Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance Page 6

He was now, I was glad to say, developing the proper possessive instincts and beginning to bark at strangers. The reason I was glad to say this was that among the unwanted animals in my life were the stray dogs which came to my upstairs house in search of food.

  Greek dogs were always hungry. They seemed to be used almost entirely for hunting, and they made very good hunting dogs from an early age because they had inherited knowledge that their only chance of getting anything other than a crust of bread to eat was to put up something that could be shot down. There was no longer very much to put up during most of the year: consequently, there were a large number of hungry dogs in Greece.

  I discovered this after my third cake of expensive soap, brought all the way from England to save drachma expenditure, mysteriously disappeared from my bathroom. My bathroom was a concrete step outside the front door on which was placed a polythene basin and a piece of soap. The first piece vanished while I was away from home. The second and third while I was either in the house or ten yards away sawing firewood.

  The fourth piece I staked to a nail with several wrappings of string around it. I came back from the beach house to discover one third of it missing and the canine tooth marks on the remainder clearly visible. On each occasion a piece of Greek-made soap on the same step was left untouched.

  One Sunday night, when I was having dinner with Janni and his wife, a young man brought a sack into the dining room. He threw it on the floor where it landed with a thud and started mewing. It was the kitten I had been promised, and I carried it three miles home slung over my shoulder.

  In my kitchen I untied the neck of the sack, put in my hand, and pulled out a small bundle of multi-coloured hellfire. It spat viciously and damn near tore my wrist and hand to ribbons.

  I finally got it immobilised in the crook of my elbow and set about establishing a more harmonious relationship by feeding it condensed milk on the tip of my little finger. Twice it licked this off happily. The third time it nearly bit off the top quarter inch of flesh. That was how Elsa came into my life. And that was how she went out of it the next morning – through the window with about two inches of my skin trailing from her claws. But she came back at night and licked up the saucer of milk I put on the window-sill for her. I knew it was Elsa because I sat up in the darkness until midnight to make sure nothing else got it.

  I did not call her Elsa immediately. That came a week or two later when I was beginning to feel like Joy Adamson. Every nightfall Elsa would come into the kitchen as soundless as a ghost. The first I knew of her presence was the lapping noise at the saucer. Even Dog missed her arrival. By sunrise she had vanished into the bush and rocks which surround me.

  Very occasionally she would let me stroke her – an operation which I approached as suspiciously and fearfully as she did. Then, on the cold nights, she would let me wrap her in the apron of my jersey and she would sleep on my lap. I thrilled to the first purr as any mother hearing the first baby-gurgling noise. Then, one night at supper, I felt a sudden, light weight on my knee. I could hardly believe it. But the kitten had jumped on my lap. That was when I called her Elsa.

  She was now almost tame, slept on my bed every night and sometimes on my face, had polished off the mouse and begun to pinch the cheese herself, and played happily with the centipedes, beetles, lizards, flies, scorpions and other awakening denizens of my many-holed walls. Soon, I hoped, she would have established better than neutral relationships with Dog, who desperately wanted to be friendly but whose advances were always repelled by three or four incredibly swift left jabs.

  Elsa still disappeared in the mornings, but never before breakfast and was always back in the afternoons. She did not go far from the house, and I often saw her crouched on top of the big rock above the woodpile watching me sawing or lazing, leopard-like across the branch of the thorn tree. I hoped she’d stay that way. I didn’t want a civilised tabby cat. It would not have gone with the furniture.

  Chapter 9

  What I Was Really Looking For Was a Miracle

  There was a boat-builder’s yard at Gythion. It was at the entrance to the island (now linked to the mainland by a causeway and a sea wall on which Paris and Helen took refuge on the eve of their flight to Troy.) I had often wandered around there among the fishing boats under repair and the sad hulks of vessels whose sea-going days were over and who had now come ashore to end their days as misplaced and neglected as a retired merchant skipper.

  The boat builder’s name was Alexis and he was, I hoped, a friend. There was a boat there that he said I could have for thirty pounds, but it had no motor and no sails and it was too big to row any distance. I did not wander with any specific intent. I had not got thirty pounds. I believed I had a backer to the extent of about ten pounds which was roughly what I bartered my labour and a month of my life for down in the cotton fields. It was just that I didn’t want to miss another opportunity; also I liked wandering around boat-yards at the edge of the sea. What I was really looking for, of course, was a miracle – a miracle that would come to me out of that sea.

  Alexis and I sometimes sat under the trees of the island cafe trying to make conversation about boats above the noise of the record player and above the limitations of my Greek. We didn’t do too badly and the wine was a great help to understanding. “You see that one? I built that one myself.”

  He pointed to a desolate-looking caïque or kaiki, as the Greeks call them, which was resting on blocks high up on the beach less than fifty yards away. The paint was peeling off the open seams along its sides, the rigging was bleached and frayed and the ironwork rusty, and the furled sail revealed its tatters and uselessness all along the length of a distorted boom.

  But as I looked at her I was suddenly conscious of the great difference between her and the other boats hulking in the yard. Her prow lifted proudly and the poise and the tilt of the single mast created the impression – surely intentional – that she would rise gracefully to the incoming swell rather than the littered ground which bore her.

