Roumeli (30 page)

“Come back later,” they said. “We'll get hold of Uncle Elias for you.”

“Who's he?”

“He knows a lot.
Pollá xérei!
”

My hunchback friend guided me along the lanes. Our hobnails struck sparks from the cobbles. Another
phlambouri
was finished:
halpou
was here....

“It's nearly ready!” Marko exulted. He sprang to his feet and advanced to the middle of the firelit room rubbing his hands and almost dancing with contagious delight. “Just listen to that wonderful smell!”
[14]

The fragrant noose had ensnared me several yards up the lane. The whole house trembled with marvellous fumes.

He seized a bottle of
ouzo
and tapped it on the flank, exclaiming, “
Sans Rival
from Tyrnavos!” and poured out two glasses. Then he started slicing sausage and cheese and spring onions and
avgotaracho
, delicious grey mullet's roes from Missolonghi densely compressed and enclosed in an oblong carapace of yellow wax. He put a handful of giant olives and white and blood-red radishes in a saucer and showered them with salt: a magnificent
mézé
, in fact, to accompany the
ouzo
.

“And we've got some retsina you'll like,” he went on as he poured a second glass of
ouzo
. “A whole demijohn from Spata in Attica.” He pointed to the great osier-cradled vessel in the corner. “I've put a couple of bottles in the well to get cold.” He went out to fetch one.

I envied his quarters. They were white-washed and spotless with low divans along two walls and a red and black rug on the floor: across it Marko had flung the skin of a large wolf shot in the Grammos mountains, where he had won his decoration: I knew because I had asked him. “But it wasn't for that,” he smiled: the noise of the fighting in the mountain-tops had driven the wolves down to the foothills and even into villages; bears too. A fireplace arched with an ogee made a wide niche in a jutting semi-cylinder of white plaster and the bisected cone of the chimney tapered to a low wooden ceiling which wove a faint fragrance into the other drifting smells. An old woman in black squatted on the hob. Peering from her task, she quavered a greeting. Kyria Diamánti looked light enough to lift in the palm of one hand. Marko sometimes called her
theia
or “auntie.”

Drinking our
ouzo
we settled on either side of the
sofra
: a low circular wooden table still common in some parts of Roumeli, Epirus and Macedonia; one eats cross-legged on the floor, or slightly levitated, as we were now, on little rush-bottomed stools. The blue and white check cloth was laden with the implements of our impending feast. At a warning cry from the fireside, the remains of the
mézé
and the
ouzo
were thrust aside and the great metal pan was lifted sizzling from the flames to the table's centre. Marko begged our cook to join us. No, no, she had supped; and anyway, no meat for her! She grasped her upper gum between a finger and a thumb to display utter toothlessness, like a horse-coper refusing a deal, and went off into a cracked and engaging laugh. “
Na phate, na phate, paidia!
” she squeaked: “Eat, eat, boys!”

Marko caught the shrouding grease-paper by the corner and
carefully unwrapped the joint. A golden brown leg of lamb emerged, blistering and bubbling with juice and surrounded by a brood of spitting potatoes. The full redolence exploded on us, not of garlic only but of thyme and rosemary too. His knife flashed in the light of the fire as he drove it down alongside the bone: the promised cloves were there! We put a handful of cress, picked at the spring, in both plates.

“What did I tell you!” he said with kindling eyes. “It's a three months' old lamb, born about Christmas.”

Our eagerness now was touched with frenzy. He made the sign of the cross thrice, we clinked our glasses together.

“
I tan i epi tas!
” he said, like the Spartans before Thermopylae. “Behind our shields or on them!”; and we fell to. A passion of destruction held us in thrall. Not a word was uttered as we guzzled our way deep into the joint. Holding the joint upright in the pan, Marko sliced away helping after helping and heaped our plates in turn. We halted an instant now and then to grasp our glasses, touch them rim to rim and, after a murmured toast, swallow the delicious wine in unison. Only these brief liquid caesurae—brief but frequent enough soon to summon a second bottle dripping from the well—scanned the breakneck tempo of the meal.

Instead of slackening, the rhythm accelerated with every mouthful. We might have been vying with each other or eating against time or for a bet. The zest and the scope of ogres had descended on us. The only utterances were an occasional ringside murmur of encouragement from the frail crone on the settle. Her arms were clasped about her knees. Goshawk eyes lit with pleasure at the demolition of her handiwork and her features radiated with the total smile that accompanied toothlessness at either end of a lifetime. Now and then she stressed her murmur with a pat of her knotted fingers on our knees or our shoulders. When it passed before the fire, her hand was as transparent as a leaf.

