Labels and Other Stories Read online

  I suffered the indignity of being visited by the same firm of bailiffs for which I used to work, but my old mates were kind to me and took only things that I did not need very much, such as the grandfather clock and my ex-wife’s Turkish carpet. They left me my fridge, my cooker, my collection of books on the manufacture of terrines and pâtés, my vast accumulation of garlic crushers, peppermills, herbs and French cast-iron cookware. I feel I should explain that I never could do things by halves; I always have to possess complete collections.

  I became extremely good at my new vocation. The more expensive cat foods made exquisite coarse pâtés and meat pies (my shortcrust pastry is quite excellent, and I never leave big gaps filled up with gelatine, as most pie-makers do). The cheaper ones that have a lot of cereal generally do not taste very good unless they are considerably modified by the addition of, for example, diced mushroom and chicken livers fried in olive oil. Turkey livers are a little too strong and leave a slightly unpleasant aftertaste.

  The fish-based cat foods are generally very hard to use. With the exception of the tuna and salmon, they always carry the unmistakable aroma of cat food, which is caused, I think, by the overuse of preservatives and flavour-enhancers. They are also conducive to lingering and intractable halitosis, as any owner of an affectionate cat will be able to confirm.

  And so this is how cat food, which got me into so much trouble, also got me out of it. I began by supplying the local delicatessen, and was surprised to find that I was able to make over one hundred per cent profit. I redoubled my efforts, and learned to decorate my products with parsley and little slices of orange. I learned the discreet use of paprika, and even asafoetida. This spice smells of cat ordure, but is capable of replacing garlic in some recipes, and in that respect it is similar to parmesan cheese, which, as everyone knows, smells of vomit but improves the taste of minced meat.

  I also discovered that the addition of seven-star Greek brandy is an absolute winner, and this led me on to experiments with calvados, Irish whiskey, kirsch, Armagnac, and all sorts of strange liquors from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.

  But what really made the difference was printing the labels in French, which enabled me to begin to supply all the really expensive establishments in London; ‘Terrine de Lapin à l’Ail’ sounds far more sophisticated than ‘Rabbit with Garlic’, after all. I had some beautiful labels printed out, in black, with scrolly writing.

  I have become very well off, despite being a one-man operation working out of my own kitchen, and I am very contented. I have outlets in delicatessens and restaurants all over Britain and one in Paris, and my products have even passed quality inspections by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. It might be of interest to people to know that my only complete failure was a duck pâté that was not made of cat food at all.

  I go out quite often on trips across Europe, looking for superior brands of cat food with nice labels, and my ex-wife comes with me, having moved back in as soon as I became successful. She is now most skilful at soaking off labels, and is a deft hand with an hachoir. The liver with chives was entirely her own invention, and she grows most of our herbs herself.

  I recently received two letters which greatly amused me. One was from a woman in Bath who told me that my terrines are ‘simply divine’ and that her blue-point Persian pussycat ‘absolutely adores them’ as well.

  The other was from a man who said that he was beginning a collection of my ‘most aesthetically pleasing’ labels, and did I have any copies of past designs that I could send to him? I wrote back as follows:

  Dear Sir,

  Our manager thanks you for your letter and asks me to assure you that it is receiving his closest attention.

  Naturally I never wrote back again, nor did I send him any labels. Nonetheless, I feel a little sorry for him, and anxious on his behalf; it’s easy enough to turn cat food into something nice, but what do you do with hundreds of jars of pâté? With him in mind, I had a whole new range of labels printed in fresh designs, with details of a competition on the reverse.

  GÜNTER WEBER’S CONFESSION

  It is not entirely true that Leutnant Günter Weber stayed away from the doctor’s house after the massacre of the Italian soldiers. He came back once, very briefly, seven months afterwards, in the spring.

  He paused at the entrance to the yard and ran his fingers over the table where Pelagia used to cut up onions, and where the boys of La Scala used to drink robola together and sing. With the tip of his jackboot he nudged the frayed end of the rope that formerly attached Pelagia’s goat to the olive tree. He sniffed the air, and took his cap off and on several times, because he was unsure whether or not to wear it, and because he needed a pretext for wasting a little time. He thought of leaving, but then summoned up his courage and tapped on the door.

