The Magus

by John Fowles

  ‘I did not like the colonel at all. He had eyes like razors. I think the most unpleasant eyes I have ever seen in a human being. They were without a grain of sympathy for what they saw. Nothing but assessment and calculation. If they had been brutal, or lecherous, or sadistic, they would have been better. But they were the eyes of a machine.

  ‘An educated machine. The colonel had brought some bottles of hock with him and we had the best lunch I had eaten for many months. We discussed the war very briefly, rather as one might discuss the weather. It was the colonel himself who changed the subject to literature. He was obviously a well-read man. Knew Shakespeare well, and Goethe and Schiller extremely well. He even drew some interesting parallels between English and German literature, and not all in Germany’s favour. I realized that he was drinking less than we were. Also that Anton was careless with his tongue. We were both in fact being watched. I knew that halfway through the meal; and the colonel knew that I knew it. We two older men polarized the situation. Anton became an irrelevance. The colonel would have had nothing but contempt for the ordinary Greek official, and I was highly honoured to be treated by him as a gentleman and equal. But I was not misled.

  ‘After lunch we performed a few lieder for him, and he was full of compliments. He then announced that he wished to inspect the lookout post on the far side of the island, and invited me to accompany him – the place was of no great military importance. So I travelled round with them in his launch to Moutsa and we climbed up to the house here. There was a great deal of military paraphernalia about -wire everywhere and some pill-boxes. But I was happy to find that the house had not been damaged at all. The men were paraded and briefly addressed by the colonel in my presence – in German. He referred to me as “this gentleman” and insisted that my property should be respected. But I remember this. As we left he stopped to correct some minor fault in the way the man on guard at the gate was wearing his equipment. He pointed it out to Anton and said to him, “Schlamperei, Hen Leutnant. Sehen Sie?” Now schlamperei means something like sloppiness. It is the kind of word Prussians use of Bavarians. And of Austrians. He was evidently referring to some previous conversation. But it gave me a key to his character.

  ‘We did not see him again for nine months. The autumn of 1943.

  ‘It was the end of September. I was in my house one beautiful late afternoon when Anton strode in. I knew that something terrible had happened. He had just come back from Bourani. About twelve men were stationed there at a time. That morning four who were not on duty had gone down to Moutsa to swim. They must have grown careless, more schlamperei, because they all got into the water together. They came out, one by one, and sat throwing a ball and sunning on the beach. Then three men stood out of the trees behind them. One had a submachine-gun. The Germans had no chance. The Unteroffizier in charge heard the shots from here, the house, wirelessed Anton, then went down to look. He found three corpses, and one man who lived long enough to say what had happened. The guerillas had disappeared – and with the soldiers’ guns. Anton immediately set out round the island in a launch.

  ‘Poor Anton. He was torn between doing his duty and trying to delay the news from reaching the dreaded Colonel Wimmcl. Of course he knew that he had to report the incident. He did so, but not until that evening, after he had seen me. He told me that that morning he had reasoned that he had to deal with andarte from the mainland, who must have slipped over by night and who would certainly not risk going back again before darkness. He therefore went round the island very slowly, searching every place where a boat might be hidden. And he found one, drawn up in the trees over there at the end of the island facing Petrocaravi. He had no alternative. The guerillas must have heard and seen him searching. There were strict High Command instructions in such a contingency. One destroyed the means of retreat. He set the boat on fire. The mice were trapped.

  ‘He had come to explain all this to me; by this time Wimmel’s price-list was well known. We owed him eighty men. Anton thought we had one chance. To capture the guerillas and have them waiting for Wimmel when he arrived, as he was almost certain to, the following day. At least we should thus prove that they were not islanders, but agents provocateur. We know they must be Communists, el as men, because their policy was the deliberate instigation of German reprisals – in order to stiffen morale on the Greek side. The eighteenth-century klephts used exactly the same tactics to raise the passive peasantry against the Turks.

  ‘At eight that evening I called all the leading villagers together and explained the situation to them. It was too late to do anything that night. Our only chance was to co-operate with Anton’s troops in combing the island the next day. Of course they were passionately angry at having their peace – and their lives – put into such jeopardy. They promised to stand guard all night over their boats and cisterns and to be out at dawn to track the guerillas down.

  ‘But at midnight I was woken by the sound of marching feet and a knocking at the outside gates. Once again it was Anton. He came to tell me that it was too late. He had received orders. He was to take no more action on his own initiative. Wimmel would arrive with a company of die Raben in the morning. I was to be placed under immediate arrest. Every male in the village between the ages of fourteen and seventy-five was to be rounded up at dawn. Anton told me all this in my bedroom. He paced up and down, almost in tears, while I sat on the side of my bed, and listened to him say he was ashamed to be German, ashamed to have been born. That he would have killed himself if he did not feel it his duty to try to intercede with the colonel the next day. We talked for a long time. He told me more than he had before about Wimmel. We were so cut off here, and there were many things I had not heard. In the end he said, there is one good thing in this war. It has allowed me to meet you. We shook hands.

