Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  It seemed that everyone had trembling hands and tearfilled eyes. People spoke as little as possible because it was hard to speak when choking either from the vile smoke of sizzling flesh or with such tormenting grief. In pairs and threes they carried bodies away to caves and crannies, to hastily dug but massive graves, to holes where in the past one hid one’s goods and money from taxmen and the customs. Parties went out to places where there had been battle, and recovered those that the Nazis had not found. Orthodox prayers were said hastily over Catholic souls, and it was noted that none of them wore rings or carried cash. The bodies had been looted, their fingers hacked away, their gold teeth pulled, their silver chains with crucifix removed.

  At dawn a black and viscous cloud hung over the land and blotted out the sun, and the people returned to their houses and locked the doors till dark. General Gandin’s smoke had mingled with that of his boys in the Cephallonian sky, one of the first to die, an honourable, chivalrous old soldier of the ancient school, who trusted his enemies and had tried to save his men. He died straight-backed and unflinching, in the knowledge that his frequent changes of mind and his conscientious delays had killed them as surely as the fusillades that now splashed his blood upon the rocks. Soon the remainder of his officers would be taken away from the Mussolini barracks in Argostoli, and they too would spit and shrivel in the flames.

  That night the Greeks emerged once more, pulling bodies from the seawells and sinks, noting once again that no one had a watch, a pen, a single coin. They found photographs of laughing girls, loveletters, pictures of families standing in a line and smiling. They found that many of the soldiers, acknowledging the imminence of extinction but determined to speak even from the far side of the grave, had scribbled addresses upon the backs of cards and photographs, in the poignant hope that there might be someone who would write a letter, someone to convey the news. On many letters the ink had run as though a few large drops of rain had caught the reader in the open air.

  They did not know that, having quickly learned the lesson of the previous night, the Germans were now economising on physical effort by forcing the officers to carry their own dead to the trucks, and shooting them only when the work was done. They did not know that there was a Leutnant Weber who was not the only Nazi maddened and broken by his own dutiful atrocities. But again they saw the same fires, shook their heads as the same foul concoction of stenches impregnated their houses and clothes, and once more they did their best to salvage the dead amid a night that was made sepulchral by the attenuated and dancing shadows of trees and men that were cast out by the leaping orange pyres.

  On the following day a rumour began, to the effect that St Gerasimos had wandered out in the darkness and then returned to his catafalque, the nuns purportedly finding him in the morning with the traces of tears upon the black leather of his shrivelled cheeks, and crimson blood upon the gilt and satin of his shoes.

  58 Surgery and Obsequy

  When the door was suddenly kicked open just as it was getting dark, Pelagia’s first thought was that it was the Germans. She knew that all the Italians were dead.

  Like everybody else she had heard first the sounds of battle – the mechanical yattering of machine-guns, the snap of rifles, the short bursts of automatics, the muffled bass timpani of shells – and she had heard afterwards the unending crackling of the firing squads. Through the shutters she had seen truck after truck pass by, laden either with triumphant grenadiers or lolling corpses of Italians with the blood trickling from the corners of their mouths and their eyes fixed upon infinity. At night she had gone out with her father, whose cheeks were trembling with tears of rage and pity, and gone to look for lives to save amongst those bodies scattered and abandoned by those monstrous fires.

  It had left her inarticulate, not with fear or sorrow, but with emptiness.

  So life was already over. She knew that young and pretty women were transported by the Germans, since their brothels did not run on volunteers. She knew that they were full of terrorised and tortured girls from every place from Poland to Slovenia, and that the Nazis shot them at the first signs of resistance or disease. She had been sitting at her table, her mind preoccupied with memories, occasionally looking all about her and taking in for the last time the mundane details of a life; the knots on the leg of the table, the dinted pans she had scoured so thin, the inexplicable discoloration of one of the tiles of the floor, the illegal picture of Metaxas on the wall that her father had placed there even though he was an implacable Venizelist. She had her hand in the pocket of her apron, and when the Germans came she would shoot one of them, so that they would have to shoot her in return. The little derringer seemed insufficient to the task, but at least her father had an Italian pistol and fifty rounds that someone, perhaps a member of La Scala, had left outside their door to be a bleak inheritance.

