From inside the house came a series of piercing shrieks, interspersed with cries for help from the Almighty, the Virgin Mary, and St Spiridion. I gathered from all this uproar and activity that I had arrived in the middle of a family row. This interfamily warfare was quite a common thing among the peasants and something I always found very enjoyable, for any quarrel, however trivial, was carried on with grim determination until it was sucked dry of the very last juices of drama, with people shouting abuse at one another through the olive trees and the men periodically chasing each other with bamboos.
I tethered Sally and made my way to the front door of the house, wondering, as I did so, what this particular row was about. The last one in this area that I remembered had lasted for a prodigious length of time (three weeks) and had all been started by a small boy who told his cousin that his grandfather cheated at cards. I wriggled and pushed my way determinedly through the knot of people who blocked the doorway and finally got inside, only to find the entire room seemed to be filled with Katerina’s relatives, packed shoulder to shoulder like a football crowd. I had, quite early in life, discovered that the only way of dealing with a situation like this was to get down on one’s hands and knees and crawl. This I did and by this means successfully achieved the front row in the circle of relatives that surrounded the great double bed.
Now I could see that something much more interesting than a family row was taking place. Katerina was lying on the bed with her cheap print frock rolled right up above her great, swollen breasts. Her hands were tightly clasping the head of the big brass bedstead, her white mound of a stomach quivered and strained with what appeared to be a life of its own, and she kept drawing her legs up and screaming, rolling her head from side to side, the sweat pouring down her face. Near her by the bedside, and obviously in charge of the proceedings, was a tiny, dirty, wizened little witch of a woman holding a bucket in one hand full of well water. Periodically she would dip a bundle of filthy rags into this and mop Katerina’s face and her thighs with it. On the table by the bedstead a jug full of wine and a glass stood, and every time the old crone had finished the ablutions, she would put a drop of wine in the glass and force it into Katerina’s mouth; then she would fill the glass and drain it herself, for presumably, in her capacity as midwife, she needed to keep up her strength as much as Katerina.
I congratulated myself warmly on the fact that I had not been deviated on my ride up to Katerina’s house by several interesting things I had seen. If, for example, I had stopped to climb up to what I was pretty certain was a magpie’s nest, I would probably have missed this whole exciting scene. Curiously enough, I was so used to the shrill indignation of the peasants over the most trivial circumstances that I did not really, consciously, associate Katerina’s falsetto screams with pain. It was obvious that she was in some pain. Her face was white, crumpled, and old-looking, but I automatically subtracted ninety per cent of the screaming as exaggeration. Now and then, when she uttered a particularly loud scream and implored St Spiridion for his aid, all the relatives would scream in sympathy and also implore the Saint’s intervention. The resulting cacophony in that tiny space had to be heard to be believed.
Suddenly Katerina clasped the bed-head still more tightly, the muscles in her brown arms showing taut. She writhed, drew up her legs and spread them wide apart.
‘It is coming. It is coming. Praised be Saint Spiridion,’ shouted all the relatives in chorus, and I noticed in the middle of the tangled, matted mass of Katerina’s pubic hairs a round white object appear, rather like the top of an egg. There was a moment’s pause and Katerina strained again and uttered a moaning gasp. Then, to my entranced delight, the baby’s head suddenly popped out of her like a rabbit out of a hat, to be quickly followed by its pink, twitching body. Its face and its limbs were as crumpled and as delicate as a rose’s petals. But it was its minuteness and the fact that it was so perfectly formed that intrigued me. The midwife shuffled forward shouting prayers and instructions to Katerina and seized the baby from between her blood-stained thighs. At that moment, to my intense annoyance, the ring of relatives all moved forward a pace in their eagerness to see the sex of the child, so that I missed the next piece of the drama, for all I could see were the large and extremely well-padded rumps of two of Katerina’s larger aunts.
