The Magus, A Revised Version (76 page)

‘
The alley curved up between the houses to the square beside the village school. It is a natural stage, inclined slightly to the north, with the sea and the mainland over the lower roofs. With the wall of the village school on the uphill side, and high walls to east and west. If you remember, there is a large plane tree in the garden of the house to the west. The branches come over the wall. As I came to the square that was the first thing I saw. Three bodies hung from the branches, pale in the shadow, as monstrous as Goya etchings. There was the naked body of the cousin with its terrible wound. And there
were the naked bodies of the two girls. They had been disembowelled.
A slit cut from their breastbones down to their pubic hair and the intestines pulled out. Half-gutted carcasses, swaying slightly in the noon wind.

‘
Beyond those three atrocious shapes I saw the hostages. They had been herded against the school in a pen of barbed wire. The men at the back were just in the shadow of t
he wall, the front ones in sunlight. As soon as they saw me they began to shout. There were insults of the obvious kind to me, confused cries of appeal
–
as if anything I could say then would have touched the colonel. He was there, in the centre of the square, with Anton and some twenty of
die Ra
b
en.
On the third side of the square, to the east, there is a long wall. You know it? In the middle a gate. Iron grilles. The two surviving guerillas were lashed to the bars. Not with rope
–
with barbed wire.

‘
I
was halted behind the two lines of men, some twenty yards away from where Wimmel was standing. Anton would not look at me, though Wimmel turned briefly. Anton
–
staring into space, as if he had hypnotized himself into believing that none of what he saw existed. As if he no longer existed himself. The colonel beckoned the collaborationist to him. I suppose he wanted to know what the hostages were shouting. He appeared to think for a moment and then he went towards them. They fell silent. Of course they did not know he had already pronounced sentence on them. He said something that was translated to them. What, I could not hear, except that it reduced the villagers to silence. So it was not the death sentence. The colonel marched back to me.

‘
He said,
“
I have made an
off
er to these peasants.
”
I looked at his face. It was absolutely without nervousness, excitation; a man in complete command of himself. He went on,
“
I will permit them not to be executed. To go to a labour camp. On one condition. That is that you, as mayor of this village, carry out in front of them the execution of the two murderers.
”

‘
I
said,
“
I am not an executioner.
”

‘
The village men began to shout frantically at me.

‘
He looked at his watch, and said,
“
You have thirty seconds to decide.
”

‘
Of course in such situations one cannot think. All coherence is crowded out of one
’
s mind. You must remember this. From this point on I acted without reason. Beyond reason.

‘
I said,
“
I have no choice.
”

‘
He went to the end of one of the ranks of men in front of me. He took a submachine-gun from a man
’
s shoulder, appeared to make sure that it was correctly loaded, then came back with it and presented it to me with both hands. As if it was a prize I had won. The hostages cheered, crossed themse
lves. And then were silent. The
colonel watched me. I had a wild idea that I might turn the gun on him. But of course the massacre of the entire village would then have been inevitable.

‘
I walked towards the men wired to the iron gates. I knew why he had done this. It would be widely publicized by the German-controlled newspapers. The pressure on me would not be mentioned, and I would be presented as a Greek who co-operated in the German theory of order. A warning to other mayors. An example to other frightened Greeks everywhere. But those eighty men
–
how could I condemn them?

‘
I came within about fifteen feet of the two guerillas. So close, because I had not fired a gun for very many years. For some reason I had not looked them in the face till then. I had looked at the high wall with its tiled top, at a pair of vulgar ornamental urns on top of the pillars that flanked the gate, at the fronds of a pepper tree beyond. But then I had to look at them. The younger of the two might have been dead. His head had fallen forward. They had done something to his hands, I could not see what, but there was blood all over the fingers. He was not dead. I heard him groan. Mutter something. He was delirious.

‘
And the other. His mouth had been struck or kicked. The lips were severely contused, reddened. As I stood there and raised the gun he drew back what remained of those lips. All his teeth had been smashed in. The inside of his mouth was like a blackened vulva. But I was too desperate to finish to realize the real cause. He too had had his fingers crushed, or his nails torn out, and I could see multiple burns on his body. But the Germans had made one terrible error. They had not gouged out his eyes.

‘
I raised the gun blindly and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened. A click. I pressed it again. And again, an empty click.

‘
I turned and looked round. Wimmel and my two guards were standing thirty feet or so away, watching. The hostages suddenly began to call. They thought I had lost the will to shoot.
I
turned back and tried once more. Again, nothing. I turned to the colonel, and gestured
‘
with the gun, to show that it would not fire. I felt faint in the heat. Nausea. Yet unable to faint.

‘
He said,
“
Is something wrong?
”

‘
I answered,
“
The gun will not fire.
”

‘
“
It is a Schmeisser. An excellent weapon.
”

‘
“
I have tried three times.
’’

‘
“
It will not fire because it is not loaded. It is strictly forbidden for the civilian population to possess loaded weapons.
”

‘
I stared at him, then at the gun. Still not understanding. The hostages were silent again.

