The Magus

by John Fowles

  ‘All this takes many words to say to you. And I have said nothing about how I felt this immalleability, this refusal to cohere, was essentially Greek. That is, I finally assumed my Greekness. All I saw I saw in a matter of seconds, perhaps not in time at all. Saw that I was the only person left in that square who had the freedom left to choose, and that the annunciation and defence of that freedom was more important than common sense, self-preservation, yes, than my own life, than the lives of the eighty hostages. Again and again, since then, those eighty men have risen in the night and accused me. You must remember that I was certain I was going to die too. But all I have to set against their crucified faces are those few transcendent seconds of knowledge. But knowledge like a white heat. My reason has repeatedly told me I was wrong. Yet my total being still tells me I was right.

  ‘I stood there perhaps fifteen seconds – I could not tell you, time means nothing in such situations – and then I dropped the gun and stepped beside the guerilla leader. I saw the colonel watching me, and I said, for him and so also for the remnant of a man beside me to hear, the one word that remained to be said.

  ‘Somewhere beyond Wimmel I saw Anton moving, walking quickly towards him. But it was too late. The colonel spoke, the submachine-guns flashed and I closed my eyes at exactly the moment the first bullets hit me.’

  54

  He leant forward, after a long silence, and turned up the lamp; then stared at me. Deep in him I sensed something was finally moved; but after a moment the stare became its old, dry self.

  ‘The disadvantage of our new drama is that in your role you do not know what you can believe and what you cannot. There is no one on the island who was in the square. But many can confirm for you every other incident I have told you.’

  I thought of the scene on the central ridge; by not being insertible in the real story, it verified. Not that I doubted Conchis; I knew I had been listening to the history of events that happened; that in the story of his life he had saved the certain truth to the end.

  ‘After you were shot?’

  ‘I was hit and I fell and I knew no more because I fainted. I believe I heard the uproar from the hostages before darkness came. And possibly that saved me. I imagine the men firing were distracted. Other orders were being given to fire at the hostages. I am told that half an hour later, when the villagers were allowed to wail over their dead, I was found lying in a pool of blood at the feet of the guerillas. I was found by my housekeeper Soula – before the days of Maria – and Hermes. “When they moved me I showed faint signs of life. They carried me home and hid me in Soula’s room. Patarescu came and looked after me.’

  ‘Patarescu?’

  ‘Patarescu.’ I tried to read his look; understood, by something in it, that he fully admitted that guilt, and did not consider it a guilt; and that he was prepared to justify it if I should press for the truth.

  ‘The colonel?’

  ‘By the end of the war he was wanted for countless atrocities. Several of them showed the same feature. An apparent reprieve at the last moment – which turned out to be a mere prolongation of the agony for the hostages. The War Crimes Commission have done their best. But he is in South America. Or Cairo, perhaps.’

  ‘And Anton?’

  ‘Anton believed that I had been killed. My servants let no one but Patarescu into the secret. I was buried. Or rather an empty coffin was buried. Wimmel left the island that same afternoon, leaving Anton in the middle of all the carnage of flesh, to say nothing of that of the good relations he had established. He must have spent all evening, perhaps night, writing a detailed report of the whole incident. He typed it himself – seven copies. He stated that fact in the report. I presume they were all he could get on the typewriter at one time. He hid nothing and excused no one, least of all himself. I will show you, in a moment.’

  The Negro came across the gravel and began to dismantle the screen. Upstairs I could hear movements.

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Two days later his body was found under the wall of the village school, where the ground was already dark with blood. He had shot himself. It was an act of contrition, of course, and he wanted the villagers to know. The Germans hushed the matter up. Not long afterwards the garrison was changed. The report explains that.’

  ‘What happened to all the copies?’

  ‘One was given to Hermes by Anton himself the next day, and he was asked to give it to the first of my foreign friends to inquire for me after the war. Another was given to one of the village priests with the same instructions. Another was left on his desk when he shot himself. It was open – no doubt for all his men and the German High Command to read. Three copies completely disappeared. Probably they were sent to relations or friends in Germany. They may have been intercepted. We shall never know now. And the last copy turned up after the war. It was sent to Athens, to one of the newspapers, with a small sum of money. For charity. A Viennese postmark. Plainly he gave a copy to one of his men.’

  ‘It was published?’

  ‘Yes. Certain parts of it.’

  ‘Was he buried here?’

  ‘His family cemetery – near Leipzig.’

  Those cigarettes.

  ‘And the villagers never knew that you had the choice?’

