War Games (10 page)

The chickens came running as Petros swung his arm, casting a handful of feed away from himself. The smaller brown hens were feisty and sometimes got more than their share. He favored the large whites with bare necks.

He heard something scrape the floor of the chicken house and thought a hen must be hurt or sick. Before he could step inside, someone grabbed him crushingly around the face and shoulders. He dropped the feed bucket, fighting hard, trying to scream.

Germans
was the first thing to come to mind. He fought harder.

“Yai!” It was a man’s voice, a man’s strength holding on to him, and then speaking in Greek. “Don’t kick and I won’t hurt you!”

He pushed Petros into the chicken house, trapping him against the nest boxes. The sharp ends of the hay scratched Petros’s face. The earthy smell of the chicken house filled his nose.

Someone else said, “George, George, don’t hurt him.”

“I haven’t hurt him, but he’s bruised me many times,” George complained, still holding Petros in too firm a grip.

“Boy, boy, stop wriggling,” the other one said. “We don’t mean you harm. We need a meal. Can you help us?”

Petros stilled, struggling to breathe. The hand covered half his face.

“George, I think you have to let go of him, George.”

They set Petros loose. He turned to face two men, both of them dirty, smelly, and wearing clothing cleaner than they were. It struck Petros they’d stolen this shirt from someone’s drying laundry. Possibly that was Elia’s father’s shirt—the large buttons looked the same.

One man was short, the other ugly. George was the ugly one.

“Who are you?” Petros’s voice came out like a frog’s croak.

“Proud fighters in the Greek army a month ago,” the short one said. “Now we are the resistance. We won’t surrender.”

“I’ll bring you something to eat,” Petros said, sounding stronger.

“We’ll come with you,” George said. “The last place we waited they brought a shotgun to send us on our way.”

Petros noticed that all of them were breathing fast, like dogs. The men were as frightened as he was. He looked toward the wheat field, hoping to wave to Zola and Old Mario. No luck—they were out of sight.

“From our back step, you can hear everything on the road,” Petros said. “If the Germans come, you can hide in the garden.”

There was only his sister in the kitchen, stirring a batter. “Sophie—” Petros’s warning came too late. She saw strangers and screamed. A rich, blood-chilling scream that stopped Petros short.

“Aieee,” the short one cried. “We’re hungry. Only hungry.”

Mama came running. “I found them in the chicken house,” Petros said quickly. “They’re resistance.”

Mama’s face was tight with distrust. But it was Sophie who said, “Every thief is a resister now.”

“Shah,” Mama said, swatting Sophie. She ordered the men as if they were children. “Sit. I’ll feed you. Then you’ll go.”

“Papa will shoot them,” Sophie said, becoming fierce.

“Where’s this papa?” George asked Petros.

“Only down the road,” Petros said.

The other one grinned. “I think we’ll take our chances.”

George poked him with an elbow. “Don’t be scaring women and children. This is my trouble, that you don’t think.”

“I thought well enough in the henhouse. You’re about to have a meal.”

Sophie threw a spatula at them, shouting, “I wish Lambros were here! He would—”

“You know Lambros?” This was George. The other ignored her, only caught the spatula and licked it clean.

“He’s our cousin,” Petros said. “He climbed the Needle.”

“That he did, he did,” George said.

“He’s our friend,” the other one said. “We fought the Germans shoulder to shoulder.”

The color had returned to Mama’s face. “Eat,” she said, setting a loaf of bread on the table. “What are your names?”

“George,” they both said.

Mama put cheese on the table, and the Georges began to slice it and eat hungrily. Petros filled glasses with water and sat down with them. “Climbing the Needle,” he said. “How was it done?”

The other George said, “Here was our problem. We didn’t know the Germans were coming through from the north—”

Sophie set olives and tomatoes in front of them. The Georges stopped talking to put more food in their mouths.

“I thought you were fighting the Italians,” Petros said, confused.

“We were—we did,” George said. “We fought them into Albania.”

Behind them, Mama wet yellow squash flowers in oil and dipped them in a dish of flour. “Then we learned of the Germans at the other border. Our men were needed farther east, around the railways.”