By the time I had burrowed between their legs and voluminous skirts and got to the front of the circle again, the midwife – at shouts of delight from everybody – declared the baby to be a boy and had severed the umbilical cord with a large and very ancient penknife she had extracted from a pocket in her skirt. One of the aunts surged forward and together she and the midwife tied the cord. Then, while the aunt held the squalling, twitching, pink blob of life, the midwife dipped her bundle of rags into the bucket and proceeded to swab the baby down. This done, she then filled a glass with wine and gave a couple of sips to Katerina and then filled her mouth with wine and proceeded to spit it from her toothless gums all over the baby’s head, making the sign of the cross over its little body as she did so. Then she clasped the baby to her bosom and turned fiercely on the crowd of relatives.
‘Come now, come now,’ she shrilled. ‘It is done. He has arrived. Go now, go now.’
Laughing and chattering excitedly, the relatives poured out of the little house and immediately started drinking wine and congratulating each other as though they had all personally been responsible for the successful birth of the baby. In the airless little room, smelling so strongly of sweat and garlic, Katerina lay exhausted on the bed, making feeble attempts to pull her dress down to cover her nakedness. I went to the edge of the bed and looked down at her.
‘Yasu, Gerry mine,’ she said and sketched a white travesty of her normal brilliant smile. She looked incredibly old, lying there. I congratulated her politely on the birth of her first son and then thanked her for the donkey. She smiled again.
‘Go outside,’ she said. ‘They will give you some wine.’
I left the little room and hurried after the midwife, for I was anxious to see what the next stage was in her treatment of the baby. Out at the back of the house she had spread a white linen cloth over a small table and placed the child on it. Then she picked up great rolls of previously prepared cloth, like very wide bandage, and with the aid of one of the more nimble and sober aunts, she proceeded to wind this round and round the baby’s tiny body, pausing frequently to make sure its arms lay flat by its sides and its legs were together. Slowly and methodically she bound it up as straight as a guardsman. It lay there with only its head sticking out from this cocoon of webbing. Greatly intrigued by this, I asked the midwife why she was binding the baby up.
‘Why? Why?’ she said, her grizzled grey eyebrows flapping over her eyes, milky with cataracts, that peered at me fiercely. ‘Because, if you don’t bind up the baby, its limbs won’t grow straight. Its bones are as soft as an egg. If you don’t bind it up, its limbs will grow crooked or when it kicks and waves its arms about, it will break its bones, like little sticks of charcoal.’
I knew that babies in England were not bound up in this way, and I wondered whether this was because the British were in some way tougher-boned. Otherwise, it seemed to me, there would have been an awful lot of deformities inhabiting the British Isles. I made a mental note to discuss this medical problem with Theodore at the first opportunity.
After I had drunk several glasses of wine to honour the baby and eaten a large bunch of grapes, I got on Sally’s back and rode slowly home. I would not have missed that morning for anything, I decided. But, thinking about it as we jogged through the dappled shade of the olives, the thing that amazed me was that anything so perfect and so beautiful should have matured and come forth from the interior of what, to me, was an old woman. It was like, I reflected, breaking open the old, brown, prickly husk of a chestnut and finding the lovely gleaming trophy inside.
PART TWO
Kontokali
Hospitality is, indeed, now no less than in classical t
imes, a sacred duty in these islands, and it is a duty most conscientiously performed.
– PROFESSOR ANSTEAD
4
The Pygmy Jungle
It was a warm spring day, as blue as a jay’s wing, and I waited impatiently for Theodore to arrive, for we were going to take a picnic lunch and walk two or three miles to a small lake that was one of our happiest hunting grounds. These days spent with Theodore, these ‘excursions’ as he called them, were of absorbing interest to me, but they must have been very exhausting for Theodore, for, from the moment of his arrival till his departure, I would ply him with a ceaseless string of questions.