  When Pelagia answered it, an expression of such fear and horror passed over her face that Weber felt as if someone had driven a long pin into his heart. ‘Please, signora,’ he said, in Italian, ‘don’t be afraid. ‘I’m alone, and I need to see your father.’

  ‘He’s not here,’ said Pelagia desperately.

  Weber sighed and turned his head away, as if to look at the view. ‘I know he’s here. I saw him come in. Please, I mean no harm. I have come to tell him something very important.’

  They looked at each other. She saw that he had heavy rings under his eyes, as if he had given up sleep for ever, and his complexion had become sallow, like that of a heavy smoker. He was still striking and somewhat handsome, but the youth and eagerness had gone out of his bearing even though he was only twenty-three years old, as if all his pride had evaporated. He looked at Pelagia, and regretted that her prettiness and vivacity had been devoured so unpityingly by the war. She was too thin, and he could almost scent her terror, as though she had bathed in it for months.

  ‘You are still beautiful,’ he lied, attempting the gallantry that he not quite managed to learn from the Italians.

  Pelagia twisted her mouth sceptically, barely able to disguise her anger. ‘Your people beat my father up,’ she said suddenly, ‘and they smashed all his medical equipment. And they stubbed out cigarettes on Drosoula’s breasts.’

  ‘Don’t accuse me,’ said Weber, ‘it wasn’t me.’ She looked back at him in silence, telling him that he was one of them. ‘I need to see your father,’ he repeated.

  ‘Do you remember the little animal we had?’ persisted Pelagia.

  ‘The pine marten? Psipsina?’

  ‘Your people killed her as well.’ Pelagia knew that it was unwise to be indignant with a Nazi officer, even a former friend, but she had too much anger and grief buried alive inside her. Like one entombed by an avalanche, it tried to claw its way out even as it suffocated for want of air and light.

  ‘I need to see your father,’ repeated Günter Weber.

  ‘I am here,’ said Dr Iannis, appearing behind his daughter and placing his hand upon her shoulder. The beating he had endured and the destruction of his lifetime’s collection of medical instruments had left him diminished. One lens of his spectacles was broken, with no prospect of replacement. He tried to wear them with dignity, and his brain had accustomed itself to ignoring the strange distortions that he perceived, but the effect was still sad and ludicrous. Like his daughter, he seemed to have aged rapidly in the passage of only a few months.

  ‘It’s important that I talk to you,’ said Leutnant Weber, ‘I have important information.’

  ‘Important to whom?’ demanded the doctor.

  Weber tried to remain patient. ‘You are a historian. I remember that you were trying to write a history of Cephalonia. I have information that is important to the truth.’

  ‘Ah, the truth,’ echoed the doctor ironically.

  ‘Dr Iannis,’ said Weber, his voice quite suddenly becoming a little hysterical, ‘if you refuse to listen to me, I will draw my pistol and force you to. I have nothing to lose. I’ve had enough.’ Weber’s mouth twisted. ‘I can’t take much mo
re of this.’

  There was such pain in the young officer’s voice that Dr Iannis took pity on him. He turned to his daughter, saying, ‘Koritsaki mou, go and make us some mountain tea.’ He turned to Weber. ‘I can’t offer you coffee, as you know, and there’s no food. I won’t tell you what we’ve been living off. We gather mountain tea on the hillsides; it’s the best I can offer you.’

  Weber sat down heavily at the table in the yard, and placed his cap on it. He sighed, saying, ‘The island is very beautiful at this time of year. I’ve never seen so many flowers.’

  ‘The island has been profaned,’ said the doctor curtly.

  ‘Doctor,’ said Weber, ‘I want to confess to you. Let me speak.’

  ‘Confess?’ repeated the doctor, sitting down opposite him.

  ‘This is where we sang songs and drank,’ said Weber, ‘the boys of La Scala, and Captain Antonio. They were the best days of my life. All gone. Sometimes I dream that I hear Antonio playing the mandolin. Do you remember that in La Scala we didn’t have military ranks? I was a bad singer so my rank was “dotted demi-semiquaver rest”. That was Antonio’s sense of humour.’

