Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  The doctor translated these instructions for Corelli’s benefit, and it was generally agreed that it was all as clear as water. Warren spoke again, ‘I’ve done a recce tonight, and jerry’s lying low. Doesn’t like the cold. Warm clothing essential. Understood?’

  Pelagia stood up and went into her room, returning with her blankets and something else. ‘Antonio,’ she said, ‘take this. I want you to have it.’ He unwrapped the soft paper, and saw that it was the embroidered waistcoat that, so many months before, he had offered to buy. He held it up, and the gold thread glistened darkly in the half light. ‘O, koritsimou,’ he said, feeling the sumptuous velvet beneath his thumb and, with his forefinger, the slippery satin of the lining. He stood up, removed his jerkin, and put the waistcoat on. He buttoned it, shook his shoulders to settle it comfortably, and exclaimed, ‘It fits exactly.’

  ‘You will wear it to dance at our wedding,’ she said, ‘but for now it will help to warm you on the boat.’

  Beyond the village of Spartia, on Cape Liaka, there is a very steep cliff that falls to the sea, and which in those days was accessible only by a long goatpath that snaked its stony way through the maquis. Its sole human use was as a track for those fishermen who in the summer spread finely meshed nets for the catching of the shoals of whitebait that gathered unsuspectingly in the lee of the great rocks that jutted above the water, and its beach consisted of a strip of sand barely two metres wide in the places which were not occupied by battered stone. As rocky and perilous as it appeared, the sea bed itself consisted almost entirely of fine sand, and it was ideal for the landing of even quite large boats, since it shelved quite sharply to a good draught, and above it the cliffs projected forward, making it difficult to observe from the summit. There were German observation posts at regular intervals from Cape Aghia Pelagia to Lourdas Bay, but they were undermanned and apathetic, especially on cold December nights, and, like the Italians before them, the Germans knew very well that the real war was happening elsewhere. In the absence of officers, the sentinels would play cards and smoke cigarettes in their little wooden huts, occasionally going out to stamp their feet or urinate, looking all the while for the pole star that beckoned the direction home.

  The journey to the beach did not therefore consist of the stuff of great adventures. A cold wind soughed through the thorns, and no moon was shining. A light rain threatened its onset by means of an occasional speckle of droplets, and the darkness was so entire that at times Pelagia feared she would lose contact with her father in front of her. The effect of the cold on her wasted frame rendered her doubly miserable at every one of Warren’s silent stops, and the fact that her father was carrying a pistol in his hand seemed somehow more frightening and disturbing than her own tight grip on her derringer. She fought against both the void that seemed to be opening in her heart, and the same heart’s fearful thumping and racing. Behind her, Antonio Corelli, although called to strength by the need to protect the fiancée in front of him, felt much the same emotions. He found himself demanding why he was involved in all of this, rebelling against it and rejecting it, but acknowledging its necessity. He was oppressed by an enfeebling sense of futility and melancholy, and almost wished that they would meet a German patrol, so that he could die, fighting and killing, ending it all in lightning and fire, but ending it now. He knew that to leave the island would be to become deracinated.

  The four of them huddled together on that tiny strip of sand, out of the cold grip of the wind, waiting for the flash of a lamp that would come to them from the sea. Warren lit his own, and shielded its glow inside his cape whilst the others took turns to warm their hands beside it. Corelli walked to the waterline and saw the black waves heaving, wondering how he would ever survive it. He remembered other beaches, seeing the boys of La Scala singing and drinking together as the naked whores splashed in the shallows of a sea so calm and clear that it should have been a lake in Arcadia. In his mind’s eye he saw the incredible turquoise of Kiriaki Bay seen from above in the summer on the journey back from Assos, and the beauty of the memory increased his sense of loss. He remembered what the doctor had told him about xenitia, the terrible nostalgic love of one’s native land that hurts the exiled Greek, and felt it turning in his own breast like the twist of a bayonet. He had his own village now, his own patrida, and even his thought and speech had changed. He threw a black stone into the sea to charm some luck, and returned to Pelagia. In the darkness he held her face in his hands, and then embraced her. Her hair still smelled of rosemary, and he breathed the scent so deeply that it hurt his mending ribs. The aroma had been quickened by the cold fresh air, and he knew that rosemary would never smell so poignant and complete again. From now on it would smell of vanished light, and dust.

