open plains of Greece? That his body was never found, never buried.
Karl feels strange. Part of him lies in that field. As far as anyone is now concerned, he’s no longer a German soldier. The pride he once felt has long since passed, but this makes it official—permanent.
“You good?”
“I’m good,” Karl says, climbing back on his bicycle.
As they ride side by side along the road, they talk to pass the time.
Niko asks, “What’s the plan?”
“I don’t know,” Karl says, being honest. “We try, I guess. I mean, they’re not expecting us, right? As far as they’re concerned, they’ve already won. They’re plundering Greece as the Germans pull back, and no one realizes it.”
Niko nods, riding along beside him. “And they’ll have no reason to doubt our intent as we’re helping them. We’re giving them something more.”
“We are.”
“They’ll see us as part of the crusade.”
“They’ll see you as part of the crusade,” Karl says. “Me? I’m German. I’ll always be the enemy.”
“But you can speak several languages, right? Which languages can you speak?”
“Ah, German, English, Greek, Russian.”
“Speak Russian,” Niko says.
Karl nods and replies in Russian and then in Greek, saying, “Yes, that will work.”
“I’ll tell them you’re from Moscow.”
“My Russian is passable for someone not familiar with the language, but a local Moscovite would be able to tell I wasn’t from there.”
Niko isn’t bothered. “I suspect none of these guys have ever met a Russian.”
The road leading to the coast is made from crushed gravel and has been compacted by trucks and tanks, meaning that if they stay on the tracks left by military vehicles, the ride is reasonably comfortable. Occasionally, there are potholes, but as long as they avoid the center and the edges of the road where the gravel is loose, they can make good time.
The moon has risen, giving them some ambient light. The smell of smoke drifts on the wind, but this isn’t the smell of a wood fire in a hearth or wildfire crackling in the brush. Karl recognizes the bitter scent—it’s the stench of war. It’s the smell of blood and oil burning, the smell of rubber smouldering, the smell of dead men singed by fire. They ride past an armored leichter Panzerspähwagen that’s been pushed off the road. In the dark, Karl can’t tell if it’s the same Panzerspähwagen he and Sophia were in when they accompanied the professor to the ruins of Delphi, but it could be. His troop would have retreated along this road.
A few minutes later, they see bodies hanging from a tree. A man and a woman have been strung up and hung from a branch some fifteen feet in the air. Their bodies have been left to make a statement, as a warning to others. Karl’s never seen someone murdered like this before. The two bodies appear elongated, slightly stretched. Their hands have been bound behind their backs. Their toes point at the ground out of reach, just a few feet below them. Their heads are bowed and covered with sacks. In the soft moonlight, he can see a silver cross hanging around the woman’s neck.
Smoke rises from a distant home set back from the road, but it isn’t rising from a chimney. The house must have been set alight and left to burn through the night. Embers glow in the dark. Smouldering remains collapse, sending glowing embers billowing into the dark sky.
Neither man speaks, but for different reasons. At a guess, for Niko, it’s the realization that this heartache has been unleashed by his communist brothers. For Karl, it’s the recognition that no one and nothing is spared in war. Germany may have withdrawn from Greece, but the misery remains. As easy as it would be for him to blame those deaths on the communists, he knows the only reason the communists have had such inroads into Greece is because of the German occupation.
Dark hills hide the coast. If he hadn’t seen the flat sea from the mountains, he’d think they were going the wrong way. As it is, the road twists and rounds the base of the hills before opening out on the plain leading down to the coast. The land is parched. The grass is dead. Bushes fight for life in tufts reaching up a few feet in height. It is as though the very land is mourning the course of war.
“Do you play football?” Niko asks out of nowhere as they ride along the road. Although Karl’s initial reaction is to be curt about a game he despises, he realizes Niko is trying to span the cultural and adversarial divide between them.
“My father did.”
“What team did he follow? What teams are there in Berlin?”
“Oh, he used to follow English teams.”
“English???” Niko replies in what sounds like utter astonishment.
“We had this old wireless radio,” Karl says with a genuine sense of nostalgia for something he never really understood or appreciated at the time. “It was verboten, of course, but we’d listen to the English league on Saturday afternoons.”
