Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (13 page)

“Medicine is no good for you. You must have X-ray. Immediately.”

“But what's wrong with me?”

“When they have seen the X-rays they will tell you what's wrong.”

He was still laughing merrily when I left the surgery.

A week later, I was in Athens submitting myself to all sorts of indignities at the hands of no fewer than nine doctors and learner doctors at the Red Cross hospital.

The combined diagnosis was that I did not qualify as the emergency that merited the bed that was an
essential preliminary to X-ray examination.

“Come back in two weeks,” they told me.

Two compassionate doctors and a friend got me into hospital a couple of days later on down payment of nearly a hundred pounds for a month's board and lodging in advance.

Going into that hospital was like being put on a highly efficient factory production line from which I emerged three weeks later minus a tumour and a couple of feet of internal plumbing.

There was a potent post-operative pause while the laboratory examined my tumour. When this report took six days instead of the usual two or three I had a good idea what to expect. So when my surgeon came into the ward beaming, I saved him any discomfiture he may have been concealing.

“It's malignant, isn't it?

He nodded and slapped me heartily on the shoulder.

“If you were a Greek, I wouldn't tell you. But I was trained in America and there they seem to think it's better to know the worst.”

So I had cancer.

I felt curiously unshocked, but I was intensely interested in what happened next. It turned out to be a course of medication in which I was to swallow orally this liquid. What I really wanted to know, of course, was what were my chances of living and for how much longer.

“If this medication is effective then the tumour will not recur and I will have no more problems?” I asked.

It was not intended to be a funny question but it set him off laughing gaily.

“If the medication is effective you will be a very lucky man.”

This seemed to be a good opportunity to join in the laughter. When it had subsided I asked whether, if the medication was not effective, I would keep on getting tumours until there was nothing left to cut out. More hilarity.

“Not necessarily. I reckon your chances are about fifty-fifty. Probably a little less.”

“What is the time factor?”

“Every six months,” he said, “is six months in your favour.”

I didn't pursue the implications of this. He was a very busy man and there were some practical things I wanted to know.

“What about diet? Is there anything I shouldn't eat or drink?”

“No, but you should develop the Greek habit of only drinking with food. Otherwise, you can eat, drink and be merry.”

“Do you know the next line?”

He gave me another thump on the back while I waited for his laughter to subside.

“But of course. Tomorrow you can get run over by a bus. It happens all the time.”

For some reason, I emerged from this conversation light-hearted and encouraged. It was only after I had jotted down the conversation that I realised that it wasn't all that funny. In fact, it was bloody sinister. I fully intend to eat, drink and be merry but this final instruction of my doctor before he went off, like everybody else in Greece,
for his month by the sea, was not easy to carry out when it included drinking Fluoro-Uracil. This voracious liquid courses through your veins apparently not only consuming the malignant cells but anything else it finds. Thus you have to have a blood count once a week to see how much of what you have got left. Who was winning this encounter I had no idea. I knew only that when the respective totals dropped I must stop taking the medicine and phone the doctor. I didn't know whether this was something to look forward to or not.

Cancer, I can reveal, can produce significant changes in outlook. No doubt, this differs from person to person and is probably affected by the form of treatment and by the nature of the individual most concerned. In my own case there was a new tendency to withdraw from social contacts and a facility for doing so at any minute without the necessity for explanation. I just got up and walked off.

I found the situation surprisingly undramatic. I was not fearful of the future in any way for a variety of reasons which would not fit into this space or mood and which, no doubt, was simply a product of the wonderful human capacity for rejecting the dreadful and accepting that “it can't happen to me.” It seemed a good enough substitute for other kinds of faith.

What was I going to do about it? I had no intention of altering a plan I had nurtured for more than a year: I would be in Crete looking at donkey's teeth as a preliminary to selecting a working companion for a walk around the perimeter of the island.

I had no idea how long it would take. Obviously, in these new circumstances, the longer the better.

There was a donkey at the bottom of my garden. And it belonged to me.

This was the culmination of a month of more or less monosyllabic bargaining each Saturday morning at the market town where donkeys were paraded for sale alongside cows, mules, pigs, poultry and sheep. The bargaining always began with: “How much for this one?”

The replies varied between 4,000 and 5,000 drachmas. My reaction was always the same two words: “Two thousand.”

Then would begin the slow descent from 5,000 until, finally, the halter rope would be thrust into my hands as though the whole matter had been concluded.

“No,” I would say and walk away.

All this in front of a curious and critical crowd who got to following me from donkey to donkey as though I was an auctioneer. I was waiting for the word to get around the villages that there was a foreigner wanting to buy a donkey. Eventually, a small boy came to my hut one evening to tell me that his father had a donkey for sale cheap. He told me where he lived.

Next morning I was on the road at dawn to walk to the small village of Pitsidia in the mountains just over three miles from Matala where I had been recuperating since leaving a cancer ward. The proceedings when I got there did not last long.

“How much?”

“One thousand five hundred.”

I took two notes out of my back pocket. Fifteen hundred drachmas was all I had on me – or anywhere else for that matter.

Thus, for just over twenty pounds, I had a donkey, a saddle worth seven pounds new, a bridle which cost two pounds and ten yards of good rope for tethering. I would say that both parties were satisfied.

I didn't know how old the donkey was. The owner told me ten years but somebody suggested later that it was nearer thirty. I didn't really mind though. I supposed I ought to have considered its resale value at the end of my journey round Crete.

Before I set off back to Matala I had one last question.

“What's its name?”

The man looked at me in astonishment. It was obviously an idea that had never entered his head.

“Its name?”

“Yes, do you not have a name to call it or when you speak to it?”

