Roumeli (29 page)

He smiled to himself as he resumed work, selecting the tacks and banging them neatly home in an upturned sole. The absurdity of such a distance tickled him:
Anglia
, indeed....A charming man with a hunchback took me under his wing and we headed for the
magazi
. He admitted that it was a pretty village; yes, pretty but wretched: they had to bring earth up here by donkey from the Kotsalos, which flowed along the ravine between Perista and Dorvitza, the next village north. A hopeless region. Nobody wanted these barren hills, so people, long, long ago—
palaia! palaia!
—took refuge here from the Turks. Soil erosion and fire had stripped it bare and reduced the villagers to poverty, emigration, living from hand to mouth, peddling, even beggary....There was a rumour that the place had been prosperous once: look at those mulberry trees! People said they might have been planted long, long ago by Jews who grew rich on silkworms and then vanished, or most of them anyway. There might be a few of their descendants left: what about
names like Rorós, Kagánis and Solomos?
[11]
Otherwise there was nothing to pasture flocks on, not a square inch of soil to grow grain, no heather, even, for bees. A little water there was, thank God; enough for a few potatoes and chick peas, not much else. The tops of some plane trees showed where the path coiled into the valley; and the pale green of young poplars intercepted the slanting light. A few cornel cherry trees flourished and a sprinkling of wild pears and crab-apples. One of the planes and a raft of vine shaded the little space outside the
magazi
. Inside it was wide and cool, sparsely stocked with bales of cloth, wool, horse nails, saws, tinned stuff, coils of rope (always, rather oddly to a Western eye, sold by weight), baskets, open tubs of salted sardines and anchovy, or
ouzo
“loose” in big jars (as opposed to the smart “sealed” kind), slabs of salt cod, and, looped on strings and painted black to keep off rust, except for the edges still bright from the forge, were looped the haftless heads of
skeparnia
, those Biblical, all-purpose adze-like tools with a curved blade for cutting or hacking on one side and a flat surface on the other, which Greeks use as a spade, a hoe, an axe, a hammer, a rough plane, a pruning knife or, in masons' hands, a trowel for slicing and trimming bricks. There were mule bridles and lengths of webbing for girths and a wooden saddle or two.

A sloe-eyed boy, writing in an exercise book, shouted to his mother that a stranger had come—
Mammá! Ena xéno!
—and
went on with his work. She brought me a coffee. I looked through my midday scribbling. After a time the boy said, “What are you reading?”

“You'll never guess.”

“Go on.”

“All right, then.” I read out the boliaric sentence about “looking out for the important policeman.” He laughed.

“
Sovará?
” he asked—“Seriously?”—and came over to have a look: then, after reading a few words, he told two men who were just coming in that I was a foreigner and reading
bóliárika
.

The words acted like Open Sesame on the two newcomers and on the others, including my hunchback mentor, who soon followed them in. Why had I ever thought there would be any difficulty in learning about the old days in the Kravara?
Of course
there had been beggars here, hundreds of them, the best in Greece—not so much here in Perista, one of them said deprecatingly; Dorvitza was the place, the next village along the valley, and Platanos, the one I had just left. Loose, cupping gestures suggested multitude and the long whistles on all sides could be interpreted as admiration or implied rebuke. It was exactly what I had heard in Platanos, except that there, Perista and Dorvitza were the two villages cited: and in Dorvitza, when I went there, Platanos and Perista....And what about Vonorta, Simi, Palaiópyrgi, Aráchova—yet another Aráchova out of the many in Greece—Pevkos, Diasyláki? As they spoke they pointed at the barren ranges all round where, invisible from where we sat, these hamlets were dispersed. And Kastaniá, Houmouri, Perdikóvis, Neochori, Ayia Triada, Elevtheriani, Kositza, Terpitza, Artótiva, Ternos, Lobótina, Stránoma, Klépa, Pokistá? These were the nests from which the Kravarites had set out on their travels “in the old days.” There was something in their voices of the affectionate homesickness with which people in England speak of lamplighters, muffin-men, horse buses and
German bands, and a shade of the rue that accompanies the remembrance of past heroes. They had been
tou diavólou i kaltza
, the Devil's sock: all the epithets suggesting quick wits were lavished on them—ownership of four eyes, the ability to fly and to sleep with open lids, the dexterity to horseshoe flies and lice. And the gift of the gab! (Perista, I learnt afterwards, was the most famous of them all for eloquence and, as it were, the knack of talking the hind leg off a donkey and replacing it with a wooden one without either the animal or its owner realizing that anything was wrong.)

