The Maze Read online

  It had been a marriage of peaceful routines. There had been the occasional liaison, of course. Thinking about these, Brigadier Nestor now shrugged his shoulders self-righteously: it was impossible for a soldier away from home for such long periods not to succumb. But nothing of substance ever. He would have told her about them if she had been capable of comprehending – but it was different for women, he understood. He had long since absolved himself. He licked his thumb and, as he turned the page, a photograph fell out: a child dressed in a sailor suit, riding a tricycle: Brigadier Nestor’s grandson. The old officer held it at arm’s length for some time, squinting and smiling with pride, before he returned it into the envelope.

  Finally, he found the letter from his daughter, which announced the terrible news, and confirmed the date of his wife’s death from pneumonia: a year ago tomorrow – he had to arrange the memorial service. ‘Orderly!’ he shouted in the direction of the hatch, and when the boy appeared: ‘Ask the padre to come and see me.’

  He blew his nose in his handkerchief and then, as soon as he placed it in his pocket again, he detected the smell of putrefaction. He traced it to under his cot, where he saw a dead snake. Kneeling down, Brigadier Nestor observed his discovery thoughtfully, as if trying to interpret an omen. The snake lay in the dust in an unnatural position, twisted in the shape of the numeral eight. Someone had hurled it there, the brigadier thought, stroking his chin. He opened his trunk and used his ceremonial sword to retrieve the reptile. He noticed that its head was crushed. Holding up the snake, skewered from the tail, he studied next the patterns of its skin.

  ‘It is wrong to kill a creature with a skin more intriguing than Euclidean geometry,’ he said. ‘Orderly!’

  The hatch to the driver’s cabin opened. When the soldier saw the snake, his eyes opened wide too.

  His commanding officer asked, ‘Who did this?’

  The young man shrugged, while his big brown eyes remained fixed on the dust-covered carrion. Through the hatch Brigadier Nestor saw the evening desert framed by the dirty windscreen, vague and all of a single dark colour: a few broad strokes on a canvas left otherwise unfinished. He looked back again, made an expression that indicated he did not believe his aide and passed him the snake.

  ‘I do not care what the Bible says. You are not to kill another serpent.’

  As soon as the hatch closed, he cleaned his sword and put it back in the trunk, under a stack of starched and ironed shirts which had lost their freshness a long time ago. He locked both the enormous padlocks and sat at his desk. Buried under his maps were the pair of compasses, the ruler and a pencil as small as a cigarette end. In his breast pocket were his spectacles. ‘Now,’ he puffed, and fixed the wires of his glasses behind his ears, ‘let’s find out where the hell we are.’ He licked the blunt tip of his pencil with gusto and started.

  For some time he was absorbed in the geodetic calculations he did on the margin of the maps. He only had a break in order to fill his cup with coffee and search for the protractor. He sipped the bitter coffee with a sentimental craving for sugar. More than an hour later he put down his infinitesimal pencil and read out the depressing news.

  ‘Three hundred and twenty-two yards west of our last position. Plus or minus eleven.’

  He removed his spectacles, fixed his eyes on the leather holster hanging over his head and at once recalled the legend of Damocles’ sword – he had read about it recently in his book of mythology.

  ‘And we are headed away from the coast,’ he added.

  A gentle voice from outside brought him back from his grim reflections.

  ‘I could come back later,’ the padre said softly.

  Brigadier Nestor waved him in.

  ‘Come in, Father. My job won’t be any easier in an hour.’

  The padre climbed into the back of the lorry, smiling. He found a stool, sat down, undid the button that held the stiff collar of his tunic and exhaled. Then he started talking in a pleasant manner. He apologised for being late – it was because that afternoon he had caught a soldier eating corned beef. Brigadier Nestor looked at the padre with weary eyes.

  ‘Is that an offence now?’

  ‘Eating meat on Wednesday,’ the padre explained.

  The brigadier nodded. There was a sweat stain on the map where his palm had lain: like the territory they had annexed during the three-year expedition, it soon began to evanesce. Brigadier Nestor contemplated the old map – he would have called the whole venture a waste of time if it were not for the dead, the dispossessed, the refugees. No: it had been an outright catastrophe. Father Simeon was still talking.