  ‘Then I went with him back to the school, where I slept under guard.

  ‘When I was taken down to the harbour the next morning at nine, all the men and most of the women in the village were there. Anton’s troops guarded all the exits. Needless to say, the guerillas had not been seen. The villagers were in despair. But there was nothing they could do.

  ‘At ten die Raben arrived in a landing-craft. One could see at once the difference between them and the Austrians. Better drilled, better disciplined, far better insulated against feelings of humanity. And so young. I found that the most terrifying aspect of them, their fanatical youth. Ten minutes later a seaplane landed. I remember the shadows of its wings falling on the whitewashed houses. Like a black scythe. A young fisherman near me picked a hibiscus and put the blood-red flower against his heart. We all knew what he meant.

  ‘Wimmel came ashore. The first thing he did was to have all of us men herded on to a quay, and for the first time the islanders knew what it was like to be kicked and struck by foreign troops. The women were driven back into the adjoining streets and alleys. Then Wimmel disappeared into a taverna with Anton. Soon after I was called for. All the villagers crossed themselves, and I was roughly marched in to see him by two of his men. He did not stand to greet me, and when he spoke to me, it was as if to a total stranger. He even refused to speak English. He had brought a Greek collaborationist interpreter with him. I could see that Anton was lost. In the shock of the event he did not know what to do.

  ‘Wimmel’s terms were made known. Eighty hostages were to be chosen at once. The rest of the men would comb the island, find the guerillas, and bring them back – with the stolen weapons. It was not sufficient to produce the corpses of three brave volunteers. If we did this within the next twenty-four hours the hostages would be deported to labour camps. If we did not, they would be shot.

  ‘I asked how we were to capture, even if we could find them, three desperate armed men. He simply looked at his watch and said, in German, “It is eleven o’clock. You have until noon tomorrow.”

  ‘At the quay I was made to repeat in Greek what I had been told. The men all began to shout suggestions, to complain, to demand weapons. In the e
nd the colonel fired a shot from his pistol in the air, and there was quiet. The roll of the village men was called. Wimmel himself picked out the hostages as they filed forward. I noticed that he picked the healthiest, the ones between twenty and forty, as if he were thinking of the labour camp. But I think that he was choosing the best specimens for death. He chose seventy-nine like that, and then pointed at me. I was the eightieth hostage.

  ‘So the eighty of us were marched off to the school and put under close guard. We were crammed in one classroom, without sanitation, given nothing to eat or drink – die Raben were guarding us – and even worse, no news. It was only much later that I found out what happened during that time.

  ‘The remaining men rushed to their homes – poles, sickles, knives, they picked up what they could and then met again on a hill above the village. Men so old they could hardly walk, boys of ten and twelve. Some women tried to join them but they were pushed back. To be guarantors of their men’s return.

  ‘This sad regiment argued, as Greeks always will. They decided on one plan, then on another. In the end someone took charge and allotted positions and areas to search. They set out – one hundred and twenty of them. They were not to know that they were searching in vain even before they began. But even if the guerillas had been in the pine-forest I do not think they would have found them – let alone captured them. So many trees, so many ravines, so many rocks.

  ‘They stayed out all night on the hills in a loose cordon across the island, hoping that the guerillas might try and break through to the village. They searched wildly the next morning. At ten they met and tried to make up their minds to launch a desperate attack on the troops down in the village. But the wiser heads knew it could only end in an even greater tragedy. There was a village in the Mani where two months before the Germans had killed every man, woman, and child for far less provocation.

  ‘At noon they came, carrying a cross and ikons, down to the village. Wimmel was waiting for them. Their spokesman, an old sailor, in a last vain lie told him they had seen the guerillas escape in a small boat. Wimmel smiled, shook his head and had the old man put under arrest – an eighty-first hostage. What had happened was simple. The Germans themselves had already captured the guerillas. In the village. But let us look at Wimmel.’

  Conchis clapped his hands again.

  ‘This is him, in Athens. One of the resistance groups took it so that we should have his face recorded.’

  The screen filled with light again. A town street. A German jeeplike vehicle drew up in the shade on the opposite side of the street. Three officers got out and walked in the hard sunlight diagonally across the camera, which must have been in the ground-floor room of the house next to the one they were entering. The head of someone passing blocked the view. A shorter, trimmer man led the way. I could see he had an air of curt, invincible authority. The other two men existed in his wake. Something, a shutter or a screen, obscured the view. Darkness. Then came a still of a man in civilian clothes.

  ‘That is the only known photograph of him before the war.’

  An unexceptional face; but a mean mouth. I remembered there were other sorts of humourlessness and fixed stare besides Conchis’s; and much more unpleasant ones. There was a certain similarity with the face of the ‘colonel’ on the central ridge; but they were different men.