Eventually, Theodore’s cab clopped and tinkled its way up the drive and Theodore dismounted, clad, as always, in the most unsuitable attire for collecting: a neat tweed suit, respectable, highly polished boots, and a grey Homburg perched squarely on his head. The only ungracious note in this city gentleman’s outfit was his collecting box, full of tubes and bottles, slung over one shoulder, and a small net with a bottle dangling from the end, attached to the end of his walking-stick.
‘Ah, um,’ he said, shaking me gravely by the hand. ‘How are you? I see that we have got, um… a nice day for our excursion.’
As at that time of year one got weeks on end of nice days, this was scarcely surprising, but Theodore always insisted on mentioning it as though it was some special privilege that had been granted us by the gods of collecting. Quickly we gathered up the bag of food and the little stone bottles of ginger beer Mother had prepared for us, and slung these on our backs, together with my collecting equipment, which was slightly more extensive than Theodore’s, since everything was grist to my mill and I had to be prepared for any eventuality.
Then, whistling for Roger, we went off through the sunlit olive groves, striped with shade, the whole island, spring-fresh and brilliant, lying before us. At this time of the year the olive groves would be full of flowers. Pale anemones with the tips of their petals dyed red as though they had been sipping wine, pyramid orchids that looked as though they had been made of pink icing, and yellow crocuses so fat, glossy, and waxy-looking you felt they would light like a candle if you set a match to their stamens. We would tramp through the rough stone paths among the olives, then for a mile or so follow the road lined with tall and ancient cypresses, each covered in a layer of white dust, like a hundred dark paint brushes loaded with chalk white. Presently we would strike off from the road and make our way over the crest of a small hill and there, lying below us, would be the lake, perhaps four acres in extent, its rim shaggy with reeds and its water green with plants.
On this particular day, as we made our way down the hillside towards the lake, I was walking a little ahead of Theodore and I suddenly came to an abrupt halt and stared with amazement at the path ahead of me. Alongside the edge of the path was the bed of a tiny stream which meandered its way down to join the lake. The stream was such a tiny one that even the early spring sun had succeeded in drying it up, so that there was only the smallest trickle of water. Through the bed of the stream and then up across the path and into the stream again lay what at first sight appeared to be a thick cable which seemed to be mysteriously possessed of a life of its own. When I looked closely I could see that the cable was made up of what looked like hundreds of small, dusty snakes. I shouted eagerly to Theodore and when he came I pointed this phenomenon out to him.
‘Aha!’ he said, his beard bristling and a keen light of interest in his eyes. ‘Um, yes. Very interesting. Elvers.’
What kind of snake was an elver, I inquired, and why were they all travelling in a procession?
‘No, no,’ said Theodore. ‘They are not snakes. They are baby eels and they appear to be, um… you know, making their way down to the lake.’
Fascinated, I crouched over the long column of baby eels, wriggling determinedly through the stone and grass and prickly thistles, their skins dry and dusty. There seemed to be millions of them. Who, in this dry, dusty place, would expect to find eels wriggling about?
‘The whole, um… history of the eel,’ said Theodore, putting his collecting box on the ground and seating himself on a convenient rock, ‘is very curious. You see, at certain times the adult eels leave the ponds or rivers where they have been living and, er… make their way down to the sea. All the European eels do this and so do the North American eels. Where they went to was, for a long time, a mystery. The only thing, um… you know… scientists knew was that they never came back, but that eventually these baby eels would return and repopulate the same rivers and streams. It was not until after quite a number of years that people discovered what really happened.’
He paused and scratched his beard thoughtfully.
‘All the eels made their way down to the sea and then swam through the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic, until they reached the Sargasso Sea, which is, as you know, off the northeastern coast of South America. The… um… North American eels, of course, didn’t have so far to travel, but they made their way to the same place. Here they mated, laid their eggs, and died. The eel larva, when it hatches out, is a very curious, um… you know… leaf-shaped creature and transparent, so unlike the adult eel that for a long time it was classified in a separate genus. Well, these larvae make their way slowly backwards to the place where their parents have come from and by the time they reach the Mediterranean or the North American shore, they look like these.’
