Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (32 page)

I did not answer, for the strange man was standing still, indulging in one of his regular little pauses. He had a large square head with a thatch of greying hair upon it. The wide wings of his black moustache were swept back and up from his mouth. He cocked a barrel of his shotgun now with a clumsy sort of gesture, intended no doubt to be unobtrusive. The sound of the hammer clicking back was quite audible—like someone cracking his knucklebones. “Measure for measure,” I said, and slipped the little pistol under the napkin on my knee, consoled by the cold butt under my fingers and at the same time disgusted—for Panos’s sake. He observed the gesture and made a wry mouth. “That won’t be much use,” he said. I went on eating my sandwich and watching the newcomer lazily out of the corner of my eye. He had stopped now and stood undecidedly beside the trunk of a carob tree. “Ho there,” he called in a deep hoarse voice, and I knew at once from his tone that we had nothing to fear. Sticking the pistol still wrapped in the napkin back into the basket I raised the demijohn of wine and gave him the traditional Cypriot greeting. “Kopiaste—sit down and join us.” He relaxed at once, uncocked his gun, and stood it against the tree before walking over to us.

“Why Sir Teacher,” he said reproachfully as he took Panos’s hand. “Why did you not say it was you?” Then
he turned his dark curious eye upon me and explained gruffly, “The Sir Teacher stood godfather to my second son.” Panos was now sitting up and putting on his glasses the better to enter into the spirit of recognition. “Why Dmitri Lambros,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been shooting crows,” replied the newcomer, with a flash of white teeth in a face as dark as a plum cake. “I know it’s forbidden,” he added as if to forestall an inevitable question. “But up here …” he waved a hand in the direction of the mountain, “we are so far away. You can hear a car as it turns off the highroad at the bottom of the hill. Plenty of time to put it away.” He winked and with a brief word of thanks raised his glass with a friendly nod at me before drinking deeply and exhaling his breath in a rapturous “Ah! that was good.” He wiped his rough brown hands with their ragged nails on his thighs before accepting the hunk of bread and meat which Panos offered him, asking as he did so, the dozen conventional questions which, like the opening moves of a game, must be made before any real conversation can begin in peasant Greek. His naturalness and the frank roughness of his glance were pleasing, and I could see from Panos’s expression that he held the man in good esteem. In his game-bag reposed three bedraggled and crumpled corpses of the jackdaws against which he had been waging war, and these he showed us with some pride. “I’ve got a good eye,” he explained.

“How are things up at the village?” asked Panos, and I was not surprised to hear him answer “Quiet as the grave” for the village was far more secluded among the foothills even than my own. “Of course,” he added after a moment, “we’ve got one or two of Them. They watch us. But so far there has been nothing. But of course if the English hang this boy Karaolis.…” Panos interrupted him gravely to say: “The Kurios is English,” and Lambros turned upon me a pair of dark sweet eyes, full of a sort of bravado. “I guessed—in fact I have seen him down at the land where the Desposini Maria is building a house, have I not? And her man Janis is my cousin. So you see, nothing can be hidden in Cyprus!” He lit a cigarette swiftly and deftly and sat back on his haunches blowing out the smoke with a long exhalation of rare pleasure. “Why is there so much feeling about Karaolis,” I said, “since everyone knows he was guilty?” He looked thoughtfully at the ground and then raised his face to mine, gazing earnestly into my eyes. “Guilty but not culpable,” he said. “What he did was for Enosis not for gain. He is a good boy.” I sighed: “This is wordplay. Suppose a Turk Hassan killed someone on behalf of Volkan and then said it was for Enosis.” He stroked his moustache with the backs of his fingers. “The Turks are cowards,” he said. Panos sighed. “Don’t be a twisted stick, Dmitri, it is true what the Kurios says. Crime is crime whatever the motive.” The man shook his head slowly from side to side like a bull and gazed up through lowered eyebrows. His
mind refused the jump; Karaolis was a young hero. Once again I could not help remarking how absent was any conception of abstract guilt—abstract justice. Who could discern in the thought-processes of a modern Greek the exercise of a logic which was Socratic? They thought like Persian women, capriciously, waywardly, moving from impulse to impulse, completely under the domination of mood. Had Karaolis been killed outright he would still have been canonized as a martyr but everyone would have accepted the fact and shrugged it off—to get shot is part of the penalty for shooting. A martyr no less, his death would have been accepted as part of the hazard of ordinary life. But the long-winded processes of the European juridical system were an intolerable bore, an incomprehensible rigmarole to a people which valued action first and the pallid reflections thrown by its moral values afterwards. Here, they thought, comes the old hypocritical Anglo-Saxon mania for trying to justify injustice. The boy was a hero, and they were trying to slip a noose about his heroism. “We know the truth,” he said, setting his jaw obstinately, and Panos glanced at me with a twinkle and an expression which said: “Argument on this topic is useless.” I knew it was.

