The Road to Ithaca Read online

  Ben Pastor, born in Italy, became a US citizen after moving to Texas. She lived for thirty years in the United States, working as a university professor in Illinois, Ohio and Vermont, and currently spends part of the year in her native country. The Road to Ithaca is the fifth in the Martin Bora series and follows on from the success of Tin Sky, Lumen, Liar Moon and A Dark Song of Blood, also published by Bitter Lemon Press. Ben Pastor is the author of other novels including the highly acclaimed The Water Thief and The Fire Waker, and is considered one of the most talented writers in the field of historical fiction. In 2008 she won the prestigious Premio Zaragoza for best historical fiction.

  Also available from Bitter Lemon Press by Ben Pastor:

  Tin Sky

  Lumen

  Liar Moon

  A Dark Song of Blood

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Bitter Lemon Press, 47 Wilmington Square, London WC1X 0ET

  www.bitterlemonpress.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Ben Pastor

  This edition published in agreement with the author through Piergiorgio Nicolazzini Literary Agency (PNLA)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

  The moral rights of Ben Pastor have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN 978–1–908524–81–2

  Typeset by Tetragon, London

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR9 4YY

  To all those who believe, with Wordsworth,

  that the Child is father of the Man

  Contents

  Main Characters

  Foreword

  Part One: Setting Off

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two: Wandering

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Three: Returning

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Afterword

  Glossary

  MAIN CHARACTERS

  Martin Bora, Captain, German Army Abwehr

  Frances L. Allen, American archaeologist

  Andonis Sidheraki, her Cretan husband

  Gottwald “Waldo” Preger, Captain, German Airborne Troops

  Vairon Kostaridis, Police chief, Iraklion

  Patrick K. Sinclair, First Lieutenant, Leicestershire Regiment, CreForce

  Manoschek, Undersecretary, German Embassy in Moscow

  Emil Busch, Major, German Army Abwehr

  Bruno Lattmann, Captain, German Army Abwehr

  Alois Villiger, Swiss scholar

  Rifat Bayar Agrali, “Rifat Bey”, Turkish businessman in Crete

  Pericles Savelli, Italian scholar

  Geoffrey Caxton, English archaeologist

  “Bertie”, Sergeant Major, CreForce

  Margaret Bourke-White, US photographer

  Erskine Caldwell, US author

  Go back to the target you missed; walk away from the one you hit squarely.

  CRETAN SAYING,

  IN KAZANTZAKIS’ REPORT TO GRECO

  A room lit to the most hidden corner is no longer liveable.

  WERNER HERZOG,

  I AM MY FILMS

  Foreword

  TO: Colonel Bruno Bräuer, Commander Airborne Regiment 1, 7th Flieger Division, eyes only

  FROM: Medical Officer Dr Hellmuth Unger, Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau

  Colonel,

  In the process of verifying reports of war crimes committed against German military personnel during the recently concluded operation in Crete, the following account came to my notice. As you will see, it is of a completely different – I would say opposite – nature, and, in view of possible pressures forthcoming from Messrs Brunel and Lambert of the International Red Cross, it may require immediate attention.

  Yesterday, 31 May, a British prisoner of war of officer rank repeatedly insisted on being heard. Brought into my presence, he handed in a photographic camera, whose contents he urgently asked us to develop. The camera was entrusted to him by a fellow prisoner, an NCO who successfully escaped from the gathering point at Kato Kalesia. The photos (see attached) bear witness to an atrocity supposedly committed by troops belonging to Airborne Regiment 1: hence this preliminary note to you.

