Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  It was a very red-faced angel, and it was terribly tangled up in strings and the fabric of the diaphanous mushroom. Alekos cocked the rifle and pointed it straight into the angel’s face. It opened its eyes, looked at him politely, said, ‘What ho,’ and went straight to sleep.

  It took Alekos some time to disentangle the angel from its webbing and cords, and he decided that the wondrous cloth of the mushroom would make a most luxurious sheet. It also had an ingenious hole in the middle through which one could place one’s head, thereby allowing the mushroom to be worn as a robe. Alekos decided that he would wear it to the feast of the saint, if the angel would give it to him and allow him to cut off the strings.

  He moved the heavenly visitor into his hut, and went to open the large packet that had fallen with him; it contained a heavy metal box with dials, and a small engine. Alekos was by no means stupid, and he concluded that the angel was probably bringing in the engine so that he could build himself some kind of vehicle.

  For two days he fed it on honey and yoghurt, and other dainties that he thought suitable for such a creature from another world, and was delightedly pleased when it began to sit up, rub its head, and talk.

  The trouble was that he could not make head or tail of what it was saying. He did recognise some of the words, but the rhythm of angel-speech was quite foreign to him, the words did not seem to fit together, and it spoke as if it had a pebble in its throat and a bee up its nose. The angel was obviously very annoyed and frustrated at not being understood, and it made Alekos feel fearful and guilty even though it was not his fault. They had to resort to communicating by signs and facial expressions.

  The most intriguing thing about the angel was that when it wanted to speak to God or one of the saints, it fiddled about with the metal box and made lots of interesting whines and hisses and crackles. And then God would speak back in angel-speech, sounding so far away and stilted that Alekos realised for the first time how difficult it was for God to get himself heard by anyone. He began to recognise words that were repeated often, like ‘Charlie’ and ‘Bravo’, and ‘Wilco’, and ‘Roger’. Another odd thing about the creature was that it carried a pistol, a light automatic, and a number of very heavy khaki-coloured iron pine cones with metal levers that he was not allowed to touch. All the angels he had ever seen in pictures carried swords or spears, and it seemed odd that God had seen fit to modernise.

  After four days the angel showed clear signs of wanting to go somewhere, and Alekos, having struggled with his reluctance to leave his goats to the andarte thieves, tapped his chest, smiled, and indicated that the angel should follow him. It accepted with gratitude and gave him chocolate, which he ate in one go, feeling slightly sick afterwards. However, it did not want to go in daylight, and Alekos had to wait until dusk. It also wanted to exchange its webbing packs for a large goatskin. As far as Alekos was concerned, this was the best deal that had ever come his way, and he accepted with alacrity, despite a small twinge of guilt over having diddled an angel, albeit involuntarily and by consent. It consigned its metal box and small engine to the goatskin, bound it up with cord, and slung it over its shoulder.

  Alekos knew that the only person who might have a chance of understanding angel-speech was Dr Iannis, and accordingly it was to that house that he took the angel. It took four days of travelling at night with what Alekos considered to be quite unnecessary stealth, and it took three days of hiding in the maquis in the outrageous heat, being bitten to death by mosquitoes and trying to talk in whispers. It seemed quite likely that God had expelled this particular angel from heaven on the grounds of insanity. But Alekos was not going to protest; it had very fair hair, was outstandingly tall, had indefatigable powers of endurance, and possessed all of its teeth, giving it a very engaging smile. It also scowled fiercely when Italian or German soldiers were nearby, and from this Alekos deduced that God was undoubtedly fighting for the Greeks.

  Dr Iannis was awoken at three o’clock in the morning by a gentle tapping on his window. He lay still for a moment, wondering with irritation how a branch could be doing such a thing when there was not any tree. Finally he rolled out of bed and unbolted the shutters. He saw Alekos, which was surprising enough, but he also saw a very tall fair-haired man dressed in the fustanella of an evzone. Alekos perceived the expression of perplexity on the doctor’s face, raised his hands, shrugged, said, ‘I’ve brought you an angel,’ and departed before he could become involved in any arguments about responsibility for it.

  The angel smiled and held out his hand. ‘Bunnios,’ he said, ‘I cleped am.’

  The doctor shook the proffered hand through the window, and said, ‘Dr Iannis.’

