66 Rescue
In those days Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. It had a sense of humanitarian responsibility and a myth of its own importance that was quixotically true and
universally accepted merely because it believed in it, and said so in a voice loud enough for foreigners to understand. It had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of waiting for months for permission from Washington before it clambered out of its post-imperial bed, put on its boots, made a sugary cup of tea, and ventured through the door.
Accordingly the British were the first to arrive, the ones to stay longest, the ones to do the most, and the last to leave. Overnight HMS Daring loaded with water, food, medicines, spare doctors, and rescue equipment, and sailed from Malta to arrive at dawn the following day, to find the harbour of Argostoli churning, spouting and foaming with what seemed to be depth-charges and magnetic mines. A Sunderland flying-boat brought the Commander-in-Chief of Mediterranean forces, HMS Wrangler took supplies to Ithaca, and before long there turned up HMS Bermuda, the Forth, the Reggio, and the New Zealand ship, The Black Prince. Between them they brought 250 miles of bandages, 2,500 gallons of disinfectant, SO Nissen huts, 6,000 blankets, bulldozers, baby bottles, 60,000 tins of milk, three meals per diem for 15,000 people for seven days, and an inordinate and prodigal two and a half tons of cotton wool and lint.
The Yugoslavs, whose Dubrovnik port was closest, sent nothing whatsoever to the capitalists, but soon there would appear four diffident little ships of the Israeli Navy. Italy, mindful of its shameful past and the obligations implied by it, sent its finest capital ships loaded with the elite firemen of Naples, Milan and Rome, and began the evacuation of casualties to Patras. The Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Salem arrived, loaded with earthmovers and helicopters, and shortly there would come four combat transports loaded with 3,000 US marines. The Greek Navy, hindered by bureaucratic in-fighting, turned up late but eager, and General Iatrides was appointed governor of Ionia for the duration of the emergency. The King and his family took advantage of the occasion to swerve incognito about the islands in a jeep, and the rotund little nuns of the enclosed monasteries emerged conscientiously but gleefully to take a taste of life, with its attendant chocolate and its opportunities for work and conversation.
Because of the wide streets there were few casualties in Cephallonia; the towns consisted mainly of one-storey buildings separated by courtyards and rubbish tips, and there were the usual miracles concerning people who had lost their sense of time, and emerged from beneath the rubble after nine days, believing that it had been a few hours.
The British ratings perspired and laboured in the enervating heat, complaining bitterly about the smell of faeces in the harbour and the sunburn peeling off their skin in sheets. As red as cardinals, they dynamited unsafe buildings, which turned out to be all of them, so that the island seemed to have been made yet more desolate by their attentions, and further panicking the distraught islanders, who could not distinguish aftershocks from explosions, and whom the sailors, poor on both geography and polite circumlocution, referred to jovially as `wogs'. On their notice boards were pinned, amidst the standing orders and special instructions, the regularly updated scores of the cricket match between England and Australia.
The foreign-aid workers built cities of tents and cleared gigantic parking lots for their jeeps and trucks. To the growling of the uneasy earth was added the stupefying clatter of helicopters and the splutter and roar of earthmovers trying to clear the landslides that cut off the remoter communities, whose people for three days believed that they had been unutterably forgotten and left to starve or die of thirst. One village in Zante was on the point of despair when an aeroplane dropped the best bread they had ever tasted, its savour remaining in their collective memory forever as a foretaste of paradise that no mortal housewife would ever be able to recreate. It was followed by corned beef and chocolate, the latter on the point of melting almost as soon as it landed, to be licked eagerly from the silver paper by the humans, and then doubly licked by dogs before they swallowed the foil itself.
The crew of the Franklin D. Roosevelt made seven thousand loaves a day, and delivered them in crumbled ports and upon beaches by landing craft more accustomed to howitzers, tanks and troops. An American officer with a phrasebook wandered about, repeating `Hungry?' with an insufficiently interrogative intonation, and pointing to his mouth to reinforce the point, until some villagers took pity upon him and made him a banquet with what little they could find. When the Americans left, their tents and rubbish bins were plundered, and for a decade their miraculous tin-openers no bigger than a razorblade were currency in the place of coins and penknives within the swaps and negotiations of the islands' little boys.
The Greeks themselves reacted differently according to whether or not they found a natural leader amongst themselves. Those where none appeared lapsed into melancholia, lost their sense of time, became listless and purposeless, and suffered harrowing nightmares about falling infinitely in space. They were beyond tears, and no one wept. They did not even pin up notices, as elsewhere,
arranging rendezvous with relatives and friends.
During the earthquake itself, perhaps a quarter, like the doctor, had not panicked, but afterwards the remaining three-quarters remembered their desertion of their children and their aged parents, and suffered the agony of utter humiliation. Strong men felt like cowards and fools, and to the sense of having been frivolously and gratuitously struck by God was added a dire and insidious sense of worthlessness. Their hearts leapt and fluttered at the braying of a mule, the creak of a door, or the scratching of a cat.
