the footsteps of two or three people on the gravel round by Maria's cottage. I glanced back from my soup, but the table had been, no doubt deliberately, placed where it was impossible to see. "Tonight I wish to illustrate my story," said Conchis. "I thought you'd done that already. And only too vividly." "These are real documents." He indicated that I should go on eating, he would say nothing more. I heard footsteps on the terrace outside his bedroom, above our heads. There was a tiny squeal, the scrape of metal. I tried to get a conversation going while we ate the kid Maria had cooked for us, but he did not bother to keep up the host-guest fiction anymore. He did not want to talk, and that was that. At last Maria brought the coffee, which she placed on the table by the front steps. Conchis stood up, excused himself for a moment, and disappeared upstairs. I looked back from the edge of the colonnade towards the cottage; nothing unusual. I strolled a few steps out on the gravel and peered up, but once again there was nothing to be seen. Conchis returned very shortly with a large cardboard file, and gestured to me to bring the chairs to the front steps. We sat, facing the sea, the table between us, evidently waiting. I was silent, on my guard. Then I heard footsteps again on the gravel and my heart leapt because I thought it was Julie, that we had been waiting for her. But it was a man, the black-dressed Negro, carrying a long bundle. He crossed to in front of us and then, at the edge of the gravel, he set the bundle on its tripod end and I realised what it was--a small cinema screen. There was a ratcheting noise and he unfurled the white square; adjusted it. Someone called in a low voice from above. "_Entaxi_." All right. A Greek voice I didn't recognise. I turned to Conchis. "Isn't Lily going to see this?" "No. I would be ashamed to present this to her." "Ashamed?" "Because these events could have taken place only in a world where man considered himself superior to woman. In what the Americans call a 'man's world.' That is, a world governed by brute force, humourless arrogance, illusory prestige and primeval stupidity." He stared at the screen. "Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling that we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women--and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death." He stopped and turned down the lamp to the faintest glimmer. His mask face looked as grim as I could remember having seen it. Then he said, "I will begin."
53
_Eleutheria_ "When the Italians invaded Greece in 1940, I had already decided that I would not run away from Europe. I cannot tell you why. Perhaps it was curiosity, perhaps it was guilt, perhaps it was indifference. And here, on a remote corner of a remote island, it did not require great courage. The Germans took over from the Italians on April 6th, 1941. By April 27th they were in Athens. In June they started the invasion of Crete and for a time we were in the thick of the war. Transport airplanes passed over all day long, German landing craft filled the harbours. But after that peace soon alighted back on the island. It had no strategic value, either to the Axis or to the Resistance. The garrison here was very small. Forty Austrians--the Nazis gave the Austrians and the Italians all the easy Occupation posts--commanded by a lieutenant who had been wounded during the invasion of France. "Already, during the invasion of Crete, I had been ordered out of Bourani. A permanent lookout section was posted here, and