Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  Fortunately she had a friend. Drosoula had long known that Pelagia had lost her love for Mandras, that there would be no wedding, and that in his long absence and by his long silence her son had forfeited his rights. She knew also that Pelagia was waiting for an Italian, and yet she felt no bitterness and never uttered a single word of blame. When Pelagia had limped bleeding through her door and flown into her arms after the abduction of her father, Drosoula, who had also suffered much, stroked her hair and uttered words such as a mother might for her daughter. Within a week she had closed up the doors and shutters of her little house on the quay, and moved into the doctor’s house on the hill. She found his Italian pistol and its ammunition in a drawer, and kept it at her side for when the Fascist pigs returned.

  Like Pelagia, Drosoula had been diminished by the war. Her great ugly moon of a face had shrunk inwards, giving her an air of ethereal soulfulness despite her thick lips and massive brows. Her cheerful rolls of fat had fallen from her thighs and hips, and the massive promontory of her maternal bosom had lapsed downwards into the space left vacant by the erstwhile exuberance of her stomach. Arthritis had begun to afflict one knee and both joints of the thigh, and she walked now with a slow dragging and jerking motion that was painful and mechanical to behold. Her new and unwonted slenderness lent dignity to her great height, however, and her grey hairs inspired respect and left her more formidable. Her spirit was unbroken, and she gave Pelagia strength.

  For comfort they slept together in the doctor’s bed, and by day they concocted schemes to find supplies of food and listened to each others’ plaints and tales. They dug for roots in the maquis, sprouted ancient beans in dishes, lethally disturbed the hibernation of hedgehogs, and Drosoula took her young friend down to the rocks to learn to fish and turn the stones for crabs, returning with seaweed to serve in place of vegetables and salt.

  But it was at an hour that Drosoula was out that Mandras returned, full of his purported glory and his new ideas, expectant of the dutiful and admiring attention of the fiancée that he had not seen for years, and intent upon exacting his revenge.

  He came in through the door without knocking, dropped his knapsack from his shoulders, and propped his Lee-Enfield against the wall. Pelagia had been sitting upon her bed putting the finishing touches to the blanket that she had crocheted for her wedding, and which, miraculously, had burgeoned flawlessly from the day of Antonio’s departure. It had been a way of creating their life together in his absence, and every stitch and knot had been tied in with all the labyrinthine yearning of her solitary heart. When she heard the noise in the kitchen she called out, ‘Drosoula?’

  A man came in that she did not recognise, except that he looked very like Drosoula had done before the war. There was the same distended belly and thighs, the same round, coarse face, the identical heavy eyebrows and thickened lips. Three years of living in idleness upon the bounty of the British and the booty stolen from peasants had turned the handsome fisherman into nothing if not a toad. In perplexity, Pelagia stood up.

  Mandras also was perplexed. There was something about this frightened skinny girl that reminded him of Pelagia.

  But this breastless woman had silver threads in her thin black hair, her lank skirts hung straight to the ground for lack of rounded hips, her lips were chapped and parched, her cheeks hollow. He looked quickly about the room to see whether Pelagia was there, assuming that this must be a cousin or an aunt. ‘Mandras, is it you?’ said the woman, and he recognised the voice.

  He stood, astounded, much of his hatred knocked out of him, confused and appalled. She in her turn looked at those gross and transfigured features, and felt a pang of horror. ‘I thought you must be dead,’ she said at length.

  He closed the door and leaned against it, ‘You mean you were hoping I was dead. As you see, I am not. I am very alive and very well. Don’t I get a kiss from my betrothed?’

  She advanced timidly and reluctantly, and placed a kiss on his right cheek. ‘I am glad you are alive,’ she said.

  He caught both her wrists and held them tightly, ‘I don’t think you are. How is your father, by the way? Is he not here?’

  ‘Let me go,’ she said softly, and he did so. She returned to the bed and told him, ‘The Communists took him away.’

  ‘Well, he must have done something to deserve it.’

  ‘He did nothing. He healed the sick. And they beat me with a chair, and they took everything.’

