Corelli's Mandolin

  ‘Psipsina catches rabbits, but she won’t let us have them. She growls and runs away.’

  ‘If it was spring I could look for eggs.’

  ‘Hug me.’

  ‘Santa Maria, my ribs.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I keep forgetting.’

  ‘I wish I could. Merda. Nonetheless, I love you.’

  ‘Forever?’

  ‘In Sicily they say that eternal love lasts for two years. Fortunately, I am not Sicilian.’

  ‘Greek men love themselves and their mothers forever. Their wives they love for six months. Fortunately I am a woman.’

  ‘Fortunately.’

  ‘You will come back? After the war?’

  ‘I will leave Antonia as a hostage. That way you will know you can trust me.’

  ‘You could get another.’

  ‘She is irreplaceable.’

  ‘Aren’t I irreplaceable?’

  ‘Why don’t you trust me? Why do you look at me like that? Don’t cry. How could I pass by the opportunity to have such a good father-in-law?’

  ‘Bastard.’

  ‘Ow. My ribs.’

  ‘O, carino, I am so sorry.’

  ‘I’ve got to go. Tomorrow night. Kiss me. I love you.’

  Out into the night he would go, creeping from hedge to wall, jumping at the slightest sound, and dawn would find him dreaming beneath his blankets, the clouds of calcium beneath his flesh forming gradually into bone, the memory of tenderness populating his reverie with images of Pelagia and his operatic boys. In the early afternoon he would wake and search for berries, perform exercises to keep his fingers nimble, and scrabble in the undergrowth for snails. Not only did the doctor make him eat the things, but he had to grind the shells in a mortar and pestle, and the whole family would drink the gritty pieces down in wine, for it was Dr Iannis’ intention that no one should be without a splendid skeleton, however thin and tired; it was no worse than the ancient stores of desiccated beans that kept the belly full but gave a man the gripes.

  Pelagia was torn. She wanted to keep her captain on the island, but knew that she would kill him if she did. There were people who for bread would brook any betrayal, and it could only be a matter of time before the Nazis became aware of his furtive presence in their lives. Furthermore the weather was turning foul, the roof of Casa Nostra leaked, and the captain had no warmth against the slashing wind or the vindictive cold. There was less and less to eat for her father and herself, and sometimes she found herself looking longingly at spiders on the walls. She told Kokolios and Stamatis to look out for the madman who used to go round with Arsenios, and to tell him to call on her if he could.

  For some time now Bunny Warren had been following the British policy, implemented by means of gold sovereigns, of encouraging the owners of boats to deny their use to the Germans, and there were not a few surviving Italian soldiers who had found themselves bound at night for Siracusa, Bianco, or Valletta, in vessels which seemed to be made of matchsticks but in which their owners expressed the most incorrigible and optimistic faith. From trough to crest they bounced their nomadic way past E-boats and searchlights, battleships and mines, their sailors singing lustily and their passengers wide-eyed, frozen, and tormented by nausea, eventually to arrive upon dry land and discover that its stillness made them sick.

  Therefore it was all in a day’s work for Warren to arrange the captain’s departure. He called at Pelagia’s house at three in the morning, tapping softly on the window outside her own room, and when she had disentangled herself from Corelli’s embrace, she opened the shutters and saw the man whose help she had both sought and dreaded. ‘What ho,’ he said, as he came in through the door, adding, ‘Kalimera, Kyria Pelagia.’ Very formally he shook her hand and made a comment about the weather.

  Bunny Warren’s Greek was now colourful and colloquial, but he still spoke with a perfectly upper-class English accent, managing to turn the Greek for ‘Let’s go’ into ‘In taxi’, which suited his English ears, made sense to him, and was also comprehensible to Greeks. Since his normal range of adjectives and adverbs was untranslatable, he still punctuated his speech with English words such as ‘spiffing’ and ‘simply ripping’ and ‘absolutely ghastly’, whose effect was disorientating and redundant rather than nonsensical.

  ‘Who is this?’ asked Corelli, who for a moment had been fearing a visit from the Germans.

  ‘Bunnio’,’ said Pelagia, without answering his question, ‘this is an Italian soldier, and we have to get him out.’

