Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (10 page)

Once again, I looked round for a suitable weapon, but goat lovers will be happy to know that the goat became a frequent and delightful visitor. I did wish, however, that he was a nanny goat. I was getting a bit tired of condensed milk.

I had had a basinful of this. In fact, a basinful about every hour. That was as long as it took to fill one if I put it outside the front door. The rains had come – and I had seldom seen so much of it all at one time. Neither had the Greeks. They had paused from mopping up their cellars and kitchens to tell me that they could never remember so much rain.

After living alongside a dry riverbed for six months, it was startling to wake up in the morning alongside a waterfall. That's what it sounded like, but closer inspection revealed that the rumble and thunder was caused by a raging torrent hurtling over the cobbles and rocks of the road at the bottom of my garden. The river had burst its banks along most of its length and not only transformed the road but made a moving lake of Janni's cotton fields.

The river lay between me and the well which supplied me with drinking water. The last time I had been able to get there was two days before, when I filled my bucket and watering can with a normal day's requirements for humans, animals and plants. Now it was a case of water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink. But I had not yet reached the ancient mariner's desperation.

A couple of weeks before, I had rolled two empty oil drums up the drive and placed them carefully to catch the run-off from the roof. The resultant din on the first night
of rain brought me leaping out of bed with torch in one hand and African club in the other, wondering if the guerrilla bandits had returned to Greece to oust the National Government.

Now my fortuitous foresight was paying quick dividends in tea and coffee and shaving water. There was a slight flavour of diesel oil, but this could be an acquired taste and was probably better than mud.

Sitting in my living room, if I listened carefully, I could hear under the noise of rain and thunder and rushing water, a faint trickle in the kitchen. Or, rather, two faint trickles. The rocks into which the hut was set had sprung two leaks and I now had a twin spring of crystal water emerging from the kitchen wall and spreading over the floor.

I was giving a good deal of thought to this problem which I would have welcomed if I could have felt sure that the springs would continue to flow through the summer. I concluded that I must hack a channel across the concrete floor to lead the water under the door.

I lifted up my eyes and the blue bay through my windows had been replaced by a brown and shifting desert beyond which yesterday's sea was seen only as a dim, dark line. Half the Gulf of Laconia appeared to be full of the top-soil brought down by every flooded river in the area. What was very clear to me was that if the rain went on much longer it was going to be easier for Janni to grow cotton on the beach than in his fields.

But there came Leila, doing a powerful breast-stroke across my front terrace. Leila had a farm on top of the mountain and a field of lucerne (a clover-like plant used for grazing) down by the river. She was a widow and every summer she moved down with her ancient
mother, five cows, two sheep, one donkey, ten hens, one pig, and three daughters to a reed hut they had built for themselves in the lucerne.

Yesterday they had fled back up the mountain as the waters rose about them with all the livestock they could carry, drive or drag. They had just moved in time. I could see their hut from my window. What I should say is that I could just see the top of their hut from my window. The rest was under water.

Leila told me she got everything away except the furniture and the pig. The furniture was not as important as the animals and they could not catch the pig.

It was the gladiolus that finally did it. I had nursed it through drought, protected it from animals and unseeing boots, and guarded it from fire (when I covered it with a wet bucket and a wet sack).

It was the sole survivor of three bulbs I had bought in Sparta. One had died of thirst and the other, ill-placed perhaps, had been trodden into shapelessness by a visitor's tethered donkey. Unhappily, it did not live to benefit from the manure.

All of a sudden, one morning, the first petals gleamed like pink windows in a distant green tower. I felt almost as triumphant as a family doctor whose farmhouse patient had produced quintuplets. There were nine of mine. At the end of the next day, I came back from shopping in Gythion to find that each petal had been nibbled off and it was as though all the lights had been turned off in that green tower. I knew the culprits only too well.

They had pecked my geraniums to skeletal supplicants and had started on the chrysanthemums whenever my back was turned, and they had even taken passing nips from the upturned green fingers of the succulents I had persuaded to flourish, almost unwatered, on the terrace edge.

The gladiolus was the last peck on the bushel that broke this camel's heart. I went down to the hut in the lucerne field.

“Leila,” I said, not even bothering to go through the prolonged formula of greeting. “Do you want two hens and two cockerels? Let Demetria and Maria come back with me now and take them away.”

She looked surprised and doubtful.

“There will be nothing to pay,” I assured her. “But I would like one of the cockerels for the oven when it is fat enough to eat.”

That was the end of my poultry keeping. The occasional egg no longer compensated me for the loss of a garden.

We had been together for quite a long time. Almost since the beginning. Nine of them had been born there and seven of them had died there – prematurely.

They had had more than their fair share of my vegetable garden; I was not going to let them have my flower garden.

I did not miss them except occasionally the one-eyed chick which had been more or less brought up in the kitchen. But it refused to be house-trained and, well, she was getting to be a big girl.

A week or so without poultry proved that it was a wise decision.

The geraniums were putting forth profuse green hands of thanksgiving, the chrysanthemums were shiny with buttons near to bursting point, forgotten nasturtiums were daring to put their heads above ground again and the succulents, though jagged, were full of juice and raring to go.

There was another reason for it being a wise decision. Every animal that I attached to myself and which got attached to me was an obligation. They had to be fed and
watered and cared for.

Anybody who is in search of freedom from responsibility, even of liberty, cannot achieve it completely with these animal associations. You cannot, in response to sudden impulse, ride or walk away for a week, or forever.

I couldn't do it, for instance, because – though I no longer had poultry – I still had Dog and Elsa, the cat. I didn't want to leave either. That was the trouble.

It was not only that they were essential to my sedentary establishment there; we were three devoted friends.