  ‘There would be reasons. The party is never wrong. Whoever is not with us is against us.’

  She noticed that he was in the uniform of an Italian captain, and that he wore the red star of ELAS clumsily sewn into the front of his cap. He was a shabby caricature of the man who had replaced him. ‘You’re one of them,’ she said.

  He leaned ever more casually against the door, placing all his weight against it, increasing her sense of imprisonment and her fear. ‘Not just one of them,’ he said complacently, ‘an important one of them.’ He taunted her, ‘Soon I shall be a commissar, and we will have a nice big house to live in. When shall we get married?’

  She trembled and shuddered. He saw it, and it increased his rage. ‘We will not be married,’ she said. She looked up at him as placatingly as she could, ‘We were very young and naïve, it was not what we thought it was.’

  ‘Not what we thought? And there was I, fighting for Greece, thinking of you all day and dreaming of you all night. And when I thought of Greece, I gave her your face, and I fought harder. And now I come back at last and find a faded slut who has forgotten me. And did I say “married”? I forgot myself. I forgot that marriage is a sham.’ He quoted the Communist Manifesto: ‘Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked.

  ‘The matter with me?’ He took from his jacket a thick bundle of tattered papers. ‘This is what is the matter with me.’ He tossed them towards her feet, and she picked them up slowly, her stomach churning with misgivings. She held the bundle in her hands, and realised that it consisted of her letters to him at the Albanian front. ‘My letters?’ she said, turning them over in her hands.

  ‘Your letters. As you know, I cannot read, so I have come back to hear you read them again. A reasonable request I think. I would like you to start with the last one, and we will work backwards from there perhaps. Go on, read.’

  ‘O Mandras, please. Why is this necessary? It’s all in the past.’

  ‘Read,’ he said, raising his hand to strike her. She cringed away, protecting her face with her hands, and then fumbled with the tripwire that bound the letters together. She found the last one, but could not read it. She pretended to be looking for it, and chose one from near the beginning. In a faltering voice she began, ‘ “Agapeton, Still no word of you, and strangely enough I am beginning to get stoical about it. Panayis came back from the front with his hand missing, and he told me that it is too cold at the front for it to be possible to hold a pen at all …” ’

  Mandras interrupted her, ‘Do you think I am stupid, slut? I said, read the last one.’

  Horrified, she scrabbled through the sheets to find the last one, and realised that he was putting her through a torment identical to that which she had suffered so many months before. She looked at the stark message on her last letter, and her terror made her weak. ‘ “Agapeton,” ’ she began, her voice cracking, ‘ “I miss you so much …” ’

  Mandras roared with disgust and snatched it out of her hands. He held the paper up to the light and read, ‘ “You never write to me, and at first I was sad and worried. Now I realise that you cannot care, and this has caused me to lose my affection also. I want you to know that I have decided to release you from your promises. I am sorry.” ’ He smiled sardonically, a mirthless grin both sinister and menacing. ‘Have you ever heard of Workers’ Self-Education? Yes, I can read. And this is what I found in the letters I had been carrying next to my heart. It’s strange, but when you read this letter to
me once, I seem to recall that it said something different. I have been wondering how a letter might rewrite itself. It almost makes me believe in angels. Peculiar isn’t it? I wonder what the explanation could possibly be.’

  ‘I didn’t want to hurt you. I am sorry. But now at least you know the truth.’

  ‘The truth,’ he shouted, ‘the truth? The truth is that you are a whore. And do you know what else? Do you know the first thing I hear when I arrive? I hear, “Hey Mandras, did you hear about your old fiancée? She’s going to marry an Italian.” So you’ve found a Fascist for yourself have you? Is this what I’ve been fighting for? Traitor slut.’

  Pelagia stood up, her lips quivering, and said, ‘Mandras, let me out.’

  ‘Let me out,’ he repeated satirically, ‘let me out. Poor little thing’s frightened is she?’ He strode up to her and struck her across the face so brutally that she wheeled about before she fell. He kicked her in the region of the kidneys, and bent down to pick her up by the wrists. He flung her on the bed, and, quite against his original intentions, began to tear at her clothes.

