Corelli's Mandolin Read online

  ‘It’s got to be right,’ replied Corelli. ‘If it’s too thick, you have to tighten the string beyond the capacity of the instrument, and it just folds in half. If it’s too thin, then it’s too slack to have a decent tone and it rattles on the frets.’

  The doctor leaned back and sighed. Suddenly he asked, ‘Are you and Pelagia planning to be married? As her father I think I have a right to know.’

  The captain was so taken aback by the frankness of the question that he was utterly stumped for an answer. Things had only been able to proceed on the basis that no one ever brought the issue out into the open; things could only work at all on the understanding that it was a dark secret that everybody knew. He looked at the doctor in dismay, his mouth working wordlessly like an improvident fish that a wave has tossed unsuspectingly upon a spit of sand.

  ‘You can’t live here,’ said the doctor. He pointed at the mandolin. ‘If you want to be a musician this is the last place to be. You would have to go home, or to America. And I don’t think that Pelagia could live in Italy. She is a Greek. She would die like a flower deprived of light.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the captain, for the lack of any intelligent remark that came immediately to mind.

  ‘It’s true,’ said the doctor. ‘I know you have not thought about it. Italians always act without thinking, it’s the glory and the downfall of your civilisation. A German plans a month in advance what his bowel movements will be at Easter, and the British plan everything in retrospect, so it always looks as though everything occurred as they intended. The French plan everything whilst appearing to be having a party, and the Spanish … well, God knows. Anyway, Pelagia is Greek, that’s my point. So can it work? Even disregarding the obvious impracticalities?’

  The captain unwound the tangle of wire at the tuning pegs, and replied, ‘It’s not the point, with respect. It is a more personal thing. Let me confide in you, Dottore. Pelagia has said to me that you and I are very alike. I am obsessed by my music, and you are obsessed with your medicine. We are both men who have created a purpose for ourselves, and neither of us cares very much for what anyone else may think of us. She has only been able to love me because she learned first how to love another man who is like me. And that man is you. So being a Greek or an Italian is incidental.’

  The doctor was so touched by this hypothesis that a lump arose in his throat. He quelled it and said, ‘You don’t understand us.’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  Dr Iannis became a little riled, and therefore a little vehement, ‘But you don’t. Do you think you’re going to get a nice amenable girl and that every path will be strewn with petals? Don’t you remember asking me why it is that Greeks smile when they are angry? Well, let me tell you something, young man. Every Greek, man, woman, and child, has two Greeks inside. We even have technical terms for them. They are a part of us, as inevitable as the fact that we all write poetry and the fact that every one of us thinks that he knows everything that there is to know. We are all hospitable to strangers, we all are nostalgic for something, our mothers all treat their grown sons like babies, our sons all treat their mothers as sacred and beat their wives, we all hate solitude, we all try to find out from a stranger whether or not we are related, we all use every long word that we know as often as we possibly can, we all go out for a walk in the evening so that we can look over each others’ fences, we all think that we are equal to the best. Do you understand?’

  The captain was perplexed, ‘You didn’t tell me about the two Greeks inside every Greek.’

  ‘I didn’t? Well, I must have wandered off the point.’ The doctor stood up and began to walk about, gesturing eloquently with his right hand and clutching his pipe with his left. ‘Look, I’ve been all over the world. I’ve seen Santiago de Chile, Shanghai, Stockholm, Addis Ababa, Sydney, all of them. And all the time I’ve been learning to be a doctor, and I can tell you that no one is more truly themselves than when they are sick or injured. That’s when the qualities come out. And I’ve nearly always been on ships whose crews were mainly Greek. Do you understand? We are a race of exiles and sailors. I’m saying that I know more than most people what a Greek is like.

