Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

But there was no doubt that he had been too much obsessed by an historical sense, with the idea that there was a messianic mission which had been chosen for him to fulfil. He had thought that there could have been no other man, that he was the one to take the Greek nation by the neck and drag it, kicking and expostulating, towards the rightful goal. He had felt himself a doctor who inflicts necessary pain, knowing that after the curses and protests of the patient, there would come a time when he would be crowned with the flowers of the grateful. He had always done what he knew to be right, but perhaps in the end it was vanity that had impelled him, something as simple and disgraceful as megalomania.

I rebel against the charges of perversion and obscenity that would be made against my memory, and I will keep these recollections to myself. To me they are not obscene; they are precious, exquisite and pure. In any case, no one would know what they mean. They are for the private museum that each of us carries in our heads, and to which not even the experts or the crowned heads of Europe are permitted access.

He pondered briefly the romantic possibility of disappearing; he could go to Piraeus and work as a clerk; he could become a fisherman; he could go to America and make a new beginning.

ephemeral image of himself,

Stamatis appeared downcast: ‘Hippocrates says so? So I’ve got to be nice to her?’ The doctor nodded paternally, and Stamatis replaced his hat. ‘O God,’ he said. The doctor watched the old man from his window. Stamatis went out into the road and began to walk away. He paused and looked down at a small purple flower in the embankment. He leaned down to pick it, but immediately straightened up. He peered about himself to ensure that no one was watching. He pulled at his belt in the manner of girding up his loins, glared at the flower, and turned on his heel. He began to stroll away, but then stopped. Like a little boy involved in a petty theft he darted back, snapped the stem of the flower, concealed it within his coat, and sauntered away with an exaggeratedly insouciant and casual air. The doctor leaned out of the window and called after him, ‘Bravo Stamatis,’ just for the simple but malicious pleasure of witnessing his embarrassment and shame.

‘Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?’

He did not stop to try to understand why he and Kokolios should both be sick with horror over the violation of an icon and a holy day, when one was a Communist and the other a secularist. He did not stop to question whether or not war was inevitable. These were not things that needed to be examined. Kokolios and Stamatis stood up and came out together when he said, ‘Come on boys, we’re all going to the church. It’s a question of solidarity.’

A guilty man wishes only to be understood, because to be understood is to appear to be forgiven. Perhaps in his own eyes he is guiltless, but it is enough for him to know that others consider him culpable and he feels the need to be explained.

Thank God no one reads my mind, I’d be locked up and all the old women would throw stones at me and call me a whore.

the trepidation that afflicts those who are about to be witnesses to the breaking of the veil between this world and the next.

Sometimes the gap between herself and the world would yawn so wide that she would look down and see an infinite void beneath her feet;

Pelagia wished that there was something better for Lemoni, as though it were idle to wish better things for herself.

slow ballet of pointless tasks that failed to counterbalance the absence of her lover, but became instead a kind of frame to it.

all was nothing but a sign of what was missing.

perhaps in the time of Odysseus there had been young girls like herself who had gone to the sea in order to spy on the nakedness of those they loved. She shivered at the thought of such a melting into history.

She was surprised, even disappointed, for it revealed that the lovely boy was made only of flesh, and not of imperishable gold.

He seemed suddenly to have become a dream-creature of frightening and infinite fragility, something too exquisite and ephemeral to be human.

The doctor found himself hoping guiltily that Mandras would not survive the war, and this led him to the uncomfortable suspicion that he was not as good a man as he had always deluded himself into believing.

the doctor believed that the pleasure of homecoming was more than recompense for the pains of setting out, and that therefore it was always worth departing.

It seemed inconceivable that this desolate ghost concealed the soul and body of the man she had loved and desired and missed so much, and then finally dismissed.

they had comforted each other with words that, however deeply meant, had by now become clichés in every household in Europe.