Here Theodore paused and rasped his beard again and delicately inserted the end of his cane into the moving column of elvers so that they writhed indignantly.
‘They seem to have a very um… you know… strong homing instinct,’ said Theodore. ‘We must be some two miles from the sea, I suppose, and yet all these little elvers are making their way across this countryside in order to get back to the same lake that their parents left.’
He paused and glanced about him keenly and then pointed with his stick.
‘It’s quite a hazardous journey,’ he observed, and I saw what he meant, for a kestrel was flying like a little black cross just above the line of baby eels, and as we watched he swooped and flew away with his claws firmly gripping a writhing mass of them.
As we walked on, following the line of eels, since they were going in the same direction, we saw other predators at work. Groups of magpies and jackdaws and a couple of jays flew up at our approach and we caught, out of the corner of our eye, the red glint of a fox disappearing into the myrtle bushes.
When we reached the lake-side, we had a set pattern of behaviour. First we would have a prolonged discussion as to which olive tree would be the best to put some of our equipment and our food under – which one would cast the deepest and the best shade at noon. Having decided on this, we would make a little pile of our possessions under it and then, armed with our nets and collecting boxes, we would approach the lake. Here we would potter happily for the rest of the morning, pacing with the slow concentration of a pair of fishing herons, dipping our nets into the weed-filigreed water. Here Theodore came into his own more than anywhere else. From the depths of the lake, as he stood there with the big scarlet dragon-flies zooming like arrows round him, he would extract magic that Merlin would have envied.
Here in the still, wine-gold waters, lay a pygmy jungle. On the lake bottom prowled the deadly dragon-fly larvae, as cunning predators as the tiger, inching their way through the debris of a million last year’s leaves. Here the black tadpoles, sleek and shiny as licorice drops, disported in the shallows like plump herds of hippo in some African river. Through green forests of weed the multi-coloured swarms of microscopic creatures twitched and fluttered like flocks of exotic birds, while among the roots of the forests the newts, the leeches uncoiled like great snakes in the gloom, stretching out beseechingly, ever hungry. And here the caddis larvae, in their shaggy coats of twigs and debris, crawled dimly like bears fresh from hibernation across the sun-ringed hills and valleys of soft black mud.
‘Aha, now, this is rather interesting. You see t
his, um… little maggot-like thing? Now this is the larva of the China-mark moth. I think, as a matter of fact, you have got one in your collection. What? Well, they’re called China-mark moths because of the markings on the wing, which are said to resemble very closely marks that potters put on the base of, er… you know, very good china. Spode and so forth. Now the China-mark is interesting because it is one of the few moths that have aquatic larvae. The larvae live under water until they are… um… ready to pupate. The interesting thing about this particular species is that they have, er… um… you know, two forms of female. The male, of course, is fully winged and flies about when it hatches and er… so does one of the females. But the other female when it hatches out has, um… no wings and continues to live under the water, using its legs to swim with.’
Theodore paced a little farther along the bank on the mud that was already dried and jigsawed by the spring sun. A kingfisher exploded like a blue firework from the small willow, and out on the centre of the lake a tern swooped and glided on graceful, sickle-shaped wings. Theodore dipped his net into the weedy water, sweeping it to and fro gently, as though he were stroking a cat. Then the net was lifted and held aloft, while the tiny bottle that dangled from it would be subjected to a minute scrutiny through a magnifying glass.
‘Um, yes. Some cyclopes. Two mosquito larvae. Aha, that’s interesting. You see this caddis Iarva has made his case entirely out of baby ram’s-horn snail shells. It is… you know… remarkably pretty. Ah now! Here we have, I think, yes, yes, here we have some rotifers.’
In a desperate attempt to keep pace with this flood of knowledge, I asked what rotifers were and peered into the little bottle through the magnifying glass at the twitching, wriggling creatures, as Theodore told me.
The Corfu Trilogy (the corfu trilogy) Page 37