Corelli's Mandolin Page 30

  ‘And another thing. It’s clear to anyone with any brains that leadership is a functional specialisation, and that therefore it inevitably presupposes centralisation. So stop moaning that we’re not fighting the Germans enough, and stop moaning about having to fight EDES and EKKA. The central leadership knows exactly what it’s doing. It sees the whole picture whilst we only see a tiny corner of it, and that’s why we absolutely must not go around acting on our own initiative; there might be some bigger plan that we mess up if we start to be opportunist. Opportunism means a lack of definite and firm principles. There must be complete, comradely, mutual confidence amongst revolutionaries, and we must stand undeviatingly together in the decisive struggle. And if you’re going to complain any more about opposing the reactionary and fascist so-called guerrillas in EDES, just let me remind you that a bad peace is not better than a good quarrel. They say that they are fighting the same enemy as us, but they weaken us by taking recruits that should have come to us and by inculcating in them a false consciousness of the real nature of the world-historical struggle. It is our absolute historical duty to purge them because a party always becomes stronger by purging itself.

  ‘This means that we must at all times preserve solidarity and iron discipline, and that is why it is in accordance with the strictest demands of justice that the leadership has decided that anyone who deviates earns himself a sentence of death. Since I am the representative of that leadership hereabouts, it all boils down to the single requirement that you should obey me, without questioning. At this moment in history there is no room whatsoever for doubters and hangers-on and false-humanitarians. We must keep our eyes fixed solely upon the single goal, because to do anything else is to betray not only Greece and the working classes, but History itself. Any questions?’

  Mandras raised his hand deferentially, ‘I didn’t understand all of it, Comrade Hector, but I want to say that you can count on me.’ One day he might be able to read that book of Hector’s himself. He might hold it in his hands as though it were printed upon sheets of diamond. At night he might kiss its covers and sleep with it beneath his head, as though its inconceivable wisdom might seep by capillary action into his brain. One day he would be an intellectual, and neither the doctor nor Pelagia would ever be able to say otherwise. He imagined himself as a schoolteacher, with everyone calling him ‘daskale’ and listening avidly to his opinions in the kapheneia. He imagined himself as the mayor of Lixouri.

  Mandras never did read that book, and was spared the disappointment of discovering that it was an immensely tedious and irrational tirade against a rival Communist newspaper. But there would come a time when he understood every word that Hector said, and would drink in his intoxicating visions of the dictatorship of the proletariat as though they were the revelations of a saint.

  But on that evening, one of the Venizelists who was about to risk his life by defecting to EDES came up to him later in the darkness, sympathetically offering him a cigarette, and explaining, ‘Look, you don’t have to understand all that jargon from our sesquipedalian friend, because all it boils down to is that you’ve got to do just as he says, or he’ll cut your throat. It’s really that simple.’ The man, a lawyer in civilian life, patted him on the shoulder, and, as he turned away, said enigmatically, ‘I feel sorry for you.’

  ‘Why?’ called Mandras after him, but received no reply.

  37 An Episode Confirming Pelagia’s Belief that Men do not Know the Difference Between Bravery and a Lack of Common Sense

  A great voice boomed out behind him, and Captain Corelli, absorbed in reading the pamphlet, nearly died of shock.

  ‘Those that seek my soul to destroy it shall go to the lower parts of the earth, they shall fall by the sword, they shall be a portion for foxes, God shall shoot at them with an arrow and suddenly they shall be wounded.’

  Corelli leapt up and found himself face to face with the patriarchal beard and flaming eyes of Father Arsenios, who was glaring at him over the wall, having lately taken to startling unsuspecting Italian soldiers by means of thunderous improvisations upon Greek biblical texts. The two men stared at one another, Corelli with his hand over his heart and Arsenios waving his home-made crozier. ‘Kalispera, Patir,’ said Corelli, whose grasp of Greek etiquette was improving, whereupon Arsenios spat into the dust and declared, ‘Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger, thou shalt swallow them up in the time of thy wrath, and the fire shall devour them. Their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth, and their seed from among the children of men, for they have imagined a mischievous device which they are not able to perform.’

