Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (30 page)

The life of the towns endured the new climate of affairs with the same deceptive normality—the smiles and gestures of impenitent friendliness were fewer, but they were still there, the last fragile handclasp of parting. Only my little village lay obstinately outside the frame of things, saturated by the smoke of wood fires in an early autumn, its inhabitants drowsing away the noons at their spindles. But they were no longer talking village affairs, weddings, baptisms, for the radio bulletins poured in upon them, drenching them with news they might never have known of searches and curfews and killings in the various quarters of the island. Then, too, masked men had visited them to collect arms, frightening the wits out of them. “I thought they were Easter mummers,” said Anthemos, “and then I became afraid of the firelight shining on their masks. They said: ‘Dighenis wants all the shotguns.’ They were armed. What could we do? We handed them over—all except Petro who had hidden his. They were not from here, you know. Nobody recognized them. They came in a car and left it on the threshing-floor.”

I met Andreas sitting in a corner of Clitos little cave, hunched up over his drink and silent. At my greeting he turned a vacant weary face to me and tried to smile. He looked shrunk up and all of a sudden much older.
He said in a whisper: “The boy has gone. Said he was going to the mountains. I tried to keep hold on him—what could I do? There are no schools, and always this business of strikes and riots. He has changed very much. You know, I was going to come in to your office and ask you if you couldn’t get him arrested as a terrorist—put away somewhere safely. But Dmitri’s bus wasn’t going. Anyway I didn’t have the money. And also I was torn, you understand, trying to understand if I was right or wrong. Now they will catch him and kill him.” Tears came into his eyes. He swallowed them down and smiled as Clito came over with a bottle of brandy. He had told nobody, it seemed, and telling me was in its way a relief. He cheered up a little after a couple of brandies, and we walked down the little twisted streets to the harbor arm-in-arm.

“How different it was,” he said, seeing the long row of parked lorries and the crowded spit of sand which was all Kyrenia had in the way of a beach. “But praise be, the village is still the same, neighbor. It hasn’t changed. And even you can come there and find everything quiet.” But for how long, I wondered?

Christmas came with its cloudy skies and the skirling rain, bringing new tones to the Gothic range, making us forget the long painful nights of tedium with their sporadic excitements and alarms. The gradually growing pressures upon the terrorists began to react upon the civil population, upon industry, business and entertainment. Curfews plunged the old town in
darkness no less than the bloody incidents which were now an almost daily feature of our lives. Roadblocks with their laborious searches began to fragment the clumsy road haulage systems upon which local industry relied to feed the villages and the ports. Tourism flickered fitfully for a while, and then went out. Stage by stage the island became an armed camp, spreading the sense of suffocation in restricted movement, passes and permits, limitations on traffic; and in the wake of the bonny soldiers came the contract police—big heads, big feet, and big appetites. Pistols became part of the
tenue de ville
—what every well-dressed man must wear; bulging like pouter pigeons, sagging at the buttocks, dragging at the shape of coat-pockets and trousers. Bulpit, Gorge, and Piles; Dubbin, Bulk, and Shove; we laid our pistols on the bar of the Homer Palace and called for a double with the air of bing-bing artists in a Western. Visitors from Kenya and Malaya, and those who pined for the Mandate, found themselves breathing familiar air. There was nothing left to recognize in Nicosia now—the old town shuttered, dark and dead, the joints outside its walls swollen with new faces. Most of the poppy-shallow cabaret girls had gone, too, and those who remained only did so presumably because they could not resist the thrill of feeling a pistol pressed against them as they danced.

Outside all this hubbub, secure in the mastery of his craft, the Field Marshal sat before the great wall map in Government House—its loose leaves covering the first
yellowing field survey of the island by that other soldier of fame—Kitchener. Absolutely composed, contained, with his eye (that fresh francolin’s eye) upon the invisible enemy in the mountains. Of his three handsome A.D.C.s the third was now Richard Lumley, basking in the unexpected glory of an appointment he so well deserved. But one could not visit the Governor in his cockpit at Government House without being impressed by that matchless concentration based in repose.

In the whipping rain upon the blank promontory where Marie’s half-finished house stood, I walked by the thundering sea mentally recreating those long lamp-lit evenings of calm argument over Clito’s wine, or those walks by high moonlight to the lonely mosque of the Seven Sleepers whose history nobody knew, but who slumbered under the green holiness of their flags in the bubble-domed mosque, conscious perhaps of the moonlight (so dense was it) as it soaked through the white plaster to their very bones.

