“Barba Elia,” I asked. “What is the farthest that any of them got?”
“A few,” he said, “used to push on to Siberia. It was all right in summer, but the snow in winter! Po! Po!...Early snow was a blessing, mind you.”
“Why?”
“They could track hares and bang them on the head.” A tap with his pipe stem between fingers upheld in a V demonstrated a stick striking a snowbound hare between the ears. “But later it was their enemy. You see, it didn’t look right for them to wrap up too warm. Bad for trade. And there were wolves; not small packs like ours, but whole troops. One of our people from the village of Klépa over there,” he pointed through the window at the dark, “perished in the snow a few miles outside Vladivostok. Frozen stiff as a plank, the ill-fated one, all that was left of him.”
This journey, farther-flung than Marco Polo’s mission to Kubla Khan, was almost too much to take in. When did it happen? “Oh, a long time ago. It was during the war.” Which war? The Great War? Or ta Valkánika? “No. Earlier. When the Russians were fighting the Japanese....”
The old man smoked in silence as though he were scrutinizing these remote events; and we marvelled by proxy. The chill of Manchuria had broken in to our southern lamplight. Oddly venerable all of a sudden, he towered over the rest of us: the last survivor of a race of lonely skirmishers that for generations had invaded kingdoms and looted empires under the flag of General Cuckoo.
More cheerful thoughts soon routed the pensive moment. The gullibility of the Russians woke fond memories: you could steal a bone off a dog and sell it to its master as the shank of St. Barnabas, pick up a bit of firewood and auction it as the True Cross. A long beard and hair down the back, worn with some religious emblem, would turn the wearer into a minor prophet and loosen a tinkling cataract of charity. Love potions made of flour and pepper, remedies for barrenness, charms against bad crops or the Eye, all fetched good prices, especially if they were administered with an incantation. They had a deep trust in magic. (I privately wondered how they compared to similar beliefs in remote parts of Greece.)
“A fellow-villager of mine called Luke was very good at this. He knocked on the door of a lonely farmhouse in the Ukraine where he had heard that the farmer’s wife wanted children. He declared that he was Grtzki and Pravoslavnik—Greek and Orthodox—and knew how to make the barren fertile. ‘This is a holy house,’ he said. ‘A silver cross is buried here.’ The farmer’s wife asked what he meant. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a silver cross. I can feel it.’ Luke began to wander about the room with his eyes shut and his hands held out like a sleep-walker. ‘It’s here!’ he cried, pointing to the floor. The wife fetched a knife and dug into the earthen floor at the spot he was pointing to, and there was a little tin cross; Luke had slipped in and buried it early that morning while she was feeding the farm animals. After this she believed everything Luke said. She looked on him as a saint. He sold her a charm made of some rubbish, then asked her if she would like twin boys, which doubled the price. Overcome with gratitude, she kissed his hand: she would give him anything he asked for. Well!...She had big blue eyes, plump as a partridge. The scoundrel stayed there all the afternoon, and at the end of it she pulled the eiderdown off the bed and gave it to him. He set off with it over his shoulder. He’d only gone a couple of miles when he saw a horseman galloping after him; the husband! Luke sat down on a tree stump and waited. ‘What’s this heap of lies you’ve been telling my wife?’ the husband thundered. ‘Give me back that eiderdown!’ ‘If I’ve been telling lies,’ Luke said with dignity, ‘may that eiderdown burst into flames!’ The husband seized it in silence and set off home at a gallop. It was beginning to get dark. All of a sudden the horseman stopped dead and Luke saw a great flame and smoke coming out of the eiderdown! The farmer threw it away in terror and, galloping back, dismounted quaking all over and fell on his knees begging forgiveness. He made Luke mount behind him and took him back to the farm and loaded him with gold. He asked him to stay for a month, a year, for ever. But off he set next morning, a much richer man.” Uncle Elias was shaking with silent laughter at the recollection. Everyone asked how it had all come about.
“When he saw the husband riding towards him,” Uncle Elias said, “he lit one of these,” he held up a bit of the fungus he used as tinder for his flint and steel, “and slipped it inside the quilting. The wind soon saw to the rest.
“But that wasn’t the end of it. A twelvemonth later, on his way back westward after many travels, Luke lost his way on a plain one night. It was pitch dark; no moon. He found a barn, went in and slept on the straw. When day came, there, in the yard, was the farmer! Luke had come back to the same place by mistake! ‘I’ll catch it,’ he thought. ‘If he sees me I’ll have to eat wood! Aiee! ’ He tried to slink off; but the farmer caught sight of him. ‘Holy Virgin, now I’m for it!’ thought Luke. But the farmer ran up and clasped him in his arms and covered him with kisses. ‘My benefactor!’ he kept shouting. He led Luke indoors. There was the farmer’s wife weeping tears of joy and there, in the cradle, were two splendid boys! They loaded him up with money all over again; slaughtered a sucking pig, opened the best wine. In a couple of hours, the farmer was dead drunk and snoring on the floor. The twins were fast asleep in their cradle, only Luke and the farmer’s wife were awake. So...” Uncle Elias broke off. His shoulders and his hands lifted and widened palm upwards; then his hands, as though he were ill-resigned to the thought of these ancient backslidings, fell limp between his knees. His snowy head shook and his tongue clicked slowly and sorrowfully in a mock disapprobation which, as he looked up, also embraced the hilarity he had unleashed in the taverna. He turned up the wick and peered round at the heightening chiaroscuro of our joyful masks.