  The priest’s eyes rolled prophetically, and Corelli said placatingly, ‘Quite so, quite so,’ despite not having understood any of it. Arsenios spat again, rubbed the saliva into the ground with his foot, and pointed at the captain to signify that he would be milled into the dust in the same way. ‘Quite so,’ repeated Corelli, smiling politely, whereupon Arsenios waddled away in a manner intended to convey disgust and absolute certainty.

  The captain returned to his reading, only to be disturbed by the doctor and Pelagia returning from a medical expedition, and Carlo Guercio arriving in the jeep. Hastily he hid the document in his jacket, but not before the doctor had caught a glimpse of it.

  ‘Ah,’ said the doctor, ‘I see that you’ve got a copy too. Amusing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Fuck the war,’ said Carlo gaily as he came through the entrance to the yard with his customary greeting. He struck his forehead on a lower branch of the olive where Mandras had used to swing, and momentarily stunned himself. He grinned sheepishly, ‘I’m always doing that. You’d think I’d know it was there by now.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be so tall,’ said the doctor, ‘it shows lack of foresight and good judgement. There was a king of France who died from doing something like that.’

  ‘I appear to be alive,’ said Carlo, touching the incipient bruise with an index finger. ‘Have you seen the pamphlet?’

  Corelli shot him an angry glance, but Pelagia said, ‘It seems to have appeared all over the island during the night.’

  ‘In fact the captain is trying to conceal one at this very moment,’ said the doctor gleefully.

  ‘British propaganda,’ said the captain, feigning a great lack of interest.

  ‘There weren’t any planes last night,’ said Carlo. ‘When they come over everything rumbles and shakes, but there was nothing.’

  ‘Can’t be British then,’ said the doctor happily, ‘I think you’ve got someone here with access to a press and an excellent delivery service.’ He saw Carlo flushing and looking at him angrily, and realised that it was better not to talk. ‘As you say, just British propaganda,’ he added lamely, shrugging his shoulders.

  ‘It must be somebody who knows a lot,’ said Pelagia, ‘because everything in it is true.’

  Corelli flushed with anger and stood up abruptly. She feared for a second that he was tempted to strike her. He removed the leaflet from his jacket and dramatically tore it in half, throwing the pieces to the goat. ‘It’s nothing but a heap of shit,’ he declared, and strode into the house.

  The remaining three exchanged glances, and Carlo made a grimace that mockingly expressed fear and trembling. Then he became very serious and said to Pelagia, ‘Please excuse the captain, and do not tell him that I said this, but you must understand that in his position … he is an officer, after all.’

  ‘I understand, Carlo. He wouldn’t admit it was true even if he wrote it himself. Do you think it could have been written by a Greek?’

  The doctor scowled. ‘What a stupid idea.’

  ‘I just thought …’

  ‘How many Greeks could know all that, and how many Greeks here can write Italian, and how many Greeks have transport, that they can leave it lying about the whole island? Don’t be silly.’

  But Pelagia warmed to her hypothesis, ‘Lots of the Rs were written as Ps, and that’s a natural Greek mistake, so an Italian could have
given all the information to a Greek, they could have composed it and printed it, and then the Italian could have delivered it everywhere on a motorcycle or something.’ She smiled triumphantly, and raised her hands to show how simple it all was. ‘And anyway, everyone knows that people listen to the BBC.’ In the presence of Carlo she deemed it imprudent to mention that the men of the village listened to it, smoking furiously as they crammed themselves together inside a large cupboard in the kapheneia, and then emerged choking and spluttering, to bring the news home to their wives, who in turn passed it on to each other at the well and in their kitchens. She was not to know that the Italian soldiers did much the same thing in their barracks and billets, which would have explained why everybody on the island knew the same jokes about Mussolini.

  Carlo and the doctor looked at one another, fearing that if Pelagia could work it out, someone else might. ‘Don’t get too clever,’ said the doctor, ‘or your brains might squeeze out of your ears.’ It was a childhood formula.

