Captain Corelli's mandolin (29 page)
Soldiers! We have no uniforms to wear because the DUCE has ordered that they must be worn by all teachers and government employees, we have been abandoned in North Africa for lack of transport, having marched 600 kilometres across the desert in full summer. We have lost one-third of our merchant marine because He forgot to order them home before declaring war, we have been persuaded that halving the size of a division means that we have double the number of divisions, we have been made to invade Greece from the north in the rainy season, without winter clothing, having been demobilised, through ports in the Adriatic where it was impossible to disembark, without the knowledge of the Army Chief-of-Staff, who first heard about it on the radio. All our Albanian soldiers immediately deserted, and we only know what is happening to us by listening to the BBC. Our Navy, for lack of air cover and aircraft carriers, has been annihilated at Taranto and Cape Matapan, for the loss of one British plane, and in North Africa our 300,000 troops have been defeated by 35,000, because we have no Air Force, our light tanks are made of paper, and our motorised units have no motors. Whilst we die for nothing the DUCE has set up His Headquarters near the Vatican, so that it will not be bombed.
Soldiers! We have been made to invade an innocent country of brave people, knowing that we could never feed them in the event of victory, so that their starvation is worse than ours. Against all rules of war and conscience, the DUCE has ordered us to kill twenty of them for each of ours that is lost, and to our eternal credit, most of us have ignored Him.
Soldiers! La us weep for what has happened at home, where 350,000 of us have been transported as slave labour to Germany, where the DUCE has created the impossible condition of there being unemployment during a war, where there is hopeless inflation and where three-quarters of food is obtainable only on the black market that is run by His own officials, where ration cards are forged without restraint, and where there are forty distribution agencies with overlapping functions that ensure that nothing can ever happen.
Let us weep for our country, where medals are awarded for the imaginary sinking of non-existent British ships, where we are obliged to stand and salute during radio news bulletins, where the speeches of a lunatic are treated as sacred texts and a million copies printed, where the Lunatic in question is like a conductor Who Himself attempts to play simultaneously all the instruments of the orchestra, Who is like a power station connected to a single broken bulb, Who has had Himself filmed winning tennis matches against professionals in games umpired by the Minister for Propaganda, Who is the Most Disobeyed Man in History because everyone knows that every order will be shortly countermanded.
Soldiers! This is the Man who commanded us to use mustard gas and phosgene against savages armed with spears. This is the Ridiculous Man whose malicious blackshirted bandits and arsonists nun away in battle but kill our fathers, mothers, and uncles by making them drink castor oil laced with petrol. This is the Man who has destroyed the economy and has made us ashamed forever.
Soldiers! It has been well said that every nation gets the leaders it deserves. VIVA IL BUFFONE. VIVA IL BALORDO. VIVA L'ASSASSINO. VIVA IL DUCE.
The boys had made kokoretsi out of the intestines and offal of the goat that they had taken from the resentful nomarch of the village, and were watching it sizzle in the cinders of the fire. Appetites were whetted, and to pass the time until it was ready, Hector decided to pass on once more the benefit of his learning. Some of the andartes yawned in scarcely disguised boredom. Some others, who had been pressed into the group for lack of having been presented with an alternative, sat in a resentful sulk and thought about how good it would be to cram the mouth of this lout with goatshit. During the night two of them would take their weapons and disappear in search of a band that fought the Germans instead of their fellow Greeks. They knew that they would die if they were caught, but even that seemed preferable to remaining. A Royalist wrote `Erkhetai' in the dust and carefully covered it with pine needles so that Hector would not see it; it was a fervent hope ('He is coming'), but it was necessarily a secret one. Four Venizelist republicans listened to Hector and wondered bitterly how it was that all the bands had somehow ended up with a committee of three leaders who were Communist and were against Britain, the only country that had ever tried to help them since the war began. When Hector said something, it was natural to suppose that the opposite of what he said was true; this was how one got the news, just by listening to Hector and reversing it. Only Mandras and the two other nominal leaders listened to Hector with any attention as he paced back and forth with his hallowed copy of What Is To Be Done? under his arm. An owl hooted in the distance, as though in mockery of his discourse, and the night grew colder as a northern wind stirred the branches of the pines. Behind them the peak of the mountain sat brooding between two brightly pulsing stars, oppressing and overhanging that limitless forest, with its strangely intermuddled population of heroes, pine martens, boars, brigands, and thieves.
