Free Enemy and Brother by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page B

uncle to guide him into the house. Vasso picked up the suitcase and followed them.
    The butcher circled back and parked the car, immediately becoming the center of a men’s jabbering council. The children pelted one another with the flowers, the girls went home to put away their pretty dresses and some of the boys from the chorus staggered mockingly into the street, groping the air in a sort of grotesque game of blind-man’s buff.
    I walked to the opposite end of the village to the shop where I had myself been given my first welcome to Kaléa just two days before.

7
    A MAN CONSPICUOUS BY his absence from Stephanou’s homecoming was George Kanakis, the village president. I sought him out in his shop. He was at the forge, turning the blade of a plow that had been cruelly bent as by a rock. I watched him try to hammer it into shape while he looked at the fading coals and cursed the boy who had deserted the bellows. I volunteered to try my hand at them. I was more a menace than a help, sending up a cascade of sparks with my first attempt.
    “It can wait,” Kanakis said, and laid aside the plow.
    “I can learn.”
    “Why? It is an ancient trade and you are a modern man. What is happening with the return of the hero?” I could not tell: sarcasm or acclaim?
    “He is old,” I said. “He would not speak.”
    “Not to Vasso?”
    “To no one except the butcher, telling him to drive on.”
    Kanakis led the way to the front of the shop and offered me one of the two chairs there. At the door he clapped his hands, a signal to the kafenion -keeper two doors away. “You will have a coffee with me,” he said.
    “I would be honored. What was he like before he went away?”
    “Before he went away. I remember Paul when he was a boy and I was already a man.” He threw up his hands. “I remember when he was born. His mother died, may she be with God. His father was killed in a street demonstration in Athens. He too was a radical, a self-educated man. Modenis, his uncle, brought Paul up like his own son, sent him to school. He was a fine student, very good in languages at the gymnasium. Then before the war he won a scholarship to the university in Athens. Modenis gave a party that night—oh, I tell you, it was beautiful.” He tilted back in his chair, remembering, his toughened face soft with the visions he saw. “Everybody got drunk. A scholar from Kaléa. It was like having a doctor from the village, you know? It was like all of us together were part of him. And we were. We all gave something so that he should live well in Athens, like the son of a merchant or a lawyer. But the war came, and Paul fought in the north with our ragged and heroic army and then afterwards when everything was lost, he came back and the terrible time of the German came on us. He could have gone to Egypt with the government… the flight into Egypt….” Kanakis smiled at the bitter image. “But he chose to stay. He taught school at night—in the cave where a candle burns to this day. Our children were like moles, but they learned to use words, to read and write their own language. He was like a young priest. And later, when he roused us all by his passion—he would tell us in the church while the priest—it was the old priest, not the one here now—watched from the belfry lest the Germans come. He would tell us of our ancient heroes, of our rising amongst the graves defiled by the Turk, and then afterwards our young men and some not so young—I was among them—would follow him in the night and we learned something else—how to kill, how to blast with dynamite; I who turn my back like a woman when the butcher sticks a pig. In this village we were not afraid of the Andarte. In those days we were the Andarte .”
    The coffee came, the small cups and the glasses of water were set daintily on a nail keg. The quick darkness of the valley was coming soon. We sipped the coffee in silence. I offered my host a cigarette.
    When he had smoked for a