The oracle, p.2
The Oracle, page 2
The world spins around the young German soldier. The blue of the sky, the green of the trees, and the sandy brown of the dirt and gravel flash before him over and over again as he tumbles down the slope. Karl rolls on the loose stones. He collides with a bush. Branches bend and snap, slapping him across the face, scratching his cheeks. Dust swirls around him. He’s easily thirty feet below the edge of the road. The truck slams into a tree another forty to fifty feet further on. Smoke rises from the wreckage.
For a moment, Karl lies still on the slope, catching his breath. Pain surges through his back. His palms sting. He looks at his hands. Red blots of blood rise where rocks and gravel have embedded themselves in his skin, but he’s alive. Instinctively, he pats his chest with his hands, checking the pockets on the front of his shirt. His precious Septuagint is in one buttoned pocket, while his reading glasses are in the other.
Karl staggers to his feet. His boots shift beneath him. He has to stab at the ground to keep his balance and not tumble down toward the truck. In the silence that follows, there’s moaning from the wreckage.
Nearby, a soldier lies draped over a boulder. He’s lying face-first on the rock. Blood drips from his chest, seeping into the stone and finding cracks that allow it to run down toward the dirt.
Karl staggers over to him. He’s in shock. He doesn’t know what to do. With trembling fingers, he reaches out and touches the dead man’s neck. His skin is warm but lifeless.
Slowly, Karl works his way down the slope, grabbing hold of saplings and trees as he makes his way toward the smoldering ruins of the army truck.
Korporal Fuchs is alive. He’s broken his leg and is sitting up against the back of the truck. Bone protrudes from his torn trousers. Blood soaks into the ground around him.
“Meier! Private Meier! Private Karl Meier,” he calls out, reaching with his arms, trying to reach Karl even though he’s still twenty feet away, further up the slope.
“Easy,” Karl says, rummaging around through one of the scattered backpacks and finding some combat bandages. Karl wants to say something more, but he can’t. Words escape him. It’s all he can do to act.
Karl straightens the corporal’s leg and wraps a bandage around it, fixing a piece of wood in place to span the two broken halves of what is either the tibia or fibula or perhaps both. There’s so much blood and torn muscle and sinew, Karl has no idea what he’s looking at. On instinct, he tries to keep the upper and lower parts of the leg roughly in line, hoping he’s doing what’s right. Korporal Fuchs grimaces, grabbing his upper leg with his hands and gritting his teeth as Karl works on his leg.
When he’s finished, Karl steps back and surveys his efforts. To him, his response is feeble, pathetic when compared to the carnage around him.
Rather than being in excruciating pain, Korporal Fuchs appears happy. He’s in shock, and that seems to be numbing his pain.
“Good. Good. This is good. You have done this before, no?”
“No,” Karl replies.
“We—we need to get to Delphi. There’s an outpost there. The colonel. The professor. He will be able to arrange an ambulance.”
“Yes,” Karl says, struggling with the shock of what has happened, aware he’s been reduced to one-word answers. For him, the war was an abstract notion. Intellectually, he knew that at some point he would be called on to fight for the Fatherland, but this isn’t fighting. No fists were thrown. There’s been no bullets fired, no exchange of punches, no wrestling, no contest, just death. One moment, they were joking around. Korporal Fuchs was laughing at him. An instant later, most of the squad was dead. Was it a tank? A bomb from an airplane? A mine? A grenade? Does it matter?
“We must go,” Korporal Fuchs says. Karl stands there stunned, unsure about what he should do now that he’s bandaged the corporal’s leg, but he nods, agreeing with his sentiment.
“We go.”
For Karl, two words are a significant improvement over one. He reaches down and takes hold of the corporal’s outstretched arm, hoisting it over his shoulder.
“And your gun,” the corporal says.
“My gun?”
Looking over the debris strewn behind the truck, Karl sees the wooden stocks of several bolt-action Mauser Karabiners scattered among the bushes. His thinking is too small, too literal. He stands there with Korporal Fuchs hanging from his shoulder, wondering which rifle is his, unsure how he could tell which one he’d been issued with back in Berlin.
“Grab a gun. Any gun.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what good soldiers do.”
