Francesco's mother was a small grey woman with a mole on one cheek and a brushing of black down upon her upper lip. She wore black, and all the time that I talked to her she twisted a duster in her hands. I could see that once she had been beautiful and that my beloved Francesco had inherited his looks from her; the same Slavonic eyes, the same olive skin, the same jeweller's forgers. Francesco's wife was there too, but I could hardly bear to look at her; she had known the pleasure of his body in a way that I could never know. She sobbed in a corner whilst her mother kneaded the duster and questioned me.
`When did he die, Signor? Was it a good day?'
`He died on a fine day, Signora, with the sun shining and the birds singing.'
(He died on a day when the snow was melting and when, from beneath that carapace, there were emerging a thousand broken corpses, knapsacks, rusted rifles, water-bottles, illegible unfinished letters drenched in blood. He died on the day when one of our men realised that he had entirely lost his genitals to frostbite, put a rifle barrel into his mouth, and blew away the back of his head. He died on the day when we found a corpse with its trousers down, squatting against a tree, frozen solid in the act of straining against the intractable constipation of the military diet. Beneath the fundament of the dead man lay two tiny nuggets of blood-streaked turd. The cadaver wore bandages in the place of boots. He died on a day when the buzzards came down from the hills and began to tear the eyes from those long dead. The Greek mortars were coughing over the bluff, and we were buried in the hail of mud. It was raining.)
`He died in action, Signor? Was there a victory?'
`Yes, Signora. We charged a Greek position with bayonets and the enemy were expelled.'
(The Greeks had repelled us for the fourth time with a barrage of mortar fire. They had four machine-guns above us where they could not be seen, and we were being cut to pieces as we fell back. Eventually we received a command rescinding the order to take the position, since it was of no tactical significance.)
`Did he die happy, Signor)'
`He died with a smile on his lips, and told me that he was proud to have done his duty. You should be pleased to have had such a son, Signora.'
(Francesco limped up to me in the trench with a wild expression in his eyes. He spoke to me for the first time in weeks. `Bastards, bastards,' he shouted. He said, `Look,' and he rolled up his trousers. I saw the purple ulcers of the white death. Francesco touched the rotting flesh with a glow of wonder in his eyes. He rolled his trouser back down again and said to me, `It's enough, Carlo. It's too much. It's all over.' He clasped me in his arms and kissed me on both cheeks. He began to sob. I felt him trembling in my arms. He took the mouse Mario from his pocket and gave it to me. He took up his rifle and clambered up over the lip of the trench. I grabbed at his ankle to prevent him, but he struck me on the side of the head with the butt of his weapon. He advanced slowly on the enemy position, stopping to fire at every five paces. The Greeks perceived his heroism and did not return fire. They preferred to capture courageous men rather than to shoot them. A mortar shell fell next to him, and he disappeared beneath a shower of yellow clay. There was a long silence. I saw something stir where Francesco had been.)
`He died quickly, didn't he, Signor? He was not in pain?'
`He died very quickly of a bullet through the heart. He can have felt nothing.'
(I put down my rifle and climbed out of the trench. The Greeks did not shoot at me. I reached Francesco and saw that the side of his head had been blown away. The pieces of skull looked grey and were coated in membrane and thick blood. Some of the fluid was bright red, and some of it was crimson. He was still alive. I looked down at him and my eyes were blinded with tears. I knelt and gathered him into my arms. He was so emaciated from the winter and the hardship that he was as light as a sparrow. I stood up and faced the Greeks. I was offering myself to their guns. There was a silence, and then a cheer came from their lines. One of them shouted hoarsely, `Bravissimo.' I turned and carried the limp bundle back to my lines. In the trench Francesco took two hours to die. His gore soaked into the sleeves and flanks of my tunic. His shattered head was cradled in my arms like a little child and his mouth formed words that only he could hear. Tears began to follow each other down his cheeks. I gathered his tears on my fingers and drank them. I bent down and whispered into his ear, 'Francesco, I have always loved you: His eyes rolled up and met mine. He fixed my gaze. He cleared his throat with difficulty and said, `I know.' I said, `I never told you until now.' He smiled that slow laconic smile and said, `Life's a bitch, Carlo. I felt good with you.' I saw the light grow dim in his eyes and he began the long slow journey down into death. There was no morphia. His agony must have been indescribable. He did not ask me to shoot him; perhaps at the very end he loved his vanishing life.)
