Captain Corelli's mandolin (19 page)

There is a story that in the Royal Palace, which was so vast and empty that the Royal Family travelled within it on bicycles, and so derelict that its water-taps spewed cockroaches, a White Lady appears as an omen of disaster. Her footsteps make no sound, her face blazes with malevolence, and once, when two aides-de-camp attempted to arrest her for attacking the grandmother of Prince Christopher, she vanished into thin air. If she had wandered the palace on this day, she would have found it occupied not by King George, but by German soldiers. If she had gone outside into the city, she would have found the swastika flying from the Acropolis, and she would have had to travel to Crete to find the King.

The Cephallonians needed no such malicious ghosts to warn them. Two days before, the Italians had taken Corfu under farcical circumstances which were to be repeated identically today, and there was no one on the island who did not anticipate the worst.

It was the waiting that was tormenting. A great nostalgia rose up like a palpable mist; it was like making love for the last time to someone who is adored but is leaving forever. Every last moment of freedom and security was rolled about on the tongue, tasted, and remembered. Kokolios and Stamatis, the Communist and the monarchist, sat together at a table cleaning the components of a hunting rifle that had gathered dust on a wall for fifty years. They were without ammunition, but, as it was to everyone on the island, it seemed important to be engaged upon some gesture of resistance. Their busy fingers sought to calm the storms of anxiety and speculation in their minds, and they talked in low voices with a mutual affection that belied their years of vehement ideological difference. Neither of them knew any more how long their lives would be, and they had become precious to each other at last.

Families embraced more than had been the habit; fathers who expected to be beaten to death stroked the hair of pretty daughters who expected to be raped. Sons sat with their mothers on doorsteps and talked gently of their memories. Farmers took their barrels of wine with the glint of sunlight in it, and buried them in the earth so that no Italian would have the pleasure of their drinking. Grandmothers sharpened their cooking knives, and grandfathers remembered old deeds, persuading themselves that age had not diminished them; in the privacy of sheds they practised the `shoulder-arms' with shovels and sticks. Many people visited their favourite places as if for the last time, and found that stones and dust, pellucid sea and ancient rock, had taken on an air of sadness such as one finds in a room where a beautiful child is lying at the door of death.

Father Arsenios knelt in his church, attempting to find words to a prayer, perplexed by a novel sensation of having been let down by God. He had become so accustomed to the idea that he was condemned forever to be the one who let down God, that he found himself lost for a formula that was not full of reproaches, and even insults. He resorted to his habitual, `Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,' and reflected that even after all these years its repetition had failed to enter his heart. In his youth he had believed that one day this prayer would reveal the Vision of Divine and Untreated Light, but he knew now that it had become a formula, a barrier between himself and the God who was speechless and evasive. `Lord Jesus, Son of God,' he prayed at last, `what the hell do you think you're doing? What was the point of Golgotha if the Devil was not defeated? I thought you said you'd banished sin. Did you die for nothing, then? Are you going to let us all die for nothing? Why don't you do something? I know that you are invisibly manifest at the Eucharist, but if you are invisible, how do I know that you are there?'

His fat jowls vibrated with emotion; he felt like a boy who has come to man's estate and discovered that his father has left him no inheritance. `Lord Jesus, Son of God,' he prayed. `If you're not going to do anything, I will.'

At his desk Dr Iannis read once more the famous open letter to Hitler that Vlakhos had published in the Kathimerini. Moved by its noble, grandiloquent exposition of the right to national independence, he cut it out of the paper, stood up and stuck it onto the wall with a thumbtack, unaware that every other literate man in Greece had done the same; it would remain there until 1953, growing dry and yellow, curling at the corners, its sentiments freshening and deepening with every passing year.

