Captain Corelli's mandolin (51 page)

He flicked it away over the scrub, and Iannis asked, `What is it?'

`Well, young man, it's what you roll over your pride and joy when you don't want children.'

`How do you go for a pee then? Do you have to take it off?'

`Yes,' said Spiro, sensing that if he was not careful he was letting himself in for some lengthy explanations, `you take it off. In fact you only put it on when you're at it, see?'

'Oh,' said Iannis, `it's a condom, is it? I've heard about them. Dmitri told me.' Spiro raised his eyebrows, blew out his cheeks, and sighed. These kids. He began to throw out the rubble, the pieces of broken tiles, the flattened tin cans, the long and distasteful strips of smeared lavatory paper (also the legacy of tourists), and the innumerable green bottles. `We've got two days' work here,' he said. `I suppose we'll just have to get on with it.'

By the next evening there was a clear space in the middle of the old floor, and a dusty stack of broken stones and tiles one metre high outside the walls, along with snapped and rotting lengths of wood. There was also a pile of treasures which Iannis wanted to save; an ancient and smashed wireless with its red tuning needle permanently stuck on 'Napoli', a distorted pan with a jagged hole rusted through the bottom, a broken walking-stick with a silver top, an intact glass jar full of snail shells, a mouldy set of fat books entitled The Complete and Concise Home Doctor in English, a stethoscope whose rubber tubes had perished and whose bell was distorted, a photograph in a silver frame with a cracked glass, and inside it a picture of two funny drunks in strange hats with their arms about each other, and, in the distance, the tiny but marvellously naked figure of a lithe girl kicking up the water of the sea, also in a silly hat. He even found a complete photograph album, a little damp, its pages eaten away by insects at the edges, and brown water stains elegantly and delicately spread in undulating patterns across its pages. The first picture was inscribed `Mama and Papas On Their Wedding Day' and it showed in sepia a young couple standing very formally in clothes so old-fashioned that Iannis could not believe that anyone had really dressed like that. He went through them, sitting on the wall: 'Pelagia's First Steps' - a picture of a baby in a frilly bonnet, flat on its face, looking up with astonishment. He would show them to Grandma later to find out what they all meant. Meanwhile it was fascinating enough to have found a clasp knife with its blade locked by rust, a small glass jar containing a dried pea encrusted with something black and flaky, and a mouldy book of poems by someone called Andreas Laskaratos.

Spiro tried to get his fingers under the iron ring of the long trapdoor, but it had seized in its place and would not budge. Under the wood he slipped the blade of an old screwdriver he had found, but it bent like a piece of cheese and broke. He would have to go and borrow a crowbar, because no doubt the hinges were also rigid with rust.

`Why don't we just smash it?' enquired Iannis.

`Because we don't want to smash the mandolin, that's why. Nothing's to be gained from impatience.'

They stood looking at the door, scratching their heads, frustrated at being baulked after having come so far, and then became aware of a very big old man in a black suit and collarless shirt, a heavy silver stubble on his face, standing a little bent in the doorway. `What are you doing?' he asked. `O, it's you, young Iannis. I thought you were looters. I was going to give you the back of my hand.'

`We're trying to open this, Kyrie Velisario',' acid the boy. `It's stuck, and it's got something inside that we want.'

The old man shuffled inside and looked down at the trapdoor with his watery eyes. Iannis noticed that he was carrying a red rose. 'I'll help you to lift it in a minute,' he said, `but first let me put down this flower.'

He went back into the yard and placed his flower very carefully on the parched earth. `I normally do it in October,' he told them, `but I'll probably be dead myself by then, so I'm putting it there early.'

`What for?' asked Iannis.

`Young man, there's an Italian soldier down there. I buried him myself. A very brave man, as big as me. I liked him, he was very kind. I come every year and put the flower there to show that I have not forgotten. No one has ever seen me do it before, but who cares these days? We have different enemies now, and there's no shame anymore.'

`You mean there's a real skeleton down there?' asks lanais, wide-eyed with horrified delight, and secretly thinking that it would be ghoulishly exhilarating to try and dig it up. He had always wanted a real skull.