`What were his last words, Signor?'
`He recommended himself to you, Signora, and he died with the name of the Virgin on his tips.'
(He opened his eyes once and said, `Don't forget our pact to kill that bastard Rivolta.' Later on, in a great spasm of pain, he grasped my collar with his hands. He said, 'Mario.' I took the little mouse from my pocket and placed it in his hands. In the ecstasy of his own death he clenched his fist so tightly that the little creature died with him. To be precise, its eyes came out.)
'Signor, where is he buried?'
`He is buried on the side of a mountain that in spring is covered with tulips and receives the first light of the sun. He was buried with full military honours, and shots were fired over his grave by his comrades.'
(I buried him myself. I dug a deep hole in our trench that filled instantly with ochre water. I loaded him with stones so that his corpse would not rise to the surface of the earth. I buried him in a place inhabited by gigantic rats and tiny goats. I stood over his grave and beat to death with a shovel the rats that arrived to dig for his corpse. I put the mouse Mario in his breast pocket, above his heart. I took his personal effects. They are in this bag that I shall leave with you. It contains a lucky stone from Epirus, a letter from his wife, the insignia of the 9th Regiment of Alpini, three medals for valour, and the wing feather of an eagle that he was delighted with when it fell in his lap on the way to Metsovon. It also contains a photograph of me that I did not know that he possessed.)
'Signor, as long as he did not die for nothing.'
'Signora, we now have mastery of Greece with the help of our German allies.'
(We lost the war and were saved only when the Germans invaded from Bulgaria and opened a second front that the Greeks had no resources to defend. We fought and froze and died for the sake of an empire that has no purpose. When Francesco died I held his broken head and kissed him on the lips. I sat there with tears of rage falling upon his atrocious wounds and vowed that I would live for both of us. I took no part in the dismembering of Greece or in the shameful triumphalism of a conquest that was a victory only in name. The valiant Greeks fell before eleven hundred German panzers, which they faced with less than two hundred light tanks, many of them captured from us, and our glorious Italian advance consisted merely in following them as they retreated in a vain attempt to avoid the German encirclement. I took no part in that iniquitous charade because, the day after I buried Francesco, I took a pistol that I had removed from a wounded Greek, and in a moment of cold calculation I shot myself through the flesh of the thigh.)
Pelagia returned from the well with a jar upon her shoulder, set it down in the yard, and came through the door, singing. The bad news that had set the island buzzing had only served to increase her appreciation of momentary beauties, and she had just seen her first butterfly of the year. She was feeling strong and whole, and had been enjoying having the house to herself whilst her father was up on the mountain checking both Alekos and his herd of goats; nothing was ever wrong with either of them, the advantage to Alekos being that he could catch up with the news, enjoy some human company, hear words whose use had vanished from his interior monologue, and to the doctor that he would return with a plentiful supply of dried meat that made scratching and crackling noises in his haversack as he walked. Additionally the doctor believed that the pleasure of homecoming was more than recompense for the pains of setting out, and that therefore it was always worth departing.
When Pelagia entered the kitchen she stopped singing abruptly, and was seized with consternation. There was a stranger seated at the kitchen table, a most horrible and wild stranger who looked worse than the brigands of childhood tales. The man was quite motionless except for the rhythmic fluttering and trembling of his hands. His head was utterly concealed beneath a cascade of matted hair that seemed to have no form nor colour. In places it stuck out in twisted corkscrews, and in others it lay in congealed pads like felt; it was the hair of a Nazarene or of a hermit demented by the glory and solitude of God. Beneath it Pelagia could see nothing but an enormous and disorderly beard surmounted by two tiny bright eyes that would not look at her. There was a nose in there, stripped of its skin, reddened and flaked, and glimpses of darkened, streaked and grimy flesh.
