John Fowles - The Magus

I knew it was acting, but it was magnificent acting. It came out harsh as fire, more a diabolical howl than anything else, but electrifying, right from the very inmost core.

It jagged into the colonel like a rowel of a spur. He must have understood Greek. He spun round like a steel spring. In three strides he was in front of the Cretan and had delivered a savage smashing slap across his face. It knocked the man’s head sideways, but he straightened up at once. Again it shocked me almost as if I was the one hit. The beating-up, the bloody arm could be faked, but not that blow.

Lower down the path they came dragging the other man out of the bushes. He could not stand and they were pulling him by the arms. They dropped him in midpath and he lay on his side, groaning. The sergeant went down, took a water bottle from one of the soldiers and poured it over his face. The man made an attempt to stand. The sergeant said something and the original guards hauled him to his feet.

The colonel spoke.

The soldiers split into two sections, the prisoners in the middle, and began to move off. In under a minute the last back disappeared. I was alone with my two guards, the colonel and the lieutenant.

The colonel came up to me. His face had a basilisk coldness. He spoke in a punctiliously overdistinct English.

“It. Is. Not. Ended.”

There was just the trace of a humorless smile on his face; and more than a trace of menace. As if he meant something more than that there was a sequel to this scene; but that the whole Nazi Weltanschauung would one day be resurrected and realized. He was an impressively iron man. As soon as he spoke he turned and began to follow the soldiers down the path. The lieutenant followed him. I called out.

“What isn’t ended?”

But there was no reply. The two dark figures, the taller limping, disappeared between the pale, soft walls of the tamarisk. I turned to my guards.

“What now?”

For answer I found myself jerked forward and then back, and so forced to sit. There were a ridiculous few moments of struggle, which they easily won. A minute later they had roped my ankles together tightly, then hoisted me back against a boulder, so that I had support for my back. The younger soldier felt in his tunic top pocket and tossed me down three cigarettes. In the flare of the match I lit I looked at them. They were rather cheap looking. Along each one was printed in red, between little black swastikas, the words Leipzig dankt euch . The one I smoked tasted very stale, at least ten years old, as if they had been overthorough and actually used cigarettes from some war-issue tin. In 1943 it would have tasted fresh.

I made attempt after attempt to speak with them. In English, then in my exiguous German; French, Greek. But they sat stolidly opposite me, on the other side of the path. They hardly spoke ten words to each other; and were obviously under orders not to speak to me.

I had looked at my watch when they first tied me. It had said twelve thirty-five. Now it was one thirty. Somewhere on the north coast of the island, a mile or two west of the school, I heard the first faint pump of an engine. It sounded like the diesel of a large coastal caïque. The cast had re-embarked. As soon as they heard it, the two men stood up. The elder one held something up, a table knife. He put it down where he had been sitting. Then without a word they started to walk away, away from the north coast, up the path.

As soon as I was sure they had gone I crawled over the stones to where they had left the knife. It was blunt, the rope was new, and I wasn’t free for another exasperating twenty minutes.

I climbed back to the ridge, to where I could look down over the south side of the island. Of course it was quiet, serene, a landscape tilted to the stars, an Aegean island lying in its classical nocturnal peace. But as I went back down to the school, I could still hear, miles from the island by then, the sound of a caïque on its way back to Athens.

Morning school began at seven, so I had had less than five hours’ sleep when I appeared in class. It was ugly weather, too, without wind, remorselessly hot and stagnant. All the color was burnt out of the land, what few remaining greens there were looked tired, defeated. Processional caterpillars had massacred the pines; the oleander flowers were brown at the edges. Only the sea lived, and I did not begin to think coherently until school was over at noon and I could plunge into the water and lie in its blue relief.

One thing had occurred to me during the morning. Except for the main actors, almost all the German “soldiers” had looked very young—between' eighteen and twenty. It was the beginning of July; the German and the Greek university terms would probably be over. If Conchis really had some connection with film producing he could probably have got German students to come easily enough—to work for a few days for him and then holiday in Greece. What I could not believe was that having got them to Greece he would use them only once. More sadism was, as the colonel warned, to come.

But I had cooled down enough to know that I wasn’t going to write the angry and sarcastic letter I had been phrasing on the way down from the ridge. Conchis had the enormous advantage of giving the entertainment—and such entertainment; it seemed ridiculous to get angry about the way the thing was done when the staggering fact was that the thing had been done.

I floated on my back with my arms out and my eyes shut, crucified in the water. A course of action: the paramount thing was that I should go on seeing Julie. I would make that absolutely clear to her over the weekend; if it meant ruining the masque, so much the worse for the masque; and if it meant going on with the masque, and finding myself in the middle of such unpleasant entertainments as the one on the ridge, so much the worse for me.

The post came on the noon boat and was distributed during lunch. I had three letters; one of the rare ones from my uncle in Rhodesia, another with one of the information bulletins sent out by the British Council in Athens; and the third… I knew the handwriting, round, a bit loose, big letters. I slit it. My letter to Alison fell out, unopened. There was nothing else. A few minutes later, back in my room, I put it on an ashtray, still unopened, and burnt it.

The next day was Friday. I had another letter at lunch. It was postmarked Geneva and I had a premonition about its contents, so that I didn’t open it until I had escaped from the dining room.

Geneva, Monday

DEAR NICHOLAS,

I am afraid my presence here will be essential for at least another week. However, I think it almost certain that I shall be back at Bourani by the following weekend. I hope you are enjoying the good weather.

Yours most sincerely,

MAURICE CONCHIS

I felt a bitter plunge of disappointment, of new and different anger with Conchis. The last sentence—when was the weather ever not good in the Aegean in summer?—stung especially. It was a deliberate taunt, a way of saying, I know you can enjoy nothing till I pretend to return. Or perhaps “good weather” was a hint that he knew about my meetings with Julie… and that bad weather was soon to come. I couldn’t believe that he would keep her from me for another week. He must know that I should rush over to Bourani whether he was there or not.

I decided that it was his way of saying, Your move. So I would move.

Soon after two o'clock on Saturday, I was on my way up into the hills. At three, I entered the clump of tamarisk. In the blazing heat—the weather remained windless, stagnant—it was difficult to believe that what I had seen had happened. But there were two or three recently broken twigs and branches; and where the “prisoner” had dived away there were several overturned stones, their bottoms stained ruddy from the island earth; and more broken sprays of tamarisk. A little higher I picked up several screwed-out cigarette ends. One was only half-smoked and had the beginnings of the same phrase: Leipzig da —