The Breaking Point (36 page)

‘You surely could afford one day,’ he said, ‘or even half a day. I could call for you early, with my car . . .’ but Stephen brushed him aside.

‘How’s the weather in the north?’ he asked. ‘You’ve checked that the road over the pass is open?’

I left them to it, the pointing of fingers on maps, the tracing of mountain villages, the tracks and contours on maps of larger scale, and basked for the one evening allowed to me in the casual, happy atmosphere of the taverna where we dined. I enjoyed poking my finger in a pan and choosing my own piece of lamb. I liked the chatter and the laughter from neighbouring tables. The gay intensity of talk - none of which I could understand, naturally - reminded me of left-bank Paris. A man from one table would suddenly rise to his feet and stroll over to another, discussion would follow, argument at heat perhaps swiftly dissolving into laughter. This, I thought to myself, has been happening through the centuries under this same sky, in the warm air with a bite to it, the sap drink pungent as the sap running through the veins of these Greeks, witty and cynical as Aristophanes himself, in the shadow, unmoved, inviolate, of Athene’s Parthenon.

‘The cabin store will be open then?’ pursued Stephen. ‘They don’t shut down when the weather breaks? And the bus runs from Kalabaka until the pass is closed by snow?’

I felt it time to intervene. Our hosts were drained, and had no more to give.

‘Listen, Stephen,’ I said, ‘if the pass is closed, and the store is burnt to the ground, I’m still willing to take a groundsheet and sleep in the open, so long as you find your chamois. Let’s give it a miss until tomorrow. I want to see the Parthenon by moonlight.’

I had my way. They flood-light it now, to great advantage I am told, but it was not so then, and since it was late in the year there were few tourists. My companions were all intelligent men, including my own husband, and they had the sense to stay mute. I suppose, being a woman, I confuse beauty with sentiment, but, as I looked on the Parthenon for the first time in my life, I found myself crying. It had never happened to me before. Your sunset-weepers I despise. It was not full moon, or anywhere near it. The half-circle put me in mind of the labrys, the Cretan double-axe, and the pillars were the more ghostly in consequence.What a shock for the modern aesthete, I thought when my crying was done, if he could see the ruddy glow of colour, the painted eyes, the garish lips, the orange-reds and blues that were there once, and Athene herself a giantess on her pedestal touched by the rising sun. Even in those distant times the exigencies of a state religion had brought their own traffic, the buying and selling of doves, of trinkets: to find himself, a man had to go to the woods, to the hills.

‘Come on,’ said Stephen. ‘It’s beautiful and stark, if you like, but so is St Pancras station at four a.m. It depends on your association of ideas.’

We crammed into Burns’s small car, and went back to our hotel.

We left Athens early the next morning, seen off at the station by our still bewildered friends. Stephen, of course, had no regrets. As to myself, it was like being dragged from Paris at seventeen, having glimpsed the Champs-Elysées overnight. Athens had that same surge of life, that same bright air, the crowded morning streets at once urgent and indolent.

We rattled our way north, Stephen at his maps again, myself at the window. The plains of Thessaly to me spelt armies of the past, to my husband the narrowing of distance between us and the chamois.

We changed trains at one point. Where it was I cannot remember. There were signs of a recent earthquake, houses in half, buildings in rubble, unmoving to our eyes who had seen all this in war. The bright light faded. It began to rain. The earth turned yellow-brown, and dispirited women, their faces veiled from the hidden sun like Moslems, scratched at the lean ground. As we passed through empty stations donkeys brayed. A rising wind drove the rain slantways. In the far distance I saw mountains, and touching Stephen on the knee I pointed to them. Once again he consulted his map. Somewhere, amongst that misty range, snow-capped and hidden from us, would be Olympus, stronghold of the gods. Not for us, alas, that ultimate discovery. Our trek was westward, to the chamois.

