Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  Kokolios held up two fingers and said, ‘Two chickens.’

  Corelli nodded in agreement, and Kokolios said, ‘I will do it with Stamatis, and we want two chickens each.’

  Pelagia translated, and the captain grimaced, ‘Each?’ He rolled his eyes in exasperation and muttered, ‘Rompiscatole,’ under his breath.

  And so it was that Kokolios and Stamatis, the Royalist and the Communist but two old friends nonetheless, and united in hunger and entrepreneurial acumen, returned to their houses and came back with spades. In the place indicated by the captain they began to dig a rectangular hole, piling up the sand on the mine side of it to form a protective rampart. When it was only four feet deep it began to fill with water, and the captain looked down at the ochre slush with some disapprobation and dismay. ‘It’s filling up with water,’ he remarked unnecessarily to Pelagia, who was standing with everyone else watching the labour of the two old men. She looked at him and laughed, ‘Everyone knows that if you dig a hole in a beach it fills up with water.’

  Corelli frowned, and began to have reservations about this whole idea, which only made him more determined to carry it through.

  Carlo returned, not only with the dynamite and the other equipment, but with an entire truckload of troops, all of them heavily armed and wonderfully eager to witness the forthcoming spectacle. Corelli was annoyed: ‘Why didn’t you tell Hitler too, and invite the entire German Army?’

  Carlo was impenitent and aggrieved: ‘They made me bring all these men because it’s against regulations to transport explosives without an escort. It’s because of the partisans, so don’t blame me.’

  ‘Partisans? What partisans? You mean those bandits that loot the villages when we’re not looking? Don’t make me laugh.’

  ‘This hole is in the wrong place,’ interrupted a small man in the uniform of an engineer.

  ‘This hole is where I put it,’ cried the captain, growing increasingly annoyed at the prospect of having his recreational escapade removed from his control.

  ‘It’s too close,’ persisted the engineer, ‘the shock wave will pass straight over this hole and suck your eyes and brains out, and then we’ll have to dig you out, unless it’s your wish to rest there in peace.’

  ‘Listen Corporal, let me point out to you that I am a captain and you are a corporal. I am in charge around here.’

  The soldier was undeterred, ‘And let me point out to you that I am a sapper and you are a mad son of a bitch.’

  Corelli’s eyes opened at first with surprise, and then opened yet wider with rage. ‘Insubordination!’ he shouted. ‘I’m putting you up on a charge.’

  The sapper shrugged his shoulders and smiled, ‘You can do what you like, because a dead man can’t press charges. If you want to die, OK, I’ll watch.’

  ‘Carogna,’ spluttered Corelli, and the soldier repeated, ‘Mad son of a bitch,’ and strolled away. Disowning the entire proceeding, he went to the top of the cliff, lit a cigarette, and squinted against the lowering sun as he watched the preparations below. It was lovely. The sea was a multitude of shades of aquamarine and lapis lazuli, and he could see the dark mounds of rocks and the swaying tresses of weeds beneath the waves. He was looking forward to seeing what was going to happen to that idiot officer.

  Corelli placed a charge of dynamite beneath the mine, and unreeled the command wire, which was just long enough to reach his soggy trench. Then, anxious that what the sapper had said might just be true, but determined nonetheless to complete his purpose, he and the excitable troop of soldiers piled a thick wall of sand about the mine so that most of the blast would be directed upwards, until eventually it looked like the exact opposite of a doughnut, an excavated ring containing at its centre a column of sand, domed by a forlorn-looking bristle of rusty and truncated spikes. Drosoula was not the only woman who reflected that it looked very like a megalithic penis in repose.

  ‘Avanti,’ cried the captain at last, and the soldiers and spectators wound their way back up the slopes of the cliff, perspiring and panting even though the evening sun had by now lost most of its heat. Down below, Corelli looked little larger than a mouse. The soldiers settled down and argued about whether or not it would be a good beach for playing football. The engineer corporal expatiated vehemently and acidly upon the lunacy of the officer, and offered to take wagers upon his survival. Pelagia began to feel deeply worried, and she noticed that Carlo was sweating with anxiety. She saw him cross himself repeatedly, and mutter prayers. He caught her eye and shot her an imploring glance, as if to say, ‘You are the only one to stop him.’

