The Corfu Trilogy (the corfu trilogy)

by Gerald Durrell

  The café was justly famous for producing the best ice-cream in Corfu, for Costi had been to Italy and had learned all the dark arts of ice-cream making. His confections were much in demand and there was scarcely a party worth calling a party given on the island that did not include one of Costi’s enormous, tottering, multi-coloured creations. Costi and I had a good working agreement; I would go to his café three times a week to collect all the cockroaches in his kitchen to feed my birds and animals, and in return for this service I was allowed to eat as many ice-creams as I could during my work. Determined that his shops should be clean for the Royal Visit, I went along to Costi’s café about three days before the King was due and found him in a mood of suicidal despair such as only a Greek, with the aid of ouzo, can acquire and sustain. I asked him what was the matter.

  ‘I am ruined,’ he said sepulchrally, setting before me a stone bottle of ginger beer and a gleaming white ice-cream big enough to sink the Titanic. ‘I am a ruined man, kyria Gerry. I am a laughing stock. No longer will people say “Ah, Corfu, that is where Costi’s ice-cream comes from.” No, they will say instead, “Corfu? That’s where that fool Costi’s ice-cream comes from.” I shall have to leave the island, there is no other course. I shall go to Zante or maybe Athens, or perhaps I shall join a monastery. My wife and children will starve, my poor old parents will feel burning shame as they beg for their bread…’

  Interrupting these gloomy prophecies, I asked what had happened to bring about this state of despair.

  ‘I am a genius,’ said Costi simply and without boastfulness, seating himself at my table and absent-mindedly pouring himself out another ouzo. ‘No one in Corfu could produce ice-creams like mine, so succulent, so beautiful, so… so cold.’

  I said this was true. I went further, for he obviously needed encouragement, and said that his ice-creams were famous throughout Greece, maybe even throughout Europe.

  ‘True,’ groaned Costi. ‘So it was natural that when the King was to visit Corfu the Nomarch wanted him to taste my ice-cream.’

  I was greatly impressed and said so.

  ‘Yes,’ said Costi, ‘twelve kilos of ice-cream I was to deliver to the Palace at Mon Repos and one special ice-cream for the great banquet on the night His Majesty arrives. Aghh! it was this special ice that was my undoing. This is why my wife and children must starve. Ah, cruel and relentless fate!’

  ‘Why?’ I asked bluntly, through a mouthful of ice-cream. I was in no mood for the frills; I wanted to get to the core of the story.

  ‘I decided that this ice-cream must be something new, something unique, something never dreamed of before,’ said Costi, draining his ouzo. ‘All night I lay awake waiting for a sign.’

  He closed his eyes and turned his head from side to side on a hot, unyielding, imaginary pillow.

  ‘I did not sleep, I was in a fever. Then, just as the first cocks crowed, “Ku-ka-ra-ka, koo,” I was blinded by a flash of inspiration.’

  He smote himself so hard on the forehead he almost fell out of his chair. Shakily, he poured out another ouzo.

  ‘I saw before my hot and tired eyes the vision of a flag, a flag of Greece, the flag for which we have all suffered and died, but the flag made in my best superior, quality, full cream ice-cream,’ he said triumphantly, and sat back to see its effect on me.

  I said I thought the idea was the most brilliant I had ever heard of. Costi beamed, and then, remembering, his expression became one of despair again.

  ‘I leaped out of bed,’ he continued dolefully, ‘and ran into my kitchen. There I discovered that I had not the ingredients to carry out my plan. I had chocolate to colour the cream brown, I had dyes to make it red or green or even yellow, but I had nothing, nothing at all, to make the blue stripes in the flag.’ He paused, drank deeply, and then drew himself up proudly.

  ‘A lesser man… a Turk or an Albanian… would have abandoned the plan. But not Costi Avgadrama. You know what I did?’

  I shook my head and took a swig of ginger beer.

  ‘I went to see my cousin Michaeli. You know, he works for the chemist’s down by the docks. Well, Michaeli – may St Spiridion’s curse fall upon him and his offspring – gave me some stuff to make the stripes blue. Look!’

  Costi went to his cold room and disappeared inside; then he came staggering out bearing a mammoth dish and laid it in front of me. It was full of ice-cream with blue and white stripes and did look remarkably like the Greek flag, even if the blue was a little on the purple side. I said I thought it was magnificent.

