Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (12 page)

A dozen cattle came slipping and sliding down that stony brink at the pace of racehorses, bursting across the main street in a confused tangle of horns and udders, urged on by the inhuman yells of the man who, half dragged along, shouting with laughter, held the twisted tail of the hindmost in his knotted hand. He was screwing it as he shouted. In his free arm he was waving a water-gourd. His roars and screams were fearsome to hear, but they set the whole street in a roar of laughter. With his great sweeping moustache, sweat-beslobbered shirt and black trews set off by tall mountaineer’s boots, he was a heroic figure belonging to the age of the Titans; he looked like some dispossessed character from the same Homeric cycle, who had yoked the oxen of the sun.

It was Frangos. His charges sped into their stalls like bullets, still pitifully lowing, while he, releasing the tail of the last cow, bestowed a last shriek and a kick on it. Then he stood in his own courtyard, arms akimbo, roaring for water like a lion and cursing everyone for being so slow. Bent double with laughter, his two tall daughters made their way to him bearing a jug and basin. Still growling he seized the jug and emptied it
over the crown of his head, gasping and shouting in mock-anger at the coldness of the water, expelling his breath in a great swish like a steam boiler and calling everyone in the house a lazy cuckold.

“There. That will do,” shouted the old lady Helen, his wife. “We don’t want any more of your foul tongue about this house.” But the two spirited daughters rallied him unmercifully and he made a playful grab at the skirt of one, threatening to spank her. He was like a celebrated actor playing a familiar role to an audience which has seen it many times, knows it almost word for word, and loves it. “Eh, you, motor-bicycle polisher, cuckold, ape, doorpost.”

“You leave me alone,” said his son-in-law to be, “or I’ll throw you to your cattle, compost-heap.” A series of violent pleasantries in this vein were thrown from balcony to courtyard and back again.

A small boy, passing outside the house, saw us leaning over the balcony and explained: “Every day Frangos comes back with the cattle like that.”

“I see,” said Andreas.

“He calls it the defeat of the Bulgarians at Marathassa. It’s the last charge. Usually we all cheer.”

I was glad to hear it, though Frangos’s history seemed a bit weak. (I found later that he made up everything out of his own head, and reckoned books not worth a fig.)

Now he sat with a somewhat portentous air under his own fine tree and his wife brought him a long drink of wine and a clean handkerchief with which
to mop his tousled head. His eldest daughter brought a comb and mirror with which he combed his fine moustache. Then he gave a sigh and betook himself to the little domed privy at the garden’s end, where he squatted down and, between epic grunts, conducted a disjointed conversation with his wife. “I hear a stranger has come to stay in the village. Some pest of an Englishman, eh?” She replied, “He has bought Kakojannis’s house. He is on the balcony watching you.” There was silence for a moment. “Ho ho ha ha,” said Frangos at last and then, catching sight of me, gave another great whoop and put up his great paw. “Yasu,” he cried formally, addressing me as if I were in the next valley; and then taking a step towards me he added: “Ho there, Englishman, we drank together, did we not?”

“We did. To the
palikars
of all nations.”

“God be with them.”

“God be with them.”

There was a silence. He appeared to be struggling against his innate friendliness. “What have you come to Bellapaix for?” he asked me at last in a loud, provocative tone, but without any real sting in it. It was as if his self-possession were not quite complete: perhaps my brother’s death at Thermopylae had holed him below the water-line.

“I have come to learn to drink,” I said drily, and he gave a great snort of laughter and banged his knee until the dust flew out of the folds of his baggy trousers.
“Do you hear that?” he said, turning to his family for approval. “To drink! Good! Excellent!” Then turning back to me he boomed: “I shall be your master.”

“Agreed.”

“And what will you give me in exchange?”

“Whatever you wish.”

“Even my freedom?”

I was about to extricate myself from this small predicament by a sophistry which would not have damaged friendly relations when a welcome interruption occurred. Andreas Kallergis put his face over the wall and said: “Frangos, you rogue, you owe me money,” and a furious argument now broke out about the cost of a barn which Andreas had converted. “I just gave it a kick and it fell down,” shrieked Frangos; “what sort of building is that?” “Anything you kicked would be bound to fall down,” said Andreas. “Why don’t you save your kicks for your good-for-nothing sons?” Frangos beetled. “As for you, you’re not man enough to be able to make a son.” All this in roaring good humor.

We parted in amity, shouting and screaming at one another, and set off down the hill. At the first corner stood a shy little girl of about fifteen, with very beautiful dark eyes and long hair in pigtails. She advanced on us as timorously as a squirrel, holding her hand behind her back. Her hesitation was touching as she sidled up. Behind her back she had a small wicker basket with a bundle of shallots in it and a blood orange; in her other hand a bunch of wild anemones wrapped in the
broad leaf of an arum lily. These gifts she handed to me saying: “My father Morais sends these to you and says welcome to your new house.”

I felt inordinately proud of having earned this gesture and thought it worth cementing with a counter-gift, so I detached the heavy pocket-knife which I had bought the day before from my belt and gave it to her with an appropriate message.

