The other side of the fire displayed a set of conflicting clues: wicker cheese baskets on planks, a leaning sheaf of crooks and a grove of white, hanging globes – cheese that had been poured liquid into dripping goatskin bags, hairy side innermost. A cauldron of whey simmered over a second fire, and the stooping Cyclopean greybeard stirred and skimmed. Across the dark reaches at the far end ran a breast-high wall of bleached stones and furze, and the mystery of an abrupt and derisive cachinnation beyond.
The old man took a brand from beneath the cauldron and flourished it with a possessive smile. The lasso of radiance that his flame looped into the murk lit up a thicket of spiralling and bladed horns and the imperial beards and matted black-and-white pelts of fifty goats; a wave of the torch kindled a hundred oblong-pupilled eyes, provoking another falsetto jeer, a click of horns and the notes of a few heavy bells. A patina of smoke and soot polished the walls of the cave. Jags of mineral were tables or sideboards for these troglodytes. Half a dozen dogs slept or foraged around; a reclining white mongrel with hanging tongue and forepaws crossed observed the scene through close-set eyes, the left one of which was surrounded by a black ring. The sand and the pebbles underlay a trodden crust of goats’ pellets and fish scales, and the cavern reeked of fish, goats, curds, cheese, tar, brine, sweat and wood-smoke. It was an abode harmoniously shared by Polyphemus and Sinbad.
Supper was finished but they ladled me out the last of the lentils while one of the fishermen poured oil in the frying pan, laid a couple of mackerel across it and, in due course, whisked them out sizzling by their tails and put them in the tin plate the lentils had that instant vacated. I must have been coming to; these delicious fish were demolished at speed. What were they called? Skoumbri, one fisherman said; no, no, cried the others: skumria. There was some friendly teasing about this, for the shepherds were Bulgars and the fishermen were Greeks, members of the Greek community scattered all over southern Bulgaria. I was surprised to see these irreconcilables in each other’s company. One of them apologised, saying they had finished the slivo and wine. I dug a contribution out of my rucksack: two bottles of raki from Tirnovo, one safe in a wooden flask, the other mercifully intact. In spite of an occasional shudder and a rattle of teeth, my spirits, as the food and drink piled up, began to rise. The circulating raki ignited a mood of nautico-pastoral wassail and by the time the second bottle was broached the wind-battered and weather-chipped faces were wide-mouthed in song.
A goatskin, which I had taken to be a vessel for milking the ewes, turned out to be a bagpipe. But when the old man puffed it full, the drone through the horn trumpet died in a wail that called forth an answering howl from the white dog, briskly silenced by a backhanded cuff. A crease in the cracked parchment had split. I patched it up, to everyone’s applause, with a criss-cross of adhesive tape. As the sound swelled again one of the fishermen began a burlesque Turkish belly dance, called the kiitchek. He had learned it, he said, in Tzarigrad, the Bulgarian for Constantinople, the town of the Emperors. It was very convincing, even to the loud crack that accompanied each spasmodic wrench of the haunch and the midriff, produced by the abrupt parting of the stiff interlocked forefingers of both hands as they were held, palms joined, above his head.
The comic effect was enhanced by the fierce and piratical looks of Dimitri the dancer. ‘He needs a charchaff,’ one of the shepherds cried. He wrapped a cheesecloth round the lower part of Dimitri’s face. The rolling of his smoke-reddened eyes above this yashmak turned him into a mixture of houri and virago. Meanwhile Costa, another sailor, advanced into the firelight with the same rotating motion as Dimitri. Uninhibited laughter broke out. A third fisherman tied a two-foot length of rope into a ring, made Costa step into it, then lifted it to the level of his thighs and made him stretch his legs apart. When the rope was taut he inserted a heavy log which he turned over several times, till the log in the twisted rope could be made to lift or drop like the beam of a siege engine. The comic impropriety of this vision brought the house down. (I wonder whether Aristophanes knew of this device? It would have been handy for the Lysistrata…) A mock pursuit of the veiled Dimitri began, with Costa moving by leaps: the ithyphallic gait of a pasha-like grasshopper bent on rape. To drive this fierce aspect home, he pulled out one of the shepherds’ knives and held it between his teeth.