`Not just a skeleton. A man. He deserves his rest. We gave him a bottle of wine and a cigarette, and there's no scolding woman down there to annoy his bones and start tidying up when he only wants his peace. He's got all a man could want.'

Spire coughed politely but sceptically. `Don't trouble yourself with trying to lift this door, sir, I've tried it and I can't.'

'I'll have you know,' said Velisarios proudly, `that I was the strongest man in Greece, if not the world. For all 'I know, I still am. Do you see that old stone water-trough? In 1939 I lifted it above my head, and no one else has done that before or since. I have lined mules to my chest with two riders still mounted.'

'It's true, it's true,' said Iannis. `I've heard about it. And it was Kyrios Velisarios who saved the village.'

`Give me your hand,' said Velisarios to Spire, `and see what kind of men there used to be in Cephallonia. Remember that I am seventy-eight years old, and think about what I must have been.'

Smiling a little patronisingly, Spire held out his hand. Velisarios enfolded it with his own and squeezed. Spire's expression changed from consternation to alarm to horror as he felt the bones of his hand crushing and making as though trapped between the atones of an olive press. 'Ah, ah, ah; he cried, sinking to his knew and raising his other hand in a gesture of desperate appeasement. Velisarios released him, and Spire stared at his hand, waggling the fingers and panicking at the thought that he might never play an instrument again.

Velisarios bent down slowly and inserted the tips of the fingers of one hand under the iron ring. He leaned sideways against the strain to put all his weight and strength into the feat, and with a sudden and gratifying rending and splintering of wood and old iron, the door flew upwards in a cloud of dust, torn from its hinges and split down four planks. Velisarios rubbed his hands together, blew on the tips of his forgers, and seemed abruptly to revert to being a tired old man. `Farewell, my friends,' he said, and shuffled his way slowly down the path to the new village.

`Unbelievable,' said Spire, still wringing his paralysed hand. `I just can't believe it. An old man like that. Are his sons giants too?'

`He didn't get married, he was too busy being strong. Did you know that Cephallonia was the original place where the giants lived? It says so in Homer. That's what Grandma says. I'd like to be a giant, but I think I'm going to be average.'

`Unbelievable,' repeated Spire.

Everything inside that cachette that had been scaled up for nearly thirty-six years was in perfect condition. They found an antique handwound German record-player complete with a set of records and winding handle, a large and intricately crocheted blanket, a little yellowed but still wrapped and interleaved in soft tissue paper, a soldier's knapsack full of wartime curiosities, two bandoliers of bullets, a wad of papers written in Italian, and another wad of papers written in a beautiful Cyrillic script, inside a black tin box, and entitled `A Personal History of Cephallonia'. There was also a cloth bundle, containing a case, itself containing the most beautiful mandolin that Spire had ever seen. He turned it over and over in the sunlight, amazed at the exquisite purfling and binding, the gorgeous inlay and the perfect craftsmanship of the tapered sections of the belly. He sighted along the diapason and discovered that the neck was unwarped. Four strings were missing, and the remaining four were black with tarnish, lying loosely upon the frets where Corelli had relaxed their tension for storage in 1943. `This,' he said, `is worth more than a whore's memoirs. Iannis, you're a very lucky boy. You've got to look after this better than you love your mother, do you understand?'

But Iannis was at that moment more interested in the Lee-Enfield rifle with a barrel so long that it was almost as tall as himself. Excited and gleeful, he waved it about from the hip, striking Spiro on the backside, and going, `Bang. Bang. Bang.'

He pointed it up towards the tree and squeezed the trigger. The gun leapt in his hands with a terrible and heartstopping crash, the barrel cracked him in the forehead, and a shower of chips of wood sprayed from the branch above him. He dropped the cumbersome weapon as though it had given him a violent electric shock and he sat down abruptly and burst into tears of shock and terror.