  ‘Sire, of youre gentillesse, by the leve of yow wol I speke in pryvetee of certeyn thyng.’

  The doctor knitted his brows in bewilderment, ‘What?’

  The strange man signalled that he wanted to come in, and the doctor sighed impatiently, reckoning upon telling him to go around to the door. But as soon as he nodded the man put one hand up to the frame of the window and bounded through. He dumped his skin full of equipment upon the floor, and shook the doctor’s hand all over again. Pelagia came in blearily, having heard the sounds, and beheld a man dressed in the tasselled cap, the white kilt and hose, the embroidered waistcoat, and the slippers with pompoms that was the festival dress of some people on the mainland. It was very grubby, but unmistakably new. She looked up at him in amazement, and put her hand over her mouth. Wide-eyed, she demanded of her father, ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Who’s this?’ repeated the doctor. ‘How am I supposed to know? Alekos said it was an angel and then ran off. He says he’s called Bunnios, and he talks Greek like a Spanish cow.’

  The outlandish man bowed politely and shook Pelagia’s hand. She let it go limp in his, and could not conceal her astonishment. He smiled charmingly and said, ‘I preise wel thy fresshe beautee and age tendre, I trow.’

  ‘I am Pelagia,’ she said, and then she asked her father, ‘What’s he speaking? It’s not Katharevousa.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t. And it certainly isn’t Romaic’

  ‘Do you think it’s Bulgarian or Turkish or something?’

  ‘Greek of th’olde dayes,’ said the man, adding, ‘Pericles. Demosthenes. Homer.’

  ‘Ancient Greek?’ exclaimed Pelagia, disbelievingly. She stepped back for fear of being in the company of a ghost. She had heard from childhood all about the Marble Emperor who had been carried by an angel to a cave, whence he would return one day to drive out the oppressors. But this man seemed more flesh than marble, and it was only a silly legend. There was another tale about fair-haired strangers from the north who would bring deliverance. Who knows?

  The doctor tapped his forefinger to his forehead, and looked up triumphantly. ‘English?’ he asked.

  ‘Engelonde,’ agreed the man. ‘Natheless, I prithee, by my trouthe …’

  ‘Of course we won’t tell anyone. Please may we speak English? Your pronunciation is truly terrible. It hurts my head. Pelagia, bring a glass of water and some spoon sweets.’

  The Englishman smiled with what was obviously an enormous relief; it had been an awful burden to be speaking the finest public school Greek, and not be understood. He had been told that he was the nearest thing to a real Graecophone that could be found under the circumstances, and he knew perfectly well that modern Greek was not quite the same as the Greek of Eton, but he had had no idea that he would be found quite so incomprehensible. It was also very clear that someone in Intelligence had contrived a completely aberrant notion of what was worn in Cephallonia.

  ‘We are having an Italian officer asleeping in a room,’ said the doctor, whose English was not as good as he liked to believe, ‘so we are being very quiet, please.’

  The Englishman unbound his goatskin and removed a revolver. Pelagia was horrified. As far as she was concerned, no one was going to shoot Antonio. The man saw her consternation and said, ‘A precaution. I wouldn’t want to bring about re
prisals unless I jolly well had to.’

  ‘A spy?’ asked the doctor. ‘Espionage?’

  The man nodded, and said, ‘Very hush-hush. Do you have any clothes I could have? I would be most frightfully grateful.’

  The doctor indicated the fustanella; ‘Is not our cloths of Cephallonia.’ He pointed to a framed picture on the wall of a young man in knee-length breeches, a white sash about his waist, a white floppy cap upon his head, and a waistcoat with two rows of broad silver buttons. ‘Is our cloths,’ he explained, ‘but only feast. We dress same as you. I bring you cloths, you give me fustanella, OK?’

  The doctor had always wanted a set of fustanella and had never been able to afford it. Whilst fetching some ordinary clothes he said, ‘Thank you Wiston Tzortzil,’ raising his eyes to heaven as though Churchill were the deity. One day he would astonish everybody at a celebration. He chuckled with anticipative delight. The mangas in the kapheneia would think he had given up being a Europeanised alafranga and turned into one of those traditionalist fustanellophoroi. He wondered where he could find one of those elaborate traditional pipes, a tsibouki, to complete the picture.

