Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘Do you have any idea how foolish you two look?’ expostulated the doctor. ‘For God’s sake, it’s embarrassing. If only you could see yourselves.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ said Pelagia reprovingly, resenting this interruption to their very infantile enjoyment, ‘he’s a madman, and it’s contagious.’

  The captain threw back his head and howled to the tune of ‘Sola, Perduta, Abandonnata’. The doctor winced and shook his head, and Psipsina went to the door and scratched at it, preferring to be let out into the drifting rain than to remain in the room and endure that frightful lament; real dogs were bad enough. Pelagia got up, took a peach from the table, returned to her seat, and just when the captain had thrown his head back for a most plaintive howl, she jammed the peach into his mouth. His expression of astonishment, pop-eyed and disproportionate, was a pleasure to behold. ‘Do you know how silly you look?’ she enquired. ‘Down on your knees, all tied up with wool, and a peach in your mouth?’

  ‘Invaders should behave with more dignity,’ said the doctor, his sense of historical aptness somewhat offended.

  ‘Ung,’ said the captain.

  Pelagia was distracted, understandably, and when she had finished winding the skein, it transpired that she had been doing so with a steadily increasing pressure. The captain stood up, and realised that his nose was becoming blocked just because he could not breathe through his mouth. He bit into the peach and let the remainder of it drop upon the floor, where Psipsina investigated it with some interest before running off with it. He struggled to extract his hands, and failed. ‘A plot,’ he cried, ‘a treacherous Greek plot against their Italian liberators.’

  ‘I’m not going to unwind it again,’ said Pelagia, ‘it took long enough as it is.’

  ‘Tied up for life,’ said the captain, and spontaneously their eyes met. She smiled coyly, and for no good reason at all lowered her eyes again and said, ‘Bad dog.’

  34 Liberating the Masses (3)

  It was an humiliation and an embarrassment to be carpeted by Lt-Col Myers, but it had happened to Hector and to Aris, his commander, so many times that it had become almost a game. All you had to do was profess ignorance or indignation or penitent horror every time your andarte group was reported to the British for misdemeanours and atrocities, and then say that you could not sign any agreements without permission from the committee in Athens, and for that you would have to send a runner who might take two weeks to get back. You could always say that the runner had been caught and killed by the Italians, or the Germans, or one of the other resistance groups, or you could even blame the British, saying that they obviously favoured EDES. You could even blame the Greek villagers whom the Germans had armed so that they could defend their chickens against the relentless requisitioning of the patriotic ELAS guerrillas. This had the advantage of being occasionally true, and nearly always unverifiable.

  Hector adjusted his red fez, and stood before Lt-Col Myers, feeling like a naughty schoolboy. He had left Mandras outside, unwilling that he should be a witness to his discomfiture. Mandras watched the British Liaison Officers coming and going, and was once again struck by their great height, their red and peeling noses, and the great pleasure they took in banter. Some of them were New Zealanders, and Mandras guessed that this must be a special place somewhere in Britain where soldiers were bred specially for the purpose of parachuting out of Liberators and blowing up viaducts. They always had colds, but were capable of incredible endurance, and they made incomprehensible jokes whose irony was completely lost in translation. They made sincere efforts to learn Romaic Greek, but delighted in mispronunciation; if a woman was called Antigone, they all called her ‘Auntie Gonie’, and Hector himself was known as ‘My Sector’. Mandras could not have known that this was because ‘This is my sector’ was the standard ripost of his mentor when confronted with his double-dealings, his dishonesty, and his barbarity.

  ‘This is my sector,’ said Hector to Myers, ‘and my orders come from Athens, not from you. Are you Greek, to be giving us orders all the time?’

  Myers heaved a patient sigh. He was not trained in diplomacy, had not been told that ninety percent of his job would be the prevention of internecine war amongst the Greeks, and was longing for a simple life in which all one had to do was fight the Germans. He had nearly died of pneumonia, and was still very thin and tired, but nonetheless he had the moral authority of someone who refuses to compromise an ethical principle in the name of an ideal. All the ELAS leaders hated him for making them feel like worms, and yet they never dared to defy him too much because he was the source of all the weapons and gold sovereigns that they were storing up for the revolution, after the Germans had gone. They had to keep him quiet by going along with some of his plans, by occasionally performing minor warlike acts against the Axis troops, and by enduring the lectures that he always delivered with blazing eyes and unanswerable certainty.