Villages specialized in different devices. Vagrants from Ternos were adept at herbalism—not really adept, they quickly explained—but at pretending to be: quacks in fact. “I wouldn't like to try their remedies,” one of the company said. “Nor would I,” added another, “but I'd rather swallow their muck than consult the eye specialists from Dermati! If you're blind, your eyes drop out and if you can see, they blind you.” Ternos, Kambia and Karva lived entirely by rascality, it seemed: when someone from these places came to a village, it was no good locking the doors and the windows: they'd be down the chimneys in the night; and next day, where are your trousers? There were dealers in trinkets and counterfeit gold who spirited rings off people's fingers to examine them and then replaced them with gilt brass. Others, in the early days of photography, wandered about with empty boxes on tripods; after making passes with voluminous black cloths and resounding clicks, they left their customers with squares of black celluloid which had to be kept in a dark cupboard for a week before the picture appeared; by which time...

Others dealt in sacred books “blessed by the Oecumenical Patriarch,” holy relics, bits of the true cross from Jerusalem, incense from Mt. Ararat....But all of these, as far as I could gather, were elaborations of the basic local calling. The true Kravarite vocation was straight mendicancy; but mendicancy
elaborated by many ruses: feigned blindness, madness and epileptic fits, and, above all, the semblance of lameness, loss of limb, and malformation. Some would be hunchbacks. (“Not real ones, like me!” my earlier mentor said.) Others contorted their arms, turning them, as it were, inside out with a tangle of suppliant fingers at the end. Some even pretended to have lost both legs, or, at least, the use of them. They strode cheerfully whistling along the road until a village came in sight; then out of their bags came little trolleys on which they settled and then punted themselves along the main street with their hands to take up their stations at the likeliest points. Rolling back their eyes till only the whites showed and contorting themselves into postures that made them quite unrecognizable from the swagmen of the highways which they had been a few moments before, they waited with their brass bowls for the first musical tinkle of a coin. Their trollies were miniature wooden horses for the conquest of Troy after Troy.

These disguises, the old ones said, achieved a perfection which was not learnt overnight. A few villages were the headquarters of specialists who trained promising boys in all the arts they needed for their careers. They were mountain academies of begging in which the classes,
mutatis mutandis
, must have resembled Fagin's school for young gentlemen. When they had no more to learn, they set out on their travels, paying the fees retrospectively from the takings of their maiden journeys.

I knew about these real or fictitious classes: it is one of the fragments of rumour which anybody who knows anything about the Kravara has heard; and I had been waiting to ask if there was anything in it. There is an associated rumour, widely bandied about and mentioned in Karkavitza's novel, about which I longed, but did not dare, to ask. I managed it in the end: Was there any foundation for the report that, in the bad old days, parents—or others—would sometimes distort the limbs of children when they were very young, in order to help
them in their foredestined careers? There was a pause. They had all heard of it, they said, but there was, as far as they knew, no foundation for the rumour. Perhaps, one old man said, some wicked parents long, long ago might have done such a deed—after all, there were bad folk everywhere!—but if it had ever happened it must have been a single case. Nothing of the kind had ever been heard of in his day and he was a very old man: nor in his parents' or grandparents' time, which took one back to the days of
Turkokratía
, long before the War of Independence. Everyone agreed, and their tone and their openness about every other detail of old Kravarite life carried conviction.