Alexi appropriated the rifle and its ammunition. He cleaned it up and oiled it carefully, adding it to his secret cache in a wardrobe. He had a very small derringer, an old Italian pistol with some ammunition, and now this wonderful rifle, one of the best for snipers that was ever made. He had changed his favourite slogan to `We have nothing to lose but our possessions,' and no burglar or Communist fanatic was going to break in or start a revolution with him unprepared. Nowadays he still did not trim his toenails, but spared his mother-in-law her darning by throwing his holey socks away. Despite having become fatter and sweatier, he and Antonia (to whom he also referred as 'Psipsina') were more in love than ever, united by a common love for their enterprises that took the place of brothers and sisters for their son.

As for Pelagia, Iannis had never seen her cry so much. Grandmothers were sentimental creatures, and they even cried if you gave them a seashell that you found on the beach, but this crying for a week was more than he could understand.

First she clutched the mandolin to her chest, going, `O Antonio, mio carino, o Antonio,' her face working with emotion, her tears dripping from her eyes and splashing on the tiles of the floor, and rolling down her cheeks to disappear down her collar and in between her errant and wrinkly cleavage. Then she picked up the sheaf of Italian papers and clutched those to her chest, going, `O Carlo, mio poverino, o Carlo.'

Then she picked up the wad of Greek papers, and went, `O Papas, o Papakis,' and she would hug the crocheted blanket to her breasts, and more tears would flood down her face as she clapped her hand to the side of her head and wailed, `O my poor life that never was, o God in Heaven, o my life, alone and waiting, o . . . ' and she would start all over again with the mandolin, kissing it and hugging it as though it were a baby or a cat. She played the scratchy old records over and over, winding the handle furiously and using up all the spare needles in the little compartment at the side, since each one could only be used once, and all the records were of a woman singing German in a smoky voice from a great distance. He liked one of them, called `Lili Marlene', which was very good for whistling when you walked along the street. The records were very thick, and wouldn't bend, and they had small red labels in the middle.

`Why didn't you have cassettes?' he asked. She would not reply, because she was turning over in her hand the clasp knife that she had once given to her father, or reading the poems of Laskaratos that he had given in return, the voice of the poetry filling her soul as it once had done in the days of a dead and unrecorded world.

Iannis comforted his grandmother as best he could. He sat on her lap, which he was really a little too old for, and he dabbed at her tears with a sodden handkerchief. He submitted without too much dismay to numerous rib-cracking hugs, and he wondered how it was possible to love so much an old woman with dangly jowls, varicose veins, and grey hair so thin that you could see the pink scalp underneath. He stood patiently whilst she went through the photograph album again and again, repeating the same information in the same words, and pointing with her mottled fingers. 'That's your great-grandfather, he was a doctor you know, he died saving us in the earthquake, and that's Drosoula who was a sort of auntie that you never knew, and she was so big and ugly but the nicest person in the world, and that's the old house before it fell down, and look, there's me when I was young - can you believe I was ever so beautiful? - and I'm holding a pine marten we had for a pet, Psipsina, and she was a very funny little thing, and this is Drosoula's son, Mandras - wasn't he handsome? - and he was a fisherman, and I was engaged to him once, but he came to a bad end, God rest his soul, and that's your great-grandmother who died when I was so young I can hardly remember, it was tuberculosis and my father couldn't save her, and that's my father when he was a sailor, so young, good God, so young, and doesn't he look happy and full of life? He saved us in the earthquake, you know. And this is Gunter Weber, a German boy, and I don't know what happened in him, and this is Carlo who was as big as Kyrios Velisarios, and it's him who's buried at the old house, he was so kind and he had his own sadness that he didn't mention, and these are the boys of La Scala, singing, all drunk, and that's the olive tree before it split, and that's Kokolios and Stamatis, the funny stories I could tell you about them, old enemies, always fighting about the King and Communism, but the best of friends, and this is Alekos, he's still alive you know, older than Methuselah, still looking after his goats, and that's the Peloponnisos from the top of Mt Aenos, and that's Ithaca if you just turn round in the same place, and that's Antonio, he was the best mandolin player in the world, and I was going to marry him but he was killed, and between you and me I've never got over it, and it's his ghost that comes round the bend at the old village and then disappears . . . ' Grandma would pause for tears " . . . and this is Antonio with Gunter Weber being silly on the beach, and as for that naked woman, I don't know who she was, but I've got my suspicions, and that's Velisarios lifting a mule -isn't it incredible? - and look at those muscles, and that's Father Arsenios when he was very fat. He got thinner and thinner during the war, and then disappeared completely without anyone knowing why - isn't that strange? - and that's the old kapheneion where Papas, your great-grandfather, used to hide whenever I wanted him for something, and did you know? I was the first woman who ever went into it . . . '