  Pelagia saw the unease of her father and Carlo, remembered that before the war Kokolios had been given a small hand-turned press by the Communist Party, for the purpose of turning out party propaganda, and recalled that Carlo had access to a jeep. She shook her head as if to drive these speculations out of her mind, and then it occurred to her to wonder where they might have got hold of sets of Roman letters. Her momentary sense of relief was vanquished when she recalled that her father had some quid pro quo arrangements with the fat hypochondriac quartermaster with the intractable corns. She looked from Carlo to her father and felt a pang of anger strike her in the throat; if it was them, and it was a conspiracy, then just how stupid and irresponsible could they get? Did they not know the danger? ‘The trouble with men …’ she began, and followed the captain into the house, without completing the sentence. She swept Psipsina from the kitchen table, as though cuddling the animal might abate her sense of peril.

  Carlo and the doctor raised their hands, and let them fall, standing together in a moment of self-conscious and eloquent silence. ‘I should have brought her up stupid,’ said the doctor at last. ‘When women acquire powers of deduction there’s no knowing where trouble can end.’

  38 The Origin of Pelagia’s March

  One day it happened that Captain Corelli did not go into work because an earthquake was vibrating in his head. He lay in Pelagia’s bed, attempting not to open his eyes and not to move; the slightest shard of light pierced his brain like a poignard through the eye, and when he moved he had the distinct certainty that his cerebellum had become loose and was sloshing about on the inside of his skull. His throat was as dry and stiff as leather, and there was no doubt that someone had been stropping razors in it. Periodically a tide of nausea welled in his gullet, rippling equally towards his stomach and his lips, and he fought disgustedly to restrain the bitter torrents of bile that seemed determined to find their way to an exit and decorate his chest. ‘O God,’ he groaned. ‘O God have mercy.’

  He opened his eyes and held them open with his fingers. Very slowly, so as not to perturb his brain too much, he looked about the room, and suffered a disturbing hallucination. He blinked; yes, it was true that his uniform was lying on the floor and was moving about on its own. He checked groggily that its movement was independent of the circular motion of the room, and closed his eyes again. Psipsina emerged from inside the tunic, and jumped up on the table in order to curl up inside his cap, which had been her favourite resting place ever since she had discovered the joys of contortionism; she filled it and overflowed from it in such a tangle and jumble of whiskers, ears, tail and paws that it was impossible to tell which part of her was which, and she slept in it because it reminded her of gifts of salami and chicken skins. The captain opened his eyes and saw that his rumpled uniform was now rotating in harmony with the rest of the world, and felt reassured that he was getting better, until some demented and metaphysical percussionist began to play the kettledrum in his temples. He screwed up his face and pressed the palms of his hands to the sides of his head. He realised that he needed to empty his bladder, but also recognised with resignation that it was going to be one of those occasions when he would need to be supported, would sway backwards and forwards, would be unable to exercise voluntary release, and would finally and inexplicably find himself simultaneously pissing on his own foot and falling over. He felt infinitely oppressed by intimations of mortality, and wondered whether it might not be better to die than to suffer. ‘I want to die,’ he groaned, as though the articulation of the thought might give it greater precision and dramatic force.

  Pelagia entered, bearing a pitcher of water, which she set down at the side of the bed with a tumbler. ‘You’ve got to drink all this water,’ she said firmly, ‘it’s the only cure for a hangover.’

  ‘I haven’t got a hangover,’ said the captain pathetically, ‘I’m very ill, that’s all.’

  Pelagia filled the tumbler and administered it to his lips. ‘Drink,’ she ordered him. He sipped at it suspiciously and was astonished by the cleansing effect of it upon his physical and psychological state. Pelagia refilled the glass. ‘I’ve never seen anyone so drunk,’ she remonstrated, ‘not even at the feast of the saint.’

  ‘O God, what did I do?’

  ‘Carlo brought you back at two in the morning. To be exact, he crashed the jeep into the wall outside, carried you inside like a baby in his arms, tripped over, hurt his knees, and woke everyone who was not already awake by shouting and swearing. Then he lay on the table in the yard and went to sleep. He’s still there, and during the night he wet himself.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. And then you woke up and you knelt down in front of me and waved your arms about and sang “Io sono ricco e tu sei bella”, at the top of your voice and completely out of tune, and you forgot the words. Then you tried to kiss my feet.’

