Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (3 page)

“Return?” asked the clerk.

“Definitely not,” I told him.

It was not only that seeing the name Salzburg awakened an old wish to see the town. From there, it seemed to me, I could go south-west, south-east, or due south and still be heading for the destination which heart and memory had chosen.

The train left at 10am. On the side of the carriage was spelled out the pattern of my magic carpet: DOVER – OSTEND – FRANKFURT.

It was not very full. Most of the passengers in my compartment were casually reading morning newspapers. They might just as well have been in the 10am for Bromley and Sevenoaks. A few letter-writers scribbled, serious-faced. Nobody bothered to look up as we pulled out of Platform 7. My departure could not have been less dramatic.

Was I unique on that train? Newspapers were on my lap, too. There was nothing about me to distinguish me from the other passengers.

Yet I was looking at London and Southern England for the last time. Not only at England, but at fifty-five
years of my life. They flashed past the window as rapidly as telephone poles.

Twenty-four hours after leaving Victoria, I was standing on the main road leading south out of Salzburg. In my right hand, I carried my suitcase. A typewriter and a briefcase struggled for possession of my left hand.

My tactics were simple enough. Every time I heard a car coming I picked up my paraphernalia and lurched along the edge of the road. If the driver ignored me, I just dropped everything and basked in travel-brochure sunshine until the next one came along. Just before noon, a car slowed and halted. It was middle-aged. So was the woman at the wheel. Both were unmistakably English. There was a girl in the front seat. The back seat was empty.

“
Konnen wir Sie helfen
?” she asked, smiling.

“Only as far as Athens,” I replied in my deliberately best English.

“That's where we're going,” she said, determined to be imperturbable. “Know anything about cars?”

“I can push one further than most.”

“Jump in then. You may be just the man we're looking for.”

The glum expression on daughter's face indicated disagreement with this assessment but what did I care? Athens was suddenly within reach.

Athens was, in fact, nearly 2,000 miles and thirteen days later. And if I'd known how much pushing lay ahead of me, perhaps I would have carried on walking into Yugoslavia. It was not her daughter. There were the
formal introductions. “I am Mrs L… and this is my niece Deborah and we're going to have a look at Greece while it isn't full of tourists.” I responded appropriately and made a brief reckoning that Mrs L was forty-something and Deborah was twenty-something.
Well, at least
, I thought, contemplating the days of propinquity ahead,
they are both over the age of consent
. Deborah clearly thought I was past the age for anything.

Four or five days, we reckoned, would see us in Athens. I was overwhelmed by my good fortune. But I should have had more respect for the verities of isostasy – isostasy being my own personal religion. It is a word manufactured from the Greek
isos
, meaning equal, to describe the geological phenomenon of maintaining equilibrium on the surface of the planet. If a mountain range is elevated the imbalance thus caused is compensated by an equal and opposite depression. If there were no compensating factor, no isostasy, the earth would develop a wobble in its revolutions with unpredictably dire consequences for the human race including probably universal seasickness.

That every action has an equal and opposite reaction is a well-known principle of physics. I have come to believe that it applies equally emphatically in the realm of metaphysics and human behaviour. Our lives, whether we recognise it or not, are affected intimately and potently by the same laws of compensation. We are always involved in isostasy. With curious appropriateness the Greek word also means perhaps.

The morning had been too favourable and I had
been too lucky. Isostasy was not long in making adjustments. Five minutes after I had entered the car, cluttering up the empty space in the back with my load, there was a loud bang and we swerved to a halt as the rear tyre went flat. Naturally, it fell to me to change the wheel but I got a shock when I saw the condition of the tyres. They were all worn smooth.

“Listen,” I said to auntie, “you'll never get over that mountain let alone reach Athens on those tyres.”

“What would you suggest?”

“There's only one thing to do. Go back to Villach and get a couple of retreads for the rear wheels.”

