“I know she’s probably got lice.”
She didn’t look up at me or stop caressing the child. But a second later the little girl winced. Alison bent back and looked down her neck. “Look at this, oh, look at this.” It was a small boil, scratched and inflamed, on the child’s shoulder. “Bring my bag.” I went and got it and watched her poke back the dress and rub cream on the sore place, and then without warning dab some on the child’s nose. The little girl rubbed the spot of white cream with a dirty finger; and suddenly, like a crocus bursting out of winter earth, she looked up at Alison and smiled.
“Can’t we give them some money?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They’re not beggars. They’d refuse it anyway.”
She fished in her bag and produced a small note, and held it out to the boy and pointed to him and the girl. They were to share it. The boy hesitated, then took it.
“Please take a photo.”
I went impatiently to the car, got her camera, and took a photo. The boy insisted that we take his address; he wanted a copy, to remember us.
We started back for the car with the little girl beside us. Now she seemed unable to stop smiling—that beaming smile all Greek peasant children have hidden behind their solemn shyness. Alison bent and kissed her, and as we drove off, turned and waved. And waved again. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her bright face turn to me, then take in my expression. She settled back.
“Sorry. I didn’t realize we were in such a hurry.”
I shrugged; and didn’t argue.
I knew exactly what she had been trying to tell me; perhaps not all of it had been put on for me; but some of it had. We drove for a mile or two in silence. She said nothing until we got to Livadia. We had to talk then, because there was food to buy.
* * *
It should have cast a shadow over the day. But it didn’t, perhaps because it was a beautiful day and the landscape we came into one of the greatest in the world; what we were doing began to loom, like the precipitous blue shadow of Parnassus itself, over what we were.
We wound up the high hills and glens and had a picnic lunch in a meadow dense with clover and broom and wild bees. Afterwards we passed the crossroads where Oedipus is reputed to have killed his father. We stopped and stood among the sere thistles by a dry stone wall; an anonymous upland place, exorcized by solitude. All the way in the car up to Arachova, prompted by Alison, I talked about my own father, and perhaps for the first time in my life without bitterness or blame; rather in the way that Conchis talked about his life. And then as I glanced sideways at Alison, who was against the door, half-turned towards me, it came to me that she was the only person in the world that I could have been talking like that to; that without noticing it I had slipped back into something of our old relationship… too close to need each other’s names. I looked back to the road, but her eyes were still on me, and I had to speak.
“A penny for them.”
“How well you look.”
“You haven’t been listening.”
“Yes I have.”
“Staring at me. It makes me nervous.”
“Can’t sisters look at their brothers?”
“Not incestuously.”
She sat back obediently against the seat, and craned up at the colossal gray cliffs we were winding under.
“Just a walk.”
“I know. I’m having second thoughts.”
“For me or for you?”
“Mainly for you.”
“We’ll see who drops first.”
Arachova was a picturesque shoulder of pink and terracotta houses, a mountain village perched high over the Delphi valley. I made an inquiry and was sent to a cottage near the church. An old woman came to the door; beyond her in the shadows stood a carpet-loom, a dark-red carpet half-finished on it. A few minutes’ talk with her confirmed what the mountain had made obvious.
Alison looked at me. “What’s she say?”
“She says it’s about six hours’ walk. Hard walk.”
“But that’s fine. It’s what Baedeker says. One must be there at sundown.” I looked up at the huge gray mountainside. The old woman unhooked a key from behind the door. “What’s she saying?”
“There’s some kind of hut up there.”
“Then what are we worrying about?”
“She says it will be damn cold.” But it was difficult to believe, in the blazing midday heat. Alison put her hands on her hips.
“You promised me an adventure, I want an adventure.”
I looked at the old woman and then back at Alison. She whisked her dark glasses off and gave me a hard, sideways, tough-woman’s stare; and although it was half-joking I could see the hint of suspicion in her eyes. If she once began to guess that I was anxious not to spend the night in the same room with her, she would also begin to guess that my halo was made of plaster.
