Roumeli (28 page)

“
Straví
.”

“And?”

“
Kaníki
.”

“Another?”

“
Dervó?
”

“And another?”

“
Grígoro
.”

“One more?”

“
Matsoúka
.”

“One last one?”

I was stumped. “You can't have it till you remember,” the old man said. At last it came.

“
Láoussa!
”

He handed it over amid applause and laughter. I set off, followed by cries of well-wishing and invitations to return; followed also by the injunction to stílianize in the next sielo as it was stuffed with boliars and shoreftis.

The village of Platanos had turned up trumps. How vain the
kaphedzi
's warning had proved! No boliarization there. In fact, I might almost be said to have boliarized them, as I hadn't been allowed to pay a single lepta. “It's paid for,” they said. “Your turn when we come to England,” or “Put that cash away, Mihali. It has no currency here....”

One of them accompanied me out of the village to put me on my way. The poverty-stricken ranges soared reproachfully all round....Something my companion said deflected our talk from secret languages. We had been speaking of Father Andrew.

“Yes,” he said, “he's even taller than his brother—and he was enormous. Did you never see him? Archbishop Damaskinos?”

I halted, amazed. How could one relate our tattered and delightful drinking companion to the gigantic figure of the famous Archbishop? A vision of that beetling titan, robed in the canonicals of the Archbishopric of Athens and the Primacy of all Greece, shot through my brain; his breast was ablaze with pectoral ornaments, his huge hand grasped a pastoral staff, and the veils which, on state occasions, are draped from an orthodox dignitary's headgear, fluttered about his enormous trunk like black plasma. He was vested in the temporal as well as the spiritual leadership of the country; Regent of Greece until the return of King George II, it was as a Head of State that he
negotiated with Churchill, Eden and Macmillan. Once, on a rainy morning in London, when the Regent was there on a state visit, I went to see him celebrate High Mass in the Greek Cathedral in Moscow Road. Under a globular gold tiara a foot high and armed with a crosier glittering with gems and twisting serpents, the majestic colossus intoned the liturgy in a voice of modulated thunder: the thurible, as he censed the iconostasis and the congregation, was reduced by his tremendous size to a toy. At the end of the service, he emerged into the drizzle and the crash of presented arms and an escort of motor-cyclists and a Rolls Royce a-glitter with gold-fringed pennants wafted him back to Grosvenor Square....

The slight coarseness of feature of the huge and controversial Archbishop—the “wily mediaeval prelate” of Churchill's famous phrase—was no match, I thought, for the mandarin looks of his humbler brother. Haloed by the spun silver of his hair and beard, those noble and transparent features were, plainly, proof against any Dionysiac onslaught and safe from the stigmata of power.

My companion left me on the brow of the gorge. A canyon yawned and the downhill path between the boulders and black-berry clumps and the occasional tufts of bracken must have been a foaming torrent when the snow melted. Now it was only to be picked out from the havoc all round by a hardly-discernible pallor which the hoofs of goats and pack animals had chipped on the rocks' surface and by the precious scattered clues of their droppings. Paths like this, even with half a gallon of midday wine raging in the blood-stream, are best descended at speed: leaping helter-skelter from rock to rock and bouncing on one foot to land with the other on the next boulder in a breakneck concatenation of parabolas. The rate of such descents and the
fixity of one's gaze, blinded to all but the random staircase underfoot, lands one at the end of them—panting, with temples pounding, salty-throated and glittering with sweat—in a world that the violent interval has utterly transformed. I slowed up in the nethermost depths among bleached stones by a clump of trees. Deep-probing sunbeams revealed a thread of water snaking from a cranny of rock and expanding for a foot or two among fine pebbles and cress, then trickling away under the trees. Here, sheltered by an oleander, with his head on a haversack, his beret over his eyes and the red and blue ribbon of the Greek Military Cross on the breast of his battledress, a second-lieutenant reclined with his combat-booted ankles crossed, the image of young martial repose. But he wasn't asleep: one eyelid and an eyebrow like a rook's feather were lifted to take in the newcomer.

“I saw you coming down,” he said with a smile. “You look thirsty. It's remarkable water.”