The doctor removed Psipsina from his desk, sat down and wrote, `It is our custom to compare the many nations that have usurped this island to the Turks. Thus the Romans and the Normans were worse than the Turks, the Catholics were worse, the Turks themselves were probably not as bad as we like to imagine, and so, paradoxically, were not as bad as themselves. The Russians were infinitely better, and the French were marginally better. The latter enjoyed constructing roads, but could not be trusted - the Turks never promised us anything, and therefore were by definition incapable of perfidy - and the British were worse than the Turks for some of the time, and the best of all of them for the rest. The general Greek bitterness against the British arose because they brazenly sold Parga to Ali Pasha, but in this island it was caused initially by the governor, Sir Thomas Maitland, who was an unmitigated tyrant. However, Charles de Bosset, a Swiss serving in the British Army, built our invaluable bridge across the Bay of Argostoli. Lord Napier built the magnificent courtroom at Lixouri with its arcaded market underneath (the Markato) and was so popular that the population raised a subscription for a commemorative statue after he left. Lord Nugent became so well-liked that our parliament issued him with a vote of thanks. Frederic Adam, Stewart McKenzie, and John Sexton appear to have been more philhellenic than we ourselves, but General Howard Douglas was outrageously and scandalously despotic. And so it goes on. What does this teach us? `It teaches us that to be associated with the British is to be offered the choice of one of two bags tied at the neck with string. One contains a viper, and the other a bag of gold. If you are lucky, you will choose the bag of gold, only to find that the British have reserved the right to exchange it for the other without notice. Conversely, ill luck might cause you to pick the bag with the viper, whereupon the British will wait until you have been bitten, and then say, "We didn't mean it; have this other bag."

`We don't know what to think about the British. With the Turks we knew that our sons would be taken for janissaries, our daughters to harems. We knew that we would be exempt from military service, that we would be forbidden to ride horses, and that our sultans were voluptuaries and lunatics. With the British you can be sure of nothing except that they will treat you despicably and then make up for it a hundred-fold. At one time we loved them so much that we asked for Prince Alfred as our King - and we still have a cult of Lord Byron and at other times they have kicked us in the teeth. It is with a heavy heart that I record here the fact that they have abandoned us to our fate because they have judged that the war will not be decided in Greece.

`I wait despondently, in the knowledge that Corfu has fallen and that this may be the last thing I ever write. I commend my memory to posterity, and that of my beloved daughter Pelagia, and I beg that whoever fords these papers and my unfinished history should preserve them intact. I pray that the British have not abandoned us irrevocably, and I pray that they may win through to victory even if I am dead. I believe that I have led a good and useful life, and if it were not for the daughter who may not live and the grandchildren I may never set, I am content to die in the hope that, as Plato says, death might be " . . . a change, a migration of the soul from one place to another". I have never believed this to be so, but the imminence of invasion convinces me that life can be a sad and weary thing, and that death might conceivably be a time when I will rest once more with my wife in whatever place she might have gone. Solos said that one should call no man happy until he dies, because until then he is at best fortunate. But I have been both happy and fortunate; happy in my marriage and fortunate in my daughter. Let it not have been for nothing.'

The doctor reached for a top shelf and took down a black tin box. Into it he placed the sheaves of his history and this final piece, which, as usual, had started on one subject and finished on another, and then he turned the key. He put the box under one arm, lifted the mat beneath the table, and opened the trapdoor, exposing the large cavity that had been made there in 1849 for the concealment of the Radicals whom the British had first persecuted and then put into government. Into this hole that had once concealed the fugitive Joseph Momferatos and Gerasimos Livadas, the doctor placed his literary remains. He returned to his desk, took down his two massive volumes of The Complete and Concise Horse Doctor, and began to revise the sections that dealt with `bleeding; dressings; shock; tourniquet; bullet wounds; burns; cuts; stabs; asepsis; drainage and irrigation of wounds; lockjaw; pus; trepanning for the relief of depressed fractures of the skull.'

In Drosoula's house, to which Mandras had been transferred, the doctor's daughter sat in an agony of shame; she had begun to suspect that Mandras was torturing her deliberately.

His physical ills had abated. considerably. The red nodules, the eczema, the skin on his feet, had all begun to cure themselves. His face had filled out a little, his ribs had hidden themselves beneath new flesh, his hair was beginning to grow, and the insane gleam in his eyes had dimmed to a feeble glimmer that the doctor did not think was an improvement. `It's a shame,' he had said, `that he was not actually wounded. It would have given him something concrete to concern himself with.'

