Hopes, Fears and Lies

Wartime ghosts are hard to exorcise, and those from Greece have a peculiar and disturbing persistence, their smell of blood barely camouflaged by thyme and oregano or dried out by sunlight beating on bare rock. The German occupation of 1941-44 was murderous, its opponents as likely to fight each other as the enemy. Reprisals were taken, villages burned to the ground, mass executions ordered and carried out. Who killed or betrayed whom, and why, became anyone’s guess, and food for endless self-exculpatory post-war myths. Occupation is never a simple business. Official and personal motives become inextricably intertwined. Survival means compromise of a kind that in retrospect, all danger past, can embarrass, not least when, as in Greece, bitter guerrilla rivalry was followed soon after the peace by an even more bitter civil war.

Few non-Greeks know this scarily ambiguous period better than Edmund Keeley. A scholar and novelist, he has spent a lifetime interpreting the endless elusive facets of modern Hellenic civilization. His translations of, and critical works on, such Greek poets as Constantine Cavafy, Angelos Sikelianos, Ritsos, Odysseas Elytis and George Seferis are justly famous.

Keeley is also a shrewd observer of the modern Greek social and political scene (see his “The Salonika Bay Murder: Cold War Politics and the Polk Affair”), and his fiction (six previous novels, most recently “School for Pagan Lovers”) explores that fascinating no man’s land where Greek and foreigner meet and interact, with Eros always lurking in the background to confuse national mores.

“Some Wine for Remembrance” (the title comes from a haunting 1943 poem, “Amorgos,” by surrealist poet Nikos Gatsos) is set in German-occupied northern Greece, near Thessaloniki, and is based on World War II incidents. Keeley assures us that all his characters are “of course fictional,” but this isn’t strictly true. The notorious Sgt. Fritz Schubert, a sadistic killer who makes the arrogant mistake of returning to Greece as a post-war tourist and is arrested and executed, is only too real and a classic example of the “that was then, this is now” morality. Above all, there is the mysterious but to me unmistakable villain who, always offstage, like Captain Flint in “Treasure Island,” lurks at the heart of Keeley’s novel.

This unpleasant and powerful figure, never present (except in a couple of creepy scenes), and carefully never even named, remains a constant brooding obsession for every character throughout. He has a long nose, large ears and a disdainful, arrogant manner. During the Greek occupation, he served as a Wehrmacht intelligence officer. His initial on documents is compared to a Greek omega, which bears some resemblance to a “W.” After the war, he rises to high political office in his native Austria. Keeley acknowledges a couple of books he used for research that identify this person, referred to as “the Big O” by those seeking to prove his participation in wartime atrocities.

Thus what Keeley is attempting in “Some Wine for Remembrance” is that currently fashionable exercise, promoted most notably by Simon Schama, the illumination of fact through fiction. The main drawback of this genre is that though the fiction may profitably fill gaps in the factual record, it can’t rewrite, much less anticipate, the known course of history. The trouble with the Big O, of course, is that his likeliest model is still very much at large and a respected senior statesman in his own country. As a result the investigation Keeley depicts so brilliantly, with a wealth of persuasive detail and subtly nuanced insights, lacks tension because we know that, ultimately, the pursuers can’t get their man. As a result the denouement is both psychologically improbable and something of an anticlimax.

This, though, is my only criticism of a narrative that in all other respects is the best fiction Keeley has ever written. The two main hunters--Wittekind, a reformed Austrian ex-Nazi who may or may not be a count, and his initially reluctant agent Jackson Ripaldo, an Italian American journalist with Greek connections--make a wonderfully convincing odd couple of an investigative team. You may not be able to find the village of Hortiati on a map of northern Greece, but the fictional massacre and arson that Keeley assigns to German troops there in September 1944 have all-too-authentic parallels. The scenes in Vienna and Salzburg also carry instant conviction. The sense of a dossier is neatly created by a series of first-person depositions, sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary, through which Ripaldo labors to establish what really happened at Hortiati, who did what and why. As in life, some details are clarified, but the overall picture remains elusive. So does the Big O.

It is the depositions that give “Some Wine for Remembrance” its vividness and dramatic force. Each voice, each personality, is sharply differentiated: Vassilis Angeloudis, cafe-owner and professional survivor; his wife, Marina, with her secret and emotionally volcanic past involving a German soldier; the carefully self-exculpatory potential deserter Oberleutnant Wolfgang Hertzel; the retired ultra-rightist officer Max Ebert. There are also the wartime diary of the sweet-hearted medical orderly Martin Schonbrun, who may or may not have died at the hands of partisans, and the evidence offered by Schonbrunn’s morally disconcerting Viennese girlfriend, Lotte Kistner.

Their cumulative testimony builds up a kaleidoscope of hopes, fears, lies, self-deceptions, passionate emotions, vileness and decency, public gestures and private beliefs, all intermingled. This, surely, is how it was: Keeley has achieved an extraordinary dramatic retrieval. In the end, it’s his microcosm of flawed and suffering humanity, Greek and German both, that stays with us. The Big O becomes secondary in importance.

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From ‘Some Wine for Remembrance’

“One old-timer finally warned Ripaldo that he wasn’t likely to get the whole truth out of anybody who had survived the World War or the Civil War .... Those on the left will tell you that what happened to the village was all the result of rightist collaborators who had

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Peter Green, former fiction critic of the London Daily Telegraph, lived in Greece for many years.