“Hah, same,” Niko says, swerving slightly on his bicycle, getting distracted by the conversation. “My father and I would listen on the radio to Greek football being played in the cities. We have AEK Athens and Doxa Drama. You’ve heard of them?”
Karl hates the reply he has to give, but he can’t lie, not to Niko, not now, not after all they’ve been through.
“No, sorry. I haven’t.”
“Kleanthis Vikelidis? Thessaloniki?”
“No.”
“He’s a striker,” Niko says with particular emphasis on the word. As he speaks, it’s as though he were thumping a soccer ball into the back of a net with all the fury he can muster. “Vikelidis is a legend. Best in the world. Oh, if only we could settle our differences on a football field. Germany versus Greece!”
“Hah, that would be much better than war,” Karl concedes.
“Yes, yes. And we would win,” Niko says, being cheeky and laughing in reply.
Karl smiles and laughs as well. It’s the first time he’s smiled in what seems like forever, and on a day when he thought he’d never smile again. If only Sophia could see them, laughing and joking together.
“My father liked Manchester City and Arsenal.”
“And Chelsea?” Niko asks.
“Honestly, I think he liked all of them.”
“What about Tottenham Hotspur?”
“I guess so.”
“I have always wondered,” Niko says. “What is a hotspur?”
“Oh, I know this,” Karl says, but not because he follows English football so much as English literature and history. “Hotspur comes from the spurs used to ride horses into battle. They were sharp and could draw blood. These days, hotspur means being impetuous, eager to charge into the fray.”
“Ah,” Niko says, liking that explanation.
“In the 14th century, there was a British knight by the name of Sir Henry Percy. They called him Harry Hotspur.”
“And he had a football team named after him?”
“Oh, yeah. He was even included in one of Shakespeare’s plays,” Karl replies, although he’s probably pushing his pedantic love of history a little too far.
“Well, if I were British, I would support Tottenham Hotspur.”
“Me too,” Karl says, but more so because of the affinity he feels with Niko than any love of football.
As they approach the coast, the trees become more lush. Olive groves grow in long rows that have stood for centuries. There’s a glow in the distance, with distant lights marking the twin port towns of Itea and Kirra on the Gulf of Corinth.
“Sentries,” Niko says, slowing as they ride up to a series of wooden barricades placed across the road. “Don’t worry, they’re keeping people in, not out.”
A soldier holds out his hand, having seen them at a distance. He walks into the middle of the road, signaling for them to come to a halt, but he’s not wearing a uniform. The communists have formed into militias and are trying to take over Greece following the German retreat. The guard has a rifle slung over his shoulder. A gas lantern hisses on the side of the street, casting light over the checkpoint.
“Papers,” the soldier says.
Niko laughs. “Papers. What are you? The Gestapo?”
The man laughs. “It’s good to see you, Niko.”
“And you, Leon.”
“And who’s this?” Leon asks with his chin rising in a characteristic motion. It’s as though he wants to point at Karl but can’t be bothered.
“Dimitri.”
“Dimitri?” Leon says, looking Karl up and down as he sits on his bicycle with one boot on the ground. Karl regrets wearing his standard-issue German Army trousers. If he’d thought about it more, he would have asked the priests if they had some spare overalls. The bandage around his chest is dirty. His singlet is ripped. Dried blood stains the cotton. Now they’ve stopped riding their bicycles, the cold of the night chills him.
Niko ignores him. “We’ve got some more treasure. We’re trying to catch up with Grigoris. Has he passed by?”
“He’s in Kirra, at the port.”
Niko walks his bicycle forward toward the wooden barrier. It’s a wooden horse, being little more than a single pole with four legs and a row of barbed wire nailed on top. Karl copies Niko’s confidence, hopping off his bicycle and pushing it through the narrow gap between barricades.
Leon stops Karl, placing his hand in the center of his chest.
“Have I seen you before?”
“No.”
“Were you up there? In the mountains?”
“He was in Athens,” Niko says, but that’s a mistake. By cutting in before Karl can reply, he’s making Leon even more suspicious. Karl is nervous. The two of them are bluffing.
“You were wounded?” Leon asks, tapping the bandage on Karl’s chest while looking at Niko. It seems he’s daring him to respond on Karl’s behalf, looking to further undermine their story. To his credit, Niko remains silent.
