Corelli's Mandolin

  ‘Let’s sing, boys,’ said Antonio Corelli as the truck they were in lurched from one rut to another. From the passionless faces of the German guards, he looked up and down the truck at his men. One of them was already gibbering and tearful, others were praying, their heads bowed down to their knees, and only Carlo was sitting bolt upright, his massive chest thrust forward as though no bullet in the world could break it. Corelli felt strangely euphoric, as though drunk on fatigue and the infallible excitement of certainty. Why not smile in the face of death? ‘Let’s sing, boys,’ he repeated. ‘Carlo, sing.’

  Carlo fixed him with eyes full of infinite sorrow, and began very softly to sing an Ave Maria. It was neither Schubert’s version nor Gounod’s, but was something that came trickling out of his own soul, and it was beautiful because it was docile and lyrical. The men stopped praying, and listened. Some of them recognised notes from a lullaby, remembered from infancy, and others heard snatches from a love song. Carlo twice repeated, ‘Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,’ and then stopped and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. One of the tenors of La Scala began the ‘Humming Chorus’ from Madama Butterfly, and soon others joined in or dropped out, as the catch in their throats permitted. There was something soothing and appropriate in that lulling melody; it suited the exhausted men, all of them filthy and ragged, all of them at the door of death, all of them too oppressed with misery even to look upon the beloved faces of comrades they were shortly due to lose. It was easy to hum whilst thinking of their mothers, their villages, their boyhood in the vines and fields, the embrace of their fathers, the first kiss of an adored fiancée, the wedding of a sister. It was easy to sway almost indiscernibly to that tune and contemplate this island, the scene of so many drunken nights, rowdy games, and beautiful girls. It was easier to hum than to dwell on death; it gave the heart something to do.

  When the truck arrived at the pink walls of the brothel, Günter Weber’s knees began to buckle. Almost before it had arrived, it seemed that he had known that fate had called him to the killing of his friends.

  He had not expected them to arrive singing, humming the very tune that he and La Scala had sung together late at night at the doctor’s house, when they were too far gone to remember or pronounce the words of anything else. He had not expected them to jump so lightly from the truck, he had thought they would be pushed and toppled from it by means of bayonets and rifle-butts. He had not expected Antonio Corelli to recognise him and wave. Perhaps he had thought that a man’s face changes when he becomes an executioner. He designated a sergeant to herd his friends against the wall, lit another cigarette, and faced away. He watched his own soldiers milling about in silence, and decided to wait in case there was news of a reprieve. He knew it would never come, but nonetheless he waited.

  Finally he turned on his heel, knowing that some tiny shred of decency must be salvaged, and he approached the Italians. More than half of them were praying, kneeling in the soil, and others wept like children at a death. Antonio Corelli and Carlo Guercio were embracing. Weber reached for his packet of cigarettes, and approached them. ‘Cigarette?’ he asked them, and Corelli took one, Carlo refusing. ‘The doctor said it was bad for my health,’ he said.

  Corelli looked at his former protégé and said, ‘Your hands are trembling, and your legs.’

  ‘Antonio, I am very sorry, I tried …’

  ‘I am sure you did, Günter. I know how it goes.’ He took a deep lungful of smoke and added, ‘You lot always did get the best tobacco. It annoyed the doctor.’

  ‘Così fan tutte,’ said Weber, giving a short and hollow laugh. He coughed, and jerkily applied his hand to his mouth.

  ‘Don’t give us a cold,’ said Carlo.

  Weber’s face trembled with suppressed tears and desperation, and at last he said suddenly, ‘Forgive me.’

  Carlo sneered, ‘You will never be forgiven.’ But Corelli put his hand up to silence his friend, and said quietly, ‘Günter, I forgive you. If I do not, who will?’

  Carlo made a sound of disgust in his throat, and Weber held out his hand. ‘Goodbye, Günter,’ said Corelli, taking it. He let his hand linger in the palm of his former friend, shook it briefly one final time, and released it. He linked an arm through Carlo’s, and smiled up at him. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘we two have been companions in life. Let us go together to paradise.’

