Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (31 page)

The narrow streets of the little village were empty and most of the shops closed, save for the coffeehouse
in the main square where half a dozen farmers sat before their morning coffee idly scanning the newspapers of yesterday. This peaceful and traditional scene was only belied by the heavily sandbagged police station with its stalwart Commando guarding the front door, his keen blue eyes in a brown face turned towards us in hostile curiosity, one finger on the trigger of his Sten. His alertness was comforting; when I waved at him he smiled and waved his hand back at me, comforted perhaps by a familiarly English face among so many dark ones. “How I wish,” said Panos, turning an admiring eye upon the young soldier, “things were normal. But they won’t be.” He shook his head and sighed deeply. “For a long time yet, my friend, unless … unless …” But he shook his head. “They won’t take us seriously until the hotheads gain control. Look, oleanders. It is too early for snakes is it not? I thought I caught a glimpse of one.”

A few miles beyond the village, after a series of vertiginous loops and dips of the road, one finds great bunkers of sand shored up against the road—a quarter of a mile from the beach. The carobs and olives hereabout stand a couple of feet deep in the drifts which year by year move inland, smothering the light scrub and holm-oak in brown suffocating dunes. The whole great Pachyammos beach is marching inland, though precisely why I cannot tell. But these dunes athwart the road are a godsend for builders who send out lorries to collect the sand for use in Kyrenia; and here we
came upon Sabri, sitting unmoved under a carob in a red shirt and grey trousers, while a grunting team of young Turks filled a lorry for him. We stopped and he came delightedly across to talk to us. Panos and he were old familiars, if not actually cronies, and it was warming to see the genuine friendliness between them. They were co-villagers first, and the link of the village was stronger here, on neutral ground, so to speak, than any differences of race or belief. “Are you buying more houses?” he asked, and the smiling Panos answered for me. “Never without your help. No, we are going to gather wild flowers.” Sabri said: “I am gathering money,” nodding towards his little team of workers in their colored head-cloths. “We poor men,” he added wryly, “cannot take the day off when we wish.” He was busy building a big house for an English lady, he added. “It is not arty like yours, my dear, but rather
posh
, as you say.” I knew exactly what he meant. It would be called “Auchinlech.”

We sat for a while in the warm sand under the ancient carob tree, trading a sip of our wine against a couple of rosy pomegranates which he had stolen from a wall in Kasaphani, while the sunny morning began to make the foothills glow and tremble in the humidity, and the old grey crocodile-skin of Buffavento turned to violet. The moon was still in the sky, pale and bloodless. Somewhere in the thin blue beyond the range of eyesight a plane cracked and re-cracked the sound-barrier and sent a wave of thunder flowing over the hills.
“Bombs?” said Sabri comfortably—in the warmth and contentment of that perfect morning it was impossible to make such a word sound any different from the word “lizards” or “wildflowers.” Panos turned and yawned. Our own silence surrounded us like a cocoon, softly woven by the briny air which climbed the hot dunes to stir the breathing shadows under the carobs. “Summer is beginning,” said a Turkish youth, wiping the sweat from his dark brows with the end of a colored head-cloth. It was quite an effort to tear ourselves away from these warm dunes and follow the little signpost which said “Klepini,” but Panos s thirst for cyclamens was not to be denied, and so we reluctantly turned the little car off the main road and began the slow ascent upon the less kindly surface of the village road.

Though it was only a few hundred feet up we had moved into different air. The faint luminous tremble of damp had gone from the sky, and the sea which rolled below us among the silver-fretted screen of olives was green now, green as a Homeric adjective. The foothills began here, and the village itself lay higher up on a platform of reddish sandstone, remote and smiling. And here were the cyclamens and anemones we sought—sheets and sheets of them glittering like young snow, their shallow heads moving this way and that in the sea-wind so that the fields appeared at first sight to be populated by a million butterflies.