  When the light flashed three times from the sea, and Warren returned the signal, Corelli shook the lieutenant’s hand, kissed his father-in-law on both cheeks, and returned to Pelagia. There was nothing to be said. He knew that her mouth was working with grief, and he himself felt the constriction of the same passion in his throat. He stroked her cheek tenderly and kissed her at the eyes, as though to mitigate her tears. He heard the hollow sound of oars striking the gunwales of a skiff, the creak of wood on leather, and looked up to see the silhouette of the craft approaching, the shadows of two men labouring together. The four approached the water, and the doctor said, ‘Go well, Antonio, and return.’

  In Romaic the captain said, ‘From your lips to the ear of God,’ and for the last time he held Pelagia.

  After he had plunged through the surf and clambered aboard, vanishing into the darkness like a ghost, Pelagia ran into the waves until the sea reached her thighs. She strained to see him for the last time, and saw nothing. As though by a raptor’s claw, she was seized and clutched by emptiness. She put her hands to her face and wept, her shoulders heaving, her sobs of agony carried off in the wind and lost in the hiss of the sea.

  62 Of the German Occupation

  Of the German occupation there is little to say, except that it caused the islanders to love more nearly the Italians they had lost. It seldom happens that a people can bring themselves to learn affection for their oppressors, but hardly since Roman times had there been any other kind of rule. Now there were no more Italians working amid the vines beside the farmers in order to escape the boredom of garrison life, there were no more football matches between sides that squabbled and cheated and mobbed the referee, there was no flirtation with girls by bombardiers whose caps were askew, whose chins were unshaven, and who always had a demi-cigarette smouldering at the corners of their mouths. There were no more tenor voices to send snatches of Neapolitan song and sentimental aria out across the pines of the mountains. There were no more inefficient military police to cause traffic jams at the centre of Argostoli by waving their arms and shrilling their whistles at everyone at once, there was no unpunctual aquaplane to buzz a lazy and half-hearted reconnaissance about the island, there were no more flagrant military whores with painted lips and parasols bathing naked in the sea and being driven about by a bemused old Greek with a cart. There is no record of what happened to the girls; possibly they were deported for slave labour to some nameless camp of Eastern Europe, and possibly they were abused and killed, finding a grave amongst the men they had loved for duty, or mingling their ashes with theirs in the biblical pyres that had filled the sky with black smoke, burned giant circles deep into the turf, and tarred the nostrils with the stench of kerosene and charring bone. Adriana, La Triestina, Madama Nina, all had disappeared.

  The few remains of the Italian soldiers were gathered together after the war. A few bodies were dug intact from the Italian cemetery, they were carried back to Italy on a black-hulled ship of war, and efforts were made to identify them. It was not possible, and it is said that families were given bones and cinders that could have been those of any man at all. Therefore there were some mothers who made lamentation over the dead children of other mothers, but most were left with sons who now were melding
with the soil of Cephallonia or who had scattered to the Ionian air as ash, cut off in the full exuberance of youth and lost forever to a world that had ignored their plight in life and disregarded them in death.

  Gone were the charming chicken-thieves, the waggish individualists and songsters, and in their place an interregnum came that the doctor recorded in his History as the direst time of all.

  The islanders remember that the Germans were not human beings. They were automata without principles, machines finely tuned in the art of pillage and brutality, without any passion except the love of strength, and without belief except in their natural right to grind an inferior race beneath the heel.

  To be sure the Italians had been thieves, but their sorties at night, their strategies to avoid being caught, their shame when apprehended, had disclosed that they knew that what they did was wrong. The Germans came into any house at any time of day, kicked over the furniture, beat the occupants, however old or young, however ill, and in front of their eyes carried away whatever took their fancy. Ornaments, rings handed down in one family for generations, oil-lamps, benzene stoves, sailors’ souvenirs of the East, all disappeared. It was amusing and appropriate to humiliate the negroids whose culture was so paltry. Casually they let the people starve, and made the sign of thumbs up when Greek coffins passed over the stones to tombs.

