The Magus - John Fowles [82]
53
_Eleutheria_ "When the Italians invaded Greece in 1940, I had already decided that I would not run away from Europe. I cannot tell you why. Perhaps it was curiosity, perhaps it was guilt, perhaps it was indifference. And here, on a remote corner of a remote island, it did not require great courage. The Germans took over from the Italians on April 6th, 1941. By April 27th they were in Athens. In June they started the invasion of Crete and for a time we were in the thick of the war. Transport airplanes passed over all day long, German landing craft filled the harbours. But after that peace soon alighted back on the island. It had no strategic value, either to the Axis or to the Resistance. The garrison here was very small. Forty Austrians--the Nazis gave the Austrians and the Italians all the easy Occupation posts--commanded by a lieutenant who had been wounded during the invasion of France. "Already, during the invasion of Crete, I had been ordered out of Bourani. A permanent lookout section was posted here, and the maintenance of this observation point was the real reason we had a garrison at all. Fortunately I had a house in the village. The Germans were not unpleasant. They carried all my portable possessions over there for me. And even paid me a small billeting rent for Bourani. Then just when things were settling down, it happened that the _proedros_, the mayor of the village that year, had a fatal thrombosis. Two days later I was summoned to meet the newly arrived commandant of the island. He and his men were installed in your school, which had been closed since Christmas. I was expecting to meet some promoted quartermaster type of officer. Instead I found myself with a very handsome young man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, who said, in excellent French, that he understood I could speak the language fluently. He was extremely polite, more than a little apologetic, and inasmuch as one can in such circumstances we took to each other. He soon came to the point. He wanted me to be the new mayor of the village. I refused at once: I wanted no involvement in the war. He then sent out for two or three of the leading villagers. When they came he left me alone with them, and I discovered that it was they who had proposed my name. Of course the fact was that none of them wanted the job, the odium of collaboration, and I was the ideal _bouc �ssaire_. They put the matter to me in highly moral and complimentary terms, and I still refused. Then they were frank--promised their tacit support... in short, in the end I said, very well, I will do it. "My new but dubious glory meant that I came into frequent contact with Lieutenant Kiuber. Five or six weeks after our first meeting he said one evening that he would like me to call him Anton when we were alone. That will tell you that we often were alone and that we had confirmed our liking of each other. Our first link was through music. He had a fine tenor voice. Like many really gifted amateurs, he sang Schubert and Wolf better--in some way more feelingly--than any but the very greatest professional _lieder_ singers. That is, to my ear. On his very first visit to my house he saw my harpsichord. And rather maliciously I played him the _Goldberg Variations_. If one wishes to reduce a sensitive German to tears there is no surer lachrymatory. I must not suggest that Anton was a hard subject to conquer. He was more than disposed to be ashamed of his role and to find a convenient anti-Nazi figure to worship. The next time I visited the school he begged me to accompany him at the school piano, which he had had moved to his quarters. Then it was my turn to be sentimentally impressed. Not to tears, of course. But he sang very well. And I have always had a softness for Schubert. "One of the first things I wanted to know was why Anton, with his excellent French, was not in occupied France. But 'certain compatriots' considered him not sufficiently 'German' in his attitude to the French. No doubt he had spoken once too often in the mess in defence of Gallic culture. And that was why he had been relegated to this backwater. I forgot to say he had been shot in the kneecap during the 1940 invasion and had a limp, unfitting him for active military duties. He was German, not Austrian. His family was rich, and he had spent a year before the war studying at the Sorbonne. Finally be had decided that he would become an architect. But of course his training was interrupted by the war." He stopped and turned up the lamp; then opening the file, unfolded a large plan. Two or three sketches--perspectives and elevations, all glass and glittering concrete. "He was very rude about this house. And he promised he would come back after the war and build me something new. After the best Bauhaus principles." All the notes were written in French; not a word of German anywhere. The plan was signed. _Anton Kiuber, le sept juin, ran 4 de la Grande Folie_. I noticed one of the sketches was of a theatre, a small amphitheatre. An exotic sickle-shaped apron stage, a canopied proscenium. "And your theatre." "Yes. He was going to come and design for me." He let me look a few moments longer, then he turned down the lamp again. "For a year during the Occupation everything was tolerable. We were very short of food, but Anton--and his men--shut their eyes to countless irregularities. The idea that the Occupation was all a matter of jackbooted stormtroopers and sullen natives is absurd. Most of the Austrian soldiers were over forty and fathers themselves--easy meat for the village children. One summer dawn, in 1942, an Allied plane came and torpedoed a German supply landing craft that had anchored in the old harbour on its way to Crete. It sank. Hundreds of crates of food came bobbing to the surface. By then the islanders had had a year of nothing but fish and had bread. The sight of all this meat, milk and rice and other luxuries was too much. They swarmed out in anything that would float. Somebody told me what was happening and I hurried down to the harbour. The garrison had a machine gun on the point, it had fired furiously at the Allied plane, and I had terrible visions of a revengeful massacre. But when I got there I saw islanders busily hauling in crates not a hundred yards from where the machine gun was. Outside the post stood Antbn and the duty section. Not a shot was fired. "Later that morning Anton summoned me. Of course, I thanked him profusely. He said that he was going to report that several of the crew of the landing craft had been saved by the prompt action of the villagers who had rowed to their help. He must now have a few crates handed back to show as salvage. I was to see to that. The rest would be considered 'sunk and destroyed.' What little hostility remained against him and his men among the villagers disappeared. I remembered one evening, it must have been about a month after that, a group of Austrian soldiers, a little drunk, began to sing down by the harbour. And then suddenly the islanders began to sing as well. In turn. First the Austrians, then the islanders. German and Greek. A Tyrolean carol. Then a _kalamatiano_. It was very strange. In the end they were all singing each other's songs. "But that was the zenith of our small golden age. Somewhere among the Austrian soldiers there must have been a spy. About a week after the singing, a section of German troops was added to Anton's garrison to 'stiffen morale.' He came to me one day like an angry child and said, I have been told I am in danger of becoming a discredit to the Wehrmacht, and I must mend my ways. His troops were forbidden to give food to the islanders, and we saw them far less frequently in the village. In November of that year the Gorgopotamos exploit created a new strain. Fortunately I had been given more credit than I deserved by the villagers for the easiness of the r