The Demons of Athens by Vrasidas Karalis

Author:Vrasidas Karalis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brandl & Schlesinger

Day 15

Whispers, whispers, whispers everywhere. What are they saying? They fly around me all night long: ‘You are sleeping in the room where your grandfather died, in pain and yet he never complained, alone and in silence. He died waiting for you – but you never arrived.’

My chest is aching, I am falling into the euphoric abyss of guilt, shame and self-flagellation. And now look, it happens: my grandfather comes in, as he was thirty years before he died. He talks to me about his adventures of the Asia Minor campaign back in 1920.

‘We were doomed to lose that war,’ he says. ‘We were unfair, loathsome, abominable. Every time we entered a village, the soldiers burned houses and assaulted women. I was in the middle of all these sinners, one of them, being counted with them. I felt a horrible needle piercing my brain, my heart was breaking; and after the monsters killed the women, we had to march again towards the east – where to? To the Catastrophe – which was ruthless, monstrous and still lasts to this day.’

‘And what were you doing?’ I ask him.

‘I was praying to be forgiven, to find a way to atone for the crimes we committed. We were doomed to lose the war, we defiled everything...’

I see him again that single day we went together under the huge pine tree. After fifty years, he wants to confess and chose me for his admission of sins.

‘We walked through the Salt Desert, Eski Sehir; then it was the battle of Sangarios river. Fighting for ten days, so many dead soldiers around. I slept for two nights in halfdug trenches, surrounded by corpses rotting in the unbearable heat of August. I fought fiercely to save them, I fought harder to survive. After some months of doing nothing, the inevitable disaster was near. We were to be punished. It was the justice of God.’

He is with me in the dark, our last meeting finally now taking place, each of us standing on different shores, separated by the cold rivers of existence and oblivion.

I grew up with his stories:

‘The glory in war is the loss of the breath of God in us. It evaporates, it vanishes like steam, puuuuph... And it’s gone.’

I remember. He never went to any national celebration as a veteran – even when they offered him lots of money and medals.

‘What happened after the last battle?’

‘I was sure that I was to be killed. Only twenty of us remained. Soon we were scattered all over the desert, panic and horror... I was scared, so many corpses around. I tried to bury as many as I could. Then, I heard Turkish soldiers galloping towards us. They will kill me, oh God, forgive me for what I have witnessed, I thought, they will kill me. Then darkness fell and found shelter in a cave. At night, I went down the river washed myself and my khaki clothes believing that I had to meet the creator clean and fresh.

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