The Breaking Point (37 page)

The store with its earth floor, its canned food, its coils of rope, and the chattering voices of the men - all three of them now bending over Stephen, absorbed in his drawing - was somehow welcoming. Even the cracked loudspeaker and the confused babble of Radio Athens seemed at that moment reassuring, part of a life that was familiar. I went and sat down at the table beside Stephen, and helped myself to another of the proprietor’s cigarettes.

‘They’re here,’ said Stephen, not bothering to look at me, and sketching in a stunted bush beside his chamois head.

‘Who’s here?’ I asked.

‘Chamois,’ he answered. ‘They were seen again two days ago.’

I don’t know why - perhaps I was tired, for our journey had been long that day: we had left Athens in the early morning, and the drive up to the pass had told on nerve and muscle - but a wave of depression came upon me with his words. I wanted to say, ‘Oh, be damned to chamois. Can’t we forget them until tomorrow?’ but to do so would have brought tension between us, happily stilled since leaving London. So I said nothing and watched him draw, the smoke from the cigarette making my eyes smart, and presently, yawning, I let my head rest on the wall behind me and dozed, like a nodding passenger in a railway carriage.

The change of music woke me. Radio Athens had become an accordion. I opened my eyes, and the rat-faced cook had turned into entertainer, and was now sitting cross-legged on his chair, instrument in hand, applauded by the proprietor and the wall-eyed driver, and by Stephen too. His song was melancholy, wild, slav, bred in heaven knows what bald Macedonian vale by a long-forgotten forebear, but there was rhythm somewhere, and ferocity as well, and his thin voice like a reed was also the pipe of Pan.

It was only when he had finished, and laid his accordion down, that I noticed we were no longer five, but six. The goatherd from the night had come to join us. He sat on a bench apart, still wrapped in his hooded burnous, leaning upon his crook, but the swinging lamp from the beam shone upon his face and into his eyes. They were the strangest eyes I had ever looked upon. Golden brown in colour, large and widely set, they stared from his narrow face as though suddenly startled into life. I thought, at first glance, that the abrupt cessation of the music had surprised him; but when the expression did not change, but remained constant, with all the alert watchfulness of one poised for flight or for attack, I knew myself mistaken, that he was perhaps blind, that his wide stare was in reality the sightless gaze of a man without vision. Then he shifted his posture and said something to the proprietor of the store; and from the way he moved, catching a packet of cigarettes thrown to him, I saw that he was not blind, but on the contrary had a sight keener than most men - for the cigarettes were poorly thrown and the catch was quick - and the eyes, shifting now to the rest of us round the table, and finally resting upon Stephen, were now larger, if possible, than before, and the searching stare impossible to hold.

I said to Stephen in a low voice, ‘Do you think he’s mad?’

‘No,’ said my husband. ‘He lives a lot alone. He’s the fellow they’ve been talking about. We’re going with him in the morning.’

My spirits ebbed. The doze against the wall had rested me, and I was no longer tired. But apprehension filled me.

‘Go with him where?’ I asked. The man was watching us.

‘He has a hut in the forest,’ said Stephen impatiently. ‘It’s all settled. An hour’s climb from here. He’ll put us up.’

From the way Stephen spoke, he might have been arranging a week-end with some obliging golfing friend. I looked at the goatherd again. The honey-coloured eyes never moved from Stephen’s face, and his whole body was taut, as though he waited for us to spring, and must seize advantage first.

‘I don’t think he likes us,’ I said.

‘Rubbish,’ said Stephen, and rising to his feet he picked up his rifle.

The goatherd moved. It was strange, he was by the door. I had not seen him shift from chair to door, so swift had been his passage.Yet he was standing there, his hand on the latch, and the door was open. No one noticed anything unusual in the quickness of the flight - if flight it was. Stephen’s back was turned. The rat-faced cook was strumming his accordion. The proprietor and the wall-eyed driver were sitting down to dominoes.

‘Come to bed,’ said Stephen. ‘You’re dead on your feet.’

The door closed. The goatherd had gone. I had shifted my eyes for the passing of a second, and I had not seen him go. I followed Stephen up the ladder to the lofts above.

