Prick of the Spindle: Fiction: Panayotopulos: Bloodstained

Bloodstained
By Angela Panayotopulos

It was slick, slippery on fingers that trembled. Red, human sap, drained long enough from the body to cool but not long enough to harden. For a second her hand hesitated, hovered, then plunged again into the full pottery bowl; her fingers emerged clad in a crimson mask thick enough to hide their human pigment. The sour-sweet metallic whiff assaulted the girl’s nostrils, too familiar to elicit even a wrinkled nose. The young woman looked up beyond the image on the canvas before her, beyond the only window left unblocked by burnt debris. Its stained glass was long knocked out, and blessing had it that this last open frame overlooked the Ionian seascape.

Her eyes strained beyond, and did not notice the blood trickle down her thumb, revealing the olive-hued skin. Yet within the blindness of the setting sun, she could see nothing but redness.

As a child she had read, somewhere, of prisoners who pricked their fingers with quills to create a desperate shade of ink. In some regards she was luckier; her ink, of the same sort, was ready-brought—but not ready-made, no, never. It was bought with bullets, accumulated by agony, extracted via the exorcism of pacifism. The pool of red in the pottery bowl wasn’t hers, but it was as if hers. It was human. It was islander.

Her imagination tortured her with possible means of collection, not a one better than another; images of corpses dangling and dripping as Nazi soldiers hovered beneath, vulture-like, with upraised beaks of bowls and basins. Perhaps they preferred live interaction instead; they would saw off a limb—hold him down tight, boys, and take your pick, any limb—so the blood flowed profusely into their palms. It could be that of her grandfather, her neighbor, her friend. War split this liquid life and drained it down to its basest essence: the body’s red tears of torment, the most authentic war paint.

In front of the finished painting, the woman’s fears lunged through her mental barriers. Her hands rose in helpless retaliation, shaking. She stared at their redness and retched.

The snarl of her name assaulted her ears, accompanied by a cold clicking of boots on the flagstones behind her. The German’s accented voice echoed within the church, the conjured words bouncing off the walls like demon spirits flailing against those blackened scraps of iconography.

Kannela wiped her mouth with a wrist and rocked back on her heels. He’d taken her by surprise; she had not even heard the key grating in the lock. While she reasoned that his officers’ demands regulated his schedule, this habit of random appearances unsettled her more than she cared to admit. For once, however, she could appreciate the interruption. She swallowed a ragged breath of air and fought down the bile. “Don’t you people ever take a nap?”

“Always around when you need me,” he replied. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Same as you.” She glanced up in time to see his scorching blue gaze scan the tiny church, her prison and her sanctuary. Once, white-washed concrete and blue domes reflected the brilliancy of sky and sea. Now refuse and rags shrouded the floor, the wooden benches before the altar and Platytera removed to the German barracks. The stench of smoke erased all perfumes of incense. Propped canvases suffocated the icon-plastered walls; only the eyes of saints were visible here and there, glittering sporadically in the zenith rays. Within this blackened skeleton of God’s house, those slivers of color pulsed like fragments of a broken heart.

“You look a mess,” the soldier grimaced. Kannela’s eyes followed him as he crossed the room and came to squat beside her on the floor. He held out his own canteen, not even looking at her anymore. “Drink this.”

She took it, careful to avoid his fingers. It was cool to the touch, and the water soothed her tormented mouth. She turned her head aside to spit and rinse.

“My grandfather is doing all right? My mother?” she asked when she could. He was looking straight ahead at the canvas, so intently that she was surprised his stare didn’t leave blue streaks of its own against the painted surface. His uniform creased as he adjusted himself on his heels. She stared at it hungrily, a crisp gray-green amidst the red haze around her. He was so close that she could smell the soap in his hair, and was sure he could smell the lack of it in hers.

“Everyone’s fine. You know, I kind of like this.” His eyes remained transfixed on the scarlet landscape. It was a sketch of the sea, bordered with a hazy sky, a curl of clouds to frame the top. But even without looking he could feel the intensity of her dark stare. He exhaled and returned to her own concerns. “Relax, woman, they live yet. I’ve promised to see to that much, haven’t I?”

She took another sip from the canteen, ruminated over her cleansing mouthful, then nodded. He observed how a layer of tension melted from her face to reveal the softer, more natural, curve of her cheek. He turned away toward the painting once more.

