Captain Corelli's mandolin (37 page)

The Allies invaded Sicily for strategic reasons, and in doing so betrayed their most longstanding and gallant ally, Greece. They left the Communists a year for preparing a coup, and a year for civil war. ELAS destroyed EKKA, and drove EDES into a corner so far from the centres of power that Zervas, their leader, would feel betrayed by the British for the rest of his life. The Allies had gone for a jugular vein in Italy, and had set on one side the little nation that had given Europe its culture, its impetus, and its heart. The angry Greeks heard from the BBC all about the destruction of Fascism in Italy, and demanded to know why they had been ignored. The British Liaison Officers, impotent and frustrated, wrung their hands and watched the country fall apart. Communists in the Greek Army in Syria fomented a mutiny that further delayed the victory in Italy, and it was at that point that the Cold War started and the Iron Curtain began to descend. In the West the admiration and respect for the heroism of the Soviets began to be eroded, and it became abysmally dear that one kind of Fascism was about to be replaced by another. In Britain and America no one would believe at first that the Communists in Greece were committing atrocities on an unimaginable scale; journalists put it down to right-wing propaganda, and the disbelieving Greeks put it down to renegade Bulgarians.

But in some seas at least, if not in Ionia, the time of miracles and singularities returned. Operation 'Noah's Ark' found the British harassing the Axis withdrawal with Beaufighters and canoes, transforming the Iron Ring into an Iron Cage. In Lesbos the Communists took over and declared an independent republic. At Khios a Gestapo house was discovered where people had been forced to spend a night with a skeleton in a cellar. The German commander had been strafed to death whilst making love to his mistress. At Inousia the British found an island where every single person spoke fluent English, and where everyone was called either Lemmos or Pateras. Raiders killed the commanders at Nisiro, Simi, and Piscopi, and Patrick Leigh-Fermor and Billy Moss abducted the commander of Crete. At Thira the raiders killed two-thirds of the garrison for the loss of two men. In Crete, again, they destroyed two hundred thousand gallons of fuel. On Mikonos and Amorgos the wireless stations were destroyed, and seven prisoners taken by five men. On Khios a few Royal Marines destroyed two destroyers, even though the local andartes failed to turn up as agreed, having 'lost interest'. They hated to join attacks that anyone else had planned, and refused to take part if even another of their number had had the idea. On Samos one thousand Italians surrendered to Maurice Cardiff and twenty-three men, and then sat down to have breakfast; Cardiff discovered that for some inexplicable reason all the local doctors spoke French. At Naxos the German commander surrendered by mistake; he had rowed out to greet a boat that he thought was flying the red flag of the swastika, but was in fact flying the Red Ensign. He fell into such a deep depression and wept so bitterly that the crew had to cheer him up by teaching him to play ludo. At that time one pound sterling was worth two thousand million drachmas, and one cigarette cost seven and a half million. The people of Lesbos enterprisingly offered an advantageous rate of exchange, and every single coin and note from the whole region flew there, seemingly of its own accord, leaving no money at all in any other place. At Siros a party of Germans was seen running away without any trousers. The Communists got into the habit of demanding twenty-five percent of everything as tax, and in many places the people resigned from the party. Later on in Crete, and Samos, they would turn on the Communists and defeat them. There is a story that the Cretans demanded British rule, but that the latter turned them down on the grounds that it was bad enough trying to govern Cyprus. All in all, for the loss of nineteen dead, four hundred men of the special forces held down forty thousand Axis troops, paying three hundred and eighty-one visits to seventy separate islands. The German sense of the proper way of doing things was so confounded by such randomised plagues of sliced throats and inexplicable explosions that they became completely helpless, and the Italians, who had never seen any sense in fighting in the first place, surrendered courteously and with pleasure.

