— 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.