‘What were his last words, Signor?’
‘He recommended himself to you, Signora, and he died with the name of the Virgin on his lips.’
(He opened his eyes once and said, ‘Don’t forget our pact to kill that bastard Rivolta.’ Later on, in a great spasm of pain, he grasped my collar with his hands. He said, ‘Mario.’ I took the little mouse from my pocket and placed it in his hands. In the ecstasy of his own death he clenched his fist so tightly that the little creature died with him. To be precise, its eyes came out.)
‘Signor, where is he buried?’
‘He is buried on the side of a mountain that in spring is covered with tulips and receives the first light of the sun. He was buried with full military honours, and shots were fired over his grave by his comrades.’
(I buried him myself. I dug a deep hole in our trench that filled instantly with ochre water. I loaded him with stones so that his corpse would not rise to the surface of the earth. I buried him in a place inhabited by gigantic rats and tiny goats. I stood over his grave and beat to death with a shovel the rats that arrived to dig for his corpse. I put the mouse Mario in his breast pocket, above his heart. I took his personal effects. They are in this bag that I shall leave with you. It contains a lucky stone from Epirus, a letter from his wife, the insignia of the 9th Regiment of Alpini, three medals for valour, and the wing feather of an eagle that he was delighted with when it fell in his lap on the way to Metsovon. It also contains a photograph of me that I did not know that he possessed.)
‘Signor, as long as he did not die for nothing.’
‘Signora, we now have mastery of Greece with the help of our German allies.’
(We lost the war and were saved only when the Germans invaded from Bulgaria and opened a second front that the Greeks had no resources to defend. We fought and froze and died for the sake of an empire that has no purpose. When Francisco died I held his broken head and kissed him on the lips. I sat there with tears of rage falling upon his atrocious wounds and vowed that I would live for both of us.
I took no part in the dismembering of Greece or in the shameful triumphalism of a conquest that was a victory only in name. The valiant Greeks fell before eleven hundred German panzers, which they faced with less than two hundred light tanks, many of them captured from us, and our glorious Italian advance consisted merely in following them as they retreated in a vain attempt to avoid the German encirclement.
I took no part in that iniquitous charade because, the day after I buried Francisco, I took a pistol that I had removed from a wounded Greek, and in a moment of cold calculation I shot myself through the flesh of the thigh.)
20 The Wild Man of the Ice
Pelagia returned from the well with a jar upon her shoulder, set it down in the yard, and came through the door, singing. The bad news that had set the island buzzing had only served to increase her appreciation of momentary beauties, and she had just seen her first butterfly of the year. She was feeling strong and whole, and had been enjoying having the house to herself whilst her father was up on the mountain checking both Alekos and his herd of goats; nothing was ever wrong with either of them, the advantage to Alekos being that he could catch up with the news, enjoy some human company, hear words whose use had vanished from his interior monologue, and to the doctor that he would return with a plentiful supply of dried meat that made scratching and crackling noises in his haversack as he walked. Additionally the doctor believed that the pleasure of homecoming was more than recompense for the pains of setting out, and that therefore it was always worth departing.
When Pelagia entered the kitchen she stopped singing abruptly, and was seized with consternation. There was a stranger seated at the kitchen table, a most horrible and wild stranger who looked worse than the brigands of childhood tales. The man was quite motionless except for the rhythmic fluttering and trembling of his hands. His head was utterly concealed beneath a cascade of matted hair that seemed to have no form nor colour. In places it stuck out in twisted corkscrews, and in others it lay in congealed pads like felt; it was the hair of a Nazarene or of a hermit demented by the glory and solitude of God. Beneath it Pelagia could see nothing but an enormous and disorderly beard surmounted by two tiny bright eyes that would not look at her. There was a nose in there, stripped of its skin, reddened and flaked, and glimpses of darkened, streaked and grimy flesh.
The stranger wore the unidentifiable and ragged remains of a shirt and trousers, and a kind of surcoat cut out of animal skins that had been tacked together with thongs of sinew. Pelagia saw, beneath the table, that in place of shoes his feet were bound with bandages that were both caked with old, congealed blood, and the bright stains of fresh. He was breathing stertorously, and the smell was inconceivably foul; it was the reek of rotting flesh, of suppurating wounds, of dung and urine, of ancient perspiration, and of fear. She looked at the hands that were clasped together in the effort to prevent their quivering, and was overcome both with fright and pity. What was she to do?