  ‘Is this a confession?’ asked the doctor. ‘Have you come here to be nostalgic about everything that you destroyed, and everyone you killed?’

  ‘I tried to get out of it,’ said Weber, ‘I tried to refuse to command a firing squad. They wouldn’t let me. The major said that I could be shot for refusing to obey an order. He said the Italians would all be shot anyway, whether I refused or not. I think,’ he said, ‘that you should realise that not all of us are without a conscience.’

  ‘Are you asking me to feel sorry for you?’ demanded the doctor.

  Weber looked at him desperately. ‘The order came from the Führer.’ The doctor returned his gaze, and saw the tears well up in Weber’s eyes. The young German blurted out, ‘It was me. It was me who commanded the squad. I had to shoot my own friends. Carlo, and Antonio, all the boys.’

  Dr Iannis felt his throat go dry.

  Weber continued, ‘Antonio was behind Carlo. He didn’t die straight away. When I went to give the coup de grâce, I bent down, and Antonio’s eyes looked straight back. I was going to finish him off, but I couldn’t.’ Weber hung his head, his voice growing weak and pitiful. ‘That was all I could do to salvage some honour, letting Antonio die more slowly.’

  The doctor kept his peace. Part of him would have loved to have told Weber that Antonio Corelli had been dragged from beneath the heap of bodies, and that he had lived, but he knew that it was dangerous to tell such things even to a German who had almost been a friend.

  ‘As long as I live,’ said Weber, ‘I’ll never forget Antonio’s face, all scarlet with blood. And those eyes, looking back at me, all glowing, and full of tranquillity.’

  Pelagia came out bearing a tray with two small cups of pale yellow liquid. She placed them before Weber and Dr Iannis, and retreated without saying a word.

  ‘I already knew it was you,’ said the doctor, adding hurriedly, ‘Word gets around in such a small place.’ He leaned forward, cupping the glass of tea in his hands. ‘And I’ll tell you something else.’ He paused. ‘I looked at some of the bodies you left lying around before you disposed of them. I looked at the bodies of the Italian officers that were thrown in that pit near the lighthouse, and you know what? Your firing squads were shooting them in the legs so that it wouldn’t be them who were the murderers. They shot them in the legs so that you officers would have to finish them off with a shot in the head, and be the true assassins. Did you know that? That’s how your soldiers kept themselves innocent.’

  Weber sat absolutely still. He closed his eyes, and muttered, ‘My God, my God.’

  ‘So now you’ve confessed,’ said the doctor.

  ‘No,’ replied Weber, ‘I haven’t. I came to tell you something else. I just wanted to tell you about Antonio and the boys first. It’s a double confession, perhaps.’

  The doctor remained wordless, knowing that Weber would talk without prompting, given sufficient time. ‘I …’ began the young man, and then he choked. He put his head in his hands and blurted out, ‘Two weeks ago I had to kill a woman.’

  ‘There is no chivalry here,’ said the doctor, waving his right hand, as if to indicate the island, its suffering, its long history, its occupation by barbarians from the north. ‘Why is it so bad to kill a woman when you have killed so many men? Isn’t a life a life?’

  ‘I’ve never killed a woman,’ said Günter Weber, ‘but now I’ve had to. I just couldn’t stand to hear her screaming any more.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said the doctor, who was longing to light his pipe, but had had nothing to smoke in it for days.

  ‘It’s the communists,’ explained Weber.

  ‘The communists?’

  ‘The KKE. We kill communists. It’s our policy. We go into a village, we get everyone out in the plaza, and we say “Who are the communists?” and if anyone is pointed out, we kill them straight away. We hang them on the plane trees.’

  ‘I know all this,’ said the doctor, his voice unmistakably betraying his anger and disgust.

  ‘Two weeks ago I was in such a village, and a woman was pointed out by another villager, so we had to get the rope ready. We slung it over a branch, and then the woman went crazy. It’s hard for me to tell you. It’s so hard, Doctor.’

  ‘Well?’ said Dr Iannis.

  ‘She started to scream and wail. She threw herself down and writhed in the dust. Her eyes were rolling. And she crawled through the dirt and threw her arms about my knees, and she was crying, “Eleos, eleos, eleos. Eimai athoa, eimai athoa.” I don’t know what it means, but I can’t forget it, I hear it every moment, that wild voice, terrified, screaming, “Eleos, eleos. Eimai athoa, eimai athoa.”’

