In the darkness he bound up Carlo’s shattered jaw with a strip of sheet, and then he hacked downwards, chopping through the olive’s roots, unearthing ancient layers of stones and fires, tossing out shards of pottery and the ancient shoulder-blades of sheep. He did not know it, but he buried Carlo in the soil of Odysseus’ time, as though he had belonged there from the first.
Just before dawn, when the surgery on the captain was complete at last, and father and daughter were both unutterably exhausted, they came out to say farewell to that heroic flesh.
Pelagia combed the hair and kissed the forehead, and the doctor, naturally a pagan and always moved by ancient ways, placed a silver coin over each eye and a flask of wine in the grave. Velisarios stood below and brought the body down. He straightened up, and a thought occurred to him. From his pocket he took a crushed pack of cigarettes, removed one, straightened it out, and placed it in the dead man’s lips. ‘I owed him one,’ he said, and clambered out.
The doctor made an oration, with Pelagia beside him weeping and Velisarios kneading his hat in his hands.
‘Our friend,’ he said, ‘who arrived as an enemy, has passed over the meadows of asphodel. We found him fuller of the knowledge of goodness than any other mortal man. We remember that his many decorations were for saving lives, not for destroying them. We remember that he died as nobly as he lived, valiant and strong. We are creatures of a day, but his spirit will not dim. He made an eager grace of life and was arrested in mid-path by blood-boltered men whose name will live in infamy down the passage of the years. These also will pass away, but unlamented and unforgiven; the meed of death is common to us all. When death comes to these men they shall become spirits drifting useless in the dark, for man’s day is very short before the end, and the cruel man, whose ways are cruel, lies accursed and is a by-word after death. But the spirit of Carlo Guercio shall live in the light as long as we have tongues to speak of him and tales to tell our friends.
‘It is said that of all things that creep and breathe upon her, the earth breeds no feebler thing than man. It is true that Carlo was made by misfortune to roll around the world, but in him we found no feebleness. In him there was no rude arrogance, he was no nefarious ruffian to misuse another’s home. In him we found combined the softness of a maiden and the massive strength of rock, the perfect figure of the perfect man. He was one who could have said, “I am a citizen, not of Athens or of Rome, but of the world.” He was a man of whom we would say, “Nothing can harm a good man, either in life or after death.”
‘Remember these sayings that have come down to us from old:
‘ “Whom the gods love, die young.”
‘ “Man is a dream of a shadow.”
‘ “Even the gods cannot change the past.”
‘ “Men in their generations are like the leaves of the trees. The wind blows and one year’s leaves are scattered to the ground; but the trees burst into bud and put on fresh ones when the springtime comes.”
‘I remember also that the poet tells us that surely there is a time for long-speaking and a time for sleep. Sleep long and well. You will not be curbed by age, you will not grow weak, you will not know sorrows nor infirmity. As long as we remember you, you will be remembered fair and young. Cephallonia has no greater honour than to count itself the guardian of your bones.’
Leaning upon each other, the doctor and his daughter returned inside, listening to Velisarios, the stony scrape of the shovel, the patter of falling earth. Carefully they carried Corelli to Pelagia’s bed, and outside the first birds sang.
59 The Historical Cachette
It was only a short time before the Germans had consolidated their positions and begun to take an interest in loot. Not only did the doctor have to hide his valuables, which was the common lot and nothing to be wondered at, but he found himself embarrassed by an Italian officer immobile in his daughter’s bed. Pelagia made up bedding for him at the bottom of the cachette beneath the floor of the kitchen, and once more Velisarios was called in to carry him, neither the doctor nor Pelagia having the strength to move him without injury. There he was reunited with his mandolin, and Carlo’s papers were temporarily removed. In the interests of Corelli’s health the lid of the hiding-place was left open unless troops were in the vicinity, propped up by a piece of broomstick that could be quickly kicked away before the mat was replaced and the table realigned. Thus there was to come a time when he and Pelagia huddled helplessly in the darkness of the hole as the family’s glasses and plates were stolen and the doctor was assaulted and abused.