Some enterprising Greeks took instantaneously to business, avidly and opportunistically selling government property such as stamps and licences. Others opened fruit-stalls, and a bank manager in Argostoli set up a table before the ruins of his bank, conducting his usual transactions and enjoying his job for the first time. In Ithaca somebody hung up a sheet and opened up a cinema. Youth clubs from all over Greece poured in for working holidays, laughing and taunting each other if anyone showed fear at the pulse and breathing of the rock.
The most unlikely people emerged as saviours. Although he had always been considered slow and placid, Velisarios took command in Pelagia's village. He was now forty-two years old, and without vanity knew that he was stronger than he had ever been before, even though he lacked the immeasurable stamina of youth and all its happy dreams of remaining young forever. The earthquake somehow cleared his brain, just as it cured Drosoula's rheumatism, and it was as if alight had switched itself on amid his mind's flow of animal apperception and instinctive reflex.
It was Velisarios who threw himself into the task of the village's resurrection, and it was the grateful inhabitants who followed. With a strength that seared greater than that of the earthquake he thaw off the beams and boulders that imprisoned the crumpled body of the doctor, aware that putrefaction brought with it its 386 diseases, and thereafter he gathered together the confused and hopeless, and ordered them into small working parties with widely varying jobs. He himself clambered down into the well and began to pass up the rubble that had filled it, working so furiously that he exhausted two fatigue parties without resting himself. It was solely because of Velisarios that no one suffered thirst.
A rumour began, to the effect that the island was sinking into the sea, and that
the government had ordered the entire population to take to its boats. As the gullible and credulous ran to the ruins of their houses for anything they could salvage for the exodus, Velisarios strode from one to the other, appealing to the cupidity and common sense of the people.
`Are you stupid?' he demanded. 'This is a nonsense started by people who would be looters. Do you want to lose everything and be made a fool of? If anyone leaves, I'll change their lights, and that's a promise. Cephallonia doesn't sink, it floats. Don't be idiots, because that's what people want.'
When folk scattered and screamed at every one of the thousands of small aftershocks, it was Velisarios who told them to pull themselves together and get back to work, and more than once he pulled idlers and the terrified from their hidey-holes and threatened them with broken bones and heads unless they resumed their tasks. With his shaggy grey hair, his perspiring temples, his bare chest hairier than a bear, and his legs thicker than columns of stone, there was no one whom he did not bully into sanity and work. Even Pelagia was persuaded to cover her father's corpse, and went to attend to people's wounds. She splinted and set two broken legs, even putting them into traction by means of ropes and boulders, and she smeared honey on cuts and extracted grit from babies' eyes with a feather and spittle. Drosoula, who at first had done nothing but cry hysterically, `We have nothing left, nothing but our eyes to cry with,' was put in charge of the children so that their parents could be put to work. They played hide-and-seek in the ruins, and tag, and built pyramids of stones; their small contribution to clearing up the houses and the street. When the aid workers finally bulldozed through the landslide in the road, they found a small community living in tents of corrugated iron lashed to salvaged beams, with discreet latrines dug at a safe distance from the well, their communal olive-press repaired and in working order so that money would continue to be earned and starvation kept at bay.
They found a gigantic man in charge, who into old age would be more venerated and respected than the teacher or the priest.
For three months the earth heaved, sounding as though it was breathing, holding its breath, and exhaling. Everyone lived in tents that were washed away and shredded by an untimely and freezing storm, only to be tacked together and retracted. Through the early part of winter they shivered, sometimes fifteen to a tent for warmth, and then the wooden sheds went up, inconceivably spacious by
comparison, but very near as cold. For three months Antonia went away on a holiday organised by the Queen in camps originally built for orphans of the civil war, and returned with lice and nits, and a shocking new vocabulary of oaths and names for private parts. In one year reconstruction began, and in three years it was complete. Ancient and beautiful Venetian towns re-emerged as undistinguished agglomerations of whitewashed concrete boxes. One village was rebuilt completely by a philanthropic exile who lavished his wealth on running water, sewerage, metalled streets, and wrought-iron lamp posts, and it became as charming as Fiskardo, the only town to survive intact. Pelagia's village was rebuilt further down the hill, nearer to the new road that had been built by ingenious French engineers, and her old house was abandoned, the treasures and relics in the cachette buried, it seemed, beyond recall.
Because the earthquake had consisted entirely of compression waves, very few fissures had opened in the earth. But soon after the disaster an Italian fireman found one. He had travelled up from Argostoli in a jeep borrowed from an American, and he stood before Pelagia's deserted and demolished house, looking up at it in dismay and trepidation. He walked across the yard with its sundered olive, and noticed that a crack had widened in the earth. He looked down into it and saw a skeleton, its sternum and ribs splintered, its massive skull with its shattered jaw opened as if caught in midspeech, the tarnished silver coins in the sockets of its eyes endowing it with an expression of sadness, astonishment, and reproach.
The fireman gazed at it for a few minutes, until a new tremor stirred him. He fetched a golden poppy from amongst the stones, threw it down upon the corpse, and then he went to the jeep for a spade. No sooner had he begun the task of reburial than another judder unbalanced him, and the red earth closed once again over the colossal bones of Carlo Guercio.