Captain Corelli's mandolin (39 page)

Antonio, my Captain, We find ourselves in bad times, and I have the strongest feelings that I shall not survive them. You know how it is, how a cat creeps away to die, or a man sees the ghost of his own mother beside his bed when he is sick, or even meets the ghost of himself coming the other way at a crossroads.

You find with this letter all my writings that I have done since I came to this island, and if you read them you will discover what kind of man I am. I hope you are not disgusted, and I hope that, because you have a big and generous heart, you will be able to forgive me and remember me without contempt. I hope that you will remember all the times that we have embraced as comrades and brothers, and that you will not shudder with retrospective horror because they were the caresses of a degenerate. I have always tried to show you the affection that I have felt, without taking anything from you and without giving you anything that you did not want.

When you read these pages you will see that in Albania I was desolated by the loss of my comrade Francesco, and I wish to tell you here that the wound that I received in that war was a wound that I inflicted on myself. I am not ashamed I did what was right. When Francesco died, I wanted to die too. All the beauty went out of my life and everything was meaningless, but I lacked the unnatural courage that a man needs to blow away his own brains. I came to this beautiful island with nothing but a grey fog in my mind and an aching and empty heart that was inconsolable, bursting with grief and bitterness. What is a man who has a chest full of medals but a heart beneath it too disconsolate to beat? My dear Antonio, I want you to know that in return for your inextinguishable laughter, your great music, your incomparable spirit, I have loved you with the same surprise and gratitude that I see in your own eyes when you are with Pelagia, and I shall remember you always, even when I am dead. You removed the sorrow from my breast and made me smile, and I have accepted and rejoiced in your friendship, always conscious of my own unworthiness, always struggling against any impulse to debase it, and I trust that for this you will not despise me as some might think that I deserve.

Antonio, I have so many memories of these few short months, it makes me weep to think of them now that they are gone. So many happy memories. Do you recall how you nearly blew yourself up with that mine, and I carried you back to the doctor's house? I knew then that if you had died I would have gone mad, and I now thank God that I shall die before you, so that I shall not have to bear the grief.

Antonio, I speak to you from beyond the grave, in seriousness. I have loved you with all my shameful heart, as much as I once loved Francesco, and I have conquered any envy that I might have felt. If a dead man may have a wish, it is that you should find your future with Pelagia. She is beautiful and sweet, there is no one who deserves you more, and no one else worthy of you. I wish that you will have children together, and I wish that once or twice you will tell them about their Uncle Carlo that they never saw. As for me, I hoist my knapsack on my shoulders and buckle the webbing, I put my arm through the sling of .my rifle, and I open the veil to march into the unknown as soldiers always will. Remember me.

Carlo.

Despite the unequivocal demand of his men that the Germans should be forced to surrender and their arms confiscated, General Gandin played the saint and agreed with Colonel Barge that his Italian soldiers should be allowed to keep their arms and evacuate the island. There were no ships with which to evacuate them, however, a point which did not seem to strike him as significant. In Corfu the Germans had agreed in the most gentlemanly way to provide the troop transports themselves, and whilst the soldiers were wading out to them through the surf, had machine-gunned them all, every one of them, and left their bodies floating. The incomparably courageous Colonel Lusignani, entirely abandoned by the British, held out against impossible odds for several days. All of his men who survived to find their way onto German transports were killed when the British bombed them at sea. Those who managed to leap into the water were machine-gunned by the Germans, and their bodies left to float.

In Cephallonia the Germans had now had fourteen days grace in which to organise themselves and to bring in reinforcements and extra weapons, whilst the bemused Italians, for want of any leadership, had acted or not according to the initiative of individual officers. Some, like Appollonio and Corelli, had prepared their men to the last degree, but others, intoxicated and blinded by the prospect of going home, had drifted vapidly away into a suicidal and optimistic lethargy that had left their men seething with irritation and dismay; they foresaw transportation to labour camps in cattle wagons with no light, sanitation, or sustenance - did not everybody know that this had been happening to the Greeks for months? - and they foresaw massacres. Some sank into a fatalistic depression, and others set their jaws with determination, gripping the stocks of their rifles so hard that their knuckles blenched.

The Greeks, Pelagia and Dr Iannis amongst them, looked at one another with haunted eyes, their hearts churning with omens, and the pitiful whores of the military brothel forgot their cosmetics and drifted helplessly from room to room in their dressing-gowns like the underworld's grieving, senseless shades, opening the shutters, looking out, closing them again, and pressing their hands against their palpitating hearts.

When the formation of Stukas arrived early in the afternoon, tipped their wings, banked in formation, and howled vertically down upon the Italian batteries, it was almost a relief. Now everything was clear; it was at last obvious that the Germans were perfidious, that every soldier would have to fight for his life. Gunter Weber knew that he would have to turn his weapons on his friends, Corelli knew that his musician's fingers, so well accustomed to the arts of peace, must now tighten about the trigger of a gun. General Gandin knew too late that in his radical indecision and his consultations with epicene priests he had condemned his men to die; Colonel Barge knew that he had successfully gulled his former allies into a disadvantageous position; the whores knew that men who had formerly stolen their happiness were now to leave them to the crows, and Pelagia knew that a war that had always really been somewhere else was now about to settle upon her home and blast its stones to dust.

