I said to Stephen in a low voice, ‘Do you think he’s mad?’
‘No,’ said my husband. ‘He lives a lot alone. He’s the fellow they’ve been talking about. We’re going with him in the morning.’
My spirits ebbed. The doze against the wall had rested me, and I was no longer tired. But apprehension filled me.
‘Go with him where?’ I asked. The man was watching us.
‘He has a hut in the forest,’ said Stephen impatiently. ‘It’s all settled. An hour’s climb from here. He’ll put us up.’
From the way Stephen spoke, he might have been arranging a week-end with some obliging golfing friend. I looked at the goatherd again. The honey-coloured eyes never moved from Stephen’s face, and his whole body was taut, as though he waited for us to spring, and must seize advantage first.
‘I don’t think he likes us,’ I said.
‘Rubbish,’ said Stephen, and rising to his feet he picked up his rifle.
The goatherd moved. It was strange, he was by the door. I had not seen him shift from chair to door, so swift had been his passage.Yet he was standing there, his hand on the latch, and the door was open. No one noticed anything unusual in the quickness of the flight - if flight it was. Stephen’s back was turned. The rat-faced cook was strumming his accordion. The proprietor and the wall-eyed driver were sitting down to dominoes.
‘Come to bed,’ said Stephen. ‘You’re dead on your feet.’
The door closed. The goatherd had gone. I had shifted my eyes for the passing of a second, and I had not seen him go. I followed Stephen up the ladder to the lofts above.
‘You’re for the cupboard,’ said my husband. ‘I’ll turn in with the chaps.’ Already he was choosing his particular heap of blankets.
‘What about the man?’ I asked.
‘What man?’
‘The goatherd. The one we’re to go with in the morning.’
‘Oh, he’ll wrap himself in his hood out there with the goats.’
Stephen took off his coat, and I groped my way to the cupboard. Below, the rat-faced cook had started once more upon the accordion, and the reedy voice floated up through the floorboards. A crack in the planking of my cupboard gave me a view upon a narrow strand of plateau beyond the cabin. I could see a single beech tree, and a star. Beneath the tree stood the hooded figure leaning upon a crook. I lay down on my blankets. The cold air from the crack in the planking blew upon my face. Presently the sound of the accordion stopped. The voices too. I heard the men come up the ladder to the loft, and go into the room with Stephen. Later their varying snores told me of their sleep, and of Stephen’s too. I listened, every sense alert, for a sound I somehow knew must come. I heard it, finally, more distant than before. Not a bird’s cry, nor a shepherd’s call to his dogs, but more penetrating, more intense; the low whistle of one who sees a woman on a street.
2
Something in me grudges sleep to others when my own night has been poor. The sight of Stephen, tackling fried eggs again at seven, and drinking the muddied grains of coffee, fresh-shaved too from water boiled by the cook, was unbearably irritating as I climbed down the ladder to the store below.
He hailed me cheerfully. ‘Slept like a top,’ he said. ‘How was the cupboard?’
‘The Little Ease,’ I told him, remembering Harrison Ainsworth’s Tower of London and the torture-chamber, and I glanced with a queasy stomach at the egg-yolk on his oily plate.
‘Better get something inside you,’ he said. ‘We’ve a steep climb ahead of us. If you don’t want to face it, you can always drive back to Kalabaka with our wall-eyed friend.’
I felt myself a drag upon his day.The bread, brought yesterday, I supposed, in the bus from north or west, was moderately fresh, and I spread it with honey. I would have given much for French coffee instead of the Greek-Turkish brew that never satisfied a void.
‘What exactly do you mean to do?’ I asked.
Stephen had the inevitable large-scale map on the table in front of him. ‘We’re here,’ he said, pointing to the cross he had marked on the map, ‘and we have to walk to this.’ A speck in the nick of a fold showed our destination. ‘That is where the goatherd - his name is Jesus, by the way, but he answers to Zus - has his lair. It’s primitive, I gather, but clean. We’ll carry stores with us from here. That extra rucksack will prove a godsend.’
