Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  When she emerged into the spring sunlight with the jar of aromatic and pungent oil, she found Mandras completely shorn, and she offered the jar to Drosoula. ‘You paint it on quite thick, and it even kills ringworm if he’s got that too. Then you cover his head with a cloth and tie it round with string. I’m afraid it’s an irritant, and you have to rub olive oil in when the lice have gone, but oil of paraffin takes about two weeks to work, so I thought we’d better use this.’

  Kyria Drosoula looked at her admiringly, sniffed the liquid, said, ‘Pooh,’ and began to slop it about on her son’s head. ‘I hope you know what I’m doing,’ she commented. Mandras spoke for the first time: ‘It stings,’ whereupon his mother said, ‘O, you’re in there, are you?’ and continued to paint.

  When the head was bound up in linen, the two women stepped back and admired their work. Mandras’ face was as emaciated as that of the saint in his sarcophagus, and looked as hollow-eyed and pale as that of someone recently dead but already cold. ‘Is it really him?’ asked Drosoula, with genuine doubt in her mind, and then she asked why it was that the scratches on the head became infected. ‘It’s because the excrement of the lice is rubbed into the scratches,’ said Pelagia, ‘it’s not actually the lice that cause it.’

  ‘I always told him not to scratch,’ said Drosoula, ‘but until now I didn’t know why. Shall we do the rest of him?’

  The two women exchanged glances, and Pelagia flushed. ‘I don’t think …’ she began, and Drosoula winked and grinned broadly. ‘Don’t you want to see what you’re getting? Most girls would kill for the chance. I won’t tell anyone, I promise, and as for him,’ she nodded in her son’s direction, ‘he’s so far gone he won’t even know.’

  Pelagia thought three things all at once: ‘I don’t want to marry him. I’ve already seen him, but I can’t say so, and it was a time when he was beautiful. Not like now. And I can’t say anything because I’ve got so fond of Drosoula.’

  ‘No, really, I can’t.’

  ‘Well, you help me with everything else, and you’ll have to tell me what to do with the other bits from the other side of the door. Is the water hot? I’ll tell you confidentially, I can’t wait to see what kind of a man I’ve produced; do you think I’m terrible?’

  Pelagia smiled, ‘Everyone thinks you’re terrible, but no one thinks any the worse of you for it. They just say “O, there’s Kyria Drosoula for you.” ’

  With his clothes removed Mandras shivered no more than he had done with them on. He was so pathetically reduced that Pelagia felt no shame in remaining with him even when he was naked, and she did not have to resort to delivering instructions from the far side of a door. His muscle was gone, and the skin hung about his bones in flaccid sheets. His stomach bulged, either from starvation or parasites, and his ribs protruded as sharply as the bones of his spine. The shoulders and back seemed to have bent and crumpled, and the thighs and calves had shrunk so disproportionately that the knees seemed hugely swollen. The worst of it was what they beheld when they peeled off the encrusted bandages upon the feet; Pelagia was reminded of the story of Philoctetes, erstwhile Argonaut and suitor to Helen, abandoned by Odysseus upon the island of Lemnos because of the insupportable decay of his foot, with only his great bow and the arrows of Hercules for company. Pelagia would later recall that the conclusion to this story was that he was cured by Aesculapius and had helped to bring down the Trojans, and would reflect that she herself had been the healer, whilst the Italians had aptly supplied the place of their own forebears.

  She did not feel very much like a healer when she saw those feet, however; they were unrecognisable as such. They were a necrotic, multi-hued pulp. A shell of pus and scab lay upon the inner windings of the abandoned bandages, and yellow maggots writhed and squirmed in flesh that was all but dead. ‘Gerasimos!’ exclaimed Drosoula, clutching her son’s withered shoulders for support as she tried not to faint away. The stench was inconceivably stupefying, and at last Pelagia felt herself flood with the sacred compassion whose absence had previously so appalled her. ‘Wash him all over,’ she said to Drosoula, ‘and I’ll do the feet.’ She looked up at Mandras with tears brimming in her eyes and said, ‘Agapeton, I’m going to have to hurt you. I’m so sorry.’

