The Europe That Was Read online

  ‘I want you to shoot me through the leg,’ said Pavlo.

  Mirko Brancovitch understood the urgency of it. But his weapon was not equal to his skill. He had only an old muzzle-loader. Normally he charged it with bird shot. On any game as big as Pavlo Popovnic he would have to use ball.

  He pointed out that what Pavlo and Despina required was difficult. A leg was very small. He might give a flesh wound which wouldn’t keep anybody out of the Army or, worse still, he might smash the knee-cap. Of course, at point-blank range he could make sure, and if he used a light charge of powder he could guarantee a clean break. But what about the powder burns and the wadding? The military examiners could be trusted to find that palpable evidence, for it would be just what they were looking for.

  ‘Besides,’ he had said, ‘why in the devil’s name should I shoot at you?’

  Pavlo looked blank. He himself knew very well the sort of crime which Brancovitch would or would not commit, but he assumed that to the outside world a bandit was unaccountable; if caught, he would be executed in any case, so he was free to take a pot shot at anyone he pleased to amuse himself. It did not occur to Pavlo Popovnic that bandits had to have motives like anybody else.

  Despina thought up a dozen reasons for shooting at her husband, but all of them were improbable and involved quite unforeseeable consequences. Brancovitch sadly refused to have anything to do with the plan. He accepted a bottle of Despina’s plum brandy and gave in return a little bag of wild seeds for the hens. It was very welcome. At home there were few scraps fit for chickens, and of course no grain.

  On their way back Pavlo was silent. His obstinate male mind was more impressed by the technical than the personal difficulties of firing a ball into a leg. He was an experienced shot himself. The death of the family cow had compelled him to sell his gun to buy a heifer.

  He left his family to their thin soup and returned to the bone-setter, though it was now after dark and no time to disturb her. He begged her to tell him if there were not a way to hide powder burns and to make a bullet wound appear as if it had been inflicted from a distance.

  Her memories went as far back into the past as Brancovitch’s today. She knew a trick handed down from the time when the Turkish Janissaries raided the valleys to recruit Christian boys and drove the Serbs up into crags where liberty could be preserved at the price of hunger.

  ‘You will buy two thick loaves,’ she instructed him, ‘of good wheat bread, not our peasant bread. Tie a loaf on each side of the leg and fire through them.’

  Her prescription was obviously sound. Pavlo trusted it as if she had given him an infallible charm. He begged her not to reveal the secret to any of the other families who had husbands or sons called up for the Army. He did not fear that they would give him away. Mutual loyalty among the Serbs was absolute. No, he was alarmed lest they might all play the same trick and consequently all go to prison.

  ‘They are as brave as I,’ he said with a conceit which was national rather than personal.

  ‘But their wives have not the courage of your Despina,’ she answered.

  It always took time—very naturally—to find Mirko Brancovitch. When at last they were able to tell him about the bread, he saw the point and was professionally enthusiastic. He suggested that the loaves should be at least a day old, since new bread might slow up the ball like a sandbag. And, to avoid shattering the bone, he was going to load with only a quarter charge of powder.

  He was far more willing to oblige Pavlo and Despina than before. He explained that he had given his lonely thoughts to their problem. It was in his interest, too, that Pavlo’s leg should be broken so long as it was plain that he had been shooting not at him, but at the police. And it was about time he did, or Danilo might be transferred to some other district.

  Danilo was responsible for enforcing such law as he could over fifty square miles of rock. He and Brancovitch were of the same clan and most reluctant to interfere with each other; but for the sake of higher authority an occasional exchange of shots was essential.

  ‘If you are willing to swear that I fired at Danilo from ambush and he fired back,’ Brancovitch said, ‘there will be no questions afterwards.’

  Yes, he could ensure Danilo’s co-operation and silence. No trouble at all there. The greatest difficulty still lay ahead. You, forty years later, the former bandit would explain, could never suspect it. The greatest difficulty was to get the bread.

  Time was beginning to run short. In three days’ time Pavlo had to report to the depot. The nearest baker was half a day’s journey away, and even he did not bake town bread unless it were specially ordered. Neither Despina nor her neighbours had an oven which would bake loaves of the texture and thickness required.

