48 La Scala
'It's true, Antonio, some of your men are running a racket, and in my opinion and the opinion of my brother officers, it reflects very badly on you. Not you
personally, but on the Army of Italy. It's as scandalous as that pamphlet about the Duce that everyone's reading. It's part of the same disease.'
Corelli turned to Carlo, 'Is this true, as Gunter says?'
'Don't ask me. You'd have to ask a Greek.'
'Iatre,' called Corelli, 'is it true?'
The doctor came out of the kitchen, where he had been carefully sharpening the blades of old scalpels on a whetstone, and asked, 'Is what true?'
'That some of our soldiers are buying goods from the hungry with ration cards, and then some other people come in and confiscate the cards back again because they were acquired illegally.'
'It's not "some other people",' said the doctor, `it's just the other half of the same gang. It goes round in a perfect circle. Stamatis got stung like that last week. He lost a valuable clock and two silver candlesticks, and ended up with no ration cards, and a belly as empty as before. Very ingenious.'
The doctor turned to go, and then stopped, 'And another thing, your soldiers are stealing from people's vegetable patches. As if we were not all dying of hunger.'
'We Germans do not do this,' said Gunter Weber smugly, enjoying a little schadenfreude at Corelli's expense.
`Germans can't sing,' riposted Corelli irrelevantly, `and anyway, I'll get this investigated, and I'll put a stop to it. It's too bad.'
Weber smiled, 'You are very famous for defending the rights of Greeks. I wonder sometimes if you understand why you are here.'
'I'm not here to be a bastard,' said Corelli, `and to be perfectly frank, I do not feel good about it. I try to think of it as a holiday. I don't have your advantages, Gunter.'
'Advantages?'
'Yes. I don't have the advantage of thinking that other races are inferior to mine. I don't feel entitled, that's all.'
'It's a question of science,' said Weber. 'You can't alter a scientific fact.'
Corelli frowned, 'Science? The Marxists think they are scientists, and they believe the exact opposite of you. I don't care about science. It's an irrelevance. It's a moral principle that you can't alter, not a scientific fact.'
'We disagree,' said Weber amiably, 'it's obvious to me that ethics change with the times as science does. Ethics have changed because of the theories of Darwin.'
'You're right, Gunter,' interjected Carlo, 'but no one has to like it. I don't like it, and neither does Antonio, that's all. And science is about facts, and morality is about values. They are not the same thing and they don't grow together. No one can find a value on the slide of a microscope. It might be true that Jews are evil or inferior, for instance, how would I know? But how does that mean that we should treat them with injustice? I don't understand the reasoning.'
'Do you remember,' said Weber, leaning back in his chair, 'how you pulled a pistol on me when I was going to club that pine marten for its skin? I didn't kill it. I didn't know it was a pet in any case. I couldn't argue with a pistol. That is the new morality. Strength needs no excuses and doesn't have to give reasons. It is Darwinism, as I said.'
'It has to leave reasons to history,' said Corelli, 'or else it stands condemned. It's also a question of being at ease with oneself. Do you remember when that bombardier tried to rape that girl who was cured by the supposed miracle?
Mina, that was her name. Do you know why I did that?'
`You mean when you made him stand to attention in the sun with nothing on except a tin helmet and a haversack?'
'A haversack full of rocks. Yes. I did it because I imagined that woman was my sister. I did it because when he was well-cooked I felt a lot better. That is my morality. I make myself imagine that it's personal.'
`You're a good man,' said Gunter, `I admit it.'
'By the way, I stopped you from clubbing Psipsina in order to save your life,' said Corelli. 'If I hadn't stopped you, Pelagia would have killed you.'
'Aaaaaagh,' spluttered Weber, pretending to strangle himself. `Where is Pelagia? I thought she liked our singing.'
`She does, but it's embarrassing for her to be the only woman in a bunch of boys. I expect she's listening in the kitchen.'
'No I'm not,' she called.
'Ah,' said Weber, 'there you are. Antonio was just saying that we ought to bring some of the girls from the Casa Rosetta, to balance the numbers. What do you think of that?'
`My father would throw La Scala out, and you'd have to go back to singing in the latrines.'
`We could bring two armoured cars, and come anyway,' said Weber. He looked around at the faces that were not smiling at his remark, and said, `Only a little joke.'
`Our armoured cars wouldn't be able to get up the hill,' said one of the baritones, `we'd have to borrow one of yours.'
`Lies and slanders,' replied one of the tenors, `they go very well if you take the armour off. Come on, let's sing something.'
"La Giovinezza," ' suggested Weber enthusiastically, and all the rest of them groaned. `OK, OK, I'll get my gramophone from my vehicle, and we can all sing with Marlene.'
`And afterwards we can sing love songs,' said Corelli, `because tonight is a beautiful night, and everything is peaceful, and we should be thinking about being romantic.'
Weber went to his jeep, proudly and proprietorially returning with his gramophone. He set it on the table, and twisted down the needle. There was a sound very like the stirring of a distant sea, and then the first martial bars of `Lili Marlene'. Dietrich began to sing, her voice full of languid melancholy, worldliness, the sadness of knowledge, and the longing for love. 'O,' exclaimed Weber, `she is the incarnation of sex. She makes me melt.'
Some of the boys joined in the song, and Corelli began to pick up the melody on his mandolin. 'Antonia likes this,' he said, 'Antonia is going to sing.'
He began to introduce grace notes, and then rapid sections of fingerwork that filled in the scale between the notes. On the last verse he broke into a tremolo that soared above the music in a descant, embellished it with sly glissandos, rests and ritardandos, climbed ambitiously towards the highest and thinnest pitch of the instrument, and then fell back deliciously upon the sonorous middle range of the third and second strings. In the village the people stopped what they were doing and listened to Corelli fill the night. When the music stopped they sighed, and Kokolios said to his wife, `The man's mad, and he's a wop, but he's got nightingales in his fingers.'
`It's better than listening to you snorting and farting all night,' she said.
'A proletarian fart is greater music than a bourgeois song,' he said, and she grimaced and said, `You wish.'
Pelagia left the kitchen, her slender silhouette ghostlike in the dim light of the candle from the kitchen. 'Please play that again,' she requested, 'it was so beautiful.'
She came out and stroked the polished wood of Weber's gramophone. The machine was another wonder of the modern world, like Corelli's motorbike, that had escaped the world of Cephallonia until the war years came. It was something fine and glorious amid the loss and separation, the deprivation and fear.
'Do you like it?' asked Weber, and she nodded wistfully. `All right,' he continued, `when I go home after the war, I'll leave it with you. You can have it. It would please me very much, and you will always remember Gunter. I can easily find another in Vienna, and you can accept it as an apology to Psipsina.'
Pelagia was touched, almost overjoyed. She looked at the smiling youngster with his smart uniform, his clipped blond hair and his brown eyes, and she was filled with pleasure and gratitude. `You're so sweet,' she said, and kissed him very naturally on one cheek. The boys of La Scala cheered, and Weber blushed, tiding his eyes with his hand.