The Breaking Point (38 page)

‘Funny sort of bloke,’ said Stephen. ‘Hardly the type to make us crack our ribs with laughter.’

‘It’s his eyes,’ I said. ‘Have you noticed his eyes?’

‘Yes,’ said Stephen, ‘they look a bit frozen. So would you be, if you lived up here for long.’

Frozen, though, was a new thought. Frozen, petrified. A petrified forest was surely the life-sap of a substance turned to stone. Were the goatherd’s emotions petrified? Had he no blood in his veins, no warmth, no sap? Perhaps he was blasted, like the lone pine outside his hut. I helped my husband to unpack, and soon we had some semblance of comfort within the four blank walls.

It was only ten o’clock, but I was hungry. The proprietor of the store had put a tin-opener amongst our rations, and I was soon eating pork-ham, canned in the United States, and dates thrown in for good measure. I sat cross-legged in the sun outside the hut, and the eagle still soared above me in the sky.

‘I’m off,’ said Stephen.

Glancing up, I saw that he had his cartridge-bag at his belt, his field-glasses round his neck, and his rifle slung over his shoulder. The easy cameraderie had gone, his manner was terse, abrupt. I scrambled to my feet. ‘You’ll never keep up,’ he said. ‘You’ll only hold us back.’

‘Us?’ I asked.

‘Friend Jesus has to set me on the way,’ replied my husband.

The goatherd, silent as ever, waited by a cairn of stones. He was unarmed, save for his shepherd’s crook.

‘Can you understand a word he says?’ I spoke in doubt.

‘Sign language is enough,’ said Stephen. ‘Enjoy yourself.’

The goatherd had already turned, and Stephen followed. In a moment they were lost in scrub. I had never felt more alone. I went into the hut to fetch my camera - the panorama was too good to miss, though it would be dull enough, no doubt, when it was printed - and the sight of the ground-sheets, the rucksacks, the stores and my thicker jersey restored confidence. The height, the solitude, the bright sun and the scent of the air, these were things I loved; why, then, my seed of melancholy? The sense, hard to describe, of mutability?

I went outside and found a hollow, with a piece of rock at my back, and made myself a resting-place near the browsing goats.The forest was below, and somewhere - in the depths - our lodging of last night. Away to the north-east, hidden from me by a range of mountains, were the plains of the civilized world. I smoked my first cigarette of the day, and watched the eagle. The hot sun made me drowsy, and I was short of sleep.

When I opened my eyes the sun had shifted, and it was half-past one by my watch. I had slept for over three hours. I got up and stretched, and as I did so the dog, watching me a few hundred yards away, growled. So did his companion. I called to them and moved towards the hut, and at this the pair of them advanced, snarling. I remained where I was.They crouched once more, and as long as I did not move they remained silent. One step, however, brought an instant snarl, and a stealthy lowering of the head, a forward padding movement as if to spring. I did not fancy being torn to pieces. I sat down again and waited, but, knowing my husband, I was aware that it might be nightfall before he returned. Meanwhile I must remain, marked by the dogs, the full force of the sun already spent. I could not even get to the hut for another jersey.

Somewhere, from what direction I could not tell, I heard a shot, and the sound echoed from the gorges far below. The dogs heard it too. They cocked their heads and stared. The goats rustled in the scrub, surprised, and one old patriarch, bearded to his breast, bleated his disapproval like some professor roused from sleep.

I waited for a second shot, but none came. I wondered if Stephen had found his mark, or missed. At any rate, he had sighted chamois. He would not have wasted his bullet on other game. If he had hit and killed, it would not be long before he returned, bearing his prey upon his shoulder. If he had hit and wounded only - but that would be unlike Stephen - he would go after the poor beast and shoot again.

I went on sitting above my hollow, close to the blasted pine. Then one of the dogs whined. I saw nothing. But the next moment the goatherd was behind me.

‘Any luck?’ I asked. I spoke in English, having no Greek, but the tone of my voice should tell him what I meant. His strange eyes stared down at me. Slowly he shook his head. He raised his hand, pointing over his shoulder. He continued to shake his head gently from side to side, and suddenly - fool that I was - I remembered that the Greek ‘yes’, the affirmation, is always given with this same shake of the head, suggesting its opposite, denial. The child’s voice coming from the impassive face said ‘nei’, and this was repeated, the head still moving slowly.