It was all very well for Stephen. He had slept. The smell of brewing eggs was nauseous. I hastily swallowed my coffee dregs and went outside.The bright clear day helped to pull me together. There was no sign of the goatherd with his unlikely name, nor of his goats. Our driver from Kalabaka was washing his car. He greeted me with enthusiasm, and then made great play of gesturing to the woods above us, bending himself as if under a rucksack, and shaking his head. Laughing, he pointed downwards where the road twisted like a snake to the depths beneath, and from the road to his car. His meaning was plain. I would do better to return with him. The thought of the descent was worse than the climb to the unknown. And somehow, now that morning had come, now that I could breathe the sharp air and glimpse the great sky, cloudless and blue above the yet golden beech trees, the unknown did not seem to hold much danger.
I washed in the stream - the saucepanned water in the kitchen amongst the oil did not tempt me - and while Stephen and I were packing our rucksacks the first bus of the day arrived, travelling from the west. It halted for five minutes, while the driver and the few passengers stretched their legs. Inevitably our wall-eyed chauffeur had a cousin among the passengers, inevitably the purpose of our journey became known, and we were surrounded at once by eager questioners, poking our rucksacks, peeping at Stephen’s rifle, overwhelming the pair of us with advice we could not understand. The cousin had a sister in America. This supposed bond between us made him spokesman of the group.
‘No good,’ he said, pointing to the trees, ‘too late, no good.’ And then, feigning the posture of one holding a gun, he said, ‘Bang . . . bang . . . bang . . .’ rapidly. A chorus of approval came from his fellow-passengers.
Stephen continued to strap his rucksack. The proprietor of the store came out carrying more goods for us to pack away. Perched on the top, incongruous, was a great packet of soap-flakes and a bottle of bull’s-eyes. Everybody suddenly started shaking hands.
When the bus pulled away down the road to Kalabaka, followed by our wall-eyed driver and his cousin in the car, it was as though our last link with sanity had snapped. I looked up, and saw the goatherd emerging from the trees. I stood my ground and waited. He was smaller than I had thought, barely my own height, and the hooded burnous dwarfed him further. He came and took my rucksack without a word, seizing at the same time the extra pack with the stores. He had the two slung over his shoulder in an instant.
‘He can’t very well take both,’ I murmured to Stephen.
‘Rot,’ said my husband. ‘He won’t notice them, any more than one of his own goats.’
The proprietor and the cook stood waving at the door of the store. It seemed suddenly a home, a long-known refuge, in the full sunlight. I forgot the cupboard where I had spent the night, and the oily eggs. The little store was friendly and the red earth comforting, the smiling proprietor and the rat-faced cook with his accordion men of good-will. Then I turned my back on them, and followed Stephen and Jesus the goatherd through the trees.
We must have made a queer procession, no one speaking, the three of us in single file. The goats and the dogs had vanished. Perhaps this was the goatherd’s second journey of the day. Our way lay through forest at first, mostly beech but pine as well, then clearings of tufty grass and box and shrub. As we climbed the trees thinned, the air became purer, sweeter, the range of mountains opened up on either side and above and beyond us, some of them already capped with snow. Now and again Stephen halted, not for breath - I believe he could have climbed without pause all day - but to swing his field-glasses on the nearer ridge above the tree-line, to the left of us. I knew better than to talk. So did our g
uide. He was always just ahead, and when Stephen lifted the binoculars the goatherd followed their direction, his face impassive, but those honey-coloured eyes staring wild and startled from beneath the gaping hood. It could be some disease, I told myself, like goitre; yet the eyes were not full, they did not protrude. It was the expression that was so unusual, so compelling, yet not compelling in an hypnotic, penetrating sense - these eyes did not only see, but appeared to listen as well. And not to us. That was the curious thing. Stephen and I were of no account.The goatherd, although our beast of burden, did not listen or watch for us.
Now it was all sun, all sky, and the trees were beneath us, except for one lone blasted pine, lording it over a crisp sheet of recent snow, and above our heads, dark and formidable, circled our first eagle. A dog came bounding over the ridge towards us, and as we topped the rise I saw the goats, spread out and snuffing at the ground. Hard against an overhanging rock was a cabin, a quarter the size of our store below on the pass. Shelter from the elements it might have been - I was no judge of that - but a hermit-saint or an aesthete could not have picked upon a spot more apt for contemplation or for beauty.
