Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  He looked down at the diminutive girl, caught her ernest expression, and said, ‘Oh, hello, koritsimou. What was that you said?’

  ‘A funny kind of cat.’

  ‘Hmm, yes, what about a funny kind of cat?’

  The little girl rolled her eyes in exasperation and wiped a filthy hand across her forehead, leaving a grimy streak. ‘I’ve found a funny kind of cat.’

  ‘How clever of you. Why don’t you go and tell your Papa?’

  ‘It’s ill.’

  ‘What kind of ill?’

  ‘It’s tired. It might have a headache.’

  The doctor hesitated. A cup of coffee was calling him, and he had a conclusive refutation of Communism to deliver to the assembly. He felt a twinge of childish disappointment at the thought of having to forgo their admiration and applause. He looked down at the consternation on the face of the little girl, smiled with noble resignation, and took her hand. ‘Show it to me,’ he said, ‘and bear in mind that I don’t like cats. Also I don’t know anything about curing headaches in cats. Especially funny ones.’

  Lemoni led him impatiently down the road, urging him to make haste at every step. She obliged him to climb over a low wall and duck beneath the branches of the olives. ‘Can’t we go round the trees?’ he demanded. ‘Remember I’m taller than you.’

  ‘Straight is quicker.’ She took him to a patch of briar and scrub, fell to her knees, and began to crawl on all fours through a tunnel that had been forged by some wild animal for its own use. ‘I can’t go through there,’ protested the doctor, ‘I’m much too big.’ He beat his way through with his cane, following the retreating backside as best he could. Painfully he imagined Pelagia’s displeasure at being asked to repair the rents in his trousers and do something about the tangled loops of thread. He felt his scratches beginning to itch already. ‘What on earth were you doing in here?’ he asked.

  ‘Looking for snails.’

  ‘Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?’ asked the doctor rhetorically. ‘If I went crawling around for snails I would be taken to Piraeus and locked up.’

  ‘Lots of big snails,’ observed Lemoni.

  Just when the doctor was feeling exasperation and heat overcome him, they came into a small clearing that had been divided at some distant time into two by a sorry and sagging barbed-wire fence. Lemoni jumped to her feet and ran to the wire, pointing. It took some moments for the doctor to realise that he was supposed to follow, not the line of the mucky finger (which was directed obtusely towards the sky) but the general line of her arm. ‘There it is,’ she proclaimed, ‘it’s the funny cat, and it’s still tired.’

  ‘It’s not tired, koritsimou, it’s got caught on the wire. God knows how long it’s been hanging there.’ He went down on his knees and peered at the animal. A small pair of very bright black eyes blinked back at him with an expression that bespoke an infinity of despair and exhaustion. He felt moved in a manner that struck him as quite strange and illogical.

  It had a flat, triangular head, a sharp snout, a bushy tail. It was a deep chestnut colour, except for the throat and breast, which was of a shade that had settled at some indefinable point between yellow and creamy white. The ears were rounded and broad. The doctor peered into the eyes; the suspended creature was quite obviously near to death. ‘It’s not a cat,’ he said to Lemoni, ‘it’s a pine marten. It could have been hanging here for ages. I think it would be best to kill it, because it’s going to die anyway.’

  Lemoni was overcome with indignation. Tears rose to her eyes, she stamped, she jumped up and down, and, in short, forbade the doctor to kill it. She stroked the head of the animal and stood between it and the man to whom she had entrusted its salvation. ‘Don’t touch it, Lemoni. Remember that King Alexander died of a monkey bite.’

  ‘It’s not a monkey.’

  ‘It might have rabies. It might give you tetanus. Just don’t touch it.’

  ‘I stroked it before and it didn’t bite. It’s tired.’

  ‘Lemoni, it’s got a barb through the skin of its stomach, and it could have been there for hours. Days. It’s not tired, it’s dying.’

  ‘It was tightrope walking,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen them. They walk along the wire and they go up that tree, and they eat the eggs in the nests. I’ve seen them.’