‘You’re for the cupboard,’ said my husband. ‘I’ll turn in with the chaps.’ Already he was choosing his particular heap of blankets.

‘What about the man?’ I asked.

‘What man?’

‘The goatherd. The one we’re to go with in the morning.’

‘Oh, he’ll wrap himself in his hood out there with the goats.’

Stephen took off his coat, and I groped my way to the cupboard. Below, the rat-faced cook had started once more upon the accordion, and the reedy voice floated up through the floorboards. A crack in the planking of my cupboard gave me a view upon a narrow strand of plateau beyond the cabin. I could see a single beech tree, and a star. Beneath the tree stood the hooded figure leaning upon a crook. I lay down on my blankets. The cold air from the crack in the planking blew upon my face. Presently the sound of the accordion stopped. The voices too. I heard the men come up the ladder to the loft, and go into the room with Stephen. Later their varying snores told me of their sleep, and of Stephen’s too. I listened, every sense alert, for a sound I somehow knew must come. I heard it, finally, more distant than before. Not a bird’s cry, nor a shepherd’s call to his dogs, but more penetrating, more intense; the low whistle of one who sees a woman on a street.

Something in me grudges sleep to others when my own night has been poor. The sight of Stephen, tackling fried eggs again at seven, and drinking the muddied grains of coffee, fresh-shaved too from water boiled by the cook, was unbearably irritating as I climbed down the ladder to the store below.

He hailed me cheerfully. ‘Slept like a top,’ he said. ‘How was the cupboard?’

‘The Little Ease,’ I told him, remembering Harrison Ainsworth’s
Tower of London
and the torture-chamber, and I glanced with a queasy stomach at the egg-yolk on his oily plate.

‘Better get something inside you,’ he said. ‘We’ve a steep climb ahead of us. If you don’t want to face it, you can always drive back to Kalabaka with our wall-eyed friend.’

I felt myself a drag upon his day.The bread, brought yesterday, I supposed, in the bus from north or west, was moderately fresh, and I spread it with honey. I would have given much for French coffee instead of the Greek-Turkish brew that never satisfied a void.

‘What exactly do you mean to do?’ I asked.

Stephen had the inevitable large-scale map on the table in front of him. ‘We’re here,’ he said, pointing to the cross he had marked on the map, ‘and we have to walk to this.’ A speck in the nick of a fold showed our destination. ‘That is where the goatherd - his name is Jesus, by the way, but he answers to Zus - has his lair. It’s primitive, I gather, but clean. We’ll carry stores with us from here. That extra rucksack will prove a godsend.’

It was all very well for Stephen. He had slept. The smell of brewing eggs was nauseous. I hastily swallowed my coffee dregs and went outside.The bright clear day helped to pull me together. There was no sign of the goatherd with his unlikely name, nor of his goats. Our driver from Kalabaka was washing his car. He greeted me with enthusiasm, and then made great play of gesturing to the woods above us, bending himself as if under a rucksack, and shaking his head. Laughing, he pointed downwards where the road twisted like a snake to the depths beneath, and from the road to his car. His meaning was plain. I would do better to return with him. The thought of the descent was worse than the climb to the unknown. And somehow, now that morning had come, now that I could breathe the sharp air and glimpse the great sky, cloudless and blue above the yet golden beech trees, the unknown did not seem to hold much danger.

I washed in the stream - the saucepanned water in the kitchen amongst the oil did not tempt me - and while Stephen and I were packing our rucksacks the first bus of the day arrived, travelling from the west. It halted for five minutes, while the driver and the few passengers stretched their legs. Inevitably our wall-eyed chauffeur had a cousin among the passengers, inevitably the purpose of our journey became known, and we were surrounded at once by eager questioners, poking our rucksacks, peeping at Stephen’s rifle, overwhelming the pair of us with advice we could not understand. The cousin had a sister in America. This supposed bond between us made him spokesman of the group.

‘No good,’ he said, pointing to the trees, ‘too late, no good.’ And then, feigning the posture of one holding a gun, he said, ‘Bang . . . bang . . . bang . . .’ rapidly. A chorus of approval came from his fellow-passengers.

Stephen continued to strap his rucksack. The proprietor of the store came out carrying more goods for us to pack away. Perched on the top, incongruous, was a great packet of soap-flakes and a bottle of bull’s-eyes. Everybody suddenly started shaking hands.

