Captain Corelli's mandolin (36 page)

'It's true, Antonio, some of your men are running a racket, and in my opinion and the opinion of my brother officers, it reflects very badly on you. Not you personally, but on the Army of Italy. It's as scandalous as that pamphlet about the Duce that everyone's reading. It's part of the same disease.'

Corelli turned to Carlo, 'Is this true, as Gunter says?'

'Don't ask me. You'd have to ask a Greek.'

'Iatre,' called Corelli, 'is it true?'

The doctor came out of the kitchen, where he had been carefully sharpening the blades of old scalpels on a whetstone, and asked, 'Is what true?'

'That some of our soldiers are buying goods from the hungry with ration cards, and then some other people come in and confiscate the cards back again because they were acquired illegally.'

'It's not "some other people",' said the doctor, `it's just the other half of the same gang. It goes round in a perfect circle. Stamatis got stung like that last week. He lost a valuable clock and two silver candlesticks, and ended up with no ration cards, and a belly as empty as before. Very ingenious.'

The doctor turned to go, and then stopped, 'And another thing, your soldiers are stealing from people's vegetable patches. As if we were not all dying of hunger.'

'We Germans do not do this,' said Gunter Weber smugly, enjoying a little schadenfreude at Corelli's expense.

`Germans can't sing,' riposted Corelli irrelevantly, `and anyway, I'll get this investigated, and I'll put a stop to it. It's too bad.'

Weber smiled, 'You are very famous for defending the rights of Greeks. I wonder sometimes if you understand why you are here.'

'I'm not here to be a bastard,' said Corelli, `and to be perfectly frank, I do not feel good about it. I try to think of it as a holiday. I don't have your advantages, Gunter.'

'Advantages?'

'Yes. I don't have the advantage of thinking that other races are inferior to mine. I don't feel entitled, that's all.'

'It's a question of science,' said Weber. 'You can't alter a scientific fact.'

Corelli frowned, 'Science? The Marxists think they are scientists, and they believe the exact opposite of you. I don't care about science. It's an irrelevance. It's a moral principle that you can't alter, not a scientific fact.'

'We disagree,' said Weber amiably, 'it's obvious to me that ethics change with the times as science does. Ethics have changed because of the theories of Darwin.'

'You're right, Gunter,' interjected Carlo, 'but no one has to like it. I don't like it, and neither does Antonio, that's all. And science is about facts, and morality is about values. They are not the same thing and they don't grow together. No one can find a value on the slide of a microscope. It might be true that Jews are evil or inferior, for instance, how would I know? But how does that mean that we should treat them with injustice? I don't understand the reasoning.'

'Do you remember,' said Weber, leaning back in his chair, 'how you pulled a pistol on me when I was going to club that pine marten for its skin? I didn't kill it. I didn't know it was a pet in any case. I couldn't argue with a pistol. That is the new morality. Strength needs no excuses and doesn't have to give reasons. It is Darwinism, as I said.'

'It has to leave reasons to history,' said Corelli, 'or else it stands condemned. It's also a question of being at ease with oneself. Do you remember when that bombardier tried to rape that girl who was cured by the supposed miracle? Mina, that was her name. Do you know why I did that?'

`You mean when you made him stand to attention in the sun with nothing on except a tin helmet and a haversack?'

'A haversack full of rocks. Yes. I did it because I imagined that woman was my sister. I did it because when he was well-cooked I felt a lot better. That is my morality. I make myself imagine that it's personal.'

`You're a good man,' said Gunter, `I admit it.'

'By the way, I stopped you from clubbing Psipsina in order to save your life,' said Corelli. 'If I hadn't stopped you, Pelagia would have killed you.'

'Aaaaaagh,' spluttered Weber, pretending to strangle himself. `Where is Pelagia? I thought she liked our singing.'

`She does, but it's embarrassing for her to be the only woman in a bunch of boys. I expect she's listening in the kitchen.'

'No I'm not,' she called.

'Ah,' said Weber, 'there you are. Antonio was just saying that we ought to bring some of the girls from the Casa Rosetta, to balance the numbers. What do you think of that?'

`My father would throw La Scala out, and you'd have to go back to singing in the latrines.'

`We could bring two armoured cars, and come anyway,' said Weber. He looked around at the faces that were not smiling at his remark, and said, `Only a little joke.'

`Our armoured cars wouldn't be able to get up the hill,' said one of the baritones, `we'd have to borrow one of yours.'

`Lies and slanders,' replied one of the tenors, `they go very well if you take the armour off. Come on, let's sing something.'

"La Giovinezza," ' suggested Weber enthusiastically, and all the rest of them groaned. `OK, OK, I'll get my gramophone from my vehicle, and we can all sing with Marlene.'

`And afterwards we can sing love songs,' said Corelli, `because tonight is a beautiful night, and everything is peaceful, and we should be thinking about being romantic.'

