Captain Corelli's mandolin (30 page)
`You shouldn't be so tall,' said the doctor, 'it shows lack of foresight and good judgement. There was a king of France who died from doing something like that.'
'I appear to be alive,' said Carlo, touching the incipient bruise with an index finger. `Have you seen the pamphlet?'
Corelli shot him an angry glance, but Pelagia said, 'It seems to have appeared all over the island during the night.'
'In fact the captain is trying to conceal one at this very moment,' said the doctor gleefully.
`British propaganda,' said the captain, feigning a great lack of interest.
`There weren't any planes last night,' said Carlo. 'When they come over everything rumbles and shakes, but there was nothing.'
'Can't be British then,' said the doctor happily, 'I think you've got someone herewith access to a press and an excellent delivery service.'
He saw Carlo flushing and looking at him angrily, and realised that it was better not to talk. 'As you say, just British propaganda,' he added lamely, shrugging his shoulders.
'It must be somebody who knows a lot,' said Pelagia, `because everything in it is true.'
Corelli flushed with anger and stood up abruptly. She feared for a second that he was tempted to strike her. He removed the leaflet from his jacket and dramatically tore it in half, throwing the pieces to the goat. `It's nothing but a heap of shit,' he declared, and strode into the house.
The remaining three exchanged glances, and Carlo made a grimace that mockingly expressed fear and trembling. Then he became very serious and said to Pelagia, `Please excuse the captain, and do not tell him that I said this, but you must understand that in his position . . . he is an officer, after all.'
'I understand, Carlo. He wouldn't admit it was true even if he wrote it himself. Do you think it could have been written by a Greek?'
The doctor scowled. `What a stupid idea.'
'I just thought . . .I'
'How many Greeks could know all that, and how many Greeks here can write Italian, and how many Greeks have transport, that they can leave it lying about the whole island? Don't be silly.'
But Pelagia warmed to her hypothesis, `Lots of the Rs were written as Ps, and that's a natural Greek mistake, so an Italian could have given all the information to a Greek, they could have composed it and printed it, and then the Italian could have delivered it everywhere on a motorcycle or something.'
She smiled triumphantly, and raised her hands to show how simple it all was. `And anyway, everyone knows that people listen to the BBC.'
In the presence of Carlo she deemed it imprudent to mention that the men of the village listened to it, smoking furiously as they crammed themselves together inside a large cupboard in the kapheneion, and then emerged choking and spluttering, to bring the news home to their wives, who in turn passed it on to each other at the well and in their kitchens. She was not to know that the Italian soldiers did much the same thing in their barracks and billets, which would have explained why everybody on the island knew the same jokes about Mussolini.
Carlo and the doctor looked at one another, fearing that if Pelagia could work it out, someone else might. `Don't get too clever,' said the doctor, `or your brains might squeeze out of your ears.'
It was a childhood formula.
Pelagia saw the unease of her father and Carlo, remembered that before the war Kokolios had been given a small hand-turned press by the Communist Party, for the purpose of turning out party propaganda, and recalled that Carlo had access to a jeep. She shook her head as if to drive these speculations out of her mind, and then it occurred to her to wonder where they might have got hold of sets of Roman letters. Her momentary sense of relief was vanquished when she recalled that her father had some quid pro quo arrangements with the fat hypochondriac quartermaster with the intractable corns. She looked from Carlo to her father and felt a pang of anger strike her in the throat; if it was them, and it was a conspiracy, then just how stupid and irresponsible could they get? Did they not know the danger? `The trouble with men . . .' she began, and followed the captain into the house, without completing the sentence. She swept Psipsina from the kitchen table, as though cuddling the animal might abate her sense of peril.
Carlo and the doctor raised their hands, and let them fall, standing together in a moment of self-conscious and eloquent silence. 'I should have brought her up stupid,' said the doctor at last. `When women acquire powers of deduction there's no knowing where trouble can end.'