When the bus pulled away down the road to Kalabaka, followed by our wall-eyed driver and his cousin in the car, it was as though our last link with sanity had snapped. I looked up, and saw the goatherd emerging from the trees. I stood my ground and waited. He was smaller than I had thought, barely my own height, and the hooded burnous dwarfed him further. He came and took my rucksack without a word, seizing at the same time the extra pack with the stores. He had the two slung over his shoulder in an instant.

‘He can’t very well take both,’ I murmured to Stephen.

‘Rot,’ said my husband. ‘He won’t notice them, any more than one of his own goats.’

The proprietor and the cook stood waving at the door of the store. It seemed suddenly a home, a long-known refuge, in the full sunlight. I forgot the cupboard where I had spent the night, and the oily eggs. The little store was friendly and the red earth comforting, the smiling proprietor and the rat-faced cook with his accordion men of good-will. Then I turned my back on them, and followed Stephen and Jesus the goatherd through the trees.

We must have made a queer procession, no one speaking, the three of us in single file. The goats and the dogs had vanished. Perhaps this was the goatherd’s second journey of the day. Our way lay through forest at first, mostly beech but pine as well, then clearings of tufty grass and box and shrub. As we climbed the trees thinned, the air became purer, sweeter, the range of mountains opened up on either side and above and beyond us, some of them already capped with snow. Now and again Stephen halted, not for breath - I believe he could have climbed without pause all day - but to swing his field-glasses on the nearer ridge above the tree-line, to the left of us. I knew better than to talk. So did our guide. He was always just ahead, and when Stephen lifted the binoculars the goatherd followed their direction, his face impassive, but those honey-coloured eyes staring wild and startled from beneath the gaping hood. It could be some disease, I told myself, like goitre; yet the eyes were not full, they did not protrude. It was the expression that was so unusual, so compelling, yet not compelling in an hypnotic, penetrating sense - these eyes did not only see, but appeared to listen as well. And not to us. That was the curious thing. Stephen and I were of no account.The goatherd, although our beast of burden, did not listen or watch for us.

Now it was all sun, all sky, and the trees were beneath us, except for one lone blasted pine, lording it over a crisp sheet of recent snow, and above our heads, dark and formidable, circled our first eagle. A dog came bounding over the ridge towards us, and as we topped the rise I saw the goats, spread out and snuffing at the ground. Hard against an overhanging rock was a cabin, a quarter the size of our store below on the pass. Shelter from the elements it might have been - I was no judge of that - but a hermit-saint or an aesthete could not have picked upon a spot more apt for contemplation or for beauty.

‘H’m,’ said Stephen, ‘it looks central enough, if that’s our shakedown.’ Central. He might have been talking about the Underground at Piccadilly. ‘Hi, Zus!’ he called, and jerked his head towards the hut. ‘Is this the spot? Do we unload?’ He was still talking in Italian, believing, by some process of thought peculiar to him, that the language meant more to the goatherd than English could.

The man replied in Greek. It was the first time I had heard him speak. Once again, it was disconcerting. The voice was not harsh, as I had expected, but oddly soft, and pitched a little high, like the voice of a child. Had I, in fact, not guessed his age as forty or thereabouts, I would have said that a child was speaking to us.

‘Don’t know what that was about,’ said Stephen to me, ‘but I’m sure it’s the place all right. Let’s have a look at it.’

The dogs, for the second one had now appeared, watched us gravely. Their master led us to his refuge. Blinking, because of the strong sunlight without, we lowered our heads from the beam and stepped inside. It was just a plain wood shelter, with a partition down the centre. There was no furniture, except for a bench at one end on which stood a small Primus stove. The earth floor had more sand on it than the floor of our overnight cabin store. It must have been built to serve as a shelter only in the case of sudden storm.

‘Nothing wrong with this,’ said Stephen, looking about him. ‘We can spread our ground-sheets on the floor and the sleeping-bags on top.’

The goatherd, our host, had stood aside as we explored his premises. Even the space behind the partition was unfurnished like the rest. There was not even a blanket. Now, silently, he unloaded our things for us, and left us to arrange them as we pleased.