Exactly a year had passed since I had walked out on the life I had been living for over fifty years and began what, for brevity's sake, I would call my self-imposed exile on a remote peninsula in Greece.

The end of the first year is always a convenient time for the first summing up. It meant in practical terms that I had lived through all the seasons with all the year's vagaries and that I had done it on my income of ten pounds a month. There was, therefore, no reason why I could not go on doing it indefinitely.

That, of course, was an overstatement. Nothing can be continued indefinitely. We are not immortal and I realised that I could be defeated (temporarily) by prolonged illness or injury. But they did not enter my contemplation. Occasionally I paused to think what would happen if I developed a sudden acute appendicitis, or broke both legs, or got bitten by a deadly snake.

As a matter of fact, I'd got a pretty good idea what would happen. I could lie there for anything up to two weeks before anybody knew there was anything wrong with me, and possibly another two weeks before anybody discovered there was a corpse in the place. Picking up the telephone was out. The nearest one was two miles away. Such thoughts did not enter my contemplation.

As I looked around, inside and outside my upstairs house, there was a not inconsiderable sense of achievement. The hut that Janni had led me to a year before through waist-deep thistles and nettles was knee-deep
in sheep's dung and the left-behinds of years of passing gypsies and shepherds.

The walls were blackened by the smoke of many fires, which had struggled vainly to escape from close-shuttered windows, and the thickness of the walls was a hollow sham through which every rainstorm sent slow cascades of water that ended up in pools on the bedroom and kitchen floors.

Now the hut was entitled to be called a house. It still had primitive characteristics that gave it a primitive charm. I was working hard on a way to divert the charm of the spring which periodically erupted through the kitchen wall.

There was not a single mod con in the place. But it was clean and well furnished (well, it was furnished) in spite of the absence of carpeting. Goodness knew what hordes of insects carpeting would have provided shelter for; the bare concrete was an entomological museum.

Outside there was now a lawn on the terrace. The garden had been coming on fine until a night of exceptional frost (the worst in living memory) killed off most of the alien plants. I had one of the loveliest views in the world and it was my home.

During the past year I had acquired many skills that I never had before and never thought to have.

I could make my own bread and marmalade and tomato sauce, and I could even turn out a
maquereau espagnol
; I could identify dozens of weeds and wild plants that were edible and I had learned the various ways of cooking them; I could hoe and pick cotton, dry
figs, press wine with my feet, pick and preserve olives; I did my own laundry and though I had not yet darned a hole in my sock, that very week I had sewn a patch over a hole in my trousers; I could mix cement, build a rockery, and make a table and sideboard and a bookcase.

It had not always been easy, and trial had often resulted in error. But in spite of the most elementary mistakes, it had never been as difficult as I thought it would be. It never was. The rewards had always outmatched the disappointments and frustrations, so that at the end of that year I knew myself to be a wiser and better-equipped man in every respect than when I started it.

What about those other things I had been seeking? Well, I am not going to lay my soul bare for public inspection. I can say that I did not find freedom, nor independence, nor detachment, and I am not sure for those who seek them this is not an infinite search. They must simply go on searching. But I found other things that I was not exactly looking for.

In that environment I lived in intimate contact with nature. To me there was no doubt at all that the closer you were to nature the closer you were to God. It was both a communion and a conflict.

I spent a good deal of that first year in communion and conflict and emerged believing that I knew God better than ever before. It was, I supposed, a question of Truth. The search for Truth is mankind's Holy Grail. It is the inspiration of all research and enquiry. Christianity and most of the great religions reconcile themselves to the impossibility of this quest by declaring God is Truth. That He is the beginning and is the end.

God is the Creator. That is one truth. But the more
profound truth lies at the end, and where is the probe that can go into time-to-come?

Religion provides an answer which it asks its adherents to accept blindly.

But there was no need for me to go to church. Here, I worshipped God in every wondrous dawn and sunset, in every miracle of burgeoning flower and fruit.

But I also saw Him daily in the indiscriminate profusion and impersonality of His ways and in the terrifying ruthlessness of the balance, with which His natural order was maintained. That was God in action.

It was the time of year at which I was due to be haunted. They all told me that around there. It had been at the end of one January several years before that a dispute over a land boundary had led to a meeting on the square of brown, clear soil below my house where the pass over the mountain cascaded on to the road to Ageranos.

There had been three men there. A father and son together and the son of the owner of the land in dispute. Ten minutes after the first angry words opened the discussion there had been nobody there – just a corpse with seven oozing knife wounds draining away unnecessarily.

No need for any detective work. Everybody had known who had done it and why it had been done. Father and son had been arrested, convicted and sentenced: father to life imprisonment, son to a term which had expired a year or two before. He would never return to the farm which his mother and sister struggled to keep in production. He knew without any doubt that the same instrument of death awaited him in the hands of the murdered boy's avengers.

But the murdered boy – and this was what they all told me – returned every year at that time to see if the debt of his blood had been repaid. All I could say was that I fervently hoped he did not call on me to find out. I couldn't speak the language.

It was neither an exceptional story nor event in those parts. The Mani, on the edge of which I lived, had only
comparatively recently emerged from savage years of blood feuds. Each village had its towered houses built ever higher and higher to give the household the opportunity of shooting down upon its neighbour. And the rock of those great bleached mountains where nothing grew was fertile enough in the production of legend and superstition. The inhabitants, too, seemed to live very close in their thoughts to the primitive. They were all devout members of the Greek Orthodox Church – a demanding religion – and believed passionately in the numerous saints after whom every Greek child, male and female, was named. But one suspected they believed just as strongly in the opposing forces of darkness which roamed those barren ranges and from which they looked to their saints to protect them.