‘
I said, very helplessly,
“
How can I kill them?
”

‘
He smiled, a smile as thin as a sabre-slash. Then he said,
“
I am waiting.
”

‘
I understood then. I was to club them to death. I understood many things. His real self, his real position. And from that came the realization that he was mad, and that he was therefore innocent, as all mad people, even the most cruel, are innocent. He was what life could do if it wanted
–
an extreme possibility made hideously mind and flesh. Perhaps that was why he could impose himself so strongly, like a black divinity. For there was something superhuman in the spell he cast. And therefore the real evil, the real monstrosity in the situation lay in the other Germans, those less-than-mad lieutenants and corporals and privates who stood silently there watching this exchange.

‘
I walked towards him. The two guards thought I was going to attack him because they sharply raised their guns. But he said something to them and stood perfectly still. I stopped some six feet from him. We stared at each other.

‘
“
I beg you in the name of European civilization to stop this barbarity.
”

‘
“
And I command you to continue this punishment.
”

‘
Without looking down he said,
“
Refusal to carry out this order will result in your own immediate execution.
”

‘
I walked back over the dry earth to that gate. I stood in front of those two men. I was going to say to the one who seemed capable of understanding that I had no choice, I must do this terrible thing to him. But I left a fatal pause of a second to elapse. Perhaps because I realized, close to him, what had happened to his mouth. It had been burnt, not simply bludgeoned or kicked. I remembered that man with the iron stake, the electric fire. They had broken in his teeth and branded his tongue, burnt his tongue right down to the roots with red-hot iron. That word he s
houted must finally have driven
them beyond endurance. And in those astounding five seconds, the most momentous of my life, I understood this guerilla. I mean that I understood far better than he did himself what he was. He helped me. He managed to stretch his head towards me and say the word he could not say. It was almost not a sound, but a contortion in his throat, a five-syllabled choking. But once again, one last time, it was unmistakably that word. And the word was in his eyes, in his being, totally in his being. What did Christ say on the cross? Why hast thou forsaken me? What this man said was something far less sympathetic, far less pitiful, even far less human, but far profounder. He spoke out of a world the very opposite of mine. In mine life had no price. It was so valuable that it was literally priceless. In his, only one thing had that quality of pricelessness. It was
e
le
utheria:
freedom. He was the immalleable, the essence, the beyond reason, beyond logic, beyond civilization, beyond history. He was not God, because there is no God we can know. But he was a proof that there is a God that we can never know. He was the final right to deny. To be free to choose. He, or what manifested itself through him, even included the insane Wimmel, the despicable German and Austrian troops. He was every freedom, from the very worst to the very best. The freedom to desert on the battlefield of Neuve Chapelle. The freedom to confront a primitive God at Seidevarre. The freedom to disembowel peasant girls and castrate with wire-cutters. He was something that passed beyond morality but sprang out of the very essence of things -that comprehended all, the freedom to do all, and stood against only one thing
–
the prohibition not to do all.

‘
All this takes many words to say to you. And I have said nothing
about how I felt this immalleability, this refusal to cohere, was essentially Greek. That is, I finally assumed my Greekness. All I saw I saw in a matter of seconds, perhaps not in time at all. Saw that
I
was the only
person left in that square who had the freedom left to choose, and that the annunciation and defence of that freedom was more important than common sense, self-preservation, yes, than my own life, than the lives of the eighty hostages. Again and again, since then, those eighty men have risen in the night and accused me. You must remember that I was certain I was going to die too. But all I have to set against their crucified faces are those few transcendent seconds of knowledge. But knowledge like
a white heat. My reason has re
peatedly told me I was wrong. Yet my total being still tells me I was right.

‘
I
stood there perhaps fifteen seconds
–
I could not tell you, time means nothing in such situations
–
and then I dropped the gun and stepped beside the guerilla leader. I saw the colonel watching me, and I said, for him and so also for the remnant of a man beside me to hear, the one word that remained to be said.

‘
Somewhere beyond Wimmel I saw Anton moving, walking quickly towards him. But it was too late. The colonel spoke, the submachine-guns flashed and I closed my eyes at exactly the moment the first bullets hit me.
’

⁵⁴

He leant forward, after a long silence, and turned up the lamp; then stared at me. Deep in him I sensed something was finally moved; but after a moment the stare became its old, dry self.

‘
The disadvantage of our new drama is that in your role you do not know what you can believe and what you cannot. There is no one on the island who was in the square. But many can confirm for you every other incident I have told you.
’

I thought of the scene on the central ridge; by not being insertible in the real story, it verified. Not that I doubted Conchis; I knew I had been listening to the history of events that happened; that in the story of his life he had saved the certain truth to the end.

‘
After you were shot?
’