‘He has found them, then?’ I said. ‘There are chamois?’ and he reaffirmed his nei, which looked so much like contradiction, and went on staring at me with his great honey-coloured eyes, the frozen petrified eyes, until I was seized with a kind of horror, for they did not go with the gentle childish voice. I moved away through the scrub to put some distance between us, calling over my shoulder uselessly - for he could not understand me - ‘I’ll go and find out what’s happened.’ This time the dogs did not snarl, but stayed where they were, watching their master, and he remained motionless, leaning on his crook and staring after me.

I crawled through the scrub and up a track which I judged to be the one taken by Stephen and the goatherd earlier. Soon the scrub gave place to rock, a track of a sort beneath the overhanging face, and as I went I shouted ‘Stephen!’, for the sound of my voice must carry even as the sound of the rifle shot had done. I had no answer.

The world in which I found myself was sparse and bare, and I could see no footprints in the snow in front of me. Had Stephen come this way there must be footprints. Now from my vantage point it was as though the whole of Greece was spread beneath me, infinitely far, belonging to another age, another time, and I was indeed at the summit of my world and quite alone. I could see the forests and the foothills and the plains, and a river like a little silken thread, but my husband was not with me, nor anyone at all, not even the eagle that had soared above at midday.

‘Stephen!’ I shouted, my voice flat and feeble against the rock.

I stood and listened. It might be that I should hear a rifle shot again. Any sound would be welcome in such barren solitude. Yet when one came I was shocked out of immobility, for it was no rifle shot, but a whistle. That same lewd whistle to attract attention, coming from fifty feet above my head, from the jutting ledge, the overhanging rock. I saw his horns, his questing eyes, his satyr’s face staring down at me, suspicious, curious, and he whistled again, a hiss, a mockery, and stamped his hoofs, releasing a crumbling stone. Then he was gone - the chamois was gone, my first live chamois - he was away and lost, but crouching below me, on a narrow lip over a precipice, clinging to the rock-face, his rifle vanished, was a white-faced man who could not speak from fear, my husband, Stephen.

He could not move. I could not reach him. That was the horror. I could not reach him. He must have edged his way on to the lip of rock and found that he could go no further. In some extremity he had dropped his rifle. The thing that appalled me most was the terror on his face. Stephen, who rode rough-shod over the feelings of his friends, Stephen the cold, the calculating. I threw myself down full-length on the ground and stretched out my hands. There was a gap between us of a few feet, no more.

‘Keep your eyes turned to the rock,’ I said softly - instinct warned me not to speak too loudly - ‘edge your way inch by inch. If you got yourself there you must be able to return.’

He did not answer. He moistened his lips with his tongue, He was deadly pale.

‘Stephen,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to try.’

He tried to speak, but nothing came, and as though to mock us both the lewd warning whistle of the chamois sounded once again. It was more distant now, and the chamois itself was out of sight on some unattainable fastness of his own, secure from human penetration.

It seemed to me that if Stephen had had his rifle with him he would not have been afraid. The loss of the rifle had unmanned him. All power, all confidence had gone, and with it, in some sickening way, his personality. The man clinging to the rock face was a puppet. Then I saw the goatherd, staring down at us from a rock above our heads.

‘Please come,’ I called gently, ‘my husband’s in danger.’

He disappeared. A loose stone crumbled and fell past Stephen’s head. I saw my husband’s knuckles turn white under the strain. A moment’s horror suggested that the crumbling of the stone had been intentional, that the goatherd had vanished on purpose, leaving Stephen to his fate. A movement behind me told me I had misjudged him. He was by my side.

I crawled away to let him have my place. He did not look at me, only at Stephen. He threw off his burnous, and I was aware of something lithe and compact, with a shock of black hair. He leapt on to the narrow lip beside Stephen and seized hold of him as an adult would seize a child, and all the six feet two of my husband’s body was thrown like a sack across the goatherd’s shoulder. I put my hand over my mouth to stifle the cry that must surely come. He was going to throw Stephen into the depths below. I shrank away, my legs turned to jelly, and the next moment the goatherd was back on the track beside me, and Stephen too; Stephen was sitting hunched on the ground, his face in his hands, rocking from side to side. When I looked back from him I saw that the goathered was dressed in his burnous again, and was standing some little distance away from us, his head averted.

