Costa
JOHN JULIUS NORWICH (born London, 1929), is a historian, travel writer and anthologist. He has written histories of Norman Sicily, Venice, Byzantium and the Mediterranean, and presented more than thirty history documentaries for BBC TV. He is also the author of a study of Shakespeare’s Kings, and two travel books, Mount Athos and Sahara. He has recently completed a History of the Popes, and is currently working on a short history of England, as seen from 100 different locations. His annual Christmas Cracker anthology has been going for 41 years. www.johnjuliusnorwich.com
His real name was Achillopoulos, but he never used it; some of his best friends never even knew it. To everyone, whatever their age or position, he was just plain Costa. He was sixty-ish when I first met him: brown as a walnut, with brilliant green eyes and hair that had gone white overnight when he was twenty. As the years passed, he came to look more and more like Picasso; often indeed, when he went out to dinner in a bistro near Grasse – where he lived when he wasn’t in some distant corner of the globe – he would be taken for the great man and obligingly sign menus with a signature indistinguishable from the original.
Brought up in Paris, London and Oxford, Costa spoke French like a native, and his English, apart from a ghost of an accent, was virtually as good. His Greek, he told us, came a poor third, but it sounded perfect to me. He had, after all, transferred from the Free French Army to the Greek as soon as he could. He seemed to be always on the move; there were few countries in the world he hadn’t visited, and he was full of hilarious stories about what had happened to him on the road – stories almost invariably against himself. He never had much money, but his Rolleiflex was always with him and in those happy days before mass travel he had little difficulty in selling his photographs to newspapers and magazines.
And so, when in the summer of 1963 Reresby Sitwell and I decided to go to Mount Athos and clearly needed a Greek-speaker to accompany us, Costa was the obvious choice. I had been there the previous year but I had travelled alone, and the journey had been a disaster. It had pelted with rain, my Greek had proved nowhere near good enough, and the donkeys and mules that I had understood to be ubiquitous were virtually non-existent. On the third day, sopping wet and bitterly cold, I had given up in despair.
Costa had immediately accepted our invitation, as I knew he would; and – as I had also confidently expected – he made all the difference. He kept us amused, the monks adored him, and he proved, rather to his surprise, a superb interpreter. ‘Then,’ he said after a day or two – he began most sentences with that word – ‘I am astonished at the excellence of my Greek.’
Costa in the port of Alexandria, 1943
He was also able, on more than one occasion, to transform our meals. As a result of my previous experience I had perhaps laid it on pretty thick about the Athonite cuisine, for any visit to the Holy Mountain invariably spells gastronomic martyrdom. After that first trip, with the full horror of it still upon me, I had written: For the first few meals, while courage and self-discipline remain steady, a person of normal digestive sensibility may be able to contemplate – and even in part consume – the interminable platefuls of beans, spasmodically enlivened by a single slice of anchovy or a sliver of briny cheese which, if the monasteries had their way, would stand alone between himself and starvation. But on such a diet the spirit soon flags. Within a day or two those liverish-white lumps, glaring remorselessly up at him from their puddle of stone-cold grease, take on a new expression, hostile and challenging. ‘Bet you can’t’, they seem to say. And they are right.
Even more than its inexpressible nastiness, it is the uniformity of the Athonite menu that wears one down as the same grim breakfast offering of beans will reappear, congealed, at supper. It doesn’t take long to understand and appreciate the old custom of the cenobitic monasteries according to which, as the monks pass out of the refectory, the cooks ask pardon on their knees for the atrociousness of the meal. Nor to understand why, among all the ascetic disciplines of the Mountain, that of almost continuous fasting is so insistently stressed.
Reresby had wisely stuffed his rucksack with a tiny spirit stove and various succulent delicacies from Fortnum & Mason, where he was then employed. But it turned out that Costa could do more. He would chat up one guestmaster after another, who would then suddenly conjure up a tomato omelette or even a fish. It was also thanks to him that we were quite often, after dinner, presented with a tray bearing generous glasses of the home-brewed monastic hooch, deliciously aromatic and pulverisingly strong.