The stranger wore the unidentifiable and ragged remains of a shirt and trousers, and a kind of surcoat cut out of animal skins that had been tacked together with thongs of sinew. Pelagia saw, beneath the table, that in place of shoes his feet were bound with bandages that were both caked with old, congealed blood, and the bright stains of fresh. He was breathing stertorously, and the smell was inconceivably foul; it was the reek of rotting flesh, of suppurating wounds, of dung and urine, of ancient perspiration, and of fear. She looked at the hands that were clasped together in the effort to prevent their quivering, and was overcome both with fright and pity. What was she to do? `My father's out,' she said. `He should be back tomorrow.'
`You're happy, anyway. Singing,' said the man in a cracked and phlegmy voice that Pelagia recognised as that of someone whose damaged lungs were filling with mucus; it could be tuberculosis, the onset of pneumonia, or perhaps it was the voice of a man whose throat had filled with polyps or contracted in the grip of cancer.
`Ice,' said the stranger, as though he had not heard her, `I'll never be warm again. The obscenity of ice.'
His voice cracked, and she realised that his shoulders were heaving. `O God, the ice,' he repeated. He held his hands before his face and accused them: `Bastards, bastards, leave me alone, for the love of God, be still.'
He wrapped his fingers together, and his whole body seemed to be fighting to suppress a succession of spasms.
`You can come back tomorrow,' said Pelagia, appalled by this gibbering apparition, and completely at a loss.
`No crampons, you see. The snow is whipped away by the wind, and the ice is in ridges, sharper than knives, and when you fall you are cut. Look at my hands.'
He held them up to her, palm outwards in the gesture that would normally be an insult, and she saw the horrendous cross-tracking of hard white scars that had obliterated every natural line, scored away the pads and calluses, and left seeping cracks across the joints. There were no nails and no trace of cuticles.
`And the ice screams. It shrieks. And voices call to you out of it. And you look into it and you see people. Mating like dogs. They beckon and wave, and they mock, and you shoot into the ice but they don't shut up, and then the ice squeaks. It squeaks all night, all night.'
`Look, you can't stay,' said Pelagia, adding, as though to excuse herself, `I'm on my own.'
The wild man ignored her. `I saw my father, my father who died, and he was stuck under the ice, and his eyes were staring at me, and his mouth was open, and I hacked with my bayonet. To get him out. And when I got him out it was someone else. I don't know who it was, the ice deceived me, you see. I know I'll never be warm, never.'
He hugged himself with both arms and began to shiver violently. `Pathemata mathemata, pathemata mathemata; so sufferings are lessons, are they? Don't go out in the cold, don't go out in the cold.'
Pelagia's perplexity was growing into an acute anxiety as she wondered what on earth she was supposed to do on her own with a mad vagrant ranting in her kitchen. She thought of leaving him there and running out to fetch Stamatis or Kokolios, but was paralysed by the thought of what he might do or steal in her absence. `Please leave,' she pleaded, `my father will be back tomorrow, and he can . . .'
she paused, torn between the naming of any number of medical procedures that would be necessary, `. . . see to your feet.'
The man responded to her for the first time, `I can't walk. I walked from Epirus. No boots.'
Psipsina entered the room and sniffed the air, her whiskers put her hands on his shoulders, which she kneaded with her fingers. There was bone where once there had been perfect, longed-for, pristine flesh, and she saw that indeed he did have lice.
Mandras' mother was one of those perplexing creatures as ugly as the mythical wife of Antiphates, of whom the poet wrote that she was `a monstrous woman whose ill-aspect struck men with horror', and yet she had married a fine man, borne a child, and become widely loved. Some said that she had prospered through witchcraft, but the truth was that she was an amiable and good-natured woman whom fate had deprived of a pretext for becoming vain in her youth, and consequently she had not become embittered as her girth and her hairiness increased. Kyria Drosoula was descended from a family of `ghiaourtovaptismenoi', the `baptised in yoghurt', which is to say that her family had been expelled from Turkish territory with nothing to carry away except sacks containing the bones of their ancestors.
The Lausanne settlement had seen nearly half a million Muslims translated to Turkey in return for over a million Greeks, and was an example of racial cleansing which, though necessary for the prevention of further wars, had brought with it a profound legacy of bitterness. Drosoula had known only how to speak Turkish, and she and her mother had been roundly despised by the Old Greeks at the same time as they wept with nostalgia for their life in the lost homelands. Drosoula's mother buried the bones of her father and her husband, and for fear of being ridiculed for her Pontos accent, elected to become dumb, leaving all responsibilities to her fifteen year old daughter, who, within the space of three years, had learned to speak the Cephallonian dialect and had married a shrewd fisherman who knew a faithful wife when he saw one. Like so many of the oar-loving islanders, he had lost his life in a squall that sprang up suddenly from the east, leaving a son to take up his trade and a formidable widow who sometimes dreamed in Turkish but had forgotten how to speak it.
During Mandras' absence Pelagia had found her way down to Kyria Drosoula's house almost every day, enraptured by tales of the imperial city of Byzantium and of life on the Black Sea amongst the infidels, and in that small, fishy, but immaculate house by the quayside they had comforted each other with words that, however deeply meant, had by now become clich‚s in every household in Europe. As the ever-changing sea stopped on the stones outside, they had cried and hugged each other, repeating that Mandras must be all right, because they would have heard if he wasn't. They practised for the eventuality of having to hit an Italian over the head with a shovel, and they laughed behind their hands at some of the appallingly coarse jokes that Drosoula had learned in Turkey from the Muslim boys.
It was to this admirable and hirsute amazon that Pelagia ran, leaving her fiancé at the kitchen table, lost in his world-girdling oceans of fatigue and his terrible memories of comrades who had become the spoil and booty of the carrion birds. The two women returned, breathless, to find him in the same position, still absently caressing Psipsina's ears.
Intending to gather her son into her arms, Drosoula flung herself into the kitchen with a cry of joy, and then performed a double-take that in other circumstances might have been comical. She looked about the kitchen as if to see whether or not there was airy other there than that dishevelled apparition, and glanced at Pelagia questioningly.
`It is him,' said Pelagia. `I told you he was in an awful state.'
`Jesus,' she exclaimed, and without further ado she took her son by the shoulder, raised him out of his seat, and led him outside, despite Pelagia's protests and the evident wreckage of his feet. `I'm sorry,' said Drosoula, `but I'm not having my son sitting in a respectable house in that state. It is too much shame.'
Out in the courtyard Kyria Drosoula inspected Mandras as though he were an animal whose purchase she was contemplating. She peered into his ears, disgustedly lifted his locks of matted hair, made him show his teeth, and then announced, `You see, Pelagia, what a state these men get into when there are no women to look after them. It's disgraceful and there's no excuse for it, no there isn't. They're just babies who can't manage without their mothers, that's what, and I don't care if he's been to war. Go and put a big pot to boil, because I'm going to wash him from head to foot, but fast of all I'm getting rid of all this awful mop, so bring me some scissors, koritsimou, and if I catch his fleas and lice I'm going to flay him alive, I'm itching from just looking at him, I can hardly bear to be on the same island, and the stench, phew, it's worse than pigs.'
Mandras sat passively as his mother ardently and disapprovingly cut away the ropes and pads of his head and beard. She tutted and grimaced at every glimpse of a louse, and carried away the rank locks in the blades of the scissors so that they and their cargo of nits could burn foully in the charcoal of the brazier, shrivelling and spitting, releasing a thick and stinking smoke vile enough to banish demons and disturb the dead.
