Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  But the duplicitous soil of Cephallonia was far from still; it was like a dog who has slept in the rain and then gets up to shake away the drops.

  It is said that in ancient times all lands were one, and it seems that the continents themselves profess nostalgia for that state of affairs, just as there are people who say that they belong not to their nation but to the world, demanding an international passport and a universal right of residence. Thus India pushes northwards, ploughing up the Himalayas, determined not to be an island but to press its tropical and humid lust on Asia. The Arabian peninsula wreaks a sly revenge on the Ottomans by leaning against Turkey casually in the hope of causing it to fall into the Black Sea. Africa, tired of white folk who think of it as musky, perilous, unknowable and romantic, squeezes northward in the determination that Europe shall look it in the face for once, and admit after all that its civilisation was conceived in Egypt. Only the Americas hurry away westwards, so determined to be isolated and superior that they have forgotten that the world is round and that one day perforce they will find themselves glued prodigiously to China.

  It seemed obvious afterwards that it was going to happen, but there had last been such an occasion not in Cephallonia but in Levkas to the north, in 1948, when Greece had been so embroiled in savagery that no one else had noticed, and the signs and omens of the morning were considered strange rather than portentous.

  The Korean War had just concluded, but French troops had just parachuted into Indochina, and it was a fine August 13th of 1953, near the Feast of the Assumption, after the harvesting of the grapes. There was a thin haze, and streaky clouds like vapour trails were draped across the skies at insouciant angles, as though placed there by an expressionist artist with an allergy to order and serious aesthetic objections to symmetry and form. Drosoula had noticed that there was an inexplicably strange smell and glow upon the land, and Pelagia had found that the water was right up to the top level of the well, even though there had been no rain. Yet minutes later she had returned with her pail and found no liquid there at all. Dr Iannis, who had been tightening the miniature screws of his spectacles, found to his amazement that they stuck to his screwdriver with implausible magnetic force. Antonia, now eight years old but as tall as a child of twelve, went to pick up a sheet of paper from the floor, and the sheet fluttered upwards and stuck to her hand. ‘I’m a witch, I’m a witch,’ she cried, skipping out of the door, only to find that a hedgehog with two babies was scuttling across the yard, and that a similarly nocturnal owl was inspecting her from a lower branch of the olive, flanked by rows of Pelagia’s new chickens that sat roosting obliviously with their heads beneath their wings. If Antonia had looked, she would have seen not one bird flying in the sky, and if she had gone down to the sea, she would have seen flatfish swimming near the surface, and the other fish leaping as if they now wished to be birds and to swim in air, whilst many others pre-emptively turned turtle, and died.

  Snakes and rats left their holes, and the martens in the Cephallonian pines gathered together in groups upon the ground and sat waiting like opera-lovers before the overture begins. Outside the doctor’s house a mule tethered to the wall strained against its rope and kicked out at the stones, the thudding of its hooves reverberating in the house. The dogs of the village set up the same ungainly and enervating chorus that normally occurs at dusk, and rivers of crickets streamed purposefully across roads and yards to vanish amongst the thorns.

  Curious events followed one upon another. Crockery rattled and cutlery clattered just as it had in the war when British bombers overflew. Outside in the yard Pelagia’s bucket fell over, spilling its water, and Antonia denied upsetting it. Drosoula came inside, perspiring and shaking, and told Pelagia, ‘I am ill, I feel terrible, something has happened to my heart.’ She sat down heavily, clutching her hand to her chest, gasping with anxiety. She had never felt so weak in the limbs, so tormented by pins and needles in the feet. Not since the last feast of the saint had she so much wanted to be sick. She took deep breaths, and Pelagia made her a restorative tisane.

  Outside in the yard Antonia realised that she was suffering from headache, was a little giddy, and was also oppressed by that vertiginous terror that one experiences when looking over a precipice and fears that one is being drawn over it. Pelagia came out and said, ‘Psipsina, come in and watch; the other Psipsina’s going bonkers.’