  It was far from easy to get the spy into the garments of a smaller man, but it was a small consolation that they both required an identical size of hat. The trussed Englishman departed for Argostoli at dawn, the turn-ups of his trousers half way up his pink calves and the jacket unfastenable, bearing his equipment in a hessian sack, also provided by the doctor, who would not let him depart without imparting some sound advice:

  ‘Look, OK? You accent terrible-terrible. Not to talk, understand? You are quiet until you learning. Also, you watch out andartes. They thieves, not soldiers, they say Communist, but they thieves. They not interested fighting, understand? Italians OK, Germans not good, see?’

  And so it was that Lieutenant ‘Bunny’ Warren, seconded to the SOE from the King’s Dragoon Guards, with astounding initiative and outstanding cheek, set up his home in a large house in which four Italian officers were already billeted. He perplexed and confounded them by trying to communicate in Latin, and every week he trekked to the deserted shack where he had installed his radio and his recharging engine. He reported in great detail to Cairo, informing them of troop movements and numbers, just in case the Allies should decide to invade Greece instead of Sicily.

  It was a lonely life, and it was galling to be considered mad, but then madness was perhaps the best disguise. With his bodybelt full of gold sovereigns he covered Cephallonia on foot, memorising everything, and once or twice he climbed Mt Aenos to pay his respects to his first host, who was never entirely convinced that he had not been an angel. He sometimes joined up with the conveniently peripatetic Father Arsenios, and passed for another prophetic religious fanatic.

  His radio never let him down once. It was a Brown B2. It had only two Loctal valves, it had an aerial that looked exactly like a washing-line, it ran from the mains or by a six-volt battery, and, weighing in at a paltry thirty-two pounds, it was a miracle of miniaturisation.

  47 Dr Iannis Counsels his Daughter

  Dr Iannis packed his pipe with the lethally acrid mixture that passed for tobacco in those days of occupation, tamped it down, lit it, and sucked unwisely hard. The sharp smoke struck him at the back of the throat, and his eyes bulged. He spluttered, clutched at his neck with one hand, and coughed violently. He threw the pipe down and muttered, ‘Faeces, nothing but faeces. What has the world come to when I am reduced to smoking coprolite? Well, that’s it, I will never smoke again.’

  The pipe had recently brought him more pain than consolation. For one thing it was impossible to obtain pipe cleaners, and he had been reduced to scouring the garden for wing feathers. He had even bribed little Lemoni to go down to the beach and find them, and this had involved inducing Pelagia to make the little honey-pastries that Lemoni loved. It threatened to become an infinite and unmanageable regress of corruption. He had attempted to cut the Gordian knot by giving up the cleaning of his pipe, but this had resulted in the inhalation of indescribably repellent, ferociously bitter, and appallingly slimy gobbets of cold dottle. It made him feel as nauseated as a maladapted dog that had eaten chilli peppers soaked in gasoline, and all this just so that he could smoke tobacco that was no less than the equivalent of an amateur tonsillectomy. He felt betrayed and irritable. His pipe was a St Claude that he had bought in Marseilles, and it was supposed to be an old friend. Agreed, it had burned away about the rim and the stem was yellowed and bitten, but it had never before attacked him with such malice. He left it on the floor and returned to his writing:

  ‘Because the island is a jewel it has since the time of Odysseus been the plaything of the great, the powerful, the plutocratic, and the odious. The unphilosophical Romans, unenlightened in any of the arts except for that of managing slaves and that of military conquest, sacked the city of Sami and massacred its population after an heroic resistance that had endured for four months. There began a long and lamentable history of its being passed from hand to hand as a gift, at the same time as it was repeatedly being raided by corsairs from all the many corners of the malversated Mediterranean Sea. Thus was an island plundered in perpetuity, an island whose celebrated musician Melampus had won the prize for Cithara at the Olympic Games as long ago as 582 BC. From the time of the Romans the only prize for us was survival.’

  The doctor paused and picked up his pipe from the floor, forgetting that moments before he had renounced it forever. It was the same old problem; it was not so much a history as a lament. Or a tirade. Or a Philippic. He was struck suddenly by the illuminating idea that perhaps it was not that it was impossible for him to write a history, but that History Itself Was Impossible. Satisfied with the profundity of the implications of this thought, he rewarded himself with a deep draw on his pipe that once again reduced him to helpless paroxysms of agonising sneezes and coughs.