Iannis gazed at those unlined faces from the ancient past, and an eerie feeling came over him. Obviously there weren't any colours in the old days, and everything was in different shades of grey, but it wasn't that. What troubled him was that all these pictures were taken in a present, a present that had gone. How can a present not be present? How did it come about that all that remained of so much life was little squares of stained paper with pictures on? `Yia, am I going to die?'

Pelagia looked down at him, `Everybody dies, Ianni'. Some die young, some die old. I'm going to die soon, but I've had my chance.

You die, and then someone comes to take your place. "The Deathless Ones have appointed its due time to each thing for man upon this fertile earth."

That's what Homer says. Apart from being born, it's the only thing in which we have no choice. One day, I hope when you are very old, you'll die too, so don't be like me. Make the most of everything while you can. When I'm dead, all I want is for you to remember me. Do you think you will? O, I'm sorry, Ianni, I didn't mean to upset you. No, don't cry. O dear. I forgot how young you were.'

Iannis begged Antonia to get him some strings for the mandolin from which she had derived her name, and she promised to find him some when she went to Athens. Alexi promised to buy him some when he went to Naples, which he still had found no reason to visit. Pelagia took Iannis on the bus to Argostoli, and bought him some strings in a music shop on one of the sidestreets that goes up the hill at right-angles to the main thoroughfares. `I love your parents very much,' she told Iannis, `but they never notice anything that's right under their nose. Athens and Naples! What rubbish!' Back at the Taverns Drosoula, Spire carefully cleaned the mandolin and polished it. He rubbed graphite from a pencil tip into the machine-heads, and turned them over and over until everything rotated smoothly, without squeaks, creaks, hesitations or resistance of any kind. He showed the young boy how to pass the upper end of the string through the silver tailpiece, hooking the loop with the polychrome balls of fluff onto the correct hook. He showed him how to wind it through the hole of the machine-heads in such a way that it was less likely to break, and how to settle it in the grooves of the bridge and nut, having first scribbled some graphite into them too, for easy tuning.

He showed him how to tune up each string slowly, going from one to another in turn and then back to the beginning. He demonstrated the use of harmonics to find the correct position of the bridge, he explained the principles of tuning each string to the seventh fret of the pair of strings above it, and then he began to play. He produced three simple chords to accustom his fingers to the reduced space of a mandolin's fretboard, and then he cascaded down a scale at a rapid tremolo.

Iannis was hooked as certainly as the strings with their odd little balls of fluff were hooked to the tailpiece. He digested religiously all of Spiro's information about not letting it sit in the sunshine, not letting it get damp or too cold in the winter, not letting it drop, keeping it polished with special polish such as is used on a bozouki, detuning it for storage, tuning the strings a semitone high in order to get them settled more quickly . . . Spiro told him seriously that he was holding in his hands the most precious thing he would ever own, and it awoke in him a sense of awe and reverence that had never struck him in church when dragged there by Pelagia. He only permitted Spiro and his grandmother to touch it, and was furious if ever anyone knocked it.

Most curiously, even though he had wanted it in order to be able to impress girls when he was older, by the time he was thirteen, and already quite a good player, he had discovered that girls were a complete dead loss. Their intractable mission in life was to frustrate, annoy, and have things that you wanted but that they would not bestow. In fact they were spiteful and capricious little aliens. It was not until he was seventeen and Grandma had begun her wild and frivolous second youth that he met one who made him burst with longing, and who had stopped nearby to listen when he was making Antonia sing: