The Magus

by John Fowles

‘Gut.’

  He turned away; said something in German. The sergeant went up the path and came back with a hurricane lamp, which he lit, then set behind me.

  The ‘colonel’ moved up the path to where the ‘sergeant’ was standing, and I was left staring at the ‘lieutenant’. There was something strange in his look, as if he would like to tell me something, but couldn’t; searching my face for some answer. His eyes flicked away, and he turned abruptly, though awkwardly, on his heel and rejoined the colonel. I heard low German voices, then the sergeant’s laconic command.

  The men stood to, and for some reason I couldn’t understand lined up on both sides of the path, facing inwards, irregularly, not standing to attention, as if waiting for someone to pass. I thought they were going to take me somewhere, I had to pass through them. But I was pulled back by my two guards in line with the others. Only the sergeant and the two officers stood in the centre of the path. The lamp threw a circle of light round me. I realized it had a dramatic function.

  There was a tense silence. I was cast as a spectator in some way, not as the protagonist. At last I heard more people coming. A different, unmilitary figure came into sight. For a second I thought he was drunk. But then I realized he had his hands tied behind his back; like me, a prisoner. He wore dark trousers, but was bare above the waist. Behind him came two more soldiers. One of them seemed to prod him, and he groaned. As he came closer to me I saw, with a sharp sense that the masque was running out of control, that he was barefoot. His stumbling, ginger walk was real, not acted.

  He came abreast of me. A young man, evidently Greek, rather short. His face was atrociously bruised, puffed, the whole of one side covered in blood from a gash near the right eye. He appeared stunned, hardly able to walk. He didn’t notice me until the last moment, when he stopped, looked at me wildly. I had a swift stab of terror, that this really was some village boy they had got hold of and beaten up – not someone to look the part, but be the part. Without warning the soldier behind jabbed him savagely in the small of the back. I saw it, I saw his spasmic jerk forward, and the – or so it sounded – absolutely authentic gasp of pain the jab caused. He stumbled on another five or six yards. Then the colonel spat one word. The guards reached roughly out and brought him to a halt. The three men stood there in the path facing downhill. The colonel moved down to just in front of me, his lieutenant limping beside him; both backs to me.

  Another silence; the panting of the man. Then almost at once came another figure, exactly the same, hands tied behind his back, two soldiers behind him. I knew by then where I was. I was back in 1943, and looking at captured resistance fighters.

  The second man was obviously the kapetan, the leader – heavily built, about forty, some six feet tall. He had one naked arm in a rope sling, a rough bandage covered in blood round his upper arm. It seemed to have been made from the sleeve torn off his shirt; was too thin to staunch the blood. He came down the path towards me; a magnificent klepht face with a heavy black moustache, an accipitral nose. I had seen such faces one or twice in the Peloponnesus, but I knew where this man came from, because over his forehead he still wore the fringed black headband of the Cretan mountaineer. I could see him standing in some early-nineteenth-century print, in folk-costume, silver-handled yataghan and pistols in his belt, the noble brigand of the Byronic myth. He was actually wearing what looked like British Army battledress trousers, a khaki shirt. And he too was barefooted. But he seemed to refuse to stumble. He was less battered than the other man, perhaps because of the wound.

  As he came up level with me, he stopped and then looked past the colonel and the lieutenant straight at me. I understood that he was meant to know me, that I had once known him. It was a look of the most violent loathing. Contempt. At the same time of a raging despair. He said nothing for a moment. Then he hissed in Greek one word.

  ‘Prodotis.’ His lips snarled on the v-sounding demotic Greek delta.

  Traitor.

  He had great power, he was completely in his role; and in a barely conscious way, as if I sensed that I must be an actor too, I did not come out with another flip remark but took his look and his hatred in silence. For a moment, I was the traitor.

  He was kicked on, but he turned and gave me one last burning look back across the ten feet of lamplight. Then again that word, as if I might not have heard it the first time.

  ‘Prodotis.’

  As he did so there was a cry, an exclamation. The colonel’s rapped command: Nicht schiessenl My guards gripped me vice tight. The first man had bolted, diving headlong sideways into the tamarisks. His two guards plunged after him, then three or four of the soldiers lining the path. He can’t have got more than ten yards. There was a cry, German words, then a sickening scream of pain and another. The sound of a body being kicked, butt-ended.

  At the second cry the lieutenant, who had been standing watching just in front of me, turned and looked past me into the night. I was meant to understand he was revolted by this, by brutality; his other first look at me was explained. The colonel was aware that he had turned away. He gave the lieutenant a quick stare round, flicked a look at the guards holding me, then spoke – in French; so that the guards could not understand … and no doubt, so that I could.

  ‘Mon lieutenant, violà pour moi la plus belle musique dans le monde.’

  His French was heavily German; and he gave a sort of mincing lip-grimacing sarcasm to the word musique that explained the situation. He was a stock German sadist; the lieutenant, a stock good German.

  The lieutenant seemed about to say something, but suddenly the night was torn open by a tremendous cry. It came from the other man, the noble brigand, from the very depths of his lungs and it must have been heard, if anyone had been awake to hear it, from one side of the island to the other. It was just one word, but the most Greek of all words.

  I knew it was acting, but it was magnificent acting. It came out harsh as fire, more a diabolical howl than anything else, but electrifying, right from the very inmost core.

