— 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…