The men of the batteries, demented and disorientated by the mechanical scream of the Stukas, the hail of machine-gun fire, and the sticks of bombs that fell amongst their guns and showered them with earth and exiguous shreds of the flesh of their comrades, struggled to remove their limbers and prevent the detonation of their ammunition. Then, before the battery commanders could set up any returning fire, the Stukas bobbed away like starlings and turned on a column of troops arriving in Argostoli on the far side of the sportsground, where in the past the Italian soldiers had passed their military service in raucous and emotional games of football, and where at night Italian soldiers in love with Greek girls had arranged assignations that were hardly private even in the dark.

To Corelli and to Appollonio, to Carlo and to the members of La Scala, it was obvious that the Germans were trying to paralyse Argostoli because that was where the most Italian troops were concentrated; the enemy was attempting to protect its scattered and undermanned emplacements at the outposts of the island. This was not obvious to Gandin, however, and he brought his troops into the city in increasing numbers, where it would be easier for the Germans to isolate and cut them down. He himself was reluctant to leave his splendid offices in the fine municipal building. He set up observation posts in the most amateurishly obvious places, the Venetian spires of the churches, and thereby provided the Germans with the most admirable opportunities for rangefinding and target practice. He omitted to provide these posts with radios or field telephones, and they were forced to communicate with their own gunners by means of motorcycle messengers, and runners who were easily winded after such a lazy war. Dripping with blood, their flesh burned and studded with fragments of shrapnel, bullets clanging against the bells and ricocheting about their heads in the confined spaces, the observers held their posts as long as they could, knowing that when darkness fell the Stukas must depart.

That night Alekos watched the fireworks from the top of Mt Aenos, wrapped luxuriously in his robes of parachute silk. On the hill above Argostoli he saw tracer bullets arcing gracefully towards the German positions, and he heard the crump and double-trump of falling shells, a noise very like a drummer tapping softly with a muffled stick upon the skin of an old bass drum. He saw two brilliant beams of light incandesce across the bay, and he tugged the sleeve of the man next to him, the man he had once mistaken for an angel, and who was now talking rapidly into his radio. Bunny Warren took up his binoculars and saw that an invasion flotilla of improvised barges had set out from Lixouri and been caught in the searchlights like an improvident rabbit held in the dazzling headlights of a car. `Bravo!' he exclaimed, as the Italian batteries opened fire and sank the barges one by one, and Alekos admired the beautiful flashes of orange flame that sparkled like fireflies upon the hill above the town. `These wops have balls after all,' said Warren, whose Greek had now improved to the point of becoming demotic. Once more he tried to impress his superiors with the paramount importance of providing the beleaguered Italians with air and sea support, and the efficient voice at the other end of the line told him, `Dreadfully sorry, old boy, can't be done. Chin-chin. Over and out.'

Dr Iannis and his daughter sat side by side at their kitchen table, unable to sleep, holding each others' hands. Pelagia was weeping. The doctor wanted to relight his pipe, but out of respect for his daughter's despair he allowed his hands to stay in hers, and he repeated, `Koritsimou, I am sure he is all right.'

`But we haven't seen him for days,' she wailed. 'I just know he's dead.'

`If he was dead someone would have told us, someone from La Scala. They were all nice boys, they would think to let us know.'

`Were?' she repeated. `You think they're all dead? You think they're dead too, don't you?'

'O God,' he said, a little exasperated. There was a knock at the door, and Stamatis and Kokolios came in together. Dr Iannis looked up, and both men removed their hats. `Hello boys,' said the doctor.

Stamatis shifted on his feet and said, as though it were a confession, `Iatre, we have decided to go out and shoot some Germans.'

'Ah,' said the doctor, unsure as to what he was supposed to do with this information.

'We want to know,' said Kokolios, 'if we can have your blessing.'

'My blessing? I am not a priest.'

`Next best thing,' explained Stamatis. `Who knows where Father Arsenios is?'

'Of course you have my blessing. God go with you.'

'Velisarios has dug up his cannon, and he's coming too.'

'He has my blessing also.'

`Thank you, Iatre,' continued Kokolios, `and we want to know . . . if we are killed . . . will you see to our wives?'

'I will do my best, I promise. Do they know?'

The two men exchanged glances, and Stamatis confessed, 'Of course not. They would only try to stop us. I couldn't stand all that screaming and crying.'

'Me neither,' added Kokolios.

'I also wanted to thank you, for curing my ear. I will need it now, for hearing the Germans.'

`I am glad it turned out to be useful,' said the doctor. The two men hesitated a moment, as though to add something, and then left. The doctor turned to his daughter, `Look, two old men are going out to fight for us. Have courage. As long as we have men like that, then Greece is never lost.'