Weber went to his jeep, proudly and proprietorially returning with his gramophone. He set it on the table, and twisted down the needle. There was a sound very like the stirring of a distant sea, and then the first martial bars of `Lili Marlene'. Dietrich began to sing, her voice full of languid melancholy, worldliness, the sadness of knowledge, and the longing for love. 'O,' exclaimed Weber, `she is the incarnation of sex. She makes me melt.'

Some of the boys joined in the song, and Corelli began to pick up the melody on his mandolin. 'Antonia likes this,' he said, 'Antonia is going to sing.'

He began to introduce grace notes, and then rapid sections of fingerwork that filled in the scale between the notes. On the last verse he broke into a tremolo that soared above the music in a descant, embellished it with sly glissandos, rests and ritardandos, climbed ambitiously towards the highest and thinnest pitch of the instrument, and then fell back deliciously upon the sonorous middle range of the third and second strings. In the village the people stopped what they were doing and listened to Corelli fill the night. When the music stopped they sighed, and Kokolios said to his wife, `The man's mad, and he's a wop, but he's got nightingales in his fingers.'

`It's better than listening to you snorting and farting all night,' she said.

'A proletarian fart is greater music than a bourgeois song,' he said, and she grimaced and said, `You wish.'

Pelagia left the kitchen, her slender silhouette ghostlike in the dim light of the candle from the kitchen. 'Please play that again,' she requested, 'it was so beautiful.'

She came out and stroked the polished wood of Weber's gramophone. The machine was another wonder of the modern world, like Corelli's motorbike, that had escaped the world of Cephallonia until the war years came. It was something fine and glorious amid the loss and separation, the deprivation and fear.

'Do you like it?' asked Weber, and she nodded wistfully. `All right,' he continued, `when I go home after the war, I'll leave it with you. You can have it. It would please me very much, and you will always remember Gunter. I can easily find another in Vienna, and you can accept it as an apology to Psipsina.'

Pelagia was touched, almost overjoyed. She looked at the smiling youngster with his smart uniform, his clipped blond hair and his brown eyes, and she was filled with pleasure and gratitude. `You're so sweet,' she said, and kissed him very naturally on one cheek. The boys of La Scala cheered, and Weber blushed, tiding his eyes with his hand.

The doctor and the captain were sitting indoors at the kitchen cable, the latter removing a broken swing from his mandolin, and lamenting the fact that new strings were impossible to obtain.

`How about surgical wire?' enquired the doctor, leaning forward and inspecting the defunct string through his spectacles, `I think I've got some of the same gauge.'

`It's got to be right,' replied Corelli. `If it's too thick, you have to tighten the string beyond the capacity of the instrument, and it just folds in half. If it's too thin, then it's too slack to have a decent tone and it rattles on the frets.'

The donor leaned back and sighed. Suddenly he asked, `Are you and Pelagia planning to be married? As her father I think I have a right to know.'

The captain was so taken aback by the frankness of the question that he was utterly stumped for an answer. Things had only been able to proceed on the basis that no one ever brought the issue out into the open; things could only work at all on the understanding that it was a dark secret that everybody knew. He looked at the doctor in dismay, his mouth working wordlessly like an improvident fish that a wave has tossed unsuspectingly upon a spit of sand.

`You can't live here,' said the doctor. He pointed at the mandolin. `If you want to be a musician this is the last place to be. You would have to go home, or to America. And I don't think that Pelagia could live in Italy. She is a Greek. She would die like a flower deprived of light.'

`Ah,' said the captain, for the lack of any intelligent remark that came immediately to mind.

`It's true,' said the doctor. `I know you have not thought about it. Italians always act without thinking, it's the glory and the downfall of your civilisation. A German plans a month in advance what his bowel movements will be at Easter, and the British plan everything in retrospect, so it always looks as though everything occurred as they intended. The French plan everything whilst appearing to be having a party, and the Spanish . . . well, God knows. Anyway, Pelagia is Greek, that's my point. So can it work? Even disregarding the obvious impracticalities?'

The captain unwound the tangle of wire at the tuning pegs, and replied, `It's not the point, with respect. It is a more personal thing. Let me confide in you, Dottore. Pelagia has said to me that you and I are very alike. I am obsessed by my music, and you are obsessed with your medicine. We are both men who have created a purpose for ourselves, and neither of us cares very much for what anyone else may think of us. She has only been able to love me because she learned first how to love another man who is like me. And that man is you. So, being a Greek or an Italian is incidental.'

The doctor was so touched by this hypothesis that a lump arose in his throat. He quelled it and said, `You don't understand us.'

`Of course I do.'

