Hans looked like he very much wanted to join her, but Peter spoke sharply to him in German and offered him a cigarette instead. How anybody could smoke outside in the heat of the day Aphrodite could never understand, but it was an addiction her father the tobacco merchant had always encouraged.
She sighed and let her eyes drift across the sparkling water toward Pondikonissi, or Mouse Island, the farther of two islets that floated offshore. Legend said that the islet was Odysseus’s ship, the one Poseidon turned to stone. Seen from a distance, the dark mound did indeed resemble a vessel enshrouded in somber cypress trees. It was crowned at the top by a tiny whitewashed monastery from the eleventh century, the Church of the Pantokrator, an inviting refuge.
“Suit yourselves,” she called, and broke away toward the islet. They started calling out after her in angry, fearful tones, but she ignored them and made her way to the islet.
Upon reaching it, she rose from the water, wrung her long black hair, and let the beads of water roll off her bronzed body. At the foot of the whitewashed steps, she found her robe hanging on a peg along with some slippers. One look back toward shore showed Hans watching her through his Zeiss field glasses, to make sure she was all right, and Peter radioing the others on the villa’s terrace. She slipped on the robe, tied the belt, and ascended the steps that spiraled up to the treetops.
At the top of the hill, she emerged onto a cobbled terrace and entered the tiny monastery. It was to this hiding place that she often came, to shed her pretentious ways with the Baron, to light a candle for Chris, and to confess her life of sin to the Orthodox priest, whose wizened old face now nodded gravely as she began to cry once more in the dark.
“The Baron returns today, Father John,” she said. “Please grant me God’s forgiveness.”
Father John raised an eyebrow. “For what you have done, child, or what you are going to do?”
Aphrodite felt embarrassed to discuss such things with a priest who had sworn off the temptations of the flesh. Still, the old man smiled in a way that hinted that before making his vows, he had not passed through life without knowing its pleasures.
“What’s done is done,” she confessed, and told him once again-for her own justification rather than for his understanding-how she had met Baron Ludwig von Berg that summer day in ’42 when he was wheeled into her Red Cross hospital in Athens with a gunshot wound to the head.
23
A phrodite had been acquainted with the brutal realities of death and dismemberment ever since she joined the Greek Red Cross as a nurse, with her friend Princess Katherine, in the early days of the war. She had become a nurse because she was tired of serving no higher purpose in life other than being beautiful, a role her parents and others were content to let her play but which she despised. At that point in the war, the Greeks were whipping the Italians and morale was high, and the work helped crowd out her worries about her brother fighting at the front and her fiance far away in America. That was before the Germans invaded and she began to attend to the smashed bodies of British Royal Air Force men, Greece’s new defenders. Then came that fateful Sunday morning when the Herrenvolk finally entered Athens and hoisted the swastika over the Acropolis. The Germans ruthlessly began to clear the beds of major hospitals, throwing the wounded out on the streets to make room for their own.
She also had been familiar with the German troops, who soon filled the streets of Athens. Their gray-green uniforms were soiled, their faces harassed and hungry. They traveled in large groups and carried so-called occupation marks, Reichskreditkassenscheine, which shopkeepers were forced to accept. They grabbed everything in sight, emptying shelves and decimating what was left of the Greek economy. What they didn’t buy, they simply took, such as Aphrodite’s car parked at the tennis club; when she walked outside, her driver stood alone at the curb, arms raised in exasperation.
She experienced famine in the winter of 1941-42, when children with swollen bellies and the skeletons of old men and women haunted the streets of the city. More than three hundred thousand Athenians starved to death in two months, and whenever a lifeless body dropped, only the ration card of the forgotten soul was remembered by survivors, a means to prolong their own suffering. The city had become an extermination camp, and there was little she could do at the hospital except watch the poor and weak die.
What she had not been prepared for was a German like Baron Ludwig von Berg. For three days he lay there in his hospital bed, hovering between life and death, his face invisible behind the bandages wrapped around his shattered skull. The miracle was not only that he survived but that, through it all, he carried himself like the perfect German officer and gentleman. When the wrappings were lifted, he turned out to be younger than she had imagined, and better-looking, considering the silver plate in his skull. He also was obviously quite taken with her. Only his icy blue eyes betrayed a hint of ruthlessness and the sense that whatever charming things the Baron might say were not necessarily what was in his heart.
It was a Greek sniper who’d shot him. The Gestapo had rounded up some three hundred hostages in reprisal, according to one of the SS guards posted outside the private room. She later learned from the doctor, however, that the bullet dislodged from the Baron’s skull came from a Czech Ceska of the type favored by SS intelligence-he had most likely been shot by one of his own men. She could never confirm this, as the doctor disappeared shortly thereafter, along with the Baron himself.
When she told her family about the Baron, her father recognized the name as that of a wealthy German industrialist who came to Greece every so often to check on the supply of chrome and other raw materials. Her brother, Kostas, however, spat in contempt. “A ‘gentleman,’ you call him? Stupid girl. He’s as bad as that playboy fiance of yours in America. I don’t know why you still pretend that coward Andros loves you. He’s an embarrassment to his father and to Greece. Tell me, where was he when we were risking our necks against the invaders? Where is he now?”
Ever since he returned from the front, Kostas had been a bitter man, especially after the Italian Brenero Division under General Paolo Berardi “triumphantly” entered Nazi-occupied Athens. “We whipped these boys in Albania, this very division, sent them running through the snow and mountains to their mothers,” Kostas had said. “Now they dare return and call themselves victors!”
Then Vasilis Tobacco was obliged to accept the “Mediterranean drachmas” the Italians brought with them as payment for what little tobacco the company was still able to produce beyond what the Germans confiscated. An overconfident Rome had printed the currency before its failed invasion of Greece in October 1940.
This was the last straw for Kostas, who, with the first tobacco consignment, hid a bomb in one of the cases on the docks in Piraeus. The Greek stevedores who loaded the cargo aboard the Italian transport said nothing about the extra weight. The ship blew up at quayside, sinking to the bottom to the cheers of the Greek dockers. At the same time, when the first tobacco crop arrived in Germany, it was immediately confiscated by Nazi officials, who opened it to find neither tobacco nor explosives but sand and sawdust. Since that time Kostas had become even more deeply involved with the Resistance, to depths their parents did not care to probe.
“Mark my words,” Kostas told her. “That Baron is no gentleman, and your playboy is no son of General Andros.”
That night the sound of screeching tires woke the family. Aphrodite’s usually reserved mother burst into her daughter’s bedroom in her nightgown, making the sign of the cross, screaming, “The Gestapo!” Behind her mother, Aphrodite could see her pudgy father throwing on his robe as he hurried downstairs to answer the pounding on the door. When Aphrodite pulled the curtain back from her bedroom window, she saw three black Mercedeses in the drive and several men in black leather greatcoats and carrying machine guns.