The bagpipe howled with growing stridency and the spectators jovially clapped out the time. Dimitri oscillated with lumbering skittishness; the uncouth chase brought the sweat to Costa’s brow, while monstrously enlarged shadows of their evolutions loomed about the cave. Finally a long scream of the pipe propelled him, with his legs splayed and knees bent, round and round his partner in mock-lecherous leaps. Cheerfully goaded by the onlookers the bagpiper blew faster and faster until the panting pibroch mercifully ended at last with the diminishing wail of an ox under the knife: my running repair had come unstuck. Laughing and out of breath, Costa collapsed with mock melodrama. The raki travelled round the cave in a hubbub of laughter, and the flames threw a beltane chiaroscuro over hilarious masks.
Another bottle was miraculously discovered. Panayi, the fourth of the fishermen, lifted a long object from the boat. When he rejoined us on the floor, the unwinding of the cloth revealed an instrument halfway between a lute and a mandolin. Ivory and mother-of-pearl inlaid the sounding board, and ivory and ebony ribbed its gleaming bowl; but the great length and slenderness of the neck which slanted from his cross-legged lap, while he screwed the pegs into tune and plucked the eight wires with a hen’s quill, gave it the air of a court minstrel’s instrument from a Persian painting: an incongruously delicate and skilfully wrought thing for this rough den.
When it was in tune, the player showered an intricate pattern of minims and crotchets into the falling hush of the grotto and then plaited a flowering wreath of chords in different keys which cohered, after a short halt, in a tune whose slow, heavily stressed and almost lurching beat fell between metallic cascades of short notes and defined a rhythm that slid insidiously into the bloodstream until even the musician himself, stooping over the strings or gazing into the flames with large grey eyes, seemed to be mesmerised by his own music.
Panayi the lutenist was a tall and muscular man and the slender bouzouki looked frail in his great hands. He and the older man began a song that sounded like a lament. It was full of repeated phrases and Oriental modulations, and at moments it was designedly strained and grating. Oddly placed pauses syncopated the run of the words. The older man marked the beat by slapping the side of a gourd with his star-backed hand, steadying it with the stump of the other.
The night moved into a different gear. Linked at arm’s length by a hand on each other’s shoulder, Costa and Dimitri were standing side by side; their feet were together and each unsmiling face hung, chin on breast, like that of a gallows-bird. This initial immobility thawed into movement as slight as the bending and straightening of the knee; the feet, flat on the ground with heels together, opened at an angle, then closed and opened once more. Both right feet were then lifted and slowly swung backward and forward. A left-foot jump brought their torsos seesawing forward in a right angle to balance a simultaneous kick on the ground behind them with their right. Then the dancers swept forward for an accelerated pace or two, braked and halted with their right bent legs, from the knee down, lifted parallel to the ground and sweeping in slow scything movements and falling again. An unhurried flick sent both right feet soaring, and their hands smote together under their knees in a sudden clap; then they were almost on their knees, hands on each other’s shoulders again, gliding sideways, then rolling forward in a gait resembling a sleepwalking hornpipe.
Nothing could have been less carefree or orgiastic than the perverse mood of their evolutions: the subtle and complex beauty of this peculiar dancing, coming, as it did, hotfoot on the straightforward bumpkin commotion of the first performance, was as much of a surprise as would be the discovery, in a collection of folk verse, of a contorted metaphysical jungle of conceits,
tropes, assonances, internal rhymes, abstruse allusions and concealed acrostics. 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, was, though akin to its forerunner, odder still. There was the same delay and deliberation, the same hanging head with a cigarette in the centre of his lips as he gazed at the ground with eyes nearly closed and rotated on the spot with his hands crossed in the small of his back. Soon his arms lifted above his head and slowly soared in alternate sweeps before his lowered face, like a vulture rocking on a slow breeze, with an occasional carefully placed crack of thumb and forefinger as the steps evolved. The downward gaze, 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 outflung in two radii for balance – these steps and passes and, above all, the downward scrutiny were as though the dancer were proving, on the trodden fish scales and the goats’ droppings, a lost theorem about tangents and circles, or retracing the conclusions of Pythagoras about the square of the hypotenuse.