  Both Pelagia and her father were beaten at different times for no apparent cause. Psipsina, for the crime of being tame, was torn from Pelagia’s arms and frivolously clubbed to death with the butt of a rifle. Drosoula had cigarette stubs burned into the skin of her breasts for scowling at an officer. The doctor had all his precious medical equipment, gathered together through twenty conscientious years of poverty, smashed in his presence by four soldiers who wore the death’s-head upon their belts and whose hearts were as dark and dank and empty as the Drogarati caves. In the year of the German occupation, the Holy Snakes did not appear at the church of Our Lady at Markopoulo, and neither did the Sacred Lily flower at Demoutsandata.

  When in November 1944 the invincible representatives of the master-race of the eternal Reich were ordered to withdraw, they destroyed every building for which they found the time, and the inhabitants of Cephallonia rose spontaneously against them and fought them all the way to the sea.

  But the night before he left, Günter Weber, who had ashamedly stayed away from the house since the time of the massacres, brought his gramophone and his collection of Marlene Dietrich recordings, and left them outside Pelagia’s door, as he had promised in more fortunate days. He left an envelope underneath the lid, and when she opened it Pelagia found a photograph depicting Antonio Corelli and the Leutnant on the beach, their arms about each others’ shoulders. Corelli wore an elaborate woman’s bonnet complete with artificial fruit and tattered paper roses; he was waving a bottle of wine at the camera, and Günter was wearing an Italian fore-and-aft cap sideways on his head. Their eyes were half-closed, and obviously both of them were drunk. In the distance Pelagia barely discerned the figure of a naked woman paddling at the sea’s edge, wearing the peaked officer’s cap of a German grenadier. Her arms were outspread in a gesture of delight, and an arc of spray had been caught by the light as she had kicked it upward with her foot. Obscurely, Pelagia felt neither surprise nor jealousy at the presence of this arresting figure; it seemed right that she should be there, appropriate to the intimations of Eden that Corelli used to conjure from the air.

  She turned the photograph over, and found four lines from Faust whose meaning she would not discover until she showed it to a diffident German tourist some thirty-five years later. It said:

  ‘Mein Ruh ist hin,

  Mein Herz ist schwer;

  Ich finde sie nimmer

  Und nimmermehr.’

  Underneath Weber had written in Italian, ‘God be with you, I will remember you always.’

  The record-player was hidden in the hole in the floor, along with Antonio’s mandolin and Carlo’s confessional papers, and it survived the fratricide.

  History repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then again as tragedy. The Germans had killed perhaps four thousand Italian boys, including one hundred medical orderlies with Red Cross armbands, burning their bodies or sinking them at sea in ballasted barges. But another four thousand had survived, and, exactly as in Corfu, the British bombed the ships that were taking them away to labour camps. Most drowned in the hulls, but those who managed to leap into the sea were machine-gunned by the Germans, and once again their bodies left to float.

  63 Liberation

  The Germans left and the celebrations began, but no sooner had the bells pealed out than the andartes of ELAS, now calling themselves the EAM, emerged from their state of hibernation and imposed themselves on the people with the aid of British arms, mistakenly supplied in the belief that they were to be used to defeat the Nazis. Acting, it was said, on Tito’s orders, they formed Workers’ Councils and Committees, and proceeded to elect themselves unanimously to every post of authority, and to extort a tax of a quarter on everything they could think of. In Zante, villages with Royalist sympathies armed themselves and fortified their houses, and in Cephallonia the Communists began to deport awkward characters to concentration camps; from a safe distance they had watched the Nazis for years, and were well-versed in all the arts of atrocity and oppression. Hitler would have been proud of such assiduous pupils. Their secret police (OPLA) identified all Venizelists and Royalists, and marked them down for Fascists.

