If he saw her he would wave and get the lorry to stop, stroll between the trees and talk to her. She would smile again on seeing him. But how would he talk? His Greek was less than basic. He knew the alphabet from school but not much beyond a few travellers’ phrases, and how to count — a large percentage more than most but hardly fluent enough for courting. On the other hand maybe she was a schoolteacher who knew English, and had come back to be with her family for the weekend.
He would marshal up words and signs to charm her till she agreed to meet him a few days later. After a few occasions of stumbling communication in the vineyards, or by the house she lived in if he was lucky (perhaps he would meet her like Rebecca at the well) he would take her to the cinema, even though tall moustachioed brothers came as chaperones. Laughing at his gauche mistakes with the language she would teach him, till he could unravel affectionate thoughts for her wondrous approval. He was nineteen, and she maybe a few years beyond, but how could it matter? After a while they would get married in whatever church she named, buy a house for a few hundred pounds and, on his discharge from the army, he would land an easy job in administration so that they could live happily ever after.
Human intercourse would be difficult at first, on all sorts of levels, but exciting; she will have no preconceptions about my past, he thought; I’ll have no clear notion about hers; therefore we’ll have the romantic experience and even difficulty in getting to know each other, which may take years, but so much the better because it’ll be an adventure, since there’ll be more than a lot to learn.
Eyes ached at following the descent of one in ten. The road zigzagged up again, terraced vineyards to either side. He gobbed all that was dusty in his throat out of the window, as if to let the bus struggling behind tread down such pathetic ideas. Crumbling stone walls bordered the road, divided groves and terraces. When caged birds weren’t escaping, or preparing to, they were the victims of romantic dreams, he mused.
Milky cloud covered the descent into Omodhos. A building was marked with an Enosis sign. With such a big difference between ideas, language, race even, no woman would be seen with a British soldier, smile though he might, hope though he would, so he’d have to get used to the impossibility — unless she was Aphrodite or Circe or Oenone, for whom such trivial considerations wouldn’t matter. And yet, if they were made for each other, as he knew they must be, she would come to him in whatever manifestation because she had, after all, smiled at him. She could be married, but he wanted her with an excitement that wouldn’t leave him alone.
After the large monastery they drove through the packed houses of the village. Men stared from the café, and the lorry had to wait until an ancient geezer on a donkey turned into a side street. Women on stools in the doorways clicked sticks to make lace. Clear of buildings, there was no young woman for him to get down from the lorry and walk towards over the stony soil.
Chagrined, he looked at the village with the eyes of a soldier: the closely grouped houses on the bend would control the road if fortified both ways. Dispositions were noted on his map for artillery and crossfire, the siting of Brens and mortars, so that he momentarily forgot why he had made the driver bring them on this bleeding-heart roundabout track which Archie Bleasby (or even Dominic, had he come this way, or whenever he did) would say was a more than useless carry on.
He peered at every tree and wall, but the grove had been magicked away, no woman there. Or he couldn’t say where the ground had been. Terracing was at all angles, trees differently spaced. A blackbird flew across the windscreen. Beyond a house-to-house search, or a battue through outlying land, there was nothing to be done. She was gone, never to be found — as he had feared would be the case. A faint whistle of breath indicated marks for trying, and now it was back into himself, though with the certainty that the dream would haunt him forever.
Swivelling at a bend, the driver swore blind at what only he saw, spun from one side of the road to the other to avoid killing a woman who suddenly appeared carrying a load of wood. Such a hit would bring the population down from the village intent on stringing them up, and who could blame them? Carelessness was unforgivable. The problem was avoided, but Herbert knew they’d had it. Or the lorry had. Something was bound to happen, and he braced himself for the impact. Doors and bumpers hit a bridge, scraping masonry. Pemberton stayed silent and upright. They bounced back across the road.
All so slow. When was the loony driver going to bring it under control? Herbert called out as much, though didn’t know why. Inevitably the lorry jumped a culvert, slow it seemed, spun through pine trees. You could count them and the seconds it took for each to go by, if the heart let you.
Heads went down, and he sensed their progress in vivid colours, heard the grazing of sultry trunks, scraping and turning, the driver fighting with the strength and skill of a demon who wouldn’t be cornered. They landed precariously on a ledge lower down and, on thinking they were safe at last, the wheels slipped.
‘No!’ Pemberton shouted.
Herbert’s last hope, a crushing pain in his leg, was that they didn’t have enough petrol in the tank to catch fire — before the lorry went three more somersaults and smashed against rocks by the river.
He was sure he had been tied up and thrown on to a bed of pebbles. Some were sharper than others, though only when he tried to move. They were cooking him, and he couldn’t understand why. ‘What had he done to be treated thus? If you want to know he’d offended us.’ Bloody silly words streaming again and again through his brain.
He wasn’t even hot, or uncomfortable in his dream, but would be if he woke up. Would they eat him when they’d finished? Where they were he’d never know, too sleepy to care. One pebble grew to enormous size, and was sliced in two hemispheres, each shining grey as quartz as both parts wheeled off on separate trajectories into space. He hoped he hadn’t screamed, would be ashamed if he had. Every nightmare was only the same in that none lasted forever, though he swore the knives and forks had been real.
A clown face showed through clouds of disinfectant, recalling the Jewish hut in the refugee camp. Maybe he was sweating the stuff. He’d been knocked about. The bite of gangrene came and went.
‘You’ve got a Blighty one, corp. Half a dozen, really. The army won’t want you any more.’
Nor did he want to see that Beano face again, with its typical RAMC wide-lipped cackle, now that I know I’m not blind or deaf, he added to himself. As for the rest, maybe the MO would enlighten him — if he could get away from putting his hand up the nurses’ skirts. He vomited at the pain when he tried to turn to a better angle of comfort. The needle of the ward sister felt like the cut of a scalpel, and an enormous soft pillow muffled him back into oblivion.
‘We thought you was for the black pyjamas,’ the male orderly said, spooning slop into his mouth for supper. ‘Your driver only had a few bruises and a headache.’
‘Thank God for that.’ The croak came from inside his armour casing. He had never slept so many aeons. ‘How long have I been here?’
‘A week ago it happened. We laid bets when you was brought in.’
‘I hope you lost.’
‘Nar, I won five akkers. I just knew you was a hard case, though it was hard to read it on your face.’