‘Larry, dear,’ said Mother distraught, ‘what have you been doing?’
‘Attacked,’ gasped Larry between wheezes. ‘Unprovoked… Creature mad… Probably rabies… Ruptured appendix.’
With Leslie on one side of him and Spiro on the other they carted Larry slowly back to the villa, with Mother and Margo fluttering commiseratingly and ineffectually around him. In a crisis of this magnitude, involving my family, one had to keep one’s wits about one or all was lost. I ran swiftly round to the kitchen door where, panting but innocent, I informed our maid that I was going to spend the day out and could she give me some food to eat. She put half a loaf of bread, some onions, some olives, and a hunk of cold meat into a paper bag and gave it to me. Fruit I knew I could obtain from any of my peasant friends. Then I raced through the olive groves, carrying this provender, in search of Sally.
I eventually found her half a mile away, grazing on a succulent patch of grass. After several ineffectual attempts, I managed to scramble up onto her back and then, belabouring her behind with a stick, I urged her to a brisk trot as far away from the villa as possible.
I had to return to the villa for tea because Theodore was coming. When I got back I found Larry, swathed in blankets, lying on the sofa giving Theodore a graphic description of the incident.
‘And then, absolutely unprovoked, it suddenly turned on me with slavering jaws, like the charge of the Light Brigade.’ He broke off to glare at me as I entered the room. ‘Oh, so you decided to come back. And what, may I inquire, have you done with that equine menace?’
I replied that Sally was safely bedded down in her stable and had, fortunately, suffered no ill effects from the incident. Larry glared at me.
‘Well, I’m delighted to hear that,’ he said caustically. ‘The fact that I am lying here with my spleen ruptured in three places is of apparently little or no moment.’
‘I have brought you… um… a little, you know… er… gift,’ said Theodore, and he presented me with a replica of his own collecting box, complete with tubes and a fine muslin net. I could not have asked for anything nicer and I thanked him volubly.
‘You had better go and thank Katerina too, dear,’ said Mother. ‘She didn’t really want to part with Sally, you know.’
‘I am surprised,’ said Larry. ‘I’d have thought she’d have been only too glad to get rid of her.’
‘You’d better not go and see Katerina now,’ said Margo. ‘She’s getting near her time.’
Intrigued by this unusual phrase, I asked what ‘getting near her time’ meant.
‘She’s going to have a baby, dear,’ said Mother.
‘The wonder of it is,’ said Larry, ‘as I thought when we went to the wedding, she didn’t have it in the vestry.’
‘Larry, dear,’ said Mother. ‘Not in front of Gerry.’
‘Well, it’s true,’ said Larry. ‘I’ve never seen such a pregnant bride in white.’
I said I thought it would be a good idea if I went to thank Katerina before she had the baby because after she had it she would probably be very busy. Reluctantly, Mother agreed to this, and so the following morning I mounted Sally and rode off through the olive trees in the direction of Gastouri, Roger trotting behind and indulging in a game which he and Sally had invented between them, which consisted of Roger darting in at intervals and nibbling her heels gently, growling furiously, whereupon Sally would give a skittish little buck and attempt to kick him in the ribs.
Presently we came to the little low white house, with the flattened area outside its front door neatly ringed with old rusty cans filled with flowers. To my astonishment I saw that we were not the only visitors that day. There were several elderly gentlemen sitting round a small table, hunched over glasses of wine, their enormous, swooping, nicotine-stained moustaches flapping up and down as they talked to each other. Clustered in the doorway of the house and peering eagerly through the one small window that illuminated its interior, there was a solid wedge of female relatives, all chattering and gesticulating at once.
From inside the house came a series of piercing shrieks, interspersed with cries for help from the Almighty, the Virgin Mary, and St Spiridion. I gathered from all this uproar and activity that I had arrived in the middle of a family row. This interfamily warfare was quite a common thing among the peasants and something I always found very enjoyable, for any quarrel, however trivial, was carried on with grim determination until it was sucked dry of the very last juices of drama, with people shouting abuse at one another through the olive trees and the men periodically chasing each other with bamboos.
I tethered Sally and made my way to the front door of the house, wondering, as I did so, what this particular row was about. The last one in this area that I remembered had lasted for a prodigious length of time (three weeks) and had all been started by a small boy who told his cousin that his grandfather cheated at cards. I wriggled and pushed my way determinedly through the knot of people who blocked the doorway and finally got inside, only to find the entire room seemed to be filled with Katerina’s relatives, packed shoulder to shoulder like a football crowd. I had, quite early in life, discovered that the only way of dealing with a situation like this was to get down on one’s hands and knees and crawl. This I did and by this means successfully achieved the front row in the circle of relatives that surrounded the great double bed.