‘My father’s out,’ she said. ‘He should be back tomorrow.’
‘You’re happy, anyway. Singing,’ said the man in a cracked and phlegmy voice that Pelagia recognised as that of someone whose damaged lungs were filling with mucus; it could be tuberculosis, the onset of pneumonia, or perhaps it was the voice of a man whose throat had filled with polyps or contracted in the grip of cancer.
‘Ice,’ said the stranger, as though he had not heard her, ‘I’ll never be warm again. The obscenity of ice.’ His voice cracked, and she realised that his shoulders were heaving. ‘O God, the ice,’ he repeated. He held his hands before his face and accused them: ‘Bastards, bastards, leave me alone, for the love of God, be still.’ He wrapped his fingers together, and his whole body seemed to be fighting to suppress a succession of spasms.
‘You can come back tomorrow,’ said Pelagia, appalled by this gibbering apparition, and completely at a loss.
‘No crampons, you see. The snow is whipped away by the wind, and the ice is in ridges, sharper than knives, and when you fall you are cut. Look at my hands.’ He held them up to her, palm outwards in the gesture that would normally be an insult, and she saw the horrendous cross-tracking of hard white scars that had obliterated every natural line, scored away the pads and calluses, and left seeping cracks across the joints. There were no nails and no trace of cuticles.
‘And the ice screams. It shrieks. And voices call to you out of it. And you look into it and you see people. Mating like dogs. They beckon and wave, and they mock, and you shoot into the ice but they don’t shut up, and then the ice squeaks. It squeaks all night, all night.’
‘Look, you can’t stay,’ said Pelagia, adding, as though to excuse herself, ‘I’m on my own.’
The wild man ignored her. ‘I saw my father, my father who died, and he was stuck under the ice, and his eyes were staring at me, and his mouth was open, and I hacked with my bayonet. To get him out. And when I got him out it was someone else. I don’t know who it was, the ice deceived me, you see. I know I’ll never be warm, never.’ He hugged himself with both arms and began to shiver violently. ‘Pathemata mathemata, pathemata mathemata; so sufferings are lessons, are they? Don’t go out in the cold, don’t go out in the cold.’
Pelagia’s perplexity was growing into an acute anxiety as she wondered what on earth she was supposed to do on her own with a mad vagrant ranting in her kitchen. She thought of leaving him there and running out to fetch Stamatis or Kokolios, but was paralysed by the thought of what he might do or steal in her absence. ‘Please leave,’ she pleaded, ‘my father will be back tomorrow, and he can …’ she paused, torn between the naming of any number of medical procedures that would be necessary, ‘… see to your feet.’
The man responded to her for the first time, ‘I can’t walk. I walked from Epirus. No boots.’
Psipsina entered the room and sniffed the air, her whiskers twitching as she sampled the strong and unfamiliar smells. She ran across the floor in her fluid a
nd elliptical manner, and leapt up onto the table. She approached the neolithic man and burrowed in the remains of a pocket, emerging triumphantly with a small cube of white cheese that she demolished with evident satisfaction. She returned to the pocket and found only a broken cigarette, which she discarded.
The man smiled, revealing good teeth but bleeding gums, and he petted the animal about the head. ‘Ah, at least Psipsina remembers me,’ he said, and silent tears began to follow each other down his cheeks and into his beard. ‘She still smells sweet.’
Pelagia was astounded. Psipsina was afraid of strangers, and how did this ghastly ruin know her name? Who could have told him? She wiped her hands on her apron for the lack of any sense of what to think or do, and said, ‘Mandras?’
The man turned his face towards her and said, ‘Don’t touch me, Pelagia. I’ve got lice. And I stink. And I shat myself when a bomb fell next to me. I didn’t know what to do, and I came here first. All the time I knew I had to get here first, that’s all, and I’m tired and I stink. Do you have any coffee?’
