Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance by Robert Crisp Page A

and the son of the owner of the land in dispute. Ten minutes after the first angry words opened the discussion there had been nobody there – just a corpse with seven oozing knife wounds draining away unnecessarily.
    No need for any detective work. Everybody had known who had done it and why it had been done. Father and son had been arrested, convicted and sentenced: father to life imprisonment, son to a term which had expired a year or two before. He would never return to the farm which his mother and sister struggled to keep in production. He knew without any doubt that the same instrument of death awaited him in the hands of the murdered boy’s avengers.
    But the murdered boy – and this was what they all told me – returned every year at that time to see if the debt of his blood had been repaid. All I could say was that I fervently hoped he did not call on me to find out. I couldn’t speak the language.
    It was neither an exceptional story nor event in those parts. The Mani, on the edge of which I lived, had onlycomparatively recently emerged from savage years of blood feuds. Each village had its towered houses built ever higher and higher to give the household the opportunity of shooting down upon its neighbour. And the rock of those great bleached mountains where nothing grew was fertile enough in the production of legend and superstition. The inhabitants, too, seemed to live very close in their thoughts to the primitive. They were all devout members of the Greek Orthodox Church – a demanding religion – and believed passionately in the numerous saints after whom every Greek child, male and female, was named. But one suspected they believed just as strongly in the opposing forces of darkness which roamed those barren ranges and from which they looked to their saints to protect them.
    Awareness of and respect for these forces of good and evil was clearly apparent to the stranger in their midst. I had often seen my old friend, Janni, cross himself half a dozen times in an effort to get an uncooperative pump engine to start. Sometimes it worked and sometimes was enough.
    I had stopped my ignorant practice of making little jokes about it. It had embarrassed my friends to rebuke me with their disapproving silence. And I had caused consternation and genuine dismay among a group of small visitors by imitating the call of the bird whose song outside a house is prophetic of death within.
    I tried to argue that a bird could not possibly know anything of selective human death but I had no facts that I could argue with. Can it be proven that a bird does not know these things? I couldn’t prove it. At least, not to their satisfaction.
    I had seen even the most sophisticated Atheniansblanch and spit on the ground three times when shown a dead snake. They had offered no reasonable explanation in response to my queries and I had not pressed the matter, chiefly because it was extremely difficult to find a Greek who did not spit anywhere and everywhere. It was a national habit and I sincerely wished the military junta would introduce a law against it. With special provision for snakes.
    The Greeks’ relationship with trees and plants also seemed to have inherited something from distant mythology and many trees and plants were invested with characteristics, which were not only medicinal in a way which was akin to witchcraft, but personal.
    Still, who was I to say they were wrong? I had good reason for believing they were right.
    Early in the summer, sweating it out in the young cotton rows, I had been warned against going to sleep in the noonday siesta under a fig tree. I had noticed that all the labourers chose mulberry trees for their lunch and nap and avoided the figs, in spite of their fine deep shade. There were various explanations: “You will wake up sick.” “Your dreams will be full of bad people.” “The shadow is too dark. It will lie heavily on you.” Of course, I did