“It is you who prefers them,” she sneered. Her words emerged more bitterly than desired; but if she had it her way, these canvases would serve best as kindling. “Art won’t stoop to personal preference. Or do you think you Germans have the power to control even the innate?” What did he take her for, blind? She knew all too well how he used her and her artwork; the first night he had returned as light-hearted as she’d ever seen him. Success. Despite his silence on the matter, it was all too easy to imagine the praise he’d gotten from the German troop for the painting he created and brought to show off—out of blood no less, being so tough and manly. Oh, she didn’t grudge him recognition of any sort—what she wanted was to scrub her fingers raw to the bone, be free of this madness forever. Instead, he hid her and used her as his secret source of redemption in the eyes of comrades who probably thought him weak-kneed or soft-hearted. Her stomach knotted in anger, and she raised her eyes to meet the calm dark ones of the saints above her. Patience.

The soldier grabbed her wrist—the left one, of course—and twisted it. At her gasp he let go as one would jerk away from fire, as if surprised at his own strength. “This is war,” he said. “Questioning costs lives.”

Kannela snatched her arm away. She glared at the red landscape she’d created, and raised her right hand. With her thumb she deliberately smudged the clouds of her canvas. As the soldier looked on, she dunked two fingers and created a representation of human figures among the freshly painted rain. A few deft strokes, and she’d added wings, broken with odd angles. Again she dipped her hand into the bowl, three fingers pressed together as if she was about to cross herself. Her hand poised snake-like before the canvas, she flicked out her fingers so that beads of blood spattered forth across the surface. They tricked down from the painted falling angels.

He sat motionless in fear of creating further damage to the painting. “What have you done?” he growled. “It was fine before.”

She stood up, wiped her hands ineffectively on her dress, but not before touching the back of his shoulder with those three red fingers. “It’s finished,” she said. “It’s my last masterpiece. You might as well take it away now.”

Disbelief in his eyes. “You’re lying,” he said. “You’re very much lying. But I don’t have time to deal with this now. They need me in the barracks in five minutes, and this—this thing is coming with me. You will continue to paint. And you will continue to sign. You know what I’d do otherwise.”

Yes. She knew all too well. It was only thanks to him, it seemed, that her grandfather and mother lived yet, hoarded in their homes like everyone else, allowed to breathe the Ionian air. Kannela knew where they lived, even—she’d slipped out once when he’d forgotten to lock the door, and had found them in a half-collapsed shed further down the street. It housed three more families, and Pappou lay ill on the only bed. Kannela’s mother recognized her knock and opened the door to accept the food, almost blinded by her veil of tears. She crushed her daughter into her embrace, and then pled for her to flee back to the church, their hands still instinctively twined. “There is nowhere to run on an island,” her mother had worried. “And they have been lax in their sentries. But if they see you there will be interrogations, and that never ends well. You must stay in the church.”

Kannela shared her plan before retreating. Mama had doubts, of course. How would Kannela distract the soldiers and bribe a boatman to whisk them all away at night? She didn’t know; she would think of something. She would give them a sign; they would look for the red marks on the soldier’s uniform when leaving the church.

In three days’ time they could be free. Provided no freak circumstance stopped them. And this German, like the rest of his kind, had the power of creating freak circumstance.

So Kannela crouched forward and with her finger signed the bottom right corner. Rolph Engel.

Without another word, the soldier took the canvas and made his way out toward the dusky street, stopping only to secure the door behind him. He could not suppress a shudder. As always, the eyes of the saints followed him from the walls.

He came to church the following afternoon and sat beside her on the floor. Quieter than usual, he handed her the usual loaf of bread, wrapped with two drumsticks and a small flask. Kannela glanced at them and him, uncertain.

She fell to with grateful gusto. A part of her remained detached, sickened at the sight of her own satisfaction. After the war began, her appetite for flesh had vanished like her fantasies of swift future pacifism. But hunger was a veteran player in the game of persuasion, and her palate would have accepted lamb and lard as readily as fruit and honey. It was like dealing with this man; using a wolf to guard your flock for lack of dogs.

“They adored it.” She glanced over at him above the meal at hand, intrigued by his sober tone. He kept his eyes transfixed on her latest half-finished work.

He shrugged. “The Captain actually called the piece ausgezeichnet!” The German didn’t bother to translate; she didn’t bother to wonder. She washed down the last of the meat with a cool drought of—wine, of all things—from the flask. “I’m not saying—" he glanced at her “—you’re an incredible painter, I don’t mean to demean your art.” She frowned and washed down the meat with a cool drought of the wine. Hungry as she still was, she left the other drumstick untouched, as well as most of the bread loaf.

“But some found it too much,” the soldier continued. “That fool Gottlieb fought vomit at the sight, in view of the officers. Two other fellows simply walked out—a wiser idea. Strange how it’s the perception and constitution of a matter that really makes the difference. Blood never bothers them when it stares up at them from the faces in the fields and the gutters in the streets.”

