Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  Mandras joined ELAS at first because he had no choice. He and his fellows were lounging in a small shelter of brush with leaves for bedding, when they were surprised by ten men who surrounded them. All of these men were garbed in the remnants of uniform, were draped in bandoliers, had knives stuffed into their belts, and were so bearded as to look almost exactly alike. Their leader was distinguished by a red fez that would have been poor camouflage had it not been so faded and filthed.

  Mandras and his friends looked up into the barrels of a semicircle of light automatics, and the man with the fez said, ‘Come out.’

  Reluctantly the men stood up and came out, fearing for their lives, their hands upon the backs of their heads, and one or two andartes entered the shelter and threw out their weapons, which rattled together on the ground with that curious sound of dense metal muffled by wooden stocks and oil.

  ‘Who are you with?’ demanded the fez.

  ‘With no one,’ replied Mandras, confused.

  ‘Are you with EDES?’

  ‘No, we are on our own. We have no name.’

  ‘Just as well,’ said the fez, ‘now go back to your villages.’

  ‘I have no village,’ said one of the prisoners, ‘the Italians burned it.’

  ‘The deal is, that either you go back to your villages and leave us your weapons, or you fight it out with us and we kill you, or you join us under my command. This is our territory and no one else muscles in, especially not EDES, so which is it to be?’

  ‘We came to fight,’ explained Mandras. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am Hector, not my real name, which no one knows, and this …’ he indicated his troop, ‘… is the local branch of ELAS.’ The men grinned at him in a very friendly fashion, quite at odds with the dictatorial mien of the fez, and Mandras looked from one of his men to the others. ‘We stay?’ he asked, and they all nodded in agreement. They had been too long in the field to give it up, and it was good to have found a leader who might know what ought to be done. It had been demoralising to wander like Odysseus from place to place, far from home, improvising a resistance that never seemed to amount to anything.

  ‘Good,’ said Hector. ‘Come with us, and let’s see what you’re made of.’

  Still disarmed, the small column was led three kilometres to a tiny village which seemed to consist of nothing but rangy dogs, a few sagging houses whose stones had lost their mortar and were held together only by gravity and habit, and a pathway that had widened temporarily and optimistically into a dusty street. There was one house guarded by an andarte, and to this man Hector signalled, ‘Bring him out.’

  The partisan went inside and, kicking and pushing, propelled an emaciated old man into the sunlight, where he stood trembling and blinking, naked to the waist. Hector handed Mandras a length of knotted rope, and, pointing to the old man, said, ‘Beat him.’

  Mandras looked at Hector in disbelief, and the latter glared at him ferociously. ‘If you want to be with us, you’ve got to learn to administer justice. This man …’ he pointed ‘… has been found guilty. Now beat him.’

  It was loathsome, but it was not impossible to beat a collaborator. He struck the man once with the rope, lightly, out of deference for his age, and Hector impatiently exclaimed, ‘Harder, harder. What are you? A woman?’ He struck the old man once more, a little harder. ‘Again,’ commanded Hector.

  It was easier at each stroke. In fact it became an exhilaration. It was as if every rage from the earliest year of childhood was welling up inside him, purging him, leaving him renewed and cleansed. The old man, who had been yelping and jumping sideways at every blow, spinning and cowering, finally threw himself to the ground, whining piteously, and Mandras suddenly knew that he could be a god.

  A young woman, perhaps no more than nineteen years old, ran forward, escaping the grasp of one of the andartes, and threw herself at Hector’s feet. She was gasping in fear and desperation. ‘My father, my father!’ she exclaimed. ‘Mercy on him, have mercy, he is an old man, o my poor father.’

  Hector placed the sole of his foot upon the side of her shoulder and pushed her over. ‘Shut up, Comrade, stop your whining, or I won’t answer for the consequences. Somebody take her away.’

  She was dragged away, pleading and weeping, and Hector took the rope from Mandras. ‘You do it like this,’ he said, as though explaining some abstruse point of science. ‘You start at the top …’ he slashed a wide cut across the man’s shoulders ‘… then you do the same across the bottom …’ he cut another bloody swathe across the small of the back ‘… and then you fill in between in parallel lines, until the skin is all gone. That is what I mean when I say “beat him”.’