But more striking still was the tragic and doomed aura that invested this dance, the flaunting so quickly muffled and the introvert and cerebral aloofness of the dancer. Absorption lifted him so far from the others in the cave that he might have been alone in a distant room, raptly applying ritual and undeviating devices to abstruse and nearly insoluble conundrums or exorcising a private and incommunicable pain. The loneliness was absolute. The voices and hands had fallen silent, isolating the wiry jangle of the strings.
On a rock, lifted there to clear the floor, the round, low, heavy table was perched. Revolving past it, Costa leaned forward: suddenly the table levitated itself into the air, sailed past us, and pivoted at right angles to Costa’s head in a series of wide loops, the edge clamped firmly in his mouth and held there only by his teeth buried in the wood. It rotated like a magic carpet, slicing crescents out of the haze of smoke and soon travelling so fast 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 it redefined itself, when the pace dwindled into a slowly revolving still life.
As the dancer sank gyrating to floor level, firelight lit the table-top; when he soared into the dark, only the underside glowed. He quickened his pace and reduced the circumference of the circles by spinning faster and faster in the same place, his revolutions striking sparks of astonished applause through the grotto: cries which rose to an uproar. His head was flung back; muscles and veins corrugated his streaming features and his balancing arms were outflung like those of a dervish until the flying table itself melted into a vast disc twice its own diameter and spinning at such a speed in the cave’s centre that it should by rights have scattered the still life that it bore into the nether shadows.
Slowly the speed slackened. The table was looping through the smoke five feet from the floor. Soon it was sliding from its orbit and rotating back to its launching rock, unhurriedly alighting there at last 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 cigarette he had left burning on the edge of a plate. Dancing slowly back to the centre with no hint of haste or vertigo, he tapped away the long ash and replaced the cigarette in his mouth. Gyrating, sinking and rising again, he unwound the dance to its sober initial steps; then, straight as a wand and poised on tiptoe at his motionless starting point, he broke off and sauntered with lowered lids to the re-established table. Picking up his raki glass he took a meditative sip and, poker-faced in the clamour, slowly subsided.
I could catch a loose word here and there in the flow of Romaic as they talked among themselves. 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? Panayi was swaddling his instrument for the night: its incendiary work was done but its message still twanged and hovered in our veins. Dimitri had dropped asleep for a moment, lying with his head on his arm. The one-handed elder clapped the raki bottle to his eye, as an admiral would a spyglass, to see if any was left. Costa the dancer smoked and smiled with the easy air of a geometrician who has proved what had to be proved; Quod erat demonstrandum, the silent smile seemed to say under the peak of the old cap tilted rakishly forward to shield his eyes from the flames.
The cave dwellers, after a final gulp of raki, began to settle for the night. I was to sleep at the sailors’ end of the cave. Costa and Dimitri hospitably spread new leaves close to the fire, rolled up a coat as a pillow, piled blanket on blanket and laid the old shepherd’s cloak on top of me. ‘Kryo?’ they asked. ‘Studeno?’‘Cold?’ – they had learned four or five words of English on their travels. Only an occasional tremor at wide intervals reminded me of my earlier mishaps; later impressions had snowed them under. There was nothing guarded or apathetic about these particular Greeks; the trance-like melancholy of their steps had evaporated with the last fumes of the dances and the music; their identical grey eyes were filled with humour, alertness and friendly warmth. I thought I had divined an extra feeling in their welcome and in their horny handshakes earlier on, and I had interpreted it as a late symptom of Greek feelings towards Lord Byron’s countrymen. I was right. Dimitri said as much. Uttering the words ‘Lordos Veeron!’ he raised his bunched fingers in a gesture of approval.