Pelagia’s mind became void, decentred by a babble of emotions. She felt despair, unbearable excitement, guilt, pity, revulsion. Her heart jumped in her chest and her hands fell to her side. Perhaps more than anything else, she felt helpless. It seemed inconceivable that this desolate ghost concealed the soul and body of the man she had loved and desired and missed so much, and then finally dismissed. ‘You never wrote to me,’ she said, coming up with the first thing that entered her head, the accusation that had rankled in her mind from the moment of his departure, the accusation that had grown into the angry, resentful monster that had eaten out the bowels of her devotion and left it empty.
Mandras looked up wearily, and said, as though it were he that pitied her, ‘I can’t write.’
For a reason that she did not understand, Pelagia was more repelled by this admission than by his filth. Had she betrothed herself to an illiterate, without even knowing it? For the sake of something to say she asked, ‘Couldn’t someone else have written for you? I thought you were dead. I thought you … couldn’t love me.’
Mandras looked up, an infinity of fatigue in his eyes, and shook his head. He tried to steady his cup to drink, failed, and put it down on the table. ‘I couldn’t dictate to a comrade. How could I let everyone know? How could I have my feelings discussed by the boys?’ He shook his head again, and futilely attempted another sip at the coffee, which ran into his beard and onto the skins. He glanced up again so that at last she recognised his eyes, and said, ‘Pelagia, I got all your letters. I couldn’t read them but I got them.’ He fumbled inside his clothing and drew out a huge and bedraggled packet bound together with tripwire. ‘I kept them where they would keep me warm, knowing they were there. I thought that you could read them to me. Read them to me, Pelagia, so that I know everything.’ He added, with resignation rather than conscious pathos, ‘Even if it’s too late.’
Pelagia was horrified. Mandras would perceive without fail the steady diminution of endearments, the greater concentration on the factual as the order of the letters proceeded. He would perceive it with a clarity far greater than if he had read them over successive months. ‘Later,’ she said.
Mandras sighed heavily and fondled Psipsina’s ears, talking as though he was addressing the pine marten rather than his fiancée. ‘I carried you in here,’ he said, thumping his chest with his fist. ‘Every day, all the time, I was thinking of you, talking to you. I kept going because of you. I was not a coward because of you. The bombs, the shells, the ice, the night attacks, the bodies, the friends I lost. I had you instead of the Virgin, I even prayed to you. Yes, I even prayed to you. I had you in my mind, singing in the yard, and I saw you at the feast, when I pinned your skirts to the bench and asked you to marry me. I would have died a thousand times, but I had you before my eyes like a cross, like a cross at Easter, like an icon, and I never forgot, I remembered every second. And it burned in my heart, it burned even in the snow, it gave me courage, and I fought for you more than I fought for Greece. Yes, more than Greece. And when the Germans came from behind I got through the lines, and all I could think of was Pelagia, I’ve got to get home to Pelagia, and now …’ his body shook once more and a great sob burst out of him ‘… only the animals know me.’
To Pelagia’s confusion and distress he buried his face in his hands and began to rock like an injured child. She came behind him and put her hands on his shoulders, which she kneaded with her fingers. There was bone where once there had been perfect, longed-for, pristine flesh, and she saw that indeed he did have lice.
21 Pelagia’s First Patient
Mandras’ mother was one of those perplexing creatures as ugly as the mythical wife of Antiphates, of whom the poet wrote that she was ‘a monstrous woman whose ill-aspect struck men with horror’, and yet she had married a fine man, borne a child, and become widely loved. Some said that she had prospered through witchcraft, but the truth was that she was an amiable and good-natured woman whom fate had deprived of a pretext for becoming vain in her youth, and consequently she had not become embittered as her girth and her hairiness increased. Kyria Drosoula was descended from a family of ‘ghiaourtovaptismenoi’, the ‘baptised in yoghurt’, which is to say that her family had been expelled from Turkish territory with nothing to carry away except sacks containing the bones of their ancestors.
