Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (21 page)

His view was fairly general, as far as I could see, among those who genuinely wanted to set a term to agitation: who were, in a sense, on our side. At this time there were very many; and this temperate view of things must have been shared by at least half the peasants. I deduce this from one fact: I never saw the slogan ENOSIS written up anywhere without finding immediately underneath it some reference to “Heretics”—i.e. those who were against it. At first it was “A MURRAIN ON HERETICS.” Later it was to
become “DEATH TO TRAITORS.” Death in word and in fact.

At the Secretariat all was silence and emptiness. The Government by tradition spent the summer in the mountains and it would have been deemed loss of face to concede the necessity of staying in the capital for the trifling crises of the moment. There was nobody here to consult save the officer of the watch, so to speak, who was linked to Government House in Troodos by telephone. He had no views on the Proclamation, and appeared not to have been informed of its existence; he had no glosses to offer upon it, and contented himself with giving me detailed instructions as to how to reach my satrapy—the Public Information Office, which was then located opposite the law courts on the edge of the Turkish quarter, in an old building full of mirrors: a place which would have delighted Pierre Loti.

This too was closed and the staff on holiday, so I took myself by sunlight to the hospitable porch of Maurice Cardiff where I found him admonishing a vine which showed signs of escaping from its trellis. “Am I mad,” I asked him, “or is this Proclamation rather a risky thing to do?” He laughed. “We are all mad,” he said. “It’s clear you don’t understand Cyprus.”

“But seriously.”

“But seriously.”

“I mean if I were a nationalist leader longing to give UNO some examples of illiberality I would immediately provoke a demonstration and get several hundred
schoolboys locked up. It would be an admirable political gambit. Unless you think the Government is only blustering and would be too timid to act.”

“Worse than that. The Cypriots themselves are too stupid to take advantage of it. You’ll see.”

The phone rang and I was left pondering in the sunlight, inhaling the deep scent of magnolia blossom. He returned with a grimace and said: “You may see martyrs yet. The press has decided to go on strike for a week; there are to be demonstrations. Perhaps they’ll have some martyrs to take to UNO after all.”

These were depressing enough omens for a newly appointed official to ponder on. I was grateful that my duties were not to begin for a few weeks. I went down to the Turkish quarter and sat down among the carters and bus-drivers for a coffee and cognac in the very shadow of the Bedestan, the most haunting corner of Nicosia. Here I was joined by Stephanides and Glykis from the terrible class Epsilon Alpha. They appeared not to have heard of any Proclamation—but as neither enjoyed reading it was not surprising. “My father tells me The News at night,” said Stephanides, and added under his breath, “when he doesn’t drink too much.” He thought the world of his father.

I remembered how the old man one day, wiping his hands on his leather apron, had winked and said: “Enosis? Yes. I could settle it this afternoon. Cede the place to Greece on condition that you can lease it back for a hundred years at a nominal rent. Crown the King
in the Cathedral and tell everyone to shut up—
He’ll
do it for you.” It sounded easy, and yet in these days a comic opera solution would have been not beyond the bounds of possibility. But once it had become an International Problem … what then?

“Well,” said Glykis tilting back his cap and gazing up at the irrational beauty of a Gothic cathedral which sprouted tall minarets, symbolizing at a single blow the beauty of Cyprus which rests upon incongruities, “well! The Lusignans were here for three hundred years and Venice for eighty-two. The Turks stayed three hundred, the British seventy-eight. What does it all mean?” What indeed?

Lying across the sea-routes of the world she had always been the direct concern of any maritime power whose lines of life stretched across the inhospitable and warring East. Genoa, Rome, Venice, Turkey, Egypt, Phoenicia—through every mutation of history she was sea-born and sea-doomed. And now for us she was no longer the galleon she had been to Venice but an aircraft carrier: a ship-of-the-line. Could she be held? There was no doubt of it, if she must be; the problem was not there. It turned upon another point. Could she be held by
force
and not guile?—because in default of political accommodations we would find ourselves in the situation of Venice. I didn’t know.

Troublesome as gadflies, I chased away these thoughts with their annoying persistence, and turned my back on the capital and its buzzing coffeehouses,
taking the long curling road towards the Gothic range, its mountains drawn back like harps against the noontide sun. The bright uplifted blade of the sea greeted me as I pierced the blank stone wall of the pass, dispersing these gloomy intimations of a world outside this tangerine-scented sunshine which would so soon close down upon us with the ring of an iron door.

