Corelli's Mandolin

  Sitting on the bed, Corelli became so absorbed in his practising that he forgot the sleeping girl, and he began to work on getting his tremolo up to speed; it was deeply annoying to him that every day he would have to play for at least a quarter of an hour before he could make it steady and continuous, and he commenced the exercise by mechanically clicking the plectrum backwards and forwards at half speed across the top pair of trebles.

  Pelagia awoke ten minutes later. Her eyes flicked open, and she lay there for a second, wondering if she was still asleep. There was a most beautiful noise coming from somewhere in the house, as though a thrush had adapted its song to human tastes and was pouring out its heart on a branch by the sill. A shaft of sunlight was breaking through the window, she felt too hot, and she realised that she had overslept. She sat up, wrapped her arms about her knees, and listened. Then she picked up her clothes from where they lay beside her pallet, and went to dress in her father’s room, still attending to the trilling of the mandolin.

  Corelli heard the metallic clatter of a spoon in a pan, realised that she had risen at last, and, still clutching the mandolin, came out into the kitchen. ‘Sewage?’ she asked, offering him a cup of the bitter liquid that nowadays passed for coffee. He smiled and took it, realising that he was still very sore from riding that horse, and that he was still very relieved that he had not suddenly fallen off; it had been a near thing when it had started to dance like that. His thighs ached and it was painful to walk, so he sat down. ‘That was very beautiful,’ commented Pelagia.

  The captain looked at his mandolin as though he was blaming it for something, ‘I was only practising tremolando scales.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she replied, ‘I still liked it, it made waking up very easy.’

  He looked unhappy, ‘I’m sorry I woke you up, I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘That’s very beautiful,’ she said, pointing at the instrument with a spoon, ‘the decoration is wonderful. Does all that improve the sound?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said the captain, turning it around in his hands. He himself had forgotten how exquisite it was. It was purfled about the rim of the soundbox with trapezia of shimmering mother-of-pearl, and it had a black strikeplate in the shape of a clematis flower, inlaid with multicoloured blossoms that were purely the result of an exuberant craftsman’s imagination. The ebony diapason was marked at the fifth, seventh, and twelfth frets with a pattern of ivory dots, and the rounded belly of it was composed of tapering strips of close-grained maple, separated skilfully by thin fillets of rosewood. The machine heads were finished in the shape of ancient lyres, and, Pelagia noted, the strings themselves were decorated at the silver tailpiece with small balls of brightly coloured fluff. ‘I suppose you don’t want me to touch it,’ she said, and he clutched it tightly to his chest.

  ‘My mother dropped it once, and for a moment I thought I was going to kill her. And some people have greasy fingers.’

  Pelagia was offended, ‘I don’t have greasy fingers.’

  The captain noted her aggrieved expression, and explained, ‘Everyone has greasy fingers. You have to wash and then dry your hands before you touch the strings.’

  ‘I like the little balls of fluff,’ said Pelagia.

  Corelli laughed, ‘They’re stupid, I don’t even know why they’re there. It’s traditional.’

  She sat down opposite him on the bench and asked, ‘Why do you play it?’

  ‘What an odd question. Why does one do anything? Do you mean, what led me to start?’

  She shrugged her shoulders, and he said, ‘I used to play the violin. A lot of violinists play one of these because they’re tuned the same, you see.’ Contemplatively he ran a fingernail across the strings to illustrate his point, a point which Pelagia, for the sake of simplicity, pretended to see. ‘You can play violin music on one of these, except that you have to put in tremolos where a violin would have one sustained note.’ He executed a quick tremolo to illustrate this second point. ‘But I gave up the violin because, however much I tried, it just came out sounding like cats. I’d look up and the yard would be full of them, all yowling. No, seriously, it was like a tribe of cats or even worse, and the neighbours kept complaining. One day my uncle gave me Antonia, which used to belong to his own uncle, and I discovered that with frets on the fingerboard I could be a good musician. So there you are.’

  Pelagia smiled, ‘So do cats like the mandolin?’