  ‘I didn’t know we had any down here at all. I thought they stayed in the trees on the mountains. It just goes to show.’

  ‘Show what?’

  ‘Children see more than we do.’ The doctor knelt down again and examined the marten. It was very young, and he imagined that it had only opened its eyes a few days before. It was exceedingly pretty. He decided, for Lemoni’s sake, to rescue it and then kill it when he got home. No one would thank him for saving an animal that killed chickens and geese, stole eggs, ate garden berries, and even rifled beehives; he could tell the little girl that it had died on its own, and perhaps he could give it to her to bury. He peered round and saw that it had not only impaled itself on a barb, but that it had actually managed to wind itself around the wire twice. It must have struggled relentlessly, and it must have endured an excruciating torment.

  Very carefully he grasped it behind its neck and rotated the body. Hand over hand he unwound it from the wire, conscious of Lemoni’s head right next to his own as intently she watched him. ‘Careful,’ she advised.

  The doctor winced at the thought of the lethal bite that might leave him foaming at the mouth or lying in bed with his jaw locked. Imagine it, risking one’s own life for the sake of vermin. The things that a child could make one do. He must be mad or stupid or both.

  He held the animal belly upwards and inspected the wound. It was solely in the loose skin of the groin and would have done no muscular damage. It was probably merely a question of acute dehydration. He noted that it was a female and that its smell was sweet and musky. It reminded him of a woman sometime during his maritime days, a smell to which he could not fit a face. He showed it to Lemoni and said, ‘It’s a girl,’ to which she replied, inevitably, ‘Why?’

  The doctor put the kitten in the pocket of his coat and took Lemoni home, promising to do his best. He then proceeded to his own house, only to find that Mandras was in the yard, engaging Pelagia in animated conversation as she attempted to sweep it. The fisherman looked up shamefacedly and said, ‘O, kalimera, Iatre. I was just coming to see you, and as you weren’t here, I have been talking to Pelagia, as you see. I have been having some trouble with the wound.’

  Dr Iannis eyed him sceptically and experienced a surge of annoyance; no doubt the suffering of the little animal had upset him. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your wound. I suppose you are going to tell me that it has been itching.’

  Mandras smiled ingratiatingly and said, ‘That’s exactly it, Iatre. You must be a magician. How did you know?’

  The doctor twisted his mouth laconically and heaved a mock sigh. ‘Mandras, you know perfectly well that wounds always itch when they are in the process of healing. You also know perfectly well that I know perfectly well that you have only come here to flirt with Pelagia.’

  ‘Flirt?’ repeated the young man, affecting both innocence and horror.

  ‘Yes. Flirt. There’s no other word for it. Yesterday you brought us another fish and then flirted with Pelagia for one hour and ten minutes. Well, you’d better get on with it, because I’m not wasting time on a perfectly healthy wound, I haven’t had breakfast, and I’ve got a funny kind of cat in my pocket that I have to look at indoors.’

  Mandras attempted not to appear bemused, and was inspired by unwonted boldness: ‘Then I have your permission to talk to your daughter?’

  ‘Talk, talk, talk,’ said Dr Iannis, waving his hands with irritation. He turned on his heel and went inside the house. Mandras looked at Pelagia and remarked, ‘Your dad’s a funny fellow.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my father,’ she exclaimed, ‘and anyone who says
otherwise gets a broom in the face.’ She prodded at him playfully with the implement and he caught it and twisted it out of her grasp. ‘Give it back,’ she said, laughing.

  ‘I’ll give it back … in return for a kiss.’

  Dr Iannis placed the expiring animal carefully on the kitchen table and contemplated it. He took off one of his boots, grasped it by the toe, and raised it above his head. Such a small and fragile skull would be very easy to crush. There would be no suffering involved. It would be the best thing to do.

  He hesitated. He couldn’t give it back to Lemoni for burial with a smashed skull. Perhaps he should break the neck. He picked it up with his right hand, placing the fingers behind the neck and the thumb under the chin. It was simply a question of pressing back with the thumb.