  It was true. The cat was indulging in behaviour more mysterious than any seen in any feline since the time of Cleopatra and the Ptolemies. She scratched at the floor as though burying something or unearthing it, and then rolled upon the spot as though expressing pleasure or wriggling against the pricking of her fleas. She skipped suddenly sideways, and then straight up in the air to an extraordinary height. She turned her gaze on the humans for one split second, somersaulted with a wide-eyed expression that could only have meant astonishment, and then shot out of the door and up the tree, where she ignored the chickens. A moment later she was back in the house looking for things to get into. She tried a wicker basket for size, put her head and forepaws into a brown paper bag, sat for a minute in a pan that was too small to contain her, and ran straight up the wall to perch, blinking owlishly, upon the top of a shutter that was swaying precariously from side to side and creaking with her weight. ‘Mad cat,’ remonstrated Pelagia, whereupon the animal leapt and skittered from one shelf to another, hurling itself dementedly round and round the room without once touching the floor, in a manner that reminded Pelagia of the cat’s eponymous predecessor. She stopped abruptly, her tail fluffed out to splendid dimensions, the hair of her arching back standing straight on end, and she hissed fiercely at an invisible enemy that appeared to be somewhere in the region of the door. Then quietly she returned to the ground, slunk out into the yard as though stalking, and sat on the wall yowling tragically as though perplexed at the loss of kittens or lamenting an atrocity. Antonia, who had been clapping her hands and laughing with delight, suddenly burst into tears, exclaimed, ‘Mama, I’ve got to get out,’ and ran outdoors.

  Drosoula and Pelagia exchanged glances, as if to say, ‘She must have reached puberty early,’ when there erupted from the earth below a stupefying roar so far below an audible pitch that it was sensed rather than heard. The two women felt their chests heave and vibrate against the restraint of sinews and cartilage, their ribs seemed to be tearing, a god seeming to be dealing mighty blows to a bass drum within their lungs. ‘A heart attack,’ thought Pelagia desperately, ‘O God, I’ve never lived,’ and she saw Drosoula with her hands to her stomach and her eyes bulging, stumbling towards her as though felled by an axe.

  It seemed as though time stopped and the unspeakable rowling of the earth would never end. Dr Iannis plunged out of the doorway of the room that used to be Pelagia’s and spoke for the first time in eight years: ‘Get out! Get out!’ he cried, ‘It’s an earthquake! Save yourselves!’ His voice sounded tinny and infinitely remote behind that guttural explosion of ever-augmenting sound, and he was thrown violently sideways.

  Panicked and blinded by the frantic leaping and quivering of the world, the two women lurched for the door, were hurled down, and attempted to crawl. To the infernal and brain-splitting booming of the earth was added the cacophony of cascading pans and dishes, the menacing, wild, but mincing tarantella of chairs and table, the gunshot reports of snapping beams and walls, the random clanging of the church-bell, and a choking cloud of dust with the stench of sulphur that tore at the throat and eyes. They could not crawl on hands and knees for being thrown upwards and sideways, again and again, and they spread their hands and legs and writhed like serpents for the door, reaching it only as the roof began to cave.

  Out into the heaving yard they went, the light obliterated from the sky, the direful clamour bursting inside their heads and breasts, dust rising slowly from the earth as though attracted by the moon. The ancient olive, before their very eyes, made obeisance to the ground and split cleanly down the centre of the trunk before springing uprigh
t and shaking its branches like a palsied Nazarene. A bubbling and filthy waterspout erupted from the centre of the street to a height of twelve metres, and then disappeared as though it had never been, leaving a pool of water that filled rapidly with dust and also disappeared. Higher up the hill, invisible because of the ascending curtains of pale and choking dust, a plate of rock and red clay split from the slope and tobogganed down, entering the road to the south side, dragging the olives in its route, and removing the field from which the crickets had migrated. Once more the unsettled giant in the bowels of the earth slammed a mighty fist vertically upwards, so that houses leapt from their foundations and solid stone walls rippled like paper in the wind, and suddenly there was a stillness like that of death. An uncanny and sepulchral silence settled upon the land, as though belatedly regretting such catastrophe, and Pelagia, hawking and filthy, filled beyond measure by a sense of impotence and tininess, began to struggle to her knees, still winded beyond measure by the last titanic blow that had struck her in the diaphragm and paralysed her lungs. She stood up, tottered on her feet, and the praeternatural stillness was suddenly broken by the wild and savage cries of the priest, who had rushed from his church and was now wheeling and spinning, his arms raised to the heavens, his eyes flashing through the grime of his face, not imploring the deity to desist, as Pelagia at first supposed, but berating him. ‘You bastard!’ he roared, ‘You filthy dog! You son of a fleabitten bitch! You whore’s disease!’ The forbidden words spewed out of him, all the serenity of his pious soul transformed instantaneously to contempt, and he fell to his knees, battered the earth with his fists, and, his body incapable of enfolding his rage, he sprang once more to his feet and punched a fist towards the sky. Tears rose to his eyes and he demanded, ‘Have we not loved you? Ungrateful shit! Excrement of the devil!’

