Giant plane trees often mark their issue; without them, neither the trees nor the surrounding houses would have sprung up, and the villagers sitting in the shade and the drinking mules would never have assembled. How miraculous, on the way down from baking watersheds, seems the green froth nourished by rock-borne springs! The water is husbanded in conduits, bean tendrils steal up flimsy obelisks of cane, medlar, lemon and orange trees form cool undercrofts. Pumpkins scatter the channelled soil, gourd stems climb the trunks and the branches to hang dappled green globes in the penumbra, goitrous with the damp. The wells that dive through the floors of lonely houses fill the cisterns with acoustics that capture the clank and splash of the bucket and send the rumour of the upper world booming about the vaulted dark. Sometimes thirst turns mediocre water into good: a gulp of cloudy liquid in the wilderness of the Deep Mani, for instance, or brackish draughts on a gasping Cretan shore. Round the mouths of some old wells, castles and monasteries fall to bits. Rope-grooves fret the coping and the roots of fig trees prise the steyning askew. After the lizards and kestrels and the Herculean mountains all round, it is hard, looking down, to focus the gloom of those cylinders. Small as a coin at the end of a tufted descending mile of cobwebs and as though seen through a telescope the wrong way, a disc of reflected sky looks back stamped with one’s own craning torso. After seconds of waiting a dropped pebble fractures this medallion with the report of a cork drawn in the Antipodes and the splashing echoes mount as faintly as the voices of the hamadryads calling to Hylas. Into these dark and plunging tunnels, in a score of fairy stories, are dropped the goblets and rings and swords whose recovery, after years of trouble, settles a princely identity, a claim to a kingdom or reconciles lovers long estranged or spell-bound.
Of so polar a chill is one blue dragon’s eye of water half-way up Mt. Olympus that a stranger tempted to swim across it climbs back into the heat of August frozen to the bone. Running springs are the surest talismans against the noonday. Nereids are said to make some of them perilous for shepherds and many are heavy with fable. There is a spring between Mt. Ida and the White Mountains that has the attribute, like many fountains in myths, of bestowing immortality. During the war we would halt here and, leaning our guns against the trunk of an arbutus, lie flat, lower our turbanned heads and drink deep and long. Moments of tranquillity and benediction! But better than all of them today seemed this legendless Aetolian trickle. I could hear each drop falling like the note of a celesta the other side of a brittle wall of sleep.
I watched the second-lieutenant peeling an apple fast and deftly so that the skin fell off in an unbroken coil. He cut it up and offered a neat slice on the tip of a silver pen-knife.
“It’s from Naoussa,” he said, “in Macedonia. The best in Greece.” He was stationed in Perista, the village for which I, too, was heading. “You must stay with me,” he said, looking pleased at the prospect of company. “I’m all alone there, just back from leave in Athens. There’s a marvellous leg of lamb in here.” He patted his haversack. “A present from a friend in Navpaktos. The woman where I’m billeted will roast it, all wrapped up in grease-paper so that none of the goodness gets out! She’s an ace; she pokes whole garlic cloves right down between the meat and the bone! You’ll see....”
Marko, the second-lieutenant, a lithe, good-looking Athenian with shining black hair, gave off sparks of enjoyment and energy even in repose. He was an epicure and a hedonist and, as I soon saw, nimble as a lynx on the ascent, which was long and steep. Too young for the war and the occupation, he had grown up in time to get the civil war as a coming-of-age present. Much of it he had spent in precisely the region where his present assignment lay. This valley had been the theatre of dogged and merciless conflict. Marko paused to describe the advance of his company up the slope we were climbing in pursuit of a force of communist guerrillas. His rapid discourse seemed to fill the empty chasm once more with machine-and sub-machine-gun fire and the explosion of grenades and mortar bombs; it peopled the slopes with running and crouching figures and splintered the air with fragments. At a bend in the track where a group of boulders slanted higgledy-piggledy—I think he had been waiting for them—he stopped again.