The old man asked where I had heard such tales. I said, in the Great Greek Encyclopaedia. “Under what?” the boy asked; he had been listening to the conversation and occasionally joining in. I said, “Under Kravara.” He went to a cupboard behind the counter and there, to my astonishment, lying on their sides, pile on pile, were the huge quarto volumes of the
Megáli Elleniki Enkyklopaídia
.
[12]
He lifted out the appropriate volume—
Kosmologia—Leptokaryon
—and lugged it to his table. “Here we are,” he said, “Kravara” and read the paragraph out loud, dealing with the fairly elaborate
katharevousa
of the dictionary—he went to school at the Gymnasium in Navpaktos—with impressive ease. “Some of the inhabitants,” he read “in accordance with old custom, twisted their arms and legs at a youthful age or feigned blindness with intent to deceive as they wandered about the towns of Greece and, frequently, of foreign countries....
Kravarite
: derogatory name for an untruthful person, a feigner, charlatan, tramp, deceiver or beggar.”

He shut the book with the word “
Keratádes!
The Horn-wearers! They oughtn't to have written that! Especially as it's not true!” I wished now I hadn't brought the subject up. “Eh!” somebody said, “the chap who wrote it was probably jaundiced. Perhaps he'd been boliarized by someone from the Kravara and wanted to get his own back!” The awkward moment dissolved in laughter.

They were surprised and incredulous when I told them that though tramps and beggars may have dwindled to a small number in Greece, there were still plenty in Europe. They found it hard to credit that they were a common sight in a bourgeois and orderly place like England, and even in the heart of London. It was emigration to America which had changed the Kravara, they said. Inhabitants sailed away by the thousand. The villages remained nearly as poor, but an artificial economy kept them going: all the Kravarites in the United States sent money back to their families. Cash for the first journey was often collected by the old means. The brief expedient of begging had led now and then to substantial fortunes. Look at..., an old ex-boliar from Vonorta, who now owned three blocks in Larissa! Kravarites in Rumania grew rich as agents and rent-collectors for landowners; a calling in which they earned a reputation for ruthlessness....Many of the churches towering like cathedrals above the humble villages were founded on alms given twice over.

“That was the extraordinary thing,” an old man said. “They would be up to a thousand and one dodges on the road. God knows what!” He laughed. “Never ask! But at home these old scoundrels, our ancestors, were pillars of rectitude, dutiful sons, faithful husbands, stern fathers, pious and Godfearing men, fierce patriots and model citizens.”

The Kravara abounds in talent. Roumeli has always furnished some of Greece's best soldiers, and the Kravara has not lagged behind. “We've turned out countless generals,” the old man continued urgently, “and at this very moment there are
four on the general staff. Archbishops, too, as you know; professors, teachers, lawyers—that's where the gift of the gab comes in!—judges, administrators, governors....”

I suddenly remembered that a friend of mine, a Nomarch—a regional prefect with enormous powers—came from exactly here. When I first knew him his little kingdom included part of the Aegean archipelago. He was a small, dark dynamo, a dashing administrator, and a quick and cogent speaker. Compelling language streamed out of him, all obstacles dissolved at his approach. The glint in the eyes round the table suddenly became familiar by association.

Were there still any practising boliars? There was a laugh. “Not officially. Only a few itinerant peddlers and photographers; if a Kravarite peddler ever tries to sell you anything, don't buy! it's bound to be trash! And beware of their watches: they tick for a day and then stop for ever. The photographers are all right. They have to be, nowadays....”
[13]

Shadows heaped up in the gorge below the window. Mt. Ardini towered at the end of it. Is it the same—for so many villages and rivers and mountains have two names or more—as Mt. Oxya? Tall triangles ascended and the evening sun struck their western edges; the rest was invaded by an icy blue that faded to grey as it grew darker. Through the grim chaos beyond lay the route along which the old ones had set out: two days' march through the pathless Eurytanian wilderness to Karpenisi. At Mt. Tymphrestos they turned east to Lamia where they took the old road north to the Balkans and Central Europe....

A tinkle from the mountains told of a small flock homing
and the glimmer of a fire, unsuspected by day, indicated a fold. We seemed lost in a hinterland of unbelievable remoteness. The vanishing of the daylight sent a tremor of misgiving through the ravines and touched us briefly with something akin to a child's fear of the dark. Conversation languished under the spell, reviving as the petrol lamp was lit. It was time to set off to the second-lieutenant's.