Sometimes, however, as we trudged northward up the eastern side of the Mani, enclosed valleys and the dry zigzag of a torrent bed gave an illusion of hinterland. Vasilio had offered to accompany us to a village further up the coast and had lashed our battered luggage—filled now with clean and beautifully ironed linen and with parting gifts from her family—onto her father’s mule, a great grey raking thing that shouldered all this and two great sacks of corn as though they were stuffed with thistledown.
We had come down from the tower at cockcrow. There was not a trace of sirocco in the early morning air and the wide empty valleys, though just as dry and stony and steep as any we had crossed so far, seemed surprisingly easy going. Letting the animal and our little caravan circle through a winding valley along the ghost of a mule track, I found a short cut between two spurs and was soon looking across another ravine to the towers and walls of Layia: towers and walls that so exactly tallied in texture and colour with the stone-crop of the surrounding hills that it was as if the landscape had shrugged them together into a system of lanes and shot those tall parallelograms into the air on a sudden subterranean impulse.
Once again as I ascended the sunny cobbles it seemed as if all the villagers had fled, until, coming at last to a little square rouga beside the church, I found three old men—like the elders of Alika, the only survivors, one might think—sitting round a wooden table with glasses and wine before them and two cucumbers sliced up like fallen pillars, the pale green drums sparkling with sprinkled rock salt. The leaves of a mulberry tree spread an umbrella of shade and the unwalled eastern side of the little square overhung the sea. The rusting barrels of eighteenth-century swivel guns were prone on the slabs among tall grass. There was something delightful in this little group and the conversation wandered at random on a variety of themes. Such assemblies of old men, sheltering under leaves in all the hill towns of Greece and letting the hours go by to the rhythm of the slow fall of their amber beads, call to mind the scene, on the Scaean Gate of Troy, of Priam conferring with his elders whose fighting days old age had ended, all chirping harmoniously like cicadas on a tree.
It was half-past eight and they had been peacefully enjoying the wine and the morning air since daybreak. My arrival, the courteous chorus of welcome, the stranger’s answer of “Well-found,” and the offer of a chair and a glass, only made a short interruption in their discourse. I sat and listened. The Laconian peninsula lay weightlessly along the eastern horizon and, slightly more substantial, the outline of Elaphonisi—Stag-Island—loomed between us. Wraithlike on the Lybian Sea which expanded southwards far beyond the divider-point capes of Malea and Matapan, hovered Cythera once again, and beyond it, hardly discernible, Anticythera, the last stepping stone to the two stormy western capes of Crete. An old man aimed his finger at the blue waste of water south-west and beyond his grooved and broken fingernail I could just descry two thin fragmentary scratches on the surface of the far-away sky: the summits of the White Mountains and of Mt. Ida; and I thought with homesickness of Cretan friends there, turbaned, black-clad and high-booted figures with their rifles beside them, grazing their shaggy flocks in the sky.
The war, politics and the Cyprus question were mercifully absent from the conversation. It ranged unhurriedly through distant countries, the fall of Byzantium, history, the nature of the equator, shipwrecks, the clouds, condensation of water, Lord Byron, verse forms, the price of oil and wine, the evils of hashish smoking, the excavations of Troy and other ancient sites, salt fish, polar bears, the Arctic circle, and the migration of birds. One of the quails that had alighted there a few years before—1946? 1947? the old man could not remember—had worn an inscribed steel ring round its leg. Disappearing into his house he brought the scrap of paper on which he had copied the inscription. There was no name, but 42, Rue Lenormant, Paris, was roughly traced in Latin characters. He had written there, but no reply had come. The quail he had set on its southward journey once more, thinking it a shame to eat a bird with such august international connections.
The sun shifted during all this chat and just as we were lifting the table a couple of feet to recapture the shade, Joan and Vasilio appeared with the laden mule. After half an hour we prepared to set off.
“Why don’t you all stay? We don’t often see people,” the old men said. “There’s no hurry. We will pass the time together.... Stay for a week....”
“Dia na perasome tin ora...to pass the time....” How often this phrase crops up in Greece! It is the password to hours of enchantment like this morning or to long doldrums of tedium; it poses the whole problem of how to fill in the long gap between now and the grave. Often, from its inception, one is able to predict the whole course of a village conversation, what topic will unleash another, where the sighs and the laughter will come, the signs of the cross and the right hand displayed palm outwards and fingers extended in anathema; where heads will be shaken or the edge of the table struck in indignation with the index-finger doubled up. They unfold with the inevitability of ritual. Old jokes are best and even at their hundredth repetition the laughter that salutes them is gay and unjaded. The patina on these chestnuts is the result of aeons of fondling. Many an hour of hilarity is really a long game of conkers and there is a strange pleasure for the experienced in observing the punctilio of stroke and counter-stroke. But, in spite of this loyalty, new jokes—launched perhaps by an outsider from another district or country, the reversal of a cliché, a proverb given a paradoxical twist, a new pun, nonsense disguised as logic or a sudden eruption of fun—are welcomed and, after a moment’s hesitation aroused by unfamiliarity (a moment considerably shorter than anywhere else in the world), are hailed with an almost exaggerated acclaim. Late arrivals are initiated to this novelty and for hours and years after the original detonation, long, long after the new joke’s acceptance into the canon, it will be greeted with unflagging laughter and a chuckle at the memory of its risky and unorthodox origins. A stranger bringing a new joke to an isolated mountain community is at once a benefactor and an object of love; and, returning a decade later to one of these lonely thorpes, he will be greeted with affection and his innovation, now a household word, joyously recalled. These sudden dislocations and derailings of normal conversational procedure set off an instantaneous chain reaction, and, liberated from the rules of habit, the alert and original Greek mind—so tolerant of reiteration and the time-honoured arsenal of topics while it sticks to the formal track—breaks loose in dazzling displays of improvisation.
The reader will have gathered by now that hospitality in Greece has an almost religious importance. This is based on a genuine and deep-seated kindness, the feeling of pity and charity toward a stranger who is far from his home (as in ancient Greek the word stranger and guest are synonymous) and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that greater shame stamps the negative defect of lack of hospitality or meanness in rustic Greek eyes than many serious crimes. I think there is a subsidiary reason for this, an intellectual one. There is nothing idly inquisitive about that eager questioning of strangers: “Are you married? Are your mother and father alive? What country are you from?—do you live in the capital or outside? Did you come on foot? Where are you heading for? Are you rich? Does it really rain the whole time in England? Is the water in your village as good as ours? How high are the mountains? How do your shoes stand up to these terrible rocks?—how much did they cost? Did you get them in Europe or in Athens? Do you know an Englishman called David who was here a few years ago? Are you hungry?” All but the most raw and insensitive newcomer will soon perceive, from the eagerness and solicitude in their expression—an expression totally at variance with the indiscretion, verbatim, of some of their questions—that all this is dictated by a real and devouring interest, a wish to establish common ground between human beings with the least possible delay, the more effectively to shelter him from the hazards and privations of solitude in a harsh terrain. Indifference is considered a sign of brutishness and a denial of human feeling. The sam
e expression, until dispelled by their elders, can be read in the probing but benevolent eyes of children, grown enormous with wonder and the attempt to unravel this sudden conundrum, which accumulate round the newcomer’s chair like the vast ovals on a spread peacock’s tail.