  So when the door flew open she was startled, but it had about it the narrative inevitability of a well-thumbed book. She stood up swiftly, her hand tightening upon the weapon, her face drained of colour, and beheld Velisarios, panting like a dog, his lower body runnelled with blood, his eyes glowing with the supernatural strength with which it was his fortune to be born. ‘I ran,’ he said, and advanced to the table, gently placing upon it the pathetic bundle that was as limp, relaxed, and peaceful as any other of the thousand dead that in the last nights she had seen. ‘Who is it?’ asked Pelagia, wondering why the strongman had concerned himself with one amongst so many.

  ‘He’s alive,’ said Velisarios. ‘It’s the mad captain.’

  She bent down swiftly, horror and hope wrestling and boxing in her heart. She did not recognise him. There was too much gore, too many tiny scraps and flakes of flesh, too many holes in the tunic of his chest that still seeped blood. His face and hair were glistening and caking. She wanted to touch him, but withdrew her hand. Where does one touch a man like this? She wanted to embrace him, but how does one embrace a man so broken?

  The corpse opened its eyes, and the mouth smiled. ‘Kalimera, koritsimou,’ it said. She recognised the voice. ‘It’s the evening,’ she said idiotically, for lack of any words with which to be profound.

  ‘Kalispera, then,’ he murmured, and closed his eyes.

  Pelagia looked up at Velisarios, her eyes wide and desperate, and told him, ‘Velisario’, you have never done a greater thing. I’m going to get my father. Stay with him.’

  It was the first time that a woman had ever entered the kapheneia. It was not the place it once had been, but it was still a sacred place for males, and when she burst in and pulled open the door of the huge cupboard where all the men were listening to the BBC (the entire Venezia Division of the Italian Army had joined with Tito’s partisans) the detonation of disapproval was more than palpable. A cloud of cigarette smoke billowed from the interior, and there were her father and four men, all bolt upright in that cramping space, glaring at her with a shock that amounted near to hate. Kokolios roared at her, but she pulled her father’s hand and dragged him protesting from the shop.

  The doctor looked at the body and knew that he had never seen anything worse. There was enough blood to fill the arteries of a horse, enough mites of flesh to feed the crows for months. For the first time in his medical career he felt defeated and useless, and his hands dropped to his sides. ‘It would be kinder to kill him,’ he said, and before Velisarios could say, ‘I thought so too,’ Pelagia was beating her father on the chest with both hands, lashing at his shins with her feet, outraged and incensed. Velisarios came forward, placed one arm about her waist, and hoisted her to the usual position occupied by his cannon, resting her upon the natural ledge of his hip, where she flailed at his thighs and howled.

  And so it was that water was set to boil and the shreds of the captain’s uniform were gently clipped away. Pelagia frantically tore in strips not only her own sheets but those of her father. Afterwards she fetched every bottle of spirit that her father had concealed, and for good measure his cherished stock of island wine
.

  Dr Iannis complained as he cleaned away the blood. ‘What am I supposed to do? I am not qualified. I am not a proper surgeon. I have no gown, no cap, no gloves, none of this penicillin I’ve heard about. No X-ray machine, no sterile water, no serum, no plasma, no blood …’

  ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up,’ Pelagia was shouting, her heart now racing with both panic and determination, ‘I’ve seen you pin a fracture with a ten-centimetre nail. Just shut up and do it.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said the intimidated doctor.

  Because the doctor was unaware that most of the blood and flesh had belonged to the broad back of Carlo Guercio, it seemed to him that perhaps it was a miracle of the saint that Antonio Corelli was as little wounded as he was. Once he was cleansed, and a pile of bloody rags collected from the floor and set to boil, it was clear that the victim had six bullets in his chest, one in the abdomen, one through the outer flesh of his right arm, and an ugly but insignificant crease across his cheek.

