— 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.