Escaping to Bellapaix was like entering a walled garden; on the last crown of the road there was a small reception committee of ardent nationalists aged about nine who danced along beside the car shouting: “Union” in heartrending accents, and never failing to add as my identity was established: “Yasu, neighbor.” They would race each other breathlessly to the Tree of Idleness in the hope of carrying a parcel up the hill for me—for my mother’s liberality in the matter of homemade cakes and doughnuts was by now proverbial. The last turn of the road was like coming to rest in a favorite painting, opposite the café under the great tree; for as the engine stammered into silence the massive volume of the Abbey’s quietness welled up around one like music, encapsulating the voices of the village, the clink of glasses, the slap of cards, or the more distant sound of ravens in the trees. And detaching themselves from the groups of quiet coffee-drinkers came my friends, one by one, to bring me a rose, or a new idea for tiles, or a letter which had just arrived.

At the house I found my brother had arrived with his wife and a mass of equipment—including everything
except bags of salt and colored beads to suborn the natives. He was somewhat aggrieved to find that I had buried him at Thermopylae but on the whole took its implications very well; after all, it meant free drinks, the proper reward for family heroism. The village rejoiced in his resurrection, and even Frangos was not so huffy about the deception as I had feared. Moreover, within a matter of days, he found to his own surprise that his Greek—which he had imagined gone—returned hand over fist, and this gave him direct access to the affections and understanding of our neighbors and friends. Moreover, with film and sound equipment, he now began an exhaustive survey of the village and its life so that everyone began to nourish absurd dreams of Hollywood contracts and stalk about with an air of deliberation, “acting”; even Mr. Honey whom I would never have dreamed was so frivolous.

It was time, too, for a change of domicile, for my new duties would forbid my being so far beyond the reach of a telephone; and though sorry to go, I was glad to surrender the house to my brother and to count on enjoying the weekends spent there. If my sadness was mixed with relief it was because I knew that the minute he started collecting the whole place would be alive with lizards, rats, snakes, and every foul creeping thing the Creator invented to make our lives uncomfortable here below. No one who has not smelt an owl at close quarters, or seen a lizard being sick, will have any idea what I mean!

Chapter Nine: The Satrap

No sparks in last year’s ashes
.

A fool throws a stone into the sea and

a hundred wise men cannot pull it out
.

If the stone falls on the egg, alas for the egg—

If the egg falls on the stone—alas for the egg
.

—Cypriot Greek proverbs

T
HE INFORMATION OFFICE
had a beguiling air of good-natured shabbiness, and its awkward mirrored rooms gave one the impression of entering an abandoned barber’s shop on the Rue Cherif Pacha in Cairo. I had been led to believe that much needed to be done, but I was unprepared to find so few of the means for doing it. My inheritance seemed in pitiable shape; a cellar full of discarded blocks and photographic equipment so shabby and moldering as to be a disgrace; an aged film van or two; a moribund
house-magazine; and various other odds and ends of little practical use. Absolutely no briefs save the Colonial Report a year out of date; and a mountain of posters showing pictures of the Queen decorating coal-black mammies with long-service medals—the very thing to make Greeks and Turks, with their color-bar, dance with rage.

But nobody bothered to hide its shortcomings, and these purely operational limitations were easy enough to remedy with a little time and money: but both were short, it seemed. “It’s customary to knock administrations,” said a colleague, soberly sucking his pipe. “But when you see the revenue you’ll understand that most of our troubles come from trying to live on our income. Anything we’ve borrowed has gone into long-term projects. Building for eternity, old man.”

Apart from these remediable deficiencies, however, there was another which caused me uneasiness: there were no policy files. There were mountainous files of factual reporting on districts and personalities. There was nothing vaguely resembling a policy line which one could study and interpret. For the first time I realized that we had no real policy, save that of offering constitutions whose terms made them unsuitable for acceptance, and of stonewalling on the central issue of sovereignty. This too was all right: Enosis had been a staple feature of Cyprus life since our arrival in Cyprus, and was likely to go on being so. Irrationalities of the kind did not deserve to exist—consequently Enosis
didn’t exist. The local radio station was forbidden to mention the Archbishop or his case on the air—an absurdity so patent that I could hardly credit it. Were the proceedings at UNO also going to remain unmentioned by the domestic radio—presumably UNO did not exist either? And what of its credit with our public—which I must say, to judge by the village, was quite high? Most of these points called for quick decisions which would have been easier to make had I been able to discover what the formulated policy on the island was. Should one for example behave as if the Greeks were Greeks? The Greek National Anthem—should it be played on Independence Day while Athens was broadcasting scurrilous and inflammatory material, inciting Greeks to rise?