“It was afternoon, just about now. I was working my way uphill there,” he said, “dodging behind those boulders to avoid bursts of fire coming from that rock by the bracken. It turned into a duel: we were both determined to get each other. I managed to creep within about five yards, with fire coming down in bursts all the way. While the enemy was changing his magazine, I tossed a hand grenade behind his rock, ducked, slipped in a new magazine and waited for him to break cover. Out leaped a khaki figure with his tommy-gun blazing and shouting Na! Scullion of the Glückbergs[10] in a peculiar high voice. I dropped just in time and fired a whole burst from the ground. The guerrilla let go his gun, stumbled downhill a few paces and lay still—just over there. And do you know”—Marko’s voice after a pause had dropped to a lower pitch—“it was a woman! I had thought there was something odd about the voice. And a very good-looking one too, with her hair cut short. She’d stopped the whole burst. Phoveró itan! Phríki!! It was horrible, terrible.”
After another pause he went on, “They used to be trained along with the other communist irregulars in enormous camps the other side of the Yugoslav border. That was before Tito broke with Stalin. Some of them fought like dogs. Poor Greece....”
He was amused by my eagerness about the Kravara. “They are a queer lot,” he said, “as bright as they make them. The old ones could tell you a lot.” He gave me a few names.
We came to the top at last and a fresh landscape slid downhill into a further rolling and mountain-girt gulf of country into which I had caught a far-away glimpse from the slopes above Platanos: a bare, mountain-locked, magnificent region. Much of its asperity was tamed and softened by the gold afternoon light. Marko had to call at a house in the outskirts of the village. As he flew up the steps he told me not to be late for the leg of lamb; anyone would tell me where he lived.
There was no comparison between Platanos and Perista; the ragged and dusty look was quite absent. Trellises from opposite eaves reached out to join hands over the slanting pebbles. Shade abounded. A ball came bouncing down a steep wynd and a troop of pretty children flew squealing after it into the lane until the sight of a stranger froze them into a battery of eyes agog with wonder while the ball continued its orphaned career downhill. A small girl was pasturing a goat overhead—on what? It seemed to be grazing on shale—and singing a desperate song to herself about ambushes and bloodshed.
The priest was also a cobbler. He sat cross-legged among the lasts on his doorstep, his mouth full of wooden tacks. His hammer halted in mid-air as he mumbled through the tacks. “What news?—Tí néa?—where are you from? Anglia? Po! Po! Po!—makrya! A long way.”
He smiled to himself as he resumed work, selecting the tacks and banging them neatly home in an upturned sole. The absurdity of such a distance tickled him: Anglia, indeed....A charming man with a hunchback took me under his wing and we headed for the magazi. He admitted that it was a pretty village; yes, pretty but wretched: they had to bring earth up here by donkey from the Kotsalos, which flowed along the ravine between Perista and Dorvitza, the next village north. A hopeless region. Nobody wanted these barren hills, so people, long, long ago—palaia! palaia!—took refuge here from the Turks. Soil erosion and fire had stripped it bare and reduced the villagers to poverty, emigration, living from hand to mouth, peddling, even beggary....There was a rumour that the place had been prosperous once: look at those mulberry trees! People said they might have been planted long, long ago by Jews who grew rich on silkworms and then vanished, or most of them anyway. There might be a few of their descendants left: what about names like Rorós, Kagánis and Solomos?[11] Otherwise there was nothing to pasture flocks on, not a square inch of soil to grow grain, no heather, even, for bees. A little water there was, thank God; enough for a few potatoes and chick peas, not much else. The tops of
some plane trees showed where the path coiled into the valley; and the pale green of young poplars intercepted the slanting light. A few cornel cherry trees flourished and a sprinkling of wild pears and crab-apples. One of the planes and a raft of vine shaded the little space outside the magazi. Inside it was wide and cool, sparsely stocked with bales of cloth, wool, horse nails, saws, tinned stuff, coils of rope (always, rather oddly to a Western eye, sold by weight), baskets, open tubs of salted sardines and anchovy, or ouzo “loose” in big jars (as opposed to the smart “sealed” kind), slabs of salt cod, and, looped on strings and painted black to keep off rust, except for the edges still bright from the forge, were looped the haftless heads of skeparnia, those Biblical, all-purpose adze-like tools with a curved blade for cutting or hacking on one side and a flat surface on the other, which Greeks use as a spade, a hoe, an axe, a hammer, a rough plane, a pruning knife or, in masons’ hands, a trowel for slicing and trimming bricks. There were mule bridles and lengths of webbing for girths and a wooden saddle or two.
