Corelli's Mandolin Read online

  ‘If he had an impulse that quickened the seeds of his inactivity, it was foolish hope and the desperate need to spare the blood of the hapless men he loved. He took a sightless road and shortly condemned them to a grisly doom, failing to see in the Nazi promises so thick a mask of falsehood that by trusting them he condemned his beautiful youngsters to abandon their bones to dogs and birds of prey to pick, or to lie shrouded in the deep sand of the never-ceasing ocean after the fishes of the sea had stripped them. Sallow with fright, disguising a ruffled heart by means of witless negotiation and a tempest of orders transparent in their absurdity, he appointed the due time for his warriors to quit not only the lovely island but life itself.’ So the sightless bard might have written, for it was certain that General Gandin lacked the clear eyes of the wily Odysseus, and neither did Athene, goddess of the limpid eyes, guide him. Rome issued contradictory orders, and from Athens Vechiarelli issued orders that were illegal. Gandin was given no place to stand, and therefore could not move the earth.

  But it all happened slowly. It began with the radio. Anglo-American flights overhead were rattling the windows, and Carlo was fiddling in a desultory fashion with the dials of a machine that for so long had broadcast nothing from home but frustrating whistles and batsqueaks. In Sicily the Italian soldiers had surrendered in joyous relief, and it was an open secret that Badoglio intended to end the war. On July 19th, the United States had dropped one thousand tons of high explosives on Rome, destroying railways, airfields, factories, and government buildings, leaving hundreds dead, but sparing the antiquities and the Vatican. The Pope advised the fractious populace to be patient. On July 25th, King Victor Emmanuel had imprisoned his improbable cockerel of a prime minister and appointed the venerable Marshal Badoglio in his place, the same who had opposed all plans to invade Greece, and, despite being Chief-of-Staff, had not been informed of it even when it had already occurred. On July 26th, Badoglio had declared a state of emergency to prevent civil war. On the 27th, he had asked the suspicious Allies for terms, and outside in the streets the populace had waxed delirious with joy as they celebrated the miraculous and wondrously abrupt downfall of Benito Mussolini. On the 28th, Badoglio abolished the Fascist Party, on the 29th, he released political prisoners who had been rotting in jail without charge, some of them for more than a decade, but the war dragged on. The Germans reinforced heavily, and fought the British and the Americans with astonishing bravery whilst their Italian allies yielded. British soldiers remember that the Italian units acquired the habit of changing sides according to their perception of who was about to win, and that the local populations threw flowers over whichever side was advancing, gathering up the blossoms to use again and again in areas where battles went to and fro.

  On September 3rd Badoglio signed a secret armistice with the Allies, but the Germans had seen it coming, and in one forgotten theatre of the war they had already landed troops. It was on the island of Cephallonia, the place that travellers describe as looking like a dismasted man-o’-war, and the town where they landed was Lixouri. They came on August 1st, giving themselves a month for preparation, and the Italians a month in which to watch them preparing whilst Gandin ordered no counter-preparations.

  On the other side of the bay at Argostoli the Italian troops had fallen silent ever since the invasion of Sicily. La Scala did not meet any more at the doctor’s house, and in the town square the music of the military band became ragged and mournful. The military police still misdirected the traffic with shrill blasts of their whistles, but there were very few German officers walking about and drinking in cafés with their longstanding Italian friends. Günter Weber stayed at his quarters, vitriolic with anger over the daily news of further Italian betrayals. He had never felt so let down, even though the troops on the island itself had done nothing disgraceful. He thought of his friend Corelli, and began to despise him. Nowadays he even despised the inmates of the Italian brothel, the sad and empty-headed girls with beautiful bodies and artificial faces who still frolicked naked in the waves as though nothing had happened. He was so angry that whereas before he had wanted to buy them, now he wanted only to rape them. He was very glad when the cavalcade of motorcycles and trucks appeared from Lixouri; the Italians needed someone to show them how to fight, how not to waver, how to face death rather than embrace dishonour.

