Captain Corelli's mandolin (25 page)

On a bright morning early in the occupation, Captain Antonio Corelli woke up feeling guilty as usual. It was an emotion that struck him each morning and left the taste of rancid butter in his mouth, and it was caused by the knowledge that he was sleeping in somebody else's bed. He felt his self-esteem ratchet lower by the day as he struggled with the idea that he had displaced Pelagia, that she was sleeping, wrapped up in blankets, on the cold flags of the kitchen floor. It was true that Psipsina would creep in beside her on colder nights, and it was also true that he had brought her two Army bedrolls to place one above the other to form a mattress, but he still felt himself unworthy, and he wondered whether she would forever regard her bed as contaminated. It also worried him that she had been obliged to get up very early so that she would be decent, her bed rolled away, by the time that he came into the kitchen. He would find her yawning, her finger following the difficult English of the medical encyclopaedia, or else working vindictively at a crocheted blanket that never seemed to get any larger. Every day he would raise his cap and say, 'Buon giorno, Kyria Pelagia,' and every day it would strike him as ludicrous that he knew the Greek for 'Miss' but did not know how to say 'Good morning'. Nothing delighted him so much as to see her smile, and for this reason he resolved to learn the Greek for 'Good morning', so that he could say it to her casually as he passed on his way to where Carlo was waiting to take him away in the jeep. He asked Dr Iannis for guidance.

This latter was in a testy mood for no other reason than that it had appealed to him to be in that particular mood on that particular morning. His acquaintance with the fat quartermaster had made his practice very much easier to run than it had been even in peacetime, and since the latter was undoubtedly a hypochondriac, he had seen him often enough to ensure a continuous flow of essential supplies. Curiously enough, just when at last he had enough to get by, the islanders stopped getting ill. The communal deferral of illness in straitened times was a phenomenon of which he had heard but never previously witnessed, and every time that he was apprised of an Allied success he had set to worrying about the inevitable flood of maladies that would occur after the liberation. He had begun to resent the Italians for diminishing his usefulness, and it was for this reason perhaps that he informed Corelli that the Greek for 'good morning' was 'Ai gamisou'.

'Ai gamisou,' repeated Corelli three or four times, and then he said, 'now I can say it to Pelagia.'

The doctor was horrified, and thought quickly. 'O no,' he said, 'you can't say that to Kyria Pelagia. To a woman who lives in the same house you say "kalimera". It's just one of those strange rules that some languages have.'

'Kalimera,' repeated the captain.

`And if someone greets you,' continued the doctor, `you have to say "putanas yie" in reply.'

'Putanas yie,' practised the captain. On his way out he proudly said, 'Kalimera, Kyria Pelagia.'

'Kalimera,' said Pelagia, pulling the stitches out of her futile crochet. Corelli waited for her to be surprised or to smile, but there was no response. Disappointed, he left, and after he had gone, Pelagia smiled.

Outside, Corelli found that Carlo had not yet materialised, and so he practised his new greeting on the villagers. 'Ai gamisou,' he said cheerfully to Kokolios, who glared at him, scowled darkly, and spat into the dust.

'Ai gamisou,' he said to Velisarios, who promptly swerved in his direction and released a torrent of invective that the captain fortunately failed to understand. Corelli only avoided being struck by the enormous and wrathful man by offering him a cigarette. 'Maybe I just shouldn't speak to Greeks,' he thought.

'Ai gamisou,' he said to Stamatis, who had recently been coping with his marriage by practising the pretence that his deafness was recurring. 'Putanas yie,' mumbled the old man as he passed.

In Argostoli that evening the captain proudly tried out his new greeting on Pasquale Lacerba, the gawky Italian photographer who had been pressed into working as a translator, and was appalled to find, after some misunderstandings, that the doctor had misled him. He found himself sitting in a cafe near the town hall, more miserable than angry. Why did the doctor do that? He thought that they had established some kind of mutual respect, and yet the doctor had told him how to say 'Go fuck yourself' and 'Son of a whore', and he been making a fool of himself all day, raising his cap and smiling, and saying those terrible things. For God's sake, he had even said them to a priest, a friendly dog, and a little girl with a dirty but touchingly innocent face.