One day it happened that Captain Corelli did not go into work because an earthquake was vibrating in his head. He lay in Pelagia's bed, attempting not to open his eyes and not to move; the slightest shard of light pierced his brain like a poignard through the eye, and when he moved he had the distinct certainty that his cerebellum had become loose and was sloshing about on the inside of his skull. His throat was as dry and stiff as leather, and there was no doubt that someone had been stropping razors in it. Periodically a tide of nausea welled in his gullet, rippling equally towards his stomach and his lips, and he fought disgustedly to restrain the bitter torrents of bile that seemed determined to find their way to an exit and decorate his chest. 'O God,' he groaned. 'O God have mercy.'
He opened his eyes and held them open with his forgers. Very slowly, so as not to perturb his brain too much, he looked about the room, and suffered a disturbing hallucination. He blinked; yes, it was true that his uniform was lying on the floor and was moving about on its own. He checked groggily that its movement was independent of the circular motion of the room, and closed his eyes again. Psipsina emerged from inside the tunic, and jumped up on the table in order to curl up inside his cap, which had been her favourite resting place ever since she had discovered the joys of contortionism; she filled it and overflowed from it in such a tangle and jumble of whiskers, ears, tail and paws that it was impossible to tell which part of her was which, and she slept in it because it reminded her of gifts of salami and chicken skins. The captain opened his eyes and saw that his rumpled uniform was now rotating in harmony with the rest of the world, and felt reassured that he was getting better, until some demented and metaphysical percussionist began to play the kettledrum in his temples. He screwed up his face and pressed the palms of his hands to the sides of his head. He realised that he needed to empty his bladder, but also recognised with resignation that it was going to be one of those occasions when he would need to be supported, would sway backwards and forwards, would be unable to exercise voluntary release, and would finally and inexplicably find himself simultaneously pissing on his own foot and falling over. He felt infinitely oppressed by intimations of mortality, and wondered whether it might not be better to die than to suffer. 'I want to die,' he groaned, as though the articulation of the thought might give it greater precision and dramatic force.
Pelagia entered, bearing a pitcher of water, which she set down at the side of the bed with a tumbler. `You've got to drink all this water,' she said firmly, `it's the only cure for a hangover.'
`I haven't got a hangover,' said the captain pathetically, 'I'm very ill, that's all.'
Pelagia filled the tumbler and administered it to his lips. `Drink,' she ordered him. He sipped at it suspiciously and was astonished by the cleansing effect of it upon his physical and psychological state. Pelagia refilled the glass. `I've never seen anyone so drunk,' she remonstrated, `not even at the feast of the saint.'
'O God, what did I do?'
'Carlo brought you back at two in the morning. To be exact, he crashed the jeep into the wall outside, carried you inside like a baby in his arms, tripped over, hurt his knees, and woke everyone who was not already awake by shouting and swearing. Then he lay on the table in the yard and went to sleep. He's still there, and during the night he wet himself.'
'Really?.
`Yes. And then you woke up and you knelt down in front of me and waved your arms about and sang "Io sono ricco a to sei bells", at the top of your voice and completely out of tune, and you forgot the words. Then you tried to kiss my feet.'
The captain was completely appalled, `Out of tune? I never forget the words of anything, I am a musician. What did you do?'
`I kicked you, and you fell over backwards, and then you declared eternal love, and then you were sick.'
The captain closed his eyes despairingly and ashamedly, `I was drunk. My battery won the football match, you see. It doesn't happen every day.'
'Leutnant Weber called round early this morning. He said that your side cheated, and that the match was delayed for half an hour in the middle because two little boys stole the ball when it went over a fence.'
'It was sabotage,' said the captain.
'I don't like Leutnant Weber. He looks at me as though I'm an animal.'
'He's a Nazi; he thinks that I'm an animal as well. It can't be helped. I like him. He's only a little boy, he'll grow out of it.'
`And you're a drunk. It seems to me that you Italians are always drunk, or stealing, or chasing local girls, or playing football.'
'We also swim in the sea and sing. And you can't blame the boys for chasing the girls, because they can't do it at home, and anyway, some of the girls do very well out of it. Give me some more water.'
Pelagia frowned; there was something about the captain's remarks that struck her as offensive, and even cruel. Besides, she was in just the right mood for an argument. She stood up, emptied the pitcher over his face, and said vehemently, `You know perfectly well that they are bullied into it and driven into it out of necessity. And everyone is ashamed to have your whores here. How do you think we feel?'