  ‘I’ll tell you about the Hellene first. The Hellene has a quality that we call “sophrosune”. This Greek avoids excess, he knows his limits, he represses the violence within himself, he seeks harmony and cultivates a sense of proportion. He believes in reason, he is the spiritual heir of Plato and Pythagoras. These Greeks are suspicious of their own natural impulsiveness and love of change for the sake of change, and they assert discipline over themselves in order to avoid spontaneously going out of control. They love education for its own sake, do not take power and money into consideration when assessing someone’s worth, scrupulously obey the law, suspect that Athens is the only important place in the world, detest dishonourable compromise, and consider themselves to be quintessentially European. This is from the blood of our ancient ancestors that still flows in us.’ He paused, puffed on his pipe, and then continued:

  ‘But side by side with the Hellene we have to live with the Romoi. Perhaps I can point out to you, Captain, that this word originally meant “Roman”, and these are the qualities that we learned from your ancestors, who never made a single technological advance in hundreds of years of dominion, and who enslaved entire nations with the utmost disregard for morals. The Romoi are people very like your Fascists, so that you should feel at home with them, except that it seems to me that you personally share none of their vices. The Romoi are improvisers, they seek power and money, they aren’t rational because they act on intuition and instinct, so that they make a mess of everything. They don’t pay taxes and only obey the law when there is no alternative, they look on education as a way of getting ahead, will always compromise an ideal for self-interest, and they like getting drunk, and dancing and singing, and breaking bottles over each others’ heads. And they have a viciousness and brutality that I can only convey to you by saying that it compares very unfavourably with your gassing the natives in Ethiopia and your bombing of the field hospitals of the Red Cross. The only point of contact between the two sides of a Greek is the place that bears the label “patriotism”. Romoi and Hellene alike will die gladly for Greece, but the Hellene will fight wisely and humanely, and the Romoi will use every subterfuge and barbarity, and happily throw away the lives of their own men, rather like your Mussolini. In fact they calculate their glory by the number that were sent to their death, and a bloodless victory is a disappointment.’

  The captain was very sceptical, ‘So what are you saying? Are you saying that Pelagia has a side that I don’t know and which would be very shocking to me if I knew it?’

  The doctor leaned forward and stabbed the air with his finger, ‘That is exactly it. And another thing; I have that side too. You’ve never seen it, but I have it.’

  ‘With respect, Dottore, I don’t believe it.’

  ‘I’m very glad that you don’t. But in my better moments I know what the truth is.’

  There was a silence between the two men, and the doctor sat down at the table to relight his unco-operative pipe, with its repellent mixture of coltsfoot, rose petals, and other herbs that failed even to approximate to tobacco. He coughed and spluttered violently.

  ‘I love her,’ said Corelli at last, as though this were the answer to the problem, which to him it was. A suspicion struck him: ‘You wouldn’t be reluctant to lose her, would you? Are you trying to discourage me?’

  ‘You’d have to live here, that’s all. If she went to Italy she would die of the homesickness. I know my daughter. You might have to choose between loving her and becoming a musician.’

  The doctor left the room, more for rhetorical effect than for any other purpose, and then came back in. ‘And another thing. This is a very ancient land, and we’ve had nothing but slaughter for two thousand years. Sacrifices, wars, murders, nothing but bad deaths. We’ve got so many places full of bitter ghosts that anyone who goes near them o
r lives in them becomes heartless or insane. I don’t believe in God, Captain, and I’m not superstitious, but I do believe in ghosts. On this island we’ve had massacres at Sami and Fiskardo and God knows where else. There’ll be more. It’s only a question of time. So don’t make any plans.’

  50 A Time of Hiatus

  The Allies invaded Sicily for strategic reasons, and in doing so betrayed their most longstanding and gallant ally, Greece. They left the Communists a year for preparing a coup, and a year for civil war. ELAS destroyed EKKA, and drove EDES into a corner so far from the centres of power that Zervas, their leader, would feel betrayed by the British for the rest of his life. The Allies had gone for a jugular vein in Italy, and had set on one side the little nation that had given Europe its culture, its impetus, and its heart. The angry Greeks heard from the BBC all about the destruction of Fascism in Italy, and demanded to know why they had been ignored. The British Liaison Officers, impotent and frustrated, wrung their hands and watched the country fall apart. Communists in the Greek Army in Syria fomented a mutiny that further delayed the victory in Italy, and it was at that point that the Cold War started and the Iron Curtain began to descend. In the West the admiration and respect for the heroism of the Soviets began to be eroded, and it became abysmally clear that one kind of Fascism was about to be replaced by another. In Britain and America no one would believe at first that the Communists in Greece were committing atrocities on an unimaginable scale; journalists put it down to right-wing propaganda, and the disbelieving Greeks put it down to renegade Bulgarians.

