Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (35 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Durrell

Chapter Thirteen: A Pocketful of Sand

If God had not made brown honey men would think figs much sweeter than they do.

—X
ENOPHANES

I
HAD TO COLLECT
some books and papers from the house on the morning of the execution. A general strike had been declared in the capital, paralysing the ordinary transactions of life and creating a grim artificial holiday for us all. Such extensive precautions had been taken against civil violence that I did not fear a serious newsbreak or that my absence would be remarked. “You are mad to go to your village today of all days,” said Achilles. Nevertheless time was so short that there was no other way to retrieve the papers I needed.

It was a beautiful ringing day and the curling streets were thick with almond and peach blossom. As I turned the last corner and came to rest under the belfries of the
Abbey I saw that the whole village was there in the little square, the usual loafers sitting under the Tree of Idleness. The crowd was of Sunday proportions; nobody had gone to work. But as the engine fell silent I was aware of some altogether novel factor about the scene. It lacked all animation. The whiskered shepherds were all sitting in their accustomed places but nobody had ordered a coffee; the dusty packs of playing cards lay on Dmitri s shelf untouched. It was like a hollow transcription of a known reality snapped by the camera’s lens. To the matured resonance of the Abbey’s silence the villagers had added, like an extra dimension, a silence of their own, hollow and profound. My footsteps echoed harshly on the gravel as I walked slowly across to the little café which was crowded but utterly silent. Everybody looked at the ground, awkwardly and with a shy clumsy disfavor. My good morning provoked a raised head and a nod here and there, but not the usual roar of response and the wave of brown hands. Dmitri stood behind his bar counter holding on to his apron as if for support, and swallowing. He had turned so white that he looked as if he were about to faint. He answered my greeting by moving his lips soundlessly. My mail lay on the counter before him. I took up the letters, feeling as if I should apologize for intruding upon a scene of such universal grief.

On the cobbled street up to the house the same faces bobbed curiously from the doors, but instead of chaff and the traditional greetings, “Welcome, neighbor, Yasu Englishman,” there issued from the old-fashioned
gates with their cable-pattern carvings and defaced armorial bearings only the same drugged silence. People ducked away into the gloomy corners, into the darkness, sliding away from speech and smiles like fish. Mr. Honey sat at his usual corner under the walnut tree by the bridge. It was customary for him to rise and grab inexpertly at the lapels of my coat as he bade me sit and drink with him. The gesture began involuntarily as he caught sight of me, and a smile darkened his dark face. He threw up his hands, made as if to rise unsteadily, and then subsided again with his chin on his breast. I passed him in silence.

The cool lower rooms of the house echoed with silence and the sunlight filtered through the bitter lemon trees in the garden outside. I did not dare to climb to the balcony, so sad was I to leave it all. Xenu the puffing maid was cleaning up the kitchen. She greeted me warmly enough but said in the same breath: “Have you heard the news?” I nodded. “The execution?” She puffed and swelled with sorrow. “Why should they do such things?” I became angry. “If you kill you must die,” I said; she raised her hand, as if to stop me. “Not that. Not the execution. But they would not give his mother the body, or so they say. That is a terrible punishment, sir. For if you do not look upon your loved one dead you will never meet again in the other world.”

I busied myself in the little study, turning out a case of books. I found the old wicker basket which had accompanied me on all my journeys in Cyprus. It
was full of fragments collected by my daughter, buried in a pocketful of sand which leaked slowly through the wicker mesh. I turned the whole thing out on to a sheet of newspaper, mentally recalling as I turned over the fragments in curious fingers where each had been acquired: Roman glass, blue and vitreous as the summer sea in deep places; handles of amphorae from Salamis with the hallmark thumb-printed in the soft clay; tiles from the floor of the villa near Paphos;
verde-antico
fragments; Venus’ ear seashells; a Victorian penny; fragments of yellow mosaic from some Byzantine church; purple murex; desiccated sea-urchins and white chalk squid-bones; a tibia; fragments of a bird’s egg; a green stone against the evil eye.… All in all asort of record of our stay in Cyprus. “Xenu, throw all this away,” I said.

Once more I walked down the main street to the car in the same heavy ominous silence, observed once more from many chinks and slits in those old houses, arousing no comment; and once more the village stared deeply at its shoes in silence under the great tree—frozen into immobility. The eyes which avoided mine, flickering shyly away from my glance “like vernal butterflies”—I cannot say that they were full of hate. No. It was simply that the sight of me pained them. The sight of an Englishman had become an obscenity on that clear honey-gold spring air.

I caught sight of a few of my friends, among them Michaelis and the Seafarer, sitting inside the café
but I did not feel like intruding upon them with my good-byes.

The car started with a roar, fracturing the dense silence overflowing from the Abbey no less than from those silent, uncomprehending minds grouped about under the old tree. Nobody waved and nobody smiled.