  This violation of women was something that he could not help, it seemed. It was some irresistible reflex that welled up from deep inside his breast, a reflex acquired in three years of omnipotence and unaccountability that had begun with the armed appropriation of property and ended with the appropriation of everything. It was a natural right, a matter of course, and its violence and animality was infinitely more exhilarating than the feeble stings of lust with which it ended. Sometimes one had to kill at the end of it to draw back a tiny remnant, a vestige of the prior joy. And then there was a weariness, an emptiness that whipped one on to repetition after repetition.

  Pelagia fought. Her nails broke in his flesh, she flailed at him with hands and knees and elbows, she shrieked and writhed. To Mandras her resistance was both unreasonable and unwarranted, he was getting nowhere despite his weight and strength, and he sat back and slapped her repeatedly about the face, attempting to subdue her. Her head was flung from side to side at every blow, and suddenly he tried to wrench up her skirts. At the same moment her apron was also flung back, and the solid weight of her derringer fell from its pocket and landed beside her head on the pillow. Mandras, his eyes glazed with ferocity and rage, his breath laboured, did not see it, and when the bullet cracked through his collar-bone the shock stunned him. He put a foot to the ground and staggered backwards, clutching at his wound, his gaze both astonished and accusing.

  Drosoula heard the snap of the pistol-shot just as she came in through the kitchen door, and at first she did not recognise it. But then she knew it for what it was, and took the Italian pistol from beneath the pieces of stale bread for which she had fought with so many others of the hungry behind the windows of the Communist Party offices. Without thinking, knowing that thought would make of her a coward, she pushed open the door of Pelagia’s room and beheld the unthinkable.

  She had thought that Pelagia might have shot herself, that there might be thieves, but when she burst in she saw the doctor’s daughter leaning up on her elbows, the tiny pistol smoking in her right hand, her face pulped and bloody, her lips split, her clothes ripped, her eyes already swollen and blackening. Drosoula followed Pelagia’s gaze and the finger that was now pointing, and she saw, leaning against the wall behind the door, a man who might have been her son. She ran to Pelagia’s side and took her into her arms, rocking her and shushing her, and heard words emerge from underneath the whimpering and the terror, ‘He … tried … to … rape me.’

  Drosoula stood up, and mother and son examined each other in disbelief. So much had changed. As the fury mounted in the woman’s breast, so the fire in Mandras’ soul quelled and died. A wave of self-pity overthrew him, and all he wanted to do was weep. Everything had come to nothing, everything was lost. The torment of the war in the ice of Albania, the years in the forest, the deluded self-confidence of his mastery of writing and his lexicographical knowledge of the technical terms of the revolution, his new power and importance, it was all a vapour and a dream. He was a little cowering boy again, trembling before the fury of his mother. And his shoulder hurt so much. He wanted to show it to her, to achieve her sympathy and attention, he wanted her to touch it and restore it.

  But she pointed the pistol at him, its barrel wavering with her rage, and she spat the one word that seemed to mean the most, ‘Fascist.’

  His voice was pathetic and imploring, ‘Mother …’

  ‘How dare you call me “mother”? I am no mother, and you are not my son.’ She paused and wiped the saliva from her mouth with her sleeve. ‘I have a daughter …’ she indicated Pelagia, who was now curled up with her eyes closed, panting as though she had given birth, ‘… and this is what you do. I disown you, I do not know you, you will not come back, never in my life do I want to see you, I have forgotten you, my curse goes with you. May you never know peace, may your heart burst in your chest, may you die alone.’ She spat on the ground and shook her head with contempt, ‘Nazi rapist, get out before I kill you.’