Karl lets out a solitary laugh. “But I’m not a good soldier. I’m useless, remember.”
“Oh, I remember. But we are at war. We need everyone in war. And we need weapons.”
Reluctantly, Karl bends forward and picks up a rifle with his free hand. He slings it over his other shoulder. The rifle has an internal magazine. He assumes it’s loaded and doesn’t bother checking or grabbing any additional ammunition. Korporal Fuchs doesn’t say anything else, so Karl assumes he’s being a good enough soldier for now.
Slowly, they hobble up the slope toward the road. By the time they reach the gravel track cut into the mountainside, Karl is soaked in sweat. He rests the corporal on the side of the road, sitting him on a rock, and turns back toward the truck in the gully.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“To help. There may be others,” Karl replies, pointing into the ravine.
“There is no one else,” the corporal replies.
“No one?” Karl asks, wondering if what he can hear is the wind in the trees or the moaning of injured soldiers below him.
“No one.”
Karl doesn’t agree, but he needs certainty. His world has been thrown into chaos. Regardless of whether Korporal Fuchs is right or wrong, he’s speaking with conviction, and certainty is what Karl needs. He lowers his head, feeling bad but not having the moral strength to disagree.
On the other side of the road, a thin trail of loose rocks and stones tumble down the slope. Both soldiers look. A young woman tries to hide behind the trunk of a narrow tree that’s holding the embankment in place with its thick roots. Her skirt flutters in the breeze.
“What are you waiting for?” Korporal Fuchs barks. “Shoot her.”
Karl fumbles with his rifle, swinging it down from his shoulder. He pulls back on the bolt. The brass casing of a round is visible in the breech. With trembling hands, he pushes the bolt forward, pushing the round into the chamber. With his bloodied palm, he pushes the lever on the bolt down, locking it in place, but he doesn’t point the barrel at the woman. Instead, his rifle points well off to one side. Were he to squeeze the trigger, he’d hit dirt.
Karl turns the rifle on the woman, but he doesn’t raise it to his shoulder. The tree is tall and thin, with branches that reach out above head height, providing little in the way of cover. The woman is a teenager. She’s curious and cautious, but not afraid. She can’t be much older than him. Her dark hair has natural curls, while her skin has an olive complexion. The skirt she’s wearing is old and faded, but her blouse is crisp and clean with an embroidered collar.
She should run. She doesn’t. She peers at them, knowing full well they can see her. What is she thinking? Does she want to die? She holds onto the bark, looking past the trunk, watching the soldiers with what seems to be surprise. It’s as though they’re the first people she’s ever seen.
Karl is a terrible shot, and deliberately so. He entered the army out of a sense of patriotism and duty, not actually to fight. If she ran, she’d stand a fair chance of escaping unscathed.
Back in training, Karl would do everything as instructed by the drill sergeant on the firing range. He’d slow his breathing, pull the butt of the rifle hard into his shoulder, check the safety is off with the lightest touch of his thumb on the bolt switch, slip his finger inside the trigger guard, stare along the iron sights, line the rear mount up with the post at the end of the barrel, center the target, and squeeze—don’t pull. In theory, he’d hit the target every time. In practice, he’d see a puff of dirt somewhere vaguely in the vicinity of the wooden board forming the silhouette of a soldier. His instructor said he jerked at the trigger, but to Karl, that was the recoil. Besides, Karl doesn’t want to kill anyone, even those dark plywood outlines on the range. He wants to do his duty to the Fatherland. Apparently, that means killing people, but that’s something Karl has never been able to reconcile. If it comes down to it, he’d rather shoot dirt and scare someone off. Karl smiles, knowing the woman is perfectly safe as long as she doesn’t run, as even at this distance, he’d miss.
Instead of raising the rifle and pulling it hard into his shoulder, he lowers it. The damn thing is heavy. Karl does something that used to infuriate his army instructor. He rests the barrel on the ground. Apparently, that can lead to blockages and misfires, but Karl doesn’t care. Karl isn’t killing anyone. Not today.
“What are you doing?” Korporal Fuchs demands of him.