Pelagia turned her tearstained face to her father and sobbed, `Who cares about Greece? Where is Antonio?'

Antonio Corelli was walking in the dark through the ruins of Argostoli. The pretty town seemed to be nothing but sagging walls, dwellings that had been opened like dolls' houses, exposing complete floors that still had pictures on the walls and cheerful cloths upon the tables. All about him were heaps of rubble. From one of them a hand protruded, its fingers languid and relaxed. It was a very dirty hand, but it was diminutive and young. He scrabbled at the lumps of rock, stones that had enclosed and protected people picturesquely since Venetian times, and he found the crushed head of a little girl, about the same age as Lemoni. He looked at those pale lips, the loveable face, and he did not know whether to choke with rage or with tears. With a sense of tragedy in his heart such as he had never known before, he carefully arranged the child's hair so that it would fall more naturally about her cheeks. 'I am sorry, koritsimou,' he confided to the corpse, 'if we had not been here, you would have lived.'

He was exhausted, long past the point of fear, and his weariness had made him philosophical. little girls as innocent and sweet as this had died- for nothing in Malta, in London, in Hamburg, in Warsaw. But they were statistical little girls, children he had never seen himself. He thought of Lemoni, and then of Pelagia. The unspeakable enormity of this war suddenly broke his heart, so that he gasped and fought for breath, and at the identical moment he also knew with absolute certainty that nothing was more necessary than to win it. He touched his lips to his fingers, and then his fingers to the dead lips of the foreign child.

There was so much to be done. Refugees from villages razed and machine-gunned by the Germans were flooding into the town, and at the same time the citizens of the town were clogging the streets with handcarts as they attempted to flee to the villages. It was almost impossible to move the guns and troops, and, to make it worse, soldiers from outlying areas were pouring in on Gandin's orders, making themselves an easy target and severely exacerbating the congestion. There was nowhere to put them, the chain of command was breaking up, and there was in everyone the tacit knowledge that no ships or planes would come to help them. Cephallonia was an island of no strategic importance, its little children need not be saved, its ancient and buckled buildings need not be preserved for posterity, its blood and flesh were not precious to those conducting a war from easy. and Olympian heights. For Cephallonia there was no Winston Churchill, no Eisenhower, no Badoglio, no squadrons of ships or flights of planes. From the sky there fell only the hyperbolical snowfalls of German propaganda containing false promises and lies, on the radio there came from Brindisi only messages of encouragement, and at the exquisite white bay of Kyriaki there landed two battalions of fresh Alpine troops under the command of Major Von Hirschfeld.

At dawn the next morning a marmoreal Oberleutnant and his men overran a somnolent camp consisting of a field kitchen and a company of muleteers. After they had all surrendered the Oberleutnant had them shot, and kicked their bodies into a ditch. From there he led his men up to the pine-clad ridge at Daphni, and waited until eight o'clock, when the new Alpine troops of Major Von Hirschfeld would certainly be arriving from the other side to complete the encirclement. Again the Italians were caught unprepared, and again they had to surrender. The Oberleutnant marched them to Kourouklata and then became bored with them, so he took them to the edge of a ravine and shot the entire battalion. Out of academic interest he had the bodies dynamited, and was impressed by the results. The region was famous for a blood-red wine called 'Thiniatiko'.

Unhampered by his prisoners he proceeded to Farsa, an attractive village which the Alpine troops had already reduced to rubble by means of mortars, and where the Italian soldiers were mounting a fierce and successful resistance. Attacked now on both sides, they fought and fell until there was only a very small number of them left to be herded into the piazza and shot. At Argostoli, wave after wave of black-winged bombers progressively demolished the batteries until all the guns fell silent.

It was on the morning of September 22nd that Captain Antonio Corelli of the 33rd Regiment of Artillery, knowing that the white banner was about to be raised over the HQ at Argostoli, having had no sleep for three days, mounted his motorcycle and sped towards Pelagia's house. It was then that he threw himself into her arms, rested his burning eyes upon her shoulder, and told her, 'Siamo perduti. We have run out of ammunition, and the British have betrayed us.'

She begged him to stay, to hide in the house, in the hole in the floor, along with his mandolin and Carlo's papers, but he took her face in his hands, kissed her without the tears that he was too tired and too resigned to weep, and then rocked her in his arms, squeezing her so tightly that she thought her ribs and spine would crack. He kissed her again and said, 'Koritsimou, this is the last time I shall ever see you. There has been no honour in this war, but I have to be with my boys.'

He hung his head, 'Koritsimou, I am going to die. Remember me to your father. And I thank God I have lived long enough to love you.'

He drove away upon his motorcycle, the dust-cloud mantling higher than his head. She watched him go, and went inside. She gathered Psipsina into her arms and sat at the kitchen table with a cold talon of dread clutching at her heart. Men are sometimes driven by things that to a woman make no sense, but she did know that Corelli had to be with his boys. Honour and common sense; in the light of the other, both of them are ridiculous.