Dear Costa did however have one failing: he was accident-prone. He had already had one bad fall some years before in the Andes, when he was climbing with George Jellicoe and Robin Fedden, and now, one day as we were walking between monasteries, he trod on a loose pebble – always a danger on Athonite paths – missed his footing and, since the path was unusually narrow and cut into the side of a hill, landed some six or eight feet down the slope. At first he pooh-poohed the accident and plodded on to our destination; but by the next morning he was in agony. He insisted on continuing the journey, but he was bent double and clearly in considerable pain.
At the next monastery – Xenophontos – the monks took pity on him and bore him off to their dispensary (then rare on the Holy Mountain) where one of their number insisted on giving him an epidural injection. The equipment looked far from sterile, and I trembled for him; but the treatment proved an almost miraculous success and the following day he was walking as well as ever. When we returned to London he told his doctor, who was astonished. It was, he said, quite a dangerous procedure; it depended on knowing precisely the right place to put the needle, and was something usually left to specialists. The old monk, it seemed, couldn’t have done it better.
APART FROM THAT one little contretemps, that second trip of mine to the Mountain was a terrific success; we all enjoyed it enormously, and we learned a lot. I was determined to travel with Costa again; and, three years later, I did.
This time it was he who took the initiative. Early in 1966, my telephone rang. ‘Then,’ said a voice – it could have been no one else – ‘then, there is an expedition leaving soon for the Tibesti Mountains in the Sahara where no one ever goes and where they will make a film. They want two more people so as to have three Land Rovers, which will be safer than two. Then, can you come?’ Our fellow-travellers, he explained, would be three ladies of his acquaintance, all of them experienced and passionate sahariennes; and they had secured the services of a first-rate guide who knew the desert like the back of his hand.
Now it happened that on the previous day I had typed the final full stop to the first volume of a book that I had been working on for the previous two years; I felt that I deserved a break before starting on the second. Anyway, the temptation was irresistible. Three weeks later we were off. Costa and I flew via Algiers to Djanet in the far south of Algeria, where we met the rest of the party. Then we turned the Land Rovers due east, and headed off into the unknown.
I wrote a book about our adventure and, after some forty-five years, have had to refer to it repeatedly in the pages that follow. The trip was by far the most exciting that I have ever made. Since it lasted some eight weeks, I cannot begin to do it justice in this article – and anyway I am not writing about the Sahara, but about Costa. There was one particular incident, which occurred after about a fortnight when we had reached Auzou in northern Chad, which showed him at his most typical.
When we travel in exotic lands, we nearly all of us run up sooner or later with the problem of the uninhibited onlookers – usually in the form of a group of locals who materialise from nowhere, take up a position a yard or two away and stare and stare, fascinated by one’s every action. Even on picnics, this technique can be unnerving enough; but at a night camp, where there are no tents to afford the minimum of privacy and not even any bushes for cover, it can become a serious matter. Never have I known it to assume such formidable proportions as that evening at Auzou. The crowd must have numbered at least forty – forty pairs of staring, unblinking eyes, missing nothing, examining every item we drew from our kitbags, taking in our every move. Never, let me emphasise, was there anything remotely hostile about them. They were perfectly friendly – just very, very curious, and utterly immovable.
Our own reactions varied between agonised embarrassment and stoic fortitude. None of us felt like asking them, in so many words, to go away; without a common language, such a request could only have been exceedingly impolite, and the last thing we wanted was to cause offence. At the same time, there were other needs that were ever more pressing.
After perhaps an hour, one or two of the older spectators had slipped away; but the hard core that remained, consisting almost entirely of children and adolescents, had obviously decided that a long vigil lay ahead, and were digging themselves in for the night. At last Costa took the matter in hand. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘if they are looking for entertainment, that is what we must give them. Then they will be satisfied and go away.’ The rest of us were doubtful; but he, by now looking forward hugely to his coming performance, was not to be shaken. Delving into his kitbag, he extracted some colourful garment, twisted it expertly into a funny hat and put it on. Then, trousers rolled up to the knee, he began to dance. And as he danced he sang:
Il y avait dix filles dans un pré,
Toutes les dix à marier;
Il y avait Line, il y avait Chine,
Il y avait Claudine et Martine,
Ha, ha, Cat’rinette et Cat’rina.