We changed the subject now before it bred a taciturnity and ill-nature which would have been foreign to this chance meeting among the carob trees, and spoke about village affairs which were nearer to his heart. Helen and Maria, the daughters of the schoolmaster,
had married last week, and their wedding was the most sumptuous they had had in the village for years. The wine flowed like a canal. “Even now after five days my head rings with the wine,” he said smiling, rubbing his chin with a tanned hand. It had been like old times. And in the afternoon some English people had come to look at the church; at first the children shouted “EOKA” and were inclined to throw stones, but when they found the strangers spoke a little Greek and were “gentle” everyone felt rather ashamed. So while they were in the church the children gathered flowers for the lady and they left with bundles of them in their arms, smiling. “Such are the children of my village,” he said proudly, thrilling at the mere thought of hospitality upheld in the face of intense antagonism. Then he added, turning to me: “Such are the Greeks.” I knew this too.

The sun was in mid-heaven now, and the wine low. It seemed a crime to leave the cool deep grass and the shady trees; but if Panos was to see Marie’s land we should be on the move. “Dmitri,” said Panos, whose mind was still busy with his flower-calendar, “there is a favor I must ask of you.” The man smiled delightedly. “Anything, Sir Teacher,” he said, pronouncing the most revered title in vernacular Greek with pride. “You know the little ruined mill above the village? There is a glade there by the stream where the mushrooms grow. Set some of your famous children to pick me a basketful and bring them when next you come to Kyrenia, will you? And tell them I will send them sweets in
exchange.” “With the greatest pleasure,” said Lambros standing up and pitching away his cigarette.

I turned the car while Panos packed the food away in the hamper and gazed ruefully at the demijohn. “It’s amazing,” he said. “We’ve drunk nearly half. Let us have one more glass for the parting.” We stood in a circle under the great carob and raised our glasses. “Health,” cried Lambros, and we echoed him; and then, as if anxious to provide a phrase which would bridge the unhappy gap between himself and the hated-loved foreigner, he stuck out his hand to take mine and said, “All will be well one day.” “All will be well,” I echoed.

He retrieved his gun and stood in full sunlight to watch us go, one hand raised in salutation. I let in the clutch and the car rolled smoothly down the gradient towards the sea, its tires crunching on the bony gravels and ribbed stones of the village road. It was quite hot now and the mountains had turned pale and feathery as the ground-mists reached them from the damp plain. At the last hump before we joined the main road I paused for a minute to watch the long carved coastline stretch away into the haze, trembling and altering in the bluish afternoon as the light of a star will. Saint Epictetus lay below us with its white belfries and cubist houses; just beyond the long stone tongue of land on which Maries house had already begun to grow up, gleamed fitfully.

Sabri was still smoking under his carob on the main road. He waved to us and shouted: “There’s a search on down the road. In Saint Epictetus.”

“They will be looking for arms,” said Panos quietly. This also had become a feature of our lives, an expected and normal part of the daily routine.

