Gatherers and Hunters (10 page)

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.

‘You will have wine yes?' Andor snapped his fingers. ‘But for you, our honoured guest, the very best, the most special,' and he murmured to the host, that stocky old man who appeared immediately at Andor's beckoning.

‘My good Australian friend, you are lucky,' he said with his solicitous gleam, a gleam I was beginning to have suspicions of, as I kept shovelling the pile of mushrooms. ‘You will not appreciate your luck. Tonight is the night of broaching the new season's wine and as the first special guest on this special night, you have the great honour of tasting the first wine from the new cask. Of blessing it, in fact. There are only one hundred and fifty casks of this special chablis, it comes from the grapes of the Valley of the Martyrs, which we drove through as we came here.'

I knew I was being foolish, of inviting untoward, or politically dangerous confidences. ‘What martyrs were these?'

Andor chortled, a strangely boyish sound, more like a hoot than a chuckle. ‘Ah, my friend, already I see you imagining the qualities of this special chablis to come from the buried remains of our celebrated martyrs. Alas, dear friend, a poetic thought, but not really practical. Those martyrs were four hundred years ago. We would have to fertilise the field with fresh crops of martyrs to maintain the quality of the crop, if that were so. Every year, a new crop of martyrs to be buried. I think our wine draws its flavour from less precious sources. You like the flavour? You must drink more of this.' He held his glass to the candlelight. ‘We are most honoured.'

I think I had finished the full plate of mushrooms. I think I had drunk perhaps three capacious glasses of the white slightly fizzy wine. I think I might even have offered to sing a stanza of ‘Moreton Bay' if the musicians would accompany me (I was sufficiently cunning to realise such a request was outside their repertoire). I believe I was mopping my lips with the thick, starchy serviette when Andor's sister suddenly appeared before us.

‘You have neglected me. You have humiliated me. You have left me in Ljubljana without my car, and you have been entertaining our Australian guest all this time, you have been eating him up, you seek to destroy me.'

Her English accent was wonderful, full vowels, every consonant precise, each inflection accurate as a good recording. My first words, spoken with a rush of apology, sounded, even to me, broad and gratingly ocker.

‘Forgive Andor. Please. He has been a beaut host and we have seen some pretty amazing places …'

‘So. And you are the distinguished professor, what is your name? Never mind, I am here now and you will make conversation while I catch up with you. Andor, you will order the baby-lip mushrooms for me immediately, it is the least you can do.'

Her brother was suddenly abject.

She was stunningly beautiful, and her name was Irene.

She smiled with a sudden change of facial expression as the formal introductions were completed. Her eyes were ­enormous, and made more so through obviously sophisticated use of subtle cosmetic enhancement. Her teeth were beautifully, wonderfully even, white and generous in her full-lipped mouth. They were, indeed, magnetic. I could not keep my eyes from them. Perhaps it was the contrast to her brother's unrepentant natural mouthful. Even her little pointy eye-teeth were still intact and, just like my ­daughter's, pushed slightly into prominence by the neighbouring ­incisors. My own dentist had, usefully, recommended that my Sarah's eye-teeth be extracted to allow the others that extra space. The result had been very successful. Irene might regret allowing her mouth to crowd out with everything that nature had provided. She smiled at me, and directed her attention fully in my direction.