  ‘The report came out. Some believe it, some do not. Of course I have seen that no helpless dependants of the hostages suffered financially.’

  ‘And the guerillas – did you ever find out about them?’

  ‘The cousin and the other man – yes, we know their names. There is a monument to them in the village cemetery. But their leader … I had his life investigated. Before the war he spent six years in prison. On one occasion for murder – a crime passionnel. On two or three others for violence and larceny. He was generally believed in Crete to have been involved in at least four other murders. One was particularly savage. He was on the run when the Germans invaded. Then he performed a number of wild exploits in the Southern Peloponnesus. He seems to have belonged to no organized resistance group, but to have roamed about killing and robbing. In at least two proven cases, not Germans, but other Greeks. We traced several men who had fought beside him. Some of them said they had been frightened of him, others evidently admired his courage, but not much else. I found an old farmer in the Mani who had sheltered him several times. And he said, Kakourgos, ma Ellenas. A bad man, but a Greek. I keep that as his epitaph.’

  A silence fell between us.

  ‘Those years must have strained your philosophy. The smile.’

  ‘On the contrary. That experience made me fully realize what humour is. It is a manifestation of freedom. It is because there is freedom that there is the smile. Only a totally predetermined universe could be without it. In the end it is only by becoming the victim that one escapes the ultimate joke – which is precisely to discover that by constantly slipping away one has slipped away. One exists no more, one is no longer free. That is what the great majority of our fellow-men have always to discover. And will have always to discover.’ He turned to the file. ‘But let me finish by showing you the report that Anton wrote.’

  I saw a thin stitched sheaf of paper. A title-page: Bericht über die von deutschen Besetzsungstruppen unmenschliche Grausamkeiten …

  ‘There is an English translation at the back.’

  I turned to it, and read:

  Report of the inhuman atrocities committed by German Occupation troops under the command of Colonel Dietrich Wimmel on the island of Phraxos between September 30th and October 2nd, 1943.

  I turned a page.

  On the morning of September 29th, 1943, four soldiers of No. 10 Observation-post, Argolis Command, situated on the cape known as Bourani on the south coast of the island of Phraxos, being off duty, were given permission to swim. At 12.45 …

  Conchis spoke. ‘Read the last paragraph.’

  I swear by God and by all that is sacred to me that the above events have been exactly and truthfully described. I observed
them all with my own eyes and I did not intervene. For this reason I condemn myself to death.

  I looked up. ‘A good German.’

  ‘No. Unless you think suicide is good. It is not. Despair is a disease, and as evil as Wimmel’s disease.’ I suddenly remembered Blake -what was it, ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.’ A text I had once often used to seduce – myself as well as others. Conchis went on. ‘You must make up your mind, Nicholas. Either you enlist under the kapetan, that murderer who knew only one word, but the only word, or you enlist under Anton. You watch and you despair. Or you despair and you watch. In the first case, you commit physical suicide; in the second, moral.’

  ‘I can still feel pity for him.’

  ‘You can. But ought you to?’

  I was thinking of Alison, and I knew I had no choice. I felt pity for her as I felt pity for that unknown German’s face on a few feet of flickering film. And perhaps an admiration, that admiration which is really envy of those who have gone farther along one’s own road: they had both despaired enough to watch no more. While mine was the moral suicide.

  I said, ‘Yes. He couldn’t help himself

  ‘Then you are sick. You live by death. Not by life.’

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion.’

  ‘No. Of conviction. Because the event I have told you is the only European story. It is what Europe is. A Colonel Wimmel. A rebel without a name. An Anton torn between them, killing himself when it is too late. Like a child.’

  ‘Perhaps I have no choice.’

  He looked at me, but said nothing. I felt all his energy then, his fierceness, his heartlessness, his impatience with my stupidity, my melancholy, my selfishness. His hatred not only of me, but of all he had decided I stood for: something passive, abdicating, English, in life. He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm, to convert or detest.

  I looked down at last. ‘Then you think I’m another Anton. Is that what I’m meant to understand?’

  ‘You are someone who does not understand what freedom is. And above all that the better you understand it, the less you possess of it.’

  I tried to absorb that paradox. ‘I’ve shown too much to please you?’

  ‘To be of further significance to me.’ He picked up the file. ‘Now I suggest we go to bed.’

  I spoke sharply. You can’t treat people like this. As if we’re all just villagers to be shot so that you can prove some abstract theory of freedom.’

