by Robert Crisp
Yesterday they had fled back up the mountain as the waters rose about them with all the livestock they could carry, drive or drag. They had just moved in time. I could see their hut from my window. What I should say is that I could just see the top of their hut from my window. The rest was under water.
Leila told me she got everything away except the furniture and the pig. The furniture was not as important as the animals and they could not catch the pig.
Chapter 15
Profuse Green Hands of Thanksgiving
It was the gladiolus that finally did it. I had nursed it through drought, protected it from animals and unseeing boots, and guarded it from fire (when I covered it with a wet bucket and a wet sack).
It was the sole survivor of three bulbs I had bought in Sparta. One had died of thirst and the other, ill-placed perhaps, had been trodden into shapelessness by a visitor’s tethered donkey. Unhappily, it did not live to benefit from the manure.
All of a sudden, one morning, the first petals gleamed like pink windows in a distant green tower. I felt almost as triumphant as a family doctor whose farmhouse patient had produced quintuplets. There were nine of mine. At the end of the next day, I came back from shopping in Gythion to find that each petal had been nibbled off and it was as though all the lights had been turned off in that green tower. I knew the culprits only too well.
They had pecked my geraniums to skeletal supplicants and had started on the chrysanthemums whenever my back was turned, and they had even taken passing nips from the upturned green fingers of the succulents I had persuaded to flourish, almost unwatered, on the terrace edge.
The gladiolus was the last peck on the bushel that broke this camel’s heart. I went down to the hut in the lucerne field.
“Leila,” I said, not even bothering to go through the prolonged formula of greeting. “Do you want two hens and two cockerels? Let Demetria and Maria come back with me now and take them away.”
She looked surprised and doubtful.
“There will be nothing to pay,” I assured her. “But I would like one of the cockerels for the oven when it is fat enough to eat.”
That was the end of my poultry keeping. The occasional egg no longer compensated me for the loss of a garden.
We had been together for quite a long time. Almost since the beginning. Nine of them had been born there and seven of them had died there – prematurely.
They had had more than their fair share of my vegetable garden; I was not going to let them have my flower garden.
I did not miss them except occasionally the one-eyed chick which had been more or less brought up in the kitchen. But it refused to be house-trained and, well, she was getting to be a big girl.
A week or so without poultry proved that it was a wise decision.
The geraniums were putting forth profuse green hands of thanksgiving, the chrysanthemums were shiny with buttons near to bursting point, forgotten nasturtiums were daring to put their heads above ground again and the succulents, though jagged, were full of juice and raring to go.
There was another reason for it being a wise decision. Every animal that I attached to myself and which got attached to me was an obligation. They had to be fed and watered and cared for.
Anybody who is in search of freedom from responsibility, even of liberty, cannot achieve it completely with these animal associations. You cannot, in response to sudden impulse, ride or walk away for a week, or forever.
I couldn’t do it, for instance, because – though I no longer had poultry – I still had Dog and Elsa, the cat. I didn’t want to leave either. That was the trouble.
It was not only that they were essential to my sedentary establishment there; we were three devoted friends.
Chapter 16
A Wiser and Better-Equipped Man
Exactly a year had passed since I had walked out on the life I had been living for over fifty years and began what, for brevity’s sake, I would call my self-imposed exile on a remote peninsula in Greece.
The end of the first year is always a convenient time for the first summing up. It meant in practical terms that I had lived through all the seasons with all the year’s vagaries and that I had done it on my income of ten pounds a month. There was, therefore, no reason why I could not go on doing it indefinitely.
That, of course, was an overstatement. Nothing can be continued indefinitely. We are not immortal and I realised that I could be defeated (temporarily) by prolonged illness or injury. But they did not enter my contemplation. Occasionally I paused to think what would happen if I developed a sudden acute appendicitis, or broke both legs, or got bitten by a deadly snake.
As a matter of fact, I’d got a pretty good idea what would happen. I could lie there for anything up to two weeks before anybody knew there was anything wrong with me, and possibly another two weeks before anybody discovered there was a corpse in the place. Picking up the telephone was out. The nearest one was two miles away. Such thoughts did not enter my contemplation.
As I looked around, inside and outside my upstairs house, there was a not inconsiderable sense of achievement. The hut that Janni had led me to a year before through waist-deep thistles and nettles was knee-deep in sheep’s dung and the left-behinds of years of passing gypsies and shepherds.
The walls were blackened by the smoke of many fires, which had struggled vainly to escape from close-shuttered windows, and the thickness of the walls was a hollow sham through which every rainstorm sent slow cascades of water that ended up in pools on the bedroom and kitchen floors.
Now the hut was entitled to be called a house. It still had primitive characteristics that gave it a primitive charm. I was working hard on a way to divert the charm of the spring which periodically erupted through the kitchen wall.