“Grazed,” Karl replies.
“Lucky, huh?”
“Yeah,” Karl says, wondering how many other soldiers there are watching from the shadows. Most of them would be asleep, but there will be a handful pulling the graveyard shift.
The placement of the checkpoint might look random, but that’s deliberate to fool anyone assaulting it into being overconfident. Its location would have been carefully chosen for a number of reasons. If this were a German outpost, there would be one sentry with two points of cover. The Wehrmacht would have three soldiers on duty rather than one, but they’d be the distraction. The real defense would come from a machine gun nest set up with a clear view of the approaches, being positioned to catch an attack in a crossfire.
Karl looks into the shadows, but the light of the lantern is bright, and he suspects it is deliberately blinding. There’s a building to the right. If Korporal Fuchs were overseeing this, he’d set up a sandbagged nest on the roof. Karl has no doubt that someone is watching them from up there, staring along the iron sights of a machine gun barrel with their fingers on the trigger. If anything happens to the sentry, they’ll gun the two of them down.
Looking at Sophia’s body lying at the bottom of the grave, wrapped in white linen, Karl struggles to reconcile the sight before him with the exuberance and passion with which she lived. Death is incongruous with life. It isn’t the opposite of life so much as an insult to life. Although the white cloth provides Sophia with some dignity, it feels as though her death is being hidden from view. Karl would love nothing more than to see her face one last time, but he knows death has changed her. The brilliance and effervescence of life that once animated her body is gone.
Like the philosophers of old, Karl wonders about death. The Greeks believed in the continuation of the soul in the afterlife, being set free from the limitations of animating a single body. Plato believed death was a form of liberation. Being raised as a Christian, Karl’s not so sure, with concepts of heaven and hell dominating his thinking, but he finds it strange that so short an existence here on Earth should determine all of eternity, as that seems grossly disproportionate. Now, looking down at Sophia’s body lying in the grave, he doubts death is anything more than a tragic loss of something wonderful and beautiful and unique.
Back in Germany, in the depths of winter, Karl would walk to the dormitory after school as the sun was setting. As he attended a boarding school in Berlin, he could go home on the weekends, but during the week, he was confined to the school grounds. Snowflakes would fall from the moody sky. If a storm had blown in from the south, the snowflakes would be big and fluffy and ornate. He’d catch them in his hand and marvel at the way they glistened in the dying light of the sun. Young Karl was fascinated by the ornate patterns of snowflakes, their symmetry and repetition, and the unique geometric shapes that formed something so light and fragile. And then they were gone. They’d melt. He’d marvel at the beautiful crystal structures with their six arms and hexagonal shapes that repeated with seemingly infinite variety from one snowflake to another, only to watch them warm and form a droplet of water in the palm of his hand or a muddy puddle in the gutter. For Karl, snowflakes are life and death in a microcosm.
Niko sinks his shovel into the pile of dirt lying beside the grave and lifts it over his sister’s body. Rather than dumping it, he tilts the shovel, allowing the dirt to tumble into the shadows. Like Niko, Karl lifts a shovelful of dirt and sprinkles it over Sophia’s bound legs. Neither of them has the heart to cover her head or chest. After offering one shovelful each, they sink their shovels into the pile and leave them for the priests to fill in the grave. Both men walk away. Neither of them can stand there watching as Sophia is buried.
“This way,” the nurse says, leading them out of the graveyard with its low stone wall. She leads them to a gardening shed at the rear of the monastery. The priest with the lantern stays by the graveside, casting an eerie light over the hole in the ground. Long, dark shadows lead away from Sophia’s resting place. Karl can’t resist looking back. The priests aren’t in a rush. Two of them take their time, slowly filling the freshly dug hole in the ground.
The nurse opens the shed and pulls out one bicycle and then another.
“Are you sure you won’t stay the night?”
“No,” Karl says.
“We can’t,” Niko says.
Another priest approaches, exiting the monastery through a low wooden door in the stone wall. He’s carrying the Mauser rifle and a rucksack.
“Here,” he says, handing the rifle to Karl and the rucksack to Niko.
Niko opens the canvas bag and looks inside. He reaches in and pulls out a thick, heavy bronze cross. The metal is polished. The glass beads glisten in the starlight. In the low light, it looks priceless.