Kannela’s tongue bucked against the mouthful of wine and she nearly choked. She glanced down at her red-stained fingers and shuddered.

No. Perversity by necessity, she reasoned, feeling only a little calmer. She recalled how so many lives were at stake. One word from this madman, one concocted lie, and the soldiers would wipe out her family, her friends, her neighbors, any and all of the islander survivors. How would they ever take the word of a Greek over one of theirs? Why would they even want to? Whole villages had been exterminated at whim.

A sudden memory of her family before the island’s invasion seared her mind. It was late August, 1943, no more than two weeks ago. Kannela had been setting the table for breakfast, covering the checkered cloth with food: her mother’s black bread drizzled with beads of virgin olive oil and peppered with flakes of oregano and crumbled feta. Her grandfather came inside from the boats, his mustache gleaming with sea-spray, a bucket of shrimp in hand. He looked tired; he worked the boats alone since his son and grandsons had left to fight in the mainland months ago. Mama was smiling that morning, because the sun was shining and someone had said the Germans were retreating from Athens.

Then a tinny voice screeched out a newsflash from the radio, and swallowed up the sunlight in its black abyss of warning: German forces are acting upon the issue of new orders. All armed men are to be shot on the spot. Villages from where shots have been fired or where armed men have been encountered are to be destroyed, and then men of the villages are to be shot. Elsewhere all men capable of bearing arms are to be rounded up and sent to Ioannina.

Mama screamed in fright; Kannela dropped a plate. The three of them clasped hands and prayed their men were far and safe at sea.

The vulnerability of his words stilled the biting retort on Kannela’s lips. She tried a smile, unaware that it twisted into a grimace by the time it emerged. “I was… recollecting.”

That should have brought about a hailstorm of indignation; from what she’d seen and heard, his comrades on the streets seemed to react very personally to any hint of slight. But he merely shrugged and fell silent. His eyes found her latest painting, half-finished and leaning as usual against the wall beneath the window.

He gestured impatiently at the canvas as if it could provide the explanation. And, now that she thought about it, it did. The “paint” was of the palest pink in color; she realized the dead give-away. “It comes out so well when you cry. The hues, the depth, the perspective—” He raised an eyebrow, and barked out a laugh that sounded forced even to him. “Listen to me. It’s almost as if I know what I’m talking about!”

Her fists trembled in her lap where she dropped them, the stained fingers curling together in muted protest.

But he was right. Her use of hue was amazing as well as inevitable. When she wept, the blood in the bowl was watered down to pink, the extent of her grief adding to the paleness of her creation. Other times the opposite would occur; the blood, unmixed and pure, thickened and required more finger-stirring to become warm and palpable again. It was predictable, too, the content of her creations. There were dark, richly-red landscapes, the scenes of village life before the war; then there were the light, watery-hued images of broken ships and broken angels. The darker, bloodier paintings gave the German youth more prestige, naturally, so of course it was those he warmed to.

She glared at him in frustration, then in confusion; his eyes flashed a blue ray of empathy between the cracks of his detached-soldier mask.

It seemed to be as good an apology as she would get—and far more than she expected. Who was this foreign oxymoron, with his monstrous incentives and his compassionate words? Kannela lowered her head into her hands, kneading her brow with her knuckles. She wished she could wish the confusion away.

The soldier stood and stretched. “I think some fresh air could do you some good. How long have you stayed cooped up in here?” He made it sound as if it was she who chose a hermitage within the church instead of he who had forced it upon her, terrified that his comrades might stumble across her suspicious red fingers. Now he extracted a pair of gloves from his pocket and tossed them down into her lap. “Come, let’s go for a walk.”

She made her choice and cast the gloves aside. “I don’t take walks with murderers.”

“Murderers?” He uttered what sounded like an oath in his native tongue. “You hope to sting me by label of murderer? In war we are all murderers. Even the children grow to have murder on their mind.”

“Because you came and planted that murder in their hearts!” Kannela cried. Now her voice rebounded from the walls. They stood, inches apart, staring at one another while the red haze of war blinded them. “You German scum, all of you, red-handed sons of—”

“Some have the blood on their hands. Others have it stained on their soul. What, you think you are free of it, merely because you cannot see it within you? Which do you think is hardest to remove? Don’t judge yourself innocent Rolph! You make me paint with blood!”

It was the first time she had spoken his name, and it seemed to catch him completely by surprise. There was a long moment of silence.

“My name is not Rolph,” he finally said. “And I do not want you to paint in blood. Like you, I take my instructions from a higher order. He goes by the name of General Engel. And while that does not make me right or wrong or innocent, I feel it is something you should know. I thought it was something you did know.”