  Down in his trench, Corelli peeped over the rim of his bunker, and was struck by the implausible propinquity of the mine. The more he looked, the closer and larger it grew, until it actually seemed to be twenty metres high and sitting in his very lap like a grotesque, enormous, and unwelcome whore in a brothel that one has naïvely mistaken for a bar. He decided not to look at it. His bowels churned in a most disconcerting fashion, and he realised that he was soaked up to the knees and that his boots had filled with irritatingly gritty and startlingly wet water. He put both hands upon the T-piece of the plunger, and depressed it a couple of times in order to accustom it to the idea of producing a discharge. Then he connected the terminals.

  Concerned about the vivid possibility of having his eyes and brains sucked out, he practised in his imagination the swift manoeuvre of depressing the plunger and immediately transferring his hands to the sides of his head whilst simultaneously screwing his eyes shut. He raised his gaze to heaven, crossed himself, composed himself, and smartly thrust the plunger down.

  There was a sharp crack, an almost infinitesimal pause, and then a basso profundo roar. The folk on the cliff saw a vast column of debris ascend with majestic certainty and grace past their eyes and up into the sky. With awe in their faces they discerned slowly revolving dark plates of steel, effulgent gouts of water glistening with momentary rainbows, sloppy and distended clods of wet sand, powder storms of dry sand, and billowing efflorescences of black smoke and orange flame.

  ‘Aira!’ cried the exhilarated Greeks, and, ‘Figlio di puttana di stronzo d’un cane d’un culo d’un porco d’un pezzo di merda!’ cried the soldiers. Quite suddenly the shock wave swept upon them and bowled them flat on their backs like the impotent mortals who in ancient times were swatted by the hand of cloud-compelling Zeus. ‘Putanas yie!’ muttered the stupefied Greeks, and, ‘Porco cane!’ the soldiers. They were just beginning to struggle to their feet when they looked up and saw that the seemingly inexhaustible ascent of materials had ceased. In fact it had not only ceased but was flowering inexorably sideways, spinning out in a magisterial and all-encompassing arc. Horrified and mesmerised, the people on the cliff watched and craned their necks ever backward as the perilous but beautiful dark cloud spread above their own heads. Pelagia, like Carlo and so many of the others, was overcome by an icy and paralysed calm, a terrible and helpless dismay, and then, like them, she flung herself face down upon the thorny turf of the cliff and buried her face in her arms.

  A malicious and gigantic pat of wet sand slapped her stingingly across the back, knocking the breath out of her body, and a white-hot shard of metal shot into the soil next to her head, audibly singeing its way to the rock beneath. A splinter snapped into the sole of her shoe, neatly separating it from the heel. Burning motes of rust settled upon her clothes, charring tiny pepper-holes that tormented her flesh and made her squirm from sharp darts of pain that stung and then lingered and mushroomed like the venom of hornets and wasps. Her mind emptied of anything but the vacuum of resignation that afflicts the hopeless in the imminence of death.

  It ended, after an eternity, with a gentle and tenderly consoling rain of dry sand that drifted down out of the sky and pattered softly all upon and about them, piling up in symmetrical cones on the backs of their heads, sticking like icing sugar to the irregular splashes and streaks of wet sand, insinuating itself with insidious skill down behind the collars
of their clothes and inside the uppers of their shoes. It was warm and almost metaphysically pleasant.

  Tremulous and weak as kittens, the people began to stagger to their feet. Some people fell over as soon as they were almost upright, and others fell over because someone nearby had reached out a hand to steady themselves. It was a festa of standing up and falling over, a festa of groping and blundering, a carnival of inexplicably weakened knees and looming pallid faces streaked with congealed or dripping gloops and glots of sand. It was a solemn and stately lumbering of incredibly and bizarrely modified coiffure and unrecognisably tattered clothing, an otherworldly and Stygian celebrazione of lurching bodies, and staringly virgin eyes anomalously inserted into nigger-minstrel faces.