  Corelli came home to the doctor’s house less often, because he did drills by day and night with his battery. Bringing up the limbers, loading, slamming the breach, aiming, firing, rangefinding, changing target, removing the limbers in the event of air attacks so that their own shells would not destroy the guns after a direct hit. His men worked hard in the apocalyptic heat of August, sweating in heavy trickles that washed erratic runnels through the grime of their faces and arms. The flesh of their shoulders bubbled and burst, leaving patches of crimson sunburn that oozed and itched for lack of skin and the opportunity to heal, but they did not complain. They knew that the captain was right to practise.

  He himself stopped playing the mandolin; there was so little time for it that when he picked it up it felt foreign in his fingers by comparison with a gun. He had to play a great many scales before his fingers got up to speed, and his tremolo became ragged and sluggish. He went home to Pelagia on his motorbike at times when her father was likely to be out, and he brought her bread, honey, bottles of wine, a photograph signed on the back with the words ‘After the War …’ written on it in his elegant and foreign-looking hand, and he brought her his tired grey face, his saddened and fatalistic eyes, his air of quiet dignity and vanished joy. ‘My poor carino,’ she would say, her arms about his neck, ‘don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry,’ and he would draw back a little and say, ‘Koritsimou, just let me look at you.’

  And then came the time when Carlo was listening to the radio, trying to find a signal. It was September 8th, and the evenings had become considerably cooler than they had been before. It was now possible to sleep a little less feverishly at night, and sometimes the breeze from the sea was more invigorating. Carlo had recently been thinking a great deal about Francisco and about the horror of Albania, and now more than ever he knew that it had all been nothing but a waste, and that his time in Cephallonia had been an interlude, a holiday from a war that was circling like a lion and was about to pounce once more. He wished that there was some law of nature that forbade the possibility of a man’s voyaging through Hades more than once. He found a voice and quickly twisted back the dial to find it. ‘… all aggressive acts by Italian Armed Forces against the forces of the British and the Americans will cease at once, everywhere. They must be prepared to repel any possible attacks from any other quarter.’

  Outside the bells of the island began to ring, the Venetian campaniles reverberating with the impossible hope of peace, just as in Italy they had once rung in the exhilarating pride of war. The clamour spread; Argostoli, Lixouri, Soulari, Dorizata, Assos, Fiskardo. Across the straits of Ithaca the bells rang out in Vathi and in Frikes, and they rang far away in Zante, Levkas, and Corfu. Up on Mt Aenos, Alekos stood and listened. It could not be a feast day, so perhaps the war was over. He cupped his hand over his eyes and looked out over the valleys; it was what it must sound like in heaven when God brought all his goats to fold at night.

  Carlo listened to the text of Marshal Badoglio’s announcement, and then there was a message from Eisenhower himself: ‘… All Italians who now act to help eject the German aggressor from Italian soil will have the assistance and support of the Allies …’ He ran out and found Corelli just lurching to a halt, a great cloud of blue smoke behind him. ‘Antonio, Antonio, it’s all over, and the Allies have promised to help us. It’s over.’ He threw his enormous arms about the man he loved and picked him up, dancing in a circle. ‘Carlo, Carlo,’ the captain reproached him, ‘put me down. Don’t get so excited. The Allies don’t care about us. We’re in Greece, remember? Merda, Carlo, you don’t know your own strength. You half killed me.’

  ‘They’ll hel
p us,’ said Carlo, but Corelli shook his head. ‘If we don’t act now, we’re fucked. We’ve got to disarm the Germans.’

  That night the Italian warships in the harbours of the island slipped anchor and fled for home. There were minesweepers, torpedo boats, and a battleship. They did not tell anyone they were going, and they did not take with them a single Italian evacuee. Not one soldier, not one helpless military whore. They took with them their formidable firepower, and left only the damp and sulphurous stench of cowardice and burning coal. The German soldiers sneered, and Corelli’s men smelled treachery. Corelli waited at the telephone for orders, and when none came he fell asleep in his chair after posting a doubled guard at his battery. He dreamed about Pelagia and about the mad priest who preached that all of them would be thrown into the fire. During his sleep the radio broadcast appeals from the Allies to fight against the Germans. The telephone rang, and someone from the general’s office told the captain not to attack and to stay calm. ‘Are you mad?’ he shouted, but the line was already dead.