One of the many curiosities of the old British administrative classes was that they clearly perceived what had gone wrong at home, and never put it right. Instead, they applied these lessons to their possessions abroad. Thus, in his `Treatise Concerning Civil Government' of 1781, the philosopher Josiah Tucker noted that London was grossly over-represented in Parliament, and unfairly engrossed with advantages which ought to be common to all. More importantly, he wrote:

'AGAIN; All over-grown Cities are formidable in another View, and therefore ought not to be encouraged by new Privileges, to grow frill more dangerous; for they are, and ever were, the Seats of Faction and Sedition, and the Nurferies of Anarchy and Confufion. A daring, and defperate Leader, in any great Metropolis, at the Head of a numerous Mob, is terrible to the Peace of Society, even in the moft defpotic Governments . . .

'Once more, if a man has any senfe of Rectitude and good Morals, or has a Spark of Goodnefs and Humanity remaining, he cannot wifh to entice men into great Cities by frefh Allurements. Such places are already become the bane of mankind in every Senfe, in their Healths, their Fortunes, their Morals, religion, &cc. . &cc. And it is obfervable of London in particular, that were no frefh Recruits, Male and Female, to come out of the Country, to fupply thofe Devaftations which Vice, Intemperance, Brothels, and the gallows are continually making, the whole human Species in that City would be foon exhaufted; for the Number of Deaths exceed the Births by at leaft 7,000 every Year.'

Philosophers who have only one idea and propound it in barbarous neologisms in thirty successive volumes have a guaranteed future in the universities, but the unfortunate Josiah Tucker, so influential in his own day, has been lost to modern departments of philosophy because he was insufficiently obscure, did not propound theories mad enough, and rooted his thought in concrete examples. In Britain, instead of sensibly moving the capital to York, London was allowed to grow into the vilest human cesspit in the history of the world. But in Cephallonia the British authorities noticed that Argostoli was growing too big, took Tucker's advice, and set about constructing the exquisite town of Lixouri.

In Lixouri there was a spacious agora rimmed with trees, and a splendid courthouse constructed with a market beneath it, neatly coalescing the related benefits of commerce, justice, and sociable shade from the blows of sun and rain. To this day Lixouri and Argostoli regard each other as aberrant and eccentric, and compete doggedly in dance, music, trade, and civic pride, but in 1941 a new and ominous kind of rivalry was imposed by newly parasitic foreign powers. The Italians garrisoned Argostoli, and the Germans garrisoned Lixouri.

The German detachment was small and unassuming, and there is no doubt that it was only there at all because the Nazis knew perfectly well that the Italians were not to be trusted; and wanted to keep them under observation. It is true that Hitler had described Mussolini as `The Great Man beyond the Alps', but by then he also knew that the Duce and his henchmen were the only genuine Fascists left in Italy. He knew that their generals were old-fashioned and uninspired, he had seen for himself that the soldiers were ill-disciplined, fractious, and had minds of their own, and in North Africa he had ensured that they were always kept away from the front line during engagements that mattered. Like God setting his rainbow in the sky to remind the Israelites who was boss, Hitler sent to Lixouri three thousand grenadiers of the 996th Regiment, under Colonel Barge.

Nobody liked then, although relations between Germans and Italians were superficially friendly and co-operative. The Germans thought of the Italians as racially inferior negroids, and the Italians were perplexed by the Nazi cult of death. The belts and uniforms grimly embellished with skulls and bones struck them as pathological, as did their iron discipline, their irrational and irritating uniformity of views and conversation, and their incomprehensible passion for hegemony. The Italians, who were inveterately inclined to putting their arms across each others' shoulders, did not feel likewise inclined when in the company of a German, as though they would have received an electric shock, as though their arm might have turned to ice or been lost in the void. In the evenings one could hear `Lili Marlene' drifting out of the messes, the convivial chatter, the roars of laughter, the high jinks, but this was a private world. In the daytime the Germans were serious, did not understand irony, took polite offence, and were coldly and brutally efficient in their dealings with the local population. Captain Corelli made friends with one of them, a boy who spoke some Italian, and discovered that he only became truly human when he shed his uniform, put on his swimming trunks, and splashed about in the sea.

