‘I raised the gun blindly and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened. A click. I pressed it again. And again, an empty click.
‘I turned and looked round. Wimmel and my two guards were standing thirty feet or so away, watching. The hostages suddenly began to call. They thought I had lost the will to shoot. I turned back and tried once more. Again, nothing. I turned to the colonel, and gestured ‘with the gun, to show that it would not fire. I felt faint in the heat. Nausea. Yet unable to faint.
‘He said, “Is something wrong?”
‘I answered, “The gun will not fire.”
‘ “It is a Schmeisser. An excellent weapon.”
‘ “I have tried three times.’’
‘ “It will not fire because it is not loaded. It is strictly forbidden for the civilian population to possess loaded weapons.”
‘I stared at him, then at the gun. Still not understanding. The hostages were silent again.
‘I said, very helplessly, “How can I kill them?”
‘He smiled, a smile as thin as a sabre-slash. Then he said, “I am waiting.”
‘I understood then. I was to club them to death. I understood many things. His real self, his real position. And from that came the realization that he was mad, and that he was therefore innocent, as all mad people, even the most cruel, are innocent. He was what life could do if it wanted – an extreme possibility made hideously mind and flesh. Perhaps that was why he could impose himself so strongly, like a black divinity. For there was something superhuman in the spell he cast. And therefore the real evil, the real monstrosity in the situation lay in the other Germans, those less-than-mad lieutenants and corporals and privates who stood silently there watching this exchange.
‘I walked towards him. The two guards thought I was going to attack him because they sharply raised their guns. But he said something to them and stood perfectly still. I stopped some six feet from him. We stared at each other.
‘“I beg you in the name of European civilization to stop this barbarity.”
‘ “And I command you to continue this punishment.”
‘Without looking down he said, “Refusal to carry out this order will result in your own immediate execution.”
‘I walked back over the dry earth to that gate. I stood in front of those two men. I was going to say to the one who seemed capable of understanding that I had no choice, I must do this terrible thing to him. But I left a fatal pause of a second to elapse. Perhaps because I realized, close to him, what had happened to his mouth. It had been burnt, not simply bludgeoned or kicked. I remembered that man with the iron stake, the electric fire. They had broken in his teeth and branded his tongue, burnt his tongue right down to the roots with red-hot iron. That word he shouted must finally have driven them beyond endurance. And in those astounding five seconds, the most momentous of my life, I understood this guerilla. I mean that I understood far better than he did himself what he was. He helped me. He managed to stretch his head towards me and say the word he could not say. It was almost not a sound, but a contortion in his throat, a five-syllabled choking. But once again, one last time, it was unmistakably that word. And the word was in his eyes, in his being, totally in his being. What did Christ say on the cross? Why hast thou forsaken me? What this man said was something far less sympathetic, far less pitiful, even far less human, but far profounder. He spoke out of a world the very opposite of mine. In mine life had no price. It was so valuable that it was literally priceless. In his, only one thing had that quality of pricelessness. It was
eleutheria:
freedom. He was the immalleable, the essence, the beyond reason, beyond logic, beyond civilization, beyond history. He was not God, because there is no God we can know. But he was a proof that there is a God that we can never know. He was the final right to deny. To be free to choose. He, or what manifested itself through him, even included the insane Wimmel, the despicable German and Austrian troops. He was every freedom, from the very worst to the very best. The freedom to desert on the battlefield of Neuve Chapelle. The freedom to confront a primitive God at Seidevarre. The freedom to disembowel peasant girls and castrate with wire-cutters. He was something that passed beyond morality but sprang out of the very essence of things -that comprehended all, the freedom to do all, and stood against only one thing – the prohibition not to do all.
