Captain Corelli's mandolin (24 page)

He looked at her with one eyebrow raised, `By the way, Signorina, I couldn't help noticing that you have a derringer in the pocket of your apron.'

Pelagia's heart sank, and she began to tremble. But the captain continued, 'I understand why you should want to have it, and in fact I haven't seen it at all. But you must realise what would happen if someone else saw it. Especially a German. Just be more discreet.'

She looked up at him, appealing with her eyes, and he smiled, touched her shoulder, tapped the side of his nose with his forefinger, and winked.

After he had gone the thought occurred to Pelagia that by now they could have poisoned the captain a hundred times over if they had ever wanted to. They could have extracted aconite from monkshood, they could have gathered hemlock, or stopped his heart with digitalis, and the authorities would never have known why he had died. She slipped her hand into the pocket of her apron and slid a finger round the trigger with that familiar motion that she had practised a hundred times. She weighed it in her hand. It was good of the captain to let her know that he respected her need for safety, for the reassurance and the defiancé that proceeded from the ownership of a weapon. And you don't poison a musician, not even an Italian; it would have been as abominable as smearing excrement upon the tombstone of a priest.

That evening the doctor himself demanded a concert, and he and Pelagia found themselves outdoors in the yard whilst the captain spread a sheet of music upon the table, and both illuminated it and prevented it from being carried away by the breeze by placing a lantern on its upper edge. Solemnly he sat down and began to tap the striking plate with the plectrum.

The doctor raised his eyebrows in perplexity. This tapping seemed to go on for a very long time. Perhaps the captain was trying to establish a rhythm. Perhaps this was one of those minimalist pieces he had heard about, which was all squaw: squawks and squeaks and no melody, and perhaps this was the introduction. He looked at Pelagia, and she caught his glance and raised her hands in incomprehension. There was more tapping. The doctor peered at the captain's face, which was rapt in deep concentration. The doctor always found that in incomprehensible artistic situations like this his backside inevitably began to itch. He shifted his seat, and then lost patience, `Excuse me, young man, but what on earth are you doing? This is not quite what my daughter led me to expect.'

'Damn,' exclaimed the captain, his concentration utterly destroyed, 'I was just about to start playing.'

'Well, about time too, I should think. What on earth were you doing? What is it? Some ghastly modern twaddle called "Two Tin Cans, a Carrot, and Dead Harlot?"

Corelli was offended, and spoke with a distinct tone of lofty disdain, 'I am playing one of Hummel's Concertos for Mandolin. The first forty-five and a half bars are for the orchestra, allegro moderato a grazioso. You have to imagine the orchestra. Now I've got to begin all over again.'

The doctor glared at him, 'I'm damned if I'm going to sit through all that tapping again, and I'm damned if I can imagine an orchestra just play your parts.'

The captain glared back, clearly indicating his conviction that the doctor was a complete philistine. 'If I do that,' he said, 'I'll start getting confused about when I'm supposed to come in, and that, in a concert hall, would be a disaster.'

The doctor stood up and waved his arm about to take in the olive tree, the goat, the house, the night sky above. 'ladies and gentlemen he bawled, 'I apologise for disrupting the concert.'

He turned to Corelli, 'Is this a concert hall? And do my eyes deceive me, or is there not one orchestra present? Do my eyes perceive a single trombone? The smallest and most insignificant violin? Where, pray, is the conductor, and where are the royalty draped in jewellery?'

The captain sighed in resignation, Pelagia looked at him sympathetically, and the doctor added, 'And another thing. Whilst you are tapping away and imagining your orchestra, you are exchanging one stupid expression for another. How are we supposed to concentrate in front of such a gallery?'

When the Germans withdrew from North Africa, they established their centre of operations for the region in Peloponnisos, which meant that Mandras and his small group of andartes were obliged to move across the Corinth Canal into Roumeli.

In Peloponnisos Mandras had done very little. He had joined up with one man, and then two others, and they had conceived neither plan nor purpose. All they knew was that they were driven by something from the very depths of the soul, something that commanded them to rid their land of strangers or die in the attempt. They set fire to lorries, and one of their number garrotted an enemy soldier and sat afterwards, shaking with retrospective fear and revulsion, whilst the others comforted and praised him. They dwelt on the outer fringe of a forest in a cave, living off supplies brought by the priest of a neighbouring village, who brought bread, potatoes, and olives, and took away their clothes to be washed by a local woman. One day they chopped down the legs of a wooden footbridge that constituted part of a footpath leading to a local garrison. In reprisal for having to get their feet wet in a stream, the enemy burned down four houses in the village, and the priest and the schoolmaster begged them to leave before anything worse could happen. The four householders, now homeless, joined them.