A slab of sun trickled across the wall behind the soldier and glinted off the gold-painted irises of the Archangel Μιχαηλ. Kannela stooped to pick up the gloves, and slipped in her red-tipped fingers. Their eyes met, blue and brown shades of the planet. “And what is your name?”

The soldier smiled for the first time in days. It was a rather poor attempt, emerging crooked and small enough to be almost overlooked—but Kannela looked for it and found it. “My name is Michael,” he said.

Though it was late afternoon, the zenith rays still overwhelmed Kannela when she stepped out into the light. She squinted, instinctively holding out a hand to reorient herself, which he instinctively took, and just as quickly released. He started down the cobblestone road with a frown.

Kannela hurried along beside him to keep up with his long stride. This was a path she had followed all her life, could walk it blindfolded. It meandered like an eel, flanked at times by bougainvillea and climbing roses trailing from windowsills, so narrow in places that two average-sized people could not walk abreast. Coming out of the church was like reliving the invasion all over again; the Greek girl’s memory of rosy days was re-torn by the vision of these recent scars. The white-washed walls of the houses were as blackened as the church, wooden shutters burned or broken, and charred vines embraced the rooftops just as burnt skin clung to a skeleton.

German soldiers loitered everywhere she looked. Some wandered through the streets, some sat at the kafenio, most likely discussing carnage over cups of coffee. Young or female eyes, distinctly dark and Greek, peered out from within barricaded homes as the unlikely pair walked by. Only a handful of frail Greek elders sat out in the sun, allowed a respite after bringing in the fish for the day. Their boats bobbed colorfully out on the dock.

Kannela’s attention was elsewhere at the moment. A group of soldiers were looking over at them rather suspiciously. One lounged against a fence, beer in hand, and actually licked his lips as she passed. Her skin pricked with goose-bumps at his carnal response, but she kept her face impassive until she slipped after Michael through a narrow chasm of the street.

“You were over there,” he gestured towards the sea, near the beach below and beyond the houses. “And you were about to bury your goat.”

The sun gave a metallic sheen to his tawny hair as they emerged onto the wider part of the road. “Engel did first. He was passing by and heard singing. Some hymn? Said there you were, with this rusty old shovel when he’d thought we’d kept a close eye on all the tools. You just went ahead and dug a hole and buried that bloody mangled animal. You covered him up and walked around until you found a stone flat and big enough for a marker. For a while you just stood and stared. Then he called me over from my watch above the field, and wanted me to come over and find out about you. But then more curiously still you seemed to figure out what you were staring for, and next thing we knew you’d dipped your finger in a pool of blood left by the creature, and you created all sorts of markings on that stone.”

“He was my best goat,” Kannela explained. The childish words were weighed down by her solemnity. “He deserved a proper burial.”

The soldier shrugged. “Your artwork was incredible. I’d never seen anything like it. And you were so immersed. Your tears stopped—and your face, it was as if it glowed. You painted with such passion, and yet such… peace.” He seemed to struggle for the right words. “Engel saw it too—the mastery. But he did not see your art as a tool of respect, but as a weapon of power. Men like power. Monsters adore it.”

A couple soldiers passed them by. One of them—kind eyes, in such a rugged face—paused to tip his cap to Kannela. She smiled before she realized it, warmed by the undercurrent of humanity within an ocean of opposition.

“Do you know,” she remarked to Michael, and pointed to the dock. “I painted all of those.”

At this point in the road the olive trees on the side nearest to the cliff had cleared enough to offer a stunning view of the beach below. “They’re extremely colorful,” Michael agreed. He stepped off the road and sat down on a boulder jutting out of the feathery grasses, his legs dangling in air. After a moment she joined him. The sight of those boats stirred something in her heart, causing ripples of rhetoric.

“Do you know,” she repeated in sudden earnest. “I always wanted to be a painter. But my parents never approved. Mama always said it was the money, the distance, the strain of arguable subjects on Baba’s health. But one day when I was taking out the goats I passed by the door and I heard their voices from the kitchen.” She impersonated her father, eyes soft. “Over my dead body! My daughter sent into the cobra pit of the city? Voula, have you lost your head? Did God take away what little brain you have? She is a girl! You want your daughter corrupted in the city? I did not think so!” She gave a very shaky laugh. “My Pappou was the one who intervened. He said I have talent, that I am good now, but with some teaching one day I could become great.