“Thank you,” Karl says, straddling the bicycle with the rifle slung over his shoulder. Niko wraps the bronze cross in a cloth and returns it to the rucksack.
“And there’s the gun,” Niko says, pulling the bloodied Luger out of the bag and offering it to Karl. Niko holds the gun by the barrel so it is pointing back at him.
“Keep it,” Karl says.
Niko nods, but Karl notes he doesn’t slip the pistol into the small of his back. Instead, he places it back in the rucksack and slings the bag over his shoulder.
The nurse points. “There’s a track down there. It leads to a church on the edge of the valley. From there, you can follow the road. Kirra is no more than two miles away.”
Karl says, “Thank you.”
“God go with you,” the nurse says.
“And with you,” Niko replies as Karl pushes off and rides along the path next to the monastery. The bike lacks any suspension, meaning each bump reverberates through the seat into his body, so he stands on the pedals, riding the bicycle as though it were a horse and he was standing in the stirrups. As they’re heading downhill, there’s no need to pedal. The brakes are built into the pedals themselves, allowing him to lean back to slow down.
Niko follows. Karl can hear the tires of his bike crunching on the gravel behind him. They turn into a gully, following a pebble path through the trees and scrub. In the distance, lights mark the villages and towns on the plain. Mountains descend into the pitch black ocean.
Karl is tempted to look back. He’d love nothing more than one last glimpse of the monastery, the orchid and the cemetery on the hill, but he can’t. He needs to remember Sophia as she was, not as she now is, not as she forever will be. It’s her life he’s honoring, not her death.
Checkpoint
It takes twenty minutes riding down the rocky, winding path to reach the lower church and the open plains in the valley. Niko looks back at the monastery from the road running south toward the coast. Karl doesn’t look. He can’t. He rides up next to Niko, who’s stopped by a telegraph pole.
“You need to lose that,” the Greek says, pointing at him.
“What?” Karl brings his bike to a halt. He looks down at his torn singlet and the dirty bandages wrapped around his chest. His Erkennungsmarke hangs from a chain-link necklace slung around his neck.
“If we’re going to do this, they can’t know you’re German.”
Reluctantly, Karl nods. He gets off his bicycle, leaning it against the telegraph pole. Karl pulls the Erkennungsmarke over his head and clutches the metal identity disc in his hand along with the chain, bunching it up in his palm.
Niko is quiet, which Karl finds interesting. For all the animosity between them, they’re similar—predictable. They’re both tribal. Neither of them is inherently good or evil; they’re simply from different tribes. Oh, the Germans are the aggressors, but all nations have their day in the sun. It’s what they choose to do with their time that matters. Pericles sought to found the first democracy in Greece. Hitler only wants to destroy. Knowing that, Karl finds it fitting that he’s throwing away his Erkennungsmarke.
Karl hurls his Wehrmacht ID tags away from the road into a patch of open ground between the trees. As he watches it kick up dust as it lands in the dirt, he wonders if anyone will ever stumble upon his identity tags. And when. Will they report them back to Germany? What will his family think if he doesn’t return? That he died on the open plains of Greece? That his body was never found, never buried.
Karl feels strange. Part of him lies in that field. As far as anyone is now concerned, he’s no longer a German soldier. The pride he once felt has long since passed, but this makes it official—permanent.
“You good?”
“I’m good,” Karl says, climbing back on his bicycle.
As they ride side by side along the road, they talk to pass the time.
Niko asks, “What’s the plan?”
“I don’t know,” Karl says, being honest. “We try, I guess. I mean, they’re not expecting us, right? As far as they’re concerned, they’ve already won. They’re plundering Greece as the Germans pull back, and no one realizes it.”
Niko nods, riding along beside him. “And they’ll have no reason to doubt our intent as we’re helping them. We’re giving them something more.”
“We are.”
“They’ll see us as part of the crusade.”
“They’ll see you as part of the crusade,” Karl says. “Me? I’m German. I’ll always be the enemy.”
“But you can speak several languages, right? Which languages can you speak?”
“Ah, German, English, Greek, Russian.”
“Speak Russian,” Niko says.
