The Angry Hills - Leon Uris [38]
Mike shook his head. “I am married and I have two children.”
Christos arose and clasped his hands behind him. He looked like a little puppet pacing back and forth in his fustanella. He stopped and sighed.
“Jay, my good friend, I tell you something. From the minute I take you on my boat in Nauplion, I say to myself, here is a man. Here is a man who is something. I am now rich, although you may not agree with things I do. But every man wants this. He wants this for his son. Melpo has not given me a son. Jay, I would like very much...”
Mike arose and walked from the cottage through Melpo’s garden and onto the dirt street. He could see Christos standing in the doorway in his ballerina dress looking after him. Paleachora was asleep now—a restless and troubled sleep, disturbed by the problems of war.
Mike walked to the hill past the Church of the Prophet Elias and sat beneath a cypress tree and looked at the land by moonlight.
Many men follow a rainbow. But Mike Morrison had met it head on. Here was the sanctuary from reality that men dreamed of.
But he was filled with love as he thought of the hills of San Francisco. And he thought of the fog as it rolled in lazily or tore in angrily through the Golden Gate. He loved the redwood trees of Muir Woods stretching toward the heavens and he loved to watch the surf smash against the rocks below Land’s End. But this love had always been a brooding, morbid love which seemed to turn to bitterness in the pages he wrote.
Greece had unlocked an inner door to a love of people that he had never been able to feel before.
For many reasons Mike wanted to return to Christos and say, “Yes, I’ll stay. I will go to Dernica with Eleftheria and till the land and dance the syrtos and drink ouzo in the coffee house and I’ll learn to sing as I come from the fields.”
He began to laugh at himself, rather ashamed that he had been taken in by such a bad plot.
Christos sat at the table as he entered the cottage. Mike sat beside him and poured a glass of wine. They heard Melpo snore from the next room.
“I don’t love her,” Mike said.
“Bah! What are you talking about? For why you need love? She will have your children, she will make cloth for you, she will scrub your feet. Why you need love? You Englezos are all crazy! Do you want your women to be like—like those tramps from Dadi?”
Mike shook his head. Christos knew further argument was useless. With a look of hurt and sadness, he slammed his glass down. He sighed and started from the room. “Very well, very well. We sail for Athens at sunrise tomorrow.”
FIVE
“JAY! WAKE UP!”
Mike rolled over and propped himself on an elbow. Christos, in long nightshirt and cap, with a candle in hand, stood over the bed. The candle quivered in his hand and his face was as waxen in color as his mustache.
“Eh—what’s up?” Mike mumbled, half-asleep.
“A signal from the next village. German soldiers all over the area. They’re heading for Paleachora.”
Mike threw off the covers.
“Go to the church quickly!” Christos said.
Mike struggled into his clothes, checked his pistols and bolted through the door and crept close in the shadows of the cottages until he worked his way toward the knoll. He sprinted up the dirt path and through the door of the Church of the Prophet Elias.
Bluey was already there with three other escapees. They were half-dressed and crouched near the windows, shivering in the night air. Bluey’s fists clenched a long rifle.
The five of them huddled together, worried by the sounds of their own breathing and Bluey’s belching.
It became deathly quiet.
“I say we break for it now,” Bluey whispered.
“Stay put,” Mike ordered. “They may be waiting for us.”
They looked at each other in puzzlement. “Do what you damned please,” Mike said, “I’m riding it out.”
He sank into a sitting position with his back against the wall and rubbed his