The Magus - John Fowles [182]
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�me, and they accepted the stricter situation as well as could be expected." Conchis stopped speaking, then clapped his hands twice. "I should like you to see Anton." "I think I've seen him already." Up on the terrace a petrol engine suddenly sputtered into life. A generator. "No. Anton is dead. You have seen an actor who looks like him. But this is the real Anton. During the war I had a small cin�amera and two reels of film. Which I kept until 1944, when I could get them developed. The quality is very poor." I heard the faint whir of a projector. A beam of light came from above, was adjusted, centred on the screen. A blur, hasty focusing. I saw a handsome young man of about my own age. He was not the one I had seen the week before, though in one feature, the heavy dark eyebrows, they were very similar. But this was unmistakably a wartime officer. He didn't look particularly soft; but more like a Battle of Britain pilot; stylishly insouciant. He was walking down a path beside a high wall, the wall of Hermes Ambelas's house, perhaps. Smiling. He struck a sort of heroic tenor attitude, laughed self-consciously; and abruptly the ten-second sequence was over. In the next he was drinking coffee, playing with a cat at his feet; looked sideways up at the camera, a serious, shy look, as if someone had told him