The captain's head throbbed too much for quarrelling; it even throbbed too much to allow a reaction to being suddenly drenched by an angry maiden. Nonetheless, he became abruptly subject to a great sense of injustice. He sat up and told her, 'Everything you say and do is because you want me to apologise, in every look I see nothing but reproaches. It's been the same ever since I came. How do you think I feel? Why don't you ask yourself that? Do you think I'm proud? Do you think I have a vocation for suppressing the Greeks? Do you think I am the Duce that I commanded myself to be here? It's shit, it's all shit, but I can't do anything about it. OK, OK, I apologise. Are you satisfied?'
He slumped back into the pillows.
Pelagia put her hands on her hips, taking advantage of the superiority implicit in the fact that she was standing and he lying down. She pulled a wry face and said, 'Are you seriously saying that you are a victim, as much as us? Poor little boy, poor little thing.'
She walked over to the table, noticed Psipsina's somnolent presence in the captain's cap, and smiled to herself as she gazed out of the window. She was deliberately frustrating the intended effect of any response of the captain's, by ensuring that he would not be able to look into her eyes whilst he made it. She did feel sorry for him, she could not remain hostile to a man who permitted a pine marten to sleep in his hat, but she was not going to let her fondness show when there were principles at stake.
No answer came. Corelli looked at her silhouette against the light of the window, and a tune came into his head. He could visualise the patterned patrol of his fingers on the fretboard of the mandolin, he could hear the disciplined notes ringing from the treble, singing the praise of Pelagia as they also portrayed her wrath and her resistance. It was a march, a march of a proud woman who prosecuted war with hard words and kindnesses. He heard three simple chords and a martial melody that implied a world of grace. He heard the melody rise and swell, breaking into a torrent of bright tremolo more limpid than the song of thrushes, more pellucid than the sky. He realised with some irritation that it would require two instruments.
Father Arsenios was saved by the war, as though the entire cycle of his life had been nothing but a curve through purgatory that had finally broken through an invisible carapace and brought him to his mission. His agonies of self-revulsion fell away, his greed and indolence, his alcoholic excesses, followed one another into the graveyard of the past, and it was as if a cubit had been added to his height. His theology wound subtly around itself like a snake, and transformed his soul, so that whereas in the past he knew that he had failed his God, he now knew that God had failed the holy land of Greece. It came to him, as a man, that he might surpass the God that made him, and do for Greece what God had not. He discovered within himself the gift of prophecy.
It occurred to him that he should acquire a large dog and train it to bite Italians, and to this end he bought an animal from Stamatis that was guaranteed to be patriotic, since its own sire already had achieved a long and honourable record of biting at the calves of soldiers. His own mongrel however, misinterpreting his teaching as commands to bite the tyres of passing military trucks, passed prematurely beyond the veil, and Arsenios adopted another, less excitable dog. He set out on foot, laden with nothing but a scrip and an olivewood cross that would serve him as a staff.
Arsenios walked and preached. His blubbery thighs chafed against each other, bringing rashes and sores to his groin; in the height of summer the perspiration poured from his brow and the pits of his arms so that his black robes blossomed with sodden darker rings whose circumference was marked by wide irregular rims of fine white salt, and his beard glistened and dripped like the Arethusa spring. The leather soles of his black boots abraded away into contiguous holes until he walked on bare feet shod only by the uppers, trailing long strands of cobbler's thread behind him that left tracks in the pale dust like the marks of hair-thin snakes. In winter Arsenios discovered that any man will be warm who preserves himself in motion, and he `leaned his weight against the callous wind and the inordinate rain whilst his abject dog followed behind him, soaked to the skin, its tail between its legs, its head hanging dolefully, the very picture of unwise and unquestioning fealty.