  But it still seemed hopeless. The doctor knew too much to be an optimist, and not enough to relieve his pessimism. There would be fragments of uniform in those holes, pockets of air punched inward by the bullets. There would be splinters of rib that he would not be able to locate, osteomyelitis setting in from the infection of a myriad of microbes that would spread their poison through the marrow to the veins, causing death by septicaemia. The doctor knew that bullets might be lodged in places where to touch them would cause a welter of bleeding, but where not to touch them would cause unconquerable infection. There might already be haemothorax, the spreading of blood in the spaces between the chest wall and the lung. Before too long there might be gas gangrene. There would be sequestra to remove whose location he could not conceivably deduce. The doctor opened one of the bottles of raki, took a deep swig, and passed it to Velisarios, who out of solidarity did the same. He remained there, spellbound by the whole proceeding.

  Dr Iannis gathered his wits together and realised that it was no use jumping to conclusions. A surgeon explores first and thinks afterwards. With the taste of aniseed in his mouth and the tot of alcohol burning consolingly in his guts, he reached for a probe and inserted it gently into each wound until he felt it reach a bullet. He noted that the holes were surprisingly wide and that each one was surrounded by a yellow ring of bruising. Why were the holes so wide?

  He stood up, amazed. The holes were not even deep. He realised suddenly that in reality the bullets should have passed clean through, leaving craters in the victim’s back that should be spewing blood. ‘Daughter,’ he said, ‘I swear by ali the saints that this man’s flesh is made of steel. I think he’ll live.’ He reached for his stethoscope and listened. The heart was weak but regular. ‘Antonio,’ he called, and Corelli opened his eyes. He attempted to smile. ‘Antonio, I’m going to operate on you. I haven’t got much morphia. Can you drink? It’ll thin your blood, but it can’t be helped.’

  ‘Pelagia,’ said Corelli. Velisarios held up the captain’s head and Pelagia poured a cup of raki down his throat whilst the doctor prepared three-quarters of a gram of morphia. He would inject the same amount every half hour if it was necessary, and every half hour the captain would swallow raki, if that was also required. ‘I want maximum light,’ said the doctor, and Pelagia removed every lamp from every room, whilst Velisarios lit them in the kitchen. Outside it was dark, and the owls hooted amid the metallic scrapings of the crickets and all the natural sounds of that duplicitous and deceptive peace. Psipsina entered with the first of her nocturnal mice clamped in her teeth, and Pelagia shooed her out.

  Into one arm the doctor injected morphia, and into the other, for good measure and for no precise reason other than intuition, he injected 10cc of sugar and saline solution that Pelagia had mixed up in a jug. She did not like to see the body of the man she loved pricked and probed, but she knew that shortly she would see it hacked and cut. But, looking at that pale and penetrated body with its blood, as helpless as a worm, she knew that it was not precisely a body that one loved. One loved the man who shone out through the eyes and used its mouth to smile and speak. She held the musician’s fingers in her hand and looked at the carefully trimmed nails. At least the cuticles were pink. She did not adore the hands, but the man who made them move upon the frets. How often had she imagined them moving on her breasts? The doctor saw her reverie, and said, ‘Don’t just sit there. Do the wounds on his face and arm. Clean them up, cut away the shreds, disinfect them, and sew them up. Do you want to be a doctor or not? And we’ll need more boiling water, lots of it. And wash your hands, especially under the nails.’

  She stood up and blinked, her hands at her sides, ‘Are you sure he’s unconscious? I don’t want to hurt him.’

  ‘I’m going to hurt him a lot more than you.’ He slapped Corelli’s face and shouted, ‘Antonio, your mother’s a whore.’ There was no reaction, and the doctor said, ‘He’s out.’

  ‘His mother is dead,’ said Pelagia reproachfully. ‘Don’t drink any more raki if it makes you speak like that.’

  Outside a German armoured car rumbled past, and all three stood stock still until it had gone. ‘Bastards,’ said Velisarios.