In Roumeli there was a small British team of enthusiastic amateurs, none of whom spoke Greek, who had trained for one day before dropping in by parachute, using an innovative type of parachute which had supplies and radios tied into the upper cords, which struck the soldiers resoundingly upon the head when they landed on the ground. These Britons had been co-ordinating guerrilla groups, with the intention of blowing up the viaducts of the singletrack railway that was the main supply route that led eventually from Piraeus to Crete, and thence to Tobruk. They assumed that naturally the autonomous groups would be delighted to be commanded by British officers, and the Greeks were so impressed by this confident assumption that they fell for it almost immediately.

There was one group, however, called ELAS, which was the military wing of an organisation called the EAM, which in turn was controlled by a committee in Athens whose members belonged to the KKE. Intelligent people realised immediately that any group with such credentials must have been Communist, and that the purpose of having such attenuated chains of control was to disguise from ordinary citizens the fact that they were a Communist organisation. Initially their recruits came from all walks of life, and included Venizelist republicans and Royalists, as well as moderate socialists, Liberals and Communists, all of whom were easily duped into believing that they were a part of the national liberation struggle, and not part of some convoluted hidden agenda which was more to do with seizing power after the war than beating the Axis. The British armed them, because no one believed the assertion of the British officers on the ground that this was merely storing up trouble for later, and no one believed that swarthy foreigners could make much trouble for the British anyway. Brigadier Myers and his officers shrugged their shoulders and just got on with the job, whilst ELAS only helped or obeyed them when it felt like it. The task of Myers and his officers was impossible, but they achieved all that they had set out to do by means of a combination of grit, patience, and elan. They even recruited two Palestinian Arabs who had somehow got left behind in the general muddle of 1941.

Mandras might have joined EKKA, or EDES, or EOA, but it happened by chance that the first andartes he came across in Roumeli belonged to ELAS, and the commander who first took him into his particular band was proudly and overtly Communist. He was astute enough to see that Mandras was a lost soul, a little embittered without knowing why, young enough to be impressed and delighted by the attaching of resonant names to lofty concepts, lonely and sad enough to be befriended.

Mandras hated the mountains. There were mountains at home, of course, but ringed to infinity by the churning open masses of the sea. It was not just that these mountains of Roumeli abolished the horizon and enclosed him like the embrace of an enormous, ugly, and effusive aunt, it was also that they reminded him of the war on the border of Albania that had cost so much of his sanity, his comrades, and his health. They oppressed him and punished him, even though he knew their ways before he had seen them. He knew already how it was to roast one's thighs and belly before a fire whilst one's back and backside froze to the bone, how it was to undress and wade naked in winter, holding one's clothes above the head, through torrents that snatched the breath from the throat and stunned the flesh like a bruise. He knew already that to defeat the Italians you had to calculate upon needing roughly half their number, and he knew how to load and fire a Mannlicher when the other hand was bleeding and being used to staunch another wound.

He knew already how it was to create a life out of dreaming of Pelagia and fraternising in the cups with beloved comrades who might die upon the night.

Mandras joined ELAS at first because he had no choice. He and his fellows were lounging in a small shelter of brush with leaves for bedding, when they were surprised by ten men who surrounded them. All of these men were garbed in the remnants of uniform, were draped in bandoliers, had knives stuffed into their belts, and were so bearded as to look almost exactly alike. Their leader was distinguished by a red fez that would have been poor camouflage had it not been so faded and filthed.

Mandras and his friends looked up into the barrels of a semicircle of fight automatics, and the man with the fez said, `Come out.'

Reluctantly the men stood up and came out, fearing for their lives, their hands upon the backs of their heads, and one or two andartes entered the shelter and threw out their weapons, which rattled together on the ground with that curious sound of dense metal muffled by wooden stocks and oil.

`Who are you with?' demanded the fez.

'With no one,' replied Mandras, confused.

'Are you with EDES?'

'No, we are on our own. We have no name.'

'Just as well,' said the fez, 'now go back to your villages.'

`I have no village,' said one of the prisoners, 'the Italians burned it.'

'The deal is, that either you go back to your villages and leave us your weapons, or you fight it out with us and we kill you, or you join us under my command. This is our territory and no one else muscles in, especially not EDES, so which is it to be?'

'We came to fight,' explained Mandras. 'Who are you?'

'I am Hector, not my real name, which no one knows, and this . . . ' he indicated his troop, ' . . . is the local branch of ELAS.'

The men grinned at him in a very friendly fashion, quite at odds with the dictatorial mien of the fez, and Mandras looked from one of his men to the others.

'We stay?' he asked, and they all nodded in agreement. They had been too long in the field to give it up, and it was good to have found a leader who might know what ought to be done. It had been demoralising to wander like Odysseus from place to place, far from home, improvising a resistance that never seemed to amount to anything.

`Good,' said Hector. `Come with us, and let's see what you're made of.'

Still disarmed, the small column was led three kilometres to a tiny village which seemed to consist of nothing but rangy dogs, a few sagging houses whose stones had lost their mortar and were held together only by gravity and habit, and a pathway that had widened temporarily and optimistically into a dusty street. There was one house guarded by an andarte, and to this man Hector signalled, `Bring him out.'