‘H’m,’ said Stephen, ‘it looks central enough, if that’s our shakedown.’ Central. He might have been talking about the Underground at Piccadilly. ‘Hi, Zus!’ he called, and jerked his head towards the hut. ‘Is this the spot? Do we unload?’ He was still talking in Italian, believing, by some process of thought peculiar to him, that the language meant more to the goatherd than English could.
The man replied in Greek. It was the first time I had heard him speak. Once again, it was disconcerting. The voice was not harsh, as I had expected, but oddly soft, and pitched a little high, like the voice of a child. Had I, in fact, not guessed his age as forty or thereabouts, I would have said that a child was speaking to us.
‘Don’t know what that was about,’ said Stephen to me, ‘but I’m sure it’s the place all right. Let’s have a look at it.’
The dogs, for the second one had now appeared, watched us gravely. Their master led us to his refuge. Blinking, because of the strong sunlight without, we lowered our heads from the beam and stepped inside. It was just a plain wood shelter, with a partition down the centre. There was no furniture, except for a bench at one end on which stood a small Primus stove. The earth floor had more sand on it than the floor of our overnight cabin store. It must have been built to serve as a shelter only in the case of sudden storm.
‘Nothing wrong with this,’ said Stephen, looking about him. ‘We can spread our ground-sheets on the floor and the sleeping-bags on top.’
The goatherd, our host, had stood aside as we explored his premises. Even the space behind the partition was unfurnished like the rest. There was not even a blanket. Now, silently, he unloaded our things for us, and left us to arrange them as we pleased.
‘Funny sort of bloke,’ said Stephen. ‘Hardly the type to make us crack our ribs with laughter.’
‘It’s his eyes,’ I said. ‘Have you noticed his eyes?’
‘Yes,’ said Stephen, ‘they look a bit frozen. So would you be, if you lived up here for long.’
Frozen, though, was a new thought. Frozen, petrified. A petrified forest was surely the life-sap of a substance turned to stone. Were the goatherd’s emotions petrified? Had he no blood in his veins, no warmth, no sap? Perhaps he was blasted, like the lone pine outside his hut. I helped my husband to unpack, and soon we had some semblance of comfort within the four blank walls.
It was only ten o’clock, but I was hungry. The proprietor of the store had put a tin-opener amongst our rations, and I was soon eating pork-ham, canned in the United States, and dates thrown in for good measure. I sat cross-legged in the sun outside the hut, and the eagle still soared above me in the sky.
‘I’m off,’ said Stephen.
Glancing up, I saw that he had his cartridge-bag at his belt, his field-glasses round his neck, and his rifle slung over his shoulder. The easy cameraderie had gone, his manner was terse, abrupt. I scrambled to my feet. ‘You’ll never keep up,’ he said. ‘You’ll only hold us back.’
‘Us?’ I asked.
‘Friend Jesus has to set me on the way,’ replied my husband.
The goatherd, silent as ever, waited by a cairn of stones. He was unarmed, save for his shepherd’s crook.
‘Can you understand a word he says?’ I spoke in doubt.
‘Sign language is enough,’ said Stephen. ‘Enjoy yourself.’
The goatherd had already turned, and Stephen followed. In a moment they were lost in scrub. I had never felt more alone. I went into the hut to fetch my camera - the panorama was too good to miss, though it would be dull enough, no doubt, when it was printed - and the sight of the ground-sheets, the rucksacks, the stores and my thicker jersey restored confidence. The height, the solitude, the bright sun and the scent of the air, these were things I loved; why, then, my seed of melancholy? The sense, hard to describe, of mutability?
I went outside and found a hollow, with a piece of rock at my back, and made myself a resting-place near the browsing goats.The forest was below, and somewhere - in the depths - our lodging of last night. Away to the north-east, hidden from me by a range of mountains, were the plains of the civilized world. I smoked my first cigarette of the day, and watched the eagle. The hot sun made me drowsy, and I was short of sleep.