“And my father said, She wants to paint? What’s to stop her? Let her paint! Let her paint every rock and shell on this island, but on this island she stays! So I did. I stayed and I painted designs on pottery, clothing, walls. I helped to finish the church. I gave a new coat to every fence and shutter that needed it, and to some that didn’t. When the fishermen noticed, they imported supplies for me from the mainland, and I painted their boats and styled the names of their choice on the helms in the calligraphic style of the church books. Apollonia. Petro. Demosthenis. Eirini.”

“So you were always a painter,” the soldier remarked. His gaze shifted from the boats to her, blue eyes so cool.

Kannela drew her knees to her chest and tucked her chin on top of them. “Oh, I lived and breathed art,” she agreed. “Still do. But it’s not the same.” For a moment she hesitated, then admitted her weakness. Somehow, she realized, when spoken, it was no longer a fear, but a fact, for it was at last acknowledged. “But no longer. It kills me. Art. I hate it now. It’s no better than a spear or a gun. So easily turned upon others. So easily turned upon oneself.”

Michael stroked his shadow of a beard. “Funny you should say so. I was an artist myself once, back in my country. Used to be a sculptor. Excelled in it, actually. Maybe even enjoyed it. It is in my blood; I come from a long line of artisans, but I’m sure to be the last. I stopped sculpting when the world fell on my brother in the studio.”

Kannela raised an eyebrow. It sounded like the beginning of a joke or a tragedy. She hoped for the former and expected the latter, and received what she expected.

“My brother and I were chiseling a representation of Atlas with the world on his shoulders,” Michael continued. “One day while we were working on it a quarrel broke out—the stupidest thing, one of us had forgotten to clean the tools—and my fist flew into Atlas’ new-made shoulder. The statue cracked and the stone globe fell, and my brother just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I never touched another statue. I know that art is only what we make of it—like any tool, any weapon, any body. But I feel that knowledge and emotion are not one and the same. Seems you feel that too.”

Kannela did not have to reply.She tasted the salt of the sea borne by a forgiving wind that knew nothing of war and slaughter and change. Tears stung her eyes.

“Hell,” cursed the soldier as he noticed. “That’s exactly what the walk was supposed to heal.”

The sun’s rays probed into the village inn that served as a temporary barracks and found Michael sprawled on his back on his bed. It was the hottest hour of the day, right after noon. He’d stripped from the waist-up; sweat gleamed on his motionless muscles. With an idle finger he picked at the blood caked on the shoulder of his uniform; though an emblem of Kannela’s touch he’d rather keep, a soiled uniform without apparent cause irritated General Engel. But then plenty of things without cause irritated General Engel, Michael scowled to himself. He was, to put it politely, a man of many eccentricities.

But it wasn’t so very bad. Accommodations were fair; they’d raided the homes for extra bedding, and the nightly stream of curses stilled as the soldiers adapted to the swarms of mosquitoes and flies. On a remote rocky island lapped by gentle tongues of Ionian water, it almost felt like holiday, not war. Their Italian predecessors certainly believed as much; the first Germans who arrived at the island—Michael among them—were stunned to find the soldiers organizing dance-parties and singing opera acapellas to their geographical and cultural neighbors. General Engel put an end to these liaisons when he removed the Italians and introduced the fear of bullet, conspiracy, and torture.

The youth sighed and ran a hand over the fuzz on his skull, still unused to the lack of his old wild curls. He extracted the box in his chest-pocket, and bit down on the edge of an unlit cigarette. It was a game he played with himself most long afternoons when off-duty, pressed how long he’d last against the temptation of the fumes.

Someone cleared his throat nearby, and Michael looked up. A familiar face scowled down at him, a friend who’d recently been promoted. Michael watched as a bead of sweat trickled down to the tip of his squat nose and dripped off into oblivion.

Michael nodded. Something about General Engle wishing an audience with him right away. He swung his legs to the floor and sat up. Removing the unlit cigarette from his mouth, he gave it a look and a toss, vaguely intrigued by the angry imprint of teeth at its base. Once dressed and ready he marched out and headed down the street toward the General’s office. On his way he passed beside the village square, a cleared plot which sloped up behind the church. Close to the road it was screened by a thick fence of cypresses; on the far side it was flanked by the graveyard wall.

Muffled sobs stilled his step and arrested his attention. Wants to see you immediately, his friend’s voice reminded him. The soldier hesitated, turned off the path. Immediately would have to wait.

He parted the branches and froze. A row of Greeks stood against the wall, motionless. A row of armed German soldiers crouched before them, guns poised and ready. Another fat German appeared, armed with a handgun and accompanied by an old villager whose face was beaten beyond recognition. Confronted by the bullets of his co-patriots’ stares, the old Greek lowered his head, unable to continue.