  She was as broad-bosomed and broad-bottomed as a plump dowager but, in my new awareness, I recognised not so much the dignity of the boat as her self-assurance that her merits would be acknowledged and that, once again, she would ride the Mediterranean seaways that were her birthright.

  Alexis launched into a detailed description of the two years he spent lovingly making her using the simple tools of his ancient craft. He told me of the oak, pine and eucalyptus wood that had gone into her construction. Greeks could make a rhetorical performance last ten minutes just to say: “It turned out well” and Alexis was in full flow when I held up my hand like a point-duty policeman to stop him.

  “Does it float?” I asked him.

  “Give me a couple of weeks to work on it and she will float you to America.”

  Suddenly I found myself probing in earnest. A few buckets full of water would close up the seams and a few coats of paint would restore her seaworthiness. Rigging and sails would have to be replaced but the engine was as good as new. Closer inspection revealed that the propeller had a few dents “but it is nothing.”

  I also discovered that the kaiki belonged to a man whom Alexis referred to as Kapitanos who used to take boatloads of passengers to the caves at Mani until civilisation caught up with him and he beached his kaiki and himself and took the tourists to the caves by coach. That was two years previous.

  Those who know a Greek kaiki will need little further enlightenment as to the appearance and performance of the type. It would be unkind to refer to them as the char-women of the Mediterranean but they are built solely for work and they thrive on it without getting rich. According to the ruler I borrowed from Alexis, the dimensions of this one were: length: 10.5 metres; width: 3.7 metres; depth: 1.6 metres; draught: 1.2 metres. There was no keel and it was this which enabled a kaiki to cope with a mid-ocean storm as happily and safely as with four feet of harbour or shoal water.

  It took a bit of pushing through the water, and I thought that six or seve
n knots was about as much as the sixteen-horsepower engine could manage economically, unassisted by wind. Pretty good dowager pace at that. Of course, all discussions concerning heavy expenditure by me were purely academic. But ever since I’d been there I had been concerned with small miracles and some of the ones I had waited for had happened. I asked Alexis how much the kaiki would cost.

  “You want to know how much you would have to pay to buy the kaiki?”

  I nodded. He looked round the open-air restaurant like a conspirator and unobtrusively scribbled some figures on a piece of a cigarette box. He pushed it across to me saying: “This is what I would pay. Ready to go to sea.”

  The figures showed me 22,000 drachmas (275 pounds). The happiness and the strength of my position was that 22,000 was no more impossible for me than 2,000. I didn’t blink an eyelid. Alexis’s conspiratorial air deepened. He wrote another row of figures and said: “That is what I would offer.”

  I glanced casually at 17,000 and felt well-armed for any bargaining that lay ahead. For I was by then determined to pursue this academic project to its impossible conclusion.

  “When can I see the Kapitanos?”

  “I will tell him and he will come out to your house to talk.”

  In due course, the Kapitanos arrived at my home – by boat. He was accompanied by an elderly English-speaking Greek recently returned from America and three fish.

  Kapitanos was a sunburned and pleasant man, with a good face and merry eyes, and I felt sorry that he had given up his boat for a bus and the salt spray for dust. At the end of the chatty bit I asked him how much he wanted for the kaiki.

  “27,000 drachmas,” he said promptly, and was at great pains to point out that this would include a complete refit and engine overhaul.

  I didn’t make my counter-offer but I was glad the interpreter was there to explain that I would have to get the permission of the Government in England if I wanted to take more than fifty pounds a year out of that country but that I was writing to the Governor of the Bank of England.

  I indicated for future use that it would be most unlikely that he would give permission for any movement of capital that would not benefit Britain’s economy. Everybody looked very impressed.

  Of course, I was in a very strong position all round. At our next discussion I offered Kapitanos the ridiculous figure of 125 pounds (10,000 drachmas) for the kaiki as she lay there. After he had finished laughing and went away, he may have reflected that it would have been better to have 10,000 drachmas in his pocket than to watch 27,000 drachmas rotting away on the beach.

  That would have been one miracle. But I – and Kapitanos – would have to sit around and await another.

  Chapter 10

  A Feast to Assuage Any Sort of Hunger

  After six months of fairly naked endeavour (a description which, at least, indicates the nature of my clothing since the end of May), how went the struggle for survival? Well, I survived. And survived without the smallest doubt that ten pounds a month was adequate for all my needs and some of my indulgences. But that was not the whole struggle. If I were to ask myself a different question: “Had I succeeded in changing my environment to accommodate my needs and indulgences?” The answer would have to have been “No.”

  In other words, I had not been able to impose my own terms in the warfare I waged continuously with what could best be described as the forces of nature; and it was being made plain to me with each passing week that if this encounter was to end in unconditional surrender by one side or the other, it would probably be by me. When I raised my head from the evening table on the terrace where I was writing this I was immediately confronted by a brown and yellow hillside from which the green of oak and thorn tree emerged like scattered oases.