  ‘This is a little known fact,’ he said in a confidential manner, ‘but cats like anything in the soprano range. They don’t like things that are alto, so you can’t play a guitar or a viola to a cat. They just walk out with their tails in the air. But they do like a mandolin.’

  ‘So the cats and the neighbours were both happy with the change?’

  He nodded happily, and continued, ‘And another thing. People don’t realise how many of the great masters wrote for the mandolin. Not just Vivaldi and Hummel, but even Beethoven.’

  ‘Even Beethoven,’ repeated Pelagia. It was one of those mysterious, awesome, mythical names that implied the ultimate possibilities of human achievement, a name that in fact meant nothing at all specific to her, since she had never knowingly heard a single piece of his music. She knew simply that it was the name of an almighty genius.

  ‘When the war’s over,’ said Corelli, ‘I am going to become a professional concert player, and one day I am going to write a proper concerto in three movements, for mandolin and small orchestra.’

  ‘You’re going to be rich and famous then?’ she said teasingly.

  ‘Poor but happy. I’d have to take another job as well. What do you dream about? Being a doctor, you said.’

  Pelagia shrugged, distorting her lips into an expression of resignation and scepticism. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘I know I want to do something, but I don’t know what it is. They don’t let women become doctors, do they?’

  ‘You can have bambinos. Everyone should have bambinos. I’m going to have thirty or forty.’

  ‘Your poor wife,’ said Pelagia disapprovingly.

  ‘I don’t have one, so I might have to adopt.’

  ‘You could be a teacher. That way you could be with children in the daytime and have time for music in the evening. Why don’t you play me something?’

  ‘O God, whenever people ask me to play something I forget what pieces I know. And I always depend on having the music in front of me. It’s very bad. I know, I’ll play you a polka. It’s by Persichini.’ He positioned the mandolin, and played two notes. He stopped, explaining, ‘It slipped. That’s the trouble with these roundbacks from Naples. I often think I should get a Portuguese one with a flat back, but where does one get one of those in times of war?’ He followed this rhetorical question with the same two notes, ritardando, played four quaver chords, then a bar which disrupted one’s expectations by the introduction of a rest and a pair of semiquavers, and very shortly broke into cascades of chorded and unchorded semiquavers that left Pelagia open-mouthed. She had never before heard such elaborate virtuosity, and never before had she found a piece of music to be so full of surprises. There were sudden, flashing tremolos at the beginning of bars, and places where the music hesitated without losing its tempo, or sustained the same speed despite appearing to halve or double it. Best of all, there were places where a note so high in pitch that it could barely be sounded descended at exhilarating pace down through the scale, and fell upon a reverberant bass note that barely had had time to ring before there came a sweet alternation of bass and treble. It made her want to dance or do something foolish.

  She watched wonderingly as the fingers of his left hand crawled like a powerful and menacing spider up and down the diapason. She saw the tendons moving and rippling beneath the skin, and then she saw that a symphony of expressions was passing over his face; at times serene, at times suddenly furious, occasionally smiling, from time to time stern and dictatorial, and then coaxing and gentle. Transfixed by this, she realised suddenly that there was so
mething about music that had never been revealed to her before: it was not merely the production of sweet sound; it was, to those who understood it, an emotional and intellectual odyssey. She watched his face, and forgot to attend any more to the music; she wanted to share the journey. She leaned forward and clasped her hands together as though she were at prayer.

  The captain repeated the first part, and concluded it suddenly on a spread chord that he muted immediately so that Pelagia felt deprived. ‘There you are,’ he said, wiping his forehead with his sleeve.

  She felt excited, she wanted to jump up and perform a pirouette. Instead she said, ‘I just don’t understand why an artist like you would descend to being a soldier.’

  He frowned, ‘Don’t have any silly ideas about soldiers. Soldiers have mothers, you know, and most of us end up as farmers and fishermen like everyone else.’

  ‘I mean that for you it must be a waste of time, that’s all.’