  Pelagia discovered in that hour the exact enormity of what she had asked her father to do. Her hands trembled, and she could hardly bring herself to touch those wounds. At first she dabbed at them tentatively, horrified when looking up to see her father actually cutting wide holes around the bullet wounds. ‘It’s called debriment,’ he told her, ‘and I don’t like it either, but it works, so if you don’t like it, don’t watch. I’m taking away all the damaged flesh. You should do the same.’ Pelagia fought back the impulse to vomit, and Velisarios walked backwards and sat on the floor with his back against the door. He would watch them working, but he would spare himself the details.

  The doctor started on the bullet in the abdomen, since he needed something to do that was relatively undangerous, to boost his confidence. He found it not far beneath the surface of the skin, picked it out with his forceps, and marvelled at its flattened and distorted shape. ‘It’s a miracle,’ he said, showing it to Pelagia, who was snipping away a tattered morsel with some flatsided surgical clippers. ‘How do you account for this?’

  ‘He was behind that big man, the one as big as me,’ offered Velisarios. ‘The big man was holding him from behind, like this.’ He stood up and put his hands behind his back to demonstrate how one could grip another’s wrists. ‘He was still holding the mad captain when I picked him up. I though he was too heavy at first. I think he was trying to save this man.’

  ‘Carlo,’ said Pelagia, suddenly bursting into tears. Her father thought of comforting her, but realised that he would only smear her head with blood. Carlo was the first of the boys of La Scala who they now knew certainly to be dead. ‘No man who dies like that has died for nothing,’ said the doctor, choking on the words. He fought back his own need for tears, and, by way of distracting himself, removed and scrutinised a scrap of burned cloth from inside the wound before him. Pelagia wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her dress and said, ‘Antonio always said that Carlo was the bravest in the Army.’

  ‘All wasted,’ commented the doctor, unwittingly contradicting his earlier sentiment. ‘Velisario’, is the man’s body still there? We would like to bury it and not see it burned.’

  ‘It’s after the curfew, Iatre,’ said the strongman, ‘but I’ll go if you want. On the way I might kill a German, who knows?’ He departed, happy to be out of that grisly workshop where emotions were too high and the sights were enough to make one ill. He breathed the cool autumnal air for a few seconds, and then headed off once more across the fields.

  The doctor finished cleaning out the wound, rinsed it with alcohol, and filled it up with sulphonamide powder. He had got it from the hypochondriac quartermaster with the corns. No doubt by now his soul had fled along with all his imaginary ills, and no doubt his cheerful folds of fat had been untimely rendered on the fire. There was a boundless cloud of sadne
ss hanging in the air for anyone to feel it if they chose. It was better to concentrate on the captain. He cut a flap of flesh, rotated it, and covered the hole he had made. ‘When you’ve done that,’ he said to his daughter, ‘embroider this together. There’s parachute cord in my bag, so just unravel it into threads. There’s nothing better.’

  Pelagia’s sense of outrageous unreality grew. There she was, stitching up her lover with an accuracy and care that she owed to an asymmetrical waistcoat and the patient instruction of an aunt, and there was her father next to her, carefully extracting splinters of rib and flattened bullets from the same man’s chest, talking at the same time all about crepitus, facies hypocratica, and any number of other potential problems whose meaning was too obscure for their prospect to be appalling. She moved to the captain’s face and cleaned out the bullet crease. She wondered whether to let it heal on its own or whether to sew it up. ‘It depends,’ said the doctor, preparing another injection of morphia, ‘whether you want him with a crooked smile or not. It’s a choice between that or a wide scar. Either of them may be charming, who knows?’

  ‘A scar can be romantic,’ said Pelagia.

  ‘These scars,’ said the doctor, indicating the chest with his scalpel, ‘will be pretty horrible. If he lives.’

  Velisarios buried Carlo Guercio’s remains that night in the yard of the doctor’s house. Struggling across the walls and fields, accompanied by that sticky smell of death, his hands slimy and slipping, he had felt like Atlas burdened by the world. It had not taken him long to discover that his load was too heavy to carry in his arms as he had carried the captain, and finally he staggered along with that great weight across his shoulders, as though it were a mighty sack of wheat.