  But in some seas at least, if not in Ionia, the time of miracles and singularities returned. Operation ‘Noah’s Ark’ found the British harassing the Axis withdrawal with Beaufighters and canoes, transforming the Iron Ring into an Iron Cage. In Lesbos the Communists took over and declared an independent republic. At Khios a Gestapo house was discovered where people had been forced to spend a night with a skeleton in a cellar. The German commander had been strafed to death whilst making love to his mistress. At Inousia the British found an island where every single person spoke fluent English, and where everyone was called either Lemmos or Pateras. Raiders killed the commanders at Nisiro, Simi, and Piscopi, and Patrick Leigh-Fermor and Billy Moss abducted the commander of Crete. At Thira the raiders killed two-thirds of the garrison for the loss of two men. In Crete, again, they destroyed two hundred thousand gallons of fuel. On Mikonos and Amorgos the wireless stations were destroyed, and seven prisoners taken by five men. On Khios a few Royal Marines destroyed two destroyers, even though the local andartes failed to turn up as agreed, having ‘lost interest’. They hated to join attacks that anyone else had planned, and refused to take part if even another of their number had had the idea. On Samos one thousand Italians surrendered to Maurice Cardiff and twenty-three men, and then sat down to have breakfast; Cardiff discovered that for some inexplicable reason all the local doctors spoke French. At Naxos the German commander surrendered by mistake; he had rowed out to greet a boat that he thought was flying the red flag of the swastika, but was in fact flying the Red Ensign. He fell into such a deep depression and wept so bitterly that the crew had to cheer him up by teaching him to play ludo. At that time one pound sterling was worth two thousand million drachmas, and one cigarette cost seven and a half million. The people of Lesbos enterprisingly offered an advantageous rate of exchange, and every single coin and note from the whole region flew there, seemingly of its own accord, leaving no money at all in any other place. At Siros a party of Germans was seen running away without any trousers. The Communists got into the habit of demanding twenty-five percent of everything as tax, and in many places the people resigned from the party. Later on in Crete, and Samos, they would turn on the Communists and defeat them. There is a story that the Cretans demanded British rule, but that the latter turned them down on the grounds that it was bad enough trying to govern Cyprus. All in all, for the loss of nineteen dead, four hundred men of the special forces held down forty thousand Axis troops, paying three hundred and eighty-one visits to seventy separate islands. The German sense of the proper way of doing things was so confounded by such randomised plagues of sliced throats and inexplicable explosions that they became completely helpless, and the Italians, who had never seen any sense in fighting in the first place, surrendered courteously and with pleasure.

  On Cephallonia the Italian soldiers listened to their radios and charted the course of Allied progress up the spine of their homeland, whilst the German garrison seethed with disgust. Corelli and his brother officers sensed ice in the air, and fraternal visits between the bases of the two allies diminished. When Weber turned up at the meetings of La Scala, he seemed very quiet and distant, and his regard was interpreted as reproachful.

  One day, in the midst of these events, Pelagia found Corelli absently stroking Psipsina on the wall, and when he turned to face her, his look was troubled. ‘What happens,’ he asked her, ‘when we have to surrender before the Germans do?’

  ‘We’ll get married.’

  He shook his head sadly, ‘It’s going to be a complete mess. There’s no chance of the British coming. They’re going straight for Rome. No one will save us unless we save ourselves. All the boys think we should disarm the Germans now, whilst their garrison is small. We’ve sent deputations to Gandin, but he doesn’t do anything. He says we should trust them.’