At that moment a man led a mule past and the old woman called to him. He was going to fetch wood down from near the refuge. Alison could ride on the packsaddle.
It was destined.
40
The long path zigzagged up a cliff-face, and leaving the lower world behind, we came over the top into the upper Parnassus. A vernally cool wind blew across two or three miles of meadowland. Beyond, somber black firwoods and gray buttresses of rock climbed, arched and finally disappeared into fleecy white clouds. Alison got off and we walked over the turf beside the muleteer. He was about forty, with a fierce moustache under a broken nose and a fine air of independence about him. He told us about the shepherd life: a life of sun-hours, counting, milking, brittle stars and chilling winds, endless silences broken only by bells, alarms against wolves and eagles; a life virtually unchanged in the last six thousand years. I translated for Alison. She warmed to him at once, establishing a half-sexual, half-philanthropic rapport across the language barrier.
He said he had worked in Athens for a time, but then hyparchi esychia, there was no silent peace there. Alison liked the word: esychia, esychia, she kept on repeating. He laughed and corrected her pronunciation; stopping and conducting her, as if she were an orchestra. Her eyes flicked defiantly at me, to see if she was behaving properly in my eyes. I kept a neutral face; but I liked the man, one of those fine rural Greeks who constitute the least servile and most likeable peasantry in Europe, and I couldn’t help liking Alison for liking him back.
On the far side of the grassland we came to two kalyvia, rough stone huts, by a spring. Our muleteer was taking another path from then on. Alison fished impulsively in her red Greek shoulder-bag, and pressed on him two packets of airline cigarettes. “Esychia,” the muleteer said. He and Alison stood interminably shaking hands, while I took their photo.
“Esychia, esychia. Tell him I know what he means.”
“He knows you know. That’s why he likes you.”
At last we set off through the firs.
“You think I’m just sentimental.”
“No I don’t. But one packet would have been enough.”
“No it wouldn’t. I felt two packets fond of him.”
Later she said, “That beautiful word.”
“It’s doomed.”
We climbed a little way. “Listen.”
We stopped on the stony track and listened and there was nothing but silence, esychia, the breeze in the fir branches. She took my hand and we walked on.
The path mounted interminably through the trees, through clearings alive with butterflies, over rocky stretches where we several times lost the path. As we came higher, it grew cooler, and the mountain ahead, a damp polar gray, disappeared completely into the cloud. We spoke very little because we seldom had breath to speak. But the solitude, the effort, the need I had continually to take her hand to help her when the path became, as it frequently did, a rough staircase rather than a path—all broke some of the physical reserve between us; instituted a sort of sexless camaraderie that we both accepted as the form.
It
was about six when we came to the refuge. It was tucked away above the tree line in a goyal, a minute windowless building with a barrel-vaulted roof and a chimney. The door was of rusty iron, perforated with jagged bullet holes from some battle with the Communist andarte during the Civil War: we saw four bunks, a pile of old red blankets, a stove, a lamp, a saw and an axe, even a pair of skis. But it looked as if no one had stayed there for years.
I said, “I’m game to call it a day here.” But she didn’t even answer; simply pulled on a jumper.
The clouds canopied us, it began to drizzle, and as we turned up over a crest, the wind cut like January in England. Then suddenly the clouds were all around us, a swirling mist that cut visibility down to thirty yards or less. I turned to look at Alison. Her nose had gone red and she looked very cold. But she pointed up the next rock-strewn slope.
