What if the wind … He searched the dark rooftop, looking for weight, but found only some loose stucco where a crack ran along one corner. He pried up a few pieces, not very heavy, and distributed them at the corners of the sheet. They would have to do. Below him, on the second floor of the school, he could hear voices, a laugh, another voice, another laugh. He scuttled back to the drainpipe, descended to the ground, put on his shoes, and, feeling better than he’d felt in a long time, walked home. What did it mean, the sheet on the roof? He didn’t know, he didn’t care, he knew only what it meant to him.
The following morning he hurried off to the barbershop. In the back room, Pappou was cold and frightening. “Is it done? Whatever it is-done properly?” Behar said yes. Pappou sat still, his eyes boring into Behar’s soul, then he picked up the telephone and made a brief call. Asked for somebody with a Greek name, waited, finally said, “You can have your hair cut any time you want, the barber is waiting for you.” That was all. The foreigner appeared ten minutes later, and Pappou went out into the shop.
The foreigner asked where he’d found the wire; Behar told him. “Maybe I’ll go up to the roof myself,” he said. “What will I see?”
“A big white sheet, sir.”
“Flat?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Behar.” A pause. “If you ever, ever, tell anybody about this, we will know. Understand?” With a slow, meticulous grace he drew an index finger across his throat, a gesture so eloquently performed that Behar thought he could actually see the knife. “Understand?” the foreigner said again, raising his eyebrows.
A frightened Behar nodded emphatically. He understood all too well. The foreigner held his eyes for a time, then reached into his pocket and counted out seven one-hundred-drachma notes.
28 November.
For Costa Zannis, it began as a normal day, but then it changed. He was standing next to the captain in the school’s narrow cloakroom, which, with the addition of a teacher’s desk, had been turned into what passed for a liaison office. Pavlic was just about to join them, it was the most common moment imaginable; pleasant morning, daily chore, quiet talk. Zannis and the captain were looking down at a hand-drawn map, with elevations noted on lines indicating terrain, of some hilltop in Albania.
Then the captain grabbed his upper arm. A grip like a vise-sudden, instinctive.
Zannis started to speak-“What …”-but the captain waved him into silence and stood frozen and alert, his head cocked like a listening dog. In the distance, Zannis heard a drone, aircraft engines, coming toward them. Coming low, not like the usual sound, high above. The captain let him go and ran out the door, Zannis followed. From the north, two planes were approaching, one slightly above the other. The captain hurried back into the school and grabbed the Bren gun that stood, resting on its stock, in one corner of the entry hall. The windows rattled as the planes roared over the rooftop and the captain took off toward the street, Zannis right behind him. But the captain shouted for him to stay inside, Zannis followed orders, and stopped in the doorway, so lived.
In front of the school, the captain searched the sky, swinging the Bren left and right. The sound of the planes’ engines faded-going somewhere else. But that was a false hope, because the volume rose sharply as they circled back toward the school. The captain faced them and raised the Bren, the muzzle flashed, a few spent shells tumbled to the ground, then machine guns fired in the distance, the captain staggered, fought for his balance, and sank to his knees.
What happened next was unclear. Zannis never heard an explosion, the world went black, and when his senses returned he found he was lying on his stomach and struggling to breathe. He forced his eyes open, saw nothing but gray dust cut by a bar of sunlight, tried to move, couldn’t, and reached behind him to discover that he was pinned to the floor by a beam that had fallen across the backs of his legs. In panic, he fought free of a terrible weight. Then he smelled fire, his heart hammered, and he somehow stood up. Get out. He tried, but his first step-it was then he discovered his shoe was gone-landed on something soft. Covered with gray dust, a body lying face down. Somebody ran past him, Zannis could see he was shouting but heard nothing. He turned back to the body. Let it burn? He couldn’t. He grabbed the feet, and, as he pulled, the body gave a violent spasm. Now he saw that one of the legs was bleeding, so he took the other leg which, as he hauled, turned the body over and he saw it was Pavlic.
As he pulled Pavlic’s body toward the entry, there was a grinding roar and the rear section of the second story came crashing down onto the first floor. Zannis heaved again, Pavlic’s body moved. He could see an orange flicker now and then, and could feel heat on the skin of his face. Was Pavlic alive? He peered down, found his vision blurred, realized his glasses weren’t there, and was suddenly infuriated. He almost wanted-for an instant a scared ten-year-old-to look for them, almost, then understood he was in shock and his mind wasn’t quite working. He took a deep breath, which burned in his chest and made him cough, steadied himself, and dragged the body out of the building, the back of Pavlic’s head bouncing down the steps that led to the doorway. Immediately there was someone by his side, a woman he recognized, who worked in the post office across from the school. “Easy with him,” she said. “Easy, easy, I think he’s still alive.” She circled Zannis and took Pavlic under the arms and slid him across the pavement.
With one bare foot, and unable to see very much of anything, he headed back toward the school. As he entered the building, a reservist came crawling out of the doorway, and Zannis realized there were still people alive inside. But the smoke blinded him completely and the heat physically forced him backward. In the street, he sat down and held his head in his hands. Not far from him, he saw what he thought were the captain’s boots, heels apart, toes pointing in. Zannis looked away, tried to rub his ankle, and discovered his hand was wet. Blood was running from beneath his trouser cuff, across the top of his foot, and into the gray powder that covered the street. Very well, he would go to the hospital but, when he tried to stand, he couldn’t, so he sat there, holding his head, in front of the burning school.
He wasn’t hurt so much. They told him that later, in a dentist’s office where the lightly wounded had been taken because the town clinic-there was no hospital in Trikkala-was reserved for the badly injured. The reservists lay on the floor of the reception area, the dentist had tried to make them comfortable by putting the pillows of his waiting room couch under their heads. Zannis could hear out of one ear now, a wound in his leg had been stitched up, and there was something wrong with his left wrist. He kept opening and closing his hand, trying to make it better, but motion only made the pain worse.
As dusk fell, he realized he was tired of being wounded and decided to seek out whatever remained of his unit. In the street, people noticed him, likely because a nurse had cut off the leg of his trousers. Zannis met their eyes and smiled-oh well-but the people looked sorrowful and shook their heads. Not so much at a soldier with a bare leg and one shoe. At the bombing of their school and the men who’d been killed, at how war had come to their town.
And it wasn’t done with them. And they knew it.
Two days later, Zannis went to the clinic to see Pavlic. Some of the wounded lay on mattresses on the floor, but Pavlic had one of the beds, a wad of gauze bandage taped to one side of his face. He brightened when he saw Zannis, now fully dressed. After they shook hands he thanked Zannis for coming. “It is very boring here,” he said, then thanked him also, as he put it, “for everything else.”