For the first day after his operations he slept obliviously, but when he first awoke it was in the knowledge that his pain was terrible and his bowels had moved. He, however, could not move at all. He felt as if he had been beneath a stampede of oxen, or crushed by that mediaeval torture whereby weights were piled upon a door. ‘I can’t breathe,’ he told the doctor.
‘If you couldn’t breathe you couldn’t speak. The air passes from the lungs through the voicebox.’
‘The pain is unbearable.’
‘You have several broken ribs. I broke some myself to get the bullets out.’ The doctor paused, ‘I owe you an apology.’
‘An apology?’
‘I used some of your mandolin strings to link the bones. There wasn’t anything else. I believe you made the treble strings out of my surgical wire, and I was obliged to take it back. When the bones have reknitted, there will have to be an operation to remove the wires.’
The captain winced.
‘If the pain is very bad, Antonio, you should remember that, if you are a man, it is not pain that you should feel, but grief. All your friends are dead.’
‘I know. I was there.’
‘I am sorry.’ The doctor hesitated, ‘It appears that Carlo saved you.’
‘It doesn’t “appear”. I know he did. Of all of us, he died the best, and he’s left me to remember it.’
‘You shouldn’t weep, Captain. We are going to get you well, and then get you off the island.’
‘I stink, Dottore. Don’t let Pelagia see it.’
‘I’ll do the nursing if you wish. The space down here is very cramped, isn’t it? But we’ll manage. There have been many great libertarians down this hole, so consider it an honour to lie amid such history. I have to tell you that, however much it hurts, you must change position as often as possible or you’ll get pressure sores. They can kill you if they rot, as surely as a bullet. Sleep as much as you can, but you must move. If the pain is unbearable I can give you morphia, but there’s very little left, and with these Germans here I’m bound to need it all. If it’s all right with you, I’d prefer you to be drunk. Also I have some valerian and feverfew that Pelagia gathered in the spring. I must ask you to bear the pain as best you can. I can assure you that a lot of pain during an illness will leave you feeling doubly well when you recover. It will increase ‘Dottore, nothing could increase my gratitude.’
‘You could still die,’ said the doctor bluntly. He leaned down and asked in a confidential manner, ‘I have been meaning to ask you if your haemorrhoids got better. Forgive me for not enquiring sooner. I thought it indiscreet.’
‘I followed your advice,’ said the captain, ‘and it worked.’
‘You will get little exercise and a poor diet in here,’ said the doctor, ‘although we’ll do our best. You will undoubtedly get constipated, and I may be obliged to wash your bowels out. I don’t want to use the tube of my stethoscope, but I might have to. If we don’t do this, your haemorrhoids will return from all the straining later. I apologise for the indignity.’
The captain put his hand on the doctor’s sleeve, ‘Don’t let Pelagia see.’
‘Of course not. And another thing. You will grow a beard like a Greek. Start to think like a Greek. I will begin to teach you Greek, and so will Pelagia. I don’t know where to get some papers and a ration card; we might have to do without.’
‘When I am better you must move me from the house, Do
ttore. I don’t want you in danger. If I am caught, I should die alone.’
‘We can move you to your secret house where you used to go with Pelagia. Don’t look so surprised. Everybody knew. There’s no old woman who gossips like a goatherd. It’s the loneliness. It makes them garrulous. And you may not get better, remember that. If I didn’t clean you out enough, if there is a fistula somewhere letting through some liquid, if there is air … you must let me know at once if you get any sensation of pressure. I will have to make a hole in you and let it out.’
‘Madonna Maria, Dottore, please tell me some lies.’
‘I am not Pinocchio. The truth will make us free. We overcome by looking it in the eyes.’