At the top of it we came to a col and miraculously, as if the mist and the cold had been a small test, the sky began to clear. The clouds thinned, were perfused by oblique sunlight, then burst open into great pools of serene blue. Soon we were walking in sunshine again. Before us lay a wide basin of green turf, ringed with peaks and festooned by streaks of snow still clinging to the screes and hollows of the steeper slopes. Everywhere there were flowers—harebells, gentians, deep magenta-red alpine geraniums, intense yellow asters, saxifrage. They burst out of every cranny in the rocks, they enameled every stretch of turf. It was like stepping back a season. Alison ran on ahead, wildly, and turned, grinning, her arms held out, like a bird about to take wing; then ran on again, dark blue and jeans blue, in absurd childish swoops.
Lykeri, the highest peak, was too steep to be climbed quickly. We had to scramble up, using our hands, resting frequently. Near the top we came on beds of violets in bloom, huge purple flowers that had a delicate scent; and then at last, hand in hand, we struggled up the last few yards and stood on the little platform with its crowning cairn. Alison said, “Oh my God, oh my God.”
On the far side a huge chasm plunged down two thousand feet of shadowy air. The westering sun was still just above the horizon, but the clouds had vanished. The sky was a pale, absolutely dustless, absolutely pure, azure. There were no other mountains near to crowd the distance out. We seemed to stand immeasurably high, where land and substance drew up to a narrow zenith, remote from all towns, all society, all drought and defect. Purged.
Below, for a hundred miles in each direction, there were other mountains, valleys, plains, islands, seas; Attica, Boeotia, Argolis, Achaia, Locris, Aetolia, all the old heart of Greece. The setting sun richened, softened, refined all the colors. There were deep blue eastern shadows and lilac western slopes; pale copper-green valleys, Tanagra-colored earth; the distant sea dreaming, smoky, milky, calm as old blue glass. With a splendid classical simplicity someone had formed in small stones, just beyond the cairn, the letters phiomega—light. It was exact. The peak reached up into a world both literally and metaphorically of light. It didn’t touch the emotions; it was too vast, too inhuman, too serene; and it came to me like a shock, a delicious intellectual joy marrying and completing the physical one, that the reality of the place was as beautiful, as calm, as ideal, as so many poets had always dreamed it to be.
We took photographs of each other, of the view, and then sat down on the windward side of the cairn and smoked cigarettes, huddled together because of the cold. Alpine crows screeched overhead, torn in the wind; wind as cold as ice, as astringent as acid. There came back the memory of that mind-voyage Conchis had induced in me under hypnosis. They seemed almost parallel experiences; except that this had all the beauty of its immediacy, its uninducedness, its being-nowness.
I looked covertly at Alison; the tip of her nose was bright red. But I was thinking that after all she had guts; that if it hadn’t been for her we wouldn’t have been there, this world at our feet, this sense of triumph; this transcendent crystallization of all I felt for Greece.
“You must see things like this every day.”
“Never like this. Never even beginning to be like this.” Two or three minutes later she said, “This is the first decent thing that’s happened to me for months. Today. And this.” After a pause, she added, “And you.”
“Don’t say that. I’m just a mess. A defilement.”
“I still wouldn’t want to be here with anyone else.” She stared out towards Euboea; bruised face, being dispassionate for once. She turned and looked at me. “Would you?”
“I can’t think of any other girl I’ve ever known who could walk this far.”
She thought it over, then looked at me again. “What an evasive answer that was.”
“I’m glad we came. You’re a trouper, Kelly.”
“And you’re a bastard, Urfe.”
But I could see that she wasn’t offended.
41
Almost at once tiredness, as we returned, attacked us. Alison discovered a blister on her left heel, where the new shoe had rubbed. We wasted ten minutes of the quick-dying light trying to improvise a bandage for it; and then, almost as abruptly as if a curtain had dropped, night was on us. With it came wind. The sky remained clear, the stars burned frantically, but somewhere we went down the wrong rocky slope and at the place I expected the refuge to be there was nothing. It was difficult to see footholds, increasingly difficult to think sensibly. We foolishly went on, coming into a vast volcanic bowl, a stark lunar landscape; snow-streaked cliffs, violent winds howling round the sides. Wolves became real, not an amusing reference in a casual conversation.