Pelagia had been startled and angered by this remark, but at this moment she wanted nothing so much as to take her little derringer from her apron and shoot her fiancé in the head. The face was that Mandras had devolved to a start more unmanageable than infancy, and she was convinced that he was doing it on purpose as an act of vengeance or a punishment. She believed that he wanted her to be desperately worried, and she was.

The doctor had diagnosed his behaviour at different times as anergic stupor, melancholic stupor, resistive stupor, and katatonic stupor. The odd way in which it was all of these at different times indicated to him that it was none of them, but he was at a loss as to any other interpretation. `War shock' did not entirely fit the bill either, and like Pelagia he had begun to feel the temptation to ascribe the condition to a pathological need to enslave others by means of manoeuvring himself into a condition of complete dependency. `He thinks that nobody wants him,' said Dr Iannis, `and he's doing this in order to force us to demonstrate that we do.'

`But I don't want him,' thought Pelagia, over and over again, as she sat near his bed crocheting the matrimonial bedspread that had never grown beyond the size of a towel.

Mandras had begun his exile into inaccessibility by dramatising the idea of death. As though he had frozen into rigor mortis he lay in his bed, utterly rigid, his arms held into the air in a contorted position that no ordinary person could have sustained for a single minute. Saliva dribbled from his mouth, down his chin, across his shoulder, and soaked into the bed. Drosoula placed a cloth to soak it up, and when she returned she found that he had shifted and that the saliva was dripping from the other shoulder. Because of the position of his arms she had had the most intractable difficulty with dressing and undressing him. The doctor had tested him for katatonia by sticking pins into him; he had made no reaction, and had not closed his eye when the doctor made to prick that too. He had been fed with soup poured down a tube into his gullet, and he had neither urinated nor defecated for days until the very time that Drosoula stopped trying to make him do it. Then he had soiled the sheets so copiously that she had had to run outside and gag in the street.

On March 25th Mandras had got out of bed to celebrate National Day, had dressed himself and gone out, returning drunk and exhilarated at three o'clock in the morning. Drosoula and Pelagia held hands and danced together in circles, whirling and laughing from pleasure and relief.

But the next day he was back in bed, passive and speechless. His rigidity had gone, to be replaced by a condition in which he seemed to have disowned his body. The donor had raised his arm, and it had fallen back to the bed as though it were a stocking loosely stuffed with rags. His temperature fell and his lips swelled and turned blue, his pulse raced, and he breathed so shallowly that it seemed that he spurned the air.

On the day after that Mandras mimicked the condition of the day before, except that now he struggled wildly yet expertly against every attempt to move him or feed him. Drosoula called in Kokolios, Stamatis, and Velisarios, and not even the two tough old men and the giant could make him open his mouth and eat. It seemed that he was determined to starve himself and die. Kokolios suggested whipping him, the traditional cure for the mad, and demonstrated its efficacy by slapping the patient hard across the face. Mandras sat up suddenly, put a hand to his cheek, said, `Shit. I'll get you, you bastard,' and sank back into the sheets. Everyone present was by that time so enraged and frustrated that the idea of whipping him did not seem such a bad one.

Mandras continued his policy of resistance and starvation until the evening of April 19th, when he recovered miraculously, in time for the great celebrations of Easter. On Holy Thursday the lambs had been killed and hung, the eggs had been painted red and polished with olive oil, and he had nearly succumbed to the traditional lentil soup. On Good Friday the island had drifted with the aroma of the women's Easter bread, and on Saturday the men had roasted the lambs on spits, teased each other, and become indecently drunk whilst the women laboured to make soup and sausage. During all of this Mandras had lain motionless in bed, shitting himself and pissing whenever Drosoula had just changed the sheets.

But on Saturday night he got up, and then, dressed in black, bearing an unlit black candle, he joined the sombre procession of the icons to the monastery at Sissies. He seemed to be completely normal; when Stamatis wished him a good recovery he replied, `From your lips to the ear of God,' and when Kokolios clapped him on the back and congratulated him on his sudden appearance amongst the living, Mandras had grinned his old grin and replied with the proverb, `I am a Greek, and we Greeks are not subject to the laws of nature.'