On Cephallonia the Italian soldiers listened to their radios and charted the course of Allied progress up the spine of their homeland, whilst the German garrison seethed with disgust. Corelli and his brother officers sensed ice in the air, and fraternal visits between the bases of the two allies diminished. When Weber turned up at the meetings of La Scala, he seemed very quiet and distant, and his regard was interpreted as reproachful.

One day, in the midst of these events, Pelagia found Corelli absently stroking Psipsina on the wall, and when he turned to face her, his look was troubled. `What happens,' he asked her, `when we have to surrender before the Germans do?'

`We'll get married.'

He shook his head sadly, `It's going to be a complete mess. There's no chance of the British coming. They're going straight for Rome. No one will save us unless we save ourselves. All the boys think we should disarm the Germans now, whilst their garrison is small. We've sent deputations to Gandin, but he doesn't do anything. He says we should trust them.'

`Don't you trust them?'

`I'm not stupid. And Gandin is one of those officers who has risen to the top by obeying orders. He doesn't know how to give them. He's just another of our typical donkey generals who's got no brains and no balls.'

`Come inside,' she said, `my father's out, and we can have a cuddle. He's got lots of tuberculosis to deal with these days.'

'A cuddle would only make me sad, koritsimou. My mind is just a blank that's filled with worry.'

Father Arsenios passed by, accompanied by Bunny Warren, both of them battered, tattered, and dusty, and Pelagia said quickly, `Antonio, I must go and ask them something, I'll be right back.'

Arsenios stood by the well and waved his crozier. His abject little dog slumped on the shady side of the stones, and began to lick itself. It had blood on the pads of its paws.

`How is the gold become dim! How is the most fine gold changed! The tongue of the sucking child cleaveth to the roof of his mouth for thirst; the children ask bread, and no man breaketh it unto them. They that did feed delicately are desolate in the streets, and they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills . . . ' began Arsenios, and Pelagia took Warren's elbow and led him to one side.

`Bunnio', when are the British coming? I've got to know. What's going to happen to the Italians when they surrender? Please tell me.'

`That I cannot tell,' he said. `For I know it not myself, and neither doth any man.'

`Your Greek has improved an awful lot,' she said, amazed, `but your accent is still . . . strange. Please tell me. I'm worried. Have the Germans brought in any more soldiers? It's important.'

`Nay, I think not.'

Pelagia left him, and heard him exclaiming `Amen' at intervals. Perhaps the British were really a nation of actors and impostors. She returned to Corelli and said, `Don't worry, everything will be all right.'

`Are you serious? You go and ask the opinion of a religious madman, and you expect me to believe it?'

`O ye of little faith. Come on, come inside. Psipsina caught a mouse and let it go under the table. I think you ought to catch it for me. It was last seen running behind the cupboard.'

`After the war, when we're married, you can catch the mice yourself. I'm not going to be chivalrous after I'm thirty.'

Whilst Corelli poked behind the cupboard with a broomstick, Arsenios' mantic voice and Bunny Warren's wild amens drifted musically through the window:

' . . Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens. We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows . . . Our necks are under persecution, we labour and have no rest . . . Servants have ruled over us and there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand . . , our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine . . . Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long a time?'

`That priest has a wonderful bass voice,' remarked Corelli, releasing out of the window the mouse he had caught by the tail. `And that reminds me, I went down to the harbour to listen to the fishermen. They had some really strange instruments I've never seen before, and the singing, it was fantastic. I wrote down some of the tunes.'

`They make them up as they go along, you know. Never the same twice.'

`Incredible. And there was one tune they sang a few times. I made them teach it to me . . . ' he hummed a solemn and martial air, waving his fingers to conduct it, and only stopped when he saw Pelagia laughing. `What's so funny?? 'It's our national anthem,' she said.

