The Broken Road

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  At the end of the dance, Dimitri joined us by the fire and swelled the accompaniment with his own voice and another gourd. The next dance, on which Costa now embarked solo, though akin to its forerunner, was even odder. There was the same delay and deliberation, the same hanging head with its cap on the side, a cigarette in the middle of the dancer’s mouth. He gazed at the ground with his eyes almost closed, rotating on the spot with his hands crossed in the small of his back; soon they rose above his head like a vulture’s wings opening, then soared in alternate sweeps before his lowered face with an occasional carefully placed crack of thumb and forefinger as the slow and complex steps evolved. The downward gaze, the absorption, the precise placing of the feet, the sudden twirl of the body, the sinking on alternate knees, the sweep of an outstretched leg in three quarters of a circle, with the arms all at once outflung in two radii as the dancer rose again in another slow circle, gathering pace till he spun for a few seconds at high speed and then slowed down in defiance of all the laws of momentum – these steps and passes and above all the downward scrutiny were as though the dancer were proving, on the fish scales and the goats’ droppings underfoot, some lost theorem about tangents and circles, or retracing the conclusions of Pythagoras about the square on the hypotenuse. Sometimes during these subsidences, he slapped the ground with one hand and shot into the air again. A leap, after a few grave and nearly static paces, would carry him effortlessly through the air to land motionless with knees bent and ankles crossed. He would rise from this crouched posture, his trunk flung forward like a pair of scissors closing, the smoke from his cigarette spiralling round him. These abrupt acrobatics and calculated flashes of strength were redoubled in effect by the measured smoothness and abstraction of the steps that bracketed them. This controlled acceleration and braking wove them all into a single and solemn choreographic line. Perhaps the most striking aspect of it was the tragic and doomed aura that surrounded the dance, the flaunting so quickly muffled, and the introvert and cerebral aloofness of the dancer, so cut off by indifference from the others in the cave that he might have been alone in another room, applying ritual devices to conundrums reluctant of yielding their answers, or exorcizing a private and incommunicable pain. The loneliness was absolute. The singing had stopped and nothing but the jangle of the wire strings accompanied him.

  On a rock near where I sat was the heavy, low round table that I had eaten from. Revolving past it, Costa leant forward: suddenly the table levitated into the air, sailed past us and pivoted at right angles to his head in a sequence of wide loops, the edge clamped firmly in his mouth and held there by nothing but his teeth buried in the wood. It rotated like a flying carpet, slicing crescents out of the haze of woodsmoke, so fast at some moments that the four glasses on it, the chap-fallen bagpipe with its perforated cow’s horn dangling, the raki flask, the knives and spoons, the earthenware saucepan that had held the lentils and the backbones of the two mackerels with their heads and tails hanging over the edge of the tin plate, all dissolved for a few swift revolutions into a circular blur, then redefined themselves, as the pace dwindled, into a still life travelling in wide rings along the cave. As Costa sank gyrating to floor level, firelight lit the table from above, then he soared into the dark so that only the underside glowed. Simultaneously he quickened his pace and reduced the circumference of the circle by rotating faster and faster on the spot, his revolutions striking sparks of astonished applause through the grotto, which quickly rose to an uproar. His head was flung back and his streaming features corrugated with veins and muscles, his balancing arms outflung like those of a dervish until the flying table itself seemed to melt into a vast disc twice its own diameter spinning in the cave’s centre at a speed, which should have scattered its whirling still-life into the nether shadows. Slowly the speed slackened. The table was once more a table, looping through the smoke five feet from the floor, sliding out of its own orbit, rotating back to its launching-rock and unhurriedly alighting there with all its impedimenta undisturbed. Not once had the dancer’s hands touched it; but, the moment before it resettled in its place, he retrieved the stub of the cigarette he had left burning on the rock, and danced slowly back to the centre with no hint of haste or vertigo, tapping away the long ash with the fourth finger of his upraised left hand. He replaced it in his mouth, gyrated, sank, and unwound into his sober initial steps – the planned anticlimax again! – then having regained his motionless starting point, straight as an arrow and on tip-toe, he broke off, sauntered smoking with lowered lids to the re-established table, picked up his raki glass, took a meditative sip, deaf to the clamour, and subsided unhurriedly among the rest of us.