  At this point, as though in response, the deep growling recommenced and mounted. Once more that plutonic fist shot upwards from the profoundest depths, and once more the crust and rocks of Cephallonia jolted and danced, the peaks of the mountains rocking like the masts of boats. Thrown to the ground again, Pelagia clawed at the oscillating, thudding earth, her helplessness and terror confounding and abolishing even her desperation to survive. The whole world had shrunk to the dimensions of a dark ball of fire that seemed to be erupting in her stomach and disgorging its consuming flames into the fibres of her brain, and in this solitary inferno she writhed and choked, incredulous, astonished, beyond amazement or dismay, a plaything of the impudence and callousness of earth.

  To the south, in the island of Zante, the capital town blazed beneath a rain of incandescent cinders that fell upon the flesh so tormentingly that both men and dogs went mad. A rescue worker, one who had been a witness to Nagasaki, said afterwards that this was worse. All over the Ionian islands people found themselves with nothing but whatever idiotic items they had tried to save as they disgorged from their houses; a chamber pot, a letter, a cushion, a pot of basil, or a ring. On Cephallonia the rock at Kounopetra, in Paliki, which had vibrated for centuries and which even British warships had failed to disturb, fell still and found repose amid the demolition of the land. It became just another seaside rock as the island transmogrified itself, dissolving into desolation and rehearsing Armageddon.

  Clutching each other for support, Pelagia, Drosoula, and Antonia stood looking at their house during those intervals when the apoplectic Titan below was recouping its strength and conceiving new and ever more compelling grounds for malice. As the plates and seams of the rocks cracked apart with the noise of artillery and tanks, as the roads buckled and undulated and the pillars of Venetian balconies rotated and twisted, the three women tottered and staggered in disbelief and woe. Psipsina emerged from nowhere and joined them, her fur clogged with white dust and her whiskers embellished with cobwebs, and Antonia picked her up and held her.

  Of the old house there was little left; walls were reduced to half their height, and what was left held nothing but rubble and the remnants of the roof. It also contained the disillusioned soul and tired old body of the doctor, who had planned his dying words for years, and left them all unsaid.

  66 Rescue

  In those days Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. It had a sense of humanitarian responsibility and a myth of its own importance that was quixotically true and universally accepted merely because it believed in it, and said so in a voice loud enough for foreigners to understand. It had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of waiting for months for permission from Washington before it clambered out of its post-imperial bed, put on its boots, made a sugary cup of tea, and ventured through the door.

  Accordingly the British were the first to arrive, the ones to stay longest, the ones to do the most, and the last to leave. Overnight HMS Daring loaded with water, food, medicines, spare doctors, and rescue equipment, and sailed from Malta to arrive at dawn the following day, to find the harbour of Argostoli churning, spouting and foaming with what seemed to be depth-charges and magnetic mines. A Sunderland flying-boat brought the Commander-in-Chief of Mediterranean forces, HMS Wrangler took supplies to Ithaca, and before long there turned up HMS Bermuda, the Forth, the Reggio, and the New Zealand ship, The Black Prince. Between them they brought 250 miles of bandages, 2,500 gallons of disinfectant, 50 Nissen huts, 6,000 blankets, bulldozers, baby bottles, 60,000 tins of milk, three meals per diem for 15,000 people for seven days, and an inordinate and prodigal two and a half tons of cotton wool and lint.