“No danger,” someone said, “of the farmer, when he got older, going shorthanded at haymaking.”
“Shocking doings,” the old man resumed, as his own expanding smile brought an infinity of sharpened wrinkles into play once more. “Charis and Panos from Pokista were even worse. Mí rotáte, paidiá! Don’t ask me, children!” When we did, he settled back comfortably.
“It was the custom of Charis,” he said, “to arrive in a Russian village carrying Panos on his back—Panos was the lighter of the two—then he set him down under a tree and knelt beside him wringing his hands and weeping bitterly. A crowd would gather and ask what was wrong. Then Charis said: ‘My poor brother is dying!’—and Panos really looked like it, all grey in the face, with hollow cheeks and glazed eyes—like this.” Uncle Elias’s own features for a second mimicked a moribund rictus of alarming verisimilitude and then sprang as abruptly back to normal—“‘Here we are,’ he would moan—‘Grtzki! Pravoslavnik!—thousands of miles from home!’ All their hearts melted. They would be taken into someone’s house and that night, Panos would die.”
“Die?”
“Die. Some of the old ones had the secret. He could stop his breathing, turn white and cold: everyone would have said a corpse. They laid him out, put a clean suit of clothes on him, covered him with flowers, dug the grave and, as the custom is, all the village would contribute to a collection for the family; that is to say, for Charis; they filled his hat with roubles as he wept and mourned beside the bier. Charis explained that, in Greece, only the family must attend the vigil. So, the night before the funeral, they left him alone there lamenting. When the village was asleep, he gave the dead man a shake, and Panos sat up scattering the flowers and stepped from the candles. Then, hop! they were out of the window and away over the steppe with a new suit and a hat full of cash to the good! After a hundred versts or so, on the outskirts of a new village, Panos climbed on Charis’s back again and they headed for the market place...They were very fond of Russia.”
Our response was noisy. When it had died down, the tavern-keeper said, “Travel broadens the mind.”
“That’s true,” Uncle Elias agreed. “You see strange places and strange men. But,” he said, standing up with a sigh and picking up his stick and standin
g with hands joined over the handle, “it’s a young man’s game. Rain...wind...snow...dogs...wolves...wicked men...Lent was a bad time....”
The rigours of fasting at certain periods in the Eastern Calendar whittle the intake down to a drastic minimum. The piety of the Russians must have reduced free meals to almost nothing.
I cheerfully suggested that there were always those hen-coops as a last resort. He looked at me with an expression of a genuine shock that was echoed by all the rest. “The hen-coops? You don’t imagine that our villagers would eat meat during the Great Fast? Mnístite mou, Kyrie!” He crossed himself as though to aroint the heathenish thought and then covered his white locks with his leopard-skin cap. “Forgive me, Lord!” I had put my foot in it again. The eyes of the company, suddenly all aimed at me, held no trace of censure; merely the kind, sad smiles that an artless Hottentot might elicit among missionaries.
“I wonder what they thought about it when they found out.” The hunchback’s question halted the general move to the door.
“Who?”
“Why, the Russians, when they saw the room was empty next day.”
Uncle Elias halted in the threshold; his face, lit from below, lengthened in thought. “Who knows?” A possible solution struck him, and the long countenance dispersed in cheerful fragments. The end of his stick rose from the floor and twirled in a swift corkscrew till it touched the centre beam of the ceiling. “They probably thought they had been plucked into paradise, like my patron saint, the great prophet Elias.” Elias is the Greek for Elijah, whose chapels, as successor to Helios Apollo, are always raised on hilltops on the way to Heaven. “They would believe anything.”
There was another access of hilarity. Uncle Elias left us with a wide and fluttering wave of the hand—“Goodnight, boys”—and vanished into the dark.
[1]Mángas, Koutsavákis, Tramboükos, Rebétís, Mortis, Dervísis—a dervish!—and Daïs, though this is more an out-and-out tough—there are many words with roughly the same general meaning, each supplying a different nuance.
