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Literary Review
THE VIEW FROM KING STREET
Surviving by mistake
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CHRISTOPHER HURST cannot forget something he saw on holiday last year.
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I SPENT the last three days of February travelling from Chandigarh to Simla, from Simla to Sarahan, and back. It is a long way, and the average height above sea level is more than 2000 metres. Naturally the road follows a twisty course and there are countless bends. On the outside of the road are deep precipices; sometimes there are a few metres of rough ground between the metalled surface and the edge, but more often not. If anyone makes a mistake there is no second chance. My driver was both competent at his job and a good fellow — each morning he made a short prayer to his God before starting the motor, which reassured me as well as him. He must have wearied of my many sharp intakes of breath and muttered warnings to go slower and not overtake in the face of an oncoming bus. I realise he would never have endangered my life, or his own.
This journey reminded me of a strange experience I had in Greece last August. My partner Catherine and I were crossing a massive mountain region between the town of Ioannina, where once our poet Byron visited the bloody tyrant Ali Pasha, and the dark valley of the Meteora, a suitable home for eagles, where ancient Byzantine monasteries perch at the top of vast rocks with vertical sides — a famous target for travellers. Catherine was driving, and we were proceeding on the side of the road nearest to the precipice.
There were several cars immediately ahead of us, and we were going quite slowly. Suddenly Catherine said to me: "I think one of the cars ahead has gone off the road." In other words, over the precipice to our right. I said I didn't believe it. She replied: "Look, you can see the cloud of dust" — and there it was. A car had indeed gone over. Here was one of the places where for a short distance there was some rough ground between the road and the edge — so we and some other drivers pulled over, halted and jumped out. I expected to see something awe-inspiring and horrific over the edge, but nothing could have prepared me for what I actually saw. Barely 20 feet below us was a dense thicket of bushes, and there the car lay on its side, undamaged. The passenger's side was uppermost, and already a woman aged about 40 was clambering out. We stretched out our hands to help her, and when she was back with us she crossed herself every few seconds in her very obvious gratitude to the intervention of God or fate which had saved her life — the thicket only occurred in this small area, and a short way on either side a death plunge would have been certain. Meanwhile the driver, who one could only assume was her husband, was able to get out easily although he had been on the under side. The two did not fall into each other's arms.
The incident was quickly over, and we were told that the police had been called. As we drove on, I asked Catherine what she thought the man and the woman in the car would say to each other later. There seemed a wide range of possibilities. How had the man actually been able to drive off the road? He showed no sign of being drunk. Catherine suggested that they had been having a quarrel (in which case they were certainly man and wife); this could have made the man lose his concentration on the road, or become so tense that he swerved. How did they continue their journey? Neither of the pair would have been in a fit state to drive, but we must assume that they eventually got home safely, to be greeted by their children: "How was your trip, Mummy/Daddy?" "Well actually, darlings, your Daddy drove us over a precipice, and it was only thanks to a million-to-one chance that we didn't end up dead on the rocks at the bottom of the valley, and you are not orphans." Then, when they couldn't sleep that night: "Well, Pavlos, that was a close one." "It certainly was, Maria, but you shouldn't have been criticising my driving/my low salary/my performance in bed." "When I tell my mother what you did, Pavlos, it will be all round the family — and all round the town because, as you know, she keeps nothing to herself, and has never had a better story to tell than this one." Pavlos has no answer to this — but let us not be flippant or indulge in fantasies.
Although the woman seemed remarkably calm, there is no way that the full horror of what she had experienced would not have sunk in later. And if the certainty of not being to blame was all that the man could think of at the time, he too would have had an attack of the horrors when the rush of adrenalin subsided. And who knows how many times, in the months since, he has woken in the night and re-lived that moment when he was between this world and the next. If it had happened to me, I would not have been able to shake off the memory for as long I lived. Even as a witness I cannot forget it or help wondering what the couple have done with their lives in the last few months. In many marriages the agony would be enough to cause a divorce, especially if things were not going well beforehand. How can they look each other in the eye and not be reminded of it? But who knows if the shock did not jolt them out of their accustomed ways of thinking, and that the wife didn't say "Look, Pavlos, you may not be the answer to a maiden's prayer, but we can't go on like this for ever. Why don't we forgive even if we can't forget? Oh, and maybe we should not take the Ioannina-Meteora road again." But is such a wise, balanced and romantic outcome likely? We can hope so, but perhaps the agony continues: harsh words are still exchanged, and one or the other may exclaim: "Anything would be better than this — perhaps fate meant to punish us: we should have died instead of going on living." Perhaps. Perhaps not.
christopher@hurstpub.co.uk
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