Pelagia grimaced as much as her future mother-in-law as she witnessed the scurrying of the grey-bodied parasites and as the septic excoriations and the eczema were revealed; the scalp was pitted with inflamed scratches that glistened with fluid, and, most worrying of all, the glands of the neck were finally revealed to be enlarged and suppurating. She felt sickened where she knew that she should feel compassion, and she hurried indoors to look for the oil of sassafras. As she reached for it she realised for the first time, and with a small shock, that she had learned enough from her father over the years to become a doctor herself. If there was such a thing as a doctor who was also a woman. She toyed with the idea, and then went to look for a paintbrush, as though this action could cancel the uncomfortable sensation of having been born into the wrong world.
When she emerged into the spring sunlight with the jar of aromatic and pungent oil, she found Mandras completely shorn, and she offered the jar to Drosoula. `You paint it on quite thick, and it even kills ringworm if he's got that too. Then you cover his head with a cloth and tie it round with string. I'm afraid it's an irritant, and you have to rub olive oil in when the lice have gone, but oil of paraffin takes about two weeks to work, so I thought we'd better use this.'
Kyria Drosoula looked at her admiringly, sniffed the liquid, said, `Pooh,' and began to slop it about on her son's head. `I hope you know what I'm doing,' she commented. Mandras spoke for the first time: `It stings,' whereupon his mother said, `O, you're in there, are you?' and continued to paint.
When the head was bound up in linen, the two women stepped back and admired their work. Mandras' face was as emaciated as that of the saint in his sarcophagus, and looked as hollow-eyed and pale as that of someone recently dead but already cold.
`Is it really him?' asked Drosoula, with genuine doubt in her mind, and then she asked why it was that the scratches on the head became infected. `It's because the excrement of the lice is rubbed into the scratches,' said Pelagia, `it's not actually the lice that cause it.'
`I always told him not to scratch,' said Drosoula, `but until now I didn't know why. Shall we do the rest of him?'
The two women exchanged glances, and Pelagia flushed. `I don't think . . . ' she began, and Drosoula winked and grinned broadly. 'Don't you want to see what you're getting? Most girls would kill for the chance. I won't tell anyone, I promise, and as for him,' she nodded in her son's direction, `he's so far gone he won't even know.'
Pelagia thought three things all at once: `I don't want to marry him. I've already seen him, but I can't say so, and it was a time when he was beautiful. Not like now. And I can't say anything because I've got so fond of Drosoula.'
`No, really, I can't.'
`Well, you help me with everything else, and you'll have to tell me what to do with the other bits from the other side of the door. Is the water hot? I'll tell you confidentially, I can't wait to see what kind of a man I've produced; do you think I'm terrible?'
Pelagia smiled, 'Everyone thinks you're terrible, but no one thinks any the worse of you for it. They just say "O, there's Kyria Drosoula for you."
With his clothes removed Mandras shivered no more than he had done with them on. He was so pathetically reduced that Pelagia felt no shame in remaining with him even when he was naked, and she did not have to resort to delivering instructions from the far side of a door. His muscle was gone, and the skin hung about his bones in flaccid sheets. His stomach bulged, either from starvation or parasites, and his ribs protruded as sharply as the bones of his spine. The shoulders and back seemed to have bent and crumpled, and the thighs and calves had shrunk so disproportionately that the knees seemed hugely swollen. The worst of it was what they beheld when they peeled off the encrusted bandages upon the feet; Pelagia was reminded of the story of Philoctetes, erstwhile Argonaut and suitor to Helen, abandoned by Odysseus upon the island of Lemnos because of the insupportable decay of his foot, with only his great bow and the arrows of Hercules for company. Pelagia would later recall that the conclusion to this story was that he was cured by Aesculapius and had helped to bring down the Trojans, and would reflect that she herself had been the healer, whilst the Italians had aptly supplied the place of their own forebears.
She did not feel very much like a healer when she saw those feet, however; they were unrecognisable as such. They were a necrotic, mufti-hued pulp. A shell of pus and scab lay upon the inner windings of the abandoned bandages, and yellow maggots writhed and squirmed in flesh that was all but dead. `Gerasimos!' exclaimed Drosoula, clutching her son's withered shoulders for support as she tried not to faint away. The stench was inconceivably stupefying, and at last Pelagia felt herself flood with the sacred compassion whose absence had previously so appalled her. `Wash him all over,' she said to Drosoula, `and I'll do the feet.'