  Experiments with a little white wheat flour and inadequate fuel were hopeless. They dared not use any substitute. So one of the last precious days and nights of Pavlo and Despina had to be sacrificed while he walked to the town, gave his order to the baker, slept in the open and returned the next day with the loaves.

  It seemed extraordinary that bread should cost so much when at home it cost nothing—nothing, that is, but Pavlo’s indispensable labour and the children’s scrabblings among the rocks to find dry, burnable roots. But all of them agreed that such loaves were a perfection of food, satisfying eye, scent and touch. The sons stroked the crust with little wondering hands.

  The following morning Danilo turned up at the Popovnics’ cottage with his rifle slung on his back. His presence there would be easy to explain to his officer. He was paying a visit to answer Pavlo’s ignorant questions, to see what he was up to and to ensure that he was making no preparations for escape. The bone-setter was already boiling her remedies at the stove, with the splints and bandages under her skirt. It was unlikely that the Law would ever find out from her at what time she had come to attend to the patient. She accounted to no one for her mysterious movements and answered threats with crazy cackles of abuse and curses.

  The children were left at the cottage. Pavlo, Danilo and the two women scrambled uphill to a just cultivable clearing, the size of a small room, at the top of the land. When they were there, Brancovitch detached himself from a cluster of rocks and patted Pavlo reassuringly on the back. Pavlo was pale and nervous. He was like mid-century man being prepared for an operation. It was going to save the future of his family, but it was not pleasant.

  ‘Don’t hurt him, Mirko!’ Despina cried.

  A ridiculous remark. But no doubt surgeons hear it today. And Brancovitch knew as well as they what she meant—that he wasn’t to hurt Pavlo more than he must.

  Now that the moment of their plotting had become reality, Despina’s anxiety was silent and terrible. It had no relation to our modern fears: of a dangerous compound fracture or of septic poisoning. Her medical knowledge was not up to that. In her experience—which in a country of blood feud was considerable—men always recovered from a broken limb though it was never as useful as before. That was why she and Pavlo had chosen a leg rather than an arm. The legs were only for carrying the arms to work.

  No, her anxiety was not for the possible consequences, but a sharing of Pavlo’s pain and distress. Yet she never doubted that it was his duty. She felt no horror at all for such an atrocity. It was the only alternative to disaster, and she would have unhesitatingly mutilated herself if it had been she whom the government wanted to take away.

  Brancovitch insisted that the girl accepted the preparations naturally. She almost sanctified them by her love and simplicity, and the need of her children for food. Under those circumstances nothing in the act was criminal, nothing unclean.

  Pavlo tied the loaves lightly on each side of his shin and stood with that leg advanced. The bandit knelt at a distance of two yards from him, his old muzzle-loader pointing slightly downwards. The trajectory of the ball would correspond to that of a shot aimed at the unsuspecting Danilo from higher up the hillside.

  He fired. Pavlo sat down, biting his knuckles, free for ev
er of military service. Before the smoke of the powder had cleared, Despina had recovered the loaves and sliced out the circles of black and pink.

  ‘For the children,’ she sobbed, as she threw her arms and her long hair about her husband.

  DIONYSUS AND THE PARD

  His thumb was very obviously missing. You can know a man for weeks—if you are interested in his face—without spotting the absence of a finger, but you must miss the thumb of his right hand, especially when he is raising a glass at reasonably frequent intervals. A hand without a thumb is strangely animal; one looks for the missing talon on the under side of the wrist.

  If you saw the back view of Dionysus Angelopoulos in any eastern Mediterranean port, you would at once put him down as an archaeologist or something cast up upon the beach by the Hellenic Travellers’ Club. Judging by the tall, spare figure, slightly stooping, dressed in shaggy and loose-fitting Harris tweed, you expected a mild, pleasing and peering countenance with perhaps a moustache or a little Chelseaish beard; but when he turned round he showed an olive face with thin jowls hanging, like those of an underfed bloodhound, on either side of a blue chin, and melancholy brown eyes of the type that men call empty and women liquid when they are hiding nothing but boredom.