I slipped down the empty street under the blos soming trees and out on to the crest of the hill. Frangos was on the threshing-floor looking out to sea; he turned his head as the car passed but did not wave. I lit a cigarette and was about to increase speed when my eye caught sight of a figure rushing down through the olive groves towards the road with the obvious intention of heading me off, waving and shouting. I recognized the small brown agile Andreas, running for all his sixty years like a boy of sixteen. I drew up.

He came panting down the last terrace and gave a tremendous jump into the road, beaming and panting. “Mr. Darling,” he cried, in his excitement using a version of my name which had once been current and which, under teasing, he had discarded. “Thank God I caught you. I wanted to tell you that the boy came back! He did not join EOKA because he won a scholarship to London instead. The Government radio announced the names yesterday!” He expelled his breath in a great sigh of relief and crossed himself twice, emphatically, in the Orthodox fashion. “God is great, and his wisdom hidden from us. The boy will go to London now. Will your mother look after him when he is in England—if you
are not there? After all, neighbor, he is a kid still.” I could not look at his warm, merry kindly face without emotion. I got out into the road and we smoked a cigarette together while he talked with great excitement about London and of how much he had wanted to go there himself. “Education is everything,” he said. “How much we wished for it ourselves. Now perhaps our children can have it.” I felt bitterly ashamed of the neglect these people had endured—the poor Cyps. “Of course we’ll look after him,” I said. Andreas pressed my hand. “And don’t fear for the house,” he said, laying his hand upon his heart, “I will keep it sound and clean, everything in place. And I shall look after the vine on the balcony for your daughter. You will have shade from it over the whole balcony when you return next year, neighbor.” We stamped out our cigarettes in the road and shook hands. “And don’t forget,” he said, “to write to us, Loizus and Anthemos and the Seafarer—send us picture postcards of the London church—the big one with the clock.” I promised him that I would. “Remember,” he called after me, quoting the village proverb which illustrates hope for the future. “Next year’s wine is the sweetest.”

see,” said the driver of the taxi which took me up by night to the heavily guarded airport, “you see, the trouble with the Greeks is that we are really so pro-British.”
“Y
ou

There had been two or more explosions in various parts of the town that evening, and doubtless there would be more. He drove with a certain elated caution across the deserted streets with their occasional patrol and their inadequate lighting. He was an elderly man with a grey moustache and a leisurely manner. His accent was a Paphos accent. “I don’t follow you,” I said absently, with one ear cocked for trouble along the dark roads, and only slightly reassured by the blue bead (talisman against the evil eye) which was tied to the dashboard. “Even Dighenis,” he said thoughtfully, “they say he himself is very pro-British.” It was one of those Greek conversations which carry with them a hallucinating surrealist flavor—in the last two years I had endured several hundred of them. “Yes,” he continued in the slow assured tones of a village wiseacre, “yes, even Dighenis, though he fights the British, really loves them. But he will have to go on killing them—with regret, even with affection.”

In an island of bitter lemons

Where the moon’s cool fevers burn

From the dark globes of the fruit
,

And the dry grass underfoot

Tortures memory and revises

Habits half a lifetime dead

Better leave the rest unsaid
,

Beauty, darkness, vehemence

Let the old sea-nurses keep

Their memorials of sleep

And the Greek sea’s curly head

Keep its calms like tears unshed

Keep its calms like tears unshed
.

—L
AWRENCE
D
URRELL

Select Bibliography

Newman, Philip.
A Short History of Cyprus
(London, 1940). Handy, condensed history.

Luke, H. C.
Cyprus under the Turks
(London, 1921). Information on the Turkish Period.

Dixon, W. Hepworth.
British Cyprus
(London, 1887).

Lewis, Mrs. A Lady’s Impressions of Cyprus (1893).

Brown, Samuel, M.I.C.E.
Three Months in Cyprus: During the Winter of 1878-9
(1879).

Orr, C. W. J.
Cyprus under British Rule
(London, 1918). Information on the British Period.

Gunnis, Rupert.
Historic Cyprus
(London, 1936). Comprehensive “guidebook” to the antiquities.

Cobham, C. D.
Excerpta Cypria: Materials for a History of Cyprus
(Cambridge, 1908). Selected extracts from books and travel-diaries on Cyprus,
A.D.
2.3 to 1849. A unique compilation.

Storrs, Sir Ronald, and O’Brien, B. J.
The Handbook of Cyprus
(London, 1930). Detailed information on every aspect of the island.

Hadjicosta, Ismene.
Cyprus and its Life
(Nicosia, 1943).

Balfour, Patrick.
The Orphaned Realm
(London, 1951).

Index

Akanthou
32
,
310

Alexis (Athenian friend)
151–156

Algiers
130

Amathus
15
,
16

Anatolia
138
,
139
,
158

Andreas the Seafarer
118
,
239
,
303
,
352–353

Anthemos (grocer)
101
,
354

Aphrodite, Goddess
120