Kalabaka, crouching muddied and wet at the foot of rock-bound Meteora, offered no temptation as a refuge. Nevertheless, it was our station of descent. Rapid inquiries - and Stephen’s smattering of Greek seemed to me well-laced with Italian - soon showed that we had, in the full sense of the phrase, missed our bus. There was only one a day, at this time of the year, which climbed the winding road to the pass: and it left in the early morning. Stephen was not to be deterred. Means of transport other than a bus must be found, and we sat down in the ticket-collector’s office - ourselves, the ticket-collector, a bearded patriarch, a young boy, the ticket-collector’s brother-in-law, who happened to be passing by - all gesturing, arguing in high excitement the possibility of our reaching the top of the pass before nightfall.

The ticket-collector’s brother-in-law brought light out of darkness. His nephew had a car. A good car. A car that not only held the road and the twists in the road, but whose lights worked. The three of us went to a café to celebrate, and while we pledged each other in coffee dregs and ouzo the nephew’s car was driven to a nearby garage to be filled with petrol. The nephew had a wall-eye. I could not help wondering if the wall-eye would affect his driving. As we started off, taking the road out of Kalabaka like a speedway, it occurred to me that the wall-eye gave him confidence, making him unconscious of danger. It was his left eye, and as we started to climb it was this side of his face that was turned to the precipices.

Climbing a mountain road by car is always a doubtful pleasure. As a test of skill for experts it is endurable. In northern Greece, however, after autumn rains, when the road is heavy with loose stones and falls of earth, and it is late afternoon, and the car’s chassis shakes in protest, and its engine groans as it approaches each fresh bend, and the wall-eyed chauffeur suddenly seizes the crucifix hanging on the dashboard and kisses it with fervour, in these circumstances climbing a mountain road brings destruction of thought. Stephen, on the right side of the car, had only a bank to daunt him, but I, glancing leftwards through the window to the tumbling gorge below, was less happily placed. The grunts of the chauffeur, harmonizing with each change of gear as we came to the bends in the road, were not conducive to a sense of security, nor, as I peered ahead through the rain, was the long sight of the distant bridge spanning a ravine over which we must in some five minutes cross. The bridge looked broken. Planks from it appeared tossed amongst the boulders far below. I was not altogether surprised that our wall-eyed driver kissed his crucifix, but his action did not increase my confidence.

The dusk crept upon us. Our chauffeur switched on his lights. This, more than the kissing of the crucifix, seemed a measure of defeat, for they hardly broke the growing dark. The road wound its way ever upward, and at no place was there a possibility of turning and going back to Kalabaka. Like Roland in
Childe Harold
, we must go on, naught else remained to do. I shut my eyes. And it was only then, after a moment or two, that I heard Stephen say beside me, ‘What’s the matter? Feeling sick?’ I could only conclude that, as always, my husband lacked perception.

The final roar of the engine and a furious grinding of gears warned me that death was imminent, and, not to miss the experience, I opened my eyes. We had come to our journey’s end.

I do not know what buildings stand at Malakasi today. For all I know there may be a motel. In the year of which I speak there was a log cabin at the top of the pass, standing a little apart from the road, with room enough for a bus or lorry to park beside it. Forests of beech surrounded the cabin. The rain had ceased. The crisp cold air had all the stark invigoration that comes with a height of some seven thousand feet. A single light shone from the window of the cabin. Our driver sounded his horn, and as he did so the door of the cabin opened and a man stood on the threshold.

‘Come on,’ said Stephen, ‘help me unload. We’ll leave them to the explanations.’

My trepidation had vanished the moment the car stopped. One sniff of that mountain air was like a whiff of alcohol to an addict. I got out and stamped and stretched my legs, and if Stephen had said to me that we were to start climbing now, on foot, striking off through the trees in darkness in search of chamois, I would have followed him. Instead, we carried our traps through to the log cabin.

While Stephen interposed his odd mixture of Greek and Italian in the torrent of discussion taking place between the wall-eyed driver and the tenant of the cabin, I had time to look around me. The room was half-café, half-store, shaped like a short L, the floor earth-covered, a ladder rising from it to the lofts above, and a small kitchen at one end. I could smell food, something cooking in a pan.There were rows of goods, cigarettes, chocolate, coils of rope, toothpaste, cloths - all the things you find in a well-stocked village shop - and the owner, a cheerful-looking man of middle age, received us without surprise, shaking our hands in true Greek courtesy. Indeed, it might have been every day that a fanatical Englishman in search of the mythical chamois arrived at his store after dark demanding supper and a bed.