It was time to leave Cyprus, I knew, for most of the swallows had gone, and the new times with their harsher climates were not ours to endure. My contract still had several months to run, however, and it would be wiser to let it lapse than to hurry away and perhaps give the Greek press grounds for believing that I had resigned on policy grounds, which would have been unfair to my masters. But Maurice was leaving soon and Sarah—and the precious circle of friends which
had composed and framed my own personal picture of the island, had given it density and beauty. Austen and Pearce came and went at their swallow-like tasks of house-building in other, more favorable climates. Freya came through for a few days on her way to Turkey. And Sir Harry, to whom the island meant more than it could to any Cypriot, bound up as it was with his own youth. We lunched quietly on a deserted beach to the west of Kyrenia, drinking the good red wine labeled incongruously “Ace of Hearts,” and eating a
moussaka
for old time’s sake while the old unchanging sea rushed and hissed upon the pebbled shore. How could he find the times through which we were passing anything but incomprehensible and inexpressibly painful? In his memory he was still sitting upon the famous keep at Famagusta, watching the sea uncurl and flex itself, yawn and stretch like a heraldic lion of Saint Mark, in the year 1918. What could I tell him that would afford him any comfort? His mind’s eye was still full of a forgotten sleepy Cyprus with its old-fashioned kindnesses and haunting white villages. The island that he knew so intimately and loved so much was soon going to pass through the eye of a needle—with no Kingdom of Heaven waiting for it on the other side.

They came and went, and much of the old magic was still there for them to experience—for there were still lulls, empty days, full moons which were bombless. One needs about a month to catch the particular flavor of terrorism which is made up of quite intangible
fears—feet running down a road at midnight, a silent man in a white shirt standing at a street-corner holding a bicycle too small for him, a parked car with no lights, a factory door ajar, the flick of a torch in a field. Terrorism infects the normal transactions of life. The horror of deliberate murder, of ambush or grenade, is at least purging—the pity and the terror are in them, and the conciseness of actions which can be met. But the evil genius of terrorism is suspicion—the man who stops and asks for a light, a cart with a broken axle signaling for help, a forester standing alone among trees, three youths walking back to a village after sundown, a shepherd shouting something indistinctly heard by moonlight, the sudden pealing of a doorbell in the night. The slender chain of trust upon which all human relations are based is broken—and this the terrorist knows and sharpens his claws precisely here; for his primary objective is not battle. It is to bring down upon the community in general a reprisal for his wrongs, in the hope that the fury and resentment roused by punishment meted out to the innocent will gradually swell the ranks of those from whom he will draw further recruits. Here is the dangerous ground, for the margin of effect is a narrow one; the theory of collective responsibility worked out in terms of fines, arrests, curfews, can only run for a length of time, and will build up opposing pressures to match those applied to a situation. In other words, the use of force might prove as sterile for us as the political expedients we had tried in the past, building up before
the bows of the Government a heavier and heavier wave of opposition with each succeeding drive forward. I could not judge the truth of this for myself, I hoped it would not be so; but it seemed that the great danger in the measures I foresaw our having to take might be, precisely, the creation of Greeks where before there had only been Cypriot Greeks—for if we were not fighting Greece itself we were certainly fighting the spirit of Greece. And in this I did not foresee an easy resolution, with Athens so near and symbolized so vividly by the very type of insurrection which the Cypriots had planned and were executing. Lulls, yes, and fair periods—perhaps even lasting for years; but finally the obstinate problem would reassert itself in one form or another. And there was no political solution offering more than half of what each of the three nations wanted! Cyprus had really become a dangerously weak spot in the NATO alliance.

There was, in a sense, no novelty in the steady progression of events from this point forward, though the details impacted forcefully on the dramatic world of the press, full of vivid and confused coloring: as with bacteria the slide must be stained if one is to see the object under the microscope—but perhaps I have used the wrong metaphor. It would have been better to borrow one from the techniques photographers use to “blow up” a negative. But seen objectively, from the other end of the corridor—from the Cyprus which I had known two years before—the image changed. The
outlines of all that we know as civic life grew hazy with the Habeas Corpus Act lying suspended, Communist and Enotist alike behind bars, and the press under restriction; this was a state at war with itself.

