— No, they weren’t the least bit friendly. They were just stupid animals without the slightest curiosity. Even when I managed to free myself by cutting all the straps and strings with my medic’s knife and climbed down among them, they didn’t pay me any attention. They just went on grazing as if I were some kind of stone that had fallen from the sky — which is indeed how I lay there, Grandmother, like a stone, without moving. My hand was hurting me badly, and worse yet, my vision was as blurred as it was in the fifth grade, that year that you insisted I didn’t need glasses…
— No, I didn’t lose consciousness. I was just in such a state of shock from all that quiet around me that the only conclusion I could reach, Grandmother, as desperate as it was, was that the assault had failed and everyone was already dead or taken prisoner.
— Yes, that’s what I thought, Grandmother. It was getting on toward dusk, and I felt an odd calm, quite resigned to the fact that the Führer had sent his best sons to bleed to death on this distant, rocky island simply to let Europe know that his long arm could reach the roots it grew from. And because I remembered the Ten Commandments we had been given before taking off from Athens, and especially, the sixth one, which Baron Friedrich von Heidte in person had drilled us in, Thou shalt not surrender, thy badge of honor is victory or death, I quickly bandaged my hand, spread my stretcher out between two rocks in a little fortified position I prepared, and, while waiting for someone I could challenge to a fight, an enemy who would be worthy of killing me, I lay down among the grazing goats and listened to the chirping of the crickets, which ever since then, Grandmother, for the last three years, has followed me around day and night without my being able to decide if it’s a sound that I hate or am attracted to…
— Yes. Listen. It’s as though this great cricketing were fanning out across the island, even though, oddly enough, it only makes the silence greater.
— They’re everywhere, here too, among the leaves on the branches of the trees. You can’t see them, but if you stick your head into these branches, you’ll hear them sawing away…
— Exactly…
— It never changes. Just the same monotonous thrumming that saws the silence into dry little chips. And maybe that’s what so hypnotized me, Grandmother, that I couldn’t hear the shots and explosions coming from the airport in Heraklion, which was not exactly, as I later found out, blanketed by the deathly silence I thought it was…
— Later… in prison, when I sat going over and over what I had done that day…
— Yes, for a while… I’ll get to it…
— I didn’t want to distress you.
— Yes. That was one reason you didn’t hear from me…
— But… just a minute… look here, Grandmother, this is my story, it’s the only way I know of getting you to picture what I’ve been trying to tell you since starting up this trail — along which, Grandmother, if you’re not too tired, I’ll have to ask you to continue, so that you can see for yourself, not only the far end of the airport, which was finally captured after several days of bloody fighting by fresh forces that were landed from the sea, but the jump-off point for the private trek of Private Egon Bruner, who was temporarily cut off from history, Grandmother, in order to stumble into prehistory and into the great fan of cricket song that went on all night in deeper and deeper darkness — cut off from my olive tree too, beneath which I buried my white chute, and from the flock of goats, which I dispatched with my schmeisser to keep it from tinkling conspicuously after me… because I had made up my mind, Grandmother, I really had, to follow the sixth commandment and not be taken prisoner if only I could find someone worthy of killing me. And so I began to head south, Grandmother… there, take a good look at those two lovely hills over there, which the Australians, or so the Greeks told us, referred to as “Charlies,” which is a term of endearment they have for a woman’s breasts, although we Germans, having noticed at once that they were not the same size, changed their hames to “Friedrich the Great” and “Friedrich the Small.” And now just picture your Egon the Second, Grandmother, advancing nearsightedly between those two Charlies on the night of May 20, 1941, fully armed and toting a big knapsack with first-aid supplies, three days’ battle rations, and his stretcher, on which no doubt he intended to carry himself once he was wounded or killed, heading south on a moonless night amid the smell of fires burning under a sky like none I had ever seen back home, all fantastically lit up with stars whose names I didn’t know, moving warily through vineyards whose sour grapes I picked and ate, scrambling over stone fences, keeping away from the dark, shuttered huts and avoiding the roads, on which now and then I heard the sound of some speeding car, heading steadily south in my search for a hero from one of Koch’s Greek myths whom I could challenge…
— Don’t rush me, Grandmother Please, I beg you, give me time, let me tell the story in my own way and at my own speed, and above all, trust me to guide you through it. Tomorrow we’ll say good-bye, who knows for how long, who knows if not forever — and believe me, Grandmother, you’re getting the shortest and quickest possible version I can give you, I even have it outlined here on my palm, station by station… so please, be patient with me, because now that we’re starting up the trail again you’ll see that the direction I took that night, which certain individuals insisted on interpreting as a cowardly flight from battle, or at the very least, as a panic-stricken error, was from my point of view a deep penetration, a nocturnal sally into the bright womb that Koch lectured me so brilliantly about. Because now I know that if someday we’re called upon to justify this horrible war that we started with the clearest premeditation, to justify the blood, the suffering, the conflagration that we’ve spread everywhere, we’ll know what to answer and won’t just have to stand there mumbling sheepishly like after the last beastly war, when we were accused of invading France to force our blood on the French and English without anyone, not even us, realizing what we were up to, which was to drive south as we’ve finally done, to ancient Hellas, to this island of Crete, this most wonderful place that has been from the start, Grandmother, in my own humble opinion, the true grail of our German soul, whose deepest desire, to put it most simply, is to exit from history by hook or by crook, if not forward then backward, so that if the French, back then, in the first war, hadn’t insisted on stopping us at the frontier, we would have rushed through their country without damaging it in the least, just like, yes, like tourists of sorts, because deep down we Germans are nothing but the most passionate tourists who sometimes must conquer the countries we dream of in order to tour them unhindered, with the thoroughness to which we’re accustomed…
— No, I’m not joking… certainly not now…
— That could be. Perhaps it’s just a fantasy of mine. And perhaps it’s not. At least let me finish explaining myself before you judge me… Here, hold onto me tight while you take this step. The trail gets narrower here…