The Magus

by John Robert Fowles

  The colonel came up to me. His face had a basilisk coldness. He spoke in a punctiliously overdistinct English.

  “It. Is. Not. Ended.”

  There was just the trace of a humorless smile on his face; and more than a trace of menace. As if he meant something more than that there was a sequel to this scene; but that the whole Nazi Weltanschauung would one day be resurrected and realized. He was an impressively iron man. As soon as he spoke he turned and began to follow the soldiers down the path. The lieutenant followed him. I called out.

  “What isn’t ended?”

  But there was no reply. The two dark figures, the taller limping, disappeared between the pale, soft walls of the tamarisk. I turned to my guards.

  “What now?”

  For answer I found myself jerked forward and then back, and so forced to sit. There were a ridiculous few moments of struggle, which they easily won. A minute later they had roped my ankles together tightly, then hoisted me back against a boulder, so that I had support for my back. The younger soldier felt in his tunic top pocket and tossed me down three cigarettes. In the flare of the match I lit I looked at them. They were rather cheap-looking. Along each one was printed in red, between little black swastikas, the words Leipzig dankt euch. The one I smoked tasted very stale, at least ten years old, as if they had been overthorough and actually used cigarettes from some war-issue tin. In 1943 it would have tasted fresh.

  I made attempt after attempt to speak with them. In English, then in my exiguous German; French, Greek. But they sat stolidly opposite me, on the other side of the path. They hardly spoke ten words to each other; and were obviously under orders not to speak to me.

  I had looked at my watch when they first tied me. It had said twelve thirty-five. Now it was one thirty. Somewhere on the north coast of the island, a mile or two west of the school, I heard the first faint pump of an engine. It sounded like the diesel of a large coastal caïque. The cast had re-embarked. As soon as they heard it, the two men stood up. The elder one held something up, a table knife. He put it down where he had been sitting. Then without a word they started to walk away, away from the north coast, up the path.

  As soon as I was sure they had gone I crawled over the stones to where they had left the knife. It was blunt, the rope was new, and I wasn’t free for another exasperating twenty minutes.

  I climbed back to the ridge, to where I could look down over the south side of the island. Of course it was quiet, serene, a landscape tilted to the stars, an Aegean island lying in its classical nocturnal peace. But as I went back down to the school, I could still hear, miles from the island by then, the sound of a caïque on its way back to Athens.

  50

  Morning school began at seven, so I had had less than five hours’ sleep when I appeared in class. It was ugly weather, too, without wind, remorselessly hot and stagnant. All the color was burnt out of the land, what few remaining greens there were looked tired, defeated. Processional caterpillars had massacred the pines; the oleander flowers were brown at the edges. Only the sea lived, and I did not begin to think coherently until school was over at noon and I could plunge into the water and lie in its blue relief.

  One thing had occurred to me during the morning. Except for the main actors, almost all the German “soldiers” had looked very young—between eighteen and twenty. It was the beginning of July; the German and the Greek university terms would probably be over. If Conchis really had some connection with film producing he could probably have got German students to come easily enough—to work for a few days for him and then holiday in Greece. What I could not believe was that having got them to Greece he would use them only once. More sadism was, as the colonel warned, to come.

  But I had cooled down enough to know that I wasn’t going to write the angry and sarcastic letter I had been phrasing on the way down from the ridge. Conchis had the enormous advantage of giving the entertainment—and such entertainment; it seemed ridiculous to get angry about the way the thing was done when the staggering fact was that the thing had been done.

  I floated on my back with my arms out and my eyes shut, crucified in the water. A course of action: the paramount thing was that I should go on seeing Julie. I would make that absolutely clear to her over the weekend; if it meant ruining the masque, so much the worse for the masque; and if it meant going on with the masque, and finding myself in the middle of such unpleasant entertainments as the one on the ridge, so much the worse for me.

