The Magus, A Revised Version (73 page)

‘
One of the first things I wanted to know was why Anton, with his excellent French, was not in Occupied France. It seemed
“
certain compatriots
”
considered him not sufficiently
“
German
”
in his attitude to the French. No doubt he had spoken once too often in the mess in defence of Gallic culture. And that was why he had been relegated to this backwater. I forgot to say he had been shot in the kneecap during the 1940 invasion and had a limp, unfitting him for active military duties. He was German, not Austrian. His family was rich, and he had spent a year bef
ore the war studying at the Sor
bonne. Finally he had decided that he would become an architect. But of course his training was interrupted by the war.
’

He stopped and turned up the
lamp; then opening the file,
unfolded a large plan. Two or three sketches
–
perspectives and elevations, all glass and glittering concrete.

‘
He was very rude about this house. And he promised he would come back after the war and build me something new. After the best Bauhaus principles.
’

All the notes were written in French; not a word of German any
where. The plan was signed:
Anton Kluber, le sept juin,
l’
an 4 de la
Grande Folie.
He let me look a few moments longer, then he turned down the lamp again.

‘
For a year during the Occupation everything was tolerable. We were very short of food, but Anton
–
and his men
–
shut their eyes to countless irregularities. The idea that the Occupation was all a matter of
jackbooted stormtroopers and sullen natives is absurd. Most of the Austrian soldiers were over forty and fathers themselves
–
easy meat for the village children. One summer dawn, in 1942, an Allied plane came and torpedoed a German supply landing-craft that had anchored in the old harbour on its way to Crete. It sank. Hundreds of crates of food came bobbing to the surface. By then the islanders had had a year of nothing but fish and bad bread. The sight of all this meat, milk, rice and other luxuries was too much. They swarmed out in anything that would float. Somebody told me what was happening and I hurried down to the harbour. The garrison had a machine-gun on the point, it had fired furiously at the Allied plane, and I had terrible visions of a revengeful massacre. But when I got there I saw islanders busily hauling in crates not a hundred yards from where the machine-gun was. Outside the post stood Anton and the duty section. Not a shot was fired.

‘
Later that morning Anton summoned me. Of course, I thanked him profusely. He said that he was going to report that several of the crew of the landing-craft had been saved by the prompt action of the villagers who had rowed to their help. He must now have a few crates handed back to show as salvage. I was to see to that. The rest would be considered
“
sunk and destroyed
”
. What little hostility that remained against him and his men among the villagers disappeared.

‘
I remember one evening, it must have been about a month after that, a group of Austrian soldiers, a little drunk, began to sing down
by the harbour. And then suddenly the islanders began to sing as well.
In turn. First the Austrians, then the
islanders. German and Greek. A
Tyrolean carol. Then a
kalatnatiano.
It was very strange. In the end they were all singing each other
’
s songs.

‘
But that was the zenith of our small golden age. Somewhere among the Austrian soldiers there must have been a spy. About a week after the singing, a section of German troops was added to Anton
’
s garrison to
“
stiffen morale
”
. He came to me one day like an angry child and said,
“
I have been told I am in danger of becoming a discredit to the Wehrmacht. I must mend my ways.
”
His troops were forbidden to give food to the islanders, and we saw them far less frequently in the village. In
November of that year the Gorgo
potamos exploit created a new strain. Fortunately I had been given more credit than I deserved by the villagers for the easiness of the regime, and they accepted the stricter situation as well as could be expected.
’

Conchis stopped speaking, then clapped his hands twice.

‘
I should like you to see Anton.
’

‘
I think I
’
ve seen him already.
’

‘
No. Anton is dead. You have seen an actor who looks like him. But this is the real Anton. During the war I had a small cine-camera and two reels of film. Which I kept until 1944, when
I
could get them developed. The quality is very poor.
’

I heard the faint whir of a projector. A beam of light came from above, was adjusted, centred on the screen. A blur, hasty focusing.

I saw a handsome young man of about my own age. He was not the one I had seen the week before, though in one feature, the heavy dark eyebrows, they were very similar. But this was unmistakably a wartime
off
icer. He didn
’
t look particularly soft; but more like a Battle of Britain pilot, stylishly insouciant. He was walking down a path beside a high wall, the wall of Hermes Ambelas
’
s house, perhaps. Smiling. He struck a sort of heroic tenor attitude, laughed self
-
consciously; and abruptly the ten-second sequence was over. In the next he was drinking c
off
ee, playing with a cat at his feet; looked sideways up at the camera, a serious, shy look, as if someone had told him not to smile. The film was very fuzzy, jerky, amateurish. Another sequence. A file of men marching round the island harbour; apparently shot from above, out of some upper-storey window.

‘
That is Anton in the rear.
’

He had a slight limp. And I al
so knew that I was for a moment
watching the unfakable truth. Beyond the men I could see a broad quay, on which there stood the little island customs and coastguard house. I knew it had been built since the war. On this film the quay was bare.

The beam was extinguished.

‘
There. I took other scenes, but one reel deteriorated. Those were all I could salvage.
’
He paused, then went on.
‘
The
off
icer responsible for
“
stiffening morale
”
in this area of Greece was an S.S. colonel called Wimmel. Dietrich Wimmel. By the time I am now speaking of resistance movements had begun in Greece. Wherever the terrain permitted. Among the islands, of course, only Crete allowed
maq
ui
s
operations. But up in the north and over there in the Peloponnesus
elas
and the other groups had begun to organize themselves. Arms were dropped to them. Trained saboteurs. Wimmel was brought to Nauplia, late in 1942, from Poland, where he had had a great deal of success. He was responsible for the south-west of Greece, in which we were included. His technique was simple. He had a price-list. For every German wounded, ten hostages were executed; for every German killed, twenty. As you may imagine, it was a system that worked.

‘
He had a handpicked company of Teutonic monsters under him, who did the interrogating, torturing, executing, and the rest. They were known, after the badge they wore, as
die Raben.
The ravens.

‘
I met him before his infamies had become widely known. I heard one winter morning that a German motor-launch had unexpectedly brought an important
off
icer to the island. Later that day, Anton sent for me. In his
off
ice I was introduced to a small, thin man. My own height, my own age. Immaculately neat. Scrupulously polite. He stood to shake my hand. He spoke some English, enough to know that I spoke it much better than he did. And when I confessed that I had many cultural attachments to England, had been partly educated there, he said,
“
The great tragedy of our time is that England and Germany should have quarrelled.
”
Anton explained that he had told the colonel about our musical evenings and that the colonel hoped that I would join them for lunch and afterwards accompany Anton
in one or two songs. Of course I had,
à
titre d
’
off
ice,
to accept.

‘
I did not like the colonel at all. He had eyes like razors. I think the most unpleasant eyes I have ever s
een 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
off
icial, 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,
“
Schl
a
mperei, 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 k
new 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
Unter
off
izier
in charge heard the shots from here, the house, wire
lessed 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.