  Warren smiled and extended his hand. ‘Ave,’ he said, not having had as much opportunity to modernise his Italian as he had his Greek. Corelli felt that his hand had been almost crushed, and he was left with an exaggerated impression of the general strength of the British. He did not know that in England an attempt to break another’s fingers signifies both virility and bonhomie. He was also stupefied by the man’s lankiness and height, and disturbingly reminded of a German by the blue and very nordic eyes.

  It turned out that a caïque was leaving for Sicily the following night, weather permitting, and that it would be perfectly easy to put the captain on board, ‘Though we might have to kill one or two of those rotten bounders.’ It was simply a case of going to the bay at one o’clock in the morning with a shielded lamp, and flashing it out to sea in answer to the signals from the boat. Warren promised to be there, assuring them that everything would go swimmingly and end up top-hole and ticketyboo.

  61 Every Parting is a Foretaste of Death

  Corelli did not go back to Casa Nostra before dawn, but stayed with Pelagia in the house by the doctor’s consent. If it was at such short notice to be their last day together, then it seemed only humane to tolerate the risk, and in any case Corelli looked exactly like a Greek in his peasant clothes and his splendid beard that yet exposed the livid cicatrice across his cheek. Moreover he now spoke Greek well enough to fool a German who would know no Greek at all, and he even slapped the back of his hand to indicate someone’s stupidity, as well as tossing his head back and clicking his tongue to signify a negative. From time to time he dreamed in Greek, a terrible frustration for his sleeping soul because this necessarily slowed the pace of his dreams’ narrative, and he discovered that when speaking it his personality was different from when he spoke in Italian. He felt a fiercer man, and, for some extraordinary reason which had nothing to do with his beard, much hairier.

  The three of them sat in that familiar kitchen, saddened and apprehensive, talking quietly and shaking their heads over all the memories.

  There are so many things I will never forget,’ said Corelli, ‘like pissing on the herbs. It was when I was invited to piss on them that I knew I had been accepted.’

  ‘I wish my father would forget it,’ commented Pelagia, ‘it makes me anxious when I use them. I waste hours in washing them.’

  ‘I feel guilty about leaving alive, when all my friends are dead, and Carlo is buried out there in the yard.’

  ‘In the Odyssey, Achilles says, “Put me on earth again and I would rather be a serf in the house of a landless man than king of all these dead men who have done with life,” and he was right,’ offered the doctor. ‘When loved ones die, you have to live on their behalf. See things as though with their eyes. Remember how they used to say things, and use those words oneself. Be thankful that you can do things that they cannot, and also feel the sadness of it. This is how I live without Pelagia’s mother. I have no interest in flowers, but for her I will look at a rock-rose or a lily. For her I eat aubergines, because she loved them. For your boys you should make music and enjoy yourself, doing it for them. And anyway,’ he added, ‘you may not survive the voyage to Sicily.’

  ‘Papas,’ protested Pelagia, ‘don’t say that.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Corelli philosophically. ‘And one can also see things for the living. After so much time with you two, I shall see things and imagine what you would have said. I shall miss you very badly.’

  ??
?You’ll be back,’ affirmed the doctor. ‘You’ve become an islander, like us.’

  ‘In Italy I shall have no home.’

  ‘You must get X-rayed. God knows what I left behind inside you, and you must get the mandolin strings removed.’

  ‘I owe my life to you, Iatre.’

  ‘I am sorry about the scars. It was the best I could do.’

  ‘And I am sorry, Iatre, for the rape of the island. I do not suppose we will ever be forgiven.’

  ‘We forgave the British and the Venetians. Perhaps we won’t forgive the Germans. I don’t know. And in any case, barbarians have always been convenient; we have usually had someone else to blame for our catastrophes. It will be easy to forgive you, because all of you are dead.’

  ‘Papakis,’ protested Pelagia again, ‘don’t talk like that. Do we need to be reminded, with Carlo buried in the yard?’

  ‘It’s the truth. Only the living need forgiveness, and, as you know, Captain, I must have forgiven you, or I would not have given you permission to wed my daughter.’