  ‘What is the point of fasting if not for acquiring discipline, I told him. I had to produce the tin during confession to stop him denying it, my brigadier – took me more than an hour to absolve him.’

  Brigadier Nestor left his desk and lay on his cot. After a while he suspected that Father Simeon must have asked something because he had suddenly turned silent.

  ‘Excuse me, Father, I didn’t hear you. I was thinking about my funeral.’

  The padre raised his eyebrows and repeated the question.

  ‘You wanted to see me, brigadier?’

  The officer remembered.

  ‘Oh, yes. I need your services, Father.’

  ‘A . . . confession?’

  The padre sat on the chair and leaned forward: he was like a thirsty man bending down to drink from a tap. But it was dry. Brigadier Nestor scratched the crown of his head with bemusement.

  ‘My confession now would taste like raw meat. Still too much blood in it, you see.’

  Father Simeon assumed an expression of gloom with as much speed and accuracy as if he had rehearsed it countless times. But he was not pretending; since the collapse of the front he often thought of himself as a heavy sack of ballast in a rapidly descending balloon. The brigadier reminded the padre that it was a year since Mrs Nestor’s death. In yet another automatic reaction the padre offered his condolences.

  The officer asked, ‘A memorial service perhaps?’

  ‘By all means, my brigadier.’

  Brigadier Nestor thanked him and added, ‘I should have been by her side . . .’

  ‘How could you have, my brigadier?’

  Brigadier Nestor rubbed the furrows of his neck.

  ‘This war . . .’

  ‘Everyone has a cross to bear,’ said the padre in his usual way.

  ‘A cross,’ Brigadier Nestor echoed, and gathered as much humour as was there in his heart. ‘At my age I shouldn’t be bearing weights, Father.’

  ‘It’s a steep ascent to Calvary.’

  The brigadier chuckled bitterly.

  ‘It’s not the ascent I mind, Father, but the crucifixion afterwards.’

  The man of God could offer little more than a smile.

  ‘It’s natural to be afraid. But salvation could be round the corner.’

  ‘There are no corners in this Field of Blood.’

  Father Simeon took out his Bible and riffled through it.

  ‘Touching the Almighty, we cannot find him out,’ he read out. ‘He is excellent in power, and in judgement, and in plenty of justice.’

  The brigadier puffed with exasperation. A draught had found the lamp on his desk with the maps and toyed with it – the flame flickered but did not go out. Held down by the lamp, the old maps crackled and fluttered like birds beating their wings against the wire of their cage. Brigadier Nestor said, ‘One of these days, Father, you have to explain to me that whole lily business.’

  Father Simeon frowned.

  ‘The lily?’

  ‘The lily of the Annunciation. Just how on earth –’

  ‘A miracle, my brigadier. It was a miracle.’

  The officer nodded.

  ‘A miracle. I see – exactly what we need now. Could you arrange one for us?’

  Father Simeon did not reply – he knew better than to stoke the coals of discontent with too many moral pronouncements. Like a stone thrown in a l
ake, the ripples of the irreverent comment travelled across the silence and slowly faded away. Feeling he was no longer welcome, the padre stood up and turned to leave, but the brigadier suddenly spoke up.

  ‘Is it a sin to kill a snake, Father?’

  ‘If it were going to harm you I should think not. Isn’t it . . . the same in battle?’

  They shook hands and soon the padre was walking across the camp. His shoulders sloped under his greatcoat and the cross on his chest swung from side to side. Lying at the entrance to his tent was the dog, waiting for him. Father Simeon did not let it in. He pulled down the flap and went and sat on the edge of his cot. If only people trusted in God, he thought. Maybe that was the reason they had lost the war: the enemy had a blind faith in Allah and was not afraid of death. The enemy truly believed in Paradise – his own paradise, a barbaric notion, of course. He wondered: how many of his fellow Christian soldiers believed in salvation? He looked at a coil of rope on the floor and for a moment remembered the conversation about the snake.