  In my war the earth was strictly neutral. It lay there brown and indifferent where I had eliminated the arch-enemies of thistle and weed. The yellow area was still firmly held by massed and hostile ranks in a constant state of readiness to invade my little island.

  I could only enlist the earth as an ally by bribing it with enormous quantities of water throughout the long, dry summer and the few green patches that had maintained a footing about me were sad testimony to the inadequacy of my bribes.

  Let’s see … there were nine chrysanthemums displaying a toughness and resilience which I never dreamed such a lovely flower could possess; they were supported by a half dozen dilapidated and homesick zinnias, a few Hellenic shrubs which knew how to cope with these conditions, and some ubiquitous geraniums, bless them. The geraniums, the zinnias and a blue-flowering hedge provided the only blobs of colour in my garden. The lawn resembled a bomb site without even the verdant relief of weeds. There was a loquat tree, recently transplanted and showing clear signs of disapproval at the enforced change in environment and, finally, four cabbage plants. The latter were about eighteen inches high and had been like that for four months. I watered them now more as an automatic process than in expectation of further progress. My attempts at providing myself with vegetables through the summer had lived up to everybody’s expectations except my own. That meant I had been able to rescue a few salads and a couple of handfuls of this and that to be thrown in the soup. But the real spoils had gone to the hens, the sun and the tortoises.

  Ruthlessness is essential to success in war as in making a million and I just could not face going round the garden decapitating tortoises. I used to take them a couple of hundred yards down the road and hope they would not get back before the lettuce or the beetroot or the marrows ripened. They always did.

  A platoon of yellow skeletons marching over the brow of the hill, who cackled and jeered at me with every passing wind, was all that remained of my maize field.

  I might, in fact, have gotten one corncob to eat out of the beach garden. I calculated it had taken something like 150 buckets of water to produce. It had all been a simple case of not producing enough buckets of water.

  My hopes for a green future were literally canned. The self-injunction never to throw anything away had been well-rewarded a number of times, and more than twenty empty condensed milk tins plus half a dozen that used to hold tomato paste were now flourishing little nursery gardens crowding my broad window ledges, turning my living room into a fortress against the sun and the drought and the weeds.

  If there was a retreat it was into this green redoubt and it could justifiably be called a retirement to a better position. My grassless terrace was now bordered by creeping succulents and other hardy creepers which would, in due course, flow over the rockery with which I was fortifying and coercing the neutral soil. My tactical policy had been forced on me: I reinforced only success. Beyond these unlikely succulent outposts was the barren no-man’s-land conceded to the sun. The outcome of the campaign would not be known until the first rains of winter brought the earth to life. The big question was – would it come to life with weeds or with the wild flowers I had moved in and whose seeds, I hoped, were now lying there dormant?

  But the cycle of productivity did not pass me by. This was tomato time in southern Greece, and I lived in the heart of tomato country. The fields, the roads, the table tops overflowed with plump redness. Aubergines and melons are contemporaries of the tomato and I had only to walk up to the bus stop and back to collect red, purple and golden armfuls of each from every farm I passed. It is a sort of Greek equivalent of keeping up with the Joneses.

  My own tomatoes and aubergines in the garden by the well were now ripening, and if I got there before the scores of hens which Janni, in a misguided moment, had let loose to keep the insects down in his cotton fields, I would soon be able to cut down on those long and dusty walks to the bus stop. The mulberries had come and gone – to be retained briefly in two jars of home-made mulberry jam – but in another week or two, the figs would be ready to eat and before the last fig was picked I would be helping myself to the bunches of grapes that lined my pathway home from practically any direction. The invitation to do so had already been extended. And accep
ted. Then, in September and October, came the wine-pressing. This was all done with the feet around there. I had, of course, made my arrangements to participate in the labour and the fruits thereof, and it may be of some comfort to readers to know that wines from this part of Greece were not exported.

  When I raised my head from the evening table… over the tall heads of my thistles, the green promise of fig and vine, olive and orange, I lifted my eyes to the constant fulfilment of one of the loveliest panoramas of sea, mountain and sky in all Peloponnese – and that means in all the world. It was a feast to assuage any sort of hunger.

  Chapter 11

  Operation Whitewash

  It sounded a pretty good idea at the time. I had dropped in for a chat and a bowl of rice pudding (always available) at the house of Demetrios up the road. A husky stranger in the living room was introduced as Gregorice from Areopolis – a town on the other side of the mountains. “He did all the white-washing of this house and the outbuildings,” my host told me.

  I pricked up my ears. For weeks I had been considering the proposition of making my rain and smoke blackened upstairs house look a little brighter and cleaner, but I had postponed action for the simple reason that I was reluctant to begin a mammoth brushwork task that I would have to finish once I started. It was too binding a commitment for my summer philosophy.

  Also, getting the whitewash from Gythion to my house was a major logistical problem that I did not want to have to resolve.

  “You are a whitewasher?” I inquired politely in my basic Greek.

  Gregorice, I thought, looked a trifle put out. He replied emphatically, but as far as I was concerned, incomprehensibly. After much to-ing and fro-ing of words and gestures, I was made to understand that he was an engineer not a whitewasher, but he was also the best whitewasher in southern Greece.