Gatherers and Hunters Page 9

  ‘Instinct must be very strong’, I agreed, ‘it must carry through generations’ I said. ‘And has the experiment been a success?’

  ‘We wait. And we will see.’ he said, ‘But I have no doubts about it myself. These forests have regenerated, after the war. Beech, Linden, Oak. Our wild creatures, also, they will revert to their real natures.’

  We had moved, perhaps, into the cloud shadow by now. Despite the bright afternoon, there was a sense of darkness. Perhaps the increasingly steep cliffs that began to overhang the track had the effect of making everything seem more and more closed in. Darkness must be terrible here.

  But we came to a clearing, eventually. Beyond was a flat lake, where the source of the Sava flowed in. It was a parkland, with rustic tables and benches. There were a few other cars and a group of white haired men and women were ­clambering down a precipitous track through the off-white rocks. They helped each other down.

  ‘We will be the last visitors this afternoon. I timed it so. When we leave here we will head for the eating place and the mushrooms. We will arrive there just at dusk, and we will have our rare feast of baby-toe mushrooms.’

  ‘That name, for an Australian, is pretty funny. I wonder what we would call these mushrooms if we had them growing in Australia?’

  ‘You do not have these. Nobody has these. These are unique. Thus they are very special. As you will see. As you will taste. I promise you.’

  His smile was contagious, even though its very crookedness gave his uneven teeth an extra prominence. But we have been pampered by the cosmetic uniformity of orthodontists and the like. In the context of Andor’s well cut jacket and his neat white shirt with woollen tie, the quality of his smile enhanced the almost rustic fervour of his manner. I imagined woodcutters and forest dwellers as his particular ancestors. His Ljubljana sophistication – the excellent English, the very new car – only made this underlying rough-and-readyness more appealing. I was reminded, for an instant, of an uncle who lived at the Glasshouse Mountains. Not my uncle’s unfortunate accident with the rifle, but something of his unpretentious grin, which my first wife found threatening but which was really only the fact, which he relished, of his uneven teeth. He called that smile ‘his party trick’.

  Andor held me back, until the elderly ones had fully descended and the narrow climb up into the rocks was clear. As we waited I gazed idly at the nearby wooden bench. Two upturned soft drink cans were littered there, and I mentally tut-tutted and thought how Western sins were seeping even into this place. Half a dozen European wasps buzzed in and out of the zip-openings. They seemed to be getting increasingly erratic in their activity, as if they were already drunk – at the aggressive stage. Andor caught my eye. ‘Visitors! My niece, my beautiful niece, picked up one of these American cans and raised it to her face. She was bitten in the throat. Died. She died. She died in agony.’

  I gasped and expressed condolences.

  ‘It is nothing. That is life. But these American cans, they are to blame. They are natural temptations for the wasps and wasps do sting. Like the lynxes, they have their innate natures and nothing will alter that. It is the carelessness of man that I detest. Leaving these American cans like traps and of course the young children do not yet know, how can they know? My niece died in agony. She was very beautiful. I often had her at my place, I bathed her and put her to bed with songs and stories when her mother went off to … to her work engagements.’

  ‘She must have been devastated.’

  He looked at me. ‘You will meet her. What she needs is a mate, someone to sire another child on her. Then she will forget Marissa.’

  I understood there were complications. I thought I would welcome the extra company, though I hoped this awful incident would not be raised when we did meet. I was on holiday. Grieving parents were not on my agenda.

  ‘Come,’ And we set off on the hike among great pallid boulders.

  It was a track that was more treacherous than I had expected. Seeing those aged people returning, all of them looking enthusiastic and only a little puffed, had tricked me. Perhaps they were all members of a hiking club and practiced their paces three times a week. Perhaps they made this trek to the source of the Sava three times every week. It was something about the place: obsessive, almost, and yet strangely peopled, populated with a sense of endless footsteps that had flattened out the path over the bruising stones, generations of pilgrims making their journey to this great Source, far back into pre-Christian times. It had the feel of a place of earth worship and dark primitive rites.