  ‘Deadly!’ hissed Costi. ‘Deadly as a bomb.’

  He sat down and stared malevolently at the huge dish. I could see nothing wrong with it except that the blue was more the colour of methylated spirits than true blue.

  ‘Disgraced! By my own cousin, by that son of an unmarried father!’ said Costi. ‘He gave me the powder, he said it would be fine; he promised me, the viper tongue, that it would work.’

  But it had worked, I pointed out, so what was the trouble?

  ‘By God and St Spiridion’s mercy,’ said Costi piously, ‘I had the idea of making a small flag for my family, just so they could celebrate their father’s triumph. I cannot bear to think what would have happened if I had not done this.’

  He rose to his feet and opened the door leading from the café to his private quarters.

  ‘I will show you what that monster, my cousin, has done,’ he said, and called up the stairs, ‘Katarina! Petra! Spiro! Come!’

  Costi’s wife and his two sons came slowly and reluctantly down the stairs and stood in front of me. To my astonishment I saw that they all had bright purple mouths, the rich, royal purple of a summer beetle’s wing case.

  ‘Put out your tongue,’ Costi commanded.

  The family opened their mouths and poked out tongues the colour of a Roman’s robe. They looked like macabre orchids, or a species of mandrake, perhaps. I could see Costi’s problem. In the helpful, unthinking way that Corfiotes have, his cousin had given him a packet of gentian violet. I had once had to paint a sore on my leg with this substance and I knew that, among its many properties, it was an extremely tenacious dye. Costi would have a purple wife and children for some weeks to come.

  ‘Just imagine,’ he said to me in a hushed whisper, having sent his discoloured wife and brood back upstairs, ‘just imagine if I’d sent this to the Palace. Imagine all those church dignitaries, their beards purple! A purple Nomarch and a purple King! I would have been shot.’

  I said I thought it would have been rather funny. Costi was greatly shocked. When I grew up, he said severely, I would realize that some things in life were very serious, not comical.

  ‘Imagine the reputation of the island… imagine my reputation if I had turned the King purple,’ he said, as he gave me another ice-cream to show that there was no ill-feeling. ‘Imagine how the foreigners would have laughed if the Greek King had turned purple. Po! po! po! po! St Spiridion save us!’

  And how about the cousin, I inquired; how had he taken the news?

  ‘He doesn’t know yet,’ said Costi, grinning evilly, ‘but he will soon. I’ve just sent him an ice-cream shaped like the Greek flag.’

  So the island was wound up to a pitch of unbearable excitement when the great day dawned. Spiro had organized his huge and ancient Dodge with the hood down as a sort of combination grandstand and battering ram, determined that the family at any rate were going to get a good view of the proceedings. In a festive mood, we drove into town and had a drink on the Platia to pick up news of the final preparations. Lena, resplendent in green and purple, told us that Marko had finally, if reluctantly, given up his idea of blue and white donkeys but now had another plan only slightly less bizarre.

  ‘You know g’e’as’is father’s printing works, huh?’ said Lena. ‘Vell, ’e say’e is to print thousands and thousands of Greek flags and take them out in ’is yacht and then scatter them over the vater so that the King’s ship ’as a carpet of Greek flags to sail on, no?’<
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  Marko’s yacht was the joke of Corfu; a once rather lush cabin cruiser, Marko had added so much superstructure to it that, as Leslie rightly said, it looked like a sort of sea-going Crystal Palace with a heavy list to starboard. Every time Marko set sail in it bets were laid as to when and if he would return.

  ‘So,’ continued Lena, ‘first ’e’ave the flags print, then ’e finds they don’t float – they sink. So ’e makes little crosses of vood and sticks the flags on them so that they vill float.’

  ‘It sounds rather a nice idea,’ said Mother.

  ‘If it works,’ said Larry. ‘You know Marko’s genius for organization. Remember Constantine’s birthday.’

  In the summer Marko had organized a sumptuous picnic for his nephew Constantine’s birthday. It would have been a splendid event, with everything from roast suckling pig to watermelons filled with champagne. The élite of Corfu were invited. The only snag was that Marko had got his beaches muddled and while he sat in solitary splendour surrounded by enough food to feed an army on a beach far down south, the élite of Corfu, hot and hungry, waited on a beach in the far north of the island.