  It was for the sake of professional prestige that Mr Angelopoulos modelled himself upon what he considered an Englishman ought to look like. He was the Near-Eastern agent for a famous English firm whose name is familiar to few women but to all civilized men. He was responsible for shining palaces above and below ground from Alexandria to Ankara. Wherever there were Greek priests and Turkish coffee one was faced sooner or later by his trade-mark (a little below that of his Staffordshire principals):

  THE ALPH

  Dionysus Angelopoulos

  Sanitary Engineer

  He was a man of poetic imagination and had read his ‘Kubla Khan’. He was also a historian.

  ‘Between myself and the fall of the Roman Empire,’ he said when presenting me with his card, ‘there was nothing but indiscipline.’

  We had met on board a tiny Greek passenger ship bound from the Piraeus to Beirut: The cramped quarters and the Odyssean good cheer had swiftly ripened friendship. That is to say, he accepted me as a listener and, when he permitted me to speak, took note of any colloquialisms I might use and added them forthwith to his astonishing vocabulary.

  ‘It is obvious,’ said Mr Angelopoulos, ‘that the ancients tighted themselves with more enthusiasm than we. Frenzy, no? Wine and poetry were the business of Dionysus, no? For Plato it was natural to see godliness in a tighted man. Today we see no godliness. We have changed. It is the fault of the religious. Dear me, what bastards!’

  Considering he had just consumed two bottles of admirable claret made by the Jesuits on the slopes of Lebanon, he was unjust to Christianity. But Angelopoulos was a Wesleyan-Methodist. It was a really original point of Anglicism like the Harris tweeds. He had adapted his sect as well as his appearance to the respectable selling of sanitary earthenware.

  ‘Godliness!’ shouted Angelopoulos, raising the bottle with his right hand and placing an imaginary crown upon his head with his left. ‘Do I tell you how my thumb goes to pot?’

  ‘Not yet. I was going to ask you.’

  ‘All right. You are my friend. At this table with you I am sitting a living example of Hubris and Nemesis. I am proud I lose my thumb. Do you know La Brebis Egarée?’

  ‘I’ve heard of her.’

  There were few travellers on the Syrian shore who had not heard of the Lost Sheep—a pale, rolling Frenchwoman whose habit it was, when she felt specially obscene, to declare in the unctuous voice of a priest:

  ‘Monsieur, je suis une brebis égarée!’

  Since, anyway, she looked like a gross white ewe, the nickname stuck. She was not the type to run mythical cargoes to Buenos Aires. She merely knew everybody. Whether you fell in love with a Kurdish princess in Smyrna or a German Jewess in Jerusalem, she could tell you what your chances were and whom you should approach.

  ‘I tell you, old chappie,’ said Angelopoulos, ‘I thought she was no more of this world. I did not know till that evening where she now abided—hung out, I should say, no?

  ‘The agent Socrates found for her a house in Athens, in the new suburb below Lycabettos. It is the last house in a little street that ends slap up against the cliff. The goings-on cannot be overlooked unless one should hang by his toes from the rocks. Only once was she taken at a loss. A Daphnis and Chloë were in the laurel bushes making love—how do you say that?’

  I told him. He thanked me and, pulling from his pocket an expensive note-book bound in limp leather, made a formal entry in Greek and English.

  ‘They were so happy they went right through the laurels and slid down the rocks into her back garden. A very proper place to find themselves, no?

  ‘The Losted Sheep has a little restaurant upon the roof where the agent Socrates invited me to lunch. He does not pay there, I think. A meal ticket, no? He is a very useful chap. I will give you his card.’

  Mr Angelopoulos searched through a portfolio full of badly printed cards, each of which set forth not only the name and address of its owner but his profession and any title to distinction he might have. He handed me:

  SOCRATES PANCRATIADES

  Agent d’Affaires

  Hypothèques, Locations, Immeubles

  Vins en gros

  Publiciste

  whereupon I understood that if I bought wines, a building lot or a political libel from Socrates Pancratiades I should be quoted a reasonable price and Mr Angelopoulos would get one of the infinitesimal commissions by which the Near East lives and is made glad.

  ‘We were two upon the roof,’ went on Mr Angelopoulos, ‘the agent Socrates and I. The view was okay—the Acropolis, the Theseum, and to the south, Hymettus. Rather! God’s Truth! We were content. And the Losted Sheep did us proud. The eats were top-notch. And we were served by two little Armenians—big-busted angulars you find seeing them dead upon the walls of an Egyptian tomb. Tartlets or Turtle Doves! O estimable dead!