“What did I tell you?” said Panos, catching his breath with pleasure as we breasted the slope and rolled
down the shady inclines among the trees to come to rest noiselessly on the thick felt of green. We sat with the engine switched off, listening to the wind among the trees, silent. Reality was so far in excess of expectation that we were suddenly deprived of all desire to pick the flowers which dusted these quiet terraces to a starscape—thick as the Milky Way. One could not walk among them without doing them damage. Panos sighed deeply and puffed his cigarette, indulging the relish of his eyes as they traveled across the enchanted slopes whose familiarity had never once staled for him in fifteen years of repetition. “Embroidery,” he said under his breath in Greek, and with his hand followed the soft contour of the hills, as one might run one’s hand affectionately over the flanks of a favorite horse. “I knew that last thunderstorm would do the trick.”

We unpacked our hamper, placing it on a great smooth stone, and walked slowly to the edge of the cliff, to look down the coast towards Akanthou with its brilliant yellows and sere browns where the corn and barley grew wave upon wave. And as we walked across the carpet of flowers their slender stalks snapped and pulled around our boots as if they wished to pull us down into the Underworld from which they had sprung, nourished by the tears and wounds of the immortals. Here the trees perched upon the clear rock walls which their roots had penetrated, overhanging the valleys where the rooks turned and cawed in the wind, ruffled by the slightest air current. And beneath
it all, drawn in long quivering strokes across the middle distance, swam the green sea, the opiate and legend of Europe, drawing itself like a bow back and forth upon the steely Taurus which flanked our horizon in and bound the earth to the sky in tempering the magnificence of both.

My companion was silent now, as he climbed into the branches of a tree to look down with delight upon the rolling relief map below with its bearded curves of lowland falling downwards at one corner to the sea-line, and then climbing and sweeping away towards the sky-blue edges of the world where the Karpass threw up its snouts of stone, and the boundaries of the peninsula were marked by the crash of water on stone and the plumes of spray turning in the air. “I shall be sixty next year,” said Panos, “what a pleasure it is to get old.”

The white wine tasted sharp and good and as he raised his glass Panos gave me the toast of the day: “That we may pass beyond” (i.e. the present troubles) “and that we might emerge once more in the forgotten Cyprus—as if through a looking glass.” In a way, too, he was toasting a dying affection which might never be revived—one of those bright dreams of deathless friendship which schoolboys still believed in, of an England and Greece which were bondsmen in the spirit.

How stupid such figments sound to the politicians and how vital they are to young nations!

“You know,” said Panos quietly, “I received a threatening letter from EOKA—a second-grade letter.”

“How do you mean—second-grade?”

“There are different types. First there is just a warning letter. Then there is a letter with a black dagger and a definite death-threat, which encloses a razorblade. That is what I got. I expect one of my pupils decided to get his own back by trying to frighten me.”

“What would they have against you?”

Panos poured himself another glass of wine and watched his cigarette-smoke disperse in the still air. He was still absently smiling with his eyes, as if at the memory of our first glimpse of Klepini with its petal-starred glades. “My dear fellow, how should I know? In these situations everyone informs on everyone else. There is no circumstance of my private life not open to view.”

“Perhaps because I stayed with you—though I haven’t visited you more than once since the serious trouble started.”

“I know. I guessed why and I was grateful.”

“Then why did you come out today?”

He stood up and dusted the chalk-marks off his sleeve. He heaved a long sigh. “Because I wanted to. Life is going to be intolerable enough with all these curfews and fines and strikes; it would be unendurable if one had to obey the dictates of the hotheads. And besides, I am only one of dozens who have received such letters, and nothing has happened to them.”

“But I am a Government Official.”

“Yes, that is true.”

“They might suspect you of giving information.”

“What do I know? Nothing. It is true I am not as patriotic as most people, though I believe that Enosis is right and must one day come; I am a Greek, after all, and Cyprus is as Greek as … Vouni. But of course I shrink from violence though I see that it will certainly bring Enosis sooner than polite talk will.”