The intellectual reason for all this is two-fold. It is firstly a thirst for knowledge—they are hot for certainties and any stranger is an emissary from the complex world outside, a new light on stale political discussions arising from the reading out loud of three-day-old newspapers. If the stranger is also a foreigner he is considered a key to the marvels and mysteries that lie beyond the frontiers of Greece. He is appealed to as an interpreter of all that they find strange or upsetting in world politics, especially in their bearing on Greece. Though there are usually several wise old heads in the village, there is a tendency to treat a stranger as an oracle, just because, by virtue of being a stranger, he must have travelled and seen more places and things than them, especially if he “knows many letters,” as the phrase goes. Education, whatever its extent and its results, is revered and there is aesthetic respect for skill in talk which can carry conviction by its style and fluency in defiance of its subject matter. There is, too, in simple and isolated communities where newspapers are the only reading matter, a superstitious respect for the written word which lowers the resistance to newsprint. But the multitude of newspapers and their mutually contradictory ideas promote a spirit of debate and conflict in even the smallest hamlets. Indeed, as each individual makes his own private interpretation of the data, every Greek may be said to comprise a one-man splinter-group. Only one thing can make these eight million splinter-groups cohere: danger to the State from outside invasion or the cause of Hellenism in its largest sense. For once all the newspapers and all the political parties are unanimous and the cohesion is instantaneous. There is no need, at the present time, to look far for examples of this.
The second of these reasons takes us back a page. It is a longing for the stimulus of the unfamiliar, for the stranger’s catalytic power to dissolve the routine of talk and, by liberating them from their time-honoured rigmarole, open new tracks for speculation, improvisation and mental acrobatics. All strangers are like St. Paul with the Athenians on the Areopagus: “thou bringest certain strange things to our ears, and we would know what these things mean. For all...spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing.” The well-known phrase applies not only to the Athenians of to-day but to any group of elderly villagers sipping their minute coffee cups under any plane tree in any village in Greece. They have a passion for tidings. Once near the top of Mt. Kedros in Crete, a white-bearded old shepherd had shouted to my guide and me to join him at his fold a few hundred yards above the path. He set out cheese and bread and yoghourt with an air of suppressed excitement—he had not been down to his village for months—and when all was ready, sat down, put his hands on his knees and leant forward with jutting elbows. “Now!” he said. “News! Tell me some news—any news,” then, throwing his hands in the air with a laugh—“whatever you like—even if it’s lies.”
We prepared to leave Layia. “Don’t go,” one of them said, “there’s no hurry. Sit here and take it easy, like Gladstone.”
“Like Gladstone?”
“Yes. Don’t you know about O Gladstonos, when he was governor of the Ionian Islands? He was a great man and he loved Greece and the Greeks. Well, after he’d been there some time, Mrs. Gladstone wrote to him telling him to come home. There was no answer. She wrote again and again still no answer. Fi-nally, she said to herself, What’s happening? So she caught a steamship in London and sailed to Corfu. And there in the public square, what did she find? Gladstone outside a café on a chair and he had his right arm crooked over the back of another chair, and his left over the back of a third, and a fourth for his right leg and a fifth for his left. A string of beads hung from one hand and the mouthpiece of a narghilé was in the other; but the narghilé was out. Why? Because Gladstone was asleep. His top hat was over his eyes and his mouth had fallen open; but between his teeth was a piece of Turkish delight—it was hanging out. It was a hot day, he was enjoying the sun, and he had fallen asleep halfway through...” He paused, and we all waited for him intently.
“Mrs. Gladstone was horrified.” The narrator’s voice went up shrilly. “‘What has my husband come to?’ As she had just come from London where it always rains, she still had a black umbrella in her hand. And she gave him a jab in the side with this umbrella,” he poked in the air with his walking-stick, “and Gladstone woke up with a start”—he made a pantomime of abrupt awakening and bewilderment. “‘Hé! What’s happening?’—‘I’ll tell you what’s happening, husband,’ Mrs. Gladstone said. ‘You’re for home.’ And she took him off to London with her. He was a good man.”
“He was a very good man,” another said, “he gave Greece back the Ionian islands,” and then, with a wry but friendly smile at me, “It’s a pity he isn’t alive to-day.”
I agreed that it was a great pity.