  ‘Vell,’ said Lena, with an expressive shrug, ‘ve cannot stop him. All the flags are loaded on his boat. He has sent a man with a rocket to Coloura.’

  ‘A man with a rocket?’ asked Leslie. ‘What for?’

  Lena rolled her eyes expressively.

  ‘When the man sees the King’s ship he fires the rocket,’ she said. ‘Marko sees the rocket and this gives him time to rush out and cover the sea with flags.’

  ‘Well, I hope he succeeds,’ said Margo. ‘I like Marko.’

  ‘My dear, so do ve all,’ said Lena. ‘In my village where I ’ave my villa ve have a village idiot. He is charming, très sympathique, but ve do not want to make him the mayor.’

  With this waspish parting shot, she left us. The next one to arrive was Colonel Velvit in an agitated state.

  ‘You haven’t by any chance seen three small, fat Boy Scouts?’ he asked. ‘No, I didn’t think you would have. Little brutes! They went off into the country in their uniforms, the little savages, and came back looking like pigs! I sent them off to the cleaners to get their uniforms cleaned and they’ve disappeared.’

  ‘If I see them, I’ll send them to you,’ said Mother soothingly. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Thank you, my dear Mrs Durrell. I would not worry, but the little devils are an important part of the proceedings,’ said Colonel Velvit, preparing to go in search of the missing Scouts. ‘You see, not only do they form part of the stripe in the flag but they have to demolish the bridge as well.’

  With this mysterious remark, he departed, loping off like a hound.

  ‘Bridge? What bridge?’ asked Mother, bewildered.

  ‘Oh, it’s part of the show,’ said Leslie. ‘Among other things, they build a pontoon bridge over an imaginary river, cross it, and then blow it up to prevent the enemy following.’

  ‘I always thought Boy Scouts were peaceful,’ said Mother.

  ‘Not the Corfiote ones,’ said Leslie. ‘They’re probably the most war-like inhabitants of Corfu.’

  At that moment Theodore and Kralefsky, who were to share the car with us, arrived.

  ‘There has been… er… you know… a slight hiatus over the salute,’ Theodore reported to Leslie.

  ‘I knew it!’ said Leslie angrily. ‘That fool of a Commandant! He was too airy-fairy when I spoke to him. I told him those Venetian cannons would burst.’

  ‘No, no… er… the cannons haven’t burst. Er… um… at least, not yet,’ said Theodore. ‘No, it is a problem of timing. The Commandant was very insistent that the salute should be fired the moment the King’s foot touches Greek soil. The… er… um… difficulty was apparently to arrange a signal from the docks that could be seen by the… gunners in the… er… you know… the fort.’

  ‘So what have they arranged?’ asked Leslie.

  ‘They have sent a corporal down to the docks with a forty-five,’ said Theodore. ‘He is to fire it the moment before the King sets foot on the shore.’

  ‘Does he know how to fire it?’ asked Leslie sceptically.

  ‘Well… er…’ said Theodore, ‘I had to spend quite some time trying to make him see that it was dangerous to put it… um… you know… loaded and cocked into his holster.’

  ‘Silly fool, he’ll shoot himself through the foot like that,’ said Leslie.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Larry, ‘there’s bound to be some bloodletting before the day is out. I hope you brought your first aid kit, Theodore.’

  ‘Don’t say things like that, Larry,’ begged Mother. ‘You make me feel quite nervous.’

  ‘Ifs you’re readys, Mrs Durrells, we oughts to gets going,’ said Spiro, who had appeared, brown, scowling, looking like a gargoyle on holiday from Notre Dame. ‘The crowd’s getting very tense.’

  ‘Dense, Spiro, dense,’ said Margo.

  ‘That’s what I says, Misses Margo,’ said Spiro. ‘But don’ts you worry. I’ll fix ’em. I’ll scarce them out of the way with my horn.’

  ‘Spiro really ought to write a dictionary,’ said Larry as we climbed into the Dodge and wedged ourselves on to the capacious leather seats.