  The captain was completely appalled, ‘Out of tune? I never forget the words of anything, I am a musician. What did you do?’

  ‘I kicked you, and you fell over backwards, and then you declared eternal love, and then you were sick.’

  The captain closed his eyes despairingly and ashamedly, ‘I was drunk. My battery won the football match, you see. It doesn’t happen every day.’

  ‘Leutnant Weber called round early this morning. He said that your side cheated, and that the match was delayed for half an hour in the middle because two little boys stole the ball when it went over a fence.’

  ‘It was sabotage,’ said the captain.

  ‘I don’t like Leutnant Weber. He looks at me as though I’m an animal.’

  ‘He’s a Nazi; he thinks that I’m an animal as well. It can’t be helped. I like him. He’s only a little boy, he’ll grow out of it.’

  ‘And you’re a drunk. It seems to me that you Italians are always drunk, or stealing, or chasing local girls, or playing football.’

  ‘We also swim in the sea and sing. And you can’t blame the boys for chasing the girls, because they can’t do it at home, and anyway, some of the girls do very well out of it. Give me some more water.’

  Pelagia frowned; there was something about the captain’s remarks that struck her as offensive, and even cruel. Besides, she was in just the right mood for an argument. She stood up, emptied the pitcher over his face, and said vehemently, ‘You know perfectly well that they are bullied into it and driven into it out of necessity. And everyone is ashamed to have your whores here. How do you think we feel?’

  The captain’s head throbbed too much for quarrelling; it even throbbed too much to allow a reaction to being suddenly drenched by an angry maiden. Nonetheless, he became abruptly subject to a great sense of injustice. He sat up and told her, ‘Everything you say and do is because you want me to apologise, in every look I see nothing but reproaches. It’s been the same ever since I came. How do you think I feel? Why don’t you ask yourself that? Do you think I’m proud? Do you think I have a vocation for suppressing the Greeks? Do you think I am the Duce th
at I commanded myself to be here? It’s shit, it’s all shit, but I can’t do anything about it. OK, OK, I apologise. Are you satisfied?’ He slumped back into the pillows.

  Pelagia put her hands on her hips, taking advantage of the superiority implicit in the fact that she was standing and he lying down. She pulled a wry face and said, ‘Are you seriously saying that you are a victim, as much as us? Poor little boy, poor little thing.’ She walked over to the table, noticed Psipsina’s somnolent presence in the captain’s cap, and smiled to herself as she gazed out of the window. She was deliberately frustrating the intended effect of any response of the captain’s, by ensuring that he would not be able to look into her eyes whilst he made it. She did feel sorry for him, she could not remain hostile to a man who permitted a pine marten to sleep in his hat, but she was not going to let her fondness show when there were principles at stake.

  No answer came. Corelli looked at her silhouette against the light of the window, and a tune came into his head. He could visualise the patterned patrol of his fingers on the fretboard of the mandolin, he could hear the disciplined notes ringing from the treble, singing the praise of Pelagia as they also portrayed her wrath and her resistance. It was a march, a march of a proud woman who prosecuted war with hard words and kindnesses. He heard three simple chords and a martial melody that implied a world of grace. He heard the melody rise and swell, breaking into a torrent of bright tremolo more limpid than the song of thrushes, more pellucid than the sky. He realised with some irritation that it would require two instruments.

  39 Arsenios

  Father Arsenios was saved by the war, as though the entire cycle of his life had been nothing but a curve through purgatory that had finally broken through an invisible carapace and brought him to his mission. His agonies of self-revulsion fell away, his greed and indolence, his alcoholic excesses, followed one another into the graveyard of the past, and it was as if a cubit had been added to his height. His theology wound subtly around itself like a snake, and transformed his soul, so that whereas in the past he knew that he had failed his God, he now knew that God had failed the holy land of Greece. It came to him, as a man, that he might surpass the God that made him, and do for Greece what God had not. He discovered within himself the gift of prophecy.