Roumeli (31 page)

For Russia was the place! Uncle Elias's eyes blazed at the memory. The Russia of the Tsars beckoned them like the promised land. The inhabitants were moody, drunk, rough, a bit mad; but they were Orthodox like the Greeks and very pious; also superstitious, kind-hearted, reckless, gullible and generous. It was no good since the Revolution; you couldn't get into it. In their early heyday, the Kravarites irrupted into the Empire from Poland, after doing the rounds of the Balkans and Eastern Europe; or, striking across the Danube at Rustchuk, they followed the dotted line of Bucarest and Yassy to Czernovits, the easternmost wing-tip of the Hapsburg monarchy (before it was Rumanian and then Russian), at the end of the Carpathians: (that peculiar multi-lingual town that has enriched so many theatres and circuses with comic turns, and, they say, with lifelong child-performers carefully stunted from the cradle with spirits). From here they advanced into Podolia, a Babel world
full of great estates and of the huddling beards and elflocks of the Hasidim. Many took a shorter cut, heading straight for Bessarabia and crossing the Prut and the Dniestr into the Ukraine; no passports then! Here the Black Sea coastline beckoned. They haunted Krim Tartary and the Sea of Azov, and thrust on to the Caucasus, pausing on the way among the Greek communities of the ports: Odessa, Taganrog, Mariupol, Rostov-on-the-Don. Farther south, scattered across the Caucasus between the shores of the Black Sea and the Caspian, were whole villages of Lazi; others proliferated near Trebizond in Asia Minor, all speaking Greek. “You couldn't understand much,” Uncle Elias said, “but it was Greek all right. They'd been there since the time of
Megaléxandros
—what do I know? Perhaps even earlier than Alexander....” Sometimes they would swerve north to Kiev, Smolensk, Moscow, St. Petersburg and the shores of the Baltic. Great cities loomed and churches, castles, palaces, avenues and bridges with many spans....Carriages with six horses...! Cavalry all in white with breastplates and helmets...! Many struck east to Kazan, Perm and Omsk....What rivers! the Dniepr, the Don, the Volga! Uncle Elias conjured up oceans of wheat, forests, mountains, horses—hundreds galloping together—huge herds of sheep and cattle, wide extents of snow; Cossacks, barges, nomads, turbans, caravans of gypsies and slant-eyed men in giant fur hats dressed all in sheepskin: “you could smell them a mile off.” Some wanderers stayed away for years. A few left their interim-hoards with Greek traders in Taganrog or Rostov while they plunged farther east, recovered them on their way home and worked their passages to Constantinople and Piraeus on steamers and sailing ships. Back at last in the Aetolian thorpes that hovered round us in the dark, their deceptive tatters, and perhaps their hollow staves, yielded their lucre: a chinking shower of northern and transpontine gold from a dozen vanished mints: dinars, levas, sovereigns, piastres, lei, pengös, thalers, zlotys and roubles
stamped with the heads of Hapsburgs, Obrenovitches, Karageorgevitches, Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, Hohenzollerns and Romanoffs: the crown of St. Stephen, St. George's charger, rampant lions, and a whole metallic flight of single-and double-headed eagles emblematic of a world as remote as the Heptarchy.

“Barba Elia,” I asked. “What is the farthest that any of them got?”

“A few,” he said, “used to push on to Siberia. It was all right in summer, but the snow in winter!
Po! Po!
...Early snow was a blessing, mind you.”

“Why?”

“They could track hares and bang them on the head.” A tap with his pipe stem between fingers upheld in a V demonstrated a stick striking a snowbound hare between the ears. “But later it was their enemy. You see, it didn't look right for them to wrap up too warm. Bad for trade. And there were wolves; not small packs like ours, but whole troops. One of our people from the village of Klépa over there,” he pointed through the window at the dark, “perished in the snow a few miles outside Vladivostok. Frozen stiff as a plank, the ill-fated one, all that was left of him.”

This journey, farther-flung than Marco Polo's mission to Kubla Khan, was almost too much to take in. When did it happen? “Oh, a long time ago. It was during the war.” Which war? The Great War? Or
ta Valkánika
? “No. Earlier. When the Russians were fighting the Japanese....”

The old man smoked in silence as though he were scrutinizing these remote events; and we marvelled by proxy. The chill of Manchuria had broken in to our southern lamplight. Oddly venerable all of a sudden, he towered over the rest of us: the last survivor of a race of lonely skirmishers that for generations had invaded kingdoms and looted empires under the flag of General Cuckoo.

