Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (23 page)

Her subsequent struggles to get out succeeded only in sucking her deeper into the lime so that when Xenophon found her only her rump and the root of the tail was visible from the rear end.

Fortunately she had managed to get her neck and shoulders on the edge of the pit so that the lime was no higher than what might be called her armpits.

When I got to her she was lying completely still and seemed quite resigned to the situation and not, apparently, in any pain.

The group of men and boys, under Xenophon's guidance, were trying to pass a rope under Gaithuri's body. This they eventually managed to do in such a way that they would be able to lift her rear legs.

With five or six men on each end of the rope we heaved upwards and managed to raise her a few inches. My own thoughts were all on that unfortunate embryo inside her. Could it possibly survive all this ill-treatment?

It was also clear that if we were going to get Gaithuri out she would have to contribute a good deal of effort herself. But Gaithuri was not contributing anything. It almost seemed as if she found it a nice, comfortable place to lie in.

So I went round to her head, grabbed the halter rope, and shouted things at her which she hadn't heard since I hauled her, cursing, through the thunderstorm in the mountains just one year before. It must have made a deep impression at the time for she straight away gave a heave and managed to get her knees on the edge. Then with a great cry of “
Ola mazi
!” (all together) plus a few more choice expressions from me to Gaithuri, there was a concerted effort by man and beast and suddenly she was out on firm ground.

It was not the end of her ordeal. Three-quarters of her body was a dirty white and, knowing how useful lime has been to murderers in disposing of the evidence, I was fearful of the after-effects on my poor old donkey.

By great good fortune, the builders had laid on a connection to the main water supply and while the helpers dispersed, Xenophon sprayed every inch of her, every nook and cranny, with a strong jet of water while I stood at her head and gave what comfort I could.

She was shivering with cold by the time he had finished but munched contentedly enough at some grass when we tied her up. Later when I brought back some fruit and vegetables for her as a special treat she gave me a glad bray of anticipation which dispelled my gloomy thoughts.

It was two weeks before I saw or heard of Gaithuri again.

I had taken a long-awaited fishing trip to an outlying island intending to be back in twenty-four hours. But the weather turned bad and it was four days before we were able to leave the shelter of the island's solitary little port.

My first question to Xenophon when we got back to Matala was: “How is Gaithuri and the little one?”

He dropped his eyes before answering and did not look at me when he said: “Gaithuri is dead!”

It had been sudden and unexpected. He had given her a meal of grain and a bucket of water as usual in the evening. The next morning she was dead.

That evening I talked sadly with the villagers about Gaithuri. Among them was the farmer from whom I had originally bought her and who had told me she was ten years old.

“Now you can tell me the truth about her age,” I said to him.

“She was twenty,” he admitted gravely. “As old as my eldest son.”

That, I thought, made her close to a centenarian in human terms. I was strangely happy at the thought that the two of us had spent perhaps the best year of our lives together.

The road was a little different to the one I had walked along so expectant and wondering that January day more than eight years before.

It was tarred for a start. In those other days it had been suitable only for donkeys and tractors and, after heavy rains, rowing boats.

I was back on this road of memory as a result of a message that had been carried to my winter lair in Crete by a visitor from Gythion in the Peloponnese that the old man did not expect to survive another winter and hoped that the summer would bring me to see him.

It was something I could not refuse because the old man was Janni who had given me my first home in Greece – the hillside hut on the edge of the Mani peninsula, in which I had spent the first two years of my exile.

And although I suspected – rightly as it turned out – that reports of Janni's ill-health were exaggerated, I also had a nostalgia to see again the place where I had lived.

I called it the upstairs house because he had also provided me with the ruins of a mansion on the beach which was marvellous when it wasn't raining.

I knew everybody along that mile and a half of road from the bus stop and knew, as I left the main road behind me, that I would have to run a gauntlet of hospitality that could well defeat my main objective of revisiting two of the most rewarding years of my life.

Of course, all these people (there were only five families along the road) were very much a part of that, but I had made the hut a home and turned the wilderness about it into a garden.

My first neighbour was no problem. His house was 200 yards back from the road and obscured by the sprouting fields.

Another couple of hundred yards along and I was going past George's house on tiptoe, my eyes averted but my ears alert for the loud, blasphemous greeting that would mean an hour of foot-trodden wine and some incredibly indiscreet questioning by George and his wife, Athena – which I used to mispronounce anathema.

