Captain Corelli's mandolin (18 page)

Pelagia paused, looked up, and saw that Drosoula was smiling down at her in amazement. `Koritsimou,' said the gigantic creature, `you are astonishing. You are the first woman I have ever known who knows anything. Give me a hug.'

Pelagia blushed with pleasure, and, to distract attention from herself, she embraced Drosoula and told her, `I know you're wondering about all the horrible red lumps on his belly and his . . . equipment. They're in between his fingers as well, but don't worry, it's only scabies. The other treatments will treat that too, especially the zinc and sulphur. At least, that's what I think, but we'd better ask my father,' she concluded modestly.

Drosoula gestured towards her much-diminished son, `He's not much of a bargain is he?'

Pelagia cursed herself inwardly and said, `You fall in love with the person, not the body.'

Drosoula laughed: `Romantic claptrap. Love enters by the eyes and also leaves by the eyes, and in case you're wondering why my husband fell for me, ugly as I am, it was because he had strange tastes, thank God and the saint. Otherwise I would still be a maid.'

`I don't believe it for a moment,' said Pelagia, who, like everyone else, had always wondered how Drosoula had succeeded in finding a husband.

The following morning Dr Iannis returned exhausted from the mountain (via the kapheneion), and not only found a corpselike man asleep in his daughter's bed, but found the latter and a craggy and repulsive woman asleep in his own. The house stank of garlic, soap, ammonia, iodine, sulphur, sick flesh, vinegar, burned hair; in short, it smelled of a busy medical practice. He shook his daughter awake and demanded, `Daughter, who is that old man in your bed?'

`It's Mandras, Papakis, and this is his mother, Kyria Drosoula. You've met her before.'

`Not in my bed,' he retorted, `and that isn't Mandras. It's some terrible old man with scabies and bandaged feet. I've already looked.'

Later that morning Dr Iannis listened to Pelagia's account of everything that she had done, snorting and sucking on his pipe at every tentative diagnosis and prognostication. When she had finished she blushed, construing her father's attitude as indicating strong reproof for her presumptuousness. Then he went and examined the patient scrupulously, paying particular attention to the feet.

He said nothing until he reached for his battered hat to go out. Pelagia nervously kneaded her duster and awaited his fury. `If I could cook,' he said, to her astonishment, `I would exchange jobs with you. In fact, I might retire. Well done, koritsimou, I have never been so prodigiously proud.'

He kissed her on the forehead and swept out dramatically, scrutinising the skies for the anticipated invasion. He had a meeting of the Defence Committee to attend, in the kapheneion.

Drosoula smiled down at Pelagia, who was so overwhelmed with relief and gratification that her hands were shaking. `I always wanted a daughter,' said Drosoula. `You know what men are, they only want sons. You're lucky to have a father like that. Mine was a complete dog as far as I can remember, always drunk on raki. I pray to the saint that Mandras gets well, and then you will be a daughter.'

`As soon as we can,' said Pelagia, taking her arm, `we should get him into the sunlight and down to the sea. In cases like this it's the mind that makes a difference.'

Drosoula noted that Pelagia had judiciously ignored her remarks, but forgave her for it. It was enough to see the young woman blooming with that peculiar beauty that derives from a sudden sense of vocation.

They talk about me as if I were not there, Pelagia, the doctor, and my mother. They talk about me as though I were senile or unconscious, as though I were a body without a mind. I am too tired and too sad to resist the indignity. Pelagia has seen me naked and my mother washes me intimately as though I were a baby, and they cover me with unguents and lotions that sting and soothe and stink, so that I am like a piece of furniture that is treated with oil and wax, whose worm-holes are filled, and whose cushions are plumped up and repaired. My mother inspects my stools and talks about them to my betrothed, and they feed me with a spoon because they have no patience to see me struggle with the trembling of my hands, and I ask myself if there is any sense in which I can be considered to exist.

I suppose that I don't. Everything has become a dream. There is a veil between me and them, so that they are shadows and I am dead, and the veil is perhaps a shroud that dims the light and blurs the vision. I have been to war, and it has created a chasm between me and those who have not; what do they know about anything? Since I encountered death, met death on every mountain path, conversed with death in my sleep, wrestled with death in the snow, gambled at dice with death, I have come to the conclusion that death is not an enemy but a brother. Death is a beautiful naked man who looks like Apollo, and he is not satisfied with those who wither away in old age. Death is a perfectionist, he likes the young and beautiful, he wants to stroke our hair and caress the sinew that binds our muscle to the bone. He does all he can to meet us, our faces gladden his heart, and he stands in our path to challenge us because he likes a clean fair fight, and after the fight he likes to befriend us, clap us on the shoulder, and make us laugh at all the pettiness and folly of the living. At the conclusion of a battle he wanders amongst the dead, raising them up, placing laurels upon the brows of those most comely, and he gathers them together as his own children and takes them away to drink wine that tastes of honey and gives them the sense of proportion that they never had in life.