  How I wished I spoke Greek! I could catch a word here and there, loose in a flow of incomprehensible Romaic, as they talked among themselves. And how was I to find out, with my clumsy rudiments of Bulgarian, the origin of these dances, the roots of their unique and absolute oddity, even should the dancers know themselves? Panayi was swaddling his instrument for the night; its incendiary work was done, but its message still twanged and paused and twanged again in all our veins; Dimitri had drifted off into sleep for a moment, lying with his head on his arm, and the one-handed elder had clapped the neck of the raki bottle to his eye, as an admiral would a telescope, to see how much was left. Costa, the dancer, was smoking and smiling with the easy air of a geometrician who has proved what had to be proved: quod erat demonstrandum, the smile seemed to say, under the peak of his old cap, pushed forward to shield his eyes from the flames.

  It was only later, in Greece, that I was to learn a bit about them: that some scholars place the birth of the first dance in Tatavli, the butchers’ quarter of Constantinople, and the second one among the Tzeibeks, a wild tribe in the mountains of Phrygia, and think it possible that they date from Byzantine times. Others seek their origins much further back in Greek history, and ingenious and rather seductive mythological analogies have been evolved for the different phases of these two dances. Others, however, blind to their strangeness and their complex perfection, and abhorring their possible echoes of Turkish slavery, seek the true descendants of the warlike Pyrrhic dance in the much more straightforward and dashing chain dances – with the leader of the chain performing dazzling feats of agility – which the Klephts, who resisted and fought the Turks, danced in the free mountains for many centuries. (These dances are as much an emblem of this warlike spirit as are the white pleated kilt, the curly-tipped and pom-pommed brogues, the yataghan and the long gun.) Such critics are right in finding nothing warlike or simple in the two dances I had just seen (known jointly, with their music and singing, as mas ta rebetiko). They are, in fact, the quintessence of fatalism and morose solitude, a consolation and an anodyne in individual calamity, and with the songs that accompany them create a hard metrical and choreographic counterspell. They have another black mark against them: they are linked with low life in refugee quarters, with drunken cellars and hashish-smoking dens and waterfront bars, with idle hours spent over the nargileh, and with a dandified trick of flicking those tasselled and time-killing amber beads. Traditionally they are accompanied by a sartorial style, now largely obsolete: pointed shoes, peg-top trousers held up by a red sash, the jacket worn loose on the shoulders with sleeves hanging – and by twisted moustaches, a quiff falling over the forehead, and the cap aslant on the back of the head. With this goes a relaxed gait, a languid syncopated flick of the beads round the index finger held in the small of the back, a cigarette in the corner of the mouth, a faintly derisive smile, a poker face, an unflurriable deliberation of gesture and a dangerous ironic light in the veiled eyes.

  The urban figure in whom these attributes unite is usually known as the mangas, and though time may have modified his mid-nineteenth-century dress, the spirit, the manner and the mood remain intact. The mangas drawls in a deep, rasping and ironic tone, and, worse still, in an arcane lingo of cant words which are largely unknown outside the fraternity, laced with impropriety and strange oaths. Touchy on poin
ts of personal dignity, rancorous, sceptical and unimpressible, at least outwardly, the mangas have a rigorous code of honour and conduct among themselves which has nothing whatever to do with the official legal code. They are unshakeable in friendship and, when committed, strangers to treachery. A deep melancholy accompanies the classical canon of this proletarian dandy, as it does with more modish dandiacal postures; and, like them, it is the outward expression of a philosophy: independence, contempt for bourgeois values, readiness for any wild scheme, reluctance to accept jobs as employees (especially as grocers, though butchers for some reason have a dispensing glamour and dash), scorn of drudgery; smuggling or any similar illicit activity is ideal, even sometimes more advanced illegal practices; but mangas are never pimps, and very seldom out-and-out bad hats. A murder in mangas circles is much more likely to be prompted by an insult or a love affair gone wrong than to be a by-product of full-time criminal activity. To be crossed in love, as part of the melancholy stance, is almost a sine qua non. No relaxation of mien, even at times of great joy, is allowed to mar the outward scowl: a rose may express it symbolically, placed behind the ear or held between the teeth at the same angle as the ousted cigarette. This antisocial way of thought, however, is free of the juvenility which seems to turn the devotees of similar groups in the West into stuffed babies until they are ripe in years. Mangas, on the contrary, seek masculinity and a wary adult independence. When their crust of frowning aloofness is broken, and their guard down and the maddening banter lulled, they are often spontaneous, enthusiastic and – despite the opposite intention – extremely naive and transparently innocent. They have many variants, and many different names mark their degrees – rebetis, mortis, dervisis (dervish), koutzavakis, meraklis – all these are mangas subspecies (and the word mangas can, incidentally, also be used, in tones of affectionate derision, to mean nothing more than ‘rascal’ or ‘scamp’). The temptation to enlarge on them for several pages more is almost insuperable, but as I knew nothing about them at all at the time I am describing, and not a single word of modern Greek, I had better stop at once.