  Pelagia and Corelli looked at one another, and the latter said, ‘I never asked you specifically for permission … it seemed, somehow, an effrontery. And …’

  ‘Nonetheless, you have it. Nothing would please me more. But there is one condition. You must allow Pelagia to become a doctor. She is not only my daughter. She is, since I have no son, the nearest to a son that I have fathered. She must have a son’s prerogatives, because she will continue my life when I am gone. I have not brought her up to be a domestic slave, for the simple reason that such company would have been tedious in the absence of a son. I confess it was selfish of me; she is now too clever to be a humble wife.’

  ‘Am I then an honorary man?’ demanded Pelagia.

  ‘Koritsimou, you are yourself alone, but nonetheless, you are as I made you. You should be grateful. In any other house you would be scrubbing the floor whilst I talked with Antonio.’

  ‘In any other house I would be nagging you. You should be grateful.’

  ‘Koritsimou, I am.’

  ‘Naturally, Pelagia shall be a doctor if she wishes. A musician would never manage on his own income alone,’ said Corelli, only to be tapped smartly about the back of his head by his betrothed, who exclaimed, ‘You are supposed to become rich. If not, I will not marry you.’

  ‘I was joking, I was joking.’ He turned to the doctor. ‘We have decided that if we have a son, we will name him Iannis.’

  The doctor was visibly touched, even though this was exactly what he would have expected under the circumstances. There was a prolonged and sorrowful silence whilst all three of them pondered the imminent destruction of their mutual society, and at last Dr Iannis looked up, his eyes watering, and said simply, ‘Antonio, if I have ever had a son, it was you. You have a place at this table.’

  In lieu of the obvious reply, which by virtue of its obviousness would necessarily have rung hollow, Corelli stood up and approached the older man, who rose from his seat. They embraced, clapping each other on the back, and then the doctor, by dint of having some emotion left to express, also embraced his daughter.

  ‘When the war is over, I shall return,’ said Corelli. ‘Until then I am still in the Army, and it is necessary to get rid of the Germans.’

  ‘They are losing,’ said the doctor confidently. ‘It will not be long.’

  ‘Don’t go back to fight!’ cried Pelagia. ‘Haven’t you done enough? Haven’t you had enough of death? And what about me? Don’t you think of me at all?’

  ‘Of course he thinks of you. He thinks of getting rid of them so that you can leave the house without being afraid.’

  ‘Carlo would have done it. I can do no less.’

  ‘You men are all so stupid!’ she exclaimed. ‘You should give the world to women, and see how much fighting there is then.’

  ‘Many of the andartes on the mainland are women,’ said Corelli, ‘and many of the partisans in Yugoslavia. There would be fighting just the same, and the world has had its share of bloodthirsty queens. It is important to defeat the Nazis, and nothing could be more obvious.’

  She looked up at him reproachfully and replied softly, ‘It was important to defeat the Fascists, but you fought for them.’

  Corelli flushed, and the doctor intervened, ‘Don’t let us spoil our last day together. A man makes mistakes, he gets caught up in things, he is sometimes a sheep, and then he learns by experience and becomes a lion.’

  ‘I don’t want you to fight,’ she insisted, gazing steadily at Corelli. ‘You are a musician. In ancient times when there was slaughtering between tribes, the bards were spared.’

  The captain aimed for a compromise, ‘Perhaps it won’t be necessary, and perhaps they won’t let me. I am sure I will not be considered fit.’

  ‘Do something useful,’ said Pelagia. ‘Join the fire brigade or something.’

  ‘When I get home,’ said Corelli, after an embarrassing pause, ‘I shall have a pot of basil on my sill to remind me of Greece. Perhaps it will bring good luck.’ He paced about the room, reminding himself of everything it held; not only the familiar objects, but its history of emotions. It was a place that still echoed with hopes, with shared confidences and jokes, past antagonisms and resentment, and the saving of a life. There hung about it a residual aroma of music and embraces that mingled with the scent of herbs and soap. Corelli stood, stroking the long flat back of Psipsina where she reclined along a shelf that was bare of food, and felt an unspeakable sadness well up in him that competed with the dry mouth and fluttering stomach of a man who was about to escape to sea. The doctor saw him standing, as lonely as a man awaiting execution, and then looked at Pelagia, sitting with her hands in her lap and her head bowed. ‘I’ll leave you two children together,’ he said. ‘There is a little girl dying of tuberculosis, and I should visit. It’s in the spine and there’s nothing to be done, but all the same …’

  He left the house, and the two lovers sat opposite each other, lost for words, caressing each other’s fingers. Finally the tears began to follow each other silently down her cheeks, and Corelli knelt beside her, put his arms about her, and laid his head against her chest. He was shocked all over again at how thin she was, and closed his eyes tightly, imagining that it was another world. ‘I am so afraid,’ she said. ‘I think you won’t come back, and the war goes on and on forever, and there’s no safety and no hope, and I’ll be left with nothing.’