  Since early morning the white dusty roads had been jammed with carts and donkeys bringing peasants into the capital for the great event, and a great pall of dust covered the countryside, turning the plants and trees by the roadside white, hanging in the air like microscopic flakes of snow. The town was now as full or fuller than it was on St Spiridion’s day and great bevies of people were eddying across the Platia in their best clothes like clouds of wind-swept blossoms. Every back street was jammed with humanity mixed with donkeys, the whole moving at a glacier pace, and the air was full of excited chatter and laughter, the pungent smell of garlic, and the all-pervading smell of mothballs, the sign of special clothes carefully extracted from their places of safe-keeping. On every side you could hear brass bands tuning up, donkeys braying, the cries of the street vendors, and the excited screams of children. The town quivered and throbbed like a great, multi-coloured, redolent beehive.

  Driving at a snail’s pace, honking his great, rubber-bulbed horn to ‘scarce’ the uncaring populace out of the way, Spiro drove us down to the docks. Here all was bustle and what passed for efficiency; a band was lined up, its instruments sparkling, its uniforms immaculate, its air of respectability only slightly marred by the fact that two of its members had black eyes. Next to it was a battalion of local soldiery, looking remarkably clean and neat. Church dignitaries, with their carefully combed, white, silver, and iron-grey beards, bright and gay as a flock of parrots in their robes, chatted animatedly to each other, stomachs bulging, beards wagging, plump, well-manicured hands moving in the most delicate of gestures. Near the dockside where the King would come ashore stood a forlorn-looking corporal; obviously his responsibilities were weighing heavily on him for he kept fingering his revolver holster nervously and biting his nails.

  Presently, there was a surge of excitement and everyone was saying, ‘The King! The King! The King is coming!’ The corporal adjusted his hat and stood a little straighter. What had given rise to this rumour was the sight of Marko Paniotissa’s yacht putting out into the bay and lumbering to and fro while Marko, in the stern, could be seen unloading bundle after bundle of Greek flags.

  ‘I didn’t see the rocket, did you?’ asked Margo.

  ‘No, but you can’t see the headland from here,’ said Leslie.

  ‘Well, I think Marko’s doing splendidly,’ said Margo.

  ‘It’s certainly a very pretty effect,’ said Mother.

  And indeed it was, for several acres of the smooth sea were covered with a carpet of tiny flags which looked most impressive. Unfortunately, as we were to learn within the next hour and a half, Marko’s timing had been at fault. The man he had stationed up in the north of the island to fire the signal rocket was most reliable but his identification of ships left a lot
to be desired and so what eventually appeared was not the ship conveying the King but a rather grubby little tanker on its way to Athens. This in itself would not have been such a grave error but Marko, carried away as so many Corfiotes were that day, had failed to check on the glue with which the flags were stuck to the little wooden pieces that allowed them to float. As we waited for the King we were treated to the sight of the glue disintegrating under the influence of sea water and several thousand Greek flags sinking ignominiously to the bottom of the bay.

  ‘Oh, poor Marko, I feel so sorry for him,’ said Margo, almost in tears.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Larry consolingly, ‘perhaps the King likes little bits of wood.’

  ‘Um… I don’t… you know… think so,’ said Theodore. ‘You see how they’re all shaped like a little cross. That in Greece is considered a very bad omen.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mother. ‘I do hope the King won’t realize that Marko did it.’

  ‘If Marko is wise, he’ll go into voluntary exile,’ contributed Larry.

  ‘Ah, here he comes at last,’ said Leslie as the King’s ship sailed majestically across several acres of little wooden crosses, as though ploughing its way through a marine war cemetery.

  The gang-plank was lowered, the band struck up blaringly, the Army came to attention, and the crowd of church dignitaries moved forward like a suddenly uprooted flower bed. They reached the bottom of the gang-plank, the band stopped playing, and to a chorus of delighted ‘Ah’s’ the King made his appearance, paused briefly to salute, and then made his way slowly down the gangway. It was the little corporal’s great moment. Sweating profusely, he had moved as close to the gang-plank as he could and he had his gaze riveted on the King’s feet. His instructions had been explicit; three paces before the King stepped off the gangway and on to Greek soil he was to give the signal. This would give the fort enough time to fire the cannon as the King stepped ashore.