‘All this takes many words to say to you. And I have said nothing about how I felt this immalleability, this refusal to cohere, was essentially Greek. That is, I finally assumed my Greekness. All I saw I saw in a matter of seconds, perhaps not in time at all. Saw that I was the only person left in that square who had the freedom left to choose, and that the annunciation and defence of that freedom was more important than common sense, self-preservation, yes, than my own life, than the lives of the eighty hostages. Again and again, since then, those eighty men have risen in the night and accused me. You must remember that I was certain I was going to die too. But all I have to set against their crucified faces are those few transcendent seconds of knowledge. But knowledge like a white heat. My reason has repeatedly told me I was wrong. Yet my total being still tells me I was right.
‘I stood there perhaps fifteen seconds – I could not tell you, time means nothing in such situations – and then I dropped the gun and stepped beside the guerilla leader. I saw the colonel watching me, and I said, for him and so also for the remnant of a man beside me to hear, the one word that remained to be said.
‘Somewhere beyond Wimmel I saw Anton moving, walking quickly towards him. But it was too late. The colonel spoke, the submachine-guns flashed and I closed my eyes at exactly the moment the first bullets hit me.’
54
He leant forward, after a long silence, and turned up the lamp; then stared at me. Deep in him I sensed something was finally moved; but after a moment the stare became its old, dry self.
‘The disadvantage of our new drama is that in your role you do not know what you can believe and what you cannot. There is no one on the island who was in the square. But many can confirm for you every other incident I have told you.’
I thought of the scene on the central ridge; by not being insertible in the real story, it verified. Not that I doubted Conchis; I knew I had been listening to the history of events that happened; that in the story of his life he had saved the certain truth to the end.
‘After you were shot?’
‘I was hit and I fell and I knew no more because I fainted. I believe I heard the uproar from the hostages before darkness came. And possibly that saved me. I imagine the men firing were distracted. Other orders were being given to fire at the hostages. I am told that half an hour later, when the villagers were allowed to wail over their dead, I was found lying in a pool of blood at the feet of the guerillas. I was found by my housekeeper Soula – before the days of Maria – and Hermes. “When they moved me I showed faint signs of life. They carried me home and hid me in Soula’s room. Patarescu came and looked after me.’
‘Patarescu?’
‘Patarescu.’ I tried to read his look; understood, by something in it, that he fully admitted that guilt, and did not consider it a guilt; and that he was prepared to justify it if I should press for the truth.
‘The colonel?’
‘By the end of the war he was wanted for countless atrocities. Several of them showed the same feature. An apparent reprieve at the last moment – which turned out to be a mere prolongation of the agony for the hostages. The War Crimes Commission have done their best. But he is in South America. Or Cairo, perhaps.’
‘And Anton?’
‘Anton believed that I had been killed. My servants let no one but Patarescu into the secret. I was buried. Or rather an empty coffin was buried. Wimmel left the island that same afternoon, leaving Anton in the middle of all the carnage of flesh, to say nothing of that of the good relations he had established. He must have spent all evening, perhaps night, writing a detailed report of the whole incident. He typed it himself – seven copies. He stated that fact in the report. I presume they were all he could get on the typewriter at one time. He hid nothing and excused no one, least of all himself. I will show you, in a moment.’
The Negro came across the gravel and began to dismantle the screen. Upstairs I could hear movements.
‘What happened to him?’
‘Two days later his body was found under the wall of the village school, where the ground was already dark with blood. He had shot himself. It was an act of contrition, of course, and he wanted the villagers to know. The Germans hushed the matter up. Not long afterwards the garrison was changed. The report explains that.’
‘What happened to all the copies?’
‘One was given to Hermes by Anton himself the next day, and he was asked to give it to the first of my foreign friends to inquire for me after the war. Another was given to one of the village priests with the same instructions. Another was left on his desk when he shot himself. It was open – no doubt for all his men and the German High Command to read. Three copies completely disappeared. Probably they were sent to relations or friends in Germany. They may have been intercepted. We shall never know now. And the last copy turned up after the war. It was sent to Athens, to one of the newspapers, with a small sum of money. For charity. A Viennese postmark. Plainly he gave a copy to one of his men.’