Gunter Weber desperately wanted to be blond, and it was for this reason that he frequented the sunlit beaches in the hours away from duty, hoping that the sun would bleach his hair. But there was nothing he could do to transform his brown eyes to an un suspiciously Aryan blue. It was on the beach of Lepada Bay that he made the acquaintance of the man who became his friend and whom he was destined to betray with a Judas kiss that consisted of a maelstrom of bullets that opened scarlet and bleeding mouths in the bodies of the companions he had grown to love.

Lepada Bay is found near Lixouri, beneath the monastery where Anthimos Kourouklis conversed with God, overlooked by the ruined Corinthian hill-city of Pale, where in classical times there flourished an innocent cult of Persephone. The beach curves elegantly, and at one tip there is a striated rock that has every appearance of a listing, ruined galleon. It is a stone ideally designed by nature for sitting on in the sun, or for peering over the edge into the un-garnered sea at the hundreds of tiny fish that dart amid the weed.

It was on the stern castle of this petrified ship that Gunter Weber was sitting when he heard the Italian truck arrive beyond the fringe of stiffened grasses and disgorge its merry cargo of songsters and whores.

One would have described these whores as fresh from North Africa, were it not for the egregious inaccuracy of the term `fresh'. Having been devoured by stinging insects and obliterated by the unfeasibly dry heat of the grey desert, this party of stale but amiable pussycats had recently arrived in their new island paradise, and still could not believe their good fortune. In skimpy dresses, their faces plastered with powder and rouge, their lips fashioned into caricatures of the Cupid's bow, they adored the manner in which the mouths of old peasants dropped open as they flounced by with their parasols. They adored the fresh taste of the water, the silky feel of the sea as they swam shamelessly naked, the miraculous way in which the sun cured blemishes of the skin, and the companionable lethargy of their idle moments in the military brothel, when they lay about painting their nails and complaining about men in geeneral and in particular. Most of all they adored it when they caught diseases that would oblige the military doctors to order periods of recovery that could allow them weeks off at a time. It was a break from getting up early and being transported like cattle from one base to another, only to come home to further bouts of thrusting athletics and unvarying repertoires of grunts. Their existence was nothing but friction (no wonder their skins were smooth) and an eternity of ceilings.

Like the young German grenadier, the whores all wanted to be blonde, but they achieved with violent peroxide the end that he pursued by means of the sun. The inch of black roots at the parting of their brittle, coarsened hair gave them a disappointed and disappointing air, as if they had lacked, like a talented but unmotivated artist, that final impulse that might have consummated the illusions of artifice.

The beauty of these jaded but heliotropic flowers was entirely self-generated and self-perpetuated. Their gossamer gloss of youth and loveliness seemed to shimmer upon them like the loose glamour of a tentative spell, but was in truth created by their own efforts, efforts conscientiously made, more the product of perseverance than of hope. Theirs was a vanity in which they struggled to believe. The dutiful exercise of their profession kept their bodies slim and lithe, but there were ineradicable lines at the corners of their eyes, little pouches beneath their breasts where they had begun almost imperceptibly to sag. Their teeth were white and clean, but their smiles were automatic even when sincere. Their legs and armpits were shaven, they smelled of a greenhouse crammed with hyacinth, and they trimmed and shaped their pubic hair so religiously that soldiers who liked to burrow and disappear into a good, abundant, honest muff would come away feeling flat and cheated, as though penetration had not occurred. The women were scrubbed and shining, and Corelli and his opera club sometimes took them to the beach in a lorry because he thought it would cheer them up. The women, well versed in the varieties of male idiosyncrasy, came along because life had always washed over them and propelled them hither and thither like weed at the edge of tide, and men were the browsing fish that ate them.

Gunter Weber watched from his rock as the party of Italian soldiers opened their bottles of wine and began to wave their arms about and sing. He watched the naked nymphs separate themselves and run into the sea, squealing and splashing each other inefficiently, and he smiled with superiority as he reflected that all Italians were mad. It was agreed in the mess, agreed by the whole nation of the reunited German peoples, that the Italians were like children who would eventually be sent home at the end of a party, clutching a balloon and a lollipop in their sticky fingers. They'd get Albania and anything else that the Fuhrer could not see any point in having.

