The Europe That Was Read Free Page B

The bone-setter was already boiling her remedies at the stove, with the splints and bandages under her skirt. It was unlikely that the Law would ever find out from her at what time she had come to attend to the patient. She accounted to no one for her mysterious movements and answered threats with crazy cackles of abuse and curses.
    The children were left at the cottage. Pavlo, Danilo and the two women scrambled uphill to a just cultivable clearing, the size of a small room, at the top of the land. When they were there, Brancovitch detached himself from a cluster of rocks and patted Pavlo reassuringly on the back. Pavlo was pale and nervous. He was like mid-century man being prepared for an operation. It was going to save the future of his family, but it was not pleasant.
    â€˜Don’t hurt him, Mirko!’ Despina cried.
    A ridiculous remark. But no doubt surgeons hear it today. And Brancovitch knew as well as they what she meant—that he wasn’t to hurt Pavlo more than he must.
    Now that the moment of their plotting had become reality,Despina’s anxiety was silent and terrible. It had no relation to our modern fears: of a dangerous compound fracture or of septic poisoning. Her medical knowledge was not up to that. In her experience—which in a country of blood feud was considerable—men always recovered from a broken limb though it was never as useful as before. That was why she and Pavlo had chosen a leg rather than an arm. The legs were only for carrying the arms to work.
    No, her anxiety was not for the possible consequences, but a sharing of Pavlo’s pain and distress. Yet she never doubted that it was his duty. She felt no horror at all for such an atrocity. It was the only alternative to disaster, and she would have unhesitatingly mutilated herself if it had been she whom the government wanted to take away.
    Brancovitch insisted that the girl accepted the preparations naturally. She almost sanctified them by her love and simplicity, and the need of her children for food. Under those circumstances nothing in the act was criminal, nothing unclean.
    Pavlo tied the loaves lightly on each side of his shin and stood with that leg advanced. The bandit knelt at a distance of two yards from him, his old muzzle-loader pointing slightly downwards. The trajectory of the ball would correspond to that of a shot aimed at the unsuspecting Danilo from higher up the hillside.
    He fired. Pavlo sat down, biting his knuckles, free for ever of military service. Before the smoke of the powder had cleared, Despina had recovered the loaves and sliced out the circles of black and pink.
    â€˜For the children,’ she sobbed, as she threw her arms and her long hair about her husband.

DIONYSUS AND THE PARD
    His thumb was very obviously missing. You can know a man for weeks—if you are interested in his face—without spotting the absence of a finger, but you must miss the thumb of his right hand, especially when he is raising a glass at reasonably frequent intervals. A hand without a thumb is strangely animal; one looks for the missing talon on the under side of the wrist.
    If you saw the back view of Dionysus Angelopoulos in any eastern Mediterranean port, you would at once put him down as an archaeologist or something cast up upon the beach by the Hellenic Travellers’ Club. Judging by the tall, spare figure, slightly stooping, dressed in shaggy and loose-fitting Harris tweed, you expected a mild, pleasing and peering countenance with perhaps a moustache or a little Chelseaish beard; but when he turned round he showed an olive face with thin jowls hanging, like those of an underfed bloodhound, on either side of a blue chin, and melancholy brown eyes of the type that men call empty and women liquid when they are hiding nothing but boredom.
    It was for the sake of professional prestige that Mr Angelopoulos modelled himself upon what he considered an Englishman ought to look like. He was the Near-Eastern