  Or almost at once. It was the link between Costa’s and Dimitri’s two dances, and the characteristics of their usual exponents, which led us astray. The other great dancers of the hasapiko and the tzeibekiko, as the two forms of rebetiko dances are severally called, are seamen, particularly those that ply between the islands and the ports of the Levant in merchantmen, tramp steamers and caiques. The preoccupations of sailors on shore and of waterfront mangas easily dovetail, overlap and merge. Critics of these dances may be right in dubbing them oriental, but they are wrong to call them un-Greek. Whatever their origins and wherever they are danced, I have never seen or heard of them being performed by anyone but Greeks, and particularly Greek sailors, in Constantinople, the Danube delta, Trebizond, Smyrna, Beirut, Alexandria or any other harbour of the Levant or the Archipelago – or ever considered to be anything but Greek. In the Piraeus and Salonika and Patras, at any rate, they have long been known, but semi-underworld; since the last war, alas, they have come into the open and been exploited, losing much of their integrity and mystique; but not all. To me they seemed at the time, and they still seem, to be exactly that amalgam of Greece and the Orient which is covered by the word ‘Byzantine’, appertaining to the city which was the heart and soul of the Greek world for over a thousand years. Others have thought the same; others place rebetiko earlier, and some would demote its origins to the day before yesterday. Any of them may be right (though probability, I think, weighs heavily against the third of these verdicts), as there is not a shred of ascertainable evidence in any direction, or any real reason there should be. This being so, I have my own private subdivision of the Byzantine hypothesis. For me these dances epitomize the last two hundred years of Byzantium, when the Empire, pillaged and dismembered by the Crusades, survived with the certainty of catastrophe looming at the end. The steps seem to symbolize all the artifice, the passion for complexity, the hair-splitting, the sophistication, the dejection, the sudden renaissances, the flaunting challenge, the resignation, the feeling of the enemy closing in, the abandonment by all who should have been friends, the ineluctability of the approaching doom and the determination to perish, when the time came, with style. It is tempting to add to all this a metaphysical trend of late Byzantine times, the introspective, navel-gazing detachment of the Hesychasts. I yield to this temptation. I don’t mean that these dances are a literal mime of the late Byzantines, of whom, unlike the emperors, caesars, sebastocrators and logothetes, history says little. On nobody does a longer, more resplendent or more tragic history weigh as heavily as it does on the shoulders of the Greeks. The atavistic spring is long and tightly coiled inside them. So, should my almost baseless and incorroborable inklings be true, any half-literate, hashish-bemused mangas in the Piraeus, or any Greek fisherman in a cave on the Black Sea coast (marooned by frontiers among an alien majority), is not really twirling and halting and soaring to interpret the woes of poverty or bad luck or the pangs of disprized love – at least not in the direct way that the words of the songs indicate. He is the unsuspecting microcosm and interpreter of older and heavier sorrows.