Now I could see that something much more interesting than a family row was taking place. Katerina was lying on the bed with her cheap print frock rolled right up above her great, swollen breasts. Her hands were tightly clasping the head of the big brass bedstead, her white mound of a stomach quivered and strained with what appeared to be a life of its own, and she kept drawing her legs up and screaming, rolling her head from side to side, the sweat pouring down her face. Near her by the bedside, and obviously in charge of the proceedings, was a tiny, dirty, wizened little witch of a woman holding a bucket in one hand full of well water. Periodically she would dip a bundle of filthy rags into this and mop Katerina’s face and her thighs with it. On the table by the bedstead a jug full of wine and a glass stood, and every time the old crone had finished the ablutions, she would put a drop of wine in the glass and force it into Katerina’s mouth; then she would fill the glass and drain it herself, for presumably, in her capacity as midwife, she needed to keep up her strength as much as Katerina.
I congratulated myself warmly on the fact that I had not been deviated on my ride up to Katerina’s house by several interesting things I had seen. If, for example, I had stopped to climb up to what I was pretty certain was a magpie’s nest, I would probably have missed this whole exciting scene. Curiously enough, I was so used to the shrill indignation of the peasants over the most trivial circumstances that I did not really, consciously, associate Katerina’s falsetto screams with pain. It was obvious that she was in some pain. Her face was white, crumpled, and old-looking, but I automatically subtracted ninety per cent of the screaming as exaggeration. Now and then, when she uttered a particularly loud scream and implored St Spiridion for his aid, all the relatives would scream in sympathy and also implore the Saint’s intervention. The resulting cacophony in that tiny space had to be heard to be believed.
Suddenly Katerina clasped the bed-head still more tightly, the muscles in her brown arms showing taut. She writhed, drew up her legs and spread them wide apart.
‘It is coming. It is coming. Praised be Saint Spiridion,’ shouted all the relatives in chorus, and I noticed in the middle of the tangled, matted mass of Katerina’s pubic hairs a round white object appear, rather like the top of an egg. There was a moment’s pause and Katerina strained again and uttered a moaning gasp. Then, to my entranced delight, the baby’s head suddenly popped out of her like a rabbit out of a hat, to be quickly followed by its pink, twitching body. Its face and its limbs were as crumpled and as delicate as a rose’s petals. But it was its minuteness and the fact that it was so perfectly formed that intrigued me. The midwife shuffled forward shoutin
g prayers and instructions to Katerina and seized the baby from between her blood-stained thighs. At that moment, to my intense annoyance, the ring of relatives all moved forward a pace in their eagerness to see the sex of the child, so that I missed the next piece of the drama, for all I could see were the large and extremely well-padded rumps of two of Katerina’s larger aunts.
By the time I had burrowed between their legs and voluminous skirts and got to the front of the circle again, the midwife – at shouts of delight from everybody – declared the baby to be a boy and had severed the umbilical cord with a large and very ancient penknife she had extracted from a pocket in her skirt. One of the aunts surged forward and together she and the midwife tied the cord. Then, while the aunt held the squalling, twitching, pink blob of life, the midwife dipped her bundle of rags into the bucket and proceeded to swab the baby down. This done, she then filled a glass with wine and gave a couple of sips to Katerina and then filled her mouth with wine and proceeded to spit it from her toothless gums all over the baby’s head, making the sign of the cross over its little body as she did so. Then she clasped the baby to her bosom and turned fiercely on the crowd of relatives.
‘Come now, come now,’ she shrilled. ‘It is done. He has arrived. Go now, go now.’
Laughing and chattering excitedly, the relatives poured out of the little house and immediately started drinking wine and congratulating each other as though they had all personally been responsible for the successful birth of the baby. In the airless little room, smelling so strongly of sweat and garlic, Katerina lay exhausted on the bed, making feeble attempts to pull her dress down to cover her nakedness. I went to the edge of the bed and looked down at her.
‘Yasu, Gerry mine,’ she said and sketched a white travesty of her normal brilliant smile. She looked incredibly old, lying there. I congratulated her politely on the birth of her first son and then thanked her for the donkey. She smiled again.
‘Go outside,’ she said. ‘They will give you some wine.’
I left the little room and hurried after the midwife, for I was anxious to see what the next stage was in her treatment of the baby. Out at the back of the house she had spread a white linen cloth over a small table and placed the child on it. Then she picked up great rolls of previously prepared cloth, like very wide bandage, and with the aid of one of the more nimble and sober aunts, she proceeded to wind this round and round the baby’s tiny body, pausing frequently to make sure its arms lay flat by its sides and its legs were together. Slowly and methodically she bound it up as straight as a guardsman. It lay there with only its head sticking out from this cocoon of webbing. Greatly intrigued by this, I asked the midwife why she was binding the baby up.
‘Why? Why?’ she said, her grizzled grey eyebrows flapping over her eyes, milky with cataracts, that peered at me fiercely. ‘Because, if you don’t bind up the baby, its limbs won’t grow straight. Its bones are as soft as an egg. If you don’t bind it up, its limbs will grow crooked or when it kicks and waves its arms about, it will break its bones, like little sticks of charcoal.’
I knew that babies in England were not bound up in this way, and I wondered whether this was because the British were in some way tougher-boned. Otherwise, it seemed to me, there would have been an awful lot of deformities inhabiting the British Isles. I made a mental note to discuss this medical problem with Theodore at the first opportunity.