There was not a single mod con in the place. But it was clean and well furnished (well, it was furnished) in spite of the absence of carpeting. Goodness knew what hordes of insects carpeting would have provided shelter for; the bare concrete was an entomological museum.
Outside there was now a lawn on the terrace. The garden had been coming on fine until a night of exceptional frost (the worst in living memory) killed off most of the alien plants. I had one of the loveliest views in the world and it was my home.
During the past year I had acquired many skills that I never had before and never thought to have.
I could make my own bread and marmalade and tomato sauce, and I could even turn out a maquereau espagnol; I could identify dozens of weeds and wild plants that were edible and I had learned the various ways of cooking them; I could hoe and pick cotton, dry figs, press wine with my feet, pick and preserve olives; I did my own laundry and though I had not yet darned a hole in my sock, that very week I had sewn a patch over a hole in my trousers; I could mix cement, build a rockery, and make a table and sideboard and a bookcase.
It had not always been easy, and trial had often resulted in error. But in spite of the most elementary mistakes, it had never been as difficult as I thought it would be. It never was. The rewards had always outmatched the disappointments and frustrations, so that at the end of that year I knew myself to be a wiser and better-equipped man in every respect than when I started it.
What about those other things I had been seeking? Well, I am not going to lay my soul bare for public inspection. I can say that I did not find freedom, nor independence, nor detachment, and I am not sure for those who seek them this is not an infinite search. They must simply go on searching. But I found other things that I was not exactly looking for.
In that environment I lived in intimate contact with nature. To me there was no doubt at all that the closer you were to nature the closer you were to God. It was both a communion and a conflict.
I spent a good deal of that first year in communion and conflict and emerged believing that I knew God better than ever before. It was, I supposed, a question of Truth. The search for Truth is mankind’s Holy Grail. It is the inspiration of all research and enquiry. Christ
ianity and most of the great religions reconcile themselves to the impossibility of this quest by declaring God is Truth. That He is the beginning and is the end.
God is the Creator. That is one truth. But the more profound truth lies at the end, and where is the probe that can go into time-to-come?
Religion provides an answer which it asks its adherents to accept blindly.
But there was no need for me to go to church. Here, I worshipped God in every wondrous dawn and sunset, in every miracle of burgeoning flower and fruit.
But I also saw Him daily in the indiscriminate profusion and impersonality of His ways and in the terrifying ruthlessness of the balance, with which His natural order was maintained. That was God in action.
Chapter 17
I Was Due to Be Haunted
It was the time of year at which I was due to be haunted. They all told me that around there. It had been at the end of one January several years before that a dispute over a land boundary had led to a meeting on the square of brown, clear soil below my house where the pass over the mountain cascaded on to the road to Ageranos.
There had been three men there. A father and son together and the son of the owner of the land in dispute. Ten minutes after the first angry words opened the discussion there had been nobody there – just a corpse with seven oozing knife wounds draining away unnecessarily.
No need for any detective work. Everybody had known who had done it and why it had been done. Father and son had been arrested, convicted and sentenced: father to life imprisonment, son to a term which had expired a year or two before. He would never return to the farm which his mother and sister struggled to keep in production. He knew without any doubt that the same instrument of death awaited him in the hands of the murdered boy’s avengers.
But the murdered boy – and this was what they all told me – returned every year at that time to see if the debt of his blood had been repaid. All I could say was that I fervently hoped he did not call on me to find out. I couldn’t speak the language.
It was neither an exceptional story nor event in those parts. The Mani, on the edge of which I lived, had only comparatively recently emerged from savage years of blood feuds. Each village had its towered houses built ever higher and higher to give the household the opportunity of shooting down upon its neighbour. And the rock of those great bleached mountains where nothing grew was fertile enough in the production of legend and superstition. The inhabitants, too, seemed to live very close in their thoughts to the primitive. They were all devout members of the Greek Orthodox Church – a demanding religion – and believed passionately in the numerous saints after whom every Greek child, male and female, was named. But one suspected they believed just as strongly in the opposing forces of darkness which roamed those barren ranges and from which they looked to their saints to protect them.
Awareness of and respect for these forces of good and evil was clearly apparent to the stranger in their midst. I had often seen my old friend, Janni, cross himself half a dozen times in an effort to get an uncooperative pump engine to start. Sometimes it worked and sometimes was enough.
I had stopped my ignorant practice of making little jokes about it. It had embarrassed my friends to rebuke me with their disapproving silence. And I had caused consternation and genuine dismay among a group of small visitors by imitating the call of the bird whose song outside a house is prophetic of death within.
I tried to argue that a bird could not possibly know anything of selective human death but I had no facts that I could argue with. Can it be proven that a bird does not know these things? I couldn’t prove it. At least, not to their satisfaction.
I had seen even the most sophisticated Athenians blanch and spit on the ground three times when shown a dead snake. They had offered no reasonable explanation in response to my queries and I had not pressed the matter, chiefly because it was extremely difficult to find a Greek who did not spit anywhere and everywhere. It was a national habit and I sincerely wished the military junta would introduce a law against it. With special provision for snakes.