I made gestures of smoking, and pointed to his store of cartons behind the counter, but he brushed the idea aside, and with a bow offered me one from his own packet. Then, bowing still, he led me up the ladder to the communicating rooms above, and I saw that we must all of us, proprietor, wall-eyed driver, Stephen and myself, share the pile of blankets for the night, heaped carelessly upon the wooden floor - unless I removed myself, in modesty, to a cupboard. I smiled and nodded, hoping to express appreciation, and followed my host down the ladder to the store below.

The first person I saw was Stephen. He had taken his rifle from its cover, and was showing it to a small, rat-faced man who had appeared in shirt-sleeves from the kitchen.The rat-faced man was nodding in great excitement, and then, in fine pantomime, made a pretence of crouching, animal fashion, after which he leapt in the air, to the applause of our wall-eyed driver.

‘It’s all right,’ called Stephen at sight of me,‘there’s no mistake. These are the chaps who know the wood-cutters who saw the chamois.’

His voice was triumphant. Foolishly, I was reminded of the House that Jack built. This was the bull, that worried the dog, that killed the cat, that ate the malt . . . Had we come all this way to the top of the Pindus mountains only to destroy?

‘Fine,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders, and making a concession to femininity I took out my lipstick. There was a little cracked mirror hanging behind the counter. The men watched in admiration. My status was established. I knew that, without a word from me, those blankets in the room above would be redistributed before the night was older, and the best folded for me in the cupboard apart.The Greeks paid tribute to Gaia before the birth of Zeus.

‘That small chap understands Italian,’ said Stephen, as we sat down to eggs fried in oil and a tinned sardine. ‘He was in some prison camp during the war. He says the wood-cutters have gone down for the winter, but there’s some fellow still grazing goats a couple of hundred feet higher up, above the tree-line, who knows all about chamois. He sometimes calls in here during the evening. He may look in tonight.’

I glanced across at our three companions. The rat-faced cook had returned to his pots and pans, and our wall-eyed driver was being shaved by the proprietor of the store. He leant back at ease, a towel round his shoulders, his face in lather, the wall-eye staring up in confidence at the broad-shouldered, smiling proprietor, who leant over him, razor in hand. Somewhere a cracked loudspeaker gave forth a South American song. We were at the top of a Pindus pass. Nothing was really out of place.

I finished spooning sheep’s cream from a saucer - our dessert - and Stephen began drawing a chamois head on the bare boards of our table. The proprietor of the store came to watch, and with him our wall-eyed driver, newly shaved. Somewhere outside, I thought I heard a dog barking, but no one paid any attention, the men too intent upon the chamois head. I got up and went to the door. Observation before supper had warned me that, if I desired to wash, a stream ran beside the road and lost itself in the gorge below. I went out into the night and crunched across the gravel clearing to the stream. Last evening the quarter-moon upon the Parthenon, and now the nearby naked Pindus beeches seven thousand feet closer to the stars. No wind to stir the leaves that yet remained. The sky looked wider than it did at home.

I washed in the gully by the road, and once more heard the barking of a dog. I raised my head, and looked beyond the log cabin to a narrow plateau stretching to the very lip of the gorge. Something moved there in the darkness. I dried my hands on my woollen jersey, and crossed back over the road, past the clearing by the cabin, towards the plateau. Someone whistled. The sound was uncanny, heard there on the mountain pass, remote from town and village. It was the hissing whistle blown between tooth and lip heard on the sidewalk of a garish city, and the woman who hears it quickens her step instinctively. I paused. Then I saw the herd of goats, crowded together, bedded for the night, the narrow plateau their pillow. Two dogs stood guardian, one at either end. And motionless, in the midst of his herd, hooded, leaning on his crook, stood their master, staring not at me but at the hills above. It must have been he who whistled.

I watched them a moment, the man, and the bedded goats, and the sentinel dogs, and they seemed to me remote from the little world of the log cabin and the men within. To look upon them was intrusion. They belonged elsewhere. Their very stillness put them apart and gave me a strange feeling of disquiet. Yet why the whistle? Why the lewd, low hiss of warning? I turned away, went back to the cabin, and opened the door.