`Now, comrades, I want to speak to you because I think that many of you have not learned yet that without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement, and that the role of vanguard fighter can only be fulfilled by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory. The point is that many of you have no dear idea of how to understand our historical experience, and this leads to narrow ameliorism, economism, concessionism, and democratism. Now, it's true that this kind of bourgeois socialism, bourgeois social reformism and opportunist-socialism is consciousness in an embryonic form, but it completely fails to take account of the necessary and irreconcilable antagonism between the interests of the proletariat and the interests of reactionary obscurantism. It fails to understand the dialectic of social contradiction. You see, the interests of the proletariat are diametrically opposed to the interests of the bourgeoisie. It's not only theory, but praxis that reveals this, and it hardly needs me to try and prove it, because it's so obvious. What we have constantly to keep before the eyes of our understanding is that the world-historical significance of the struggle demands the direct intervention of the proletariat in social life, and not just some kind of parliamentarian republicanism or military semi-absolutism. The point is that Communism is always to be found in advance of all others in furnishing the most revolutionary appraisal of any given event, and is always the most irreconcilable in the struggle against all defence of backwardness. And I don't want you to go thinking that we can expose and repudiate the revisionist and eclecticist historico-ideologues of the ruling classes just by arranging strikes and forming into unions, because the trade-unionist politics of the working class is nothing more than precisely a petit-bourgeois politics of the working class. We go far, far beyond that.
`It is absolutely scientifically true that what we are about is the political and economic emancipation of the masses, but we know only too well that the proletariat must be led by an intelligentsia with sufficient education and leisure to theorise; Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, they were all bourgeois intellectuals who sacrificed their own interests in order to raise the consciousness of the world-proletariat who still do not fully understand the nature of the structures that have to be put in place. What we are aiming at is the effacement of all distinctions between workers and intellectuals, and so we need sufficiently trained, developed and experienced leaders to guide the spontaneously awakening masses away from erroneous theories that deviate from the perception of the necessary and inevitable nature of the materialist conception of history.
`We need leaders who are not susceptible to tailism, leaders who do not give in to working-class aspirations, but who help them to form correct aspirations. With the right leaders it is not necessary to bring the workers up to the level of intellectuals, because all they have to do is place their faith and trust in the leaders who will provide the stable organisation that will maintain continuity and reach a scientific understanding of the concrete conditions prevailing.
`I know that some of you have been complaining about the fact that we don't submit decisions to democratic vote, but what you've got to understand is that we have so many revanchist, recidivist, chauvinist, reactionary forces ranged against us that it is vital for our leadership to remain secret. And if it's got to be secret, how can it possibly be democratic? Democratic implies an openness that would be suicidal. It's obvious, isn't it? So let's have no more of this votism. It's a useless and harmful toy.
`And another thing. It's clear to anyone with any brains that leadership is a functional specialisation, and that therefore it inevitably presupposes centralisation. So stop moaning that we're not fighting the Germans enough, and stop moaning about having to fight EDES and EKKA. The central leadership knows exactly what it's doing. It sees the whole picture whilst we only see a tiny corner of it, and that's why we absolutely must not go around acting on our own initiative; there might be some bigger plan that we mess up if we start to be opportunist. Opportunism means a lack of definite and firm principles. There must be complete, comradely, mutual confidence amongst revolutionaries, and we must stand undeviatingly together in the decisive struggle. And if you're going to complain any more about opposing the reactionary and fascist so-called guerrillas in EDES, just let me remind you that a bad peace is not better than a good quarrel. They say that they are fighting the same enemy as us, but they weaken us by taking recruits that should have come to us and by inculcating in them a false consciousness of the real nature of the world-historical struggle. It is our absolute historical duty to purge them because a party always becomes stronger by purging itself.