I was quietly sick into a hole I scooped out of the snow. Then I shut my eyes and waited. It seemed a very long time before I heard Stephen rise to his feet. I opened my eyes and looked up at him. The colour had returned to his face. The goatherd had gone.

‘Now do you understand?’ asked Stephen.

‘Understand what?’ I asked weakly.

‘Why I must shoot chamois.’

He stood there, defenceless without his rifle; and although he was no longer pale he was somehow shrunken in stature. One of his bootlaces was undone. I found myself staring at that rather than at his face.

‘It’s fear, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Have you always had it?’

‘Always,’ he answered, ‘from the very first. It’s something I have to conquer. The chamois gives the greatest chance because he climbs the highest. The more I kill, the more I destroy fear.’ Then absently, as if thinking of something else, he pointed downward. ‘I dropped my rifle,’ he said. ‘I fired when I saw the brute, but it whistled at me instead of taking to its heels, and then the giddiness came, the giddiness that’s part of fear.’

I was still much shaken, but I got up and took his arm.

‘Let’s go back,’ I said. ‘I want a drink. Thank God for the brandy flasks.’

His confidence was returning; nevertheless, he allowed me to lead him like a child. We made short work of the descent. When we came to the hut the two dogs were waiting on guard by the entrance, and the goatherd was gathering chips of wood to make kindling for a fire. He took no notice of us, and the dogs ignored us too. We went into the hut and took a good swig at our flasks.Then we lighted cigarettes and smoked for a while in silence, watching the goatherd with his armfuls of wood and scattered cones.

‘You’ll never tell anyone, will you?’ Stephen said suddenly.

I looked at him, startled by the harsh note in his voice, betraying the strain he would not otherwise show. ‘You mean about the fear?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I don’t mind you knowing - you were bound to find out one day. And that fellow there - well, he’s not the kind to talk. But I won’t have anyone else knowing.’

‘Of course I won’t say anything,’ I replied quickly, to reassure him, and after a moment I turned away and began wrestling with the Primus stove. First things first. We should both of us feel more normal if we had hot food inside us.

Baked beans have never tasted more delicious. And the retsina wine on top of brandy helped to dull speculation. The short day faded quickly. We had scarcely eaten and put on warmer jerseys when the temperature fell at least twenty degrees, the sky deepened, and the sun had gone. The fire at the threshold of the hut threw leaping flames into the air.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Stephen, ‘I’ll go and find my rifle.’

I looked at him across the flames. His face was set, the face of the man I knew, the old Stephen.

‘You’ll never find it,’ I said. ‘It might be anywhere.’

‘I know the place,’ he replied impatiently, ‘amongst a heap of boulders and some dwarf pines. I marked it down.’

I wondered how he proposed to get himself down there, knowing his limitations as I did now. He must have read my thoughts, for he added, ‘I can get round to it from here. There shouldn’t be any difficulty.’

I threw my cigarette into the heart of the fire. It was a mistake to smoke it. Somehow I had not much stomach for cigarettes tonight.

‘If you do find it,’ I said, ‘what then?’

‘A last crack at the chamois,’ he said.

His fanaticism, instead of cooling, had intensified. He was staring intently into the darkness over my shoulder. I turned and saw Jesus, the goatherd and his saviour, come towards us to drop more chips into the fire.

‘
Kalinykta
,’ said Stephen.

It was the Greek for good night. And a sign of dismissal. The goatherd paused, and with a little gesture bowed to each of us in turn. ‘
Kalinykta
,’ he said.

The voice was as shrouded as he himself in his burnous, the childish timbre of it muted in some strange fashion because of darkness. The hood was thrown further back than it had been, so that the sharp outline of his face was more revealed, and the firelight turned his skin ruddy, the staring eyes bright like live coals.

He withdrew and left us together. Presently the sharp air, for all the leaping flames, drove us to our sleeping-bags inside the hut.We lit candles and read our Penguins for a time.Then Stephen fell asleep, and I blew out the candles and did likewise, worn with the emotion I’d been unable to express. What shocked me were my dreams. The goatherd had stripped off his burnous, and it was not Stephen that he carried in his arms but myself. I put out my hands to feel the shock of hair. It rose from his head like a black crest.