  Nothing of all this – except, perhaps, a vague inchoate feeling – could have been in my mind while the cave-dwellers, after a final all-round gulp of raki, began to settle for the night. I was to sleep at the nautical end. Costa and Dimitri hospitably spread a layer of fresh leaves close to the fire, rolled up a coat as a pillow, and piled blanket on blanket and laid the old shepherd’s cloak on top of me. I was as snug as a tortoise. ‘Kryo?’ they asked. ‘Studeno?’ Cold? – they had learnt four or five words of English on their travels. ‘No.’ Only an occasional tremor at increasing intervals reminded me of my earlier mishaps; later impressions had smothered them. I made out that the Greeks were three cousins and an uncle. There was nothing in the least guarded, apathetic or mangas-like about them. The trance-like melancholy of their steps had evaporated with the last fumes of the dances and the music. Their identical grey eyes were wide with humour, curiosity, alertness and intelligence. I thought I had divined an extra warmth in their welcome and their horny handshakes earlier on, and I interpreted it, as with Nadejda’s grandfather, as a late symptom of Greek feelings towards Lord Byron’s countrymen. I was right. Dimitri said as much. Uttering the words ‘Lordos Vyron?’ he raised his bunched fingers in a gesture of approval. Costa, shielding his action from indiscreet glances, placed his forefingers side by side; ‘Grtzia – Anglia! Good!’, then he opposed them endways on and tips touching in antagonism: ‘Grtzia! Bulgaria! Tk, tk!’ he clicked his tongue and threw back his head: not so good. The shepherds were all right though, I gathered; they were friends.

  This day, starting in the dark in Varna, had been the longest and oddest of the entire journey so far, but I couldn’t sleep for a long time. Plenty to think about, especially about unknown Greece and the Greeks, coming nearer every day. There was an occasional clank from the fifty goats at the further end, and the fall of a burning log now and again. Beyond the twelve-trope harmony of snores I could just hear the faint gasp of the Euxine a few yards off. The firelight ebbed from the walls and the stalactites, and the logs sank to a glow. Through a high gap in the cave’s outer wall, three quarters of Orion blazed like a slanting lozenge of ice-crystals. A slight clatter roused me as I was on the brink of oblivion, to observe the spectral, tip-toe figure, confident everyone was asleep (ah, but they weren’t!), of the dog with the black monocle, nimbly licking the last of the lentils out of the saucepan.

  • • •

  The storks, sculling equator-wards earlier in the year a hundred fathoms overhead, can only have had a slightly more aerial vision of this empty uncoiling and dropping-away of capes. The headlands had hoisted me into mid-air again, each time shooting skywards through layers of gulls, out of these bights of sand and shingle at the head of deep corkscrews of ravine. The interior billowed to the distant mountains, and everything was emptier than ev
er of mankind. Driven inland by the lack of habitations or shelter, I had slept in a small village (could it have been called Dolni Chiflik? – the map is blurred and torn here by a fold) and stocked up with bread, cheese, onions and garlic. The winter had now swollen the dry garlic cloves with soft green hearts, putting out shoots through their papery husks. Munching these, I blasted my switchback trail south-west. The ordeal by water, thanks to the therapy of the measureless cavern, had left no trace. The old Cyclopean shepherd had replaced my broken bootlaces by slicing a half-cured goat’s hide into strips; with my boots braced by these shaggy thongs, I felt I could confront anything. The shepherds and fishermen, two days before, had prophesied snow, and I had been secretly longing for it (‘the Pontic shore . . .’) but that freezing razor-clarity which had seemed to presage snow relaxed into milder sunshine, wandering cumulus and light intermittent rain as gentle as the quality of mercy. There was something consoling about this soft unfolding landscape, the low hovering glint of the sierras, and the sea ruffling under the wind. Sunlight and rain alternated, and often the two of them together in that union, propitious to rainbows, which is known in some places as a fox’s wedding. Occasionally the scene would dissolve in vapour. The desertion of this winter world held a seldom-failing ravishment, a stilling of the nerves and a smoothing-out of the mind. If my head were a small sun, and my glance its ray, how many miles would it have to travel through the veils that the sky suspended, before throwing more than the most unconvincing of watery shadows? Winter serenity, the peace of hibernation had descended, when ideas and inspiration fall with the quietness of dew.