I swallowed long draughts of this wonderful liquid, chewing it as a horse does then letting it sink to its goal like an icicle.

“Didn't I tell you?” he said, looking pleased as I extolled it. “From Crete?” he added, pointing to my old knapsack: those faded yellow and scarlet stripes, woven years ago in Anoyeia on the slope at Mt. Ida, betrayed its origin. I explained myself and we exchanged names and formal handshakes. I took one of his offered cigarettes and lay under the next oleander, propping my feet on a stone to tip the blood into a more level irrigation and watched the smoke climb to the lanceolate green criss-cross that a month or two would deck with pink flowers. I fell asleep half-way through the delicious Papastratos No. 1; but only an inch below the surface, subliminally floating and still aware of the afternoon, the leaves, the lattice of their shade and the trickling water.

The springs and wells parsimoniously scattered about the mountains leave memories of their blessings for years. Occasional waterfalls, plunging down the rocks and opening private rainbows across a soaking jungle of leaves, seem almost immoral in their spendthrift opulence. Sometimes they drop to a forgotten mill that laces the freshness with a whiff of weeds and toadstools and the waterlogged timber of mute wheels. The hollow dens of Cyclopes yawn among the rocks under ilex-shade, the gape of their lower jaws barred by stones and thorns to form a goat-fold; the water spills from the limestone through a funnel of twisted leaf and the hollowed tree trunk that catches it is tressed inside with dark green weeds. The rocks are mattressed by a thousand years' accumulation of pellets riddled by the slots of cloven feet; a spiralling goat's horn lies there, moulted from a skull stuck on a branch to ward off the Eye: the roving bane that can fascinate the ewes and rob them of their milk and their kids and the rams of their vigour. Some of these springs emerge in the darkness of the caves themselves at the end of long climbs into the heart of a mountain-range. Others drip in high clefts dedicated to the Assumption, St. Antony of the Desert or the Prophet Elijah to quench the thirst of an extinct line of hermits.

Giant plane trees often mark their issue; without them, neither the trees nor the surrounding houses would have sprung up, and the villagers sitting in the shade and the drinking mules would never have assembled. How miraculous, on the way down from baking watersheds, seems the green froth nourished by rock-borne springs! The water is husbanded in conduits, bean tendrils steal up flimsy obelisks of cane, medlar, lemon and orange trees form cool undercrofts. Pumpkins scatter the channelled soil, gourd stems climb the trunks and the branches to hang dappled green globes in the penumbra, goitrous with the damp. The wells that dive through the floors of lonely houses fill the cisterns with acoustics that capture the clank and
splash of the bucket and send the rumour of the upper world booming about the vaulted dark. Sometimes thirst turns mediocre water into good: a gulp of cloudy liquid in the wilderness of the Deep Mani, for instance, or brackish draughts on a gasping Cretan shore. Round the mouths of some old wells, castles and monasteries fall to bits. Rope-grooves fret the coping and the roots of fig trees prise the steyning askew. After the lizards and kestrels and the Herculean mountains all round, it is hard, looking down, to focus the gloom of those cylinders. Small as a coin at the end of a tufted descending mile of cobwebs and as though seen through a telescope the wrong way, a disc of reflected sky looks back stamped with one's own craning torso. After seconds of waiting a dropped pebble fractures this medallion with the report of a cork drawn in the Antipodes and the splashing echoes mount as faintly as the voices of the hamadryads calling to Hylas. Into these dark and plunging tunnels, in a score of fairy stories, are dropped the goblets and rings and swords whose recovery, after years of trouble, settles a princely identity, a claim to a kingdom or reconciles lovers long estranged or spell-bound.

Of so polar a chill is one blue dragon's eye of water half-way up Mt. Olympus that a stranger tempted to swim across it climbs back into the heat of August frozen to the bone. Running springs are the surest talismans against the noonday. Nereids are said to make some of them perilous for shepherds and many are heavy with fable. There is a spring between Mt. Ida and the White Mountains that has the attribute, like many fountains in myths, of bestowing immortality. During the war we would halt here and, leaning our guns against the trunk of an arbutus, lie flat, lower our turbanned heads and drink deep and long. Moments of tranquillity and benediction! But better than all of them today seemed this legendless Aetolian trickle. I could hear each drop falling like the note of a celesta the other side of a brittle wall of sleep.