  It was a beautiful day to die. A few soft inverted clouds idled on the summit of Mt Aenos. Nearby a goatbell clanged and a flock bleated. He realised that his own legs were shaking and that there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He thought about Pelagia, with her dark eyes, her vehement nature, her black hair. He thought of her framed in the doorway of Casa Nostra, laughing as he took her photograph. A succession of images: Pelagia combing Psipsina and talking to her in a squeaky voice apposite to animals; Pelagia chopping onions, wiping tears from her eyes and smiling; Pelagia striking him when her goat was stolen (he realised that he had never replaced it as he had promised – perhaps he should ask for a delay of execution?); Pelagia being delighted that first time he had played Pelagia’s March; Pelagia kissing Günter Weber on the cheek at the offer of the gramophone; Pelagia crocheting a blanket that actually grew smaller every day; Pelagia embarrassed by the asymmetry of embroidery on the waistcoat; Pelagia screaming in his ear when the brakes failed on the motorcycle and sent them hurtling down a mountain; Pelagia arm in arm with her father, returning from the sea. Pelagia, who had been so pert and rounded, now so pale and thin.

  The sergeant approached the Leutnant. He was a Croatian, one of those thuggish fanatics more national socialist than Goebbels himself, and considerably less endowed with charm. Weber had never understood how such a man could have found his way into the Grenadiers. He said, ‘Herr Leutnant, more will be arriving. We can’t delay.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Weber, and he closed his eyes and prayed. It was a prayer that had no words, addressed to an apathetic God.

  The carnage had none of the ritual formality of such occasions that film and paintings might suggest. The victims were not lined up against the wall. They were not blindfolded, faced away, or faced forward. Many of them were left on their knees, praying, weeping or pleading. Some lay on the grass as though they had already fallen, tearing at it with their hands, burrowing in desperation. Some fought their way to the back of the pack. Some stood smoking, as casually as at a party, and Carlo stood to attention next to Corelli, glad to die at last, and resolved with all his heart to die a soldier’s death. Corelli put one hand in the pocket of his breeches to steady the shaking of his leg, unbuttoned his jacket, and deeply breathed the Cephallonian air that held Pelagia’s breath. He smelled eucalyptus, goat-dung, and the sea. It occurred to him suddenly that to die outside a brothel was a little picaresque.

  The German boys heard the command to fire, and fired in disbelief. Those of them whose eyes were open aimed wide or high, or aimed such as not to cause a death. Their guns leapt and clattered in their hands, and their arms numbed and cramped from panic and vibration. The Croatian sergeant aimed to kill, firing in short and careful bursts, as intent as any carpenter, or a butcher carving joints.

  Weber’s head reeled. His former friends, wheeling and dancing in the horizontal rain, were crying out. They fell to their knees, their hands flailing, their nostrils haunted by the stench of cordite, searing cloth and oil, their mouths filling with the dry and dusty tang of blood. Some stood up again, holding out their arms like Christ, baring their chests in the hope of a quicker death, a shorter route through pain, a consummation to their loss. What no one had seen, not even Weber, was that at the order to fire Carlo had stepped smartly sideways like a soldier forming ranks. Antonio Corelli, in a haze of nostalgia and forgetfulness, had found in front of him the titanic bulk of Carlo Guercio, had found his wrists gripped painfully in those mighty fists, had found himself unable to move. He stared wonderingly into the middle of Carlo’s back as ragged and appalling holes burst through from inside his bo
dy, releasing shreds of tattered flesh and crimson gouts of blood.

  Carlo stood unbroken as one bullet after another burrowed like white-hot parasitic knives into the muscle of his chest. He felt blows like those of an axe splintering his bones and hacking at his veins. He stood perfectly still, and when his lungs filled up with blood he held his breath and counted. ‘Uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette, otto, nove …’ He decided in the arbitrariness of his valour to stand and count to thirty. At every even number he thought of Francisco dying in Albania, and at every odd number he tightened his grip on Corelli. He reached thirty just as he thought that he might be failing, and then he looked up at the sky, felt a bullet cave the jawbone of his face, and flung himself over backwards. Corelli lay beneath him, paralysed by his weight, drenched utterly in his blood, stupefied by an act of love so incomprehensible and ineffable, so filled with divine madness, that he did not hear the sergeant’s voice.