When we got down to the little square by the Abbey we found it crowded, for by now the village had come home from work. Knots of coffee-drinkers lounged perilously under the Tree of Idleness, gossiping. I scanned their faces closely for marks of the spiritual ravages caused by idleness and it did seem to me that several looked upon the point of sleep. The tavern was full now, and Dmitri with his curious disjointed walk—like a sailor on a heaving deck—was dispensing drink and coffee as fast as he was able. The tower of the Church took the tawny golden light softly upon its ancient face, so that the stonework now looked as if it were made of the compressed petals of the rambler roses which bordered the walks. Kollis and the
muktar
were taking their coffee soberly at a corner table where we joined them with our sheaves of calculations.

“I will get these people to build for you,” said Andreas quietly, “your own villagers. There are one or two good masons here—like Thalassinos over there—and Loizus for the woodwork. But it will take
me time to work out a detailed tender. When would you like to start?”

“This week.”

“So soon?”

“Yes. I will tell you what money I have and you can work out what can be done with it.”

I had already noticed that costing in Cyprus was an altogether vague affair by European standards. Prices fluctuated hopelessly according to shortages; if a consignment of European goods were held up, and the shops empty of it—say paint—the price could double in a matter of weeks. The trick was to make one’s outlay in raw materials all at once. Local contractors, through lack of capital perhaps, tended to build wall by wall, thus putting themselves at the mercy of price fluctuations in material. This accounted for the number of English people who claimed to have been cheated by contractors. In fact, with costing so hopelessly out of ratio, a contractor very often found himself woefully out in his calculations—and during my reconstruction period on more than one occasion the masons could in fact have cheated themselves by several pounds. All this was the fruit of my conversations with the sapient Sabri. “What we must do is to buy the brick, mortar and cement, for the whole job; get it up the hill; then see where we stand.”

I had divined that this method also suited the wage-structure of the workmen. It was not that wages fluctuated but that the other community needs drew off
workmen from one project to another. There was no question of contracts. In the season of olive-pressing or carob-gathering the whole village turned out in a body—and at a blow one lost masons, carpenters, plumbers, everyone. Therefore, in order to build reasonably, one had to plan in short bursts, for such times as one could assemble a whole team. Otherwise work dragged—the absence of a foreman or a carpenter might keep a whole team of masons hanging about while a window-frame or door-jamb lacked, and while the carpenter who should have built it was out in the fields attending to a crop of apples, almonds or carobs. All these hold-ups cost money, and the art of building was to limit them.

All this had to be legislated for; but meanwhile the raw materials must be brought to the site. The good Sabri could provide the bricks and concrete, but as no lorry could reach the house, we would need donkeys and mules with panniers to get the stuff up the hill. It was here the
muktar
came in, for he was to mobilize the teams with which we could achieve the desired result at short notice.

We sat now like a jury and selected our men by eyes—Pambos, Kalopanis, Dmitri Rangis, Korais: gallery of whiskers and eyebrows such as one would never see outside Drury Lane. Andreas Menas undertook to supervise, and Michaelis to lend voice and color to the unloading site at the house. I felt that the two ends of the rope, so to speak, were in good hands.
There would be no hanging about with Andreas at the foot of the hill and Michaelis at the crown. One by one the gallery of ruffians was consulted and engaged. Soberly we assessed costs. It seemed to me that the transport problem would demand an intensive ten days’ work; after that we’d have our building materials to hand and we could then tackle the builders.

All this planning had been conducted with admirable despatch, thanks to the
muktar
, and now, abandoning Andreas’s little car, I accepted the invitation of Kollis to walk down to Kyrenia with him, through the cyclamen-carpeted groves, among the cherry trees, to where the good Panos would be sitting with his glass of Commanderia on a quiet terrace above the violet sea.

Chapter Six: The Swallows Gather

Very soon the atmosphere grew convivial, and the priest, swilling his wine, began to sing in a strong Greek baritone:

The horizon opens
,

The sky is filled with light
,

Jerusalem rejoice
,

For Christ is risen
.

‘Jesus, he gone up,’ the schoolmaster explained.

The Mukhtar followed, wailing folk melodies in a high almost falsetto tenor voice:

The world goes round and round like a wheel …

Men come together and then they separate …

And then …

All knew what happened then, and joined in the refrain.…

—The Orphaned Realm
by P
ATRICK
B
ALFOUR

I
T WAS NOT
long before the mule-teams began to travel up the narrow streets of the village, each I bearing its grunting burden of pierced concrete
bricks or dusty sacks of cement; from the eyrie I had established in the lemon groves high above the Abbey I could watch them from an eagle’s angle of vision as they slipped and staggered up the stony incline. From the cyclamen-bewitched patch of shadow where I spent my day now they looked like ants hastening back to the nest, each with a grain of wheat in its jaws.

Spring had lengthened into summer now and soon the wheat would be winnowed on the old threshing floors, freeing the specialists who would be responsible for relaying the balcony and putting in windows. I had already met some of them: first there was Thalassinos, “the Seafarer,” with his quiet dour manner and clipped moustache. He was in his early forties, and maintained throughout the work an earnest and prosaic air. I was all the more surprised to catch him in a fantasy of his own invention—for every Sunday he appeared in the coffee shop in clothes of his own design: tall top-boots made in soft suede, jodhpurs, and a check tweed coat set off by a hard collar and a tie of American design with a chorus girl in flames hand-painted on it. He strolled about with an air of distinction in these clothes which were much admired.