I watched the second-lieutenant peeling an apple fast and deftly so that the skin fell off in an unbroken coil. He cut it up and offered a neat slice on the tip of a silver pen-knife.

“It's from Naoussa,” he said, “in Macedonia. The best in Greece.” He was stationed in Perista, the village for which I, too, was heading. “You must stay with me,” he said, looking pleased at the prospect of company. “I'm all alone there, just back from leave in Athens. There's a marvellous leg of lamb in here.” He patted his haversack. “A present from a friend in Navpaktos. The woman where I'm billeted will roast it, all wrapped up in grease-paper so that none of the goodness gets out! She's an ace; she pokes whole garlic cloves
right down
between the meat and the bone! You'll see....”

Marko, the second-lieutenant, a lithe, good-looking Athenian with shining black hair, gave off sparks of enjoyment and energy even in repose. He was an epicure and a hedonist and, as I soon saw, nimble as a lynx on the ascent, which was long and steep. Too young for the war and the occupation, he had grown up in time to get the civil war as a coming-of-age present. Much of it he had spent in precisely the region where his present assignment lay. This valley had been the theatre of dogged and merciless conflict. Marko paused to describe the advance of his company up the slope we were climbing in pursuit of a force of communist guerrillas. His rapid discourse seemed to fill the empty chasm once more with machine-and sub-machine-gun fire and the explosion of grenades and mortar bombs; it peopled the slopes with running and crouching figures and splintered the air with fragments. At a bend in the track where a group of boulders slanted higgledy-piggledy—I think he had been waiting for them—he stopped again.

“It was afternoon, just about now. I was working my way uphill
there
,” he said, “dodging behind those boulders to avoid
bursts of fire coming from that rock by the bracken. It turned into a duel: we were both determined to get each other. I managed to creep within about five yards, with fire coming down in bursts all the way. While the enemy was changing his magazine, I tossed a hand grenade behind his rock, ducked, slipped in a new magazine and waited for him to break cover. Out leaped a khaki figure with his tommy-gun blazing and shouting
Na!
Scullion of the Glückbergs
[10]
in a peculiar high voice. I dropped just in time and fired a whole burst from the ground. The guerrilla let go his gun, stumbled downhill a few paces and lay still—just over there. And do you know”—Marko's voice after a pause had dropped to a lower pitch—“it was a woman! I had thought there was something odd about the voice. And a very good-looking one too, with her hair cut short. She'd stopped the whole burst.
Phoveró itan! Phríki!!
It was horrible, terrible.”

After another pause he went on, “They used to be trained along with the other communist irregulars in enormous camps the other side of the Yugoslav border. That was before Tito broke with Stalin. Some of them fought like dogs. Poor Greece....”

He was amused by my eagerness about the Kravara. “They are a queer lot,” he said, “as bright as they make them. The old ones could tell you a lot.” He gave me a few names.

We came to the top at last and a fresh landscape slid downhill into a further rolling and mountain-girt gulf of country into which I had caught a far-away glimpse from the slopes above Platanos: a bare, mountain-locked, magnificent region. Much of its asperity was tamed and softened by the gold afternoon light. Marko had to call at a house in the outskirts of the village. As he flew up the steps he told me not to be late for the leg of lamb; anyone would tell me where he lived.

There was no comparison between Platanos and Perista; the ragged and dusty look was quite absent. Trellises from opposite eaves reached out to join hands over the slanting pebbles. Shade abounded. A ball came bouncing down a steep wynd and a troop of pretty children flew squealing after it into the lane until the sight of a stranger froze them into a battery of eyes agog with wonder while the ball continued its orphaned career downhill. A small girl was pasturing a goat overhead—on what? It seemed to be grazing on shale—and singing a desperate song to herself about ambushes and bloodshed.

The priest was also a cobbler. He sat cross-legged among the lasts on his doorstep, his mouth full of wooden tacks. His hammer halted in mid-air as he mumbled through the tacks. “What news?—
Tí néa?
—where are you from?
Anglia? Po! Po! Po!—makrya!
A long way.”