[2] The head of St. Andrew, smitten from the apostle’s crucified trunk in the reign of Claudius, has just returned to Patras, after five centuries’ sojourn in his brother’s famous cathedral in Rome; sent as a token of goodwill to the Greek Orthodox Church by Pope Paul V. In 1461, eight years after the fall of Byzantium, Thomas Palaeologue, Despot of the Peloponnese and brother of the last emperor, translated the famous relic to Rome to save it from the advancing army of Mehmet II; there he presented it to Pius II Piccolomini; Aeneas Silvius himself. The description of the renaissance splendour of the ceremony in the fields between Rome and Tivoli is one of the most striking passages in the memoirs of the great humanist pope.
[3] This odd word, logically, is the third person plural of the subjunctive of an unknown verb of which the first person present indicative would be boliarévo. (“Boliarize” is an attempt to turn it into an English verb.)
[4] “Happy journey!”
[5] Koulouria are hard-crusted circular rolls with a hole in the middle, sprinkled with sesame seeds. The inhabitants of Yanina and Epirotes in general are nick-named plakoképhaloi, flat-heads; their mothers are said to smack their babies on the crown to make it more convenient, later on, for balancing a koulouri-tray. Traditionally, this smack is accompanied by the words “Kai tzimitzís stin Póli!” “May you become a roll-seller in the City!” The City—Constantinople—drew young Yaniniots like a magnet for centuries.
[6] The Vlach and Rumanian languages are so close that some authorities think that they are the same and the differences merely the result of a few centuries separation. Vlach (or Aroman) communities, some static and some semi-nomadic, are sprinkled across the southern Balkans. Others maintain they are similar but unrelated developments of low Latin springing up in the Roman garrisoned colonies of Dacia—modern Rumania—and Macedonia. The Vlach language in Greece has two slightly differing dialects, spread over the Pindus round Metsovo and Samarina respectively. They could, it is argued, be the remains of the Roman legion garrisoned in the passes of the Pindus, recruited among Italiots or locally among Greeks, all of them speaking camp-Latin. When Honorius recalled the legions to Rome, this order, which emptied Britain of its Roman soldiery, may have failed to reach these remote folds of the Pindus; and here the benighted legionaries have remained ever since, rock-pools of corrupt Latin-speakers waiting for orders and pasturing their huge flocks all over Thessaly and the Pindus; or so they say. This is dangerous ground: nationalism, irridentism and opportunism have blurred the purely scholarly approach which this odd survival deserves. Unless he is ready to plunge deep, a writer can only mention the phenomenon and pass on. I choose the latter prudent course. One bold theory—where did I read it?—upholds that the Vlachs are the remains of Pompey’s army, defeated by Caesar at Pharsalus in the Thessalian plain, in 48 B.C. Enviable precision.
[7] Reluctantly, dreading lest the reader, daunted by pages of italics, should skip them, I have lifted most of the Boliaric glossary to the end of the book. It would be a shame if this curious secret language should vanish unrecorded. So there it is, in Appendix II. I long for the reader to turn to it at once but I am in no position to insist.
[8] Again, Slav?
[9] Harman’s Caveat, or Warning for Common Cursetors, vulgarly called vagabonds (1567) gives the following example of “peddelars Frenche or canting”: “Bene Lightman’s to thy quarromes, in what tipken hast thou lypped in this darkemans, whether in a lybbage or a strummel? (Good morrow to thy body, in what house hast thou lain all night, whether in a bed or in the straw?)”
[10] An insulting term for the Royal Family.
[11] Every now and then one is surprised by this rumour of evaporated Jewish communities. As we know, there were plenty in the time of the Acts of the Apostles and there are frequent mentions of them by Jewish travellers and Byzantine writers in mediaeval and early renaissance times. (I have touched on the question at some length at the beginning of Mani.) Greeks connect the silk industry with Jews and the resemblance of the name Solomos (which means “salmon” and is also the name of Greece’s greatest nineteenth-century poet, a Venetian count from the Ionian Isles) to Solomon seems, to villagers, to clinch things. But they are not accurate in these matters: sometimes “Evraioi” or “Ovraioi” means little more than “foreign” and sometimes it merely designates a Greek speaking a different dialect, such as Tzakonian. The last village to which I have heard Jewish origins ascribed, on the strength of the name Solomos, is Koutíphari, in the outer Mani, the ancient Thalamai of Pausanias.
[12] I was as surprised to see this tremendous and expensive set of books in this poverty-stricken village as I would be to find the Encyclopaedia Britannica in an English farm labourer’s cottage: more so; the poverty in the Kravara defeats all comparison. Greece is full of surprises like this. I bought these wonderful volumes, all thirty-three of them, for £50 secondhand some years ago, brought them back to England in a crate and nearly lost them all in Belgrade. A terrible moment.
[13] The last statement was corroborated later. There are two in the heart of Kolonaki, the fashionable quarter of Athens, who are both from Kravara villages. Impressively clad in the shiny peaked caps and white dustcoats that photographers have turned into a uniform, they woo passers-by to their tripods. Since this visit, whenever our paths cross now, it is a race to see which of the three of us will say first: “Stíliane! Mas photae o banikos patellos!”
Roumeli Page 24