Il y avait la belle Suzon,
La duchesse de Montbazon,
Il y avait Célimène
Et il y avait la Dumaine.
Costa was not, perhaps, outstandingly gifted for the dance; his grasp of melody was also at moments uncertain. But he made up amply in verve what he lacked in technique, and he certainly deserved a greater success than he achieved. His audience was baffled. They had not bargained for this. Having no idea how they were meant to respond, they wisely chose not to respond at all.
Visibly shaken, Costa tried again:
Le fils du Roi vint à passer,
Toutes les dix les fit coucher;
Paille à Line, paille à Chine,
Paille à Claudine et Martine,
Ha, ha, Cat’rinette et Cat’rina.
Paille à la belle Suzon,
La duchesse de Montbazon,
Paille à Célimène,
Mais bon lit à la Dumaine.
The line of faces still stared stonily back at him. There was not a word, not a whisper, far less a smile. Now genuinely sad, poor Costa took off his funny hat, unrolled his trousers and returned to the rest of us, shaking his head. ‘En effet,’ he murmured, ‘c’est un publique très difficile.’
Then, to our astonishment, we saw that it had worked. Within minutes of the song’s end, the entire audience had faded away into the darkness. Just what had prompted them to leave remains a mystery. Perhaps they had enjoyed it all more than their faces had revealed and had accepted it as we had hoped they would, as the grand finale to a memorable evening. Perhaps, on the other hand, they had hated it and been impelled to flee from the dreadful possibility of an encore. My own theory is that by directing his energies so squarely towards them Costa had somehow made them feel involved, saddled with responsibilities they did not understand. The whole thing had suddenly become too complicated. They preferred to go.
EVENTUALLY, WE REACHED our destination – the great volcanic geyserland of Soborom – and started the journey home. On entering the Tibesti ten days before, we had exchanged the Land Rovers for camels, of which we had a string of a dozen or so; they were essential for our food, water and baggage, but – the local saddles being excruciatingly painful – we seldom rode them until evening, when we were too tired to walk any further.
Of all our animals, Costa’s was generally the slowest; we had long grown accustomed to hearing his frantic cries of ‘Vas-y Alphonse!’ or ‘Alphonse, NON!’, echoing behind us. But one afternoon Alphonse was used by our local guide Abdullahi for an exhibition of galloping, and the excitement went to his head. When, shortly before sunset, we left the mountains and reached the fringes of the Bardai oasis, there was no holding him. He smelt home, greenery and water; and, just as a horse will when approaching its stable, broke once more into a gallop. But a horse has stirrups and a bridle; a camel has neither. Costa, accordingly, took the only course open to him. He fell off – and from the top of a camel it’s a long way to the ground.
I had been riding a little ahead and had no idea of what had happened until I got to the camp five minutes later. As I dismounted, Jean – our French guide – ran up, dragging a heavy mattress behind him. ‘Viens vite,’ he shouted, ‘Costa a eu un accident.’ He dashed to the nearest Land Rover, hurled the mattress in the back, and together we drove as fast as we dared to where Costa lay, conscious but in great pain and quite unable to move. Somehow we got him back to the camp, but then what? Bardai consisted only of a small fort, manned by a handful of the Chad army. It had no doctor, and certainly no X-ray. For all we knew, Costa had broken his back; the slightest wrong movement might snap his spinal cord and paralyse him for life.
The next two days was a time of increasing anxiety for us all. At first we had hoped that Costa might have suffered nothing worse than serious bruising and shock, and that after a couple of days’ rest all might be well. But it soon became clear that there was more to it than that: there could be no question of his being able to return in a bumpy Land Rover the thousand-odd miles back to Djanet. He was tortured with pain, unable even to move in bed without assistance. Luckily we had plenty of morphia with us, but we knew that we had to get the patient to hospital as soon as we could. The fort was theoretically in constant radio communication with the regional centre at Faya-Largeau, but by a piece of cruel ill-fortune the electric generator had broken down a few days before and all contact with the outside world had been lost. Costa had by now made up his mind that he was dying – and we were by no means certain that he was not right.