  ‘It was agreed from the beginning that all andarte groups would be under the control of Cairo. Kindly do not oblige me to repeat the same things every time I see you. If there is any continuation of your present counter-productive behaviour, I shall not hesitate to arrange for your supplies to be cut off. Is that understood?’

  ‘You give us nothing, all the supplies go to EDES. You have not been fair to us.’

  ‘The same nonsense,’ expostulated the colonel. ‘How many times must I tell you what you already know? We have always been strictly proportionate.’ The colonel straightened up, ‘How many times have I got to remind you that in this war we have a common enemy? Does it ever even cross your mind that we are fighting the Germans? Do you really think it’s enough to have blown up the Gorgopotamos viaduct? Because that was the last useful thing that ELAS ever did, and that was the last time you ever co-operated with EDES.’

  Hector flushed, ‘It’s Aris you should talk to. I get my orders from him, and he gets his orders from Athens. It’s no use going on at me.’

  ‘I have talked to Aris. Again and again and again. And now I am talking to you. Aris told me to talk to you, because he says that the responsibility for these latest outrages is yours.’

  ‘Outrages? What outrages?’

  The colonel felt a surge of contempt, and wanted to strike the duplicitous andarte, but he restrained himself. As he talked he enumerated his points on his fingers. ‘Firstly, last Friday there was a drop to EDES, which, let me remind you, has been the only major group that actually fights the enemy. You and your men attacked EDES, drove them away, and stole the entire drop.’

  ‘We did not,’ maintained Hector, ‘and anyway we wouldn’t have had to if you supplied us fairly. No one was killed.’

  ‘You killed five men of Zervas’ group, including a British Liaison Officer. Secondly, we have supplied you with plenty of money, and yet you never pay the peasants for what you take. Are you so stupid that you can’t see that you’re driving them into the arms of the enemy? I have had endless complaints, I have had peasants walking fifty miles in order to come and demand recompense. You have burned out three villages whose members resisted your thieving, on the pretext that they were collaborators. You killed twelve men and five women. I have seen the bodies, Hector, and I am not blind. What is the purpose of castration, tearing out eyes, and slitting the mouth so that they die smiling?’

  ‘If they will not supply us, then obviously they are collaborators, and if you will not supply us, what else are we supposed to do? If they are collaborators, I cannot blame my men for getting carried away, can I? And in any case, who says it was us?’

  Myers was almost fit to explode. He nearly said, ‘The villagers,’ but realised that this would invite further Communist reprisals. Instead he said, ‘One of our officers saw it.’

  Hector shrugged, ‘Lies.’

  Myers went cold, ‘British officers don’t lie.’ He ruefully regretted the necessary hypocrisy. He glared with patrician disdain at the andarte leader; the trouble with these red Fascists was that they were not gentlemen. They
had no sense of personal honour whatsoever. ‘Thirdly,’ he continued, ‘you have been preventing villagers from high in the mountains from entering EDES areas in order to buy wheat, without which they will starve. Is this patriotic? You are not letting them through unless they join ELAS first, and then you are doling out the death penalty for “deserters”, even though you do not have the authority. Fourthly, you have brought reprisals against a village by taking potatoes already requisitioned by the Italians. Fifthly, you personally misdirected one of our Liaison Officers when he was looking for Aris with the intention of complaining about your actions. Sixthly, you have been following a policy of disarming other andarte bands, and murdering their officers.’

  Hector was adept at diversions, and he counter-accused: ‘We know the British policy. Do you think we are stupid? You are going to bring back the King without asking the people.’