Alison must have been far more frightened, and probably far colder, than I was. At the center of the bowl it became clear that it was impossible to get out except by going back, and we sat for a few minutes to rest in the lee of a huge boulder. I held her close against me for warmth’s sake. She lay with her head buried in my sweater, in a completely unsexual embrace; and cradling her there, shivering in that extraordinary landscape, a million years and miles from the sweltering Athens night, I felt it meant nothing, it must mean nothing. I told myself I would have felt the same with anyone. But I looked out over the grim landscape, an accurate enough simile of my life, and remembered something the muleteer had said earlier; that wolves never hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
I forced Alison to her feet and we stumbled back the way we had come. Along a ridge to the west another col and slope led down towards the black distant sea of trees. Eventually we saw contoured against the sky a tor-shaped hill I had noticed on the way up. The refuge was just the other side of it. Alison no longer seemed to care; I kept hold of her hand and dragged her along by main force. Bullying her, begging her, anything to keep her moving. Twenty minutes later the squat dark cube of the refuge appeared in its little combe.
I looked at my watch. It had taken us an hour and a half to reach the peak; and over three hours to get back.
* * *
I groped my way in and sat Alison on a bunk. Then I struck a match, found the lamp and tried to light it; but it had no wick and no oil. I turned to the stove. That, thank God, had dry wood. I ripped up all the paper I could find: a Penguin novel of Alison’s, the wrappings off the food we had bought; then lit it and prayed. There were backpuffs of papery, then resinous smoke, and the kindling caught. In a few minutes the hut grew full of flickering red light and sepia shadows, and even more welcome heat. I picked up a pail. Alison raised her head from her knees.
“I’m going to get some water now.”
“Okay.” She smiled wanly.
“I should get under some blankets.” She nodded.
But when I came back from the stream five minutes later she was gingerly feeding logs through the upper door of the stove; barefooted, on a red blanket she had spread over the floor between the bunks and the fire. On a lower bunk she had laid out what was to be our meal: bread, chocolate, sardines, paximadia, oranges; and she had even found an old saucepan.
“Kelly, I ordered you to bed.”
“I suddenly remem
bered I’m meant to be an air hostess. The life and soul of the crash.” She took the pail of water and began to wash the saucepan out. As she crouched, I could see the sore red spots on her heels. “Do you wish we hadn’t done it?”
“No.”
She looked back up at me. “Just no?”
“I’m delighted we did it.”
Satisfied, she went back to the saucepan, filled it with water, began to crumble the chocolate. I sat on the edge of the bunk and took my own shoes and socks off. I wanted to be natural, and I couldn’t; and she couldn’t. The heat, the tiny room, the two of us, in all that cold desolation.
“Sorry I went all womany. It’ll never happen again.”
There was a ghost of sarcasm in her voice, but I couldn’t see her face. She had begun to stir the chocolate over the stove.
“Don’t be silly.”
A squall of wind battered against the iron roof, and the door groaned half open.
She said, “Saved from the storm.”
I looked at her from the door, after I had propped it to with one of the skis. She was stirring the melting chocolate with a twig, standing sideways to avoid the heat, watching me. She pulled a flushed face, and swiveled her eyes round the dirty walls. “Romantic, isn’t it?”
“As long as they keep the wind out.” She smiled secretly at me and looked down at her saucepan. “Why do you smile?”
“Because it is romantic.”
I sat down on the bunk again. She pulled off her jumper and shook her hair free. I invoked the image of Lily; but somehow it was a situation that Lily could never have got into; so could not be very absent-present in. I tried to sound at ease.
“You look fine. In your element.”
“So I should. I spend most of my life slaving in a four-by-two galley.” She stood with one hand on her hips; a minute of silence; old domestic memories from Russell Square; watching her cook. “What was that Sartre play we saw?”
The Magus Page 27