  Andor was way ahead of me. Peremptorily he called me on. I was surprised at how easily I became puffed. I was not all that much out of condition, surely? He waited on a narrow wooden bridge over a small abyss and I could imagine him tapping his bony fingers against the handle of the knife, while he smiled me on.

  ‘Past here. Around the corner, we come to the waterfall that is the source’ he said triumphantly. I could already hear the noise of water belting down, and even caught a first glimpse then of misty spume, half way up the cliff-face. When I held my hand to the rough wooden rail of the bridge I could feel the vibration of it.

  ‘This is a very old and sacred place. You must understand that. And you must throw into the water something of your own, something that has value for you. A coin perhaps.’

  ‘But won’t that cause litter? There must be generations of litter there, if that is the custom?’

  ‘That is the custom, and who are we to deny these old rituals?’ He said. But I sensed in his irony a greater reverence. I knew I would not dare to disobey his command.

  I fumbled in my pocket.

  ‘No. Wait,’ and his hand again barred my own. ‘You must see the waterfall that is the source,’ he said, and the rhythms of his voice repeating the phrase again, sounded to me like some ancient invocation, or the start of some ancient invo­cation. I wondered how it sounded in his native tongue?

  Holding my shoulder, he guided me along the track and around the last ledge and corner. The sight of the waterfall that was the source took my breath away.

  It was much higher, larger, more imperious than I had imagined. When I had envisaged a spring emerging from the cliff, it had been a trickle, an almost mystical and ­precious symbolic flow such as I had once seen, in a remarkably vaginal orifice in the Olgas. This source was prodigious. If this was some ancient European manifestation of the Earth Mother, then it was like a monstrous eternal breaking of the placental waters, not a sexual flow of heightened voluptuousness.

  The image that shot through my mind, in fact, was of a savage and primitive male power, the god pissing upon us and laughing; when the floods came, they would be calamitous. And that was the edict. It was a mixture of both male and female images, this place. Both of them bespoke power, not softness. Perhaps it was a merged sexuality I was metamorphosing at that instant: Whatever it was, there was something of ruthlessness in it.

  ‘Throw your token. Now. Throw it’. It was a command. Some innate reluctance in me made me avoid reaching for the fob pocket where my coins were. Perhaps it was something in Andor, his peremptory tone, that made me instinctively seek out an alternative. I reached into my shirt pocket and tugged out a new ballpoint pen that had been given to me in Belgrade. I threw it as far as I could into the white water. It seemed hardly to reach the edges of the turmoil.

  Andor looked at me sternly. ‘That was not good’ he said. ‘You have discarded something. You must offer something you value. Money, that is always of value. Throw some money this time. Otherwise, you will be doomed to ill luck, to misfortune’. And he looked so serious I had to obey him, even though I tried to explain, in the car, later, that the gift ballpoint had indeed been special, and I had valued it. My offering of that gift was an offering of a special friendship, even though it had been one of those holiday things in a foreign city where two strangers became strangely intimate and sharing – bodies, language, these things do bind us.

  ‘You were throwing away
a little forgotten entertainment, then,’ Andor said firmly. ‘I think you were destroying ­evidence.’

  I spluttered at that, but was not brave enough to deny it. Simply, it had seemed wonderfully symbolic at the time, in the moment. Money, money was nothing of value, why did he insist on that? He insisted on that.

  Clambering back from the water, earlier, I was conscious of Andor hovering behind me. I think I would have preferred him striding ahead, like an impatient, eager gun-dog. There had been long slants of diagonal sunlight slashing through the tall slender trunks of trees, which struggled up as high as they could to reach the air at the top of the crevasse-like entry to the place of the source. Although he did not say it, I could almost hear him muttering behind me, like a chant, ‘Soon be dark. Soon be dark. Soon be dark.’ I had turned back to him, once, at a bend in the little track where there were fewer boulders, and had said, ‘Surely it will soon be dark?’

  He had not replied. The slanting blade of light had faded by then, and I noticed that his features were more swarthy than I had initially registered. It was as if he felt he had to urge me on, down that last slope. The waters of the lake, dark now as cellar floors, looked more turbulent.