I can see and hear that she is disgusted with her returning hero, and I knew before I went that I was not good enough for her. It means that if she loves me then she is being patronising, making a sacrifice, and I cannot stand it because it makes me hate her and despise myself. I am going to go away again when I am well so that I can reclaim the dream of Pelagia and love her without bitterness as I did in those mountains when I fought for her and the idea of home, and when I return I shall be remade and renewed, because next time I am going to make sure that I have done things so great that even a queen would beg to be my bride.

in December, when it was twenty degrees below zero because there was no cloud, the Italians sent up a starshell. It exploded in a cascade of brilliant blue light against the face of the full moon, and the sparks drifted to earth in slow motion like the souls of reluctant angels. As that small magnesium sun hovered and blazed, the black pines stepped out of their modest shadows as though previously they had been veiled like virgins but had now decided to be seen as they are in heaven. The drifts of snow pulsed with the incandescence of the absolute chastity of ice, a mortar coughed disconsolately, and an owl whooped. For the first time in my life I shivered physically from something other than the cold; the world had sloughed away its skin and revealed itself as energy and light.

it was like making love for the last time to someone who is adored but is leaving forever. Every last moment of freedom and security was rolled about on the tongue, tasted, and remembered.

in spring the weather is balmy, there is a light breeze and gentle rain in the night, and there are wild flowers blooming in impossible places.

By the time that I arrived the Acqui Division had already surrendered to its charms, had sunk back into its cushions, closed its eyes, and become enclosed in a gentle dream. We forgot to be soldiers.

They were blackened and gnarled, twisted and stout, they made me feel strangely ephemeral, as though they had seen people like us a thousand times, and had watched us depart.

They had a quality of patient omniscience.

by an impression of the preciousness of the ephemeral,

‘Why do you play it?’ ‘What an odd question. Why does one do anything? Do you mean, what led me to start?’

He remained submissive and polite, and she would find herself practising in private all the narrowings of the eyes and hard pursings of the lips that would eventually accompany the hypothetical tempest of recrimination and contempt that every day she looked forward to heaping upon his head.

The idea that he was slightly mad left her feeling protective towards him, and it was this that probably eroded her scruples of principle.

The unfortunate truth was that, Italian invader or not, he made life more various, rich and strange.

but all the same, every time she looked up his eyes would flick to hers and she would be caught in his steady and ironic gaze as surely as if he had grasped her by the wrists.

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.

love delayed is lust augmented.

Her father had reduced all her rosy reveries to common sense and medical sordidities.

It was easier to hum than to dwell on death; it gave the heart something to do.

On the following day a rumour began, to the effect that St Gerasimos had wandered out in the darkness and then returned to his catafalque, the nuns purportedly finding him in the morning with the traces of tears upon the black leather of his shrivelled cheeks, and crimson blood upon the gilt and satin of his shoes.

So when the door flew open she was startled, but it had about it the narrative inevitability of a well-thumbed book.

the natural sounds of that duplicitous and deceptive peace.

There was a boundless cloud of sadness hanging in the air for anyone to feel it if they chose.

In lieu of the obvious reply, which by virtue of its obviousness would necessarily have rung hollow,

After he had plunged through the surf and clambered aboard, vanishing into the darkness like a ghost, Pelagia ran into the waves until the sea reached her thighs. She strained to see him for the last time, and saw nothing. As though by a raptor’s claw, she was seized and clutched by emptiness. She put her hands to her face and wept, her shoulders heaving, her sobs of agony carried off in the wind and lost in the hiss of the sea.

It did not occur to him that he was a statistic, one more life warped and ruined by a war, a tarnished hero destined for the void. He was aware of nothing but a vanishment of paradise, an optimism that had turned to dust and ash, a joy that had once shone brighter than the summer sun, but now had disappeared and melted in the black light and frigid heat of massacre and cumulative remorse. He had struggled for a better world, and wrecked it.

Why preserve life when all of us must die, when there is no such thing as immortality and health is an ephemeral accident of youth?

profligate

The two women felt their chests heave and vibrate against the restraint of sinews and cartilage, their ribs seemed to be tearing, a god seeming to be dealing mighty blows to a bass drum within their lungs.

His voice sounded tinny and infinitely remote behind that guttural explosion of ever-augmenting sound, and he was thrown violently sideways.

Once more the unsettled giant in the bowels of the earth slammed a mighty fist vertically upwards, so that houses leapt from their foundations and solid stone walls rippled like paper in the wind, and suddenly there was a stillness like that of death.