Weber was twenty-two years old and had never seen a naked woman before; he was not one of the die-hard and compulsive immolatory rapists such as the Croats and the German Czechs who had joined up, and in any case military rape did not require the removal of a woman's clothing; its brutality was perfunctory, and it was concluded with a killing. Weber was still a virgin, his father was a Lutheran pastor, and he had grown up in the Austrian mountains, capable of hating Jews and gypsies only because he had never met one. He wandered over to the group of Italians, motivated by a desperate desire, disguised as unconcern, to see a naked woman.

Corelli looked up at the open young face, and liked it. It was ingenuous and friendly. 'Heil Hitler,' said Weber, and held out his hand. 'Heil Puccini,' said Corelli, extending his own.

`I am Leutnant Gunter Weber, with the Grenadiers at Lixouri. I saw your party, and I thought that I would come and introduce myself.'

`Ah,' said Carlo, winking, `you wanted to come and look at the women.'

`It is no such thing,' lied Weber stiffly. `Naturally one has seen such things before.'

`I am Antonio Corelli,' said the captain, `and naturally, one cannot see enough of such things if one is a man.'

`Just so,' lied Carlo, who found the presence of the women a cause of deep spiritual discomfort and perplexity. He was still remembering Francesco and hanging a new loyalty onto the captain, certain that with the captain it was bound to be an affection that would have to constitute its own reward. He had never been entirely sure of this with Francesco, even though Francesco had been married and had expressed vehement aversion to homosexuals. Carlo was glad that Corelli was not an aficionado of the brothel, and had not, as others had, ever pressed him into visiting it. Carlo knew that Corelli had fallen for Pelagia before even Corelli knew it for himself, and this, along with his love of music and his adoration of children and his mandolin, was promiscuity enough for one man.

`You wouldn't be descended from the great composer?' asked Corelli, and the German replied, 'I said "Weber", not Wagner.'

The captain laughed, 'Wagner is not a great composer. Too overblown, too windy, too pompous and overbearing. No, I mean Carl Maria Von Weber, the one who wrote "Der Freischutz", and the two clarinet concerti, and the Symphony in Doh major.'

Weber shrugged his shoulders, 'I regret, Signor, that I have never heard of him.'

`And you are supposed to ask me if I am descended from the great composer,' said Corelli, smiling with anticipation. Weber shrugged again, and the captain supplied, 'Arcangelo Corelli? The "Concerti grossi"? You are not a music lover?'

`No, I like.. . 'the lieutenant paused, unable to think of anything that he did like. `You forgot to tell me your rank.'

'I am the breve, Carlo here is the semibreve, he is the crotchet, he is the quaver, and that lad in the sea is a semiquaver, and little Piero here is a demi-semiquaver. In the opera club we have our own ranking system, but otherwise I am a captain. Thirty-Third Regiment of Artillery. Please join us, we have plenty of wine, but the girls are off-duty, and I'm sure you've got your own. By the way, your Italian is excellent.'

Gunter Weber settled himself in the sand, wary of all these dark jovial foreigners, and replied, 'I come from the Tyrol. Many of us speak Italian.'

`You're not German then?'

'Of course I am a German.'

Corelli looked puzzled, 'I thought the Tyrol was in Austria.'

Weber felt his temper beginning to fray; it was bad enough having to hear slurs on the reputation of Wagner, one of the greatest of proto-Fascists. `Our Fuhrer is Austrian, and nobody says that he is not a German. I am German.'

There was a difficult silence, which Corelli broke by handing him a bottle of red wine. 'Drink,' he said, `and be happy.'

Gunter Weber drank, and was happy. The wine, the coruscating heat of the sun and the mitigating balm of the breeze, the smell of aloes, the rousing choruses, the ever-incredible nakedness of the girls, the Morse code of virgin light glancing after the perpetual motion of the waters, conspired together and unknitted the dry bones in his heart.

He permitted Adriana to fire a round from his Luger, he fell asleep, he was thrown from the rock into the sea, he basked in the admiration of the naked girls who loved his golden tan and his blond hair, and he was delivered to base that evening, his uniform sandy and askew, a fully paid-up member of the opera club, having drunkenly agreed that if ever he should express admiration for Wagner he would be shot, without trial, and without leave of appeal. He was the only one who could not sing a note, and his rank was dotted demi-semiquaver rest.