  He contemplated the deed for a few moments, exhorted himself to the act, and felt his thumb begin to move. The marten was not only very pretty, but also charming and inconceivably pathetic. It had barely lived as yet. He put it down on the table and went to fetch a bottle of alcohol. He bathed the wound carefully and put a single stitch in it. He called Pelagia.

  She entered, convinced that her father had seen her kissing Mandras. She was preparing an obdurate defence, her face was flushed, and she fully expected an explosion. She was entirely amazed when her father did not even look up. He demanded, ‘Did we get any mice in the traps today?’

  ‘We got two, Papakis.’

  ‘Well, go and dig them out of wherever you threw them, and grind them up.’ ‘Grind them up?’

  ‘Yes. Mince them. And bring me some straw.’

  Pelagia hurried out, both perplexed and relieved. She said to Mandras, who had been nervously kicking stones round the olive tree, ‘It’s all right, he only wants me to mince some mice and find him some straw.’

  ‘Jesus, I said he was a funny fellow.’

  She laughed: ‘It only means he’s got some new project. He’s not really a madman. You can go and find the straw if you like.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘I just love looking for straw.’ She smiled archly, ‘There might be recompense.’

  ‘For a kiss,’ he said, ‘I would lick a pigsty clean.’

  ‘You don’t honestly think I’d kiss you after you’d licked a pigsty?’ ‘I’d kiss you even if you’d licked the slime from the bottom of my boat.’

  ‘I believe you. You’re a lot madder than my father.’

  Inside, the doctor filled an eyedropper with goat milk and began to drip it into the back of the marten’s throat. It filled him with immense medical satisfaction when eventually it urinated on the knee of his trousers. This indicated healthy renal functioning. ‘I’ll kill it when I come back from the kapheneia,’ he decided, stroking the rich brown fur of its forehead with one finger.

  Half an hour later his patient was fast asleep on a bed of straw and Pelagia was in the yard chopping the mice with an hachoir. Inexplicably, Mandras was perched on a branch of the olive tree. Dr Iannis swept past them on his way to the kapheneia, once more rehearsing his devastating critique of Communist economics and imagining the confounded expression that was shortly to appear on the face of Kokolios. Pelagia ran to catch her father up and tugged at his sleeve just as Lemoni had done. ‘Papakis,’ she said, ‘don’t you know you’re going out with only one boot on?’

  9 August 15th, 1940

  On his way to the kapheneia Dr Iannis encountered Lemoni, who was engaged in prodding the nose of a rangy brindled dog with a stick. The animal was leaping about in a frenzy of barking, and was attempting to snap at the piece of wood, its cloudy intellect darkened further by a question whose solution seemed to lie in a decision to bark ever more wildly; was this a game or a genuine provocation? He sat back on his haunches, threw back his head, and howled like a wolf.

  ‘He’s singing, he’s singing,’ cried Lemoni gleefully, and joined in; ‘A-ee-ra, a-ee-ra, a-ee-ra.’

  The doctor put his fingers into his ears and protested, ‘Koritsimou, stop, stop at once, the day is already too hot, and this noise is making me sweat. And don’t do that to the dog, or it will bite you.’

  ‘No, it won’t, it only bites sticks.’

  The doctor reached out to pat the animal on the head, and remembered that he had once sewn up a gash in one of its pads. He winced as he recalled extracting some pieces of broken glass. He knew that everyone thought that he was odd on account of his compulsion to heal, and indeed he himself also believed it peculiar, but he also knew that every man needs an obsession in order to enjoy life, and it was so much the better if that obsession was constructive. Look at Hitler and Metaxas and Mussolini, those megalomaniacs. Look at Kokolios, preoccupied with the redistribution of other people’s wealth, or Father Arsenios, a slave to appetite, or Mandras, so much in love with his daughter that he even swung about in the olive tree, imitating an ape for Pelagia’s pleasure. He shuddered as he remembered a chained monkey he had seen in a tree in Spain; it had been masturbating and eating the results. O God, just imagine Mandras doing that.