It was three o'clock in the afternoon before we finally got away from Villach but the new sense of security was worth the delay. To make up the lost time it was agreed to keep going through the night, taking turns at the wheel. I wished they had taken turns at the punctures too. There were three more in fairly quick succession soon after crossing into Yugoslavia at sunset. Fortunately one of them occurred while we were filling up at a garage with the Balkan equivalent of an AA man present. He refused to accept a tip, which surprised and impressed me.

At midnight we were on top of another mountain in a howling blizzard when we went past a hotel sign with lighted windows gleaming warmly through the snow.

“Doesn't it make you want to stop?” said Deborah and immediately there was a now familiar detonation with the sway and slither of a flat front tyre.

“That's it,” I said firmly. “I'll change the wheel but then we're stopping for the night. In the hotel.”

The two females hurried inside while I went through the wheel-changing motions that had become automatic. My palm was slashed on some sharp projection and left the snow crimson with my blood and blushing at the torrent of imprecation with which I reviled the night and the car and the universe. In the hotel I was greeted with the news that there was only one room available and in that room only one bed.

“How big is the bed?” I asked.

“Oh, it's a big one.”

“Well then, there's no problem, is there?” I said and forestalled any argument by heading for the kitchen where I persuaded an elderly woman to produce bread and cheese and a flagon of red wine.

There was some hesitation in the air at the end of supper so I said I would get into bed first and warm it up.

“And I'm sleeping with all my clothes on if that's any comfort to you. Except my boots, of course. I suggest you do the same.”

I grabbed the flagon of half-finished wine and went upstairs. By the next morning, I was more or less one of the family.

On the way down from the mountains to the coast, we passed half a dozen overturned or ditched lorries which had skidded off the road. I could not resist the temptation to point out what our fate would have been without the new tyres. The enticement of the blue Adriatic, which kept on revealing itself unexpectedly, obliterated all thoughts of gloom and disaster.

We barely paused in Rijeka, a town of umbrellas, and driving alongside the sea with the high passes behind us and the sun coming a little nearer with each kilometre
we believed there could be no more hazards of nature to interfere with our progress. It was an optimistic forecast – as are most beliefs.

At one coastal resort we were delayed for twenty-four hours because a busload of people had literally been blown sideways off the road and the police had stopped all traffic. There was immediate compensation in a lunch in a deserted hotel dining room, consisting of soup, roast sucking pig with heaps of three kinds of vegetables, peaches and custard, a bottle of good, red wine and coffee for a total cost of fourteen shillings each.

It was at this hotel during the enforced overnight stay that, quite innocently, I broke my bed. When I reported it to the manageress, she broke into peals of laughter and a stream of gay words which I brought the head waiter along to translate.

“She wants to know,” he told me, “which of the two ladies was the lucky one.”

I carefully avoided looking at either of them.

The corniche was a pure delight once the ice-breaking gale had stopped but our enjoyment of the scenery was slightly marred by the explicit road signs which the Yugoslavs go in for. Cars are featured crushed under enormous boulders to indicate the possibility of avalanches and slippery road surfaces are portrayed by vehicles toppling over cliffs with a nightmare death's head skeleton superimposed.

They could hardly be dismissed as exaggerations. Just before Dubrovnik three-quarters of the midnight road was blocked by a fall of earth and rock that I swear
was still moving when I jammed on the brakes as we came round the bend. On another midnight a policeman flagged us down and asked me in three languages whether I spoke English, German or French.

“English,” I said.

He went on flawlessly: “You have just come through our village at forty kilometres an hour when the sign plainly limits you to thirty kilometres an hour. You may either go before the magistrate in the morning or pay a fine of 15,000 dinars now.”

Fortunately, auntie was driving at the time. She paid while I wondered what his annual income was. We left Dubrovnik with the feeling that Greece was just around the next corner. What was really waiting round the next corner was a remedial dose of equal and opposite reaction.