‘It was published?’
‘Yes. Certain parts of it.’
‘Was he buried here?’
‘His family cemetery – near Leipzig.’
Those cigarettes.
‘And the villagers never knew that you had the choice?’
‘The report came out. Some believe it, some do not. Of course I have seen that no helpless dependants of the hostages suffered financially.’
‘And the guerillas – did you ever find out about them?’
‘The cousin and the other man – yes, we know their names. There is a monument to them in the village cemetery. But their leader … I had his life investigated. Before the war he spent six years in prison. On one occasion for murder – a
crime passionnel.
On two or three others for violence and larceny. He was generally believed in Crete to have been involved in at least four other murders. One was particularly savage. He was on the run when the Germans invaded. Then he performed a number of wild exploits in the Southern Peloponnesus. He seems to have belonged to no organized resistance group, but to have roamed about killing and robbing. In at least two proven cases, not Germans, but other Greeks. We traced several men who had fought beside him. Some of them said they had been frightened of him, others evidently admired his courage, but not much else. I found an old farmer in the Mani who had sheltered him several times. And he said,
Kakourgos, ma Ellenas.
A bad man, but a Greek. I keep that as his epitaph.’
A silence fell between us.
‘Those years must have strained your philosophy. The smile.’
‘On the contrary. That experience made me fully realize what humour is. It is a manifestation of freedom. It is because there is freedom that there is the smile. Only a totally predetermined universe could be without it. In the end it is only by becoming the victim that one escapes the ultimate joke – which is precisely to discover that by constantly slipping away one has slipped away. One exists no more, one is no longer free. That is what the great majority of our fellow-men have always to discover. And will have always to discover.’ He turned to the file. ‘But let me finish by showing you the report that Anton wrote.’
I saw a thin stitched sheaf of paper. A title-page:
Bericht über die von deutschen
Besetzsungstruppen unmenschliche Grausamkeiten
…
‘There is an English translation at the back.’
I turned to it, and read:
Report of the inhuman atrocities committed by German Occupation troops under the command of Colonel Dietrich Wimmel on the island of Phraxos between September 30th and October 2nd, 1943.
I turned a page.
On the morning of September 29th, 1943, four soldiers of No. 10 Observation-post, Argolis Command, situated on the cape known as Bourani on the south coast of the island of Phraxos, being off duty, were given permission to swim. At 12.45 …
Conchis spoke. ‘Read the last paragraph.’
I swear by God and by all that is sacred to me that the above events have been exactly and truthfully described. I observed them all with my own eyes and I did not intervene. For this reason I condemn myself to death.
I looked up. ‘A good German.’
‘No. Unless you think suicide is good. It is not. Despair is a disease, and as evil as Wimmel’s disease.’ I suddenly remembered Blake -what was it, ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.’ A text I had once often used to seduce – myself as well as others. Conchis went on. ‘You must make up your mind, Nicholas. Either you enlist under the
kapetan,
that murderer who knew only one word, but the only word, or you enlist under Anton. You watch and you despair. Or you despair and you watch. In the first case, you commit physical suicide; in the second, moral.’
‘I can still feel pity for him.’
‘You
can.
But ought you to?’
I was thinking of Alison, and I knew I had no choice. I felt pity for her as I felt pity for that unknown German’s face on a few feet of flickering film. And perhaps an admiration, that admiration which is really envy of those who have gone farther along one’s own road: they had both despaired enough to watch no more. While mine was the moral suicide.
I said, ‘Yes. He couldn’t help himself
‘Then you are sick. You live by death. Not by life.’
‘That’s a matter of opinion.’
‘No. Of conviction. Because the event I have told you is the only European story. It is what Europe is. A Colonel Wimmel. A rebel without a name. An Anton torn between them, killing himself when it is too late. Like a child.’
‘Perhaps I have no choice.’