The captain relapsed into a fever two days later, and Pelagia stayed in the cachette with him, sponging his brow to reduce his temperature, and listening to the gabble of his nightmares. She changed his dressings and sniffed him for the toxic smell of pus. Her father reassured her that toxins made a man’s skin take on the yellow shade of cream, but privately he doubted for the captain’s life. He had no confidence that he had done the operations well, but he continued at intervals to inject him intravenously with saline sugar solution. He showed his daughter how to use cushions to vary his position and relieve the monotony of pressure that corrupts the flesh, but he made her leave the room for all those tasks which would normally fall to the lot of a woman, and which show the greatest love.
The fever came to a crisis on its fourth day, and Corelli was babbling and perspiring so much that both the doctor and Pelagia began to despair for his life. Carefully Dr Iannis inserted a thick veterinary needle into each of the wounds in case there was an abscess with poison to draw off (he called it ‘subcutaneous crepitation’), but he found nothing and was left mystified as to the causes of the ill. Pelagia placed the neck of Antonia, his beloved mandolin, into the fingers of his left hand. They closed about it, the captain smiled, and her father noted privately that she had demonstrated thereby a true doctor’s touch.
Two days later the fever left, and the patient opened his eyes with wonder, as though perceiving the fact of his existence for the first time. He felt weaker than it ought to be possible to feel, but he drank goatmilk laced with brandy and found that at last he could sit up a little on his own. By the same evening he was able to stand with the doctor’s help and let himself be washed. His legs were thin as sticks, and trembling, but the doctor made him walk upon the spot until he was exhausted and overcome by nausea. His ribs hurt more than ever, and he was informed that they would probably be a torment for months, at every inhalation. He should use his stomach muscles to breathe, he was informed, and when he tried it, it hurt the wound in his abdomen. Pelagia fetched a mirror and showed him the livid scar across his face and his incipient and Hellenic beard. It itched and bothered him almost as much as his scars, and it gave him a brigand’s air. ‘I look like a Sicilian,’ he said.
That night he was fed his first solid meal. Snails.
60 The Beginning of her Sorrows
Pelagia was to remember the time of Corelli’s recovery and his escape not as a period of memorable and intoxicating adventure, nor even as an interlude of fear and hope, but as the slow beginning of her sorrows.
The war had in any case reduced her. Her skin was translucent from lack of food, stretched tightly over bones that lent her an emaciated and soulful look that would not become fashionable for another twenty-five years. Her shapely breasts had withered a little and fallen, becoming practical pouches rather than things of beauty or objects of desire. Sometimes her gums bled, and when she ate she chewed carefully, lest she lose a tooth. Her rich black hair had thinned and lost its resilience, and amongst it could be seen the first grey hairs that should not have appeared for at least another decade. The doctor, who on account of his greater age had suffered less, checked her over frequently, and knew that since the occupation she had lost fifty percent of her body’s fat. By analysis of the nitrogen in her urine he determined that she also was steadily losing muscle as she used the protein up, and she was finding it difficult to sustain any energetic activity for more than a few minutes. He determined nonetheless that she was still sound in heart and lung, and when he could he gave her more than her share of milk and fish, when these could be obtained, by affecting a lack of appetite. She in turn gave her own food to Corelli by a similar affection that deceived no one. It churned the doctor’s heart to see her so faded, and he was reminded of those tattered roses that manage to survive the autumn and cling to their residual beauty until December, as if sustained by a certain dispensation of a fate that was nostalgic for the past but intent upon destruction at the last. Now that there was no shamefaced Italian officer to steal them rations, and no fat quartermaster to inveigle, the doctor was reduced to trapping lizards and snakes, but was as yet disinclined to experiment with cats and rats. Things were not as bad as in Holland, where cats were served as ‘roof rabbit’, nor nearly as severe as on the mainland. There was always the sea, the source of Cephallonia’s being, but also the source of all its turbid past and the strategic significance which was now a curious memory, the same sea that in future times would cause new invasions of Italians and Germans who would lie roasting on the sands together and leaving films of moisturising oil upon the water, tourists puzzled by the empty and surmising gaze of elderly Greeks in black who passed without acknowledgement or a word.