My forehead was damp with sweat and I noticed an answering lustre on Marko's brow. I suddenly thought of Theseus and—was it the wicked Kerkyon?—in
The Heroes
, devouring whole oxen face to face and glowering at each other in silence before their fatal wrestling match. But there was no enmity in my host's eyes: only charmed collusion and benevolence. Our work was too wild for speech. With a sulphurous, inaudible thunderclap the deadly sin of Gluttony had risen flaming through the floor.

At last we halted, our knives and forks idle, our mandibles at rest and falling hair glued to our streaming foreheads. Laughter broke the awed hush of this sudden truce, for the whole leg of lamb had vanished. Bare and polished, only a bone gleamed in the firelight in the middle of the dish.

Marko was soon dropping slices of his Macedonian apples into the retsina. When they had soaked up the wine, he offered them on a fork. Kyria Diamánti poked the coffee-saucepan into the embers.

We talked of the war, of Athenian taverns, of girls and books and poetry. I had noticed a couple of Kazanzakis' novels on a shelf, also
The Three Musketeers
in translation and some poems of Valaoritis and Palamas, notably
The Decalogue of the Gipsy
; no Cavafy or Seferis, which he had heard of and wanted to read; and we talked about the Kravarites. I told him that my evening was not yet over. He had to rise at four, so while I filled in some notes about the day's doings, he went to bed on the divan on one side of the fire. Before retiring Kyria Diamánti had laid out sheets, a quilt and a pillow on the other side for me. I had scarcely written a line before Marko was sound asleep.

“Uncle Elias is the man,” they told me in the lamplit tavern. “He'll tell you all about the old Kravarites in the epoch”—this
vague term, “
stin ipochí
” always refers to an indeterminate yore, a vague period of old days long sped. “He's ninety.”

His long, clean-shaven face was a network of wrinkles but his dark eyes darted eagerly. When he took off his cloth cap of mock-leopard's skin—headgear which has long enjoyed an intermittent proletarian vogue in Greece—a snowy shock fell thick and straight over his corrugated brow. A handsome, humorous and slightly actorish mobility stamped his features. He looked much younger than ninety and I said so. The compliment called two new fans of wrinkles into play and his smile revealed long palisades of teeth from which not one was missing.

“Those teeth are all his own, too,” the hunchback said.

“The teeth are all right,” Uncle Elias observed, flashing them once more, “but they're out of work.”

Everyone laughed. He came from a different village and the locals treated him with a mixture of affectionate teasing and respect. Laying his thick stick across the lamplit table he slowly crushed tobacco leaves in the palm of his hand and stuffed them into a home-made pipe. “Contraband from Agrinion,” someone murmured. “Don't tell the
patellos
....”

As we talked, he fished a little bar of steel out of his pocket and then, holding it between finger and thumb with a disc of dried fungus held tight against it, he struck it repeatedly with a chip of flint. A faint whiff as of singeing cloth told us that the sparks had ignited it. Blowing until the glow had spread, he laid the smouldering fungus on his pipe-bowl and puffed until a cloud of illegal and aromatic smoke embowered him.

“
Barba Elia
,” someone said, pointing to his disintegrating footgear, “you ought to get a new pair of boots. Those have seen their day.” “Don't you worry about them,” Uncle Elias answered from his cloud. “They are laughing.” It is true that the gaps between the uppers and the soles curled in the semblance of dark smiles.

The old days in the Kravara....The utterances of this fluent
old man revived them with great vividness. A mass of circumstantial detail suggested that he had played a considerable part in those ancient doings; but it was never explicit. I expected in vain that his narrative would slip at some point from
oratio obliqua
to
oratio recta
; the collusion of his glance, however, was something more than a hint.