  On the mainland they seized Red Cross provisions, poisoned the wells of hostile villages with dead donkeys and the corpses of dissidents, demanded a quarter of the food landed at Piraeus for the relief of Athens, circulated a newspaper ironically entitled Alithea (The Truth), which was full of lies about their own heroism and the cowardice of everyone else, disposed randomly of anyone inconvenient on the grounds that they had been ‘collaborators’, hired prostitutes to lure British soldiers into their line of fire, disguised themselves as British soldiers, Red Cross workers, as police or members of the Mountain Brigade, and used children carrying the white flag to work deceptions that were to lead to ambush. They fired shells at shoppers and at British soldiers ladling food out to the starving, took 20,000 innocents as hostages, shot 114 socialist but non-Communist trades union leaders, and destroyed factories, docks and railways that the Germans had left intact. Into mass graves they threw the cadavers of Greeks who had been castrated, had their mouths slashed into a ‘smile’, and had their eyes torn out. They created 100,000 refugees, and, worst of all, the Communists kidnapped 30,000 little children and shipped them across the border into Yugoslavia for indoctrination. ELAS soldiers captured by the British pleaded not to be exchanged for prisoners, so terrified were they of their leaders, and ordinary Greeks begged the British officers to help them. A dentist in Athens offered free false teeth to servicemen.

  In all this there was both an irony and a tragedy. The irony was that if the Communists had continued their wartime policy of doing absolutely nothing, they would undoubtedly have become the first freely elected Communist government in the world. Whereas in France the Communists had earned themselves a rightful and respected place in political life, the Greek Communists made themselves permanently unelectable because even Communists could not bring themselves to vote for them. The tragedy was that this was yet another step along the fated path by which Communism was growing into the Greatest and Most Humane Ideology Never to Have Been Implemented Even When it Was in Power, or perhaps The Most Noble Cause Ever to Attract the Highest Proportion of Hooligans and Opportunists.

  Of all the millions of lives irreparably blighted by those hooligans, those of Pelagia and the doctor were but two. The doctor was dragged away in the night by three armed men who had decided that since he was a republican he must therefore be a Fascist, and that since he was a doctor he must therefore be a bourgeois. They threw Pelagia into a corner and beat her unconscious with a chair. When Kokolios emerged from his house to defend the docto
r, he too was carried away, even though he was a Communist. By his actions he had betrayed the impurity of his faith, and he was supported on the arm of the monarchist Stamatis as all three were herded to the docks for transportation.

  Pelagia did not know what had happened to her father or where he had been taken, and none of the authorities would tell her. Alone in the house, penniless and helpless, stricken by a second dose of inconsolable despair, she thought for the first time in her life of ending everything by suicide. She saw no future except the succession of one type of Fascism by another, on an island seemingly accursed and destined forever to be a part of someone else’s game, a game whose cynical players changed but whose counters were fashioned out of bone and blood, the flesh of all the innocent and weak. When would Antonio return? The war was dragging on in Europe, and probably he was dead. It was a life where her beauty would be gnawed by poverty, her health by hunger. She wandered from room to room, her footsteps echoing in that empty, haunted house, her heart aching for herself and for mankind. The Nazis had slaughtered 60,000 Greek Jews, or so it said on the radio, and now her own people killed their brothers as if the Nazis had only been a police force whose departure had been eagerly awaited by the fratricides. She heard that the Communists had been killing off the Italian soldiers who had come to fight alongside them against the Germans. She remembered the happy boys of La Scala, she remembered saying that she would always hate the Nazis. Had the time come, finally, to always hate the Greeks? Of the nations who had broken into her house to beat her and steal her possessions, only the Italians were innocent, it seemed. She thought of how the British were too slow to come, and wondered what had happened to Lieutenant Bunny Warren. She would not have been surprised if she had known that shortly after the liberation he had been invited to a party by the Communists, and shot. This was the man who had told her, ‘I would do anything for the Greeks. I have come to love them.’ And if she hated the Greeks, to which people did she now belong? She was without father, without possessions, without food, without love, without hope, without country.