  Myers slammed the side of his fist into the table-top, sending a glass tumbler toppling to the floor. ‘Seven,’ he roared, ‘you kidnapped and murdered a chief of gendarmerie who was arranging a mass defection of his own men to EDES, and you made them defect to you on pain of death. Eighth, you have proclaimed that anyone not joining ELAS is a traitor to Greece, and will be shot. Ninth, you are giving the funds we give you to EAM, who give it to the KKE in Athens, and instead of payment you are giving empty promissory notes to the peasants. Tenthly, some men of your unit disgracefully attacked an EDES unit on the flank when they were engaged in a pitched battle with a unit of the SS. This is a blot on the good name of Greece, an infamy that must never be repeated. Is that clear?’ The colonel paused and took up a piece of paper from his desk. ‘I have here an agreement which has been signed by EDES and EKKA and the EOA, who have all agreed to adopt it as a code of practice. I am going to get Aris to sign it, and I want you to read it and give me your word of honour as a gentleman that you will abide by it. If not, we will have to consider cutting off your supplies.’

  Hector looked back defiantly. The colonel had tried this tactic a hundred times. ‘I cannot, and Aris will not sign anything unless we have orders from the committee in Athens. We will have to send a runner. Who knows how long it will take?’

  ‘Those are the terms,’ said Myers, handing him the piece of paper. Hector took it, saluted with lazy disrespect, and left.

  ‘What was all that about then?’ asked Mandras as they descended the precipitous and slippery goatpath that wound downwards into the valley from the cave that Myers had been using as his local Headquarters.

  ‘A load of shit,’ answered Hector. ‘What you’ve got to understand about the British is that they are Fascists, and they just want Greece for their empire, and people like Zervas and his lackeys in EDES are helping them to do it. That’s why he’s got all the supplies and we haven’t.’

  ‘We’ve got tons of stuff,’ said Mandras. ‘We’ve got enough to blow up every Nazi in Greece.’

  Hector ignored him; he was young and would learn. He said, ‘Those villagers reported us to Myers. I think we should go and teach them some lessons. Collaborating bastards.’

  ‘There were some nice women,’ said Mandras, smiling.

  ‘We’ll teach them a thing or two as well,’ replied Hector, and the two men laughed in conspiratorial pleasure. These villagers were all petit-bourgeois sympathisers, Royalists, republicans who only pretended to be opposed to the king that everyone contemptuously referred to as ‘Glucksburg’. They were all Fascist fellow-travellers, and all of them spat on scientific socialism. It was good to get those traitor women screaming and squirming underneath you, and you didn’t have to trouble your conscience about it because it was the least they deserved; a new and better Greece was about to be built, and you did what you liked with inferior bricks that were going to be discarded anyway. Likewise, when you made an omelette you threw away the shells.

  Up in his cave Myers thought again about requesting to be evacuated. Cairo ignored everything he told them about ELAS and did not seem to understand that sooner rather than later the Communists were going to start a civil war. He was just wasting his time. He mopped his brow with his handkerchief and ran his fingers through the itching beard that was still a novelty to him. Tom Barnes came in, having trekked for five days after destroying a bridge with the aid of Zervas’ men. He sat down heavily on the old wooden chair, took off his boots, and inspected the raw blisters on the soles of his feet and on his toes. Myers questioned him with one raised eyebrow, and Barnes looked up and smiled. ‘Top-hole explosion,’ he said in his New Zealand drawl, ‘absolutely ripping. Cantilevers all over the shop. It’ll keep the wops and jerries busy for weeks.’

  ‘Splendid,’ said Myers. ‘Cup of tea? I’ve just had that Hector here. He’s almost as ghastly as Aris, an absolutely bloody swine, through and through.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with bad hats,’ said Barnes, ‘they always jolly well end up at the head.’

  35 A Pamphlet Distributed on the Island, Entitled with the Fascist Slogan ‘Believe, Fight, and Obey’

  Italians! Let us celebrate together the life and achievements of Benito Andrea Amilcare Mussolini, Who from unpromising beginnings has led us to perdition.