  Leutnant Günter Weber also dozed intermittently in his chair, awaiting orders. He felt abysmally tired and all his confidence had gone. He missed his friends, and, worse than that, he missed the certainties that had accrued from so much past success. The Master Race was losing in Italy and Yugoslavia, the Russian front was collapsing, Hamburg destroyed. Weber no longer felt invincible and proud; he felt inferior and humiliated, so foully turned upon and betrayed that, were he a woman, he would have wept. He thought of the motto of his regiment, ‘God With Us’, and wondered whether it was only Italy who had betrayed him. In any case, all the sums were wrong; it was a whole Italian division against only three thousand of the 996th Grenadier Battalion, and even with God’s help he didn’t stand a chance. He tried to pray, but the Lutheran words turned bitter in his mouth.

  In the morning, Colonel Barge, commander of the German troops, moved some armoured cars from Argostoli to Lixouri, and General Gandin tried in vain to contact both the new government in Brindisi and the old High Command in Greece. He had not slept all night, and was too well-trained to know what to do.

  Pelagia and her father organised all their medical equipment and tore old sheets into strips so that they could boil them and roll them into bandages. They had a vague idea that there might be some Greeks caught in any crossfire, and in any case, they had to do something just to ease the tension. Corelli called by on his motorbike, pleading with them to let him know how to contact the partisans. But they genuinely did not know how it could be done, and he left, disconsolate, speeding away towards Sami. Perhaps the partisans might at last come out of their long and venial repose, and be of some help in holding down the Germans.

  In Sami he did not even know where to start, and the local Greeks did not know him. It was a wasted journey. He stopped his motorcycle on the way back and sat on the verge by a ramshackle wall, beneath the shade of an olive. He thought about going back to Italy, about surviving, about Pelagia. The truth was that he had no home, and that was why he had never talked about it. The Duce had made his family move to Libya as part of the colonisation, and there they had died at the hands of the rebels whilst he was in hospital with dysentery. Of all the relatives’ houses where he had stayed, which one was home? He had no family except his soldiers and his mandolin, and his heart was here in Greece. Had he borne so much pain, so much loneliness, had he finally found a place to be, only to have it wrested away? He tried to remember his parents, and their image was as thin and indefinite, as wavering as that of a ghost. He recalled a friendly little Arab boy with whom his parents had forbidden him to play. They used to throw stones at rows of bottles, and he always seemed to come home with sunstroke and diarrhoea. He had been prohibited from eating pomegranates in case he caught jaundice. It was poignant to remember so much and yet so little, and for the first time he began to feel nostalgic for Pelagia, as if she were already past. He remembered the doctor’s tale about the Lotos eaters, wandering folk who ate Lotos once, and lost their longing for home. He was one of them. He thought about dying and wondered how long Pelagia would weep. It seemed a shame to mar her lovely flesh with tears; it was pitiful to imagine it. He wanted to reach out from beyond the grave and comfort her, even though he was not yet dead.

  When eventually he returned to his battery he found his men in revolt. An order had come from Supergreccia to surrender to the Nazis in the morning.

  52 Developments

  (1)

  I am so full of rage that I can hardly speak. Antonio says to me, ‘Carlo, calm down, we’ve got to be clever, because it’s no use being angry, OK?’ But I am tired of being the toy of lunatics, incompetents, and fools, idiots who think it’s still the Great War, when everything was done in line abreast and there was still honour between enemies.

  It’s unbelievable. The Germans are flying in more reinforcements, the sky is full of Junkers, and Colonel Barge has gone to Gandin to demand surrender in accordance with the orders of Supergreccia, and Gandin does absolutely nothing except consult his chaplains and his senior officers. Isn’t he the General? Isn’t it for him to decide and to act quickly? How is he qualified to decide my fate? I who have lived through months of ice and agony in Albania, I who have held the body of a man I loved as he died in my arms in a trench of rats and freezing slime. Doesn’t Gandin listen to the radio? Is he the only one who doesn’t know that the Germans are looting and slaughtering in Italy? Doesn’t he know that only a day or two ago they crowded one hundred into one room, and blew them up with landmines? Hasn’t he heard that for one German death they have shot eighty policemen and twenty civilians in Aversa? Doesn’t he know that disarmed soldiers are being transported God-knows-where in cattle trucks?