  According to the officer, whose name, rank and unit I will include in my full report, the NCO told him he fell behind during retreat, and found himself alone, hiding from our victoriously advancing troops in a gully along a road some miles south of the so-called Chanià Gate, leading west from Iraklion’s city walls. An amateur photographer, he had a portable camera with him. From his hideout, he claimed he saw eight German paratroopers approach on foot along the road, and enter a property we have since identified as Ampelokastro, the residence of a prominent Swiss national. The men, armed with MAB 38 automatic weapons and Schmeisser submachine guns, reportedly pushed the gate open and disappeared from his view behind the garden wall. Being unarmed and outnumbered, the witness did not dare to draw close. Within minutes, immediately after a single pistol shot, a commotion followed by volleys of rapid gunfire came to his ear. The utter lack of sound after the shoot-out (“not even voices shouting in German”, which he fully expected) made him “hope that the paratroopers had fallen into a trap”, set by Allied soldiers hiding on the premises or by locals equipped by the British Army.

  As reported to the officer, nearly a quarter of an hour went by before the NCO decided to attempt crawling into the garden to see. He met with no signs of life there. A watchdog had been shot dead on the steps leading inside the building, where total silence convinced him the paratroopers had perished or were no longer in the house. Indeed, the garden (as later that day I confirmed in person when I visited the scene) is provided with a back gate, reported to have been unlocked and wide open at the time. As soon as he stepped in, the photographer was met by the ghastly sight of an entire civilian household exterminated by gunfire.

  While the eyewitness himself has thus far escaped recapture, the officer who reported the case is presently being held in the Galatas camp.

  In the interest of truth, and given the potential repercussions of such a grave incident involving the illustrious citizen of a neutral country, I decided to contact you directly and with every urgency. My full report, marked “Ampelokastro, Eyes Only”, will be deposited at your office for you to choose how to proceed.

  PART ONE

  Setting Off

  1

  Nul tisserand ne sait ce qu’il tisse.

  No weaver knows what he weaves.

  FRENCH SAYING

  SUNDAY 1 JUNE 1941, MOSCOW, HOTEL NATIONAL, 10.00 P.M. THREE WEEKS TO HITLER’S INVASION OF THE SOVIET UNION

  If Martin Bora had known that in a thousand days he’d lose all he had (and was), his actions that day wouldn’t have appreciably changed. Today things were as they were.

  On his bedside table sat a note that read Dafni, Mandilaria, and nothing else. Its heavy, slanted handwriting, however, lent it a certain importance. From a man whose signature could mean instant execution, as it had done for some forty thousand already, even the jotted names of southern wines sounded ominous.

  Bora turned the note face down. He then opened his diary to a blank page and began, from force of habit, by censoring his real thoughts.

  Maggie Bourke-White keeps fresh lilacs in her room. The scent fills the hallway on this
large top floor; I perceive it whenever I go in or out. Her husband (see below) doesn’t like me at all, and it’s mutual; she’s more tolerant, or else has a photo reporter’s interest in strange animals, such as we Germans are in Moscow these days. But it’s all strange, or else I wouldn’t have on my night table a note in Cyrillic that reads Dafni and Mandilaria. I was quietly in a cold sweat at our embassy last night when I received it from Deputy Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and NKVD chief Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria. Stalin himself doesn’t unsettle me as much as his powerful head of secret police! I, a mere captain occasionally doubling as an interpreter, had additional reasons to be fidgety. Last Friday, returning late from one of the diplomatic circle parties – actually a Russian-style drinking bout of the kind I’m getting rather sick of – something happened that illustrates the strange world we move in. I got it into my head (I was tipsy after all the Starka and Hunter’s vodka, but not actually drunk) to take a left on Gorky and head for Triumphal Boulevard and Nikitskaya, where the Deputy Chairman has his city residence. It was two minutes past midnight; I supposed there wouldn’t be much going on at that time, even though Soviet officials earn affectionate nicknames such as “stone arse” because of the long hours they reportedly spend sitting at their desks. Well, either those stories are true, or else the NKVD were ticked off for whatever reason: they stopped me around the corner despite all official papers and the propusk glued to my windscreen, and gave me (or tried to give me, I should say) the once-over. They made me leave the car and questioned me for several minutes. “Is your name Martin Bora (pronounced Marty’n Bwora)?” “Yes.” “Do you reside at the Hotel National?” “Yes.” “Then what are you doing here?” “Don’t know. Where’s here?” “Have you been drinking?” “Yes.” And so on. It all simmered down once I pretended to be soused beyond redemption. Had they been patrolmen, I’d have offered cigarettes. As foreign tobacco is at a premium in the Soviet Union, it often opens doors and shuts mouths. But with members of the secret police I wouldn’t be so glib. In the end they grumbled an admonition and let me go. Did they believe I’d got lost in the foreigners’ district? I doubt it. Will they report me to whomever? Of course. But we all play these games in Moscow nowadays: diplomats, soldiers, privileged westerners.