But he didn't take me and I don't know why. I was brave enough, certainly. I never avoided danger, and I continued even when my body was already destroyed. I think I lived because our commanders were too clever, I think I lived because death loved the Italians. Death told them to advance in line abreast against our strongest points, and we mowed them down like corn. But our generals made us outflank, outmanoeuvre, ambush, disappear and reappear. Our 140 generals made it difficult for Death, and so, instead of striking me with bullets, he made my body rot as much in a few months as with others he causes in sixty years. It was the cold, mud, parasites, starvation, grief, fear, blizzards of crystals sharper than glass, rain so dense that fish could have swum in it, all the things that there is no point in explaining because a civilian cannot even imagine it.

Do you know what kept me going? It was Pelagia, and a sense of beauty. For me, Pelagia meant home. You see, I wasn't fighting for Greece, I was fighting for home. I was getting it over with so that I could come back. Unfortunately my dream of Pelagia was better than Pelagia herself. I can see and hear that she is disgusted with her returning hero, and I knew before I went that I was not good enough for her. It means that if she loves me then she is being patronising, making a sacrifice, and I cannot stand it because it makes me hate her and despise myself. I am going to go away again when I am well so that I can reclaim the dream of Pelagia and love her without bitterness as I did in those mountains when I fought for her and the idea of home, and when I return I shall be remade and renewed, because next time I am going to make sure that I have done things so great that even a queen would beg to be my bride. I don't know what they are, but they shall be the glory and the wonder of the world, they shall robe me about, as rich and gorgeous as the jewels of the saint.

Also I have to go away again because I should not have come home in the first place. I came home because it was possible, and because coming home is like iced water after a day at sea in August when there has been no wind. I needed to wash myself in the rustling of olives, the clang of goatbells, the chaffering of crickets, the taste of Robola, and the smell of salt. I needed the strength, my bare feet on the soil I sprang from, that's all.

The fact is that my unit was wiped out by the Germans near Mt Olympus. I was the only survivor, and as I sat there amongst the bodies of my friends Pelagia came to me in a vision. Malnutrition causes these things, they say, and great strain, but to me it was as if she stood in front of me and smiled. If she had not done this I would have joined up with another unit and fought the Germans all the way to Thermopylae, but suddenly I knew that I had to get home even though I didn't know the way. I looked amongst the corpses and found the best pair of boots, a pair whose soles were y coming away, but better than mine. I put them on and I walked south-west.

Every night I noted where the sun set, and in the morning where it rose. I divided the semicircle, chose a landmark, and walked. At midday I checked that I was walking to the left of the sun. 'Me roads were clogged with the chaos of retreat - the dying donkeys, the abandoned vehicles, the knapsacks and weapons, the victims of the Stukas - and so I walked across the land, through the infinite wilderness that I now know to be the greater part of Greece. It was at first a wilderness of thorns, and stunted trees just bursting into bud, but somewhere past Elasson the land rose and it became an inhuman waste of pines, gorges, cataracts, ravines, a land of hawks and bats. There were marshes full of peaty water and barbarous flowers, mountainsides slippery with shale and scree, and goat-paths that ended suddenly and inexplicably on the edge of an abyss. My new boots gave out, and that was when I wrapped my feet in bandages. At night Pelagia lay next to me as I froze in caves, and in the morning she walked before me to the south. I could see her skirts sway about her hips, I saw her stoop to pluck the flowers, and she smiled and waited for me when I fell.

In that land there are bears and there are wild dogs that might be wolves, there are lynxes and deer. There were times that I tore the raw flesh off abandoned prey with my teeth, and once an eagle dropped a pigeon near my feet and plummeted down after it so that its talons scraped my hands as I dived for its victim. There are also people who live in those desolate places, people who are a kind of animal. Some of them are blond and it is impossible to understand them, they speak so strangely. They live in small stone houses or houses made of wood, and they dress in rags, living off outrageous stews that are made of meat and roots, cooked in ancient pots whose cracks are sealed with mud. These people threw stones at me, but when I knelt and pointed with my forger to my mouth, they took me in and fed me as gently as a child. It was one of them who gave me my jerkin made of skins.

As I travelled I began to suspect that my body was falling apart and that I was becoming mad. I no longer knew exactly what was happening. I not only saw Pelagia, but strange monsters that threatened me with their maws filled with rows of teeth. There was a place where I was passing by a waterfall, a waterfall so high that it tumbled with a roar like that of the sea in a wild storm. It fell into a pool whose waters whirled and rotated, swallowing up anything that passed by it, and I saw no way of going south-west except by swimming past it. On my left was a cliff that jutted outwards so that nothing might climb it, not even a goat, and it seemed to me that there was a creature on it with three heads that intended to devour me. I stood there with nothing in my mind but the battle between my homeward desperation and the fear of the pool and the monster. I saw Pelagia walk ahead, seemingly across the water like Our Lord, and I realised that there was a ledge beneath the water at the base of the cliff, so that I passed as easily as if I was wading out to a boat in the shallows of the bay of Assos.