“So you let the Italians in,” Sophie said, coming back.

“Never say that.” Tomato juice dripped down George’s chin. “Some may have slipped through, it’s true, but the Germans let them in.”

The other George said, “We can’t argue the difficulties of war with a little girl.” This didn’t improve Sophie’s opinion of them, and she flounced away to help Mama fry the flowers.

George told more of the story. “There were only eighteen of us at the Needle. Each day we won a little, we lost a little. But we stood on Greek soil and plugged the mountain pass.”

“We sent rocks down into the gap the Italians were fighting from. Each day they set dynamite and dug. Each day we sent down more rocks. Always they were shooting. Sometimes their bullets made rocks fall,” the other George said.

One of them spoke while the other chewed. “It was a standoff. After sixteen days, we were down to seven men.”

Mama said, “And the Italians?”

He said, “We didn’t count their dead, we counted ours. We were seven and had no food but the oats meant for the mules.”

“That’s what we ate, chewing grain all day.”

“Lambros said we must go down the mountain. Bring back food and volunteers to fight,” George said. “He would hold the Italians at bay.”

Sophie asked, “What if you were killed?”

Twin shrugs. “At least we would have tried.”

She said, “What if Lambros was killed?”

“They weren’t killed and neither was Lambros,” Petros said when the Georges hesitated. “What happened?”

“We started out on foot,” the other George said. “A man on a mule is an easy target. Lambros fired on the Italians all day.”

“For six days,” George said, “he held them off alone.”

The other George took the story back. “In the villages we learned of the surrender. Separately and together, we made our way back to tell Lambros there were new developments.”

“We carried food. But we couldn’t get to him.”

“The Germans came with tanks—tanks. They rolled through the pass with no trouble. The trucks followed. It was the invasion.”

“There were no rocks falling. No gunfire.” George shook his head. “We figured Lambros for dead.”

“While we were saying prayers for him, someone saw a light reflected from the point of the Needle.”

“It was there and then it stopped. Some said it was Lambros, some said it was only a trick of the sunlight.”

“I held a mirror up and caught sunlight,” the other George added. “There was a return signal. We saw the light at the point of the Needle again.”

“You understand—Italians were running all over the hillside. German tanks rolling past us,” George said. “But three times we signaled and three times we saw light. And then it was gone.”

“Everyone agreed Lambros did it. He had nowhere to go but up. He had nothing but fingers and toes for tools to climb that shard.”

Petros remembered Lambros didn’t look strong enough to climb the Needle. But perhaps that was how a man looked once he’d done it.

George said, “To climb up is one thing, to slide down another. We still counted him a dead man.”

“You counted wrong,” Sophie said.

When the Georges left, Mama made Petros lock the front gate.

Meanwhile, Old Mario and Zola had come in and heard about the Georges. Everything. Even Petros’s part in it, being grabbed in the chicken house, wasn’t a fresh story when finally he got a chance to tell it.

Petros went back out to his garden, grumbling to himself about Sophie’s big mouth, first turning feet that bled into dying heroes, and now talking as if she had been snatched into the chicken house herself.

Papa brought Stavros home with him. Zola met them at the gate. Petros ran and reached the house as they did, his chest heaving, but by then Zola had told them about the Georges.

Before Petros could protest, Stavros made an excellent point. “How many such men are there? Perhaps the whole Greek army is hiding in villages all over the countryside.”

“Many of them,” Papa said, and led them inside.

Petros wanted to ask Papa about the deal he’d tried to
strike with the Lemos family, whether Elia had the story straight. But he thought better of it with Stavros sitting there.

“The teachers have moved to the countryside, to houses standing empty,” Papa said. “So schools won’t open again soon.”

“Why would the teachers go?” Sophie asked. “Most are Greek.”

“Teachers know the community,” Papa said, meaning they knew of anyone who wasn’t Greek. Petros understood this much. “They don’t want to be questioned.”

“Shopkeepers know people,” Sophie argued, but her voice was weak with shock.

“Teachers and priests know them best,” Zola said, to remind her of things they’d heard on the radio before it was hidden away.