The Greeks’ relationship with trees and plants also seemed to have inherited something from distant mythology and many trees and plants were invested with characteristics, which were not only medicinal in a way which was akin to witchcraft, but personal.
Still, who was I to say they were wrong? I had good reason for believing they were right.
Early in the summer, sweating it out in the young cotton rows, I had been warned against going to sleep in the noonday siesta under a fig tree. I had noticed that all the labourers chose mulberry trees for their lunch and nap and avoided the figs, in spite of their fine deep shade. There were various explanations: “You will wake up sick.” “Your dreams will be full of bad people.” “The shadow is too dark. It will lie heavily on you.” Of course, I did not believe any of it. Neither did I sleep under a fig tree.
Chapter 18
I Taught the Children of Gythion a New Game
That morning I emerged from my hut like a bear coming out of hibernation. It had been the worst winter in Sparta, I had it on good authority, since Leonidas ruled the country and died at Thermopylae.
But what made it really seem like an end to hibernation was not the warm sun but hundreds of sudden swallows filling the near sky at eye-level – my eye-level there being a couple of hundred feet above the sea over which the swallows were circling and diving.
There were the real harbingers of spring, and as I broke the thin ice on the top of the rainwater butt that had been my water supply since the river rose, and stayed, in flood six weeks before, I accepted the instinctive knowledge of those birds, which had brought them across 300 miles of sea from the nearest bit of Africa. They had got the message that there was a land in which winter had come to an end. It was time to go north. Not that there was overmuch around there to encourage less perceptive humans to share the swallows’ prescience or optimism.
True, the sun was warm enough to enable me to write with nothing on but a pair of khaki shorts, but the wind was still honed by the ice of Taygetus pyramiding above my back, and the world at my feet was still full of water that had carved new courses in the good earth – and washed thousands of tons of it into the sea. Sitting there, feeling the bronzed palm of the sun caressing my skin, watching the green of bud and sprout responding visibly to the same caress, that other morning when I had stepped onto my terrace knee-deep in snow seemed part of another existence. Yet it was only ten days before.
They had told me in Gythion that the last snowfall on the town was in 1928, and as I watched the children from the Gymnasium, all the way up from kindergarten to senior prefects, gathering great armfuls of the stuff, I realised that none of the inhabitants under forty had ever seen snow fall on their town.
So I taught the children a new game during their eleven o’clock break.
Snowball fighting. Will it, I wondered, be another forty years before the schoolboys and schoolgirls of Gythion can throw snowballs at each other? Most Greeks were fervently hoping so. They had emerged to count the cost of winter. And it was high.
From my elevated perch I could see the acres of tomato houses with their polythene covering stripped and tattered by thundering gales that had come roaring down the mountains and through the many-boned skeletons of fig trees with a noise like Tube trains. Nights of frost had withered the exposed seedlings, so that all had to be started again with a double outlay of money.
I could see that the fields that were so laboriously planted with winter wheat for the year’s bread had turned into scoured swamps, and the brown ground of the orange groves gone golden with fallen and decaying fruit.
In Gythion that month a big German cargo boat, its Plimsoll line ten feet out of the water, had waited for two weeks for the oranges from Sparta that never came, and finally sailed back to Hamburg with its propeller churning more air than water.
I could see the centuries-old river-beds that had proved inadequate to contain those late
twentieth-century flood waters, so that they had duplicated and triplicated themselves in torrents that had taken them to places where no generation had expected them to go.
As a result, the beach below me was now littered with the flotsam and jetsam of the land, not of the sea. Fig, mulberry and olive trees had been uprooted and rolled down, and on one day of the previous week I had been picking olives up to the knees in surf. One new river had gone clean through a house that had been a summer residence for its owners for four generations. Now its walls, with their stucco decorations, stared up from the mud.
Against these very real subsistence tragedies for the Greek farmers and peasants, my own situation was insignificant. Love’s labour’s lost just about summed up the position in my hillside garden. All I had to do was start all over again with flowers and vegetables. Yet I had suffered one small tragedy.
Over on Kranae Island, the rain and wind and the snow had proved too much for my intended kaiki, lying there out of her element on the stocks. The trestles had tilted one night and the gale had tipped her over. When they got her upright again the keel was buckled in three places and a section of the hull stove in.
Disinterested expert opinion had reckoned I would be crazy to buy the boat in that condition. They had reckoned I was pretty crazy before, but this time I agreed with them.
I would not have said that this love affair between me and the kaiki was over. I still looked expectantly for that mast and prow as I came over the hill above the island. But let us say that the marriage, which had been arranged, would now not take place. Nor had this setback affected my determination to own a boat. There were many others lying around the coast whose owners had deserted fishing for the easier rewards of the land.