“Anton believed that I had been killed. My servants let no one but Patarescu into the secret. I was buried. Or rather an empty coffin was buried. Wimmel left the island that same afternoon, leaving Anton in the middle of all the carnage of flesh, to say nothing of that of the good relations he had established. He must have spent all evening, perhaps night, writing a detailed report of the whole incident. He typed it himself—seven copies. He stated that fact in the report. I presume they were all he could get on the typewriter at one time. He hid nothing and excused no one, least of all himself. I will show you, in a moment.”

The Negro came across the gravel and began to dismantle the screen. Upstairs I could hear movements.

“What happened to him?”

“Two days later his body was found under the wall of the village school, where the ground was already dark with blood. He had shot himself. It was an act of contrition, of course, and he wanted the villagers to know. The Germans hushed the matter up. Not long afterwards the garrison was changed. The report explains that.”

“What happened to all the copies?”

“One was given to Hermes by Anton himself the next day, and he was asked to give it to the first of my foreign friends to inquire for me after the war. Another was given to one of the village priests with the same instructions. Another was left on his desk when he shot himself. It was open—no doubt for all his men and the German High Command to read. Three copies completely disappeared. Probably they were sent to friends in Germany. They may have been intercepted. We shall never know now. And the last copy turned up after the war. It was sent to Athens, to one of the newspapers, with a small sum of money. For charity. A Viennese postmark. Plainly he gave a copy to one of his men.”

“It was published?”

“Yes. Certain parts of it.”

“Was he buried here?”

“No. His family cemetery—near Leipzig.”

Those cigarettes.

“And the villagers know that you had the choice?”

“The report came out. Some believe it, some do not. Of course I have seen that no helpless dependents of the hostages suffered financially.”

“And the guerrillas—did you ever find out about them?”

“The cousin and the other man—yes, we know their names. There is a monument to them in the village cemetery. But their leader… I had his life investigated. Before the war he spent six years in prison. On one occasion for murder—a crime passionnel. On two or three others for violence and larceny. He was generally believed in Crete to have been involved in at least four other murders. One was particularly savage. He was on the run when the Germans invaded. Then he performed a number of wild exploits in the Southern Peloponnesus. He seems to have belonged to no organized Resistance group, but to have roamed about killing and robbing. In at least two proven cases, not Germans, but other Greeks. We traced several men who had fought beside him. Some of them said they had been frightened of him, others evidently admired his courage, but not much else. I found an old farmer in the Mani who had sheltered him several times. And he said, Kakourgos, ma Ellenas. A bad man, but a Greek. I keep that as his epitaph.”

A silence fell between us.

“Those years must have strained your philosophy. The smile.”

“On the contrary. That experience made me fully realize what humor is. It is a manifestation of freedom. It is because there is freedom that there is the smile. Only a totally predetermined universe could be without it. In the end it is only by becoming the victim that one escapes the ultimate joke—which is precisely to discover that by constantly slipping away one has slipped away. One exists no more, one is no longer free. That is what the great majority of our fellowmen have always to discover. And will have always to discover.” He turned to the file. “But let me finish by showing you the report that Anton wrote.”

I saw a thin stitched sheaf of paper. A title page. Bericht über die von deutschen Besetzungstruppen unmenschliche Grausamkeiten…

“There is an English translation at the back.”

I turned to it, and read: Report of the inhuman atrocities committed by German Occupation troops under the command of Colonel Wilhelm Dietrich Wimmel on the island of Phraxos between September 30 and October 2, 1943. I turned a page. On the morning of September 29, 1943, four soldiers of No. io Observation-Post, Argolis Command, situated on the cape known as Bourani on the south coast of the island of Phraxos, being off duty, were given permission to swim. At 12:45…

Conchis spoke. “Read the last paragraph.”

I swear by God and by all that is sacred to me that the above events have been exactly and truthfully described. I observed them all with my own eyes and I did not intervene. For this reason I condemn myself to death.

I looked up. “A good German,”

“No. Unless you think suicide is good. It is not. Despair is a disease, and as evil as Wimmel’s disease.” I suddenly remembered Blake—what was it, Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. A text I had once often used to seduce—myself as well as others. Conchis went on. “You must make up your mind, Nicholas. Either you enlist under the kapetan, that murderer who knew only one word, but the only word, or you enlist under Anton. You watch and you despair. Or you despair and you watch. In the first case, you commit physical suicide; in the second, moral.”

“I can still feel pity for him.”

“You can. But ought you to?”

I was thinking of Alison, and I knew I had no choice. I felt pity for her as I felt pity for that unknown German’s face on a few feet of flickering film. And perhaps an admiration, that admiration which is really envy of those who have gone further along one’s own road: they had both despaired enough to watch no more. While mine was the moral suicide.

I said, “Yes. He couldn’t help himself.”

“Then you are sick, my young friend. You live by death. Not by life.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

“No. Of conviction. Because the event I have told you is the only European story. It is what Europe is. A Colonel Wimmel. A rebel without a name. An Anton torn between them, killing himself when it is too late. Like a child.”

“Perhaps I have no choice.”

He looked at me, but said nothing. I felt all his energy then, his fierceness, his heartlessness, his impatience with my stupidity, my melancholy, my selfishness. His hatred not only of me, but of all he had decided I stood for; something passive, abdicating, English, in life. He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm, to convert or detest. For the first time he seemed naked, without any masks; as if all that had gone before had been to bring me to this point, this last confrontation with the black summit of his life. We remained staring at each other. He could say no more to me, and I could mean no more to him.

He stood and picked up the file. “To bed.”

I stood as well. “I’ll wait a little.”

“Very well. But no one will come.”

“Good night, Mr. Conchis.”

“Good night, Nicholas.”

He gave me a last look, grave and penetrating, the eyes of a mathdor after the estocado, then disappeared indoors. I smoked one cigarette, another. There was a great stewing stillness, an oppressiveness, a silence. The gibbous moon hung over the earth, a dead thing over a dying thing. I got up and walked to the seat where we had sat before dinner.

I had not expected such a finale; the statue of stone in the laughing door. I thought again, in the gray silences of the night, not of Julie, but of Alison. Staring out to sea, I forced myself to think of her not as someone doing something at that moment, sleeping or breathing or working, somewhere, but as a shovelful of ashes, a futility, a descent out of reality, a dropping object that dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a smudge like a fallen speck of soot on paper.