We imagine the shade of Homer, writing: `For wreaking havoc upon a strong man, even the very strongest, there is nothing so dire as the sea. But there was no unspeakable waste of salt water, no rude arrogance of land-shaking waves, no winged scavenging of the wind, as desolating in its results as the paralysis of General Gandin. He was impelled to inaction by the burden of his pains, and in the fertility of his expedients he was less endowed than a wilderness or a lake of salt. He was the daunted one, the vaguest-willed of any man born to death, a man of instant vanishment into blind silence. He bore the unappeasable pain of being obliged to make decisions, and in his confusion he was as helpless as those in my own times who watched multitudes of birds fly hither and thither in the bright sunshine, not knowing which ones might bear messages from heaven.

`If he had an impulse that quickened the seeds of his inactivity, it was foolish hope and the desperate need to spare the blood of the hapless men he loved. He took a sightless road and shortly condemned them to a grisly doom, failing to see in the Nazi promises so thick a mask of falsehood that by trusting them he condemned his beautiful youngsters to abandon their bones to dogs and birds of prey to pick, or to lie shrouded in the deep sand of the never ceasing ocean after the fishes of the sea had stripped them. Sallow with fright, disguising a ruffled heart by means of witless negotiation and a tempest of orders transparent in their absurdity, he appointed the due time for his warriors to quit not only the lovely island but life itself.'

So the sightless bard might have written, for it was certain that General Gandin lacked the clear eyes of the wily Odysseus, and neither did Athena, goddess of the limpid eyes, guide him. Rome issued contradictory orders, and from Athens Vechiarelli issued orders that were illegal. Gandin was given no place to stand, and therefore could not move the earth.

But it all happened slowly. It began with the radio. Anglo-American flights overhead were rattling the windows, and Carlo was fiddling in a desultory fashion with the dials of a machine that for so long had broadcast nothing from home but frustrating whistles and bat-squeaks. In Sicily the Italian soldiers had surrendered in joyous relief, and it was an open secret that Badoglio intended to end the war. On July 19th, the United States had dropped one thousand tons of high explosives on Rome, destroying railways, airfields, factories, and government buildings, leaving hundreds dead, but sparing the antiquities and the Vatican. The Pope advised the fractious populace to be patient. On July 25th, King Victor Emmanuel had imprisoned his improbable cockerel of a prime minister and appointed the venerable Marshal Badoglio in his place, the same who had opposed all plans to invade Greece, and, despite being Chief-of-Staff, had not been informed of it even when is had already occurred. On July 26th, Badoglio had declared a state of emergency to prevent civil war. On the 27th, he had asked the suspicious Allies for terms, and outside in the streets the populace had waxed delirious with joy as they celebrated the miraculous and wondrously abrupt downfall of Benito Mussolini. On the 28th, Badoglio abolished the Fascist Party, on the 29th, he released political prisoners who had been rotting in jail without charge, some of them for more than a decade, but the war dragged on. The Germans reinforced heavily, and fought the British and the Americans with astonishing bravery whilst their Italian allies yielded. British soldiers remember that the Italian units acquired the habit of changing sides according to their perception of who was about to win, and that the local populations threw flowers over whichever side was advancing, gathering up the blossoms to use again and again in areas where battles went to and fro.

On September 3rd Badoglio signed a sacra armistice with the Allies, but the Germans had seen it coming, and in one forgotten theatre of the war they had already landed troops. It was on the island of Cephallonia, the place that travellers describe as looking like a dismasted man-o'-war, and the town where they landed was Lixouri. They came on August 1st, giving themselves a month for preparation, and the Italians a month in which to watch them preparing whilst Gandin ordered no counter-preparations.