  ‘You shouldn’t pat it,’ said Lemoni, glad of an opportunity to break his reverie and show off her wisdom to an adult, ‘it’s got fleas.’

  He removed his hand quickly and the dog placed itself behind him in order to avoid the little girl with the stick. ‘Have you decided on a name for the pine marten?’ he asked.

  ‘Psipsina,’ she announced. ‘It’s called Psipsina.’

  ‘You can’t call it that, it isn’t a cat.’

  ‘Well, I’m not a lemon, and I’m called Lemoni.’

  ‘I was there when you were born,’ the doctor told her, ‘and we didn’t know whether you were a baby or a lemon, and I nearly took you into the kitchen and squeezed all the juice out.’ Lemoni’s face contorted sceptically and the dog quite suddenly shot between the doctor’s legs, took the stick from her hand, and ran off with it to a heap of rubble where he proceeded to tear it to slivers. ‘Clever dog,’ commented the doctor, and left the little girl staring with astonishment at her empty hands.

  When he entered the kapheneia he saw that it was full of the usual mangas: Kokolios with his splendidly exuberant and masculine moustache; Stamatis, evading the reproachful glares and the nagging tongue of his wife; Father Arsenios, spherical and perspiring. The doctor collected his tiny cup of grainy coffee and his tumbler of water, and sat next to Kokolios as he always did. He took a deep draught of the water, and quoted Pindar, also as he always did: ‘Water is best.’

  Kokolios took a deep suck on the nargiles, blew out a cloud of blue smoke, and asked, ‘You’ve been a sailor, Iatre, have you not? Is it true that Greek water tastes more like water than that of any other country?’

  ‘Undoubtedly. And Cephallonian water tastes even more like water than any other in Greece. We also have the best wine and the best light and the best sailors.’

  ‘When the revolution comes we’ll have the best life as well,’ announced Kokolios with the intention of provoking the assembly. He pointed to the portrait of King George on the wall, adding, ‘And that fool’s mugshot will be replaced by that of Lenin.’

  ‘Scoundrel,’ said Stamatis, under his breath. The deposal of the pea from his ear had exposed him not only to the irritations of marriage, but to Kokolios’ shockingly unpatriotic anti-monarchism. Stamatis slapped his palm with the back of his hand to indicate the degree of Kokolios’ stupidity, and added, ‘Putanas yie.’

  Kokolios smiled dangerously and said, ‘Son of a whore, am I? Well, you can just drink my fart.’

  ‘Ai gamisou. Theh gamiesei.’

  The doctor bridled at these insults and these invitations to fuck off, and he slapped his glass down on the table. ‘Paidia, paidia, this is enough. We have this unpleasantness every morning. I have always been a Venizelist; I am not a monarchist, and I am not a Communist. I disagree with both of you, but I cure Stamatis’ deafness and I burn out Kokolios’ warts. This is how we should be. We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing ea
ch other. Am I not right?’

  ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ quoted Kokolios, looking at Stamatis significantly.

  ‘I don’t like your omelette,’ said Stamatis. ‘It’s made with bad eggs, it tastes foul, and it makes me shit.’

  ‘The revolution will plug your backside,’ said Kokolios, adding, ‘a fair share of what little we have, the means of production in the hands of the producers, the equal obligation of all to work.’

  ‘You don’t work any more than you have to,’ commented Father Arsenios in his slow bass voice.

  ‘You don’t work at all, Patir. You grow fatter every day. Everything is given to you for nothing. You are a parasite.’

  Arsenios wiped his plump hands on his black robes, and the doctor said, ‘There is such a thing as an indispensable parasite. There are parasitic bacteria in the gut that aid digestion. I am not a religious man, I am a materialist, but even I can see that priests are a kind of bacteria that enable people to find life digestible. Father Arsenios has done many useful things for those who seek consolation; he is a member of every family, and he is the family for those who don’t have one.’