  ‘God save us from the serpent,’ he murmured with apocalyptic fear.

  From underneath the cot he produced a candle and pushed it into a bucket filled with sand. He lit it and slowly a foul smell filled the air: ever since the paraffin had run out he had made candles from cattle fat. A scorpion crept in from under the tarpaulin and raised its tail. Father Simeon gave it an indifferent glance and wrapped himself in his blanket. His eye wandered across the wooden altarpiece. On it was a John the Baptist, a St George on horseback and an Entry into Jerusalem where Jesus’ donkey had the padre’s face. It had been meant as an innocent jest – perhaps even as an exercise in humility, but the humorous painting now appeared as a sanctimonious, blasphemous and conceited act. Father Simeon thought again about his religious failings, and those of his congregation.

  ‘Science,’ he said unexpectedly.

  His face reddened and he stood up. In situations like this, when the weight of self-recrimination became too heavy to bear, he would attack his favourite hates. With his hands made into tight fists he began to pace his tent, head bent, mumbling. Science was the new religion in the Western world, he thought. The vainglory of professors, the grandiosity of lecture theatres, the doctrinal language of scientific treatises . . . How did those people dare challenge faith? He had seen photographs of laboratories and it had struck him how much they resembled medieval torture chambers. The preposterousness of it all! Take for example the ridiculous theories of that German Zionist physicist. He scratched his head, trying to remember the name in the newspaper not long ago.

  ‘Enistan,’ he said like a profanity. Yes – that man was becoming more popular than that other enemy of Orthodoxy, the Catholic scoundrel, the Pope. Father Simeon clasped his hands behind his back and maintained his planetary orbit round the sombre religious furnishings. ‘It only goes to prove that science is the Trojan Horse of the Jews,’ he grumbled.

  He was feeling out of his depth. The frustration of not knowing exactly what he was talking about only fuelled his vexation. ‘The Enlightenment,’ he pondered scornfully, twisting the tip of his beard. ‘The scourge of Logic!’ The fortunate Ottomans had missed all that. And now . . . Father Simeon stopped his incensed walk and curled his lip. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ he said, panting. ‘For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ He bowed his head and added with despair, ‘As for us, we’ll simply burn in Hell.’

  The forest of stacked rifles gleamed in the twilight and in the glow of the fires burning under the coffee pots. Somewhere a flint was struck to light a cigarette or a pipe. Sitting cross-legged on a Muslim prayer rug, the corporal studied the chessboard, rubbing the stubble on his chin, making brief sounds with his nose: he was thinking. The cold of the desert night had begun to overwhelm the camp; it would soon be impossible to stay outside. The corporal puffed, stood to wrap himself tighter in his military coat and sat again on the rug. It was a small square rug with tassels at both ends, a beautiful tendril design all round it and an inscription in Arabic in the middle. The corporal never let it out of his sight. That night, for example, he sat on it not because the ground was too hard or cold – after all, he was a cavalryman and his lower body was used to the daily obstinacy of the saddle – but because he wanted to make sure that no one would steal this precious memento from him. In violation of the forgotten orders that strictly forbade looting, he had taken it from a house in an abandoned village the brigade had come to during its final advance into the Anatolian heartland, almost a year earlier. He would not tell anyone, but the rug was intended as a present for a special person back home.

  On the other side of the chessboard the medic sighed, adjusted his Red Cross armband and gave him an impatient look.

  ‘Let me remind you that we are still playing chess, corporal. If I didn’t know you were Christian, I would have assumed you had forgotten our game and were praying to Allah.’

  The corporal did not raise his head, but took his hands out of his pockets and cracked his fingers in a gesture of great resolve. But as he was about to touch his rook he noticed something in the arrangement of the pieces on the board and his hands retreated hastily into the deep pockets of his greatcoat once again. The wind blew the smoke from the coffee pots in their direction – a smoke without aroma: the coffee had been cut with chicory.

  ‘Your bishops have been acting like a band of brigands,’ the corporal said. ‘Against every rule of war.’