The fat soldier pressed the handgun to his temple and growled something Michael could not hear; the man raised his face and then his hand, and picked out half of the dozen Greeks in front of him. The German nodded, appeased, and gestured for the unpicked half to step aside.

They were forced to stand and watch. One of them—he was only a boy, maybe fifteen—bolted through the square towards the trees toward Michael. He stumbled by without seeing him, eyes gleaming blindly like a hunted animal’s. There was a dark patch where the boy had urinated through his trousers. When he broke through the trees, he just collapsed on all fours and continued until he vanished behind a bend in the street

Michael turned back in time to see the last of the luckless targets blindfolded. He gasped as he recognized the old fisherman on the left.

“Stop!” he cried and lurched forward. “Stop! I can vouch for that man, he is innocent!”

Only the Greek survivors paid him heed, saw their torn hearts mirrored in his eyes. The soldiers gunned down their co-patriots in a matter of seconds, and then it was over.

“I worry about you,” he confided. He gazed at his nephew over the pale bridge of his interlaced fingers, elbows propped between the papers on his desk. Blue sparks flew as their eyes met and clashed. The General’s voice was flat, compressed as the creaseless folds of his horrible uniform—but his gaze had a blue crystal-like clarity many had failed to interpret.

Michael recalled the last time they’d spoken, when he confronted the General about the use of blood.

The texture of the human finger, Engel said, is what makes it all so life-like. It’s beautiful.

There must be some alternative; beets to beat, wine to smear. This is no time of famine.

That would never mix as well. Why let all the blood go to waste? Good wine is hard to find in a pillaged country, and if found such things agree better with the stomach. Anyway, I like this shade of red.

Few knew him as Michael did: a stone man behind a stone mask, hardened until the bullying days of his childhood appeared pacifist in comparison. Skin slick with sweat, the young soldier shivered now in the absence of a different kind of warmth.

“Oh yes. So silent. Slow. Each day you seem more like your father, the devil take his soul. But I do believe you are still the best man for the job. I can trust you, and judging from the results you seem to have a way with that… Greek.”

A vision of Kannela’s eyes, almond-shaped and likewise colored, loosened Michael’s tongue.

“Sir. We had settled on the conditions that nothing was to happen to her family.”

“Ah, so that is the problem.” The older man leaned forward in his chair, pushing a frail-looking glass paperweight away from him. He busied himself by moving one pile of papers onto another. “I wondered when you’d hear of that. A traitor is a traitor, Michael. Perhaps your bilingualism provokes these disgusting sympathies. A true soldier does not allow his feelings to override the rules. War is not run on personal preference.” He brought his hands together again, and the fingers twisted around one another, like a spider mummifying a fly.

The paperweight in Michael’s hand cracked—he hadn’t even realized that he’d picked it up—and the General’s eyes snapped to his fingers. “I’ll have to get a new one of those,” he remarked. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

Michael fought to keep his breathing steady. Cooling his temper off in prison for the rest of the week wouldn’t be of use to anyone. And what was the use, after all, of showing a map of the world to a blind man? “Yes Sir. Sorry about that Sir.”

“I expect you will cement our understanding with another painting by tomorrow tonight. I have made myself clear, yes?”

“Excellent.” The General dismissed him with a flick of his hand. “Send someone to clear this mess. And a last thing—remove that blood from your uniform as soon as you get out of here.”

Michael saluted and exited. Back under the sun, he fished in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. He would need all the courage to face those almond eyes.

Shards of canvases projected like shipwrecks amidst pools of blood. The floor and base of the walls were stained where she had thrown the pottery bowls. The eyes that stared out from the iconography appeared for once more haunted than haunting. Kannela herself was curled beneath the one window, head buried in arms. She didn’t look up at the sound of his boots skirting the blood, but from her abrupt silence he knew she heard him.

“Don’t speak,” she snarled, and the sudden flash of her eyes scorched him. “Don’t speak to me! I know it. I heard it all from within here, trapped like a damned spirit!”

He knelt down beside her, daring to meet her gaze. Before he could check himself, his hand reached forward and brushed back a wisp of hair from her wet cheek.

Her fist rose and slammed into the side of his face, and he fell back, caught off-guard. She gasped and her eyes softened with regret, but the soldier rose to his feet. He left his canteen by the door.

Her fever sky-rocketed sometime during the night. She lay on her one blanket upon the stone floor, and drifted in and out of consciousness. She kept time only by the pattern of her temperature: five times (so far as she could remember) her knees kissed her chin and her joints jerked in shivery spasms; five times (no, this was six) she rolled left and right against the cold contours of the flagstones, the blanket pushed away as if the mere sight of it enflamed her.