There seemed to be no clear line on all this so I was forced to steer a course between vague amiabilities and reproaches for the time being; counsels of moderation borne upon the wings of hope. I based everything upon Anglo-Greek amity, sure that at least here one had a responsive chord which could be touched, sure, too in my own mind that here was a foundation strong enough to allow a real policy to be constructed over it.

My fellow-satraps (“Wicked Satraps of the Cyprus Government”—Athens Radio) were an amiable and good-tempered crowd, liberal in instinct and scrupulously fair in their general dealings with the world; but they saw no undue cause for urgency or brainwork on policy matters. They embodied the remorseless weight
with which the Commonwealth moves down its appointed grooves, governed by the law of inertia. It is absurd to expect the qualities of ballet dancers in public servants or to despair when one doesn’t find them.

One of the slogans of the day was “Potterism,” an opprobrious expression coined by a bibulous and witty journalist, a frequent visitor to the island whose articles never failed to cause me concern, though they were never quite so clever as his private strictures on us all. He maintained that all administrators belonged to a cohort of mindless and faceless men who should either be numbered or described collectively as “Peter Potter, O. B. E.” “It’s Potter again,” he would cry, on being informed of some stroke of policy or some new government statement. “It’s that man again.” Potterism, according to him, was characterized by the semidetached mind, and all Potters were rock-cake and lemonade administrators, small-car aficionados, sambo-rulers—and heaven only knows what else. It is easy to criticize, but harder to turn the other cheek, and while I accepted these broadsides on behalf of my fellow-satraps I returned them whenever I could, aiming a shaft or two at the press corps. A Press Officer is, after all, the administration’s whipping-boy, and after years of press work I had grown the skin of a rhinoceros so that even the persistent attacks on me in the local English paper were hardly more than amusing.

There was so much to do that there was no time for ill temper, though now and again I was snappy from
sheer fatigue. The basic problem was to convince the administration that the situation might easily become an emergency; this was no time to jog along. But this I completely failed to do. I found myself imprisoned in the rigidified formulae of the Colonial Office. With the best will in the world (and there were many people ready to cut red tape and take swift personal decisions) it was impossible to make headway through the Sargasso Sea of paper in which we were entangled—all of us, not least the Governor. The submission of estimates, the minuting of files, the endless committee-meetings, were galling to someone who had just seen the Archbishop preaching in Saint John’s, and heard the ominous growling of the crowd. Public disorder was gradually mounting, octave by octave, and it was obvious that the need to contain it would soon be forcing active decisions upon us. The Archbishop had just held an island-wide ceremony at which he had formally and deliberately committed sedition from the pulpit. The Government had saved its face by quibbling over interpretations of the Sedition Law, obviously dismayed by the sharp reactions to the Proclamation from the world press—upholders of free speech (when it pays). Worst of all, the stormy petrels of journalism were beginning to arrive and there was not a stitch of background material with which to feed them; I set the whole staff to dredging for factual data from the various departments, many of whose directors were on leave or absent for conferences. Briefing proceeded by
word of mouth, and here at least I had reason to congratulate myself, for by an inspired stroke the Colonial Secretary had appointed an officer to me whose brains and initiative were exceptional—Achilles Papadopoulos. He was typical of the best Cypriot product; one of three brothers, he came from the poverty-stricken village of Pitsillia in the hills. His father, a grey dignified old peasant, used to visit us sometimes, just for the pleasure of gazing at his son who had reached such dizzy heights of success in the Government as even to be decorated. Achilles loved the old man, as indeed we all did, and always made him comfortable on a chair and ordered him a black coffee. Each of the three sons was remarkable in his own line; for the elder and the younger both occupied positions of respectability. Whenever I was assailed on the subject of Potterism I could not help thinking that a system cannot be entirely bad if it has provided a career for such brilliant and hard-working boys as Achilles, who in one generation had stepped from the peasantry into what passed in Cyprus for the gentry. He was well worth his place in the ranks of the satraps and throughout this difficult period handled the bulk of the work, though he was new to it, with intelligence and precision. He also wrote lucid and unexceptionable English, which was a relief.