  I am crazy with anger. The commanders, all except two, have agreed to surrender. We are ten thousand and they are three. What madness is this? Hasn’t the government ordered us to take the Germans and disarm them? What’s the problem? Why does he want to obey the Fascists, whose party has been abolished, and ignore the will of the Prime Minister and the King?

  (2)

  ‘Colonel Barge? I have withdrawn the 3rd Battalion of the 317th Infantry from Kardakata, in token of good will. As you know, the island is indefensible without that position, and I therefore hope that you will accept that we have no hostile intentions, and that you will not insist upon the disarming of the troops.’

  ‘My dear General, I must insist. I have undertaken that the troops will be sent straight home to Italy, and I have no intention of going back on my word. They must be disarmed, however, or their weapons may well be turned against us when they get home. You must see that from our point of view this is only common sense. I appeal to you as an old friend.’

  ‘Colonel, I am still awaiting clarification of orders. I hope you will understand my position. It is very difficult.’

  ‘General, you have had your orders from Supergreccia, and whatever orders you receive from Italy itself are invalid, since that government is illegitimate. We are soldiers, General, and we must obey orders.’

  ‘Colonel, I will let you know as soon as I can.’

  Colonel Barge put down the telephone and turned to one of his majors; ‘I want you to take a company of men and occupy Kardakata. The idiot Italians have just abandoned it, so there shouldn’t be any problem.’

  (3)

  I have been to see Pelagia and the doctor. I asked them to look after my Antonia, and Pelagia wrapped it in a blanket and put it under the hole in the floor where political refugees used to hide in the time of the British. They told me that Carlo had also been, and had left a thick wad of writings with them, which they were not to read unless he was dead. I wonder what he has been scribbling? I did not know that he had authorial inclinations. You don’t expect it in such a big and muscular man. Pelagia looks very thin and almost ill, and we decided that we couldn’t go to our little hideaway, because there might be orders for my battery at any moment. She stroked my cheek so wistfully that I almost did not know
how to prevent some tears. She has tried to contact the partisans through someone that she calls Bunnios, without success.

  (4)

  Leutnant Weber dismantled and oiled his gun. He felt a little apprehensive without the panzers that had accompanied his Odyssey across Europe. It was a relief that so many munitions had been pouring into Lixouri, but it was worrying that so far there were not many reinforcements. It was well known that the colonel had delivered a final ultimatum to General Gandin, and had asked him some embarrassing questions about his loyalties and his intentions. There were eight hours left. He thought about Corelli and wondered what he was doing, and then he removed the silver crucifix that hung about his neck, and just looked at it. General Gandin had refused complete surrender, demanded freedom of movement for his troops, and asked for written guarantees of the safety of his men. Weber smiled and shook his head. Someone was going to have to teach them a lesson.

  (5)

  ‘Gentlemen, what should I do?’ asked General Gandin, and the chaplains looked from one to the other, enjoying their newfound importance, relishing this rare opportunity to become strategists consulted by a general. It was vastly more intoxicating than to hear confessions from men who did not, in the ultimate analysis, take them very seriously, and it was a very saintly sensation, this business of expressing peaceable sentiments with immense gravitas and moral authority.

  ‘Lay down our arms with written guarantees,’ said one, ‘and then, by God’s will, we will all be going home.’

  ‘I disagree completely,’ declared only one of them, ‘in my opinion it would be profoundly misguided.’

  ‘We can disarm them,’ said the general, ‘but we could not cope with the Luftwaffe afterwards. We must think about the Stukas. We would be without air or sea support, and we would undoubtedly be exterminated.’ The general had an obsession with Stukas. The thought of those crook-winged howling birds of destruction made his stomach churn with dread. Possibly he did not know that from a military point of view they were one of the most ineffective weapons of war ever devised; it was true that they were terrifying, but it was shellfire that caused casualties. He had far more guns than the Germans, and could have obliterated them within hours.