  Speaking of the latter, just yesterday, as I waited below for the hotel lift, I ran for the fourth or fifth time into best-selling American author Erskine Caldwell. He resides here with his lilac-loving wife Margaret, or Maggie, and enjoys the superlative kid gloves treatment from Molotov’s Narkomindel. While our embassy personnel have been restricted from travelling outside Moscow, the couple freely (or so they think) ride and fly about for their articles. I am under orders to act engagingly with non-belligerent foreigners, so I always greet Caldwell first.

  As usual, the leftist globetrotter who broadcasts starry-eyed reports from Moscow to the US ignored me. But he couldn’t very well pretend not to see a fellow who exceeds his football player’s height, speaks perfect English and is attired as a military attaché’s adjutant besides. Be that as it may, like a cowboy peering into the distant prairie, Caldwell stared elsewhere. I didn’t insist. Mrs Bourke-White wasn’t with him, but I’d met her in the hotel restaurant before. Perky rather than pretty, she strikes me as intelligent, outspoken, a news photographer by trade who has travelled half of the known world. A Bavarian who deals in optical instruments has been trying to hit on her, banking on his status as a civilian who can boast of the third-floor suite with a grand piano and Napoleonic knick-knacks. It seems the two Caldwells get along fine – although he’s rumoured to be short-tempered, and we’ll see how long a free-thinking Yankee woman will put up with that. It’d be all plain gossip if I weren’t aware of the role these intellectuals play in today’s rapid communications. I keep an unobtrusive eye on them through E., a close associate of theirs, whom they trust and at most assume will report to Comrade Stalin exclusively.

  Additionally, all of us – Soviets, Germans, others – make expedient use of the motley humanity crowding that repository of émigrés, the dilapidated Hotel Lux, former Zentralnaya, also known as the “golden cage of the Comintern”. The intrigue up and down its six floors reminded one of Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel. The residents have a desperate need for amenities – what am I saying, the basics as one understands them in the civilized world: soap, toilet paper, light bulbs, etc.

  Bribery is not impossible, though the residents know it might cost them their neck. They’ve been decimated in the last four years, despite every last one of them being communists; I should know, I have to pore over back issues of the now defunct Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung, which spewed out their red propaganda for years.

  Back to Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria. In his armoured Packard, last night he showed up uninvited at Ambassador Count von der Schulenburg’s informal get-together for a few selected guests, which is how I got my homework sketched by him on a notebook page. For whom (or what) is the third most powerful man in Russia requesting sixty bottles of choice Cretan wine?

  After a meeting that exuded goodwill but remained tense, we were wracking our brains to understand it (private use, a major bash, a present to US Ambassador Steinhardt?). For all we know, in a roundabout way the wine could be meant as a gift for our own Foreign Minister. Naturally, my superior, Colonel Krebs, agreed at once to send me all the way to Crete to secure the delicacy. Never mind that we’ve barely concluded a victorious if hard-won campaign to conquer that island.

  Officially the airborne operation closed yesterday. As per my orders, tomorrow – the major hailstorm of the past hours having abated – I’m off to Lublin on a Russian plane. From there on German wings I’ll continue on to Bucharest, and then south to Athens. At Athens I’ll hitch a ride somehow, possibly on one of the seaplanes that fly the route to Crete, or one of the ambulance Junkers likely going to and fro since the battle.