  Mandras did not even notice that the man had stopped moving, had stopped screaming and whining. With tightlipped determination he filled in the gap between the lines, going back over the ones that might have left a suspicion of pink skin. The muscles of his own shoulders ached and screamed, and finally he stopped to mop his brow with his sleeve. A fly settled on the pulp of the back, and he crushed it with one more stroke. Hector stepped forward, took the rope from his hand, and placed a pistol in his grasp, ‘Now kill him.’ He placed a forefinger against his own temple, and used his thumb to convey the impression of an imaginary hammer.

  Mandras knelt down and placed the barrel against the old man’s head. He hesitated, appalled with himself somewhere in the back of his mind. He could not do it. In order to make it look as though he was doing something, he clicked back the hammer and took up first pressure. He could not do it. He closed his eyes tightly. He could not lose face. It was a question of being a man in front of other men, a question of honour. Anyway, it was Hector who was the executioner and he was only the hand. The man had been sentenced to death, and was going to die anyway. He looked a little like Dr Iannis, with his thin grey hair and prominent occipital bone. Dr Iannis, who didn’t think him worth a dowry. Who cares about one more useless old man? Mandras clenched together the muscles of his face, and pulled the trigger.

  Afterwards he looked not at the bloody mess of bone and brain, but in disbelief at the smoking orifice of the barrel of the gun. Hector took it from him and gave him back his carbine. He patted Mandras on the back and said, ‘You’ll do.’ Mandras tried to struggle to his feet, but was too weary, and Hector crooked an elbow under his armpit to lift him. ‘Revolutionary justice,’ he said, adding, ‘historical necessity.’

  As they left the village along the dust and jagged stone that had once more shrunk to a path, Mandras found that he could not look anyone in the face, and he stared vacantly down into the dirt. ‘What did he do?’ he asked finally.

  ‘He was a dirty old thief.’

  ‘What did he steal?’

  ‘Well it wasn’t exactly stealing,’ said Hector, removing his fez and scratching his head, ‘but the British drop supplies to us and to EDES. We’ve given strict instructions to the people round here that every drop must be reported to us, so that we can get there first. Only reasonable under the circumstances. That man went and reported the drop to EDES, and after he did that, he opened one of the canisters and took a bottle of whisky. We found him lying under the parachute silk, drunk as a Turk. It was theft and disobedience.’ He replaced the fez, ‘You have to be firm with these people, or they start doing what they like. They’re full of false consciousness, and it’s just something that we have to get out of them, in their own interests. You won’t believe this, but half of these peasants are Royalists. Just imagine! Identifying yourself with the oppressors!’

  It had never occurred to Mandras to be anything other than a Royalist, but he nodded in agreement, and then asked, ‘Was it a drop for EDES?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Behind them in the village a lifequelling wail expanded through the stillness. It rose and fell like a siren, echoing from the cliff above them across the valley to the opposite rocks, returning and mingling with the later variations of its own sound. Mandras blocked from his mind the precisely clear pic
ture of what must have been happening – the keening weeping girl, black-haired and youthful like Pelagia, rocking and moaning over the mangled and aborted flesh of her own father – and concentrated on the ululation. If you didn’t think about what it was, it sounded weirdly beautiful.

  29 Etiquette

  On a bright morning early in the occupation, Captain Antonio Corelli woke up feeling guilty as usual. It was an emotion that struck him each morning and left the taste of rancid butter in his mouth, and it was caused by the knowledge that he was sleeping in somebody else’s bed. He felt his self-esteem ratchet lower by the day as he struggled with the idea that he had displaced Pelagia, that she was sleeping, wrapped up in blankets, on the cold flags of the kitchen floor. It was true that Psipsina would creep in beside her on colder nights, and it was also true that he had brought her two Army bedrolls to place one above the other to form a mattress, but he still felt himself unworthy, and he wondered whether she would forever regard her bed as contaminated. It also worried him that she had been obliged to get up very early so that she would be decent, her bed rolled away, by the time that he came into the kitchen. He would find her yawning, her finger following the difficult English of the medical encyclopaedia, or else working vindictively at a crocheted blanket that never seemed to get any larger. Every day he would raise his cap and say, ‘Buon giorno, Kyria Pelagia,’ and every day it would strike him as ludicrous that he knew the Greek for ‘Miss’ but did not know how to say ‘Good morning’. Nothing delighted him so much as to see her smile, and for this reason he resolved to learn the Greek for ‘Good morning’, so that he could say it to her casually as he passed on his way to where Carlo was waiting to take him away in the jeep. He asked Dr Iannis for guidance.