A sloe-eyed boy, writing in an exercise book, shouted to his mother that a stranger had come—Mammá! Ena xéno!—and went on with his work. She brought me a coffee. I looked through my midday scribbling. After a time the boy said, “What are you reading?”
“You’ll never guess.”
“Go on.”
“All right, then.” I read out the boliaric sentence about “looking out for the important policeman.” He laughed.
“Sovará?” he asked—“Seriously?”—and came over to have a look: then, after reading a few words, he told two men who were just coming in that I was a foreigner and reading bóliárika.
The words acted like Open Sesame on the two newcomers and on the others, including my hunchback mentor, who soon followed them in. Why had I ever thought there would be any difficulty in learning about the old days in the Kravara? Of course there had been beggars here, hundreds of them, the best in Greece—not so much here in Perista, one of them said deprecatingly; Dorvitza was the place, the next village along the valley, and Platanos, the one I had just left. Loose, cupping gestures suggested multitude and the long whistles on all sides could be interpreted as admiration or implied rebuke. It was exactly what I had heard in Platanos, except that there, Perista and Dorvitza were the two villages cited: and in Dorvitza, when I went there, Platanos and Perista....And what about Vonorta, Simi, Palaiópyrgi, Aráchova—yet another Aráchova out of the many in Greece—Pevkos, Diasyláki? As they spoke they pointed at the barren ranges all round where, invisible from where we sat, these hamlets were dispersed. And Kastaniá, Houmouri, Perdikóvis, Neochori, Ayia Triada, Elevtheriani, Kositza, Terpitza, Artótiva, Ternos, Lobótina, Stránoma, Klépa, Pokistá? These were the nests from which the Kravarites had set out on their travels “in the old days.” There was something in their voices of the affectionate homesickness with which people in England speak of lamplighters, muffin-men, horse buses and German bands, and a shade of the rue that accompanies the remembrance of past heroes. They had been tou diavólou i kaltza, the Devil’s sock: all the epithets suggesting quick wits were lavished on them—ownership of four eyes, the ability to fly and to sleep with open lids, the dexterity to horseshoe flies and lice. And the gift of the gab! (Perista, I learnt afterwards, was the most famous of them all for eloquence and, as it were, the knack of talking the hind leg off a donkey and replacing it with a wooden one without either the animal or its owner realizing that anything was wrong.)
Villages specialized in different devices. Vagrants from Ternos were adept at herbalism—not really adept, they quickly explained—but at pretending to be: quacks in fact. “I wouldn’t like to try their remedies,” one of the company said. “Nor would I,” added another, “but I’d rather swallow their muck than consult the eye specialists from Dermati! If you’re blind, your eyes drop out and if you can see, they blind you.” Ternos, Kambia and Karva lived entirely by rascality, it seemed: when someone from these places came to a village, it was no good locking the doors and the windows: they’d be down the chimneys in the night; and next day, where are your trousers? There were dealers in trinkets and counterfeit gold who spirited rings off people’s fingers to examine them and then replaced them with gilt brass. Others, in the early days of photography, wandered about with empty boxes on tripods; after making passes with voluminous black cloths and resounding clicks, they left their customers with squares of black celluloid which had to be kept in a dark cupboard for a week before the picture appeared; by which time...