  ‘Attend to me, old chappie. It was Athens in the spring and the Losted Sheep’s brandy was special reserve from the Achaea vineyard. You have seen the Achaea? Well, it is on the hills behind Patras. And there is the Gulf of Corinth at your feet with blue mountains beyond and the triremes skidding into the water at Naupactus. Splosh! No? And Aphrodite casts a veil about the swift ship. At that distance you cannot see oars and foam, but mist you see.’

  ‘Triremes?’ I asked, being a full bottle behind Mr Angelopoulos.

  ‘In the eye of the spirit, old chappie. I will give you a card. Then maybe they will let you buy the special reserve and you shall see triremes, remembering where the grapes grow.

  ‘The agent Socrates was soon tighted. I myself was tighted—but like an English gentleman. Or no. For an English gentleman always wants something. Barbarians! But I love you, my dear.’

  ‘Hellas,’ I said, realizing that this startling declaration was merely an apology, ‘is the mother of all nations.’

  ‘Incontestably all right!’ agreed Mr Angelopoulos. ‘I was content. So, you see, I was not like an English gentleman. I wanted nothing. I was a god looking down upon Athens from the Losted Sheep’s roof.

  ‘She asked me if I would drink more brandy. I did not want more brandy. Then she asked me if I would make a visit to Fifi. I did not want to see Fifi. But the agent Socrates was asleep and the Armenians were asleep, and the Losted Sheep chattered. She did not understand that it was Athens and sunset and I, Dionysus, have a poet’s entrails. I did not want Fifi, but if Fifi were young and would stay naked and quiet upon my knees, she would be better than the talk of the Losted Sheep, no?

  ‘So I said: ‘If your Fifi is beautiful, I will make her a visit. But if she is not beautiful, I will smell your fat, Brebis, while my priests eat you.’ I was a god, you see.

  ‘The Losted Sheep promised me that Fifi was more beautiful than any tail-piece
I ever saw. So I went with her down from the roof and through the rendezvous house into the garden. In the side of Lycabettos was a cave with iron bars across the mouth.

  ‘There is Fifi,’ she said.

  ‘I look. I see damn-all. A hole in the yellow rock and the shadows of the bushes where the Daphnis and Chloë entertained themselves. I do not know what to think. The Losted Sheep was a naughty one. She was maybe keeping a little savage behind the bars or a dame off her head with the bats. And then Fifi stretched herself and came to see who we were. She was a big leopard. Very beautiful, I bet you! The Losted Sheep had chattered, but she had watched me. She knew I did not want human things to worship me.

  ‘Herself she would not approach Fifi. The bars were wide, and Fifi could get her paws through and most of her head. But I, Dionysus, had no fear. I spoke to Fifi. I sat on the sill of the cage and tickled her behind the ears. She liked that. She rubbed herself on the bars and purred. Then she was gone. I could only see her eyes in the darkness at the back of the cave.

  ‘I called to her and she came at me through the air. So long and slender as if a love should fly down from heaven into my embraces. The Losted Sheep shrieked like a losted soul. But I was not afraid. I never thought to be afraid. I was a jolly god. Fifi knew that I would not hurt her. I knew that she would not hurt me. It was mutual confidence as in the sanitary or other business.

  ‘She landed with all four feet together. I pulled her whiskers. She tapped my face with her paw to tell me she would play. So soft. So strong. I have felt nothing like it in my life. I shall never feel anything like it. They were created cats, you will remember, that man might give himself the pleasure of imagining that he caresses the tiger. To caress the tiger herself, that is for a god.

  ‘I stroked her stomach. She purred. I stabbed into the fur my nails, up and down her backbone.’—Mr Angelopoulos held out his thumbless claw, crooking and contracting the fingers.—‘She was in ecstasy. There was a communion between me and Fifi. All she felt, I felt. It tickled me delicately from the point of my fingers to my kidneys. I knew when she had had enough, when her pleasure could not more be endured. It was the same for me. If she had touched me again with her paw, I should have bitten her.