  The post came on the noon boat and was distributed during lunch. I had three letters; one of the rare ones from my uncle in Rhodesia, another with one of the information bulletins sent out by the British Council in Athens; and the third… I knew the handwriting, round, a bit loose, big letters. I slit it. My letter to Alison fell out, unopened. There was nothing else. A few minutes later, back in my room, I put it on an ashtray, still unopened, and burnt it.

  * * *

  The next day was Friday. I had another letter at lunch. It was postmarked Geneva and I had a premonition about its contents, so that I didn’t open it until I had escaped from the dining room.

  Geneva, Monday

  DEAR NICHOLAS,

  I am afraid my presence here will be essential for at least another week. However, I think it almost certain that I shall be back at Bourani by the following weekend. I hope you are enjoying the good weather.

  Yours most sincerely,

  MAURICE CONCHIS

  I felt a bitter plunge of disappointment, of new and different anger with Conchis. The last sentence—when was the weather ever not good in the Aegean in summer?—stung especially. It was a deliberate taunt, a way of saying, I know you can enjoy nothing till I pretend to return. Or perhaps “good weather” was a hint that he knew about my meetings with Julie… and that bad weather was soon to come. I couldn’t believe that he would keep her from me for another week. He must know that I should rush over to Bourani whether he was there or not.

  I decided that it was his way of saying, Your move. So I would move.

  * * *

  Soon after two o’clock on Saturday, I was on my way up into the hills. At three, I entered the clump of tamarisk. In the blazing heat—the weather remained windless, stagnant—it was difficult to believe that what I had seen had happened. But there were two or three recently broken twigs and branches; and where the “prisoner” had dived away there were several overturned stones, their bottoms stained ruddy from the island earth; and more broken sprays of tamarisk. A little higher I picked up several screwed-out cigarette ends. One was only half-smoked and had the beginnings of the same phrase: Leipzig da—

  I stood on the bluff looking down over the other side of the island. A long way to the south I could see a big caïque of the kind that must have brought the “soldiers” to the island; there was nothing unusual in seeing it. Such caïques passed through the straits facing the school several times a week. But it reminded me how easy it was for Conchis’s cast to get on and off the island without my knowing. I stood some time on the bluff, because if anyone was watching I wanted them to know I was on my way. I had already told Demetriades I was going out for a long walk; and made sure that old Barba Vassili saw me going through the school gates, so that the information could be, if it usually was, wirelessed across.

  I arrived at the gate and walked straight to the house. It lay with the cottage in the sun, closed and deserted.

  I rattled the French window shutters hard, and tried the others. But none of them gave. All the time I kept looking around, not because I actually felt I was being watched so much as because I felt I ought to be feeling it. I must be meant to meet Lily again. They must be watching me; might even be inside the house, smiling in the darkness just behind the shutters, only four of five feet away. I went and gazed down at the private beach. It lay in the heat; the jetty, the pump-house, the old balk, the shadowed mouth of the little cave; but no boat. Then to the Poseidon statue. Silent statue, silent trees. To the cliff, to where I had sat with Lily the
Sunday before.

  The lifeless sea was ruffled here and there by a lost zephyr, by a stippling shoal of sardines, dark ash-blue lines that snaked, broad then narrow, in slow motion across the shimmering mirageous surface, as if the water was breeding corruption.

  I began to walk along towards the bay with the three cottages. The landscape to the east came into view, and then I came on the boundary wire of Bourani. As everywhere else it was rusty, a token barrier, not a real one; shortly beyond it the inland cliff fell sixty or seventy feet to lower ground. I bent through the wire and walked inland along the edge. There were one or two places where one could clamber down; but at the bottom there was an impenetrable jungle of scrub and thorn ivy. I came to where the fence turned west towards the gate. There were no telltale overturned stones, no obvious gaps in the wire. Following the cliff to where it leveled out, I eventually came on the seldom used path I had taken on my previous visit to the cottages.