“How do you mean?” He stretched himself upon the rock now, face downward, and thrust out his hands until his fingers were buried in the dense clumps of anemones. “O Lord!” he said, “I promised myself not to talk politics. But sometimes you ask such silly questions. Can’t you see? First there was no Cyprus problem. Then a few bangs followed and you agreed there was a problem, but that it couldn’t be solved ever. More bangs followed. Then you agree to try and solve it, but in fact only to bedevil it further. Meanwhile however EOKA has seen that a few bombs could change your inflexible ‘Never’ to ‘sometime’; now they feel they have a right to provoke an answer to the question ‘When?’ They are not politically as stupid as the authorities believe them to be. They have, in fact, very much shaken the British position and they realize it. The peasants of your village have two little proverbs which illustrate the present state of Cyprus perfectly. Of a stupid man they say ‘He thought he could beat his wife without
the neighbors hearing.’ In this case the neighbors are your own Labour Party, UNO, and many others; we are provoking you to beat us so that our cries reach their ears. Then, from another point of view, your operations against the terrorists must be conducted across the body of the Cyprus people—like a man who has to hit an opponent through the body of the referee. As you say in Bellapaix, ‘He can’t gather the honey without killing the bees.’ How, then, can you gather the honey of a peaceful Cyprus?”

We began to gather great bunches of the flowers now and stow them in the wicker basket; and while I carefully dug out the bulbs I needed for my garden Panos contented himself more easily, winding his cool wet stems about with the broad leaves of the arum lily. “We could go on like this for weeks,” he said, “and even today if we worked at it we couldn’t make any impression on the field.” He was walking about from point to point as he picked his flowers, matching the various shades as he did so, composing each handful with a skill that showed practice. I could already see them glowing in the blue Lapithos vases which decorated a shelf in the kitchen, strategically placed beyond the reach of his children. After they had gone to bed he would take the flowers down and place them before him as he fell to work upon the great piles of grey copy-books with their school essays in spidery Greek straggling over the pages; and sighing, pause for a moment to refresh the “eyes of his mind,” as he said, with a glimpse, in them, of the Klepini groves.

We picked and picked until the back of the car was brimming with flowers—”like a village marriage” as Panos said—and then sank back upon our thrones of granite to unpack the bread and the meat.

The sun was approaching mid-heaven and the great lion pads of rock among the foothills were already throwing forward their reflections of shadow. Panos put away his spectacles and fell to cutting up the coarse brown loaf, saying as he did so: “On days like this, in places like these, what does it all matter? Nationality, language, race? These are the invention of the big nations. Look below you and repeat the names of all the kings who have reigned over the kingdoms of Cyprus; of all the conquerors who have set foot here—even the few of whom written records exist! What does it matter that
we
are now alive, and
they
dead—we have been pushed forward to take our place in the limelight for a moment, to enjoy these flowers and this spring breeze which … am I imagining it?… tastes of lemons, of lemon blossom.”

As he spoke there came the sound of a shot among the olive-groves, the echoes of which rolled about for a while on the range, sinking and diminishing as if they described the contours of the land in sound; then the silence closed in again, and everything was still save for the rustling foliage in the trees around us. We looked at each other for a long second. “I thought the shotguns were all in,” I said; he smiled and relaxed his pose as he lit a cigarette. “It was a
shotgun all right,” he said, “and quite near.” With a sudden soughing of wings three jackdaws passed over our heads, as if alarmed by something in the valley beneath. “Last year one would not have turned one’s head,” said Panos with a chuckle, “and look at us. It’s some poor fellow shooting at crows to keep them off his fields.”

A small foreshortened figure now appeared at the cliff-edge and stood looking down the slope towards us. He had a shotgun under one arm, and he appeared to be listening as he watched us. I said nothing, and without his spectacles Panos “had no horizons” as he always said in Greek. “There is a man,” I said quietly, and as I spoke the figure started to stroll towards us at a leisurely pace, holding his uncocked gun in the crook of his arm. As he came nearer I saw that he was dressed in the conventional rig of a village farmer and wore a game-bag at his belt. His heavy brown snake-boots with their corded tops made no sound in the deep grass. Through the open neck of his shirt I caught a glimpse of the heavy flannel sweatshirt that all peasants made a point of wearing, summer or winter. He walked slowly towards us across the glade at a deliberate and unhurried pace, only stopping for a few seconds every ten paces, the better to eye us. “He is coming this way,” I said. Panos did not put on his spectacles, but propped his chin with his hands, and began to swear under his breath. I had never heard him use bad language before. “I swear,” he explained, “at the humiliation of having to
feel afraid in the presence of an unknown man—a sensation so foreign to Cyprus as to be quite frightening in itself, the very idea of it. God! what have we come to?”