The partisan went inside and, kicking and pushing, propelled an emaciated old man into the sunlight, where he stood trembling and blinking, naked to the waist. Hector handed Mandras a length of knotted rope, and, pointing to the old man, said, `Beat him.'

Mandras looked at Hector in disbelief, and the latter glared at him ferociously. `If you want to be with us, you've got to learn to administer justice. This man . . . ' he pointed ` . . . has been found guilty. Now beat him.'

It was loathsome, but it was not impossible to beat a collaborator. He struck the man once with the rope, lightly, out of deference for his age, and Hector impatiently exclaimed, `Harder, harder. What are you? A woman?'

He struck the old man once more, a little harder. `Again,' commanded Hector.

It was easier at each stroke. In fact it became an exhilaration. It was as if every rage from the earliest year of childhood was welling up inside him, purging him, leaving him renewed and cleansed. The old man, who had been yelping and jumping sideways at every blow, spinning and cowering, finally threw himself to the ground, whining piteously, and Mandras suddenly knew that he could be a god.

A young woman, perhaps no more than nineteen years old, ran forward, escaping the grasp of one of the andartes, and threw herself at Hector's feet. She was gasping in fear and desperation. 'My father, my father!' she exclaimed. `Mercy on him, have mercy, he is an old man, o my poor father.'

Hector placed the sole of his foot upon the side of her shoulder and pushed her over. 'Shut up, Comrade, stop your whining, or I won't answer for the consequences. Somebody take her away.'

She was dragged away, pleading and weeping, and Hector took the rope from Mandras. `You do it like this,' he said, as though explaining some abstruse point of science. `You start at the top . . . ' he slashed a wide cut across the man's shoulders `. . . then you do the same across the bottom . . . ' he cut another bloody swathe across the small of the back'... and thin you fell in between in parallel lines, until the skin is all gone. That is what I mean when I say "beat him".'

Mandras did not even notice that the man had stopped moving, had stopped screaming and whining. With tight-lipped determination he filled in the gap between the lines, going back over the ones that might have left a suspicion of pink skin. The muscles of his own shoulders ached and screamed, and finally he stopped to mop his brow with his sleeve. A fly settled on the pulp of the back, and he crushed it with one more stroke. Hector stepped forward, took the rope from his hand, and placed a pistol in his grasp, `Now kill him.'

He placed a forefinger against his own temple, and used his thumb to convey the impression of an imaginary hammer.

Mandras knelt down and placed the barrel against the old man's head. He hesitated, appalled with himself somewhere in the back of his mind. He could not do it. In order to make it look as though he was doing something, he clicked back the hammer and took up first pressure. He could not do it. He closed his eyes tightly. He could not lose face. It was a question of being a man in front of other men, a question of honour. Anyway, it was Hector who was the executioner and he was only the hand. The man had been sentenced to death, and was going to die anyway. He looked a little like Dr Iannis, with his thin grey hair and prominent occipital bone. Dr Iannis, who didn't think him worth a dowry. Who cares about one more useless old man? Mandras clenched together the muscles of his face, and pulled the trigger.

Afterwards he looked not at the bloody mess of bone and brain, but in disbelief at the smoking orifice of the barrel of the gun. Hector took it from him and gave him back his carbine. He patted Mandras on the back and said, `You'll do.'

Mandras tried to struggle to his feet, but was too weary, and Hector crooked an elbow under his armpit to lift him. `Revolutionary justice,' he said, adding, `historical necessity.'

As they left the village along the dust and jagged stone that had once snore shrunk to a path, Mandras found that he could not look anyone in the face, and he stared vacantly down into the dirt.

`What did he do?' he asked finally.

`He was a dirty old thief' 'What did he steal?'

'Well it wasn't exactly stealing,' said Hector, removing his fez and scratching his head, 'but the British drop supplies to us and to EDES. We've given strict instructions to the people round here that every drop must be reported to us, so that we can get there first. Only reasonable under the circumstances. That man went and reported the drop to EDES, and after he did that, he opened one of the canisters and took a bottle of whisky. We found him lying under the parachute silk, drunk as a Turk. It was theft and disobedience.'

He replaced the fez, 'You have to be firm with these people, or they start doing what they like. They're full of false consciousness, and it's just something that we have to get out of them, in their own interests. You won't believe this, but half of these peasants are Royalists. just imagine! Identifying yourself with the oppressors!'

It had never occurred to Mandras to be anything other than a Royalist, but he nodded in agreement, and then asked, 'Was it a drop for EDES?'

'Yes.'

Behind them in the village a life quelling wail expanded through the stillness. It rose and fell like a siren, echoing from the cliff above them across the valley to the opposite rocks, returning and mingling with the later variations of its own sound. Mandras blocked from his mind the precisely clear picture of what must have been happening - the keening weeping girl, black-haired and youthful like Pelagia, rocking and moaning over the mangled and aborted flesh of her own father - and concentrated on the ululation. If you didn't think about what it was, it sounded weirdly beautiful.