Corelli's Mandolin

  In that land there are bears and there are wild dogs that might be wolves, there are lynxes and deer. There were times that I tore the raw flesh off abandoned prey with my teeth, and once an eagle dropped a pigeon near my feet and plummeted down after it so that its talons scraped my hands as I dived for its victim. There are also people who live in those desolate places, people who are a kind of animal. Some of them are blond and it is impossible to understand them, they speak so strangely. They live in small stone houses or houses made of wood, and they dress in rags, living off outrageous stews that are made of meat and roots, cooked in ancient pots whose cracks are sealed with mud. These people threw stones at me, but when I knelt and pointed with my finger to my mouth, they took me in and fed me as gently as a child. It was one of them who gave me my jerkin made of skins.

  As I travelled I began to suspect that my body was falling apart and that I was becoming mad. I no longer knew exactly what was happening. I not only saw Pelagia, but strange monsters that threatened me with their maws filled with rows of teeth. There was a place where I was passing by a waterfall, a waterfall so high that it tumbled with a roar like that of the sea in a wild storm. It fell into a pool whose waters whirled and rotated, swallowing up anything that passed by it, and I saw no way of going south-west except by swimming past it. On my left was a cliff that jutted outwards so that nothing might climb it, not even a goat, and it seemed to me that there was a creature on it with three heads that intended to devour me. I stood there with nothing in my mind but the battle between my homeward desperation and the fear of the pool and the monster. I saw Pelagia walk ahead, seemingly across the water like Our Lord, and I realised that there was a ledge beneath the water at the base of the cliff, so that I passed as easily as if I was wading out to a boat in the shallows of the bay of Assos.

  When I knew that I was going mad I also knew that I had to stop, if only for a day, and I came to a stone hovel in the trees, at a place where the ground rose at the feet of a mountain and the pine needles lay on the ground as soft and thick as a blanket. There was no one inside, and I was unsure whether or not it was inhabited, and so I went in and lay down against the wall, and fell asleep, except that I dreamed I was in a bombardment.

  I woke up when somebody poked me with their foot. When I saw that it was an old hag, I wondered whether my dream had simply changed, but it hadn’t. She was small and withered, and she had tied her few strands of hair behind her head. Her back was bowed and bent, her dress was in tatters, and her cheeks were hollow, her chin sharpened, because there was not one tooth in her head.

  One day, when I have the strength to speak, I will tell this story in the kapheneia to make the boys laugh, because the truth is that this old scarecrow took a fancy to me. I forgot to tell you that she had only one eye. The other one was closed up and shrivelled.

  She knew only one word, ‘Circe’, which I suppose was her name – she kept pointing to herself and saying it, so that I had to say ‘Mandras’ and point to my own self – and her voice was like the croak of a raven. Her one eye lit up every time she saw me, and she fed me on pigmeat from the herd that she kept near a stand of oak so that they could feed on the acorns. I was repelled and horrified by her, but I could see that she was a simple soul to whom God had given a kind heart.

  On the third night that I was there, I slept more peacefully than for many months, and because my body was healing itself thanks to the hogmeat I did not dream of bombs and corpses, but of Pelagia. In my dream she frowned and became impatient because of my delay, and for the first time in all my visions I ran to her and kissed her. She melted in my arms and returned my passion, so that very soon we were rolling together on the floor of the forest. She clasped me to her and ran her hands about my body so that I became inflamed, and her lips were as hot as fire. She bit my lip and squirmed, and I tore her clothes away, so that my hands knew her breasts and her thighs, and I trembled with the winds of Dionysus, and entered her. In no time at all I felt the surge in my loins, and it was as I wrenched with the supreme moment that I awoke.

  Beneath me the ancient vixen writhed and groaned and croaked, her one mad eye half-closed with ecstasy. For a second I lay above her, perplexed and confused, and then I sprang to my feet with a cry of horror and rage, for I knew that she had crept beneath my skins and seduced me in Pelagia’s form. ‘Witch, witch,’ I cried, kicking her, and she sat up and shielded herself, her dugs falling to her waist and her body seeping with sores to equal mine. She waved her arms and twittered like a bird in the jaws of a cat, and it was at that point that I recognised the madness in us both and in the very manufacture of the world. I threw back my head and laughed. I had lost my virginity to an antique, loveless, solitary crone, and it was all just one small part of the way in which God had turned His face away and consigned us all to the malice and caprices of the dark. The world looked the same, but beneath the surface it had broken out with boils. I lay back down next to her, and we slept together like that until morning. I had realised that we humans are blameless.

  She tried to stop me leaving, kneeling at my feet and weeping and howling as she clutched my knees. It was pitiful, but I remember thinking that since nothing mattered any more, it did not matter if she too shared in this suffering that has taken the world by storm and laid it all to waste.

  I reached Trikkala and managed to cadge a lift on a truck that was returning from the front with a cargo of the wounded. The driver looked at the blood of my feet and the shreds of my uniform, and agreed that I too was wounded, and so I took the place of another who had died. At Lipson I rode another truck through Agios Nikolaos to Arta and Preveza, and from there it was simple to go to Levkas with a fellow fisherman who was taking mail to the island. I took another fisherman’s boat to Ithaca, and yet another to get home. I walked to Pelagia’s house all the way from Sami.

  All I got when I arrived was a horror equal to my reaction to the old woman in the woods, and I was recognised only by a small dumb animal, Psipsina. The disappointment, after so many dreams and so much fighting and wandering with Pelagia as my light, snuffed out the flame inside me, and the fatigue came over me like a fog that encloses a boat in October in the Strait of Zante. I closed my eyes and fell into the shadows, like the spirits of the dead.

  I said it was Pelagia and the sense of beauty that got me home, but I have said nothing about the sense of beauty. Once, near the Metsovon pass, in December, when it was twenty degrees below zero because there was no cloud, the Italians sent up a starshell. It exploded in a cascade of brilliant blue light against the face of the full moon, and the sparks drifted to earth in slow motion like the souls of reluctant angels. As that small magnesium sun hovered and blazed, the black pines stepped out of their modest shadows as though previously they had been veiled like virgins but had now decided to be seen as they are in heaven. The drifts of snow pulsed with the incandescence of the absolute chastity of ice, a mortar coughed disconsolately, and an owl whooped. For the first time in my life I shivered physically from something other than the cold; the world had sloughed away its skin and revealed itself as energy and light.

  It is my wish to get well so that I can go back to the lines and experience, perhaps for only one more time, that immaculate moment when I saw the face of Gabriel in an instrument of war.

  23 April 30th, 1941

  There is a story that in the Royal Palace, which was so vast and empty that the Royal Family travelled within it on bicycles, and so derelict that its water-taps spewed cockroaches, a White Lady appears as an omen of disaster. Her footsteps make no sound, her face blazes with malevolence, and once, when two aides-de-camp attempted to arrest her for attacking the grandmother of Prince Christopher, she vanished into thin air. If she had wandered the palace on this day, she would have found it occupied not by King George, but by German soldiers. If she had gone outside into the city, she would have found the swastika flying from the Acropolis, and she would have had to travel to Crete to find the King.

  The
Cephallonians needed no such malicious ghosts to warn them. Two days before, the Italians had taken Corfu under farcical circumstances which were to be repeated identically today, and there was no one on the island who did not anticipate the worst.

  It was the waiting that was tormenting. A great nostalgia rose up like a palpable mist; it was like making love for the last time to someone who is adored but is leaving forever. Every last moment of freedom and security was rolled about on the tongue, tasted, and remembered. Kokolios and Stamatis, the Communist and the monarchist, sat together at a table cleaning the components of a hunting rifle that had gathered dust on a wall for fifty years. They were without ammunition, but, as it was to everyone on the island, it seemed important to be engaged upon some gesture of resistance. Their busy fingers sought to calm the storms of anxiety and speculation in their minds, and they talked in low voices with a mutual affection that belied their years of vehement ideological difference. Neither of them knew any more how long their lives would be, and they had become precious to each other at last.

  Families embraced more than had been the habit; fathers who expected to be beaten to death stroked the hair of pretty daughters who expected to be raped. Sons sat with their mothers on doorsteps and talked gently of their memories. Farmers took their barrels of wine with the glint of sunlight in it, and buried them in the earth so that no Italian would have the pleasure of their drinking. Grandmothers sharpened their cooking knives, and grandfathers remembered old deeds, persuading themselves that age had not diminished them; in the privacy of sheds they practised the ‘shoulder-arms’ with shovels and sticks. Many people visited their favourite places as if for the last time, and found that stones and dust, pellucid sea and ancient rock, had taken on an air of sadness such as one finds in a room where a beautiful child is lying at the door of death.

  Father Arsenios knelt in his church, attempting to find words to a prayer, perplexed by a novel sensation of having been let down by God. He had become so accustomed to the idea that he was condemned forever to be the one who let down God, that he found himself lost for a formula that was not full of reproaches, and even insults. He resorted to his habitual, ‘Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,’ and reflected that even after all these years its repetition had failed to enter his heart. In his youth he had believed that one day this prayer would reveal the Vision of Divine and Uncreated Light, but he knew now that it had become a formula, a barrier between himself and the God who was speechless and evasive. ‘Lord Jesus, Son of God,’ he prayed at last, ‘what the hell do you think you’re doing? What was the point of Golgotha if the Devil was not defeated? I thought you said you’d banished sin. Did you die for nothing, then? Are you going to let us all die for nothing? Why don’t you do something? I know that you are invisibly manifest at the Eucharist, but if you are invisible, how do I know that you are there?’ His fat jowls vibrated with emotion; he felt like a boy who has come to man’s estate and discovered that his father has left him no inheritance. ‘Lord Jesus, Son of God,’ he prayed. ‘If you’re not going to do anything, I will.’

  At his desk Dr Iannis read once more the famous open letter to Hitler that Vlakhos had published in the Kathimerini. Moved by its noble, grandiloquent exposition of the right to national independence, he cut it out of the paper, stood up and stuck it onto the wall with a thumbtack, unaware that every other literate man in Greece had done the same; it would remain there until 1953, growing dry and yellow, curling at the corners, its sentiments freshening and deepening with every passing year.

  The doctor removed Psipsina from his desk, sat down and wrote, ‘It is our custom to compare the many nations that have usurped this island to the Turks. Thus the Romans and the Normans were worse than the Turks, the Catholics were worse, the Turks themselves were probably not as bad as we like to imagine, and so, paradoxically, were not as bad as themselves. The Russians were infinitely better, and the French were marginally better. The latter enjoyed constructing roads, but could not be trusted – the Turks never promised us anything, and therefore were by definition incapable of perfidy – and the British were worse than the Turks for some of the time, and the best of all of them for the rest. The general Greek bitterness against the British arose because they brazenly sold Parga to Ali Pasha, but in this island it was caused initially by the governor, Sir Thomas Maitland, who was an unmitigated tyrant. However, Charles de Bosset, a Swiss serving in the British Army, built our invaluable bridge across the Bay of Argostoli. Lord Napier built the magnificent courtroom at Lixouri with its arcaded market underneath (the Markato) and was so popular that the population raised a subscription for a commemorative statue after he left. Lord Nugent became so well-liked that our parliament issued him with a vote of thanks. Frederic Adam, Stewart McKenzie, and John Seaton appear to have been more philhellenic than we ourselves, but General Howard Douglas was outrageously and scandalously despotic. And so it goes on. What does this teach us?

  ‘It teaches us that to be associated with the British is to be offered the choice of one of two bags tied at the neck with string. One contains a viper, and the other a bag of gold. If you are lucky, you will choose the bag of gold, only to find that the British have reserved the right to exchange it for the other without notice. Conversely, ill luck might cause you to pick the bag with the viper, whereupon the British will wait until you have been bitten, and then say, “We didn’t mean it; have this other bag.”

  ‘We don’t know what to think about the British. With the Turks we knew that our sons would be taken for janissaries, our daughters to harems. We knew that we would be exempt from military service, that we would be forbidden to ride horses, and that our sultans were voluptuaries and lunatics. With the British you can be sure of nothing except that they will treat you despicably and then make up for it a hundredfold. At one time we loved them so much that we asked for Prince Alfred as our King – and we still have a cult of Lord Byron – and at other times they have kicked us in the teeth. It is with a heavy heart that I record here the fact that they have abandoned us to our fate because they have judged that the war will not be decided in Greece.

  ‘I wait despondently, in the knowledge that Corfu has fallen and that this may be the last thing I ever write. I commend my memory to posterity, and that of my beloved daughter Pelagia, and I beg that whoever finds these papers and my unfinished history should preserve them intact. I pray that the British have not abandoned us irrevocably, and I pray that they may win through to victory even if I am dead. I believe that I have led a good and useful life, and if it were not for the daughter who may not live and the grandchildren I may never see, I am content to die in the hope that, as Plato says, death might be “… a change, a migration of the soul from one place to another”. I have never believed this to be so, but the imminence of invasion convinces me that life can be a sad and weary thing, and that death might conceivably be a time when I will rest once more with my wife in whatever place she might have gone. Solon said that one should call no man happy until he dies, because until then he is at best fortunate. But I have been both happy and fortunate; happy in my marriage and fortunate in my daughter. Let it not have been for nothing.’

  The doctor reached for a top shelf and took down a black tin box. Into it he placed the sheaves of his history and this final piece, which, as usual, had started on one subject and finished on another, and then he turned the key. He put the box under one arm, lifted the mat beneath the table, and opened the trapdoor, exposing the large cavity that had been made there in 1849 for the concealment of the Radicals whom the British had first persecuted and then put into government. Into this hole that had once concealed the fugitive Joseph Momferatos and Gerasimos Livadas, the doctor placed his literary remains. He returned to his desk, took down his two massive volumes of The Complete and Concise Home Doctor, and began to revise the sections that dealt with ‘bleeding; dressings; shock; tourniquet; bullet wounds; burns; cuts; stabs; asepsis; drainage and irrigation of wounds; lockjaw; p
us; trepanning for the relief of depressed fractures of the skull.’

  In Drosoula’s house, to which Mandras had been transferred, the doctor’s daughter sat in an agony of shame; she had begun to suspect that Mandras was torturing her deliberately.

  His physical ills had abated considerably. The red nodules, the eczema, the skin on his feet, had all begun to cure themselves. His face had filled out a little, his ribs had hidden themselves beneath new flesh, his hair was beginning to grow, and the insane gleam in his eyes had dimmed to a feeble glimmer that the doctor did not think was an improvement. ‘It’s a shame,’ he had said, ‘that he was not actually wounded. It would have given him something concrete to concern himself with.’ Pelagia had been startled and angered by this remark, but at this moment she wanted nothing so much as to take her little derringer from her apron and shoot her fiancé in the head. The fact was that Mandras had devolved to a state more unmanageable than infancy, and she was convinced that he was doing it on purpose as an act of vengeance or a punishment. She believed that he wanted her to be desperately worried, and she was.

  The doctor had diagnosed his behaviour at different times as anergic stupor, melancholic stupor, resistive stupor, and katatonic stupor. The odd way in which it was all of these at different times indicated to him that it was none of them, but he was at a loss as to any other interpretation. ‘War shock’ did not entirely fit the bill either, and like Pelagia he had begun to feel the temptation to ascribe the condition to a pathological need to enslave others by means of manoeuvring himself into a condition of complete dependency. ‘He thinks that nobody wants him,’ said Dr Iannis, ‘and he’s doing this in order to force us to demonstrate that we do.’