“I’m not shooting an unarmed woman,” Karl says, turning away from her and facing the corporal. He feels strangely at peace turning his back on someone who’s supposed to be the enemy of Germany.
“She—She could be part of the Resistance.”
“She could be a farmer,” Karl replies, saying something that seems far more likely to him.
Korporal Fuchs points at the crater further down the road.
“She could have set the mine.”
Karl turns to the woman. Speaking in Greek, he calls out in a loud voice, asking her, “Did you set the mine?”
From behind the tree, the woman shakes her head.
“See?” Karl says, still dragging the barrel of his gun along the gravel and tracing lazy lines in the dust.
“And you believe her?” Korporal Fuchs says.
“I do.”
Like a good soldier, Karl shoulders his rifle, swinging the leather strap up over his arm. The barrel points at the clear blue sky.
“Come,” he says, reaching out his hand to the corporal. “We need to get to the village.”
Begrudgingly, Korporal Fuchs accepts. Karl hoists the corporal’s arm over his shoulder and continues up the gravel road, ignoring the young woman. For his part, the corporal looks back a few times and then gives up. He’s in too much pain to care.
Brother Niko
Sophia waits until the two German soldiers have staggered out of sight around the bend in the road. She slides on the loose dirt, skidding down to the gravel. The blast she heard in the hills has left a crater in the road. Dirt has been flung out in all directions, leaving a crude, dark star shape spread across the ground. Broken trees reveal where the truck left the road. Sophia peers into the ravine. Smoke drifts from the crushed remains of the truck. German soldiers lie dead in the dirt, scattered across the hillside.
Sophia picks up a twisted piece of metal painted in olive drab. It’s warm to the touch. On the inside of the cover, raised lettering reads:
M4
Made in the USA
Chicago, Illinois
And she wonders about the anti-tank landmine that blew up beneath the truck. Years ago, someone designed this thousands of miles away in the United States of America. They drew up blueprints, built switches, created samples, and tested explosive yields. And then, they received an order from the US Government to manufacture hundreds of thousands of landmines.
Somewhere near Chicago, someone put this together on an assembly line, probably a young woman not much older than she is now. They had no idea how or where it would be used as they packed it away in a crate. From there, it was shipped across the Atlantic, probably to England. Somehow, someone learned about the Greek Resistance, and a decision was made by some general in a war planning room—this mine would be sent to the Mediterranean in a warship. It slipped ashore in a crate in the dead of night. It was probably carried on the back of a donkey into the mountains of Greece, along with guns and ammunition. And then someone decided to bury it here on the road to Delphi. They would have been careful to conceal its presence, blending the freshly turned gravel with the sunbaked dirt on the road, hiding it from view.
The locals wouldn’t have been in danger. Only a heavy truck or a tank could set it off. And so it lay buried beneath the ground for months, possibly years, until this morning. And then it killed ten to fifteen German soldiers in a matter of seconds. It killed them before they could kill more Greeks. Such is the nature of war.
Death is an enigma. Life is a burst of light and awareness. Each morning, Sophia wakes from the darkness, genuinely surprised to find the world is more than a dream. These men—none of them expected to die today. She does, but they didn’t. For them, death came like a bolt of lightning out of the clear blue sky. One moment, they were alive, chatting with each other, probably smoking cigarettes and talking about home. And then—boom—they were dead.
What is death? Looking at the bodies strewn below her on the mountainside, all Sophia can think is that death in any form is a waste. She has no love for the Germans, but they’re people. And people deserve more than to be scattered around like trash in the wind.
Sophia came across a dead German soldier in the first year of the occupation. He’d been shot by a communist sniper and had fallen behind a boulder. Usually, the Germans retrieve their dead and bury them, but it was the Italians who led the invasion in the mountains. He was, supposedly, an instructor. They never found him. From what she could tell, the Italians never cared. When Sophia stumbled across him, he’d been rotting in the sun for days. Wild dogs had torn at his body. Birds had pecked at his face. Ants crawled all over him. To each of them, he was just another carcass. He could have been a dead goat or a rabbit caught in a snare. That’s when Sophia realized that death is indifferent. It didn’t matter who he was. It didn’t matter whether he was German or Italian, a member of the Ethnikí Antístasi, the Greek National Resistance, or a humble villager. He was dead. Regardless of how he defined himself in life, there was only one designation that mattered anymore.