  Shortly afterwards I was walking through the small olive orchard that surrounded them. I watched the three whitewashed houses as I approached through the trees. Strange that there was not even a chicken or a donkey. Or a dog. There had been two or three dogs before. Two of the one-story cottages were adjoining. Both front doors were bolted, with bolt handles padlocked down. The third looked more openable, but it gave only an inch before coming up hard. There was a wooden bar inside. I went round the back. The door there was also padlocked. But on the last side I came to, over a hencoop, I found two of the shutters were loose. I peered in through the dirty windows. An old brass bed, a cube of folded bedclothes in the middle of it. A wall of photographs and ikons. Two cane-bottomed wooden chairs, a cot beneath the window, an old trunk. On the windowsill in front of me was a brown candle in a retsina bottle, a broken garland of immortelles, a rusty sprocket-wheel from some bit of machinery, and a month of dust. I closed the shutters.

  The second cottage had another padlocked bolt on its back door; but though the last one had the bolt, it was simply tied down with a piece of fishing twine. I struck a match. Half a minute later I was standing inside the cottage, in another bedroom. Nothing in the darkened room looked in the least suspicious. I went through to the kitchen and living room in front. From it a door led straight through into the cottage next door; another kitchen; beyond it, another musty bedroom. I opened one or two drawers, a cupboard. The cottages were, beyond any possibility of faking, typical impoverished islanders’ homes. The one strange thing was that they were empty.

  I came out and fastened the bolt handle with a bit of wire. Fifty yards or so away among the olives I saw a whitewashed privy. I went over to it. A spider’s web stretched across the hole in the ground. A collection of torn squares of yellowing Greek newspaper hung from a rusty nail.

  Defeat.

  I went to the cistern beside the double cottage, took off the wooden lid and let down an old bucket on a rope that stood beside the whitewashed neck. Cool air rushed up, like an imprisoned snake. I sat on the neck and swallowed great mouthfuls of the water. It had that living, stony freshness of cistern water, so incomparably sweeter than the neutral flavor of tap water.

  A brilliant red-and-black jumping spider edged along the puteal towards me. I laid my hand in its path and it jumped onto it; holding it up close I could see its minute black eyes, like giglamps. It swiveled its massive square head from side to side in an arachnoidal parody of Conchis’s quizzing; and once again, as with the owl, I had an uncanny apprehension of a reality of witchcraft; Conchis’s haunting, brooding omnipresence. I flicked the spider onto the ground and looked up towards the distant central ridge. I was sure there were no buildings between it and where I was; that left only one alternative. Where they waited was somewhere in the pine forest; and why not? They might put up tents, a kind of ad hoc camp, as needed; so that I was looking, that afternoon, for nothing.

  I caught myself thinking of Alison. I almost wished she was there, beside me, for companionship. To talk to, nothing more, like a man friend… though that was ingenuous. My mind slid to that empty bed in the shuttered cottage room. I had hardly given Alison a thought for days. Events had swept her into the past. But I remembered those moments on Parnassus: the sound of the waterfall, the sun on my back, her closed eyes, her neck stiffened back, her whole body arched to have me deeper—and that dream of two complementary, compliant women floated back through me. Both, both. But I stood up then and screwed my randiness out with my cigarette. All that was spilt milk. Or spilt semen.

  I spent all the rest of that afternoon searching the south coast of the island eastward beyond the three cottages, then back past them and into Bourani again, nicely timed for tea under the colonnade; but the colonnade was as deserted as ever. An hour searching for a note, a sign, anything; it became like the idiot ransacking of a drawer already ten times searched.

  At six I returned to the school, with nothing but a useless rage of disappointment. With Conchis; with Julie; with everything.

  * * *

  On the far side of the village there was another harbor, used exclusively by the local fishermen. It was avoided by everyone from the school, and by everyone with any claim to social ton in the village. Many of the houses had been ruthlessly dilapidated. Some were no more than the carious stumps of walls; and the ones that still stood along the broken quays had corrugated iron roofs, concrete patches and other unsightly evidences of frequent mending. There were three tavernas, but only one was of any size. It had a few rough wooden tables outside its doors.