Sleep was long in coming. There was much to think about, especially Greece and the Greeks, which were drawing nearer every day. An occasional clank from the fifty goats at the farther end broke the deepening silence. A few yards off, beyond the twelve adjacent snores, I could hear the gasp of the Black Sea. The light ebbed from the walls and from the stalactites as the fire shrank to a feathery glow. Through a gap in the wall, three quarters of Orion blazed an icy slanting lozenge.
A slight clatter roused me as I was on the brink of sleep. It was the spectral, tiptoe figure, confident that everyone was asleep (ah! but they weren’t!), of the dog with the black monocle, tidily licking the last of the lentils and fish gills out of the saucepan.
BARBARA STOCKING (born Rugby, 1951) joined Oxfam as Chief Executive in 2001 and has been travelling to further the charity’s work ever since.
Afterword
BARBARA STOCKING
Chief Executive, Oxfam
Throughout my time with Oxfam, I’ve been fortunate to experience many remarkable meetings, with many remarkable people and in many remarkable places. I’ve also seen time and again how people’s lives can change simply by getting together and talking. It’s a privilege I’m careful never to take for granted.
But among all of the inspiring memories, there is one particular meeting I find myself thinking about more than most. It took place in Mali in 2004, when Oxfam was working – as we still do – in the Sahel region, between the Sahara to the north and the sprawling savannahs to the south. Our focus in the country is on girls’ education, and we work with nomadic Tuareg communities to develop ways to make it easier for children to go to school.
As with any trip, there are a lot of individual details that stick in my mind. The journey from the capital, Bamako, to our destination in the Gao region was a long one. It started with a day’s journey on good quality roads, before we moved briefly onto a ferry and then back into a 4 x 4, from which we watched the roads disappear underneath us as we bumped and jolted our way across the desert.
But what I remember most about the journey isn’t the time it took, or the rocky ride. It’s the hospitality we were shown by our driver. He would take a break every couple of hours and – wonderful man that he is (he still works for Oxfam, in fact) – at that time the tea ritual would begin. A beautiful red Persian-style rug would be taken from
the car boot, swiftly followed by a stove, a teapot and some cups. The stove would be lit, and then would come the most fantastic sweet tea I’ve ever tasted, poured from a great height into a small cup, then back into the pot, and then down from a great height again, to ensure the sugar dissolved. And there we would sit, seeking refuge from the sun under a tree in the middle of the Malian desert, enjoying one of the finest cups of tea you could ever hope to drink. Those moments were, in themselves, remarkable meetings, as we sat, shared stories and put the world to rights.
But the most remarkable meeting of all occurred when we arrived at our destination, slightly weary and feeling generally crumpled after nearly thirty-six hours of travel. I was there to take part in a workshop the Tuareg community had organised, and the sun was already setting as we pulled up at a small settlement of three or four mud huts. My memory is of everything being brown and blue; the brown being the colour of the earth and the huts, and the blue the wonderful, shimmering shade of the traditional Tuareg robes, which people sweep around their bodies and faces as protection from the sun, sand and dust.
A meal was prepared and we sat down on the ground to eat in the traditional way, around thirty of us sticking our hands into pots and pulling out balls of rice and cuts of meat. By this point it was dark, so we were there under the stars, with just a few torches to light our faces as we ate and chatted. The only sounds were voices and the occasional rustling of robes, as people went to tend to their camels or find something to drink.
The conversation moved to Oxfam’s work in Mali in the mid-1990s, shortly after a peace agreement had been negotiated to end deadly clashes between rival Tuareg groups across Mali and Niger. After the fighting had stopped, we were working in Mali, distributing goats, camels and other animals to help people earn a living. And as people shared their memories of this time, one of the Tuareg leaders said something extraordinary.
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