Karl nods and replies in Russian and then in Greek, saying, “Yes, that will work.”
“I’ll tell them you’re from Moscow.”
“My Russian is passable for someone not familiar with the language, but a local Moscovite would be able to tell I wasn’t from there.”
Niko isn’t bothered. “I suspect none of these guys have ever met a Russian.”
The road leading to the coast is made from crushed gravel and has been compacted by trucks and tanks, meaning that if they stay on the tracks left by military vehicles, the ride is reasonably comfortable. Occasionally, there are potholes, but as long as they avoid the center and the edges of the road where the gravel is loose, they can make good time.
The moon has risen, giving them some ambient light. The smell of smoke drifts on the wind, but this isn’t the smell of a wood fire in a hearth or wildfire crackling in the brush. Karl recognizes the bitter scent—it’s the stench of war. It’s the smell of blood and oil burning, the smell of rubber smouldering, the smell of dead men singed by fire. They ride past an armored leichter Panzerspähwagen that’s been pushed off the road. In the dark, Karl can’t tell if it’s the same Panzerspähwagen he and Sophia were in when they accompanied the professor to the ruins of Delphi, but it could be. His troop would have retreated along this road.
A few minutes later, they see bodies hanging from a tree. A man and a woman have been strung up and hung from a branch some fifteen feet in the air. Their bodies have been left to make a statement, as a warning to others. Karl’s never seen someone murdered like this before. The two bodies appear elongated, slightly stretched. Their hands have been bound behind their backs. Their toes point at the ground out of reach, just a few feet below them. Their heads are bowed and covered with sacks. In the soft moonlight, he can see a silver cross hanging around the woman’s neck.
Smoke rises from a distant home set back from the road, but it isn’t rising from a chimney. The house must have been set alight and left to burn through the night. Embers glow in the dark. Smouldering remains collapse, sending glowing embers billowing into the dark sky.
Neither man speaks, but for different reasons. At a guess, for Niko, it’s the realization that this heartache has been unleashed by his communist brothers. For Karl, it’s the recognition that no one and nothing is spared in war. Germany may have withdrawn from Greece, but the misery remains. As easy as it would be for him to blame those deaths on the communists, he knows the only reason the communists have had such inroads into Greece is because of the German occupation.
Dark hills hide the coast. If he hadn’t seen the flat sea from the mountains, he’d think they were going the wrong way. As it is, the road twists and rounds the base of the hills before opening out on the plain leading down to the coast. The land is parched. The grass is dead. Bushes fight for life in tufts reaching up a few feet in height. It is as though the very land is mourning the course of war.
“Do you play football?” Niko asks out of nowhere as they ride along the road. Although Karl’s initial reaction is to be curt about a game he despises, he realizes Niko is trying to span the cultural and adversarial divide between them.
“My father did.”
“What team did he follow? What teams are there in Berlin?”
“Oh, he used to follow English teams.”
“English???” Niko replies in what sounds like utter astonishment.
“We had this old wireless radio,” Karl says with a genuine sense of nostalgia for something he never really understood or appreciated at the time. “It was verboten, of course, but we’d listen to the English league on Saturday afternoons.”
“Hah, same,” Niko says, swerving slightly on his bicycle, getting distracted by the conversation. “My father and I would listen on the radio to Greek football being played in the cities. We have AEK Athens and Doxa Drama. You’ve heard of them?”
Karl hates the reply he has to give, but he can’t lie, not to Niko, not now, not after all they’ve been through.
“No, sorry. I haven’t.”
“Kleanthis Vikelidis? Thessaloniki?”
“No.”
“He’s a striker,” Niko says with particular emphasis on the word. As he speaks, it’s as though he were thumping a soccer ball into the back of a net with all the fury he can muster. “Vikelidis is a legend. Best in the world. Oh, if only we could settle our differences on a football field. Germany versus Greece!”
“Hah, that would be much better than war,” Karl concedes.
“Yes, yes. And we would win,” Niko says, being cheeky and laughing in reply.
Karl smiles and laughs as well. It’s the first time he’s smiled in what seems like forever, and on a day when he thought he’d never smile again. If only Sophia could see them, laughing and joking together.
“My father liked Manchester City and Arsenal.”
“And Chelsea?” Niko asks.