  He returned her gaze, and spoke for the second time: ‘It’s the war. We beat them hollow, we had them running. We beat the wops. You can hurt me if you want, but we couldn’t fight the Germans. It was the tanks, that’s all.’

  Pelagia forced herself to look at the feet until in her own mind they had become a problem to be solved rather than ghastly suffering to be abhorred. Gently she plucked out the maggots, throwing them over the wall, and then gathered her wits together to decide whether or not the rot had spread into the bones. If it had, it was a case of amputation, and she knew that things would have to be left to others; probably her own father would not be willing to do it. What worse could any physician do to a fellow being? She shuddered, she wiped her hands on her apron, she closed her eyes, and she picked up the right foot. She turned it this way and that, felt its textures and decided to her own surprise that there was no granulation and that no bone had died away and separated itself. ‘There’s no sequestrum,’ she said; thinking, ‘But I’ve only ever done this on a dog,’ and Drosoula replied, ‘There’s plenty of dirt, though.’ Pelagia found the flesh of the foot dry, and sighed as if a burden had been lifted away; it was the moist gangrene that was worse. She saw that there was no red line of demarcation between healthy and infected areas, and concluded that it wasn’t gangrene at all. She inspected the other foot and came to the same conclusions. She fetched a bowl of clean water, salted it heavily, and as gently as she could she washed the terrible mess. Mandras flinched as he stung, but said nothing. Pelagia found that the most gruesome patches fell away as she washed them, and that there was living flesh beneath.

  She felt a sense of elation and triumph as she stood in the kitchen and pounded five fat heads of garlic in the mortar. The powerful domestic smell comforted her, and she smiled as Drosoula’s voice wafted in from the yard. She was scolding her son as though he had not spent months in the snow, as though he was not a hero who had, like all his comrades, carried hardship far beyond the call of duty and beaten off a superior force that had been defeated by those same hardships. With a knife she spread the garlic onto two long bandages, and she carried them outside. She said to Mandras, ‘Agapeton, this will sting even worse than the salt.’ He winced as she wound the poultice about his feet, and took in his breath sharply, but he did not complain. Pelagia wondered at his fortitude, and remarked, ‘I’m not surprised we won.’

  ‘We haven’t, have we?’ retorted Drosoula. The wops couldn’t do it, so Attila did it instead.’

  ‘Hitler. But it doesn’t matter, because the British Empire is on our side.’

  ‘The British have gone home. We’re in God’s hands now.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Pelagia resolutely. Think of Lord Napier, Lord Byron. They’ll come back.’

  ‘What’s all this?’ enquired Drosoula, indicating the generality of scars, inflamed pits, and scarlet patterns on the body of her son. Pelagia scrutinised the sorry body, freshly washed, and diagnosed every parasite she had ever encountered in the company of her father. ‘On the shoulder it’s favus. You see, it smells of mice. You need sulphur and salicylic acid for that. It’s a kind of honeycomb ringworm. It’s lucky it didn’t get into the hair, because he would have lost it. These red punctures are body lice. We’ve got to burn all his clothes, and we’ve got to shave him all over – you can do that – to get the eggs off his hairs. Or we can wash him in vinegar. And we cover him with eucalyptus oil and paraffin emulsion. The rashes on his legs and arms are bêtes rouges, and we can get rid of them with ammonia and zinc ointment. They go away on their own anyway. This patch is pityriasis, you see, it’s coffee-coloured. The things we use for the other troubles will cure that too. If you shave him, you know, down there, it’ll get rid of any crab lice. I w
on’t look if you don’t mind. And he’s got terrible eczema on his arms and calves. We’ll have to paint the cracks with iodine, if I can find any, and they’ll heal up, and then we just cover him with calamine lotion, if we can find any of that, and we keep covering him with it until it’s cured. It might take weeks. We could use olive oil, I suppose, but not in the groin. You shouldn’t put anything greasy in the groin. And these maroon prickmarks are flea bites.’ Pelagia paused, looked up, and saw that Drosoula was smiling down at her in amazement. ‘Koritsimou,’ said the gigantic creature, ‘you are astonishing. You are the first woman I have ever known who knows anything. Give me a hug.’ Pelagia blushed with pleasure, and, to distract attention from herself, she embraced Drosoula and told her, ‘I know you’re wondering about all the horrible red lumps on his belly and his … equipment. They’re in between his fingers as well, but don’t worry, it’s only scabies. The other treatments will treat that too, especially the zinc and sulphur. At least, that’s what I think, but we’d better ask my father,’ she concluded modestly.