  The Yugoslavs, whose Dubrovnik port was closest, sent nothing whatsoever to the capitalists, but soon there would appear four diffident little ships of the Israeli Navy. Italy, mindful of its shameful past and the obligations implied by it, sent its finest capital ships loaded with the élite firemen of Naples, Milan and Rome, and began the evacuation of casualties to Patras. The Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Salem arrived, loaded with earthmovers and helicopters, and shortly there would come four combat transports loaded with 3,000 US marines. The Greek Navy, hindered by bureaucratic in-fighting, turned up late but eager, and General Iatrides was appointed governor of Ionia for the duration of the emergency. The King and his family took advantage of the occasion to swerve incognito about the islands in a jeep, and the rotund little nuns of the enclosed monasteries emerged conscientiously but gleefully to take a taste of life, with its attendant chocolate and its opportunities for work and conversation.

  Because of the wide streets there were few casualties in Cephallonia; the towns consisted mainly of one-storey buildings separated by courtyards and rubbish tips, and there were the usual miracles concerning people who had lost their sense of time, and emerged from beneath the rubble after nine days, believing that it had been a few hours.

  The British ratings perspired and laboured in the enervating heat, complaining bitterly about the smell of faeces in the harbour and the sunburn peeling off their skin in sheets. As red as cardinals, they dynamited unsafe buildings, which turned out to be all of them, so that the island seemed to have been made yet more desolate by their attentions, and further panicking the distraught islanders, who could not distinguish aftershocks from explosions, and whom the sailors, poor on both geography and polite circumlocution, referred to jovially as ‘wogs’. On their notice boards were pinned, amidst the standing orders and special instructions, the regularly updated scores of the cricket match between England and Australia.

  The foreign-aid workers built cities of tents and cleared gigantic parking lots for their jeeps and trucks. To the growling of the uneasy earth was added the stupefying clatter of helicopters and the splutter and roar of earthmovers trying to clear the landslides that cut off the remoter communities, whose people for three days believed that they had been unutterably forgotten and left to starve or die of thirst. One village in Zante was on the point of despair when an aeroplane dropped the best bread they had ever tasted, its savour remaining in their collective memory forever as a foretaste of paradise t
hat no mortal housewife would ever be able to recreate. It was followed by corned beef and chocolate, the latter on the point of melting almost as soon as it landed, to be licked eagerly from the silver paper by the humans, and then doubly licked by dogs before they swallowed the foil itself.

  The crew of the Franklin D. Roosevelt made seven thousand loaves a day, and delivered them in crumbled ports and upon beaches by landing craft more accustomed to howitzers, tanks and troops. An American officer with a phrasebook wandered about, repeating ‘Hungry?’ with an insufficiently interrogative intonation, and pointing to his mouth to reinforce the point, until some villagers took pity upon him and made him a banquet with what little they could find. When the Americans left, their tents and rubbish bins were plundered, and for a decade their miraculous tin-openers no bigger than a razorblade were currency in the place of coins and penknives within the swaps and negotiations of the islands’ little boys.

  The Greeks themselves reacted differently according to whether or not they found a natural leader amongst themselves. Those where none appeared lapsed into melancholia, lost their sense of time, became listless and purposeless, and suffered harrowing nightmares about falling infinitely in space. They were beyond tears, and no one wept. They did not even pin up notices, as elsewhere, arranging rendezvous with relatives and friends.

  During the earthquake itself, perhaps a quarter, like the doctor, had not panicked, but afterwards the remaining three-quarters remembered their desertion of their children and their aged parents, and suffered the agony of utter humiliation. Strong men felt like cowards and fools, and to the sense of having been frivolously and gratuitously struck by God was added a dire and insidious sense of worthlessness. Their hearts leapt and fluttered at the braying of a mule, the creak of a door, or the scratching of a cat.