  In His infancy He was thought to be dumb, but later proved to be incorrigibly garrulous and more full of wind than all the herds of cows that browse the pastures of the Alps. As a boy He blinded captive birds with pins, plucked the feathers of chickens, was deemed uncontrollable, and pinched little girls in school in order to make them cry. He led gangs, started fights, sought quarrels without provocation, and refused to pay up on bets that He lost. At the age of ten He stabbed a boy at supper, and then stabbed someone else shortly after. He let it be known that He was at the top of His class, when He was not, and at the onset of puberty took to visiting the brothel at Farti on Sundays. Amid what clouds of glory did He therefore begin his life!

  He committed a rape against a virgin in a stairwell, and when she wept for her honour He reproached her for mounting an insufficient resistance. Misanthropic and eremitic, He was scruffy, ill-mannered, unemployable, and only went out after dark. How splendidly did He continue to develop His talents!

  As a schoolteacher He was known as ‘the tyrant’ but could not control His classes. He took to alcohol and cards, undertook an adulterous affair with the wife of a soldier who was away on duty, stabbed her, and acquired a knuckleduster. In order to escape from His debtors, His affairs, and military service, He fled to Switzerland, where He declined to work. Instead He began to beg with menaces, and upon being arrested as a vagabond, protested to the police that He hated other tramps, and therefore could not be one of them. In this He displayed the gift for reasoned oratory which has since become so well known to us.

  He went to work for a wine merchant, but was sacked for drinking all the stock. His official version of this story is that He was at the time having meetings with Lenin, who professed the profoundest admiration of His qualities. In 1904 He began to encourage Italian soldiers to desert the Army, which was entirely consistent with His later demand (with which all of us are presently familiar), that all deserters must be shot.

  He moved to Paris, where He earned a living by telling fortunes. He affected an interest in philosophy, and has more recently disclosed that He studied at Geneva and Zürich Universities. This is of course true, even though there is no record of His attendance or enrolment. It is also true that He did not abandon his mother to a death in penury, or His father to imprisonment. As we all know, the DUCE believes His own propaganda, and so, therefore, do we.

  He took another teaching post and was sacked after one year for holding riotous parties in cemeteries. He also contracted syphilis during an adulterous affair. This cannot be accepted as a reason for His current insanity however, since He was already mad when He contracted it. It was at this time that He wrote His superb history of philosophy which He says was torn up by a jealous lover, but which all our professors know to have been a work of genius, even without ever having seen it. He was di
smissed from another teaching post, and discovered a new political ideology, consisting of the notion that one should act first, and think up the reasons afterwards, this being the only way in which His doctrines conflict with those of Stalin, who has always known in advance what he was intending to achieve.

  The DUCE took to pulling His hat down over His eyes in order to avoid having to recognise anyone and converse with them, deliberately crumpling His clothes and using foul language, and wrote an excellent novel in the manner of Edgar Allen Poe, which was inexplicably refused publication by all the publishing houses to which He sent it. It was a work of genius, and was possibly too sophisticated for their tastes. Shortly afterwards He became a sub-editor of Il Popolo, and discovered that he could economise on journalists by concocting the news Himself. Ten editions were confiscated for libel, and He was arrested for defaulting on a fine. Originality has always thus been persecuted.

  The DUCE gained much notoriety by accusing Jesus Christ of copulating with Mary Magdelen and by penning a pamphlet entitled ‘God Does Not Exist’, and shortly afterwards was imprisoned for encouraging sedition within the Army. He married His own half-sister, she being the illegitimate child of His own father, thus adding incest to the list of His accomplishments, and then fathered an illegitimate child in Trent. Dutiful sons should always so emulate their fathers, and in this way will one generation be a light that shines in perpetuity to every other. At this time it was said of Him that He could not look people in the eye when in conversation, possessed no sense of humour, was delinquent and paranoid, and was known by all as ‘The Madman’. This, of course, is not true, even though everyone who knew Him in those days remembers it perfectly. In 1911 He opposed the war on Libya, and on achieving power in later years followed a policy of bestial oppression in that same country, thus displaying His extraordinary adaptability in the face of an unchanging situation.