The next farm belonged to Dimitrios and Voula. There were three reasons why I should call on them.

The first was that they were certain to invite me to lunch later; the second was that I needed the magic of Voula's
ventosa
(the ancient method of cupping to draw out the evil of lung congestion); the third was that I wanted to see the fulfilment of my prediction that their ten-year-old daughter would grow into a beautiful woman.

They were just finishing a late breakfast when I arrived. I had long since ceased to be surprised at wine on the breakfast table in Greece but I was allowed to proceed after two fried eggs, two glasses of
retsina
and the
ventosa
on promising to return for lunch.

The prediction about the daughter, I might add, had been adequately justified.

I had envisaged insuperable difficulty in getting past the
magazie
just down the road. This
magazie
was a combination bakery, grocery and
taverna
and acted as the social centre for the whole district. It was there I had been arrested one midnight for playing poker – still
illegal in Greece.

Either proprietor Stavros or wife Maria or daughter Eugenia or son Nikkos would be sure to see and stop me and that would begin a session of wine or
ouzo
.

If they were all inside with shutters closed I knew that at least three dogs would rush out in horrible uproar and try to bite my ankles. They always used to.

The windows were shuttered all right. So were all the doors. And had been for a long time.

The space under the mulberry tree that once shaded our midday, wine-smoothed conversations was a confusion of long-established thistles and weeds.

The final obstacle before the long, lonely, curving stretch to the foot of the path up to my hut did not offer much cause for evasion.

It was the home of Dionysios, brother of Voula, who in my day had exhibited all the makings of a confirmed bachelor.

But Voula had revealed that he had been recently married and, as it was Sunday morning, I assumed he would be too preoccupied to pay any attention to a passing pedestrian.

In this I was apparently right and came unhindered to the bend in the road from which I would catch a first glimpse of the white-washed corner of my house through the close-crowded trees.

There was an inner and mounting excitement which was only a little dampened by the sign at the river crossing:
For Sale – Beach Building Sites. Apply…

The zigzag path that led up to my front terrace had
disappeared under six years of fecund vegetation.

I searched for another way up and came across a broad if steep path made by sheep converging from their mountain grazing to cross the ford on to the lands beyond.

Those laborious stone steps I had made were invisible but firm underfoot and I soon stood on a level patch that had once been my lawn waist deep in thistles and nettles and a host of flowers.

It had been the only lawn in Mani but now I searched my immediate environment for some sign that I had lived there and hacked and hewed and hoed and planted this earth into a recognisable bit of civilisation.

But the wilderness had advanced from the bastions of the mountain to which I had once made it retreat and had now totally overrun my few square yards of flowers and vegetables and rockeries.

Sole survivors of two years of the civilising presence were the six-inch high cactus plants that I had filched from some park. They had sprouted to a muscular and many-pronged five feet. Survival of the fittest.

I turned to the house itself. Every inch of those two square rooms, inside and out, was familiar and I was not surprised to see that the stonework above the kitchen door had collapsed.

Seven years ago I had anticipated this by cutting down a young oak tree and using it as a prop for the doorway.

Nor was I taken completely by surprise when I pushed the door open to be welcomed by a hiss. I had spent the first three months of my arrival in almost daily encounters with snakes. It was to be expected they would return with the wilderness when man withdrew.

There was this black head, weaving and flickering about two feet off the ground above a heap of rubble in the corner. With snakes I worked on the principle that they are all poisonous. So I conducted my inspection, against the hissing background, through the windows, all of which were unglazed and open.

There was, of course, nothing left of my hand-made furniture, but surely two years of constant occupation would have left some signs – if only scars.

But there was nothing to show that Peter White had passed this way except some nails hammered into the wall above the connecting doorway from which I had suspended a sackcloth curtain, and a hole carved in the wooden shutter of the kitchen window to accommodate the chimney from the stove.

But wait!

I scrambled through the thistle thicket to the wild olive tree growing out of the rocky terrace. There, just discernible in the bark, was the pale wraith of two carved initials: P.W.

The snake was still hissing when I gently closed the door and turned away.

One thought predominated over every other memory and emotion.

That it would be wonderful to start all over again.

Zen

Annabel, Deborah, me and Mrs L

The upstairs house