From the lentisk bushes and the cypress of the north to the shingle sands of Skala in the south, from the underground lakes of Sami in the east to the vertiginous slopes of Petani in the west, Arsenios trudged and sermonised. As he walked, his head as lowered as that of his dog, he constructed phrases of righteous rage that would emerge as wild tirades outside the encampments of Italians. At the German garrisons he was ignored or rudely driven away with the butts of rifles, not because they were cruel, but because they did not share their ally's love of drama. To the Teutons he was an irritation rather than an entertainment, but to the Italians he was welcome relief from interminable card games and watching out for British bombers. They looked forward to his visitations with as much anticipation as they awaited the truck of whores, Arsenios being all the more welcome for the unpredictability of his arrivals and departures.
When he came the soldiers would gather round him, mesmerised by the operatic gestures of the weather-beaten priest and the thunderous roll of biblical Greek, of which they understood not one word. Arsenios would look from one smiling and delighted face to another, knowing that their incomprehension was absolute, but would still persist because it seemed to him that he had no choice. There were words piling up inside him, words of supernatural strength, and it seemed to him that the hand of the Virgin pushed him on, that the grief of Christ had been poured into him, that it overflowed his soul and must be given to the land: `Schismatics of Rome, brothers lost to us, children of Christ who weeps for thee, sacrificial lambs, pawns of tyrants, ye who are unjust, ye who are filthy, ye who are unrighteous, ye who are dogs and whoremongers, sorcerers and idolaters, ye whose hearts are unlit by the sun, ye that have no temple within, ye of a nation that shall not be saved, ye who work abominations, ye who defile the Virgin, ye that thirst for truth and cannot drink it; ye are corrupt and have done nothing good, ye have done iniquity, ye have eaten my people as they eat bread, ye have not called upon God, ye have encamped against our cities, ye have been put to shame and God has despised thee and scattered thy bones. Behold, the Lord shall give ear to the words of my mouth, for He is my helper, He is with them who uphold my soul, He shall reward evils unto mine enemies, he shall cut them off in His truth, for strangers are risen up against my people, oppressors seek after our trees of olive and our maidens, wickedness is in the midst of them. My soul is amongst lions, and I lie even with them that are set on fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword.
`Yea, in heart ye work wickedness, ye weigh the violence of your hands upon the earth, ye are estranged from the womb, ye go astray as soon as ye be born, speaking lies, thy poison is like the poison of the serpent, ye are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear.
`But we are like the green olive in the House of God, and we shall trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever, for God has stretched forth His hand and God has spoken with the word of His mouth and behold I have heard him speaking in a great wind and in the midst of storms, in the stones of Assos and the caves of mountains. He bath strewn His salt in the lake of Melissani, He hath stored up iron in the skies of Lixouri.
`Schismatics of Rome, the Lord bath prepared a pit, He bath laid up a net for thy steps, and calamities shall overpass thee, for Satan shall be loosed from his prison, and Gog and Magog shall go out to deceive the nations that are in the four quarters of the earth, to gather them together in battle; the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And fire shall come out of heaven above the beloved city, and devour thee, and thou shalt be cast, yea, even the innocent and those as pure as babes, into the lake of oil and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are, and thy flesh shall be divided from thy bones, for ye have not been found written in the book of life and shall be cast into the flame.
'And the Lord God shall wipe away all tears from the eyes of my people, and there shall be no more tears nor crying, and neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things shall pass away, and He that sits upon the Throne shall make all things new, and He shall give to my people that are athirst to drink of the water of the fountain of life freely. For He shall take the Beast and the false prophet and the armies gathered together against us that wrought miracles before them, and He shall smite them, and the fowls of the air shall be filled with their flesh, and they shall be cast alive into the lake of fire burning with brimstone, and the remnant shall be slain.'
The soldiers provided Arsenios and his dog with bread and water, scraps and olives, and in monasteries as far apart as those of Agrilion and Kipoureon he was cared for by nuns and monks. But the hard nights in caves, the meagre diet, the two years of relentless tramping, caused his ample flesh to fall away until his vast black robes flapped about a body that had become a skeleton stretched with skin and burned with sores. His vivid eyes burned forth from above hollow cheeks, the parchment of his hands and face grew dark as teak, and for the first time in his life he found peace within himself and was happy. It is true that he neglected his parish completely, but it is probable that, had he lived, Arsenios might have become a saint.