  ‘We have deep memories,’ replied Corelli. ‘Whether they make us glad or sad is up to us. I shall not forget you, and I will come back.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise. I have given you my ring, and I have left you with Antonia.’

  ‘We never read Carlo’s papers.’

  ‘Too painful. We’ll read them when I return, when it’s not so … so recent.’

  She stroked his hair in silence, and said finally, ‘Antonio, I wish that we had … lain together. As a man and woman.’

  ‘Everything at the right time, koritsimou.’

  ‘There may not be a time.’

  ‘There will be. There will come a time. You have my word.’

  ‘Psipsina will miss you. And Lemoni.’

  ‘Lemoni thinks I am dead, no doubt.’

  ‘After you’ve gone I’ll tell her that Barba C’relli is alive. She will be very happy.’

  ‘You must get Velisarios to throw her into the air for me from time to time.’

  And so the conversation continued, circling back upon itself and reaffirming itself, until the doctor returned at curfew, as distressed as always when he had been obliged helplessly to watch a child groping its last blind steps along the path to death. He had walked home thinking the same thoughts that such occasions always provoked: ‘Is it any wonder that I lost my faith? What are you doing up there, you idle God? Do you think I am so easily fobbed off with one or two miracles at the feast of the saint? Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I have no eyes?’ In his pocket he turned over
the gold sovereign that the child’s father had given him in payment. The British had dispensed so many of them in the funding of the andartes that they had lost their value. ‘Even gold,’ he reflected, ‘is worth less than bread.’

  That evening they shared a single scrawny leg of an old rooster that Kokolios had killed so that the rapists could not appropriate it, and Pelagia saved the bone for inclusion in a soup that also contained the bones of a hedgehog. If she cooked them long enough, they would be soft enough to chew. Afterwards she made a weak and bitter tea from the hips that she had gathered from the wild roses in the autumn, pleased to have something to do to divert her from her fears, and the three of them sat in the semi-darkness, waiting as the hours passed both too slowly and too fast.

  At eleven o’clock Lieutenant Bunny Warren scratched at the window, and the doctor let him in. He entered with an air of decisive self-possession that struck Pelagia as quite unlike his usual diffident self, and there was a large and obviously well-honed knife stuck through his belt. She had heard that the British Special Forces had a positively Balkan aptitude for the silent slicing of throats, and she shuddered. It was hard to imagine Bunnios doing such a thing, and the idea that he probably did it quite frequently was discomfiting.

  He sat on the edge of the table and spoke in his usual mixture of colloquial Romaic and British jargon, and it was only at this point that Corelli began to wonder how it was that Pelagia and the doctor could possibly have made the acquaintance of a British Liaison Officer. In war, so much is bizarre that one sometimes forgets to be surprised or to ask a pertinent question.

  ‘Standard SOPs,’ began Warren. ‘Dark clothing only. Don’t want the blighters to see us. No conversation unless absolutely necessary. Stop and listen every twenty seconds. Feet to be placed on the ground flat, ergo less crunch. Feet to descend vertically, ergo no sliding and scraping. I shall go point, doctor and Kyria Pelagia second, Corelli last. Corelli must turn and look behind at every pause.’ He handed the captain a piece of wire, at each end of which was a short stick of dowel. It took some seconds for him to appreciate that this was a garrotte, and that he might be expected to use it. ‘No shooting unless commanded,’ continued Warren. ‘In the event of one unexpected jerry, I shall top the cad myself. In the event of two, Corelli and I shall take one each. In the event of three or more, we lie still, and at my signal we jolly well retrace and circle round.’ He looked from one face to another and asked, ‘Clear as water or clear as mud?’