Then, on the morning of the third day after the accident, I was returning from the last of innumerable trips to the fort to see how work on the generator was progressing when I saw a line of camels approaching across the sand. Ahead of them walked a man wearing a curious knee-length khaki tunic and a pale blue kepi. As they drew nearer I could also see, in the shade of the kepi, a close-cropped reddish beard. This, I realised, was one of the lonely handful of French méharistes still patrolling the Sahara. He grinned, and introduced himself: sergent-en-chef Jean-François Renn. Did he, I asked, have a radio? Of course he did. Could he send an SOS for us? Of course he could. In five minutes his aerial was set up; one of his local goumiers was sitting in the sand, grinding away at a hand generator; and our message was on its way to Faya-Largeau.
Sergeant Renn acted on us like a tonic; we all felt better. But Costa was distinctly worse. He had now developed a hacking cough and a lung infection which we feared – in the primitive conditions in which we were living, without electricity or running water – might easily lead to pneumonia. The reply from Faya-Largeau too was depressing. The doctor would be there on his rounds in about a week. We replied at once: this was an emergency – in a week the patient would probably be dead. Our second appeal worked. A flying doctor and two male nurses were announced to be already on their way and would be at Bardai within the hour.
The long wait was over. Half an hour later the French doctor was at the bedside; Costa was expertly transferred to a stretcher and strapped down; he was slid, with the smoothness of a drawer in a filing cabinet, into a waiting Land Rover; his kitbag was stuffed in after him; and he was gone. We hardly had time to recover our breath before we heard the aeroplane again. It circled twice over our heads to gain height; then disappeared over the mountains to the south.
We missed Costa a lot. It was an immeasurable relief to know that he was in safe hands at last, but the party was not the same without him. His interest in everything, his astonishing knowledge, his sheer enthusiasm had fired us all; now he was gone, we all felt diminished. We were worried too. He had promised to telegraph to us the results of his X-ray; but there was no chance of our hearing anything until we reached Djanet, which could not be for another three or four days at the earliest. Those days were as long as any I have ever spent. The last – which happened to be Easter Sunday – was the worst. Of our twelve hours on the piste, six were occupied with repairs after as many different breakdowns. We eventually roared into Djanet – I use the word advisedly, two of our silencers having given up altogether – and made straight for the post office where, sure enough, a telegram was waiting. The news was at least better than we had feared. Three vertebrae had been concertinaed into each other, but nothing had actually been broken. The patient was still lying in a plaster cast, but in ten days’ time he hoped to be well enough to return.
Poor Costa – it was only later, when we were all home again, that we learned the full, hair-raising story of his sufferings in Fort-Lamy. Once, in pre-independence days, its hospital had been one of the best in French Africa; and even now he had nothing but praise for the two remaining French doctors and the treatment they gave him. It was not their fault that the supply of anaesthetics was so short that they were obliged to set his spine without any; nor that, while their backs were turned, the drip-feeding apparatus that they had arranged for the patient in the next bed, seriously ill and unconscious, should have been torn away by his family, bursting en masse into the ward with much assorted livestock and cramming handfuls of rice into his unresisting mouth. Without an adequate staff of trained nurses such incidents were unavoidable. Untrained nurses seem to have been plentiful enough, but their methods tended to be unorthodox. Over some of these methods, such as the unsolicited and unwanted petits soins lavished on the powerless Costa by Georgette, his ward orderly, it is only decent to draw a veil.
Costa recovered; but he was growing older and – possibly as a result of his accident – increasingly bent. For a few more years he continued to travel, but no longer as adventurously as he had in the past; finally he stopped altogether, and settled back with his memories into his little house in the Midi. That was where I last saw him. He was by now virtually crippled, but he greeted us with all his old warmth and talked with his usual gusto throughout our lunch. My last sight of him was standing at his doorway, leaning heavily on his stick but waving cheerfully at us as we drove away.