Sophia remembers marveling at the dead German’s uniform. She’d never seen the Wehrmachtsadler up close before, only from a distance. The Wehrmachtsadler is a silver/grey eagle sewn over the chest pocket of the German uniform. The stylized eagle had its wings spread wide. Its claws clutched a swastika enclosed by a wreath. It conveyed a sense of pride and prestige that, in death, was utterly misplaced. Uniforms are important for the living, but meaningless to the dead.
Looking down the slope at the soldiers who have fallen from the truck, it strikes Sophia that everything that seemed so important when they were alive is now useless and pathetic. Perhaps their uniforms were always meaningless.
Sophia wonders about the meaning of her own life. Everyone wants for more, but what meaning does anyone ever have beyond those they love? And their loved ones will never know what happened here beyond a telegram or a line typed in an official letter of condolence. They’ll cry at the loss, ignoring how these men came here to kill others. They’ll weep for those they cared about, not realizing they died without meaning. Someone may even build a memorial for them back in Germany or a Cenotaph for the fallen with names engraved on a brass plaque or etched in marble, but it will be devoid of any real heart or actual meaning. For generations to come, they’ll just be names carved in metal or stone. Nothing about their lives will be remembered beyond the futility of their deaths.
Meaning is meaningless for animals. The rock pigeon winging its way over the valley is looking for food, not meaning. Sophia doubts the bird even registered the explosion as anything other than a signal to take flight. Why are humans preoccupied with meaning? Below her, a fox sniffs one of the dead soldiers. She watches intently, wondering if it is going to eat the bloodied hand caught in a low-hanging tree branch, but it doesn’t. It’s inquisitive. It doesn’t understand this violent intrusion into its territory. The fox slinks over to the bent remains of the truck, weaving its way between the bushes. It sniffs at the oil seeping into the dirt. And then it’s gone, blending in with the shadows.
What is the meaning of Sophia’s life? What is the meaning of any life? Standing there in the hot morning sun, looking down at the utter waste and pointlessness of war, Sophia decides life is a chance. Life is potential. What hope is there for the rocks beneath her shoes? None. But her? She’s made of the same stuff—dust thou art and all that—and yet she has a chance to do something different. She can make the world a little brighter. Sophia may die today, but she’ll die being true to herself.
She turns and follows the soldiers up the road. What is she thinking? She’s not thinking. She’s hoping, but hoping for what? Anything. One last chance to make a difference on her last day on Earth.
She catches up to the soldiers within a few minutes and follows along roughly thirty feet behind them. If they notice her, they don’t react to her presence. The wounded soldier hangs low on the shoulder of the younger one with the baby face. They’re both struggling in different ways. Blood drips from the older man’s leg, leaving dark spots in the dust.
The younger soldier is scrawny. He’s got blonde hair. His skin is pink. It’s as though he’s never seen the sun. He keeps one hand firmly under the armpit of the wounded German, helping him on, and the other pulling the man’s arm over his shoulder, but his boots drag through the gravel as well. He’s hurt, but he’s trying not to show it.
The sound of an engine floats on the breeze. Sophia recognizes the splutter. The German trucks and armored cars have deep, throaty roars. They rumble like a storm. Those few farmers who have anything other than a tractor tend to drive Styl Kars. They’re based on Italian Furkoni designs, being motorcycles converted into cars. Back in 1940, someone in Athens welded steel frames to a bunch of motorcycles, converting them into tricycles and then added the body of a small car over the top. The cab of the three-wheeled Styl Kars is narrow, barely wide enough for two people, but the flat bed backs can carry wood and vegetables to the markets with ease. Having only two cylinders in their tiny engines, they sound high-pitched. When climbing a hill, their engines scream like a fox caught in a snare. This particular Styl Kar is idling. Someone is driving down the hill, probably to investigate the explosion, but that someone is Greek, not German. The two soldiers ahead of her, though, won’t know that. They’ll be unaware of a distinction the Greeks have used to avoid German patrols and communist transports alike.