Petros suddenly understood the changes his family had made might not be temporary. If the Germans won the war, this might be the way they were to live the rest of their lives.

“It was my story to tell,” Petros complained to Zola when they were alone in their room that night. “I’m the one they grabbed, and I’m the one who brought them into the house—”

“Isn’t it enough that it happened to you?”

“It did,” Petros agreed. “So I should be the one to tell.”

“You think this news should wait until you pull a few more weeds?”

“You saw me come running when Papa came in,” Petros said.

“What if I did?” Zola said, waving him away with his hand. “I’ve lost everything. My books, my puzzles. My maps, my colored pencils. Everything.”

“You’re just looking for a fight,” Petros said.

“I’m looking for my flag.” Petros thought his brother had forgotten about the flag in the excitement of writing notes. “Don’t give me that fish-eyed look,” Zola said. “You threw away my messages. Why not my flag?”

Petros said, “Did you see any flag in the scraps bucket?” He didn’t even want to get indignant. This day had used him up.

“It was mine,” Petros added. “From the school assembly.”

“I kept it for both of us,” Zola said.

Now Petros felt a little anger stir in his heart. “If you kept it for both of us, how come I didn’t know about it?”

Zola narrowed his eyes, saying, “But you did know about it, didn’t you? I hid it from Papa, not from you.”

“Why don’t you ask Mama?” Petros said, knowing he never would. “Maybe
she
found it.”

Zola went to Sophie, who was drying the dishes, and whispered an accusation in her ear. She snapped her dish towel at his legs and gave him such a fight that Mama came in, asking them what it was about.

Zola complained, “Sophie’s worse to deal with than her cat.”

Petros smiled.

His brother came to stand beside the bed in a bullying way. He hadn’t used this manner with Petros in a long time, not since they were both much younger, and Petros found it didn’t worry him like it used to. He didn’t feel in the least afraid.

Zola even looked a little silly as he stood there another few seconds and then wandered back to his own bed. He looked tired, which they all were, and lost.

Petros was too angry to care. He wanted to tear little bits off the flag and let Zola find them in his bedsheets or in the garden. As bits of blue paper or white, only Zola would know them for something of any importance.

Zola couldn’t complain to Papa or Mama without telling them he was guilty of hiding the paper flag. It was a perfect revenge. Zola began to snore.

Petros smothered a laugh. He fell asleep and dreamed he was flying high on the back of a huge blue and white bird.

In the morning, Sophie gave both Petros and Zola several narrow-eyed looks across the breakfast table.

Petros was still angry too and thought his brother looked a little more smug than usual. He wished he could make Zola regret his irritating manner.

Zola busied himself with some chores in the yard, his dog at his heels as he walked around. He hung around the doorway during a short visit from Elia’s grandmother and stood at the gate talking to a passerby.

Petros had weeded the rows of basil and nearly-ripe tomatoes before Mama asked Zola why he wasn’t working in the garden too.

When Zola finally came to help, Petros was ready to give his brother a hard time.

“This afternoon,” Zola said out of the corner of his mouth, as if the tomatoes would repeat his secrets, “Elia’s grandmother wants you to go into town with him to get her knitting wool.”

Petros’s heart leaped, but he said, “It could wait.”

“Too late. The trucks,” Zola said. He lowered his voice still further. “Haven’t you noticed how few are passing the house since yesterday? If the troops are all here, the commander will follow.”

Petros nodded. His brother might have a point.

“These are the last notes, and they’re ready,” Zola said.

Still not wanting to look too willing a partner, Petros said, “Why the last?”

Zola lifted his chin slightly. “Because they are, that’s all.”

Fifi had climbed out of the goat pen again. She trotted in their direction, stopping to nibble at a reaching tendril of sweet pea. Zola’s dog, always careful to avoid Fifi, ambled off to the far end of the row.

“Are you afraid of Papa finding out?”

“I’m afraid of nothing,” Zola said. Fifi arrived to bite Zola on the back of his leg. “Ow!” Zola yelled, jumping away from her. “This goat is a menace.”

Petros hid a smile and snapped off a nearby stem. “Here, give her a nibble of this sweet pea vine and she won’t bite you so hard next time.”