The Lausanne settlement had seen nearly half a million Muslims translated to Turkey in return for over a million Greeks, and was an example of racial cleansing which, though necessary for the prevention of further wars, had brought with it a profound legacy of bitterness. Drosoula had known only how to speak Turkish, and she and her mother had been roundly despised by the Old Greeks at the same time as they wept with nostalgia for their life in the lost homelands. Drosoula’s mother buried the bones of her father and her husband, and for fear of being ridiculed for her Pontos accent, elected to become dumb, leaving all responsibilities to her fifteen-year-old daughter, who, within the space of three years, had learned to speak the Cephallonian dialect and had married a shrewd fisherman who knew a faithful wife when he saw one. Like so many of the oar-loving islanders, he had lost his life in a squall that sprang up suddenly from the east, leaving a son to take up his trade and a formidable widow who sometimes dreamed in Turkish but had forgotten how to speak it.
During Mandras’ absence Pelagia had found her way down to Kyria Drosoula’s house almost every day, enraptured by tales of the imperial city of Byzantium and of life on the Black Sea amongst the infidels, and in that small, fishy, but immaculate house by the quayside they had comforted each other with words that, however deeply meant, had by now become clichés in every household in Europe. As the ever-changing sea slopped on the stones outside, they had cried and hugged each other, repeating that Mandras must be all right, because they would have heard if he wasn’t. They practised for the eventuality of having to hit an Italian over the head with a shovel, and they laughed behind their hands at some of the appallingly coarse jokes that Drosoula had learned in Turkey from the Muslim boys.
It was to this admirable and hirsute amazon that Pelagia ran, leaving her fiancé at the kitchen table, lost in his world-girdling oceans of fatigue and his terrible memories of comrades who had become the spoil and booty of the carrion birds. The two women returned, breathless, to find him in the same position, still absently caressing Psipsina’s ears.
Intending to gather her son into her arms, Drosoula flung herself into the kitchen with a cry of joy, and then performed a double-take that in other circumstances might have been comical. She looked about the kitchen as if to see whether or not there was any other there than that dishevelled apparition, and glanced at Pelagia questioningly.
‘It is him,’ said Pelagia. ‘I told you he was in an awful state.’
‘Jesus,’ she exclaimed, and without further ado she took her son by the shoulder, raised him out of his seat, and led him outside, despite Pelagia’s protests and the evident
wreckage of his feet. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Drosoula, ‘but I’m not having my son sitting in a respectable house in that state. It is too much shame.’
Out in the courtyard Kyria Drosoula inspected Mandras as though he were an animal whose purchase she was contemplating. She peered into his ears, disgustedly lifted his locks of matted hair, made him show his teeth, and then announced, ‘You see, Pelagia, what a state these men get into when there are no women to look after them. It’s disgraceful and there’s no excuse for it, no there isn’t. They’re just babies who can’t manage without their mothers, that’s what, and I don’t care if he’s been to war. Go and put a big pot to boil, because I’m going to wash him from head to foot, but first of all I’m getting rid of all this awful mop, so bring me some scissors, koritsimou, and if I catch his fleas and lice I’m going to flay him alive, I’m itching from just looking at him, I can hardly bear to be on the same island, and the stench, phew, it’s worse than pigs.’
Mandras sat passively as his mother ardently and disapprovingly cut away the ropes and pads of his head and beard. She tutted and grimaced at every glimpse of a louse, and carried away the rank locks in the blades of the scissors so that they and their cargo of nits could burn foully in the charcoal of the brazier, shrivelling and spitting, releasing a thick and stinking smoke vile enough to banish demons and disturb the dead.
Pelagia grimaced as much as her future mother-in-law as she witnessed the scurrying of the grey-bodied parasites and as the septic excoriations and the eczema were revealed; the scalp was pitted with inflamed scratches that glistened with fluid, and, most worrying of all, the glands of the neck were finally revealed to be enlarged and suppurating. She felt sickened where she knew that she should feel compassion, and she hurried indoors to look for the oil of sassafras. As she reached for it she realised for the first time, and with a small shock, that she had learned enough from her father over the years to become a doctor herself. If there was such a thing as a doctor who was also a woman. She toyed with the idea, and then went to look for a paintbrush, as though this action could cancel the uncomfortable sensation of having been born into the wrong world.