  ‘Italians, it’s all over. If any of you are living, stand up now, and your lives will be spared.’

  He did not see the two or three stand up, their hands clutched over their wounds, one of them with his groin ripped out. He did not see them stagger, but he heard the renewed clatter of the automatic as the sergeant cut them down. Then he heard the single shots as the trembling hand of Weber, who, intoxicated with horror, was wandering amongst the dead, ensured their despatch with a spurious coup de grace. Next to his head he saw Weber’s jackboot, and he saw Weber bend down and look directly into his eyes where he lay entrapped beneath that weight and bulk. He saw the wavering barrel of the Luger approach his face, he saw the unfathomable sorrow in Weber’s brown eyes, and then he saw the gun withdrawn, unfired. He tried to breathe more freely, and realised that he was having difficulty not merely because of Carlo’s weight, but because the bullets that had passed with such destruction through his friend had also struck himself.

  57 Fire

  Corelli lay beneath his friend for hours, their blood intermingling in the soil, in their uniforms, and in their flesh. It was not until the evening that Velisarios came across that tangled heap of tragic remains, and recognised the man as big as himself who had once reached a hand across the barriers of hostility and offered him a cigarette. He looked down into the vacant and staring eyes, shuddered at the smashed and dislocated jaw, reached down a hand, and tried to close the lids. He failed, and was struck by the indecency of leaving such a brother to the flies and birds. He knelt down and reached his arms beneath that massive torso and those treelike legs. With a mighty effort he lifted Carlo from the ground, nearly toppled with the strain, and looked down. He saw the mad captain who was staying at the doctor’s, the one whose secret and elaborately surreptitious love for Pelagia was known and discussed by everyone on the island. The eyes were not vacant, and they flickered. The lips moved; ‘Aiutarmi,’ they said.

  Velisarios propped Carlo against the pink and bullet-pitted wall, and returned to kneel beside the captain. He looked at the hideous wounds and the dark lake of blood that was already turning black, and wondered whether it might not be a kindness just to kill him. ‘Iatro,’ said the dying man, ‘Pelagia.’ The strongman carefully picked him up, felt how light he was, and set off across the stony fields to save his life.

  Nobody knows the exact number of the Italian dead that lay upon the earth of Cephallonia. At least four thousand were massacred and possibly nine thousand. Was it 288,000 kilos of butchered human meat, or 648,000? Was it 18,752 litres of bright young blood, or 42, 192? The evidence was lost in flame.

  At the summit of Mt Aenos, Alekos looked down over his native land and wondered for one wild moment whether it was June 24th. Was St John’s Day in September? Had somebody moved it? Enormous fires were springing up at regular intervals, at places where the fires were never held for the saint. He smelt olive wood and pine, kerosene, dry thorn, resin, oil, and charring flesh; he sniffed with disgust. The Italians never could cook meat. He smelt the vile odour of burning hair and bone, even at that enormous height, and watched with dismay as dirty smoke blacked out the stars. Perhaps it was the end of the world.

  Down in the valleys the Germans competed with historical truth, destroying the evidence, displaying abundant knowledge of their guilt by converting flesh to smoke. They ran truckload after truckload of fuel. Soldiers hacked down olives a thousand years old and stacked them about heaps of lolling corpses so high that it became impossible to stack them higher. Contemptuously they pointed to individual dead, saying, ‘This one pissed himself,’ or ‘This one stinks of shit,’ but few could laugh. Abdominal slime and blood found their way onto their hands and uniforms, a sweet and sticky smell of fresh meat affected their heads like drink, and sweat poured down their temples as they slung one defunct boy after another across their shoulders, and tipped them upon the pyres. They worked until their legs weakened and the flames became too hot to approach, but there seemed to be no ending to the work. More cadavers arrived, frozen in reproach and ghoulish in that flickering light. They came in on trucks, in jeeps, slung across armoured cars and mules, once or twice on stretchers.