After I had drunk several glasses of wine to honour the baby and eaten a large bunch of grapes, I got on Sally’s back and rode slowly home. I would not have missed that morning for anything, I decided. But, thinking about it as we jogged through the dappled shade of the olives, the thing that amazed me was that anything so perfect and so beautiful should have matured and come forth from the interior of what, to me, was an old woman. It was like, I reflected, breaking open the old, brown, prickly husk of a chestnut and finding the lovely gleaming trophy inside.
PART TWO
Kontokali
Hospitality is, indeed, now no less than in classical times, a sacred duty in these islands, and it is a duty most conscientiously performed.
– PROFESSOR ANSTEAD
4
The Pygmy Jungle
It was a warm spring day, as blue as a jay’s wing, and I waited impatiently for Theodore to arrive, for we were going to take a picnic lunch and walk two or three miles to a small lake that was one of our happiest hunting grounds. These days spent with Theodore, these ‘excursions’ as he called them, were of absorbing interest to me, but they must have been very exhausting for Theodore, for, from the moment of his arrival till his departure, I would ply him with a ceaseless string of questions.
Eventually, Theodore’s cab clopped and tinkled its way up the drive and Theodore dismounted, clad, as always, in the most unsuitable attire for collecting: a neat tweed suit, respectable, highly polished boots, and a grey Homburg perched squarely on his head. The only ungracious note in this city gentleman’s outfit was his collecting box, full of tubes and bottles, slung over one shoulder, and a small net with a bottle dangling from the end, attached to the end of his walking-stick.
‘Ah, um,’ he said, shaking me gravely by the hand. ‘How are you? I see that we have got, um… a nice day for our excursion.’
As at that time of year one got weeks on end of nice days, this was scarcely surprising, but Theodore always insisted on mentioning it as though it was some special privilege that had been granted us by the gods of collecting. Quickly we gathered up the bag of food and the little stone bottles of ginger beer Mother had prepared for us, and slung these on our backs, together with my collecting equipment, which was slightly more extensive than Theodore’s, since everything was grist to my mill and I had to be prepared for any eventuality.
Then, whistling for Roger, we went off through the sunlit olive groves, striped with shade, the whole island, spring-fresh and brilliant, lying before us. At this time of the year the olive groves would be full of flowers. Pale anemones with the tips of their petals dyed red as though they had been sipping wine, pyramid orchids that looked as though they had been made of pink icing, and yellow crocuses so fat, glossy, and waxy-looking you felt they would light like a candle if you set a match to their stamens. We would tramp through the rough stone paths among the olives, then for a mile or so follow the road lined with tall and ancient cypresses, each covered in a layer of white dust, like a hundred dark paint brushes loaded with chalk white. Presently we would strike off from the road and make our way over the crest of a small hill and there, lying below us, would be the lake, perhaps four acres in extent, its rim shaggy with reeds and its water green with plants.
On this particular day, as we made our way down the hillside towards the lake, I was walking a little ahead of Theodore and I suddenly came to an abrupt halt and stared with amazement at the path ahead of me. Alongside the edge of the path was the bed of a tiny stream which meandered its way down to join the lake. The stream was such a tiny one that even the early spring sun had succeeded in drying it up, so that there was only the smallest trickle of water. Through the bed of the stream and then up across the path and into the stream again lay what at first sight appeared to be a thick cable which seemed to be mysteriously possessed of a life of its own. When I looked closely I could see that the cable was made up of what looked like hundreds of small, dusty snakes. I shouted eagerly to Theodore and when he came I pointed this phenomenon out to him.
‘Aha!’ he said, his beard bristling and a keen light of interest in his eyes. ‘Um, yes. Very interesting. Elvers.’
What kind of snake was an elver, I inquired, and why were they all travelling in a procession?
‘No, no,’ said Theodore. ‘They are not snakes. They are baby eels and they appear to be, um… you know, making their way down to the lake.’
Fascinated, I crouched over the long column of baby eels, wriggling determinedly through the stone and grass and prickly thistles, their skins dry and dusty. There seemed to be millions of them. Who,
in this dry, dusty place, would expect to find eels wriggling about?
‘The whole, um… history of the eel,’ said Theodore, putting his collecting box on the ground and seating himself on a convenient rock, ‘is very curious. You see, at certain times the adult eels leave the ponds or rivers where they have been living and, er… make their way down to the sea. All the European eels do this and so do the North American eels. Where they went to was, for a long time, a mystery. The only thing, um… you know… scientists knew was that they never came back, but that eventually these baby eels would return and repopulate the same rivers and streams. It was not until after quite a number of years that people discovered what really happened.’
He paused and scratched his beard thoughtfully.
‘All the eels made their way down to the sea and then swam through the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic, until they reached the Sargasso Sea, which is, as you know, off the northeastern coast of South America. The… um… North American eels, of course, didn’t have so far to travel, but they made their way to the same place. Here they mated, laid their eggs, and died. The eel larva, when it hatches out, is a very curious, um… you know… leaf-shaped creature and transparent, so unlike the adult eel that for a long time it was classified in a separate genus. Well, these larvae make their way slowly backwards to the place where their parents have come from and by the time they reach the Mediterranean or the North American shore, they look like these.’