  ‘And these are excerpts from newsreels taken in Poland.’

  As they came on, Conchis said, ‘That is him, behind the general’; or ‘Wimmel is on the extreme left.’ Though I could see the film was genuine, I had the same feeling that films of the Nazis had always given me; of unreality, of the distance, enormous, between a Europe that could breed such monsters and an England that could not. And I felt that Conchis was trying to enweb me, to make me too innocent, too historically green. Yet when I glanced at his face reflected in the light from the screen, he seemed even more absorbed in what he saw than I was myself; more a victim of the past.

  ‘What the guerillas must have done is this. As soon as they realized their boat had been burned they doubled back towards the village. They were probably already only just outside it when Anton came to see me. What we did not know was that one of them had relations on the outskirts of the village – a family called Tsatsos. It consisted of two sisters of eighteen and twenty, a father and a brother. But the men happened to have left two days before for the Piraeus with a cargo of olive-oil – they had a small caïque and the Germans allowed a certain amount of coastal traffic. One of the guerillas was a cousin of these girls – probably in love with the elder one.

  ‘The guerillas came to the cottage unseen, before anyone in the village knew of the catastrophe. They were no doubt counting on using the family caïque. But it was away. Later a weeping neighbour arrived to tell the sisters the news of the killing and all that I had told the village men. By then the guerillas were in hiding. We do not know where they spent that night. Probably in an empty cistern. Parties of hastily constituted vigilantes searched every cottage and villa, empty and lived-in, in the village, including the Tsatsos’s, and found nothing. Whether the girls were simply frightened or unusually patriotic we shall never know. But they had no blood relations in the village – and of course their father and brother were safely out of it.

  ‘The guerillas must that next day have decided to split up. At any rate the girls started baking bread. A sharp-eyed neighbour noticed it, and remembered that they had been baking only two days before. Bread for the brother and father to take on the voyage. Apparently she did not suspect anything at once. But about five o’clock she went to the school and told the Germans. She had three relations among the hostages.

  ‘A squad of die Raben arrived at the cottage. Only the cousin was there. He threw himself into a cupboard. He heard the two girls being struck, and screaming. He knew his time was up, so he leapt out, pistol in hand, fired before the Germans could move – and nothing happened. The pistol had jammed.

  ‘They took the three to the school, where they were interrogated. The girls were tortured, the cousin was quickly made to co-operate. Two hours later – when night had come – he led the way down the coast road to an empty villa, knocked on the shutter and whispered to his two comrades that the sisters had managed to find a boat. As they came through the gate the Germans pounced. The leader was shot in the arm, but no one else was hurt.’

  I interrupted. ‘And he was a Cretan?’

  ‘Yes. Quite like the man you saw. Only shorter and broader. All that time we hostages had been up in the classroom. It faced over the pine-forest, so we could not see any of the comings and goings. But about nine we heard two terrible screams of pain and a fraction later a tremendous cry. The one Greek word: eleutheria.

  ‘You may think that we cried in return, but we did not. Instead we felt hope – that the guerillas had been caught. Not long after that there were two bursts of automatic fire. And some time after that the door of our room was thrown open. I was called out, and another man: the local butcher.

  ‘We were marched downstairs and out in front of the school to the wing where I believe you masters live now – the western. Wimmel was standing at the entrance there with one of his lieutenants.

  ‘On the side of the steps behind them the collaborationist interpreter was sitting, with his head in his hands. He looked white, in a state of shock. Some twenty yards away, by the wall, I saw two dead female bodies. Soldiers rolled them on to stretchers as we approached. The lieutenant stepped forward and signalled to the butcher to follow him.

  ‘Wimmel turned and went into the building. I saw his back going down the dark stone corridor and then I was pushed forward after him. He stood outside a door at the far end and waited for me. Light poured from it. When I got there he gestured for me to go in.

  ‘I think anyone but a doctor would have fainted. I should have liked to have fainted. The room was bare. In the middle was a table. Roped to the table was a young man. The cousin. He was naked except for a bloodstained singlet, and he had be
en badly burnt about the mouth and eyes. But I could see only one thing. Where his genitals should have been, there was nothing but a black-red hole. They had cut off his penis and scrotal sac. With a pair of wire-cutting shears.

  ‘In one of the far corners another naked man lay on the floor. His face was to the ground and I could not see what they had done to him. He too was apparently unconscious. I shall never forget the stillness of that room. There were three or four soldiers – soldiers! of course torturers, psychopathic sadists – in the room. One of them held a long iron stake. An electric fire was burning, lying on its back. Three of the men wore leather aprons like blacksmith’s aprons, to keep their uniforms clean. There was a disgusting smell of excrement and urine.

  ‘And there was one other man, bound to a chair in the corner. He had been gagged. A great bull of a man. Badly bruised and wounded in one arm, but evidently not tortured yet. Wimmel had started first on the ones most likely to break.