On the other side of the bay at Argostoli the Italian troops had fallen silent ever since the invasion of Sicily. La Scala did not meet any more at the doctor's house, and in the town square the music of the military band became ragged and mournful. The military police still misdirected the traffic with shrill blasts of their whistles, but there were very few German officers walking about and drinking in cafes with their longstanding Italian friends. Giinter Weber stayed at his quarters, vitriolic with anger over the daily news of further Italian betrayals. He had never felt so let down, even though the troops on the island itself had done nothing disgraceful. He thought of his friend Corelli, and began to despise him. Nowadays he even despised the inmates of the Italian brothel, the sad and empty-headed girls with beautiful bodies and artificial faces who still frolicked naked in the waves as though nothing had happened. He was so angry that whereas before he had wanted to buy them, now he wanted only to rape them. He was very glad when the cavalcade of motorcycles and trucks appeared from Lixouri; the Italians needed someone to show them how to fight, how not to waver, how to face death rather than embrace dishonour.

Corelli came home to the doctor's house less often, because he did drills by day and night with his battery. Bringing up the limbers, loading, slamming the breach, aiming, firing, rangefinding, changing target, removing the limbers in the event of air attacks so that their own shells would not destroy the guns after a direct hit. His men worked hard in the apocalyptic heat of August, sweating in heavy trickles that washed erratic runnels through the grime of their faces and arms. The flesh of their shoulders bubbled and burst, leaving patches of crimson sunburn that oozed and itched for lack of skin and the opportunity to heal, but they did not complain. They knew that the captain was right to practise.

He himself stopped playing the mandolin; there was so little time for it that when he picked it up it felt foreign in his fingers by comparison with a gun. He had to play a great many scales before his fingers got up to speed, and his tremolo became ragged and sluggish. He went home to Pelagia on his motorbike at times when her father was likely to be out, and he brought her bread, honey, bottles of wine, a photograph signed on the back with the words `After the War . . . ' written on it in his elegant and foreign-looking hand, and he brought her his tired grey face, his saddened and fatalistic eyes, his air of quiet dignity and vanished joy. 'My poor carino,' she would say, her arms about his neck, `don't worry, don't worry, don't worry,' and he would draw back a little and say, 'Koritsimou, just let me look at you.'

And then came the time when Carlo was listening to the radio, trying to find a signal. It was September 8th, and the evenings had become considerably cooler than they had been before. It was now possible to sleep a little less feverishly at night, and sometimes the breeze from the sea was more invigorating. Carlo had recently been thinking a great deal about Francesco and about the horror of Albania, and now more than ever he knew that it had all been nothing but a waste, and that his time in Cephallonia had been an interlude, a holiday from a war that was circling like a lion and was about to pounce once more. He wished that there was some law of nature that forbade the possibility of a man's voyaging through Hades more than once. He found a voice and quickly twisted back the dial to find it. ` . . . all aggressive acts by Italian Armed Forces against the forces of the British and the Americans will cease at once, everywhere. They must be prepared to repel any possible attacks from any other quarter.'

Outside the bells of the island began to ring, the Venetian campaniles reverberating with the impossible hope of peace, just as in Italy they had once rung in the exhilarating pride of war. The clamour spread; Argostoli, Lixouri, Soulari, Dorizata, Assos, Fiskardo. Across the straits of Ithaca the bells rang out in Vathi and in Frikes, and they rang far away in Zante, Levkas, and Corfu. Up on Mt Aenos, Alekos stood and listened. It could not be a feast day, so perhaps the war was over. He cupped his hand over his eyes and looked out over the valleys; it was what it must sound like in heaven when God brought all his goats to fold at night.

Carlo listened to the text of Marshal Badoglio's announcement, and then there was a message from Eisenhower himself: ` . . . All Italians who now as to help eject the German aggressor from Italian soil will have the assistance and support of the Allies . . . '

He ran out and found Corelli just lurching to a halt, a great cloud of blue smoke behind him.

`Antonio, Antonio, it's all over, and the Allies have promised to help us. It's over.'

He threw his enormous arms about the man he loved and picked him up, dancing in a circle. 'Carlo, Carlo,' the captain reproached him, 'put me down. Don't get so excited. The Allies don't care about us. We're in Greece, remember? Merda, Carlo, you don't know your own strength. You half killed me.'

`They'll help us,' said Carlo, but Corelli shook his head. 'If we don't act now, we're fucked. We've got to disarm the Germans.'