  ‘It means “Mercy, mercy. I’m innocent, I’m innocent”,’ said Dr Iannis coldly. ‘Anyway, I don’t know why you bother with communists. When the Italians sent for their help, they did nothing.’

  ‘They sent about a dozen little boys with red armbands,’ said Weber. ‘We caught them straight away.’

  ‘And then you shot them,’ said the doctor. ‘My point is that the communists are up in the hills, and there aren’t any in the villages. Everyone you kill in the villages is innocent.’

  Weber seemed not to have heard this. ‘She was shrieking and clutching at her head, rolling about on the ground, and all my platoon were just watching me to see what I was going to do.’

  ‘One day,’ said the doctor, ‘there will be a time when to have a political opinion is not a capital offence.’

  ‘They shoot at us,’ said Weber.

  ‘Not very much,’ retorted the doctor, ‘and in any case, what else do you expect?’

  Weber ignored the question. ‘Doctor, I could smell the shit and urine. I could smell the panic. She was completely mad. And all that shrieking. It was going through my head, I could feel my brain beginning to explode, I just couldn’t take it, it was the worst thing I’ve ever had to hear. And she was just rolling about, clutching on to my legs, “Eleos, eleos. Eimai athoa, eimai athoa”, and then she began to foam at the mouth. It was horrible, so horrible.’

  ‘So?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘My men were still looking at me, waiting for me to decide something. I could feel their eyes upon me, sort of half observing me, from the sides of their faces. And all the villagers were standing around, you could see that some of the men were getting to the point where they were thinking of attacking us, because they couldn’t stand it any longer either, all that writhing and howling, and the women of the village started to join in the howling as well, and then suddenly I decided to have mercy on the woman, and not hang her after all.’

  ‘You spared her?’

  ‘When she was eating dirt and choking on it, I drew my pistol and shot her through the back of the head.’

  ‘This is mercy?’ demanded the doctor quietly.

  ‘I had to put her out of her misery.’r />
  ‘No,’ said the doctor, ‘you had to put yourself out of her misery.’

  ‘Believe me, it was mercy,’ said Weber. ‘You weren’t there. It was mercy.’

  ‘Do you have any cigarettes?’ asked Dr Iannis. ‘I don’t normally smoke them, but I have nothing any more.’

  Weber produced a silver cigarette case and flipped it open. The doctor flagrantly took two cigarettes, and reached into the pocket of his jacket. He took out his pipe and broke the cigarettes into it, slowly and lovingly packing the tobacco down. Weber offered him a petrol lighter, and the doctor sucked the smoke in deeply. He exhaled, saying, ‘The first taste after a long break is always the best, and then later it turns bitter, and you wonder how you ever began a habit so abominably vile.’

  The doctor considered his thoughts, ordered them, and then told Weber, ‘Young man, everyone knows all the news on this island. It is small and intimate. Everyone knows everyone else, more or less. The woman you killed was Julia Galiatsatos. I heard about it.’

  ‘Yes?’ asked Weber, as if inviting the doctor to continue.

  ‘I didn’t know it was you who killed her, though. She comes from a family that has been royalist ever since the first king arrived. I often disputed with her father, when he was alive, because I am a Venizelist, if that means anything to you.’

  Weber shrugged, and the doctor pursued his point. ‘In other words she was the very opposite of a communist. The man who pointed her out as a communist was her cousin, who would inherit her property in the event of her death. They despised each other heartily, and quarrelled frequently. It was both a scandal and a joke to everyone in the area.’

  Weber was speechless. Dr Iannis nodded slowly. ‘Yes, young man, it was a question of spite and of greed. As I said, there are no communists to speak of. There are, however, a number of people that I would not exactly describe as having inherited the Hellenic frame of mind. Regrettably, we have some people here who are venal, unprincipled and delinquent. Every time you kill a “communist” you are in fact doing the dirty work of a relative, or you are helping someone out with a vendetta. It apparently never occurs to Germans that they might be made fools of. That is certainly my observation.’