  Once before, coming back from one of my solitary winter walks, I had gone there for a drink; I remembered the taverna keeper was loquacious and comparatively easy to understand. By island standards, and perhaps because he was Anatolian by birth, conversable. His name was Georgiou; rather foxy-faced, with a lick of gray-black hair and a small moustache that gave him a comic resemblance to Hitler. On Sunday morning I sat under a catalpa and he came up, obsequiously delighted to have caught a rich customer. Yes, he said, of course he would be honored to have an ouzo with me. He called one of his children to serve us… the best ouzo, the best olives. Did things go well at the school, did I like Greece… I let him ask the usual questions. Then I set to work. Twelve or so faded carmine and green caïques floated in the still blue water in front of us. I pointed to them.

  “It’s a pity you do not have any foreign tourists here. Yachts.”

  “Ech.” He spat out an olive stone. “Phraxos is dead.”

  “I thought Mr. Conchis from Bourani kept his yacht over here sometimes.”

  “That man.” I knew at once that Georgiou was one of the village enemies of Conchis. “You have met him?”

  I said, no, but I was thinking of visiting him. He did have a yacht then?

  Georgiou had heard so. But it never came to the island.

  Had he ever met Conchis?

  “Ochi.” No.

  “Does he have houses in the village?”

  Only the one where Hermes lived. It was near a church called St. Elias, at the back of the village. As if changing the subject I asked idly about the three cottages near Bourani. Where had the families gone?

  He shook his hand to the south. “To the mainland. For the summer.” He explained that a minority of the island fishermen were semi-nomadic. In winter they fished in the protected waters off Phraxos; but in summer, taking their families with them, they wandered round the Peloponnesus, even as far as Crete, in search of better fishing. He returned to the cottages.

  He pointed down and then made drinking gestures. “The cisterns are bad. No good water in summer.”

  “Really—no good water?”

  “No.”

  “What a shame.”

  “It is his fault. He of Bourani. He could make better cisterns. But he is too mean.”

  “He owns the cottages then?”

  “Vevaios.” Of course. “On that side of the island, all is his.”

  “All the land?”

  He ticked off his stubby fingers: Korbi, St
remi, Bourani, Moutsa, Pigadi, Zastena… all names of bays and caps around Bourani; and apparently this was another complaint against Conchis. Various Athenians, “rich people,” would have liked to build villas over there. But Conchis refused to sell one meter; deprived the island of badly needed wealth. A donkey loaded with wood tripped down the quay towards us; rubbing its legs together, picking its fastidious way like a model. This news proved Demetriades’s complicity. It must have been common gossip.

  “I suppose you see his guests in the village?”

  He raised his head, negatively, uninterestedly; it was nothing to him whether there were guests or not. I persisted. Did he know if there were foreigners staying over there?

  But he shrugged. “Isos.” Perhaps. He did not know.

  Then I had a piece of luck. A little old man appeared from a side alley and came behind Georgiou’s back; a battered old seaman’s cap, a blue canvas suit so faded with washing that it was almost white in the sunlight. Georgiou threw him a glance as he passed our tabib, then called.

  “Eh, Barba Dimitraki! Ela.” Come. Come and speak with the English professor.

  The old man stopped. He must have been about eighty; very shaky, unshaven, but not totally senile. Georgiou turned to me.

  “Before the war. He was the same as Hermes. He took the mail to Bourani.”

  I pressed the old man to take a seat, ordered more ouzo and another mezé.

  “You know Bourani well?”

  He waved his old hand; he meant, very well, more than he could express. He said something I didn’t understand. Georgiou, who had some linguistic resourcefulness, piled our cigarette boxes and matches together like bricks. Building.

  “I understand. In 1929?”

  The old man nodded.

  “Did Mr. Conchis have many guests before the war?”