That night the Italian warships in the harbours of the island slipped anchor and fled for home. There were minesweepers, torpedo boats, and a battleship. They did not tell anyone they were going, and they did not take with them a single Italian evacuee. Not one soldier, not one helpless military whore. They took with them their formidable firepower, and left only the damp and sulphurous stench of cowardice and burning coal. The German soldiers sneered, and Corelli's men smelled treachery. Corelli waited at the telephone for orders, and when none came he fell asleep in his chair after, posting a doubled guard at his battery. He dreamed about Pelagia and about the mad priest who preached that all of them would be thrown into the fire. During his sleep the radio broadcast appeals from the Allies to fight against the Germans. The telephone rang, and someone from the general's office told the captain not to attack and to stay calm. `Are you mad?' he shouted, but the line was already dead.

Leutnant Gunter Weber also dozed intermittently in his chair, awaiting orders. He felt abysmally tired and all his confidence had gone. He missed his friends, and, worse than that, he missed the certainties that had accrued from so much past success. The Master Race was losing in Italy and Yugoslavia, the Russian front was collapsing, Hamburg destroyed. Weber no longer felt invincible and proud; he felt inferior and humiliated, so foully turned upon and betrayed that, were he a woman, he would have wept. He thought of the motto of his regiment, `God With Us', and wondered whether it was only Italy who had betrayed him. In any case, all the sums were wrong; it was a whole Italian division against only three thousand of the 996th Grenadier Battalion, and even with God's help he didn't stand a chance. He tried to pray, but the Lutheran words turned bitter in his mouth.

In the morning, Colonel Barge, commander of the German troops, moved some armoured cars from Argostoli to Lixouri, and General Gandin tried in vain to contact both the new government in Brindisi and the old High Command in Greece. He had trot slept all night, and was too well-trained to know what to do.

Pelagia and her father organised all their medical equipment and tore old sheets into strips so that they could boil them and roll them into bandages. They had a vague idea that there might be some Greeks caught in any crossfire, and in any case, they had to do something just to ease the tension. Corelli called by on his motorbike, pleading with them to let him know how to contact the partisans. But they genuinely did not know how it could be done, and he left, disconsolate, speeding away towards Sami. Perhaps the partisans might at last come out of their long and venial repose, and be of some help in holding down the Germans.

In Sami he did not even know where to start, and the local Greeks did not know him. It was a wasted journey. He stopped his motorcycle on the way back and sat on the verge by a ramshackle wall, beneath the shade of an olive. He thought about going back to Italy, about surviving, about Pelagia. The truth was that he had no home, and that was why he had never talked about it. The Duce had made his family move to Libya as part of the colonisation, and there they had died at the hands of the rebels whilst he was in hospital with dysentery. Of all the relatives' houses where he had stayed, which one was home? He had no family except his soldiers and his mandolin, and his heart was here in Greece. Had he borne so much pain, so much loneliness, had he finally found a place to be, only to have it wrested away? He tried to remember his parents, and their image was as thin and indefinite, as wavering as that of a ghost. He recalled a friendly little Arab boy with whom his parents had forbidden him to play. They used to throw stones at rows of bottles, and he always seemed to come home with sunstroke and diarrhoea. He had been prohibited from eating pomegranates in case he caught jaundice. It was poignant to remember so much and yet so little, and for the first time he began to feel nostalgic for Pelagia, as if she were already lost. He remembered the doctor's tale about the Lotos eaters, wandering folk who ate Lotos once, and lost their longing for home. He was one of them. He thought about dying and wondered how long Pelagia would weep. It seemed a shame to mar her lovely flesh with tears; it was pitiful to imagine it. He wanted to reach out from beyond the grave and comfort her, even though he was not yet dead.

When eventually he returned to his battery he found his men in revolt. An order had come from Supergreccia to surrender to the Nazis in the morning.