  This latter was in a testy mood for no other reason than that it had appealed to him to be in that particular mood on that particular morning. His acquaintance with the fat quartermaster had made his practice very much easier to run than it had been even in peacetime, and since the latter was undoubtedly a hypochondriac, he had seen him often enough to ensure a continuous flow of essential supplies. Curiously enough, just when at last he had enough to get by, the islanders stopped getting ill. The communal deferral of illness in straitened times was a phenomenon of which he had heard but never previously witnessed, and every time that he was apprised of an Allied success he had set to worrying about the inevitable flood of maladies that would occur after the liberation. He had begun to resent the Italians for diminishing his usefulness, and it was for this reason perhaps that he informed Corelli that the Greek for ‘good morning’ was ‘ai gamisou’.

  ‘Ai gamisou,’ repeated Corelli three or four times, and then he said, ‘now I can say it to Pelagia.’

  The doctor was horrified, and thought quickly. ‘O no,’ he said, ‘you can’t say that to Kyria Pelagia. To a woman who lives in the same house you say “kalimera”. It’s just one of those strange rules that some languages have.’

  ‘Kalimera,’ repeated the captain.

  ‘And if someone greets you,’ continued the doctor, ‘you have to say “putanas yie” in reply.’

  ‘Putanas yie,’ practised the captain. On his way out he proudly said, ‘Kalimera, Kyria Pelagia.’

  ‘Kalimera,’ said Pelagia, pulling the stitches out of her futile crochet. Corelli waited for her to be surprised or to smile, but there was no response. Disappointed, he left, and after he had gone, Pelagia smiled.

  Outside, Corelli found that Carlo had not yet materialised, and so he practised his new greeting on the villagers. ‘Ai gamisou,’ he said cheerfully to Kokolios, who glared at him, scowled darkly, and spat into the dust.

  ‘Ai gamisou,’ he said to Velisarios, who promptly swerved in his direction and released a torrent of invective that the captain fortunately failed to understand. Corelli only avoided being struck by the enormous and wrathful man by offering him a cigarette. ‘Maybe I just shouldn’t speak to Greeks,’ he thought.

  ‘Ai gamisou,’ he said to Stamatis, who had recently been coping with his marriage by practising the pretence that his deafness was recurring. ‘Putanas yie,’ mumbled the old man as he passed.

  In Argostoli that evening the captain proudly tried out his new greeting on Pasquale Lacerba, the gawky Italian photographer who had been pressed into working as a translator, and was appalled to find, after some misunderstandings, that the doctor had misled him. He found himself sitting in a café near the town hall, more miserable than angry. Why did the doctor do that? He thought that they had established some kind of mutual respect, and yet the doctor had told him how to say ‘Go fuck yourself’ and ‘Son of a whore’, and he been making a fool of himself all day, raising his cap and smiling, and saying those terrible things. For God’s sake, he had even said them to a priest, a friendly dog, and a little girl with a dirty but touchingly innocent face.

  30 The Good Nazi (1)

  One of the many curiosities of the old British administrative classes was that they clearly perceived what had gone wrong at home, and never put it right. Instead, they applied these lessons to their possessions abroad. Thus, in his ‘Treatise Concerning Civil Government’ of 1781, the philosopher Josiah Tucker noted that London was grossly over-represented in Parliament, and unfairly engrossed with advantages which ought to be common to all. More importantly, he wrote:

  ‘AGAIN; All over-grown Cities are formidable in another View, and therefore ought not to be encouraged by new Privileges, to grow ftill more dangerous; for they are, and ever were, the Seats of Faction and Sedition, and the Nurferies of Anarchy and Confufion. A daring, and defperate Leader, in any great Metropolis, at the Head of a numerous Mob, is terrible to the Peace of Society, even in the moft defpotic Governments …

  ‘Once more, if a man has any senfe of Rectitude and good Morals, or has a Spark of Goodnefs and Humanity remaining, he cannot wifh to entice men into great Cities by frefh Allurements. Such places are already become the bane of mankind in every Senfe, in their Healths, their Fortunes, their Morals, religion, &c. &c. &c. And it is obfervable of London in particular, that were no frefh Recruits, Male and Female, to come out of the Country, to fupply thofe Devaftations which Vice, Intemperance, Brothels, and the gallows are continually making, the whole human Species in that City would be foon exhaufted; for the Number of Deaths exceed the Births by at leaft 7,000 every Year.’

  Philosophers who have only one idea and propound it in barbarous neologisms in thirty successive volumes have a guaranteed future in the universities, but the unfortunate Josiah Tucker, so influential in his own day, has been lost to modern departments of philosophy because he was insufficiently obscure, did not propound theories mad enough, and rooted his thought in concrete examples. In Britain, instead of sensibly moving the capital to York, London was allowed to grow into the vilest human cesspit in the history of the world. But in Cephallonia the British authorities noticed that Argostoli was growing too big, took Tucker’s advice, and set about constructing the exquisite town of Lixouri.

  In Lixouri there was a spacious agora rimmed with trees, and a splendid courthouse constructed with a market beneath it, neatly coalescing the related benefits of commerce, justice, and sociable shade from the blows of sun and rain. To this day Lixouri and Argostoli regard each other as aberrant and eccentric, and compete doggedly in dance, music, trade, and civic pride, but in 1941 a new and ominous kind of rivalry was imposed by newly parasitic foreign powers. The Italians garrisoned Argostoli, and the Germans garrisoned Lixouri.

  The German detachment was small and unassuming, and there is no doubt that it was only there at all because the Nazis knew perfectly well that the Italians were not to be trusted, and wanted to keep them under observation. It is true that Hitler had described Mussolini as ‘The Great Man beyond the Alps’, but by then he also knew that the Duce and his henchmen were the only genuine Fascists left in Italy. He knew that their generals were old-fashioned and uninspired, he had seen for himself that the soldiers were ill-disciplined, fractious,
and had minds of their own, and in North Africa he had ensured that they were always kept away from the front line during engagements that mattered. Like God setting his rainbow in the sky to remind the Israelites who was boss, Hitler sent to Lixouri three thousand grenadiers of the 996th Regiment, under Colonel Barge.

  Nobody liked them, although relations between Germans and Italians were superficially friendly and co-operative. The Germans thought of the Italians as racially inferior negroids, and the Italians were perplexed by the Nazi cult of death. The belts and uniforms grimly embellished with skulls and bones struck them as pathologicals as did their iron discipline, their irrational and irritating uniformity of views and conversation, and their incomprehensible passion for hegemony. The Italians, who were inveterately inclined to putting their arms across each others’ shoulders, did not feel likewise inclined when in the company of a German, as though they would have received an electric shock, as though their arm might have turned to ice or been lost in the void. In the evenings one could hear ‘Lili Marlene’ drifting out of the messes, the convivial chatter, the roars of laughter, the high jinks, but this was a private world. In the daytime the Germans were serious, did not understand irony, took polite offence, and were coldly and brutally efficient in their dealings with the local population. Captain Corelli made friends with one of them, a boy who spoke some Italian, and discovered that he only became truly human when he shed his uniform, put on his swimming trunks, and splashed about in the sea.

  Günter Weber desperately wanted to be blond, and it was for this reason that he frequented the sunlit beaches in the hours away from duty, hoping that the sun would bleach his hair. But there was nothing he could do to transform his brown eyes to an unsuspiciously Aryan blue. It was on the beach of Lepada Bay that he made the acquaintance of the man who became his friend and whom he was destined to betray with a Judas kiss that consisted of a maelstrom of bullets that opened scarlet and bleeding mouths in the bodies of the companions he had grown to love.