62 Of the German Occupation
Of the German occupation there is little to say, except that it caused the islanders to love more nearly the Italians they had lost. It seldom happens that a people can bring themselves to learn affection for their oppressors, but hardly since Roman times had there been any other kind of rule. Now there were no more Italians working amid the vines beside the farmers in order to escape the boredom of garrison life, there were no more football matches between sides that
squabbled and cheated and mobbed the referee, there was no flirtation with girls by bombardiers whose caps were askew, whose chins were unshaven, and who always had a demi-cigarette smouldering at the corners of their mouths. There were no more tenor voices to send snatches of Neapolitan song and sentimental aria out across the pine of the mountains. There were no more inefficient military police to cause traffic jams at the centre of Argostoli by waving their arms and shrilling their whistles at everyone at once, there was no unpunctual aquaplane to buzz a lazy and half-hearted reconnaissance about the island, there were no more flagrant military whores with painted lips and parasols bathing naked in the sea and being driven about by a bemused old Greek with a cart. There is no record of what happened to the girls; possibly they were deported for slave labour to some nameless camp of Eastern Europe, and possibly they were abused and killed, finding a grave amongst the men they had loved for duty, or mingling their ashes with theirs in the biblical pyres that had filled the sky with black smoke, burned giant circles deep into the turf, and tarred the nostrils with the stench of kerosene and charring bone. Adriana, La Triestina, Madama Nina, all had disappeared.
The few remains of the Italian soldiers were gathered together after the war. A few bodies were dug intact from the Italian cemetery, they were carried back to Italy on a black-hulled ship of war, and efforts were made to identify them. It was not possible, and it is said that families were given bones and cinders that could have been those of any man at all. Therefore there were some mothers who made lamentation over the dead children of other mothers, but most were left with sons who now were melding with the soil of Cephallonia or who had scattered to the Ionian air as ash, cut off in the full exuberance of youth and lost forever to a world that had ignored their plight in life and disregarded them in death.
Gone were the charming chicken-thieves, the waggish individualists and songsters, and in their place an interregnum came that the doctor recorded in his History as the direst time of all.
The islanders remember that the Germans were not human beings. They were automata without principles, machines finely tuned in the art of pillage and brutality, without any passion except the love of strength, and without belief except in their natural right to grind an inferior race beneath the heel.
To be sure the Italians had been thieves, but their sorties at night, their strategies
to avoid being caught, their shame when apprehended, had disclosed that they knew that what they did was wrong. The Germans came into any house at any time of day, kicked over the furniture, beat the occupants, however old or young, however ill, and in front of their eyes carried away whatever took their fancy. Ornaments, rings handed down in one family for generations, oil-lamps, benzene stoves, sailors' souvenirs of the East, all disappeared. It was amusing and appropriate to humiliate the negroids whose culture was so paltry. Casually they let the people starve, and made the sign of thumbs up when Greek coffins passed over the stones to tombs.
Both Pelagia and her father were beaten at different times for no apparent cause. Psipsina, for the crime of being tame, was torn from Pelagia's aims and frivolously clubbed to death with the butt of a rifle. Drosoula had cigarette stubs burned into the skin of her breasts for scowling at an officer. The doctor had all his precious medical equipment, gathered together through twenty conscientious years of poverty, smashed in his presence by four soldiers who wore the death's- head upon their belts and whose hearts were as dark and dank and empty as the Drogarati caves. In the year of the German occupation, the Holy Snakes did not appear at the church of Our Lady at Marcopoulo, and neither did the Sacred Lily flower at Demoutsandata.
When in November 1944 the invincible representatives of the master-race of the eternal Reich were ordered to withdraw, they destroyed every building for which they found the time, and the inhabitants of Cephallonia rose spontaneously against them and fought them all the way to the sea.
But the night before he left, Gunter Weber, who had ashamedly stayed away from the house since the time of the massacres, brought his gramophone and his collection of Marlene Dietrich recordings, and left them outside Pelagia's door, as he had promised in more fortunate days. He left an envelope underneath the lid, and when she opened it Pelagia found a photograph depicting Antonio Corelli and the Leutnant on the beach, their arms about each others' shoulders. Corelli wore an elaborate woman's bonnet complete with artificial fruit and tattered paper roses; he was waving a bottle of wine at the camera, and Gunter was wearing an Italian fore-and-aft cap sideways on his head. Their eyes were half- closed, and obviously both of them were drunk. In the distance Pelagia barely discerned the figure of a naked woman paddling at the sea's edge, wearing the peaked officer's cap of a German grenadier. Her arms were outspread in a gesture of delight, and an arc of spray had been caught by the light as she had kicked it upward with her foot. Obscurely, Pelagia felt neither surprise nor
jealousy at the presence of this arresting figure; it seemed right that she should be there, appropriate to the intimations of Eden that Corelli used to conjure from the air.
She turned the photograph over, and found four lines from Faust whose meaning she would not discover until she showed it to a diffident German tourist some thirty-five years later. It said: 'Mein Ruh ist hin, Mein Hen ist schwer; Ich finde sie nimmer Und nimmermehr.'
Underneath Weber had written in Italian, `God be with you, I will remember you always.'
The record-player was hidden in the hole in the floor, along with Antonio's mandolin and Carlo's confessional papers, and it survived the fratricide.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then again as tragedy. The Germans had killed perhaps four thousand Italian boys, including one hundred medical orderlies with Red Cross armbands, burning their bodies or sinking them at sea in ballasted barges. But another four thousand had survived, and, exactly as in Corfu, the British bombed the ships that were taking them away to labour camps. Most drowned in the hulls, but those who managed to leap into the sea were machine-gunned by the Germans, and once again their bodies left to float.