  ‘Of course it’s a waste of time.’ He stood up and looked at his watch, ‘Carlo should have been here by now. I’ll just go and put Antonia away.’ He looked at her with one eyebrow raised, ‘By the way, Signorina, I couldn’t help noticing that you have a derringer in the pocket of your apron.’

  Pelagia’s heart sank, and she began to tremble. But the captain continued, ‘I understand why you should want to have it, and in fact I haven’t seen it at all. But you must realise what would happen if someone else saw it. Especially a German. Just be more discreet.’

  She looked up at him, appealing with her eyes, and he smiled, touched her shoulder, tapped the side of his nose with his forefinger, and winked.

  After he had gone the thought occurred to Pelagia that by now they could have poisoned the captain a hundred times over if they had ever wanted to. They could have extracted aconite from monkshood, they could have gathered hemlock, or stopped his heart with digitalis, and the authorities would never have known why he had died. She slipped her hand into the pocket of her apron and slid a finger round the trigger with that familiar motion that she had practised a hundred times. She weighed it in her hand. It was good of the captain to let her know that he respected her need for safety, for the reassurance and the defiance that proceeded from the ownership of a weapon. And you don’t poison a musician, not even an Italian; it would have been as abominable as smearing excrement upon the tombstone of a priest.

  That evening the doctor himself demanded a concert, and he and Pelagia found themselves outdoors in the yard whilst the captain spread a sheet of music upon the table, and both illuminated it and prevented it from being carried away by the breeze by placing a lantern on its upper edge. Solemnly he sat down and began to tap the striking plate with the plectrum.

  The doctor raised his eyebrows in perplexity. This tapping seemed to go on for a very long time. Perhaps the captain was trying to establish a rhythm. Perhaps this was one of those minimalist pieces he had heard about, which was all squawks and squeaks and no melody, and perhaps this was the introduction. He looked at Pelagia, and she caught his glance and raised her hands in incomprehension. There was more tapping. The doctor peered at the captain’s face, which was rapt in deep concentration. The doctor always found that in incomprehensible artistic situations like this his backside inevitably began to itch. He shifted his seat, and then lost patience, ‘Excuse me, young man, but what on earth are you doing? This is not quite what my daughter led me to expect.’

  ‘Damn,’ exclaimed the captain, his concentration utterly destroyed, ‘I was just about to start playing.’

  ‘Well, about time too, I should think. What on earth were you doing? What is it? Some ghastly modern twaddle called “Two Tin Cans, a Carrot, and Dead Harlot”?’

  Corelli was offended, and spoke with a distinct tone of lofty disdain, ‘I am playing one of Hummel’s Concertos for Mandolin. The first forty-five and a half bars are for the orchestra, allegro moderato e grazioso. You have to imagine the orchestra. Now I’ve got to begin all over again.’

  The doctor glared at him, ‘I’m damned if I’m going to sit through all that tapping again, and I’m damned if I can imagine an orchestra. Just play your parts.’

  The captain glared back, clearly indicating his conviction that the doctor was a complete philistine. ‘If I do that,’ he said, ‘I’ll start getting confused about when I’m supposed to come in, and that, in a concert hall, would be a disaster.’

  The doctor stood up and waved his arm about to take in the olive tree, the goat, the house, the night sky above. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he bawled, ‘I apologise for disrupting the concert.’ He turned to Corelli, ‘Is this a concert hall? And do my eyes deceive me, or is there not one orchestra present? Do my eyes perceive a single trombone? The smallest and most insignificant violin? Where, pray, is the conductor, and where are the royalty draped in jewellery?’

  The captain sighed in resignation, Pelagia looked at him sympathetically, and the doctor added, ‘And another thing. Whilst you are tapping away and imagining your orchestra, you are exchanging one stupid expression for another. How are we supposed to concentrate in front of such a gallery?’

  28 Liberating the Masses (1)

  When the Germans withdrew from North Africa, they established their centre of operations for the region in Peloponnisos, which meant that Mandras and his small group of andartes were obliged to move across the Corinth Canal into Roumeli.

  In Peloponnisos Mandras had done very little. He had joined up with one man, and then two others, and they had conceived neither plan nor purpose. All they knew was that they were driven by something from the very depths of the soul, something that commanded them to rid their land of strangers or die in the attempt. They set fire to lorries, and one of their number garrotted an enemy soldier and sat afterwards, shaking with retrospective fear and revulsion, whilst the others comforted and praised him. They dwelt on the outer fringe of a forest in a cave, living off supplies brought by the priest of a neighbouring village, who brought bread, potatoes, and olives, and took away their clothes to be washed by a local woman. One day they chopped down the legs of a wooden footbridge that constituted part of a footpath leading to a local garrison. In reprisal for having to get their feet wet in a stream, the enemy burned down four houses in the village, and the priest and the schoolmaster begged them to leave before anything worse could happen. The four householders, now homeless, joined them.

  In Roumeli there was a small British team of enthusiastic amateurs, none of whom spoke Greek, who had trained for one day before dropping in by parachute, using an innovative type of parachute which had supplies and radios tied into the upper cords, which struck the soldiers resoundingly upon the head when they landed on the ground. These Britons had been co-ordinating guerrilla groups, with the intention of blowing up the viaducts of the single-track railway that was the main supply route that led eventually from Piraeus to Crete, and thence to Tobruk. They assumed that naturally the autonomous groups would be delighted to be commanded by British officers, and the Greeks were so impressed by this confident assumption that they fell for it almost immediately.

  There was one group, however, called ELAS, which was the military wing of an organisation called the EAM, which in turn was controlled by a committee in Athens whose members belonged to the KKE. Intelligent people realised immediately that any group with such credentials must have been Communist, and that the purpose of having such attenuated chains of control was to disguise from ordinary citizens the fact that they were a Communist organisation. Initially their recruits came from all walks of life, and included Venizelist republicans and Royalists, as well as moderate socialists, Liberals and Communists, all of whom were easily duped into believing that they were a part of the national liberation struggle, and not part of some convoluted hidden agenda which was more to do with seizing power after the war than beating the Axis. The British armed them, because no one believed the assertion of the British officers on the ground that this was merely storing up trouble for later, and no one b
elieved that swarthy foreigners could make much trouble for the British anyway. Brigadier Myers and his officers shrugged their shoulders and just got on with the job, whilst ELAS only helped or obeyed them when it felt like it. The task of Myers and his officers was impossible, but they achieved all that they had set out to do by means of a combination of grit, patience, and élan. They even recruited two Palestinian Arabs who had somehow got left behind in the general muddle of 1941.

  Mandras might have joined EKKA, or EDES, or EOA, but it happened by chance that the first andartes he came across in Roumeli belonged to ELAS, and the commander who first took him into his particular band was proudly and overtly Communist. He was astute enough to see that Mandras was a lost soul, a little embittered without knowing why, young enough to be impressed and delighted by the attaching of resonant names to lofty concepts, lonely and sad enough to be befriended.

  Mandras hated the mountains. There were mountains at home, of course, but ringed to infinity by the churning open masses of the sea. It was not just that these mountains of Roumeli abolished the horizon and enclosed him like the embrace of an enormous, ugly, and effusive aunt, it was also that they reminded him of the war on the border of Albania that had cost so much of his sanity, his comrades, and his health. They oppressed him and punished him, even though he knew their ways before he had seen them. He knew already how it was to roast one’s thighs and belly before a fire whilst one’s back and backside froze to the bone, how it was to undress and wade naked in winter, holding one’s clothes above the head, through torrents that snatched the breath from the throat and stunned the flesh like a bruise. He knew already that to defeat the Italians you had to calculate upon needing roughly half their number, and he knew how to load and fire a Mannlicher when the other hand was bleeding and being used to staunch another wound. He knew already how it was to create a life out of dreaming of Pelagia and fraternising in the cups with beloved comrades who might die upon the night.