  Drosoula gestured towards her much-diminished son, ‘He’s not much of a bargain is he?’

  Pelagia cursed herself inwardly and said, ‘You fall in love with the person, not the body.’

  Drosoula laughed: ‘Romantic claptrap. Love enters by the eyes and also leaves by the eyes, and in case you’re wondering why my husband fell for me, ugly as I am, it was because he had strange tastes, thank God and the saint. Otherwise I would still be a maid.’

  ‘I don’t believe it for a moment,’ said Pelagia, who, like everyone else, had always wondered how Drosoula had succeeded in finding a husband.

  The following morning Dr Iannis returned exhausted from the mountain (via the kapheneia), and not only found a corpselike man asleep in his daughter’s bed, but found the latter and a craggy and repulsive woman asleep in his own. The house stank of garlic, soap, ammonia, iodine, sulphur, sick flesh, vinegar, burned hair; in short, it smelled of a busy medical practice. He shook his daughter awake and demanded, ‘Daughter, who is that old man in your bed?’

  ‘It’s Mandras, Papakis, and this is his mother, Kyria Drosoula. You’ve met her before.’

  ‘Not in my bed,’ he retorted, ‘and that isn’t Mandras. It’s some terrible old man with scabies and bandaged feet. I’ve already looked.’

  Later that morning Dr Iannis listened to Pelagia’s account of everything that she had done, snorting and sucking on his pipe at every tentative diagnosis and prognostication. When she had finished she blushed, construing her father’s attitude as indicating strong reproof for her presumptuousness. Then he went and examined the patient scrupulously, paying particular attention to the feet.

  He said nothing until he reached for his battered hat to go out. Pelagia nervously kneaded her duster and awaited his fury. ‘If I could cook,’ he said, to her astonishment, ‘I would exchange jobs with you. In fact, I might retire. Well done, koritsimou, I have never been so prodigiously proud.’ He kissed her on the forehead and swept out dramatically, scrutinising the skies for the anticipated invasion. He had a meeting of the Defence Committee to attend, in the kapheneia.

  Drosoula smiled down at Pelagia, who was so overwhelmed with relief and gratification that her hands were shaking. ‘I always wanted a daughter,’ said Drosoula. ‘You know what men are, they only want sons. You’re lucky to have a father like that. Mine was a complete dog as far as I can remember, always drunk on raki. I pray to the saint that Mandras gets well, and then you will be a daughter.’

  ‘As soon as we can,’ said Pelagia, taking her arm, ‘we should get him into the sunlight and down to the sea. In cases like this it’s the mind that makes a difference.’

  Drosoula noted that Pelagia had judiciously ignored her remarks, but forgave her for it. It was enough to see the young woman blooming with that peculiar beauty that derives from a sudden sense of vocation.

  22 Mandras Behind the Veil

  They talk about me as if I were not there, Pelagia, the doctor, and my mother. They talk about me as though I were senile or unconscious, as though I were a body without a mind. I am too tired and too sad to resist the indignity. Pelagia has seen me naked and my mother washes me intimately as though I were a baby, and they cover me with unguents and lotions that sting and soothe and stink, so that I am like a piece of furniture that is treated with oil and wax, whose worm-holes are filled, and whose cushions are plumped up and repaired. My mother inspects my stools and talks about them to my betrothed, and they feed me with a spoon because they have no patience to see me struggle with the trembling of my hands, and I ask myself if there is any sense in which I can be considered to exist.