I could see that this had not done much to clarify the situation and that Greeks did not normally speak to donkeys. But he rallied bravely.

“Of course. Its name is Gaithuri.”

Gaithuri, you know, is merely the Greek word for a female donkey. Still, it was a nice sounding name and no one could say it was not suitable. And as I had once had a dog named, by me, Dog, I could hardly question his choice.

Whatever its age my donkey had many of the qualities I
had been seeking in my walking companion – sedateness, intimations of character and feminine unpredictability, an unhurried gait and the gift of silence.

The walk to Matala was a useful running-in exercise. Some Greeks led their donkeys, others drove them from the rear. The rear position was better if you were in a hurry, but I was not in a hurry and also I liked to think of myself as a leader – if only of donkeys.

I discovered Gaithuri's speed uphill to be about two miles an hour and downhill about three. Top speed of four miles per hour could occasionally be induced for short bursts of about twenty yards. As all these speeds corresponded roughly with my own intentions, I was well enough content.

Gaithuri was an attractive dark-brown in most places with a whitish stomach. The brown intensified to a black head on which the white nose was almost startling. She had lovely eyes and two of those enormous turn-every-way ears which only donkeys could get away with. Like every other Hellenic donkey she looked about six months pregnant. This was due to the fact that Hellenic donkeys spent most of their lives under a saddle which pushed their stomachs down and out. At least I hoped so.

There was something else I had to discover. Put as succinctly as possible, it was how long I could expect to enjoy the benefits of ownership of a donkey for which I had just paid 1,500 drachmas. I had some reason for
wanting to know.

My latest blood count had shown a quite considerable drop in the number of white cells and there were other unpleasantnesses which I wanted to confirm as the side-effects of this drug, Fluoro-Uracil, I was swallowing and not a worsening of my condition.

This blood counting business which I submitted to every few weeks could be almost as exciting as watching the rise and fall of your share prices on the stock exchange.

I was surprised to learn that there was space enough in one cubic millimetre of healthy blood for between 6,000–8,000 white cells, 150,000–200,000 platelets, and half a dozen other occupants whose names my typewriter could not spell and which were irrelevant apparently to my disease. The danger point – which could be defined perhaps as the point of no return – was 3,000 white cells and 80,000 platelets.

The first blood count I had had the previous July had revealed 6,300 white cells and 140,000 platelets. It had had its ups and downs since then but recently the white cells had dropped to an alarming 4,600 though the platelets had stayed up at the 190,000 mark.

It was at this stage that I decided a consultation with my doctor was in order. A visit to Athens resulted in the inevitable prodding and probing and more than two hours under an X-ray camera (which I would have thought was enough to give anybody cancer). The verdict: Nothing for me to worry about, including the drop in white cells.

The next blood count showed 5,000 white cells and 172,000 platelets. So I had good cause for thinking that I was winning the battles, just as I intended to win the war.

While writing, I could look through my doorway
and see Gaithuri half-submerged in a patch of reeds twenty yards away. She was demolishing them rapidly.

The question of donkey diet had been important to me for that was a barren coast. But I now knew that whenever I came across a patch of weeds it would be a suitable camping spot with ample fodder for my companion.

After some sixty years of frequent movement from place to place during which I had used most kinds of transport including ox wagons, tanks and submarines but excluding zeppelins and spacecraft, there was no doubt in my mind that the best way to travel was the way I was traveling now – on foot leading a donkey.

A donkey is essential as a beast of burden: there is no pleasure in being a beast of burden yourself. No other means of transportation can provide the same opportunity to immerse yourself in the environment through which you are moving or the same facility for stopping and starting whenever and wherever you wish.

Of course, there are problems you are unlikely to encounter with a car, a train or an airplane. The first one you are likely to encounter is how to load an animal when the packsaddle has no girth and has to be balanced exactly by the weight of baggage on either side.

It took me many days to experiment and more than a few kicks from Gaithuri before I thought I had it right with the typewriter and bedroll in the middle and the base of the camp kitchen on one side balancing a rucksack of clothes and books on the other. It took only two days to prove I had it wrong and to send the kitchen back to Matala by bus.

The typewriter and rucksack were now in the middle and equilibrium was maintained by the bedding on one side acting against containers of food and water on the other. Adjustments to the amount of water ensured a perfect balance at all times.

Nobody appreciated the change more than Gaithuri.
She had about thirty pounds less to carry. I was equally happy as I had thirty pounds less to load and unload three times a day and I had been worried that my donkey had too much weight on her back – though I had seen them carrying Greeks who weigh over 250 pounds.

The donkey itself was a problem. It needed food and water like a car needed petrol and oil (and water). On that barren southern coast of Crete with its rare valleys of green it was rather like moving from filling station to filling station. Even the green was deceptive in Crete as most of it was a kind of clover which, surprisingly, nothing seemed to eat. Which accounted for the green. My rate of movement was virtually controlled by the amount of tufted grass – which the donkey liked so much – growing by the roadside.

But a donkey cannot live by grass alone any more than a man can live by bread alone and I often had to scour the overnight villages for hay or barley as well as for a patch of green in which to tether her. It must be as difficult to find a place to park a car in any city centre. But the air in Crete was fresher.

One of my problems was getting lost. I was lost on my first day out and I had been lost a number of times since. When I travelled the byways instead of the highways getting lost there was very easy. The best maps of Crete available to the public were works of the imagination rather than of fact and could wisely be discarded by the traveller on foot.

It was not just a question of coming to a fork or a T-junction without having the foggiest idea or indication where they led, so that you were reduced to instinct and luck. It was often a question of being on a well-surveyed and well-engineered road which led to nowhere.