Dr Iannis became a little riled, and therefore a little vehement, `But you don't. Do you think you're going to get a nice amenable girl and that every path will be strewn with petals? Don't you remember asking me why it is that Greeks smile when they are angry? Well, let me tell you something, young man. Every Greek, man, woman, and child, has two Greeks inside. We even have technical terms for them. They are a part of us, as inevitable as the fact that we all write poetry and the fact that every one of us thinks that he knows everything that there is to know. We are alt hospitable to strangers, we all are nostalgic for something, our mothers all treat their grown sons like babies, our sons all treat their mothers as sacred and beat their wives, we all hate solitude, we all try to find out from a stranger whether or not we are related, we all use every long word that we know as often as we possibly can, we all go out for a walk in the evening so that we can look over each others' fences, we all think that we are equal to the best. Do you understand?'

The captain was perplexed, `You didn't tell me about the two Greeks inside every Greek.'

'I didn't? Well, I must have wandered off the point.'

The doctor stood up and began to walk about, gesturing eloquently with his right hand and clutching his pipe with his left. `Look, I've been all over the world. I've seen Santiago de Chile, Shanghai, Stockholm, Addis Ababa, Sydney, all of them. And all the time I've been learning to be a doctor, and I can tell you that no one is more truly themselves than when they are sick or injured. That's when the qualities come out. And I've nearly always been on ships whose crews were mainly Greek. Do you understand? We are a race of exiles and sailors. I'm saying that I know more than most people what a Greek is like.

`I'll tell you about the Hellene first. The Hellene has a quality that we call "sophrosune". This Greek avoids excess, he knows his limits, he represses the violence within himself, he seeks harmony and cultivates a sense of proportion. He believes in reason, he is the spiritual heir of Plato and Pythagoras. These Greeks are suspicious of their own natural impulsiveness and love of change for the sake of change, and they assert discipline over themselves in order to avoid spontaneously going out of control. They love education for its own sake, do not take power and money into consideration when assessing someone's worth, scrupulously obey the law, suspect that Athens is the only important place in the world, detest dishonourable compromise, and consider themselves to be quintessentially European. This is from the blood of our ancient ancestors that still flows in us.'

He paused, puffed on his pipe, and then continued: 'But side by side with the Hellene we have to live with the Romoi. Perhaps I can point out to you, Captain, that this word originally meant "Roman", and these are the qualities that we learned from your ancestors, who never made a single technological advance in hundreds of years of dominion, and who enslaved entire nations with the utmost disregard for morals. 'The Romoi are people very like your Fascists, so that you should feel at home with them, except that it seems to me that you personally share none of their vices. The Romoi are improvisers, they seek power and money, they aren't rational because they act on intuition and instinct, so that they make a mess of everything. They don't pay taxes and only obey the law when there is no alternative, they look on education as a way of getting ahead, will always compromise an ideal for self-interest, and they like getting drunk, and dancing and singing, and breaking bottles over each others' heads. And they have a viciousness and brutality that I can only convey to you by saying that it compares very unfavourably with your gassing the natives in Ethiopia and your bombing of the field hospitals of the Red Cross. The only point of contact between the two sides of a Greek is the place that bears the label "patriotism". Romoi and Hellene alike will die gladly for Greece, but the Hellene will fight wisely and humanely, and the Romoi will use every subterfuge and barbarity, and happily throw away the lives of their own men, rather like your Mussolini. In fact they calculate their glory by the number that were sent to their death, and a bloodless victory is a disappointment.'

The captain was very sceptical, 'So what are you saying? Are you saying that Pelagia has a side that I don't know and which would be very shocking to me if I knew it?'

The doctor leaned forward and stabbed the air with his finger, 'That is exactly it. And another thing; I have that side too. You've never seen it, but I have it.'

'With respect, Dottore, I don't believe it.'

'I'm very glad that you don't. But in my better moments I know what the truth is.'

There was a silence between the two men, and the doctor sat down at the table to relight his uncooperative pipe, with its repellent mixture of coltsfoot, rose petals, and other herbs that failed even to approximate to tobacco. He coughed and spluttered violently.

'I love her,' said Corelli at last, as though this were the answer to the problem, which to him it was. A suspicion struck him: 'You wouldn't be reluctant to lose her, would you? Are you trying to discourage me?'

'You'd have to live here, that's all. If she went to Italy she would die of the homesickness. I know my daughter. You might have to choose between loving her and becoming a musician.'

The doctor left the room, more for rhetorical effect than for any other purpose, and then came back in. 'And another thing. This is a very ancient land, and we've had nothing but slaughter for two thousand years. Sacrifices, wars, murders, nothing but bad deaths. We've got so many places full of bitter ghosts that anyone who goes near them or lives in them becomes heartless or insane. I don't believe in God, Captain, and I'm not superstitious, but I do believe in ghosts. On this island we've had massacres at Sami and Fiskardo and God knows where else. There'll be more. It's only a question of time. So don't make any plans.'