On the morning's run, our stomachs replete with ham and eggs at the most expensive hotel in town in a dining room peopled by what appeared to be dowager Russian duchesses, we had skirted probably the most beautiful bay on the Dalmatian coast and turned inland to Titograd over the mountains.

From Mostar the road climbed apparently eternally and as it went up and up, the temperature went down and down. Annabel, the name Deborah had given to the car, lacked internal heating.

Any thoughts that we might have entertained that we were on our way to some sort of celestial realm were brutally contested by the road conditions. The surface was un-tarred in the passes and deep snow and mud had
been churned into an indescribable mess by the passage of scores of heavy lorries denied other routes from the coastal regions to the south. This was not the worst of it. The wheel tracks of huge trucks were a foot wider than Annabel's and we lurched crazily from side to side in deep slush bouncing from one hard-pressed snow wall to the other. Every now and then, the headlights would reveal an impenetrable cliff-face straight ahead or would launch into space above an abyss plunging into unseen depths below.

At some hour in that endless night we pulled up at an unlikely all-night garage to fill up with that foul-smelling Yugoslav petrol. The attendant, emerging from the warmth of his office, pointed immediately to the front wheel.
Not another puncture
, I thought bitterly. It was something worse: one of the front shock absorbers was hanging on by a single bolt and dragging along the surface.

Deborah made a brief inspection and straightened, undismayed, with the information that a six-inch nail would fix it. My own contribution to the subsequent proceedings was to produce a suitable nail from the attendant who then joined me in his office while Deborah lay prone in the snow under the front suspension and aunt curled up in her furs in the back.

I was a little worried that the girl might freeze to death but she emerged after about ten minutes to announce calmly that we would continue. It was the beginning of a deepening respect, confirmed by later events, for her guts and practical resources.

The Danube was far from blue when we rolled into Belgrade to learn that the Yugoslav New Year would begin in half an hour – at midnight. We could see little
point in celebrating another new year within two weeks of the first one. There was only one event we wanted to celebrate – the arrival in Athens.

A check on the speedometer revealed that the car had covered nearly 2,000 miles since leaving London. This was more or less the total distance from London to Athens and there was still a long way to go. But we shared a feeling that we were now out of the wilderness, that the snow-blocked passes were all behind us and that it was tarmac, tarmac all the way to the Mediterranean and the sun.

The snow had been with us all the way from the Rhine but when, the next morning, we came out on the great sunlit plain of Larissa we rejoiced at the prospect of finding, at last, Mediterranean weather. But it was snowing again that night when our ancient vehicle found herself, almost suddenly, surrounded by the unaccustomed and disconcerting traffic of downtown Athens.

Later we celebrated with extravagant whiskies and got a little drunk. It wasn't exactly a happy occasion. There was an underlying unease not only at the thought of the end of an adventure but at the end of an association. When one male and two females are enclosed together in a small mobile space for most of twenty-four hours for all of fifteen days some sort of relationship is bound to develop. Circumstance and event had thrown us, three diverse humans, into a contiguity as intimate as marriage. Diversity was, of course, most pronounced in our differing ages. I was fifty-five,
Auntie was forty-something and Deborah was twenty-three. None of us was virginal, none of us was impotent and all of us had healthy natural instincts. These things become apparent intuitively without question or investigation.

It was a situation which might have had complex and alarming results except that Auntie clearly considered her role to be that of chaperone and saw to it that there were never fewer than three of us alone together for any length of time. It was equally clear that, like a lot of chaperones I have known, she didn't particularly want to be chaperoned herself.

Fifty-five is a difficult and dangerous age for a man. In my own case I surprised myself by regarding any woman over forty as too old for further consideration: a tribute surely to innocence and ignorance. But I also had this conscience thing about Deborah being much too young for an old bastard like me so I ended up taking no interest in either of them. It would be dishonest of me to say that the thought of going to bed with them did not enter my mind. Conscience and lack of opportunity can be powerful allies in the war of seduction.