  Does being a soldier include such unglamorous chores as providing wine for our Russian allies? Apparently so. Enough for a diary entry. Wake-up time in five hours, 1 a.m. Berlin time, 3 a.m. Moscow time.

  MONDAY 2 JUNE

  Without daylight saving time, at 3.30 dawn was already breaking in Moscow. Bora pocketed Lavrenti Pavlovich’s note without rereading it.

  The truth is, what made me curious about his house off Triumphal Boulevard wasn’t the accounts of his work habits, but insistent rumours about his penchant for luring underage girls no one hears from afterwards. Improbable? He didn’t hesitate to arrest the wife of Stalin’s personal secretary, and they say he’ll send her to the firing squad! No wonder they stopped me at the street corner.

  He felt his jaw for smoothness after shaving, lifted his tunic from the back of the chair and put it on. The task of packing the small bag he’d take for the trip was quickly disposed of. When the waiter knocked discreetly on the door, Bora answered, “Da, kharasho,” without opening it, so that he’d leave the tray on the threshold. He’d sent for room service to save time. Because all hotel personnel worked for the secret police one way or another, and a guest assigned to the German Embassy was sure to be carefully scrutinized, Bora waited until the dying footfalls outside told him the man had gone, and then unlocked the door.

  Cup in his hand in front of the open window, he breathed in the brisk air, where droplets of moisture coalesced without actually becoming mist. From the street below, it was possible the higher floors of this and other buildings would soon appear swathed in fog. The spires of the nearby Citadel were already. One of the coldest springtimes on record, trees in parks and on street sides still behind in blooming – except for Maggie Bourke-White’s lilacs. I wonder where she finds them? Bora neared his lips to the cup without drinking – the porcelain rim was hot enough to scald. Not even by leaning out could he be sure, but his car and driver must be waiting below. Or maybe not; it was still early. Four o’clock was when he’d asked for a shared cab to Leontyevsky Lane, where he was to join embassy undersecretary Manoschek, with whom he’d fly to German-occup
ied Poland. Unlike him, Manoschek was continuing west to Berlin.

  It was good to have at last secured a room with a view after weeks of overlooking the hotel’s inner court. Bora searched the bristling horizon of cupolas, spires, towers, flat roofs of immense tenements; an odour of heating fuel and wood stoves lingered, factory smoke and smells, mostly the pungent aroma from the state brandy maker at the other end of the block. About now, from Dzerzhinsky Street’s GPU offices, so inconspicuously as to be suspect, a sombre car was no doubt approaching the National. Without smiling, Bora was amused. Are Max and Moritz in it? I bet they are; I threw those cartoon characters out of bed. There’s never a time that I walk from here to the embassy without being shadowed by one or the other, or both: all I can do is go out of my way to leave early and take the longest route possible, down to Spasopeskovskaya Square and Steinhardt’s federal-style residence, or all around the Kremlin, crossing and recrossing the bridges before heading again for the Garden Ring. I hardly stop anywhere, take no photos, so they can’t very well find fault with me. At most, I slow down in front of bookshops, or the Bolshoi Theatre (under repair), or the costly delicatessen stores on Gorky Boulevard. In the end, the few hundred metres from the National to our embassy swell to two or three miles. I make my shadows earn their daily bread.

  Again he brought the cup to his mouth and took a sip. Immediately the thought “Coffee has a strange taste” bolted through him. Bora, who drank it black and never stirred it, rushed back to the middle of the room, reached for the spoon on the silvered tray and scooped up some liquid from the bottom of the demitasse. He fished out a grainy residue, translucent, amber-coloured. His alarm rose like a spring released. With the tip of his tongue he tasted the particles from the spoon, a small motion that relaxed him at once. Nothing but sugar. Cane sugar, expensive in Moscow – an unrequested, additional touch for the foreign guest at ninety-six rubles a night. Why, on my monthly pay I couldn’t afford to spend more than ten days here: of course they’d sugar my room-service coffee. And they wouldn’t be so crass as to poison me with breakfast.