`This means that we must at all times preserve solidarity and iron discipline, and that is why it is in accordance with the strictest demands of justice that the leadership has decided that anyone who deviates earns himself a sentence of death. Since I am the representative of that leadership hereabouts, it all boils down to the single requirement that you should obey me, without questioning. At this moment in history there is no room whatsoever for doubters and hangers-on and false-humanitarians. We must keep our eyes fixed solely upon the single goal, because to do anything else is to betray not only Greece and the working classes, but History itself. Any questions?'
Mandras raised his hand deferentially, `I didn't understand all of it, Comrade Hector, but I want to say that you can count on me.'
One day he might be able to read that book of Hector's himself. He might hold it in his hands as though it were printed upon sheets of diamond. At night he might kiss its covers and sleep with it beneath his head, as though its inconceivable wisdom might seep by capillary action into his brain. One day he would be an intellectual, and neither the doctor nor Pelagia would ever be able to say otherwise.
He imagined himself as a schoolteacher, with everyone calling him `daskale' and listening avidly to his opinions in the kapheneion. He imagined himself as the mayor of Lixouri.
Mandras never did read that book, and was spared the disappointment of discovering that it was an immensely tedious and irrational tirade against a rival Communist newspaper. But there would come a time when he understood every word that Hector said, and would drink in his intoxicating visions of the dictatorship of the proletariat as though they were the revelations of a saint.
But on that evening, one of the Venizelists who was about to risk his life by defecting to EDES came up to him later in the darkness, sympathetically offering him a cigarette, and explaining, `Look, you don't have to understand all that jargon from our sesquipedalian friend, because all it boils down to is that you've got to do just as he says, or he'll cut your throat. It's really that simple.'
The man, a lawyer in civilian life, patted him on the shoulder, and, as he turned away, said enigmatically, `I feel sorry for you.'
`Why?' called Mandras after him, but received no reply.
A great voice boomed out behind him, and Captain Corelli, absorbed in reading the pamphlet, nearly died of shock.
`Those that seek my soul to destroy it shall go to the lower parts of the earth, they shall fall by the sword, they shall be a portion for foxes, God shall shoot at them with an arrow and suddenly they shall be wounded.'
Corelli leapt up and found himself face to face with the patriarchal beard and flaming eyes of Father Arsenios, who was glaring at him over the wall, having lately taken to startling unsuspecting Italian soldiers by means of thunderous improvisations upon Greek biblical texts. The two men stared at one another, Corelli with his hand over his heart and Arsenios waving his home-made crozier. `Kalispera, Patir,' said Corelli, whose grasp of Greek etiquette was improving, whereupon Arsenios spat into the dust and declared, 'Thou shale make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger, thou shall swallow them up in the time of thy wrath, and the fire shall devour them. Their fruit shall thou destroy from the earth, and their seed from among the children of men, for they have imagined a mischievous device which they are not able to perform.'
The priest's eyes rolled prophetically, and Corelli said placatingly, `Quite so, quite so,' despite not having understood any of it. Arsenios spat again, rubbed the saliva into the ground with his foot, and pointed at the captain to signify that he would be milled into the dust in the same way. `Quite so,' repeated Corelli, smiling politely, whereupon Arsenios waddled away in a manner intended to convey disgust and absolute certainty.
The captain returned to his reading, only to be disturbed by the doctor and Pelagia returning from a medical expedition, and Carlo Guercio arriving in the jeep. Hastily he hid the document in his jacket, but not before the doctor had caught a glimpse of it.
`Ah,' said the donor, `I see that you've got a copy too. Amusing, isn't it?'
'Fuck the war,' said Carlo gaily as he came through the entrance to the yard with his customary greeting. He struck his forehead on a lower branch of the olive where Mandras had used to swing, and momentarily stunned himself. He grinned sheepishly, 'I'm always doing that. You'd think I'd know it was there by now.'