Terrorism itself began to spread rather than to diminish—an ominous clue to the temper of things; and to the nauseating foulness of the street-murder of soldiers and policeman was added the disgusting, and typically Balkan, murder of civilians suspected of being traitors. Apart from this of course there was many an old score settled in the name of Enosis. The black mask was protection enough. “When you give a chap a mask and a pistol,” said Wren thoughtfully, showing that by now he was fully abreast of the Mediterranean temperament, “the first thing he does is bump someone he owes money to before getting on with more ethnic business.” He had become—we had all become—bitter.

But this disgraceful hunt for unarmed civilians who were shot down like rabbits in church, at the coffeehouse, even in hospital, drove the last effective wedge between myself and my villagers whose obstinate and unwavering friendship had not faltered. It did not even now. With the old Cypriot obstinacy they still walked to Kyrenia to post me a wedding-invitation—I had on an average one a week—lest I should think that anything had changed. But now it was I who did not dare to go, for informers were everywhere and I could not bear to think of Andreas or Frangos or fat Anthemos
having to answer for “treachery.” Yet still the invitations came, there came flowers and mandarins and bulbs; and still Andreas the “seafarer” came to discuss the merits of concrete brick, though the balcony was finished. Wherever I met a villager I was welcomed with a cry and a handshake—even on a lonely road beyond Fam agusta which was an eerie enough place for a Greek to be seen talking to a foreigner in a car. And then Panos was shot dead. He had walked out for a breath of air at dusk, through the winding narrow streets near the harbor. The walls around wore the familiar autograph of Dighenis though I doubt if Dighenis himself pressed the trigger of the pistol which killed him.

Two days before we had spent the day together out at Marie’s headland at his own request; he was anxious to study the ambitious tree-planting program she had begun, and I for my part was glad of advice as I did not quite trust her factotum Janis, and made a point, while she was away, of keeping an eye on the trees. It was a warm cloudless morning, and we set off in high good spirits for there had been a full two-day lull in bomb-incidents and killings and the warm lassitude of the island had begun, as always, to fill one with the illusion of a peace which now lay far back in memory, in a prehistoric era of the consciousness it seemed, yet was always ready to be revived by such a lull in operations. Clito had loaned us a wicker-covered demijohn full of white wine, while Panos’s own salad-garden had provided lettuce and cucumber and slender shallots. A
loaf of the rough brown peasant wholemeal and some slices of cold beef topped off the supply which we calculated would last us all day. With this provender loaded we tanked up the car and set off through the silvery olive groves to Saint Epictetus, across the peaceful green flanks of the Gothic range, now drowsing in the warm sunlight of a spring morning, and crisply etching its delicate outlines upon a clear blue sky. The great cliffs which crowned the range gleamed brown-gold as loaves. “Where to?” I said, for I had promised him a private visit or two before we made our way down to the headland. “Klepini,” he said. “My calendar tells me the cyclamen will be starting.” Panos had his own favorite nooks and corners of the range, familiar from years of walking about it—just as a lover will have favorite places in which to plant an expected kiss—the nape of the neck, or the curve of a pectoral muscle; moreover he carried in his head a veritable flower-calendar which told him, almost to the day, that the almond blossom would be out in Carmi, or the dog-roses above Lapithos. In his memory he carried a living flower-map of the range, and knew where best to go for his anemones and cyclamens, his ranunculuses and marigolds. Nor was he ever wrong.

As a concession to the sunshine he wore an open-necked shirt; but nothing, not even an August heatwave, could have persuaded him to wear anything but his rusty old black suit with its chalk marked sleeves. As we rolled along the coast-road he exclaimed
delightedly at every glimpse of the sea through the carobs and olives, puffing at his cigarette, his spectacles gleaming. “Today we shall forget everything—even the situation, eh?” he smiled, settling himself firmly in the front seat with the air of a man determined upon pleasure, whatever it may cost. I did not tell him that I had a small radio under the front seat, and that I would have to keep in touch with the news bulletins to see whether or not there might be a sudden call for my services which would send me racing back to the capital. The dreadful tug of my work was still there—yet in this benignly slumbering morning we seemed to be far from the bondage of politics or war. The little pistol itself seemed an anachronism in all this pastoral blue and yellow—the young barley struggling to its feet upon the tobacco-colored winter fields. We ran on round the loops and curls of the road, the sea marching bravely with us, until we came to the little village dedicated by its name to a saint about whom nobody knew anything. Epictetus the philosopher might have been intended, but the ascription is doubtful; it is more likely that some rock hermit with the same temperamental predisposition as Saint Hilarion had lived and died there, bequeathing in the memory of his name something of the austerity and pain of a solitary life to which the villager could cling as a symbol for holiness.