As soon as Corelli could walk, he went in the company of the doctor and Velisarios to Casa Nostra at the dead of night, whilst Pelagia remained at home, hiding in the cachette to which had been restored the mandolin, the doctor’s History, and Carlo’s papers. As long as the rapists were on the island she barely left the house, and in that hole beneath the floor she revolved her memories, crocheted and unpicked her blanket, and thought about Antonio. He had given her his ring, too big for any of her fingers, and she turned it in the lamplight, looking at the demi-falcon rising, with an olive branch in its mouth, and underneath the words ‘Semper fidelis’. She feared in her heart that back home he would dismiss her, that the words would apply to her only, that she would be left forever, faithful and forgotten, waiting like Penelope for a man who never came.
But Antonio said otherwise. He came frequently, after dark, complaining that their hideaway was cold and draughty, and relating hair-raising stories of evasion and near capture, only some of which were true. His new beard scratched her cheeks as they lay face to face and fully clothed upon her bed, wrapped in each other’s embrace and talking of the future and the past.
‘I will always hate the Germans,’ she said.
‘Günter saved my life.’
‘He slaughtered all your friends.’
‘He had no choice. It wouldn’t surprise me if he shot himself afterwards. He was trying not to cry.’
‘There is always a choice. Whatever the body gets up to, it’s the mind’s fault. That’s what we say.’
‘He wasn’t brave like Carlo. Carlo would have refused to shoot us, but Günter was a different kind of man.’
‘Would you have refused?’
‘I hope so, but I can’t say. Perhaps I would have taken the easy way. I am only a man, but Carlo was like one of those heroes in our old stories, like Horatius Cocles, or whoever it was who held the bridge of Porsenna against a whole army. Only one in a million is made like that, you mustn’t blame poor Günter.’
‘Still, I’ll always hate the Germans.’
‘A lot of the Germans aren’t Germans.’
‘What? Don’t be silly.’
‘You can’t tell by the uniforms, you know. They recruited in Poland, the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania. You name it. You don’t know it, but on the mainland they’ve got Greeks they call “Security Battalions”.’
‘It’s not true.’
‘It is. I am sorry, but it is. Every nation has its share of shits. All those thugs and nonentities who want to feel superior. Exactly the same thing happened in It
aly, they all joined the Fascists to see what they could get. All sons of clerks and peasants who wanted to be something. All ambition and no ideals. Don’t you see the appeal of an army? If you want a girl, rape her. If you want a watch, take it. If you’re in a sour mood, kill someone. You feel better, you feel strong. It feels good to belong to the chosen people, you can do what you want, and you can justify anything by saying it’s a law of nature or the will of God.’
‘We have a proverb: “Give courage to a peasant and he’ll jump in your bed.” ’
‘I like that other one you told me.’
‘ “Bean by bean the sack fills”? What’s that got to do with it?’
‘No, no, no. “If you sleep with babies you’ll be pissed on.” I’ve been pissed on, koritsimou, and I wish I’d never joined the Army. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but look what’s happened.’
‘Antonia’s lost her strings and you’re all wired up. Do you miss the boys? I do.’
‘Koritsimou, I loved those boys, they were my children. How is Lemoni? When we have a daughter we’ll call her Lemoni. After the war.’
‘If we have two sons, the second one must be Carlo. His name should live, we should be reminded every day.’
‘Every minute.’
‘Carino, do you believe in God and heaven, and all of that?’
‘No. Not after this, it doesn’t make any sense. If you were God, would you allow all this?’
‘I asked because I want Carlo and the boys to be in paradise. I can’t help it, so perhaps I do believe.’
‘Tell God when you see him that I want to punch him in the nose.’
‘Kiss me, it’s nearly dawn.’
‘I must go. Tomorrow I’ll bring you a rabbit. I’ve found a burrow, and if I lie above it I can grab one as it comes out. And I’ll find us some more snails.’