John Fowles - The Magus

I calculated: thirteen men, at least half of whom were German. Cost of getting them to Greece, from Athens to the island. Equipment. Training-rehearsing. Cost of getting them off the island, back to Germany. It couldn’t be done under five hundred pounds. And for what? To frighten—or perhaps to impress—one unimportant person. At the same time, now that the first panic had subsided, my attitude changed. This scene was so well organized, so elaborate. I fell under the spell of Conchis the magician again. Frightened, but fascinated; not really wanting it not to have happened as it did; and then there were more footsteps.

Two more men appeared. One was short and slim. He came striding down the path with a taller man behind him. Both had the peaked hats of officers. Eagle badges. The soldiers he passed stood hurriedly, but he made a brisk movement of his hand to put them at ease. He came straight to me. He was obviously an actor who had specialized in German colonel roles; a hard face, a thin mouth; all he lacked were spectacles with oblong lenses and steel frames.

“Hello.”

He did not answer, but looked at me rather as the sergeant, who was now standing stiffly some way behind him, had. The other officer was apparently a lieutenant, an aide. I noticed he had a slight limp; an Italian-looking face, very dark eyebrows, round tanned cheeks; handsome.

“Where’s the producer?”

The colonel took a cigarette case out of his inside pocket and selected a cigarette. The lieutenant reached forward with a light. Beyond them I saw one of the soldiers cross the path with something in loose paper—food of some sort. They were eating.

“I must say you look the part.”

He said one word, carefully pursed in his mouth, spat out like a grape pip.

“ Gut .”

He turned away; said something in German. The sergeant went up the path and came back with a hurricane lamp, which he lit, then set behind me.

The colonel moved up the path to where the sergeant was standing, and I was left staring at the lieutenant. There was something strange in his look, as if he would have liked to tell me something, but couldn’t; searching my face for some answer. His eyes fficked away, and he turned abruptly, though awkwardly, on his heel and rejoined the colonel. I heard low German voices, then the sergeant’s laconic command.

The men stood to, and for some reason I couldn’t understand lined up on both sides of the path, facing inwards, irregularly, not standing to attention, as if waiting for someone to pass. I thought they were going to take me somewhere, I had to pass through them. But I was pulled back by my two guards in line with the others. Only the sergeant and the two officers stood in the center of the path. The lamp threw a circle of light round me. I realized it had a dramatic function.

There was a tense silence. I was cast as a spectator in some way, not as the protagonist. At last I heard more people coming. A different, unmilitary figure came into sight. For a second I thought he was drunk. But then I realized he had his hands tied behind his back; like me, a prisoner. He wore dark trousers, but was bare above the waist. Behind him came two more soldiers. One of them seemed to prod him, and he groaned. As he came closer to me I saw, with a sharp sense that the masque was running out of control, that he was barefoot. His stumbling, ginger walk was real, not acted.

He came abreast of me. A young man, evidently Greek, rather short. His face was atrociously bruised, puffed, the whole of one side covered in blood from a gash near the right eye. He appeared stunned, hardly able to walk. He didn’t notice me until the last moment, when he stopped, looked at me wildly. I had a swift acrid stab of terror, that this really was some village boy they had got hold of and beaten up—not someone to look the part, but be the part. Without warning the soldier behind him jabbed him in the small of the back—something that could not be faked. I saw it, I saw his spasmic jerk forward, and the—or so it sounded—absolutely authentic gasp of pain the jab caused. He stumbled on another five or six yards. Then the colonel spat one word. The guards reached roughly out and brought him to a halt. The three men stood there in the path, facing downhill. The colonel moved down to just in front of me, his lieutenant limping beside him; both backs to me.

Another silence; the panting of the man. Then almost at once came another figure, exactly the same, hands tied behind his back, two soldiers behind him. I knew by then where I was. I was back in 1943, ten years before; I was looking at captured Resistance fighters.

The second man was obviously the kapetan , the leader—heavily built, about forty, some six feet tall. He had one naked arm in a rope sling, a rough bandage covered in blood round his upper arm. It seemed to have been made from the sleeve torn off his shirt; was too thin to staunch the blood. He came down the path towards me; a magnificent Klepht face with a heavy black moustache, an accipitral nose. I had seen such faces once or twice in the Peloponnesus, but I knew where this man came from, because over his forehead he still wore the fringed black headband of the Cretan mountaineer. I could see him standing in some early nineteenth-century print, in folk costume, silver-handled yataghan and pistols in his belt, the noble brigand of the Byronic myth. He was actually wearing what looked like British Army battle-dress trousers, a khaki shirt. And he too was barefoot. But he seemed to refuse to stumble. He was less battered than the other man, perhaps because of the wound.

As he came up level with me, he stopped and then looked past the colonel and the lieutenant straight at me. I understood that he was meant to know me, that I had once known him. It was a look of the most violent loathing. Contempt. At the same time of a raging despair. He said nothing for a moment. Then he hissed in Greek one word.

“ Prodotis .” His lips snarled on the v-sounding demotic Greek delta .

Traitor.

He had great power, he was completely in his role; and in a barely conscious way, as if I sensed that I must be an actor too, I did not come out with another flip remark but took his look and his hatred in silence. For a moment I was the traitor.

He was kicked on, but he turned and gave me one last burning look back across the ten feet of lamplight. Then again that word, as if I might not have heard it the first time.

“ Prodotis .”

As he did so there was a cry, an exclamation. The colonel’s rapped command: Nicht schiessen! My guards gripped me vice tight. The first man had bolted, diving headlong sideways into the tamarisks. His two guards plunged after him, then three or four of the soldiers lining the path. He can’t have got more than ten yards. There was a cry, German words, then a sickening scream of pain and another. The sound of a body being kicked, butt-ended.

At the second cry the lieutenant, who had been standing watching just in front of me, turned and looked past me into the night. I was meant to understand he was revolted by this, by brutality; his other first look at me was explained. The colonel was aware that he had turned away. He gave the lieutenant a quick stare round, flicked a look at the guards holding me, then spoke—in French; so that the guards could not understand.

“ Mon lieutenant, voild pour moi la plus belle musique dans le monde. ”

His French was heavily German; and he gave a sort of mincing lip-grimacing sarcasm to the word musique that explained the situation. He was a stock German sadist; the lieutenant, a stock good German.

The lieutenant seemed about to say something, but suddenly the night was torn open by a tremendous cry. It came from the other man, the noble brigand, from the very depth of his lungs and it must have been heard, if anyone had been awake to hear it, from one side of the island to the other. It was just one word, but the most Greek of all words.