First there had been pain. It was before she got sick, she thought, because it started as a longing. She felt she would trade an eye or a soul for yesterday, for yesteryear. Like a child she hungered for a parent’s caress, a brother’s kiss, a grandfather’s laugh. The pain grew with her sobs until it engulfed her as one physical ache. Then the fever set in and replaced that pain with a new one.

Mentally adrift, memories crowded up before her mind’s eye in strange sequence. Some flitted too fast, or not fast enough; one in particular returned over and over again to haunt her.

It was when the Germans had first arrived—was it only a week ago? Or more likely a century—and rounded up the first batch of “conspirators.” They herded them into the church, with the order to light their candles and pray. Some may have suspected execution then. But none had been prepared for General Engel’s idea of reinforcing the candlelight. They charted it in the books as a “freak accident of flame.” The screams of the dying and the awful smell of burning flesh would haunt all witnesses to their own dying days, Greek and German alike.

Now Kannela could not stop shivering. She wrapped herself in the blanket and prayed her bucking body might simply heave the memories out. She wanted to forget the rest, to want to forget the rest. Rest. Yes. Her breathing slowed; it sounded so shallow. Her fingers tapped against the stones, an involuntary musical tattoo mimicking some tribe’s drum-beat for death.

This was how Michael found her when he entered. His clear blue eyes washed over the trembling figure on the floor, and he turned and disappeared.

Two hot-flashes later he was back. He locked the door behind him when he entered. Kannela noticed that he carried a knapsack, which he set down beside her and began to rummage through. He extracted blankets and pouches of what looked like dried herbs. He had brought a bucket of steaming water, too. She made no protest when he bodily picked her up and started swathing her in the warm cloth. Her teeth chattered so hard that she vaguely feared she’d bite her tongue.

It was past midnight, and they would be looking for him in the barracks. Michael knew that, was already bracing for the hailstorm of criticism and speculation that would surface when he reemerged into their midst, and the suspicions of the General. But that mattered very little just now in the face of this beautiful young foreigner, growing older with a pain and grief he’d been so resolutely ignoring. To remain sane, he had to ignore it. Yet sanity was only one of his options.

The young woman opened her eyes to the feel of a cool wet cloth on her face. It took her a few moments to place herself, lying on the ground with her head on his crossed legs. It looked as if a bomb had fallen in the church, it was such a mess. From the ashen look of Michael’s face, he’d fought off sleep for quite a while, and the violet bruises under his eyes contrasted against his natural sun-starved skin. For all she knew, he may have sponged the sweat off her face all night.

She forced herself up from her core, his steadying hands pushing against her back. Quick shallow breaths were the most painless. She felt as if she had been run over by a ram. At least that lead weariness was gone. She turned her body slowly to face him, still seated.

She nodded, though she’d never thought about it before. It had sort of been the least of her worries.

She accepted the cup he gave her, surprised at the sweet taste of the tea within. “Thanks,” she replied after a few hot swallows. “Can’t wait to get back to reality.” She took another sip, but her eyes sparkled as they looked at him over the cup.

The German gave her a funny half-smile that did not reach his eyes. It wasn’t, she realized, that his eyes were simply unsmiling. There was something else, and she nearly didn’t recognize it as sadness. Perhaps it was because she’d never seen that before in his eyes.

“I’m really sorry about your grandfather,” he said. “And I’m very sorry about your island. About this whole Balkans genocide thing—oh, bullshit.”

It was the most ineloquent and most genuine apology, and she accepted it from him. “Michael. Do you know why I was burying my goat?”

“No.” He reached over and tucked the blanket more firmly around her. “Why?”

“That is what the women of my family do, when we aren’t helping cook or clean.”

“No,” she laughed. “We herd them. They forage well on the rocky terrain of these hills. And our men—the fathers, brothers, sons—they are the fisherfolk. That day I was herding my goats and there one of the village dogs had gone mad, and it attacked my herd. One moment it was strolling along in the field, and then next—it bounded over and tore out Mavro’s throat. Just like that. Its eyes gleamed. They were bright and crazy. It flung its head from side to side with the teeth still stuck in the skin. And my goat was dead.

“I buried the animal, Michael, and I thought I knew of sadness. Then I walk home and whatever is left of the young men of the village are dead. The women cower in their homes, the thin shadows of our children are hidden away or waste in hunger and fear. Now every day I pray that my father and brothers are alive, fighting and free. I pray that my country wakes soon from this nightmare. Every day, I pray you soldiers will leave or die.” Her voice and face hardened like stone, against only the human softness of her eyes, the window of vulnerability. “I will never paint again.”