More cheerful thoughts soon routed the pensive moment.
The gullibility of the Russians woke fond memories: you could steal a bone off a dog and sell it to its master as the shank of St. Barnabas, pick up a bit of firewood and auction it as the True Cross. A long beard and hair down the back, worn with some religious emblem, would turn the wearer into a minor prophet and loosen a tinkling cataract of charity. Love potions made of flour and pepper, remedies for barrenness, charms against bad crops or the Eye, all fetched good prices, especially if they were administered with an incantation. They had a deep trust in magic. (I privately wondered how they compared to similar beliefs in remote parts of Greece.)

“A fellow-villager of mine called Luke was very good at this. He knocked on the door of a lonely farmhouse in the Ukraine where he had heard that the farmer's wife wanted children. He declared that he was
Grtzki
and
Pravoslavnik
—Greek and Orthodox—and knew how to make the barren fertile. ‘This is a holy house,' he said. ‘A silver cross is buried here.' The farmer's wife asked what he meant. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘a silver cross. I can feel it.' Luke began to wander about the room with his eyes shut and his hands held out like a sleep-walker. ‘It's here!' he cried, pointing to the floor. The wife fetched a knife and dug into the earthen floor at the spot he was pointing to, and there was a little tin cross; Luke had slipped in and buried it early that morning while she was feeding the farm animals. After this she believed everything Luke said. She looked on him as a saint. He sold her a charm made of some rubbish, then asked her if she would like twin boys, which doubled the price. Overcome with gratitude, she kissed his hand: she would give him anything he asked for. Well!...She had big blue eyes, plump as a partridge. The scoundrel stayed there all the afternoon, and at the end of it she pulled the eiderdown off the bed and gave it to him. He set off with it over his shoulder. He'd only gone a couple of miles when he saw a horseman galloping after him; the husband! Luke sat down on a tree stump and
waited. ‘What's this heap of lies you've been telling my wife?' the husband thundered. ‘Give me back that eiderdown!' ‘If I've been telling lies,' Luke said with dignity, ‘may that eiderdown burst into flames!' The husband seized it in silence and set off home at a gallop. It was beginning to get dark. All of a sudden the horseman stopped dead and Luke saw a great flame and smoke coming out of the eiderdown! The farmer threw it away in terror and, galloping back, dismounted quaking all over and fell on his knees begging forgiveness. He made Luke mount behind him and took him back to the farm and loaded him with gold. He asked him to stay for a month, a year, for ever. But off he set next morning, a much richer man.” Uncle Elias was shaking with silent laughter at the recollection. Everyone asked how it had all come about.

“When he saw the husband riding towards him,” Uncle Elias said, “he lit one of these,” he held up a bit of the fungus he used as tinder for his flint and steel, “and slipped it inside the quilting. The wind soon saw to the rest.

“But that wasn't the end of it. A twelvemonth later, on his way back westward after many travels, Luke lost his way on a plain one night. It was pitch dark; no moon. He found a barn, went in and slept on the straw. When day came, there, in the yard, was the farmer! Luke had come back to the same place by mistake! ‘I'll catch it,' he thought. ‘If he sees me I'll have to eat wood!
Aiee!
' He tried to slink off; but the farmer caught sight of him. ‘Holy Virgin, now I'm for it!' thought Luke. But the farmer ran up and clasped him in his arms and covered him with kisses. ‘My benefactor!' he kept shouting. He led Luke indoors. There was the farmer's wife weeping tears of joy and there, in the cradle, were two splendid boys! They loaded him up with money all over again; slaughtered a sucking pig, opened the best wine. In a couple of hours, the farmer was dead drunk and snoring on the floor. The twins were fast asleep in their cradle, only Luke and the farmer's wife were awake.
So...” Uncle Elias broke off. His shoulders and his hands lifted and widened palm upwards; then his hands, as though he were ill-resigned to the thought of these ancient backslidings, fell limp between his knees. His snowy head shook and his tongue clicked slowly and sorrowfully in a mock disapprobation which, as he looked up, also embraced the hilarity he had unleashed in the taverna. He turned up the wick and peered round at the heightening chiaroscuro of our joyful masks.

“No danger,” someone said, “of the farmer, when he got older, going shorthanded at haymaking.”