When I opened my eyes the sun had shifted, and it was half-past one by my watch. I had slept for over three hours. I got up and stretched, and as I did so the dog, watching me a few hundred yards away, growled. So did his companion. I called to them and moved towards the hut, and at this the pair of them advanced, snarling. I remained where I was.They crouched once more, and as long as I did not move they remained silent. One step, however, brought an instant snarl, and a stealthy lowering of the head, a forward padding movement as if to spring. I did not fancy being torn to pieces. I sat down again and waited, but, knowing my husband, I was aware that it might be nightfall before he returned. Meanwhile I must remain, marked by the dogs, the full force of the sun already spent. I could not even get to the hut for another jersey.
Somewhere, from what direction I could not tell, I heard a shot, and the sound echoed from the gorges far below. The dogs heard it too. They cocked their heads and stared. The goats rustled in the scrub, surprised, and one old patriarch, bearded to his breast, bleated his disapproval like some professor roused from sleep.
I waited for a second shot, but none came. I wondered if Stephen had found his mark, or missed. At any rate, he had sighted chamois. He would not have wasted his bullet on other game. If he had hit and killed, it would not be long before he returned, bearing his prey upon his shoulder. If he had hit and wounded only - but that would be unlike Stephen - he would go after the poor beast and shoot again.
I went on sitting above my hollow, close to the blasted pine. Then one of the dogs whined. I saw nothing. But the next moment the goatherd was behind me.
‘Any luck?’ I asked. I spoke in English, having no Greek, but the tone of my voice should tell him what I meant. His strange eyes stared down at me. Slowly he shook his head. He raised his hand, pointing over his shoulder. He continued to shake his head gently from side to side, and suddenly - fool that I was - I remembered that the Greek ‘yes’, the affirmation, is always given with this same shake of the head, suggesting its opposite, denial. The child’s voice coming from the impassive face said ‘nei’, and this was repeated, the head still moving slowly.
‘He has found them, then?’ I said. ‘There are chamois?’ and he reaffirmed his nei, which looked so much like contradiction, and went on staring at me with his great honey-coloured eyes, the frozen petrified eyes, until I was seized with a kind of horror, for they did not go with the gentle childish voice. I moved away through the scrub to put some distance between us, calling over my shoulder uselessly - for he could not understand me - ‘I’ll go and find out what’s happened.’ This time the dogs did not snarl, but stayed where the
y were, watching their master, and he remained motionless, leaning on his crook and staring after me.
I crawled through the scrub and up a track which I judged to be the one taken by Stephen and the goatherd earlier. Soon the scrub gave place to rock, a track of a sort beneath the overhanging face, and as I went I shouted ‘Stephen!’, for the sound of my voice must carry even as the sound of the rifle shot had done. I had no answer.
The world in which I found myself was sparse and bare, and I could see no footprints in the snow in front of me. Had Stephen come this way there must be footprints. Now from my vantage point it was as though the whole of Greece was spread beneath me, infinitely far, belonging to another age, another time, and I was indeed at the summit of my world and quite alone. I could see the forests and the foothills and the plains, and a river like a little silken thread, but my husband was not with me, nor anyone at all, not even the eagle that had soared above at midday.
‘Stephen!’ I shouted, my voice flat and feeble against the rock.
I stood and listened. It might be that I should hear a rifle shot again. Any sound would be welcome in such barren solitude. Yet when one came I was shocked out of immobility, for it was no rifle shot, but a whistle. That same lewd whistle to attract attention, coming from fifty feet above my head, from the jutting ledge, the overhanging rock. I saw his horns, his questing eyes, his satyr’s face staring down at me, suspicious, curious, and he whistled again, a hiss, a mockery, and stamped his hoofs, releasing a crumbling stone. Then he was gone - the chamois was gone, my first live chamois - he was away and lost, but crouching below me, on a narrow lip over a precipice, clinging to the rock-face, his rifle vanished, was a white-faced man who could not speak from fear, my husband, Stephen.
The Breaking Point Page 29