  There was no priest but Arsenios. He had prophesied for months that these very boys would finish in the flames, and was felled by horror when it happened. Indeed, he felt responsible. On that evening when all the Greeks were hiding in their homes behind their shutters, peeping out into the night, Father Arsenios arrived with his little dog at the fire at Troianata, the largest one of all, not far from the monastery of the saint, and beheld a scene from Armageddon. As though invisible he walked amongst the pallid faces of the dead, reminded of Catholic depictions of the last day. All around him the dark and frantic silhouettes of German soldiers laboured and grunted like pigs as they hurled one corpse after another upon the flames. Not far away he heard a strangled and heart-stopping scream as a boy who was not yet entirely dead thrashed and struggled in the sharp agony of his cremation.

  Father Arsenios felt the spirit move within him, and he spread his arms wide and cried out, his voice competing with the shouts of the soldiers and the hissing and crackling of the flames. Brandishing his crozier of olivewood he threw back his head: ‘I have considered the days of old, the years of ancient times. I call to remembrance my song in the night: I commune with mine own heart.

  ‘Will the Lord cast off forever? and will he be favourable no more? Is his mercy clean gone forever? doth his promise fail for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies?

  ‘Woe to thee that spoilest, when thou wast not spoiled! Woe to thee that dealest treachery, and they dealt not treachery to thee! When thou hast ceased to spoil, then shalt thou be spoiled!

  ‘Woe unto thee, for the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations, and his fury upon their armies; he hath utterly destroyed them, he hath delivered them to the slaughter! The slain also shall be cast out, and their stink shall come out of their carcasses, and the mountains shall be melted with their blood!

  ‘Woe unto thee, for the streams of the land shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch! It shall not be quenched night or day, the smoke thereof shall go up forever; from generation unto generation it shall lie waste, and none shall pass it through!’

  Unaware that no one had heard him, fired by apocalyptic rage, Father Arsenios grasped his staff in both hands, roared, ‘I shall uncover thy nakedness, yea, thy shame shall be seen. I will take vengeance, and I will not meet thee as a man. Thou hast polluted mine inheritance,’ and flung himself into battle. Swinging the crozier he set about the shoulders and heads of the German soldiers. A helmet clanged, tired shoulders jolted with determined blows, hands were raised to protect heads, only to have their fingers crushed. The men who had efficiently slaughtered thousands seemed at a loss as to what to do. There were cries of, ‘Shit, for God’s sake get him off!’ and from the bystanders who had with relief stopped to watch, comments such as, ‘Look at that crazy priest!’ T
hey prodded each other and laughed, enjoying the discomfiture of the afflicted. In that orange glow Arsenios looked like some cadaverous bat, his voluminous black robes fluttering, and his prophetic beard, wildly glittering eyes, and tall and tattered hat with its flat top merely served to increase the impression of a madness percolated from another world. His small dog danced and skipped about him, barking senselessly with excitement and snapping at the calves of his chosen victims.

  It ended only when one soldier was on the ground and in danger of a fractured skull and broken hands. An officer of the Grenadiers drew his automatic pistol, came up behind Arsenios, and fired a single shot upwards through the nape of his neck, exploding his brains and the plates of his skull outwards through the front of his head. Arsenios died in a brilliant flash of white light that he took to be the revelation of the face of God, and his emaciated and skeletal remains were flung on the pyre, along with the young boys whose fate he had foreseen, but which he had not known that he would share.

  His dog whimpered, frightened of the flames and the strange men, attempting to approach its burning master, but having repeatedly to withdraw. It expressed its incomprehension by raising first one paw and then another, and remained there until the soldiers left and the sickened Greeks arrived, to find it singed and howling.

  Men and women and the few Italian soldiers who had escaped approached the fires as closely as the heat permitted. Without consulting each other they began to pull away the bodies they could reach at the periphery as the changing wind allowed. There were many of them still lying in distorted and toylike postures in places where no flames had reached. All of the toiling people thought the same things: is this what it will be like under the Germans? How many of these boys could there have been? How many of these boys did I know? Can I imagine the horror of their death? Can I conceive how it is to die of bleeding, slowly? Is it, as they say, like the kick of a horse when a bullet smashes bone?