Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (11 page)

Awareness of and respect for these forces of good and evil was clearly apparent to the stranger in their midst. I had often seen my old friend, Janni, cross himself half a dozen times in an effort to get an uncooperative pump engine to start. Sometimes it worked and sometimes was enough.

I had stopped my ignorant practice of making little jokes about it. It had embarrassed my friends to rebuke me with their disapproving silence. And I had caused consternation and genuine dismay among a group of small visitors by imitating the call of the bird whose song outside a house is prophetic of death within.

I tried to argue that a bird could not possibly know anything of selective human death but I had no facts that I could argue with. Can it be proven that a bird does not know these things? I couldn't prove it. At least, not to their satisfaction.

I had seen even the most sophisticated Athenians
blanch and spit on the ground three times when shown a dead snake. They had offered no reasonable explanation in response to my queries and I had not pressed the matter, chiefly because it was extremely difficult to find a Greek who did not spit anywhere and everywhere. It was a national habit and I sincerely wished the military junta would introduce a law against it. With special provision for snakes.

The Greeks' relationship with trees and plants also seemed to have inherited something from distant mythology and many trees and plants were invested with characteristics, which were not only medicinal in a way which was akin to witchcraft, but personal.

Still, who was I to say they were wrong? I had good reason for believing they were right.

Early in the summer, sweating it out in the young cotton rows, I had been warned against going to sleep in the noonday siesta under a fig tree. I had noticed that all the labourers chose mulberry trees for their lunch and nap and avoided the figs, in spite of their fine deep shade. There were various explanations: “You will wake up sick.” “Your dreams will be full of bad people.” “The shadow is too dark. It will lie heavily on you.” Of course, I did not believe any of it. Neither did I sleep under a fig tree.

That morning I emerged from my hut like a bear coming out of hibernation. It had been the worst winter in Sparta, I had it on good authority, since Leonidas ruled the country and died at Thermopylae.

But what made it really seem like an end to hibernation was not the warm sun but hundreds of sudden swallows filling the near sky at eye-level – my eye-level there being a couple of hundred feet above the sea over which the swallows were circling and diving.

There were the real harbingers of spring, and as I broke the thin ice on the top of the rainwater butt that had been my water supply since the river rose, and stayed, in flood six weeks before, I accepted the instinctive knowledge of those birds, which had brought them across 300 miles of sea from the nearest bit of Africa. They had got the message that there was a land in which winter had come to an end. It was time to go north. Not that there was overmuch around there to encourage less perceptive humans to share the swallows' prescience or optimism.

True, the sun was warm enough to enable me to write with nothing on but a pair of khaki shorts, but the wind was still honed by the ice of Taygetus pyramiding above my back, and the world at my feet was still full of water that had carved new courses in the good earth – and washed thousands of tons of it into the sea. Sitting there, feeling the bronzed palm of the sun caressing my skin, watching the green of bud and sprout responding visibly to the same caress, that other morning when I had stepped onto my terrace knee-deep in snow seemed part of another existence. Yet it was only ten days before.

They had told me in Gythion that the last snowfall on the town was in 1928, and as I watched the children from the Gymnasium, all the way up from kindergarten to senior prefects, gathering great armfuls of the stuff, I realised that none of the inhabitants under forty had ever seen snow fall on their town.

So I taught the children a new game during their eleven o'clock break.

Snowball fighting. Will it, I wondered, be another forty years before the schoolboys and schoolgirls of Gythion can throw snowballs at each other? Most Greeks were fervently hoping so. They had emerged to count the cost of winter. And it was high.

From my elevated perch I could see the acres of tomato houses with their polythene covering stripped and tattered by thundering gales that had come roaring down the mountains and through the many-boned skeletons of fig trees with a noise like Tube trains. Nights of frost had withered the exposed seedlings, so that all had to be started again with a double outlay of money.

I could see that the fields that were so laboriously planted with winter wheat for the year's bread had turned into scoured swamps, and the brown ground of the orange groves gone golden with fallen and decaying fruit.

In Gythion that month a big German cargo boat, its Plimsoll line ten feet out of the water, had waited for two weeks for the oranges from Sparta that never came, and finally sailed back to Hamburg with its propeller churning more air than water.

I could see the centuries-old river-beds that had
proved inadequate to contain those late twentieth-century flood waters, so that they had duplicated and triplicated themselves in torrents that had taken them to places where no generation had expected them to go.

As a result, the beach below me was now littered with the flotsam and jetsam of the land, not of the sea. Fig, mulberry and olive trees had been uprooted and rolled down, and on one day of the previous week I had been picking olives up to the knees in surf. One new river had gone clean through a house that had been a summer residence for its owners for four generations. Now its walls, with their stucco decorations, stared up from the mud.

Against these very real subsistence tragedies for the Greek farmers and peasants, my own situation was insignificant. Love's labour's lost just about summed up the position in my hillside garden. All I had to do was start all over again with flowers and vegetables. Yet I had suffered one small tragedy.

Over on Kranae Island, the rain and wind and the snow had proved too much for my intended
kaiki
, lying there out of her element on the stocks. The trestles had tilted one night and the gale had tipped her over. When they got her upright again the keel was buckled in three places and a section of the hull stove in.

Disinterested expert opinion had reckoned I would be crazy to buy the boat in that condition. They had reckoned I was pretty crazy before, but this time I agreed with them.

I would not have said that this love affair between me and the
kaiki
was over. I still looked expectantly for that mast and prow as I came over the hill above the island. But let us say that the marriage, which had been
arranged, would now not take place. Nor had this setback affected my determination to own a boat. There were many others lying around the coast whose owners had deserted fishing for the easier rewards of the land.