We rolled on down the green and sinuous roads while Panos peered into the dry beds of torrents to spot flowering hibiscus and oleander below the dusty culverts. After so many years he undoubtedly knew every bush, every individual clump of lentisk or sage, so that our journey was sharpened at every turn by the expectations of his memory. On the last curve but one before the little village, which lies among flowering trees, secretively folded in upon itself, we saw the first soldier. High on a bluff above us, standing lazily against the sun, with his Sten slung loosely in the crook of his arm and his red beret gleaming like a cherry among the silver olives. I raised a thumb in racial recognition and he smiled, jerking his own laconic thumb in the direction of the village and then patting the air lightly as if to say “Go slowly.” Panos took a childish delight in soldiers and unerringly recognized him as a Parachutist. “The new Kingdoms of Cyprus,” he said, “are made up of principalities where berets of different colors rule—green for the mountains, red and black for the Gothic range. We are getting used to them.” The idea gave him pleasure. Nor was he disposed to be peevish when we came upon a roadblock in the shape of a barbed wire hurdle manned by a couple of stalwart children who did not look above eighteen; one stood by with a rifle while the other came forward and saluting politely took my identification papers. His
broad southern accent and shock of yellow hair were pleasing characteristics to happen upon so far from England. A self-conscious moustache was trying to attach itself to his upper lip. He read my papers carefully, moving his lips slowly, and then handed them back and saluted again. “Is the gentleman with you a local, sir?” he asked, and Panos nudged me delightedly. “Did you hear—he called me a gentleman,” he said in a whisper; and leaning out he said: “I am Grik schoolmaster.” He never allowed an opportunity of practicing his English to slip by. The young soldier looked grave and frowned. “Well, I’ll have to search you, ‘op out,” he said, trying desperately to sound unkind. Panos was delighted. It was obvious that he adored being searched. “Yes, Yes,” he said eagerly. “Search me.” And stepped into the road to be frisked by the two youths, and to turn his wallet inside out at their behest. I must say they were efficient as well as thoughtful. They made a note of the time and of the car’s number. “Okay, Dennis,” said the large one, “let them in.” Then he turned to me and said wistfully, “Lovely lot of flowers you got there, sir,” his English eye resting gloatingly upon the back seat of the car piled high with blossom. Panos’s spectacles gleamed. “Yes. You wish? I give you some,” and before the young soldier could say any more he found himself, to his embarrassment, holding several great bunches of Klepini anemones. He made a vague gesture of handing them back, saying: “I’m on duty now, sir,” but I had already let in the clutch and we were rolling down among the trees to
the village, leaving him alone with his problem and the smiles of his companion.

There were brown military lorries parked in the little square by the church and the main street was full of an unwonted animation, the red berets glimmering in the sunshine until the cobbled streets looked like a strawberry bed. Pens of barbed wire were being run up and the villagers slowly and patiently gathered into them for searching. Little groups stood about everywhere, looking on and chattering, for all the world as if they were watching the hucksters set up their stalls in preparation for some familiar village fete. Nor could they conceal their admiration for the physique of the brown Commandos who strolled among them, tugging and pushing good-naturedly at the fringes of the crowd like sheepdogs at a trial, still smiling and patient. The whole operation was being conducted in a leisurely fashion with an air of awkward kindness. The village priest, awaiting his turn to be penned with the rest, “like turkeys” as Panos said, had ordered a coffee and a newspaper, and sat firmly on the balcony above the road, with his spectacles on his nose, reading, while at the same table sat two Commando officers, lounging like panthers, waiting perhaps for him to finish before politely shepherding him “into the bag.” Panos looked about him with the greatest interest, his commiseration for the villagers tinged with amusement. “There is Renos,” he said. “He is being pushed. I’m so glad. If ever a man needed a push it was him. How funny. But
these Parachutists are like gods tumbled out of heaven. How did they get so big? They are grown in special earth perhaps?”

The crowd eddied and swirled in one corner about a group of youths, and the soldiers pressed in firmly shouting in the unconscious accents of the worlds most famous policeman. “Pass along there, please, cut it out. Move along there, please.”

There were several lorries full of troops standing by at ease, wreathed in grins. They set up a ragged whistle as we passed and in answer to my gesture extended a forest of grubby thumbs. A lot of them had roses pinned to their berets. “I can see,” said Panos, “that they have been pinching flowers from Sabri’s rose garden and from Kollis.” “Is that considered looting?” I asked, and he giggled. “But what is all that?” he asked as we passed a lorry piled with pick helves and the awkward old-fashioned riot shields which belonged to the past era of wholesale street rioting. Indeed a couple of the youths were playing grotesquely at a game of gladiators, clad in the steel helmets and wielding what some wag had long ago christened “the Armitage patent anti-Coca-Cola-bottle shield.” They made clumsy passes at each other with pick helves as they circled round and round, their boots striking sparks from the tarmac. Enthusiastic applause came from inside the covered lorries where dozens of pairs of eyes took in this gratuitous piece of clowning. Panos was consumed with interest. “Do they
really use that equipment—so like a gardening set?” He had never seen a full-blown riot, and knew nothing of the countermeasures the administration had taken. He listened with great interest as I explained: “The Governor has made a rule that there is to be no shooting unless the troops are shot at. For ordinary riots they use pick helves; for ambushes and anything more military, their professional equipment. But as they never know when they set off for an incident just what sort of incident it is going to be they have to take everything along. Last month outside Paphos they faced bombs and shotguns. Last week in Larnaca they faced schoolchildren. In Lapithos two days ago they had to clear a roadblock of fallen trees and face up to two hundred villagers throwing stones.” Panos gazed at me with wonder and admiration at such spirited planning. “They take everything into account,” he said.