  The medic abandoned the game in order to urinate. His opponent rested his chin on his fists, filled his chest with air and studied the chessboard. When the medic returned he was already putting the pieces away.

  ‘Let’s play draughts – a democratic game where all the pieces start as equals.’

  The medic made a gesture of indifference, sat on the ground and crossed his legs. His puttees were soiled and shredded, his tunic was missing its buttons and the stitching of his sleeve was coming apart at the shoulder. But his temperament did not accord with the condition of his uniform – none of the horror and disenchantment of the war seemed to have contaminated his clear eyes: in the midst of the grief and fear of the camp he reminded one of a wise, impartial judge presiding over the trial of a horrific crime.

  He was a university student of medicine who had suspended his studies in order to join the army. He was no political animal – indeed, he would have been indifferent to the Cause if he knew what it was. His aim from the start was to gain experience in shoestring surgery, which he planned to practise after the war in a remote part of the homeland. Medicine was his religion and politics, and he wished to attend to it like a hermit. The day they were about to sail to Asia Minor he had declared to the chief medical officer that he would be following the trail of blood, and he meant it. He treated friends and foes the same, in defiance of the rule that priority should be given to one’s own casualties. His attitude had earned him the public disapproval of his comrades, but, at the same time, their secret admiration too.

  The medic pushed a draughtsman; in the next move it was going to be crowned. The corporal acknowledged the inevitable development with a bite on his moustache. He sat back, lit his pipe slowly and filled his cheeks with smoke.

  ‘With luck like yours,’ he said, puffing smoke moodily, ‘you ought to try the lottery.’

  After a moment he leaned forward again and studied the board under the fog of tobacco.

  ‘I meant to ask you, medic. Last spring, why did you order the military police to cordon off that brothel?’

  The tobacco smoke still hovered an inch above the chessboard, just like stratus clouds over a flat piece of land. Through the soft rolls of smoke the medic observed the black wooden draughtsmen scattered on the board and thought about the town with the brothel. The event that had taken place there had required the full austerity of his character. Such had been the seriousness of the situation that he had had to threaten the crowd of soldiers with a loaded pistol to stop them from entering the house of pleasure.

  The
medic frowned – sometimes he felt as if he were not a doctor but a herdsman of wild cattle. He raised his hand and pushed the smoke away from the chessboard.

  ‘That place was a conservatory of every disease suffered by man below the waist.’

  The corporal raised his head.

  ‘Would you have fired that gun?’

  His opponent met his eyes and spoke with a calmness that left no doubt.

  ‘I would kill in order to save life.’

  The corporal shuddered – the cold had begun to pierce the thick woollen coat and it hurt like needles. The call of the bugle offered him a way out of his imminent defeat. ‘Lights out,’ he declared and jumped to his feet. He rolled up the prayer rug and tucked it under his arm. ‘This game is officially a draw.’

  The medic collected the draughtsmen and, with the board under his arm, headed for the infirmary. It was a large round tent pitched in the middle of the camp, with red crosses painted on its tapering roof and its sides covered with crude paintings of wild animals, laughing clowns and acrobats in mid-air. The medic pursed his lips. They were lucky to have it. The tent had belonged to a roving Armenian circus, which the enemy had bombed from the air by mistake. When the brigade had stumbled across it, the soldiers had been confronted by the heart-rending spectacle not of dead men and women – they had managed to escape – but of their slaughtered wild beasts. A disembowelled elephant lay on its side like a beached shipwreck, several monkeys were bleeding to death while still chained together, a male lion with a singed mane and broken hind legs was crawling towards the burning carcass of his mate, growling. It had been a horrific sight. They had buried them all, and had demanded that Father Simeon say mass. It was peculiar how the suffering of animals always aroused more sympathy among the troops than the death of human beings, the medic reflected. He heard whining behind him: it was the padre’s dog. He bent down and gave its receding coat an examining look. ‘Alopecia areata,’ he diagnosed after a moment and patted the animal on the head. Caleb wagged his tail and sat down to scratch his flea bites, and the medic went to make his rounds.