  ‘Don’t you trust them?’

  ‘I’m not stupid. And Gandin is one of those officers who has risen to the top by obeying orders. He doesn’t know how to give them. He’s just another of our typical donkey generals who’s got no brains and no balls.’

  ‘Come inside,’ she said, ‘my father’s out, and we can have a cuddle. He’s got lots of tuberculosis to deal with these days.’

  ‘A cuddle would only make me sad, koritsimou. My mind is just a blank that’s filled with worry.’

  Father Arsenios passed by, accompanied by Bunny Warren, both of them battered, tattered, and dusty, and Pelagia said quickly, ‘Antonio, I must go and ask them something, I’ll be right back.’

  Arsenios stood by the well and waved his crozier. His abject little dog slumped on the shady side of the stones, and began to lick itself. It had blood on the pads of its paws.

  ‘How is the gold become dim! How is the most fine gold changed! The tongue of the sucking child cleaveth to the roof of his mouth for thirst; the children ask bread, and no man breaketh it unto them. They that did feed delicately are desolate in the streets, and they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills …’ began Arsenios, and Pelagia took Warren’s elbow and led him to one side.

  ‘Bunnio’, when are the British coming? I’ve got to know. What’s going to happen to the Italians when they surrender? Please tell me.’

  ‘That I cannot tell,’ he said. ‘For I know it not myself, and neither doth any man.’

  ‘Your Greek has improved an awful lot,’ she said, amazed, ‘but your accent is still … strange. Please tell me. I’m worried. Have the Germans brought in any more soldiers? It’s important.’

  ‘Nay, I think not.’

  Pelagia left him, and heard him exclaiming ‘Amen’ at intervals. Perhaps the British were really a nation of actors and impostors. She returned to Corelli and said, ‘Don’t worry, everything will be all right.’

  ‘Are you serious? You go and ask the opinion of a religious madman, and you expect me to believe it?’

  ‘O ye of little faith. Come on, come inside. Psipsina caught a mouse and let it go under the table. I think you ought to catch it for me. It was last seen running behind the cupboard.’

  ‘After the war, when we’re married, you can catch the mice yourself. I’m not going to be chivalrous after I’m thirty.’

  Whilst Corelli poked behind the cupboard with a broomstick, Arsenios’ mantic voice and Bunny Warren’s wild amens drifted musically through the window: ‘… Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens. We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers ar
e as widows … Our necks are under persecution, we labour and have no rest … Servants have ruled over us and there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand … our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine … Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long a time?’

  That priest has a wonderful bass voice,’ remarked Corelli, releasing out of the window the mouse he had caught by the tail. ‘And that reminds me, I went down to the harbour to listen to the fishermen. They had some really strange instruments I’ve never seen before, and the singing, it was fantastic. I wrote down some of the tunes.’

  ‘They make them up as they go along, you know. Never the same twice.’

  ‘Incredible. And there was one tune they sang a few times. I made them teach it to me …’ he hummed a solemn and martial air, waving his fingers to conduct it, and only stopped when he saw Pelagia laughing. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘It’s our national anthem,’ she said.

  51 Paralysis

  We imagine the shade of Homer, writing: ‘For wreaking havoc upon a strong man, even the very strongest, there is nothing so dire as the sea. But there was no unspeakable waste of salt water, no rude arrogance of land-shaking waves, no winged scavenging of the wind, as desolating in its results as the paralysis of General Gandin. He was impelled to inaction by the burden of his pains, and in the fertility of his expedients he was less endowed than a wilderness or a lake of salt. He was the daunted one, the vaguest-willed of any man born to death, a man of instant vanishment into blind silence. He bore the unappeasable pain of being obliged to make decisions, and in his confusion he was as helpless as those in my own times who watched multitudes of birds fly hither and thither in the bright sunshine, not knowing which ones might bear messages from heaven.