“Honestly, I think he liked all of them.”
“What about Tottenham Hotspur?”
“I guess so.”
“I have always wondered,” Niko says. “What is a hotspur?”
“Oh, I know this,” Karl says, but not because he follows English football so much as English literature and history. “Hotspur comes from the spurs used to ride horses into battle. They were sharp and could draw blood. These days, hotspur means being impetuous, eager to charge into the fray.”
“Ah,” Niko says, liking that explanation.
“In the 14th century, there was a British knight by the name of Sir Henry Percy. They called him Harry Hotspur.”
“And he had a football team named after him?”
“Oh, yeah. He was even included in one of Shakespeare’s plays,” Karl replies, although he’s probably pushing his pedantic love of history a little too far.
“Well, if I were British, I would support Tottenham Hotspur.”
“Me too,” Karl says, but more so because of the affinity he feels with Niko than any love of football.
As they approach the coast, the trees become more lush. Olive groves grow in long rows that have stood for centuries. There’s a glow in the distance, with distant lights marking the twin port towns of Itea and Kirra on the Gulf of Corinth.
“Sentries,” Niko says, slowing as they ride up to a series of wooden barricades placed across the road. “Don’t worry, they’re keeping people in, not out.”
A soldier holds out his hand, having seen them at a distance. He walks into the middle of the road, signaling for them to come to a halt, but he’s not wearing a uniform. The communists have formed into militias and are trying to take over Greece following the German retreat. The guard has a rifle slung over his shoulder. A gas lantern hisses on the side of the street, casting light over the checkpoint.
“Papers,” the soldier says.
Niko laughs. “Papers. What are you? The Gestapo?”
The man laughs. “It’s good to see you, Niko.”
“And you, Leon.”
“And who’s this?” Leon asks with his chin rising in a characteristic motion. It’s as though he wants to point at Karl but can’t be bothered.
“Dimitri.”
“Dimitri?” Leon says, looking Karl up and down as he sits on his bicycle with one boot on the ground. Karl regrets wearing his standard-issue German Army trousers. If he’d thought about it more, he would have asked the priests if they had some spare overalls. The bandage around his chest is dirty. His singlet is ripped. Dried blood stains the cotton. Now they’ve stopped riding their bicycles, the cold of the night chills him.
Niko ignores him. “We’ve got some more treasure. We’re trying to catch up with Grigoris. Has he passed by?”
“He’s in Kirra, at the port.”
Niko walks his bicycle forward toward the wooden barrier. It’s a wooden horse, being little more than a single pole with four legs and a row of barbed wire nailed on top. Karl copies Niko’s confidence, hopping off his bicycle and pushing it through the narrow gap between barricades.
Leon stops Karl, placing his hand in the center of his chest.
“Have I seen you before?”
“No.”
“Were you up there? In the mountains?”
“He was in Athens,” Niko says, but that’s a mistake. By cutting in before Karl can reply, he’s making Leon even more suspicious. Karl is nervous. The two of them are bluffing.
“You were wounded?” Leon asks, tapping the bandage on Karl’s chest while looking at Niko. It seems he’s daring him to respond on Karl’s behalf, looking to further undermine their story. To his credit, Niko remains silent.
“Grazed,” Karl replies.
“Lucky, huh?”
“Yeah,” Karl says, wondering how many other soldiers there are watching from the shadows. Most of them would be asleep, but there will be a handful pulling the graveyard shift.
The placement of the checkpoint might look random, but that’s deliberate to fool anyone assaulting it into being overconfident. Its location would have been carefully chosen for a number of reasons. If this were a German outpost, there would be one sentry with two points of cover. The Wehrmacht would have three soldiers on duty rather than one, but they’d be the distraction. The real defense would come from a machine gun nest set up with a clear view of the approaches, being positioned to catch an attack in a crossfire.
Karl looks into the shadows, but the light of the lantern is bright, and he suspects it is deliberately blinding. There’s a building to the right. If Korporal Fuchs were overseeing this, he’d set up a sandbagged nest on the roof. Karl has no doubt that someone is watching them from up there, staring along the iron sights of a machine gun barrel with their fingers on the trigger. If anything happens to the sentry, they’ll gun the two of them down.