The first impediment a young beggar had to discard, Uncle Elias instructed us, was an attribute called the
tseberi
, or the
tsipa
, of shame. The
tseberi
is the head-kerchief that village women wear and the symbol of their modesty; the
tsipa
is a thin layer or membrane, and in some regions a foreskin; its loss was a kind of psychological circumcision. Those handicapped by the stigma of its presence, which was detectable to initiates at once by the expression on their foreheads, could never come to much; they must be armed by a brazen front that no insult could shake. Old Kravarites dismissed their daughters' suitors with the words: “Go away, boy! You've still got your
tsipa tis dropis
. Get rid of that shame-brow and then we'll see.” The emblem of success was the heavy staff, or
matsoúka
, which accompanied each new journey. An array of these, hanging on the wall, proved the owner a man of substance. They were polished with handling and scarred by the fangs of a hundred dogs; these gnashing and hysterical foes invested the approach to a village with the hazards of an invasion. The trophies accumulated like quarterings of nobility and dynastic alliances were contracted between the children of households boasting an equal display. These sticks, it was said, were sometimes hollowed for the concealment of the gold coins: the weight of small change was intolerable until it was converted. British sovereigns were highly treasured.
[15]
Normally the gold coins were
dispersed and sewn about the owner's rags. The
tagari
, a roomy woven bag, slung on a cord, was essential. This they filled with
paximadia
, bread twice-baked and hard as a stone, once the diet of the hermits of the Thebaid and now the sustenance of shepherds. Accoutred with staves and sacks and this almost unfissile food, they set out; usually alone, occasionally in couples. Sometimes their professional devices were a handicap. Uncle Elias cited a duumvirate in which one member pretended to be one-legged and the other one-armed: but the one-legged partner could eat at twice the speed of his mate, so they split up. “Dumbness,” too, had drawbacks: “mute” beggars had been bitten to the bone by dogs rather than give themselves away....Did they always manage to keep up their disguises? Not always. Uncle Elias told us of a champion beggar, a tall and burly man, who had perfected the knack of extreme malformation: his legs and arms became a tangle, his head lolled, his eyes rolled and his tongue hung out: “like this!” With these words, Uncle Elias shifted on his chair, and with a click, as it were, became a scarecrow. His face switched to a burlesque mask of tragedy; a maimed arm shot out, a suppliant litany streamed from his lips: “Kind people, spare a mouthful of bread or a copper for a fellow-Christian who has lost the use of his limbs from birth and has eaten neither crust nor crumb for a week. God and Christ and the All-Holy-One and all the Saints and prophets and martyrs shower their blessings on you!” The metamorphosis, total and astonishing, had taken place in a flash. Just as suddenly, he relaxed into his normal self. “He used to almost overdo it,” he said with an engaging laugh. “But he made plenty of money. A very bright fellow.”

“Well,” he went on, “one day he arrived in a Bulgarian village inhabited by Pomaks, terrible men. But instead of alms, he got sneers, insults, shoves, pinches, kicks. He stood it as long as he could, but his blood was beginning to boil, and suddenly—” Here the old narrator uncoiled from his chair, jumped to his
feet and soared above the lamplit circle. Under those hoary brows his eyes fired glances like harpoons from face to face. “...suddenly he straightened up and set about them!” Uncle Elias' clenched fists mowed through the air in a whirlwind of scything sweeps and jabs and upper cuts. “
Dang! Ding! Boom! Bim! Bam!
Down they went like the dead!
Pam! Poom!
There must have been ten of the hornwearers flat on the ground! And the others! You should have seen their faces! Their eyes were starting out of their sockets as though the Devil had sprung from Hell! They took to their heels; the village square was empty.” He sat down again grinning. What happened to the beggar? “Why,” he said, mopping his brow from the exertion, “he ran for it too, far, far, far away over the hills! When they came round he was kilometres off!
Paraxena pragmata!
Strange doings!”

It was vital to get out of Greece as early as possible. The Bulgarians, although they were fellow-Orthodox, were stingy and xenophobe and hated the Greeks. The Serbs were not bad. Things began to look up the moment the Danube was crossed: Rumanians were more prosperous and more open-handed; the place teemed with cattle and fowl and livestock of every kind, even buffaloes, that the Rumanians used for ploughing. The Hungarians were good but of course they were Catholic; lots of livestock, specially horses. It was the same in Poland. Someone interrupted here and asked, with that curly back-handed scoop that always accompanies the mention of theft, whether the old ones ever lifted things. Not often, no, Uncle Elias said. The point was to use one's wits. But a few of them used to “vanish” things....One pinched the laundry off the line at one end of a village and sold it back at the other. Poultry was hard to resist. Experts would peer into hen-coops with a two-legged fox's glance then spit and roast their takings in the woods. Hens, ducks, geese, guinea fowl and turkeys flew into their embrace. Sheep and lambs sometimes met the same fate. One gifted
Kravarite had the mysterious knack of silencing pigs, nobody knew how: once he removed a farrow of six without a note being heard from either the sow or the piglets; he got away with four in his bag and one under each arm. There were several specialists in this line. Property dwindled at their passage, movables moved, barnyards depleted, orchards lightened, eggs melted away by the clutch the moment they were laid from under the sitting fowl; whole landscapes yielded a sporadic toll. Some professionals were irresistibly seductive in their patter; if the coast were clear, alms and a square meal were sometimes followed by the flattening (as the rather short-sighted phrase goes in vulgar Greek) of the hostess. Used as they were to the fierce morality of Greek village life, the ease and frequency of these favours filled young beggars with surprise. Their itineraries were starred with brisk hurly-burlies in barns and ricks and sometimes by snug nights indoors. Eastern Europe, Uncle Elias thought, must have been full of small Kravarites; Russia, especially....