When I knew that I was going mad I also knew that I had to stop, if only for a day, and I came to a stone hovel in the trees, at a place where the ground rose at the feet of a mountain and the pine needles lay on the ground as soft and thick. as a blanket. There was no one inside, and I was unsure whether or not it was inhabited, and so I went in and lay down against the wall, and fell asleep, except that I dreamed I was in a bombardment.

I woke up when somebody poked me with their foot. When I saw that it was an old hag, I wondered whether my dream had simply changed, but it hadn't. She was small and withered, and she had tied her few strands of hair behind her head. Her back was bowed and bent, her dress was in tatters, and her cheeks were hollow, her chin sharpened, because there was not one tooth in her head.

One day, when I have the strength to speak, I will tell this story in the kapheneion to make the boys laugh, because the truth is that this old scarecrow took a fancy to me. I forgot to tell you that she had only one eye. The other one was closed up and shrivelled.

She knew only one word, 'Circe', which I suppose was her name - she kept pointing to herself and saying it, so that I had to say 'Mandras' and point to my own self - and her voice was like the croak of a raven. Her one eye lit up every time she saw me, and she fed me on pigment from the herd that she kept near a stand of oak so that they could feed on the acorns. I was repelled and horrified by her, but I could see that she was a simple soul to whom God had given a kind heart.

On the third night that I was there, I slept more peacefully than for many months, and because my body was healing itself thanks to the hogmeat I did not dream of bombs and corpses, but of Pelagia. In my dream she frowned and became impatient because of my delay, and for the first time in all my visions I ran to her and kissed her. She melted in my arms and returned my passion, so that very soon we were rolling together on the floor of the forest. She clasped me to her and ran her hands about my body so that I became inflamed, and her lips were as hot as fire. She bit my lip and squirmed, and I tore her clothes away, so that my hands knew her breasts and her thighs, and I trembled with the winds of Dionysus, and entered her. In no time at alt I felt the surge in my loins, and it was as I wrenched with the supreme moment that I awoke.

Beneath me the ancient vixen writhed and groaned and croaked, her one mad eye half-closed with ecstasy. For a second I lay above her; perplexed and confused, and then I sprang to my feet with a cry of horror and rage, for I knew that she had crept beneath my skins and seduced me in Pelagia's force. `Witch, witch,' I cried, kicking her, and she sat up and shielded herself, her dogs falling to her waist and her body seeping with sores to equal mine. She waved her arms and twittered like a bird in the jaws of a cat, and it was at that point chat I recognised the madness in us both and in the very manufacture of the world. I threw back my head and laughed. I had tort my virginity to an antique, loveless, solitary crone, and it was all just one small part of the way in which God had turned His face away and consigned us all to the malice and caprices of the dark. The world looked the same, but beneath the surface it had broken our with boils. I laid back down next to her, and we slept together like that until morning. I had realised that we humans are blameless.

She tried to stop me leaving, kneeling at my feet and weeping and howling as she clutched my knees. It was pitiful, but I remember thinking that since nothing mattered any more, it did not matter if :he too shared in this suffering that has taken the world by storm and laid it all to waste.

I reached Trikkala and managed to cadge a lift on a truck that was returning from the front with a cargo of the wounded. The driver looked at the blood of my feet and the shreds of my uniform, and agreed that I too was wounded, and so I took the place of another who had died. At Lipson I rode another truck through Agios Nikolaos to Ana and Preveza, and from there it was simple to go to Levkas with a fellow fisherman who was taking mail to the island. I took another fisherman's boat to Ithaca, and yet another to get home. I walked to Pelagia's house all the way from Sami.

All I got when I arrived was a horror equal to my reaction to the old woman in the woods, and I was recognised only by a small dumb animal, Psipsina. The disappointment, after so many dreams and so much fighting and wandering with Pelagia as my light, snuffed out the flame inside me, and the fatigue came over me like a fog that encloses a boat in October in the Strait of Zante. I closed my eyes and fell into the shadows, like the spirits of the dead.

I said it was Pelagia and the sense of beauty that got me home, but I have said nothing about the sense of beauty. Once, near the Metsovon pass, in December, when it was twenty degrees below zero because there was no cloud, the Italians sent up a starshell. It exploded in a cascade of brilliant blue light against the face of the full moon, and the sparks drifted to earth in slow motion like the souls of reluctant angels. As that small magnesium sun hovered and blazed, the black pines stepped out of their modest shadows as though previously they had been veiled like virgins but had now decided to be seen as they are in heaven. The drifts of snow pulsed with the incandescence of the absolute chastity of ice, a mortar coughed disconsolately, and an owl whooped. For the first time in my life I shivered physically from something other than the cold; the world had sloughed away its skin and revealed itself as energy and light.

It is my wish to get well so that I can go back to the lines and experience, perhaps for only one more time, that immaculate moment when I saw the face of Gabriel in an instrument of war.