  Seized with fury, he stood up and contemplated breaking the pipe in half. He was on the point of doing so when he was vanquished by a sense of pre-emptive panic. The fact was that Giving Up Smoking was as Inconceivable as History. It was clear that there was going to have to be some kind of accommodation between himself and his pipe. He called in Pelagia, who had been carefully spooning the coffee grounds out of that morning’s cups so that they could be used again. The coffee situation was as dire as the tobacco crisis.

  ‘Daughter,’ he said, ‘I want you to melt a little honey in some brandy, and then mix this tobacco in it. It is simply insufferable as it is. It is most unpleasantly sternutatory.’

  Pelagia looked at him wryly and took the proffered tin. She was on the point of going when her father added, ‘Don’t go yet, there’s something I have to talk to you about.’

  The doctor was surprised. ‘What do I want to talk to her about?’ he asked himself. It was as if he had gleaned some impressions, some impressions that needed to be discussed, but which had not yet congealed into a set of ideas.

  Pelagia sat down opposite him, removed some stray hairs that had fallen about her face by force of habit, and asked, ‘What is it, Papakis?’ He looked at her sitting there, her hands folded on her lap, an expectant expression playing about her eyes, and a demure smile upon her lips. Her appearance of pretty innocence reminded him of what he had wanted to say. Anyone, and especially a daughter, who could appear so virginal and sweet was quite obviously involved in mischiefs and misdemeanours.

  ‘It has not escaped my notice, Pelagia, that you have fallen in love with the captain.’

  She flushed violently, looked perfectly horrified, and began to stammer. The captain?’ she repeated foolishly.

  ‘Yes, the captain, our uninvited but charming guest. He who plays the mandolin in the moonlight and brings you Italian confectionery that you do not always see fit to share with your father. This latter being the one whom you presume to be both blind and stupid.’

  ‘Papakis,’ she protested, too taken aback to add any kind of articulate coda to this interjection.
r />   ‘Even your neck and your ears have gone red,’ observed the doctor, enjoying her discomfiture and deliberately heaping more coals upon it.

  ‘But Papakis …’

  The doctor waved his pipe expansively. ‘Really, this point is not worth denying or discussing, because it is all very obvious. The diagnosis has been made and confirmed. We should be discussing the implications. By the way, it is clear to me that he also is in love with you.’

  ‘He has said no such thing, Papas. Why are you trying to vex me? I am beginning to be very annoyed. How can you say such things?’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ he said with satisfaction, ‘that’s my daughter.’

  ‘I am going to hit you, really I am.’

  He leaned forward and took one of her hands. She looked away and flushed even more deeply. It was so typical of him to make her utterly indignant and then to deflate her with a gentle gesture. He was an unmanageable father, a farrago of peremptory orders one minute, sly and wheedling the next, lofty and aristocratically detached the minute after that.

  ‘I am a doctor, but I am also a man who has lived a lot of life and who has observed it,’ said the doctor. ‘Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms. You blush in each other’s presence, you both hover in places where you expect the other to pass, you are both a little tongue-tied, you both laugh inexplicably and too long, you become quite nauseatingly girlish, and he becomes quite ridiculously gallant. You have also grown a little stupid. He gave you a rose the other day, and you pressed it in my book of symptoms. If you had not been in love and had had a little sense, you would have pressed it in some other book that I did not use every day. I think it very fitting that the rose is to be found in the section that deals with erotomania.’

  Pelagia suspected the imminent collapse of a thousand pretty dreams. She remembered the confidential advice of her aunt: ‘For a woman to obtain success, she is obliged either to weep, to nag, or to sulk. She must be prepared to do this for years, because she is the disposable property of the men of the family, and men, like rocks, take a long time to wear down.’ Pelagia tried to weep, but was physically prevented by a mounting sense of panic. She stood up suddenly, and just as abruptly sat down again. She foresaw an abyss opening at her feet and an army of Turks, in the form of her father, preparing to push her over the precipice. His dry dissection of her heart seemed already to have banished the magic from her imagination.