  The calming drizzle of sand was unrelenting; it powdered them, it settled like tiny yellow mites upon their lashes and brows, it clung with tenacious electrostatic force to the hairs within their noses, it ingratiated itself horribly into the saliva of their mouths, it found its way obscenely into the underclothes and horrified the women, it attached itself gratefully to the perspiration of their armpits, and fortuitously it rejuvenated the old by filling up their wrinkles.

  The people clung wordlessly together, dazed with astonishment, watching the spectacular black cloud of filthy smoke massively growing and spreading, blotting the sun and sky and aborting the light. They wiped the sand from their faces with their sleeves, succeeding only in replacing one streak with another. One or two of them began to inspect their cuts and watch with fascination as the crimson-welling blood rose up beneath their dusting of sand, darkened, and congealed.

  No one could recognise anybody else, and Italian and Greek peered into one another’s faces, denationalised by coughing, by grime, and by mutual amazement. Suddenly a choking voice cried out.

  As though galvanised, the people gathered around the corpse of the smug engineer, his neatly severed head smiling seraphically up through its white powdering of sand. The body lay nearby, chest downwards, guillotined by a smoking disc of rusty and jagged steel that was buried to its radius in the turf. ‘He died happy,’ came a voice that Pelagia recognised as that of Carlo, ‘you can’t ask more than that. But he won’t be collecting any bets.’

  ‘Puttana,’ came a tentative and trebly little voice that must have been that of Lemoni. Somebody began to retch, and five or six caught the contagion, adding the noise of painful gagging to the general plague of coughing.

  Abruptly seized by dread, Pelagia ran to the edge of the cliff and peered through the falling sand with panic in her heart. What had happened to the captain?

  She saw a crater thirty metres wide that had already been filled by the curious sea. There were tangled ribbons of metal scattered for hundreds of metres, variously shaped satellitic craters and mounds, but of the captain and his trench there was not a single sign. ‘Carlo!’ she howled, and clutched at her chest. Stunned by grief she sank to her knees and began to weep.

  Carlo ran down the path to the beach, as much emptied by horror as Pelagia, but more accustomed to the duty of overwhelming it. His mind expanded with the remembrance of the pietà of Francisco, with his shattered head, dying; in his arms in Albania, and nothing but running could forestall the hurricane of mourning that was about to burst his heart.

  He came to the point where he guessed the trench had been, and stopped. There was nothing. It was all obliterated and unrecognisable. He raised his arms as though reproaching God, and was about to start pounding at his own temples when there was a movement at the corner of his eye.

  Corelli was indistinguishable from the wet sand because he was perfectly covered in it. The blast had concussed him, and the updraught had sucked him high into the air and then flung him down upon his back. He was now lying face up, modelled perfectly into the beach by a chamfering and moulding of precipitated sand. Floundering and failing to sit up, he looked very like a monster from a film. Carlo laughed out loud, but at the same time his hilarity was tempered by the anxiety that this man whom he so much loved might yet be terribly injured. He could think of nothing else he could do but pick him up in his arms and carry him into the sea; it brought back once again the memory of carrying Francisco from where he had fallen between the lines, and he heard again the gallant cheering of the Greeks.

  In the waves Carlo washed his captain down, and found him wildly disorientated, but apparently uninjured. ‘Was it good?’ asked Corelli. ‘I missed it.’

  ‘It was a real sporcaccione of an explosion,’ said Carlo, ‘absolutely better than anything I’ve ever seen.’

  Corelli saw his lips move, but heard no sound at all. In fact he could hear nothing but the prolonged bonging of the biggest bell in the world. ‘Speak up,’ he said.