  Arrived at the car, he clambered in first. Previously he had always made much display of opening the passenger door for me. His first spoken words, then, had been, ‘I am disappointed.’ I understood how the sentence continued in his mind: ‘in you’. I found myself growing defensive and spiky. I almost said out loud, ‘Those mushrooms had better be good’.

  But once the car was purring again, and we moved out into more open fields and meadows, with their soft green glow in the ebbing light, I persuaded myself that I had been rather imagining it all. It was as if the gothic atmosphere of the place, and all the intimations of old rituals and superstitions had overcoloured my too willing mind. Thank goodness there had been no overhanging castle in that cliffy gulley, with a portcullis and a miasma of carrion-eating birds. But it had been a place that brooded on its own isolation, I realised.

  As if guessing my thoughts, Andor said, ‘You should see, also, the castle at Lake Bled, and the island chapel in the lake, it is very famous, very beautiful. It is, as you say it, picture-postcard. Not like Slap Savica where it fills the waters of Lake Bohin.’

  Out in these open fields, with the woodland retreating into dark shadows in almost orderly patterns, it was already growing hard to imagine ancient times of terrible splendour or those bloodthirsty battles so notorious in this part of the world. To Australian visitors, Bulgaria and Slovenia seem to inherit the same ghosts and folk tales. Vlad with his armies of impaled prisoners in serried rows; whole villages put to the scimitar in revenge for a single slight; populations razed and replaced. Old conflicts still seemed close to the surface here, I realised. And I made a mental resolve not to raise, even casually, any topic that might lead to an eruption of political claims or counter-claims. I had enjoyed Belgrade. Untactful to mention that now.

  Finally Andor broke his sulks. He became the generous host again. ‘This eating house we drive to,’ he commenced, ‘it is our best kept secret. It is naturally well known to the cognoscenti, but otherwise you are about to enter a purely Slovenian retreat of the senses: food as you will never have tasted it before; music, there will be music; servants in costumes of the area; and you will meet my sister, the one I have told you about, the one whose daughter, that beautiful child, is dead from the sting of a wasp in one of those American drink cans. But tonight you will share with me the delights of our own most intimate pleasures.’ He laughed then, and it is true, I felt a ripple in my groin and allowed myself just a small and momentary indulgence, but put it aside as a fanciful response to an unintended double-entendre.

  Language plays tricks with all of us, and when the language is not your own, it is so easy to commit even unpardonable errors. Only the week before, in that Belgrade hotel dining room, I had used a bit of my restaurant Italian to say ‘Mezzo, mezzo’ as the waiter too willingly filled my wide coffee cup. He had turned to me and whispered, in flawless English, ‘Professor, you must be careful of your pronunciation, in my language you have just said to me ‘shit, shit’.’

  We suddenly turned into a small grassy lane, unmarked, untended. It was almost as if Andor himself nearly overshot the turn off. We bumped along this dim track for perhaps half a mile, then arrived within sight of a nest of lights. Their yellow warmth made me realise how completely the darkness had overtaken us in these last minutes. In the shadow of hedges and softly indistinct rolling hills, they looked ­welcoming and almost festive. The perfect hideaway.

  As we drew up to the thatched portal, the heavy front door was opened and the sound of jolly dance music splashed around us, like the light from the elaborate candle-lit torch raised by the Majordomo (he couldn’t be called anything less, I realised) as he moved out with a stately pace and a marvellous gold-buttoned uniform to usher us inside. This was hardly a farmhouse hideaway, I realised. It was the full opera.