  He stood up and stared down at me. ‘For as long as you cherish your present view of freedom, it is you who holds the executioner’s gun.’

  I thought again of Alison; suppressed the thought.

  ‘What makes you so sure you know my real self?’

  ‘I do not claim that. My decision is based on the certain knowledge that you are incapable of knowing it yourself.’

  ‘You honestly do think you’re God, don’t you?’

  Incredibly, he did not answer; and his eyes said that that was what I might be left to believe. I let out a little snort of air, to show him what I thought, then went on.

  ‘So what do you want me to do now? Collect my bag and walk back to the school?’

  This seemed, unexpectedly, to set him back a little. There was a minute, but telltale, hesitation before he answered.

  ‘As you wish. There was to be a little final ceremony tomorrow morning. But it is not of importance.’

  ‘Ah. Well. I’d hate to miss that.’

  He contemplated my humourless smile up at him, then gave a little nod.

  ‘I wish you good night.’ I turned my back, and his footsteps receded. But he stopped at the music-room doors. ‘I repeat. No one will come.’

  I didn’t acknowledge that, either, and he went on inside. I believed him, as regards no one coming, but I had begun to smile to myself in the darkness. I knew that the threat to walk out at once had secretly alarmed him; had forced him to toss me another hasty carrot, a reason to stay. It must all have been a test, some sort of ordeal to be passed before I entered the inner circle … at any rate, I felt more than ever certain that the girls were on the yacht. I had, so to speak, been brought before the execution squad, but this time there was to be a last-minute reprieve. The longer he denied me Julie now, the more he followed the philosophy of a Wimmel … and at least I knew Conchis was a very different human being; if he was cruel it was, by his lights, to be kind.

  I smoked one cigarette, another. There was a great stewing stillness, an oppressiveness, a silence. The gibbous moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing. I got up and strolled across the gravel to the seat on the path down to the beach.

  I had not expected such a finale: the statue of stone in the comic door. But then he couldn’t have known of its secret relevance to me. He had simply guessed that for me freedom meant the freedom to satisfy personal desire, private ambition. Against that he set a freedom that must be responsible for its actions; something much older than the existentialist freedom, I suspected – a moral imperative, an almost Christian concept, certainly not a political or democratic one. I thought back over the last few years of my life, the striving for individuality that had obsessed all my generation after the limiting and conforming years of the war, our retreat from society, nation, into self. I knew I couldn’t really answer his charge, the question his story posed; and that I could not get off by claiming that I was a historical victim, powerless to be anything else but selfish – or I should not be able to get off from now on. It was as if he had planted a bandillera in my shoulder, or a succubus on my back: a knowledge I did not want.

  Once more my mind wandered, in the grey silences of the night, not to Julie, but to Alison. Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a smudge like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper.

  As something too small to mourn; the very word was archaic and superstitious, of the age of Browne, or Hervey; yet Donne was right, her death detracted, would for ever detract, from my own life. Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

  I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only extraverts cry twice; but I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

  55

  Ten o’clock. I woke and swung out of bed, aware that I had overslept; shaved in a hurry. Somewhere below I could hear hammering, a man’s voice, and what sounded like Maria’s. But the colonnade was deserted when I came down. By the wall I saw four wooden crates. It was obvious that three of them had paintings inside. I looked back inside the music-room. The Modigliani had gone; so had the little Rodin and the Giacometti; and I guessed that the other two crates held the Bonnards from upstairs. My optimism of the night before swiftly vanished before this evidence that the ‘theatre’ was being dismantled. I had a dreadful intuition that Conchis meant exactly what he had said.

  Maria appeared with coffee for me. I gestured at the crates.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Phygoume.’ We’re going.

  ‘O kyrios Conchis?’

  ‘Tha elthei.’

  He’s coming. I gave up with her, swallowed a cup of coffee, another. There was a bright wind, it was a Dufy day, all bustle, movement, animated colour. I walked over to the edge of the gravel. The yacht was alive now, I could see several people on deck, but none seemed female. Then I glanced back to the house. Conchis stood under the colonnade, as if waiting for me t
o return.

  He wore clothes that were somehow as incongruous as if he had been wearing fancy-dress. He looked exactly like some slightly intellectual businessman: a black leather briefcase; a dark blue summer suit, a cream shirt, a discreetly polka-dotted bow tie. It was perfect for Athens, but ridiculous on Phraxos … and unnecessary, since he would have had at least six hours on his yacht to change, except as a proof to me that his other world had already claimed him. He did not smile as I came up to him.