She looked up at Mandras with tears brimming in her eyes and said, `Agapeton, I'm going to have to hurt you. I'm so sorry.'
He returned her gaze, and spoke for the second time: `It's the war. We beat them hollow, we had them running. We beat the wops. You can hurt me if you want, but we couldn't fight the Germans. It was the tanks, that's all.'
Pelagia forced herself to look at the feet until in her own mind they had become a problem to be solved rather than ghastly suffering to be abhorred. Gently she plucked out the maggots, throwing them over the wall, and then gathered her wits together to decide whether or not the rot had spread into the bones. If it had, it was a case of amputation, and she knew that things would have to be left to others; probably her own father would not be willing to do it. What worse could any physician do to a fellow being? She shuddered, she wiped her hands on her apron, she closed her eyes, and she picked up the right foot. She turned it this way and that, felt its textures and decided to her own surprise that there was no granulation and that no bone had died away and separated itself. `There's no sequestrum,' she said; thinking, `But I've only ever done this on a dog,' and Drosoula replied, `There's plenty of dirt, though.'
Pelagia found the flesh of the foot dry, and sighed as if a burden had been lifted away; it was the moist gangrene that was worse. She saw that there was no red line of demarcation between healthy and inferred areas, and concluded that it wasn't gangrene at all. She inspected the other foot and came to the same conclusions. She fetched a bowl of clean water, salted it heavily, and as gently as she could she washed the terrible mess. Mandras flinched as he stung, but said nothing. Pelagia found that the most gruesome patches fell away as she washed them, and that there was living flesh beneath.
She felt a sense of elation and triumph as she stood in the kitchen and pounded five fat heads of garlic in the mortar. The powerful domestic smell comforted her, and she smiled as Drosoula's voice wafted in from the yard. She was scolding her son as though he had not spent months in the snow, as though he was not a hero who had, like all his comrades, carried hardship far beyond the call of duty and beaten off a superior force that had been defeated by those same hardships. With a knife she spread the garlic onto two long bandages; and she carried them outside. She said to Mandras, `Agapeton, this will sting even worse than the salt.'
He winced as she wound the poultice about his feet, and took in his breath sharply, but he did not complain. Pelagia wondered at his fortitude, and remarked, `I'm not surprised we won.'
`We haven't, have we?' retorted Drosoula. `The wogs couldn't do it, so Attila did it instead.'
`Hitler. But it doesn't matter, because the British Empire is on our side.'
`The British have gone home. We're in God's hands now.'
`I don't believe it,' said Pelagia resolutely. `Think of Lord Napier, Lord Byron. They'll come back.'
`What's all this?' enquired Drosoula, indicating the generality of scars, inflamed pits, and scarlet patterns on the body of her son. Pelagia scrutinised the sorry body, freshly washed, and diagnosed every parasite she had ever encountered in the company of her father. `On the shoulder it's favus. You see, it smells of mice. You need sulphur and salicylic acid for that. It's a kind of honeycomb ringworm. It's lucky it didn't get into the hair, because he would have lost it. These red punctures are body lice. We've got to burn all his clothes, and we've got to shave him all over - you can do that - to get the eggs off his hairs. Or we can wash him in vinegar. And we cover him with eucalyptus oil and paraffin emulsion. The rashes on his legs and arms are betel rouges, and we can get rid of them with ammonia and zinc ointment. They go away on their own anyway. This patch is pityriasis, you see, it's coffee-coloured. The things we use for the other troubles will cure that too. If you shave him, you know, down there, it'll get rid of any crab lice. I won't look if you don't mind. And he's got terrible eczema on his arms and calves. We'll have to paint the cracks with iodine, if I can find any, and they'll heal up, and then we just cover him with calamine lotion, if we can find any of that, and we keep covering him with it until it's cured. It might take weeks. We could use olive oil, I suppose, but not in the groin. You shouldn't put anything greasy in the groin. And these maroon prickmarks are flea bites.'