The speaker went on to deplore the absence of great political leaders. The race had died out, he seemed to say, like the extinct race of Titans. “Churchill is the last of the giants of the old breed of great statesmen; but he’s getting old, old.” A string of Greek politicians were suggested, but he dismissed them all with a backward jerk of the head, a negative tongue-click and a dismissive thumbnail sketch for each. “A fine general who has saved Greece twice in the battlefield, but not a statesman. He should have kept out of politics,” or “Not bad, a wonderful speaker but he loves the sound of his own voice,” or “Clever in a small way, but not a patch on his father. He’s a bridge player,” or “A university professor, a theorist, an ideologist—an honest man, mind you, but ambition destroys him.” “A sly one, a demon of intelligence, but he won’t last—he’ll set fire to himself with cleverness because he has no common sense,” or “An idiot who thinks he can outwit everyone, a sparrow who thinks he’s an eagle,” and “A careerist whose one thought is filling his own stomach.” Who then was the last Greek statesman?
“Why, old Venizelos, of course, old Levtheri.” A storm of dissent broke out from the Royalist remainder, who condemned Venizelos as a Cretan adventurer, an unreliable revolutionary, and an enemy of Greece as a kingdom and this was her only hope of stability—look at England!—and equality with the rest of the world.
The minority speaker was that very rare bird, a Maniot Venizelist.
“I agree he went wrong in his old age. But look how he found Greece when he started. Do you remember what we used to call her? Psorokóstaina—Mangy Betty! And look how he left her, one of the nations of the West with steady frontiers, double the size, friends with Turkey for the first time in centuries and an ally and friend of the great and victorious western powers. Who wanted to come into the first war right from the start—and who brought her in on the right side in the end? Venizelos.”
Somebody interjected that Metaxas had brought Greece into the second war on the right side.
“He had to! Do you think the Greeks would take invasion by the Macaronádes lying down—or by the Germans for that matter? If he hadn’t said ‘No,’ the whole race would have risen up and swept him aside.” He brushed a heap of cucumber peel off the table with a brusque gesture. “And do you think,” he went on, “that if Venizelos had been alive and at the height of his powers and one English statesman—only one!—of the old breed...say, Churchill at the height of his powers, or Lloyd George....”
“He let us down in Asia Minor,” one of the others darkly interjected, but the speaker overrode him.
“...or Lloyd George, do you think we would be quarrelling with England, our oldest friend, about Cyprus? Of course we wouldn’t. Venizelos would have chosen the right time, he would have known how to talk, he would have kept the priests out of it, and the English statesman would have understood that Cyprus is Greek and always has been. He would have got Cyprus for Greece without all this fuss in
the newspapers and on the radio. England would have kept her bases, and instead of being like this,” he placed his two opposing forefingers tip to tip, “enemies, we would be like this,” he placed the two fingers alongside, moving them up and down as though in caressing concord, “greater friends than ever, like brothers. But, as I said, there are no great statesmen in Greece any more, nor, my dear English friend,” here he placed a hand on my shoulder, “in England. They’re just politicians and party-men, who can see no further than their noses; and look at the mess we are all in! It’s little consolation for us in Greece to know that we are right and you are wrong. And God knows what mischief will come out of it all.” He made the sign of the cross with a rueful smile. “God save poor Greece—and poor England too!—and deliver us out of the hands of little men. Greece has had a long and bitter fight in the past hundred years and more and anything touching this question can turn us into real devils. It is the only feeling in Greece that is stronger than our historical feeling for England.”
The others all nodded their heads gloomily, with a chorus of “etsi einai, paidi mou—that’s how it is, my child.” But they soon cheered up with the thought that in the end England was bound to give Cyprus to Greece. England, after all, was a great, a just and a good race, and one that loved Greece—it was as though they were saying that England had become, in all innocence, a receiver of stolen property; who, when the time came, was sure to restore it to the rightful owner. She could keep as many bases there as she chose, and have them all over the mainland—yes, here in Layia, if they wanted, and welcome. Weren’t all their interests the same? They were both seafaring countries, both lovers of liberty and members of the free world, western allies and brothers united against the eastern danger? The bad old days were over, and Greece, thank God (“Thank Venizelos” was interjected here), was now an ally and friend of Turkey, bound by pacts and common interests; there could be no trouble there, and the Turkish minority in Cyprus would live as contentedly as the Turks of Thrace, or the Greeks of Constantinople. Where was the difficulty? Surely it was a private matter to be settled between friends. A mood of optimism hovered over us all.[1]
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