“Shocking doings,” the old man resumed, as his own expanding smile brought an infinity of sharpened wrinkles into play once more. “Charis and Panos from Pokista were even worse.
Mí rotáte, paidiá!
Don't ask me, children!” When we did, he settled back comfortably.

“It was the custom of Charis,” he said, “to arrive in a Russian village carrying Panos on his back—Panos was the lighter of the two—then he set him down under a tree and knelt beside him wringing his hands and weeping bitterly. A crowd would gather and ask what was wrong. Then Charis said: ‘My poor brother is dying!'—and Panos really looked like it, all grey in the face, with hollow cheeks and glazed eyes—like this.” Uncle Elias's own features for a second mimicked a moribund rictus of alarming verisimilitude and then sprang as abruptly back to normal—“‘Here we are,' he would moan—‘
Grtzki! Pravoslavnik!
—thousands of miles from home!' All their hearts melted. They would be taken into someone's house and that night, Panos would die.”

“Die?”

“Die. Some of the old ones had the secret. He could stop his breathing, turn white and cold: everyone would have said a corpse. They laid him out, put a clean suit of clothes on him, covered him with flowers, dug the grave and, as the custom is, all the village would contribute to a collection for the family;
that is to say, for Charis; they filled his hat with roubles as he wept and mourned beside the bier. Charis explained that, in Greece, only the family must attend the vigil. So, the night before the funeral, they left him alone there lamenting. When the village was asleep, he gave the dead man a shake, and Panos sat up scattering the flowers and stepped from the candles. Then, hop! they were out of the window and away over the steppe with a new suit and a hat full of cash to the good! After a hundred versts or so, on the outskirts of a new village, Panos climbed on Charis's back again and they headed for the market place...They were very fond of Russia.”

Our response was noisy. When it had died down, the tavern-keeper said, “Travel broadens the mind.”

“That's true,” Uncle Elias agreed. “You see strange places and strange men. But,” he said, standing up with a sigh and picking up his stick and standing with hands joined over the handle, “it's a young man's game. Rain...wind...snow...dogs...wolves...wicked men...Lent was a bad time....”

The rigours of fasting at certain periods in the Eastern Calendar whittle the intake down to a drastic minimum. The piety of the Russians must have reduced free meals to almost nothing.

I cheerfully suggested that there were always those hen-coops as a last resort. He looked at me with an expression of a genuine shock that was echoed by all the rest. “The hen-coops? You don't imagine that our villagers would eat meat during the Great Fast?
Mnístite mou, Kyrie!
” He crossed himself as though to aroint the heathenish thought and then covered his white locks with his leopard-skin cap. “Forgive me, Lord!” I had put my foot in it again. The eyes of the company, suddenly all aimed at me, held no trace of censure; merely the kind, sad smiles that an artless Hottentot might elicit among missionaries.

“I wonder what they thought about it when they found out.” The hunchback's question halted the general move to the door.

“Who?”

“Why, the Russians, when they saw the room was empty next day.”

Uncle Elias halted in the threshold; his face, lit from below, lengthened in thought. “Who knows?” A possible solution struck him, and the long countenance dispersed in cheerful fragments. The end of his stick rose from the floor and twirled in a swift corkscrew till it touched the centre beam of the ceiling. “They probably thought they had been plucked into paradise, like my patron saint, the great prophet Elias.” Elias is the Greek for Elijah, whose chapels, as successor to Helios Apollo, are always raised on hilltops on the way to Heaven. “They would believe anything.”

There was another access of hilarity. Uncle Elias left us with a wide and fluttering wave of the hand—“Goodnight, boys”—and vanished into the dark.

 

[1]
Mángas, Koutsavákis, Tramboükos, Rebétís, Mortis, Dervísis
—a dervish!—and
Daïs
, though this is more an out-and-out tough—there are many words with roughly the same general meaning, each supplying a different nuance.

[2]
The head of St. Andrew, smitten from the apostle's crucified trunk in the reign of Claudius, has just returned to Patras, after five centuries' sojourn in his brother's famous cathedral in Rome; sent as a token of goodwill to the Greek Orthodox Church by Pope Paul V. In 1461, eight years after the fall of Byzantium, Thomas Palaeologue, Despot of the Peloponnese and brother of the last emperor, translated the famous relic to Rome to save it from the advancing army of Mehmet II; there he presented it to Pius II Piccolomini; Aeneas Silvius himself. The description of the renaissance splendour of the ceremony in the fields between Rome and Tivoli is one of the most striking passages in the memoirs of the great humanist pope.