  We were ushered to a round wooden table at one side of the low ceilinged room, to a reserved table set for four places. It seemed crowded, but I was too fascinated by the whole scene to register with much attention the faces and attitudes of the others around us, engrossed in their own business. The room was large, that ceiling weighed down on us, but the decorations on the walls and several of the pillars that sustained the black wooden ceiling, were certainly artful. If I were cynical, I would call them the sort of imitation-rustic one might find in a Canada-Pacific hotel in Saskatchewan or Regina: farm implements, hoes, rakes, long scythes, fetishes made of straw, the usual worry beads made from garlic in strings, the tusks and antlers of long dead wild animals; taxidermised stoats, foxes, and in pride of place right above our table, a moth-eaten lynx. Andor explained to me that this was the last wild lynx shot in the area, and whoever was honoured with our table beneath its overview was indeed the night’s special guest. No, he had not arranged this himself, he was a humble citizen in Ljubljana, he did not have such august connections. He congratulated me.

  ‘What are the duties of a special guest, then?’ I wondered. We were seated, but the others – his sister, no doubt, and her friend doubtless – had not yet turned up.

  ‘Perhaps it will be surprise. Perhaps you will be offered the most choice mushrooms, the special ones,’ Andor whispered across the woven linen. ‘Perhaps the singers will ask you to name a special song.’ His crooked teeth, in the candlelight gleamed almost green at that moment. ‘Perhaps, who knows, my friend, you will be asked, as a visitor from a distant land, to perform something from your own culture. That would be a gesture, indeed, intended to honour a special guest. You see,’ he added, ‘in Slovenia we offer goodwill to our special visitors.’

  This was the moment I had been dreading. Before leaving Australia I had been instructed by various knowledgeable friends that if I travelled to these distant places bound deeply into their own languages and their own cultures, I would have to be prepared to offer, at the right occasion, some ‘Australian national song’, some ‘Australian national joke’ or ‘national recipe’. I had dutifully practised ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘Moreton Bay’ (that was my trump card), and had even memorised a few drought jokes (water – or its absence – is always a matter of interest in countries subject to drought). I could, at a pinch, describe the gourmet delights of mud crab. But to date I had not been asked to put any of this ­patriotic duty to the test.

  I looked around me. I realised just how inadequate had been my rehearsals and preparations, in the comfortable safety of my bedroom at home. I panicked at the thought of remembering all the words, all the stanzas. Or the punch line of the joke, which seemed suddenly to be either incomprehensible or impossible to translate. I assumed Andor had the verbal ability, but would he have the skills to evoke, in Slovenian, the nuances? Sweat began to break out on my brow, sticking my hair down. My armpits became suddenly clammy.

  It was at this moment that I also started to
realise that the rustic decorations were not all entirely guileless. Among the implements of the field were also implements clearly intended for other purposes: branding irons, a mace, several enormous swords and even what looked uncannily like leg-irons. And wasn’t that, over in the far corner, an iron lady? On the personal rack of my own dread of public exposure, at some unnamed but inevitable moment, my imagination took unhappy flight. This was no mere farmhouse; it would have cellars, and they would be airless and the home of skeletons.

  Andor was grinning still. ‘As special guest, perhaps you will merely be asked to dance for us. In our country, we love the dancing.’ He clapped his hands politely to the rhythm of the singers at the far end of the room. Their music had none of the complexities of folk music I had heard earlier, in wild but rigorous five-beat, seven-beat patterns. This music, I started to recognise, sounded much more simple minded, Tyrolean in fact, even to the incorporation of yodelling. But in four-four time, metric as a childhood beat, far too simple.

  ‘This group, as it happens,’ Andor pointed out to me, no doubt observing the way my focus had turned to the music, ‘is from Austria. Our regular musicians are performing in Helsinki. They are famous internationally.’

  There was no disappointment in his voice. He was enjoying this rustic music.

  ‘Where are the others?’ I asked finally, after we had been served huge plates of the tiny brown mushrooms, hundreds and hundreds of them, in their own sauce and without side-dishes or condiments. Thick wedges of heavy bread were the only accompaniment to the repast. Clearly, the mushrooms were to be relished for their own unique flavour.

  ‘Look! What did I tell you? You have been favoured tonight.’ Andor suddenly exclaimed with delight. ‘For you, these are the most special of our baby-fingers.’ And he pointed with his fork to a cluster of purply-brown mushrooms at the apex of the great pile. I realised I would have to eat every single one of them.