Alexis had already produced a man from a small port down near Cape Matapan who was anxious to sell, and his was only five years old. There were two others who had already made preliminary contact from over in the Deep Mani on the other side of the peninsula.

When I was as sure as the swallows that it had stopped raining and snowing and blowing ten Beaufort, I'd go and have a look at them. It was a long walk. For at the end of a more or less stationary year, I was more than ever convinced that movement was essential to freedom and independence. On something better than your feet.

The world about me was full of good sounds. Sounds of the sea and the sky and the earth. They changed with the changing seasons, and now that the first rains had put an end to the long dry, the chorus of frogs had joined the carillon of sheep bells for the rural vespers.

The same melodious tinkle, with the strident interjections of the shepherd, was my dawn accompaniment to the male voice choir of the cockerels.

There were no traffic noises in the night to override those treble glee singers, the crickets – though they could be just as disturbing as a pneumatic drill when they started up underneath my bed.

I had learned the difference between a chug and a throb coming from the bay. During the fishing season the chugging of the
kaikis
was constant enough to sink into the background of sound, but that potent throb coming into my room when the wind was off the sea summoned me to the window to see what big ship or luxury yacht had thought it worthwhile to make for Gythion.

One unforgettable morning I was rewarded with the sight of a three-masted schooner under full sail tacking to and fro for hours across my piece of sea. But in all this pleasant harmony the one essential sound was missing – and it left a void of silence that nothing else, however melodious, could adequately fill.

On that southernmost peninsula of Greece there was no bird song.

Instead, there was, or had been, the daily infliction of the boom and blast of the twelve-bore shotgun.

It was no longer daily. The National Government, which had the advantage denied more democratic rulers
of being able to govern by decree, had prohibited shooting on four days a week so that my peace was now only disturbed on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays.

My peace! My peace was insignificant compared to what was happening to the bird life of Greece. The new restriction was not likely to bring them much relief but it did at least show that somebody in authority was aware of the threat and perhaps of the consequences.

Some years before, the inhabitants of North America, and to a lesser extent of Britain, had been startled by a book called
The Silent Spring
, which told them exactly what was likely to happen to their comfortable civilisation when they had succeeded in eliminating all birds from their communities. The insect world would take over.

The spring was silent there now. And there were plenty of indications on my hillside that the insects, given a few more silent springs, would begin to take over and that the first human being they would take over would be me.

One day, moving a rubbish heap for burning, I disturbed a spider with a leg spread of at least four inches and a thick body an inch and a quarter long.

I considered spiders friends in my continuing warfare and they had a fairly free run of my house in their role of fly and mosquito killers. But this spider's body was covered in a sort of dark brown scab which, when I prodded it, disintegrated into literally hundreds of baby spiders each no bigger than a pinhead.

This profusion was typical of Nature and its object, of course, was to ensure the survival of a few. The rest
disappeared by what can very properly be called death by natural causes. Most of them were gobbled up.

It was a carefully balanced state and when one of the most essential factors in that balance – the birds – was eliminated then I, for one, could contemplate an existence literally overrun by thousands of four-inch spiders. I could only hope that they would regard me in the same friendly spirit as I regarded them.

The Greeks shot just about everything that flew. I had been dismayed during my first weeks when I had examined the contents of a passing hunter's wallet. It had contained two thrushes and a blackbird. When I had asked why he had shot them I was given a detailed recipe for cooking them. I had yet to hear that wonderful song of the thrush in Greece and the solitary blackbird I had heard was giving his alarm signal.

A kindly old gentleman driving a tractor had a hoopoe tied by one leg to his steering wheel. I tried to buy it off him but he told me, smiling, that that was impossible as he was taking it home for his granddaughter to play with.

The only birds that were not shot, as far as I had seen, were magpies, swallows and owls. Presumably because they were not considered edible.

A family of sparrows had grown up just outside my front door but, apart from their chirping, the only bird sound that I heard in the hours of daylight was the argumentative chattering and cussing of the magpies. The night-birds had the darkness uninterrupted to themselves – and made a little too much use of it. Though there was a nightingale that sang through one week of April.

The Greeks would have been flabbergasted if I had tried to tell them of the doom awaiting them when they
had eliminated all the birds in the country, or even if I had indicated that sometimes their treatment of birds and other animals was cruel. They simply did not know that they were being cruel or that other forms of life could suffer.

Their relationship with the animal world was purely functional. The animal was there to serve man, either as a beast of burden or as food. Affection did not enter into this sort of awareness. Around me there was dismay at the absence of birds that year. I was told in the spring that in June the trees became full of hundreds of turtle-doves. I had seen no more than a dozen all year – and they had not lasted twenty-four hours.

The only birds I had seen in any numbers were the migrating flocks of starlings flying high in the dawn due south for Africa. That was the last land they would see as they headed out across the Mediterranean.

I had been asking the locals if they knew why the starlings flew so high when they passed over Peloponnese. When they shook their heads I told them it was because the starlings knew that if they came any lower they would be shot. The locals accepted this as a good enough reason.

Hardly a day passed, even in stormy weather, without my seeing one or more fishing boats from Gythion dragging their slow nets across the bay at the bottom of my garden.

Presumably they would not have continued to do this if they were not sure there were fish to be caught there. In fact, I knew there were because about once a month a fisherman was put ashore there with a basket of fish on his head which he sold on his walk back to the town.