  Of the aftermath of this episode there is much to be said. Corelli was deaf for two days, and suffered the most extreme mortification at the thought of losing his music forever. For the rest of his life he would suffer periods of tinnitus, an enduring souvenir of Greece. He was put on a charge by General Gandin because of the death of the engineer and for causing the immediate mobilisation of all Axis troops on the island, an unexpected invasion by the Allies having been adduced from that terrific blast and regal mushroom cloud. He was very nearly demoted, but General Gandin concluded that since the Germans were paying the salaries of the Italian garrison, no material benefit would accrue to Italy. In any case, it was already a cause for friction that the Germans would not allow the Italians to promote anyone because of the expense to the chancellery, and the general was not about to present them with even a minimal saving. He charged Corelli for acting on his own initiative without permission, for not handing over the responsibility to the qualified authority, for reckless endangerment, and for conduct unbecoming to an officer. He was sentenced to a severe reprimand that would rest on his file for the length of his military career. Corelli flamboyantly and ingeniously presented the general’s desirable secretary with a red rose and a box of contraband Swiss chocolates, and the reprimand disappeared mysteriously from the file after smouldering ominously therein for only three days.

  The captain enjoyed the luxury of being pampered and fussed over by Pelagia as never before, and she expressed her relief by means of bombardments of kisses, tender words and promises that easily outshowered the rain of sand. Günter Weber brought over his wind-up gramophone and sat by his bed teaching him the words to ‘Mein Blondes Baby’ and ‘Leben Ohne Liebe’, and Carlo came in and out reporting the steady and saddening erosion of the crater by the sea. Lemoni called in, from now on an unparalleled expert in the finding of pieces of rusty metal, and forced him to get out of bed to come and identify an old ploughshare, the nosecone of an expended anti-aircraft shell, and a squashed tin can. Her disappointment at the realisation that none of them could be blown up surpassed adult understanding by a measure that might accurately be described as infinite.

  But on the evening of that splendid event, the enraged doctor emerged from the kitchen, intending to find Pelagia and give her a piece of his mind, when not only his daughter but an entire crowd of inconceivably filthy, exhausted and ragged folk turned up at the yard. An unrecognisable man as large as Carlo, who later turned out to be Carlo, was bearing in his arms the raving body of someone who later turned out to be the captain. A young woman who looked like some mad and irredeemable slut from the most iniquitously impoverished quarter of Cairo turned out to be Pelagia. A tiny thing that could have been either a boy or a girl dug from an early grave turned out to be Lemoni. He would be busy all night cleaning cuts, and he would earn a spectacular profit in aubergines, which at that time were just corning into season.

  But at that moment, confronted by the sorry crowd of disorientated and beggarish soldiers and Greeks, all he could think of was the repellent and astounding spectacle he had just encountered in the kitchen. ‘Who,’ he roared rhetorically, ‘has had the audacity to fill my house with snails?’

  It was true. There were snails everywhere. They were on the windows, under the
rims of tables, perpendicularly sideways on the walls and on Psipsina’s bowl, in the water jug, glued inadvisedly to the mats, proceeding with determination towards the vegetable basket, and clinging with quixotic relish to the stem of the doctor’s pipe and the glasses of the spectacles that in all innocence he had left upon the sill.

  Pelagia put her hand to her mouth in guilty horror, and Lemoni, perceiving the silvery, meandering, crisscrossing, glistening trails, and the delightfully random distribution of the beasts themselves, clapped her hands together in joy. ‘Porca puttana,’ she said, and a man who must have been her father clipped her sharply about the side of the head.

  44 Theft

  Kokolios was awoken in the middle of the night by sounds of avine distress. His first thought was that the pine marten owned by the doctor had got in amongst his fowls; he had always said that it was antisocial to keep such a notorious bird-thief as a pet, and he had already twice caught it carrying away his eggs. He swore, and then leapt out of bed; he was going to give that little robber a sound thwack over the head with a baton, and that would put an end to the issue whether Dr Iannis liked it or not.

  He pulled on his boots and reached for the cudgel that he had kept over the lintel ever since the outbreak of war. It was a heavy and knotted piece of thorn from the maquis, and he had drilled a hole through the thinner end, to take a loop of leather thong. He slipped the thong over his wrist and pulled open the door of his house, scraping the bottom of it in an arc along the flags. He had been meaning to rehang the door for ten years. Fortunately the sound of it was drowned by the frenzied clucking and screeching of the hens, and he stepped out into the night.