  It jagged into the colonel like the rowel of a spur. He whipped round like a steel spring. In three strides he was in front of the Cretan and had delivered a savage smashing slap across his face. It knocked the man’s head sideways, but he straightened up at once. Again it shocked me almost as if I was the one hit. The beating-up, the bloody arm could be faked, but not that blow.

  Lower down the path they came dragging the other man out of the bushes. He could not stand and they were pulling him by the arms. They dropped him in mid-path and he lay on his side, groaning. The sergeant went down, took a water-bottle from one of the soldiers and poured it over his face. The man made an attempt to stand. The sergeant said something and the original guards hauled him to his feet.

  The colonel spoke.

  The soldiers split into two sections, the prisoners in the middle, and began to move oft. In under a minute the last back disappeared. I was alone with my two guards, the colonel and the lieutenant.

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

  ‘It. Is. Not. Ended.’

  There was just the trace of a humourless 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 went with 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 more like the diesel of a large coastal caïque than that of the yacht. The cast had re-embarked. My two guards must have been waiting for the sound. They stood, and the elder one held a table-knife up for me to see, then threw it down where they had been sitting. Then without a word they began to walk away-but not in the direction the others had taken. They climbed the path back to the ridge, and down to Bourani.

  As soon as I was sure they had gone I crawled over the stones to the knife. It was blunt, the rope was new, and I wasn’t free for another twenty exasperating minutes. I climbed back to the ridge, to where I could look down over the south coast. Of course it was quiet, serene, a landscape tilted to the stars, an Aegean island lying in its classical nocturnal peace. The yacht still rode at anchor. I could hear the caïque, whatever it was, heading away behind me towards Nauplia. I thought of storming down to Bourani, of waking the girls, bearding Conchis, demanding explanation at once. But I felt exhausted, I felt sure of the girls’ innocence and I was far from sure I would be allowed anywhere near the villa … they would have anticipated such a reaction on my part, and I was hopelessly outnumbered in mere physical terms. I also felt, beneath my anger, a return of the old awe for what Conchis was doing. Once more I was a man in a myth, incapable of understanding it, but somehow aware that understanding it meant it must continue, however sinister its peripateia.

  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 colour was burnt out of the land, what few remaining greens there were looked parched and 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 Germans 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.

  I floated on my back with my arms out and my eyes shut, crucified in the water. I had already cooled down enough in other ways to know that I wasn’t going to write the angry and sarcastic letter I had been phrasing on the return from the ridge. Apart from anything else it was what the old man would be expecting – I had that morning in school detected something speculative and inquisitive in Demetriades’ eyes – and my one sure good move was not to do what was expected. Nor on reflection did I think there was any great danger for the sisters; as long as he believed them misled, they were safe, or as safe as they always had been. If I was to get them out of it, it was better to wait till they were in front of me; not to warn him of what I intended. And then he had the enormous advantage of giving the entertainment – and such entertainment. It seemed, in some peculiar way, foolish to be angry about the way the thing had been done when the staggering fact was that it had been done at all.

  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 had been delivered by hand and I knew the writing. I didn’t open it until I had escaped from the dining-room – which was as well, because its brief contents made me swear aloud. It was as brutal and unexpected as a slap across the face; dateless, placeless, without superscription.

  Any further visits to Bourani will be in vain. I do not think I have to explain why. You have gravely disappointed me.

  MAURICE CONCHIS

  I knew a stunned plunge of disappointment and a bitter anger. What right had he to issue such an arbitrary ukase? It was incomprehensible, it contradicted everything I had learnt from Julie; but not, as I soon saw, what had happened after I left her … that accusation of treachery gained a fresh significance. I chillingly realized that the Occupation episode could also have been a finale, a notice of dismissal – he had no more time for me. But then there were the girls. What story could he have told them? Or could tell them, when they knew he had been lying to them?

  All through that day I half expected to see them appear at the school. They must have seen through him now. I had notions of going to the police, of contacting the British Embassy in Athens. But slowly I came back on a more even keel. I recalled the parallels with The Tempest, and that old man’s trial of the young usurper in his domaine. I recalled the constant past occasions when Conchis had said the opposite of what he meant; and above all, I remembered Julie… not only the naked body in the sea, but her intuitive trust in our Prospero. I decided by the time I went to bed that it must be taken as some last black joke on his part, some testing trick analogous to the dice-game and the suicide pill. I refused to believe that he would really keep either Julie or the truth from me for another week. He must know I should go over to Bourani on the morrow. He might carry on with some comedy of intense disapproval, but he would be there; and his other puppet would also be there to help me finally call his bluff.

  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. I saw at once that the yacht wasn’t there; yet I wouldn’t let that kill all hope.

  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 round, not because I actually felt I was being watched so much as because I felt I ought to be feeling it. They must be watching me; might even be inside the house, smiling in the darkness just behind the shutters, only four or five feet away. I went and gazed down at the private beach. It lay in the heat; the jetty, the pump-house, the old baulk, 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 Julie the Sunday before.

  The lifeless sea was ruf
fled 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 levelled 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-storey 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 window-sill in front of me was a brown candle in a retsina bottle, a broken garland of immortelles, a rusty sprocket-wheel, and a month of dust. I closed the shutters.