His face hardened in turn, and again he reached forward, but this time to snatch the empty teacup from her stained fingers. Once he had it, it was as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “You will not have to,” he promised.

He shook her awake, and from the dimness within the church she could tell it was not yet morning. She didn’t know if he had stayed here the entire night again at her side, flinching awake at her every sigh and turn. His pallor proved that he continued to sacrifice sleep.

“I have a surprise for you,” he murmured, and helped her to her feet. His eyes danced like the cerulean sea, and she couldn’t help but smile. “Come with me. Quietly.”

He led her out the church and down the path in the predawn light. No one was about, not even the late-night patrol; the majority of them were probably drowsing at the kafenio over mugs of black coffee. Even the roosters, however many remained at this hour, preferred to sleep rather than squawk. Once or twice Kannela slipped on the dew of the cobblestones. Michael took her naked hand. They didn’t speak again, but after a moment she curled her fingers tighter around his.

They reached the beach where the moored boats undulated atop the waves. “No one’s on duty,” Kannela wondered aloud.

“This is my watch,” he explained. “And I gave my fellow sentries a reason to slumber more deeply tonight.”

Before she could question him further, her eye caught a shadow in the clump of trees on the further end of the dock. Sure enough, a couple figures materialized in the dim gray glow. Kannela recoiled a minute, fearing a trap. But they came closer, and she recognized their faces.

“No,” she breathed in disbelief. Her brothers—thinner, darker, just as beloved.

She broke away from Michael and hurled into their open arms, immersed in this unexpected tide of love. At last, at last! The eldest, Manoli, broke away first, his eyes bright with emotion and his bearded cheeks tight with resolve. He led Kannela and their brother Yianni to the furthest, largest boat, where they gestured and explained.

She dreaded to let them from her sight, afraid they would disappear like the better hallucinations of her fever. Yianni agreed to run with her up to the village. Like silent phantoms they ran from door to door, until the pitifully few survivors had banded behind them. Michael was nowhere to be seen—perhaps the reason no other soldier was to be seen either. There was no time for doubt or fear—no time, no fear.

The siblings let the villagers down to the dock. The footing was treacherous in the dark, but even the children seemed to realize the significance of speed and silence. The Greeks left behind every possession but the clothes on their backs and the crosses or talismans they slept with. Kannela noticed that the rest of the boats bobbed lower in the water; her eyes met Manoli’s, and he fingered the knife at his belt and winked. Yianni jumped aboard and hoisted the sails, and Kannela stooped to untie the mooring rope.

One of the women let out a sudden scream. Those closest pounced on her and muffled her cry, only to discover that she burned with fever. “My baby,” she moaned, her eyes rolling. She held up her hands in supplication Manoli cursed her ill absentmindedness, and Yianni prepared to unfurl the sheets already, but Kannela was too quick for him. She leapt to shore and ran one more time to the houses. Her brothers’ agitated hisses to return faded behind her.

She could never recall the road being so eerily empty. Mercy had it that she heard the babe wailing from the first house. She slipped through the unlocked door and found him red-faced and flailing his fists on a narrow cot. He calmed at once in her rollicking embrace.

And there was Michael, materialized from the morning gloom as she stepped out the door. The soft pastels of dawn allowed her to distinguish color as well as shape on the young male human form before her. His face was white and pinched. So tired.

“I laced their drinks, had to make sure. The officers especially needed more to match their bulk.”

She held the baby close to her breast, and stared into the bright blue eyes she’d once thought so clear and cold. “Why?”

“You think that art is killing you. It makes you weep, and I can’t see you glow.” He raised a hand and smoothed back a stray wisp of her hair. His fingers shook. “But art is not killing you. It is we who are killing you.”

“Come away with me,” she pled. “When they wake and find you, they will kill you. You’re just a good man stuck in a uniform. You’re not like them.”

Michael leaned over the baby in her arms and kissed her. “You have to go now,” he ordered, and then he turned and raced back towards the source of the German cry. The baby squirmed and hiccupped, precursor to a sob. Kannela rocked it in her arms, her tears dripping into its hair.

Her brothers met her halfway up the road when she stumbled back, prepared to follow and find her. Their eyes widened at the sight of the baby in her arms. In a matter of minutes they had joined the others in the boat and set sail.

Behind them a shot rang out from somewhere within the labyrinth curves of the village.

Angela Panayotopulos is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at GMU. Her Greek-Americanness becomes readily apparent in her joy of breaking plates at festivals and weddings, the immediate response to most things with "Opa!" and "Bravo!" and an appreciation for the fact that the mispronunciation of her last name is the perfect ice-breaker. Her work can also be found in publications of The GMU Review and Inscribed Magazine.