  I suppose that I don’t. Everything has become a dream. There is a veil between me and them, so that they are shadows and I am dead, and the veil is perhaps a shroud that dims the light and blurs the vision. I have been to war, and it has created a chasm between me and those who have not; what do they know about anything? Since I encountered death, met death on every mountain path, conversed with death in my sleep, wrestled with death in the snow, gambled at dice with death, I have come to the conclusion that death is not an enemy but a brother. Death is a beautiful naked man who looks like Apollo, and he is not satisfied with those who wither away in old age. Death is a perfectionist, he likes the young and beautiful, he wants to stroke our hair and caress the sinew that binds our muscle to the bone. He does all he can to meet us, our faces gladden his heart, and he stands in our path to challenge us because he likes a clean fair fight, and after the fight he likes to befriend us, clap us on the shoulder, and make us laugh at all the pettiness and folly of the living. At the conclusion of a battle he wanders amongst the dead, raising them up, placing laurels upon the brows of those most comely, and he gathers them together as his own children and takes them away to drink wine that tastes of honey and gives them the sense of proportion that they never had in life.

  But he didn’t take me and I don’t know why. I was brave enough, certainly. I never avoided danger, and I continued even when my body was already destroyed. I think I lived because our commanders were too clever, I think I lived because death loved the Italians. Death told them to advance in line abreast against our strongest points, and we mowed them down like corn. But our generals made us outflank, outmanoeuvre, ambush, disappear and reappear. Our generals made it difficult for death, and so, instead of striking me with bullets, he made my body rot as much in a few months as with others he causes in sixty years. It was the cold, mud, parasites, starvation, grief, fear, blizzards of crystals sharper than glass, rain so dense that fish could have swum in it, all the things that there is no point in explaining because a civilian cannot even imagine it.

  Do you know what kept me going? It was Pelagia, and a sense of beauty. For me, Pelagia meant home. You see, I wasn’t fighting for Greece, I was fighting for home. I was getting it over with so that I could come back. Unfortunately my dream of Pelagia was better than Pelagia herself. I can see and hear that she is disgusted with her returning hero, and I knew before I went that I was not good enough for her. It means that if she loves me then she is being patronising, making a sacrifice, and I cannot stand it because it makes me hate her and despise myself. I am going to go away again when I am well so that I can reclaim the dream of Pelagia and love her without bitterness as I did in those mountains when I fought for her and the idea of home, and when I return I shall be remade and renewed, because next time I am going to make sure that I have done things so great that even a queen would beg to be my bride. I don’t know what they are, but they shall be the glory and the wonder of the world, they shall robe me about, as rich and gorgeous as the jewels of the saint.

  Also I have to go away again because I should not have come home in the first place. I came home because it was possible, and because coming home is like iced water after a day at sea in August when there has been no wind. I needed to wash myself in the rustling of olives, the clang of goatbells, the chaffering of crickets, the
taste of Robola, and the smell of salt. I needed the strength, my bare feet on the soil I sprang from, that’s all.

  The fact is that my unit was wiped out by the Germans near Mt Olympus. I was the only survivor, and as I sat there amongst the bodies of my friends Pelagia came to me in a vision. Malnutrition causes these things, they say, and great strain, but to me it was as if she stood in front of me and smiled. If she had not done this I would have joined up with another unit and fought the Germans all the way to Thermopylae, but suddenly I knew that I had to get home even though I didn’t know the way. I looked amongst the corpses and found the best pair of boots, a pair whose soles were coming away, but better than mine. I put them on and I walked south-west.

  Every night I noted where the sun set, and in the morning where it rose. I divided the semicircle, chose a landmark, and walked. At midday I checked that I was walking to the left of the sun. The roads were clogged with the chaos of retreat – the dying donkeys, the abandoned vehicles, the knapsacks and weapons, the victims of the Stukas – and so I walked across the land, through the infinite wilderness that I now know to be the greater part of Greece. It was at first a wilderness of thorns, and stunted trees just bursting into bud, but somewhere past Elasson the land rose and it became an inhuman waste of pines, gorges, cataracts, ravines, a land of hawks and bats. There were marshes full of peaty water and barbarous flowers, mountainsides slippery with shale and scree, and goat-paths that ended suddenly and inexplicably on the edge of an abyss. My new boots gave out, and that was when I wrapped my feet in bandages. At night Pelagia lay next to me as I froze in caves, and in the morning she walked before me to the south. I could see her skirts sway about her hips, I saw her stoop to pluck the flowers, and she smiled and waited for me when I fell.