  Mandras left his rifle leaning against the wall of the kitchen, and left his knapsack. With bright scarlet blood trickling through the fingers of his right hand where still he comforted his wound, he stumbled out into the bleak December sun, and drew breath. He looked through swimming eyes at the olive tree where once he had swung and laughed, and where, he seemed to remember, there had been a goat. It was a tree that was incomplete without Pelagia as she was, fresh and beautiful, chopping onions beneath it and smiling through the tears. It was a solitary tree that signified an absence and a loss. A wave of grief and nostalgia overwhelmed him, and his throat constricted with sorrow as he lurched his way along the stones.

  It did not occur to him that he was a statistic, one more life warped and ruined by a war, a tarnished hero destined for the void. He was aware of nothing but a vanishment of paradise, an optimism that had turned to dust and ash, a joy that had once shone brighter than the summer sun, but now had disappeared and melted in the black light and frigid heat of massacre and cumulative remorse. He had struggled for a better world, and wrecked it.

  There was a place, once, where all had sparkled with delight and innocence. He stood still a moment, recalling where it was. He swayed on his feet, nearly fell backwards, and the peasants in their houses looked out and wondered. They did not know him, although he seemed familiar, and they thought it better not to interfere. There had been enough soldiers, enough blood. They stared at him through their shutters, and watched him lumber past.

  Mandras went down to the sea. He stood on the waterline, watching the bubbles of foam glitter and burst on his boots. Italian boots, he remembered, a man who had not died well. He kicked them off and watched them arc into the waves. With his one hand that worked he unbuttoned his breeches, let them fall, and stepped out of them. Carefully he removed his jacket and let it slip from his wounded shoulder. In wonder he watched the circle of blood soaking an ever wider circumference in his shirt around that tiny ragged hole. He unfastened his shirt’s buttons and let that fall too.

  He stood naked before the sea, even in that bitter cold, and looked up at the sky for gulls. They would guide him to the fish. He realised that he wanted nothing so much as to feel the sea upon his flesh, the draw of sand across his skin, the tightening and contraction of his groin upon the cold caress of salt and silky water. He felt the wind whipping, and his wound hurt less. He needed to be washed.

  He remembered days in his boat with nothing to do but fish and squint against the light, he remembered his triumph when something fine was landed for Pelagia, his pleasure at her pleasure when she was given it, the kisses stolen in the evenings when the crickets sawed and the sun fell suddenly in the western skies of Lixouri. He remembered that in those days he was slim and beautiful, his muscles standing proud and keen, and he recalled that there had been three wild and exuberant creatures who had loved and trusted him. Creatures who in their grace and simplicity were unruffled about
dowries and inconstancy, unconcerned about changing the world, creatures with love but without complications. ‘Kosmas! Nionios! Krystal!’ he cried, and waded out into the sea.

  The fisherman who recovered the bloated body reported that when he had found it, there had been three dolphins taking it in turns to nudge it towards the shore. But there had been stories like that from ancient times, and in truth no one knew any more whether it was merely a romantic figure or a fact of life.

  64 Antonia

  There had been so many rapes and so many orphans made, that Pelagia and Drosoula were not surprised to find an abandoned bundle on their doorstep. It had been born at such a time that its father could have been a Nazi or a Communist, and its mother might have been any unfortunate girl at all. Whoever this sorrowing and dishonoured girl had been, she had cared enough about her child to leave it upon the doorstep of a doctor’s house, knowing that those inside would have an inkling what to do. Such was the intractable chaos of the times that the two women could think of nothing else to do other than to try to care for it themselves, thinking that in time it could be adopted by someone childless or handed to the Red Cross.

  They had taken the child inside and unwrapped it, discovering that it was a girl in the process, and also had seen straight away that she was a child whose nature was made for a better world to come. She was calm and serene, sought no pretexts for that demented howling with which some babies torment their parents, she sucked the thumb of her right hand, a habit she was never to lose even in old age, and she smiled liberally, her legs and arms pumping with delight in a motion that Pelagia called ‘twittering’. She could be induced to emit a long gurgle of pleasure merely by pressing one’s finger upon the tip of her nose, producing a sound so much like a slow tremolo on a bass string that Pelagia decided to name her after Captain Corelli’s mandolin.