Others dealt in sacred books “blessed by the Oecumenical Patriarch,” holy relics, bits of the true cross from Jerusalem, incense from Mt. Ararat....But all of these, as far as I could gather, were elaborations of the basic local calling. The true Kravarite vocation was straight mendicancy; but mendicancy elaborated by many ruses: feigned blindness, madness and epileptic fits, and, above all, the semblance of lameness, loss of limb, and malformation. Some would be hunchbacks. (“Not real ones, like me!” my earlier mentor said.) Others contorted their arms, turning them, as it were, inside out with a tangle of suppliant fingers at the end. Some even pretended to have lost both legs, or, at least, the use of them. They strode cheerfully whistling along the road until a village came in sight; then out of their bags came little trolleys on which they settled and then punted themselves along the main street with their hands to take up their stations at the likeliest points. Rolling back their eyes till only the whites showed and contorting themselves into postures that made them quite unrecognizable from the swagmen of the highways which they had been a few moments before, they waited with their brass bowls for the first musical tinkle of a coin. Their trollies were miniature wooden horses for the conquest of Troy after Troy.
These disguises, the old ones said, achieved a perfection which was not learnt overnight. A few villages were the headquarters of specialists who trained promising boys in all the arts they needed for their careers. They were mountain academies of begging in which the classes, mutatis mutandis, must have resembled Fagin’s school for young gentlemen. When they had no more to learn, they set out on their travels, paying the fees retrospectively from the takings of their maiden journeys.
I knew about these real or fictitious classes: it is one of the fragments of rumour which anybody who knows anything about the Kravara has heard; and I had been waiting to ask if there was anything in it. There is an associated rumour, widely bandied about and mentioned in Karkavitza’s novel, about which I longed, but did not dare, to ask. I managed it in the end: Was there any foundation for the report that, in the bad old days, parents—or others—would sometimes distort the limbs of children when they were very young, in order to help them in their foredestined careers? There was a pause. They had all heard of it, they said, but there was, as far as they knew, no foundation for the rumour. Perhaps, one old man said, some wicked parents long, long ago might have done such a deed—after all, there were bad folk everywhere!—but if it had ever happened it must have been a single case. Nothing of the kind had ever been heard of in his day and he was a very old man: nor in his parents’ or grandparents’ time, which took one back to the days of Turkokratía, long before the War of Independence. Everyone agreed, and their tone and their openness about every other detail of old Kravarite life carried conviction.
The old man asked where I had heard such tales. I said, in the Great Greek Encyclopaedia. “Under what?” the boy asked; he had been listening to the conversation and occasionally joining in. I said, “Under Kravara.” He went to a cupboard behind the counter and there, to my astonishment, lying on their sides, pile on pile, were the huge quarto volumes of the Megáli Elleniki Enkyklopaídia.[12] He lifted out the appropriate volume—Kosmologia—Leptokaryon—and lugged it to his table. “Here we are,” he said, “Kravara” and read the paragraph out loud, dealing with the fairly elaborate katharevousa of the dictionary—he went to school at the Gymnasium in Navpaktos—with impressive ease. “Some of the inhabitants,” he read “in accordance wit
h old custom, twisted their arms and legs at a youthful age or feigned blindness with intent to deceive as they wandered about the towns of Greece and, frequently, of foreign countries....Kravarite: derogatory name for an untruthful person, a feigner, charlatan, tramp, deceiver or beggar.”
He shut the book with the word “Keratádes! The Horn-wearers! They oughtn’t to have written that! Especially as it’s not true!” I wished now I hadn’t brought the subject up. “Eh!” somebody said, “the chap who wrote it was probably jaundiced. Perhaps he’d been boliarized by someone from the Kravara and wanted to get his own back!” The awkward moment dissolved in laughter.
They were surprised and incredulous when I told them that though tramps and beggars may have dwindled to a small number in Greece, there were still plenty in Europe. They found it hard to credit that they were a common sight in a bourgeois and orderly place like England, and even in the heart of London. It was emigration to America which had changed the Kravara, they said. Inhabitants sailed away by the thousand. The villages remained nearly as poor, but an artificial economy kept them going: all the Kravarites in the United States sent money back to their families. Cash for the first journey was often collected by the old means. The brief expedient of begging had led now and then to substantial fortunes. Look at..., an old ex-boliar from Vonorta, who now owned three blocks in Larissa! Kravarites in Rumania grew rich as agents and rent-collectors for landowners; a calling in which they earned a reputation for ruthlessness....Many of the churches towering like cathedrals above the humble villages were founded on alms given twice over.
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