Daughter of the Winds (9 page)

I filled an empty water glass with wine from the carafe in the centre of the table and passed it to the suspicious young man across from me.
He took it without a word of thanks.

“
Stefanos, I am not a journalist. Really I’m not. I’m a food writer and I am in Cyprus to write about the food for a magazine in England. My interest in Varosha is entirely personal. I shan’t be writing about anything I find there. That part of the trip is just for me.”

“
What do you hope to find if you do visit Varosha?”

“
Answers.”

“
To what?” he sneered.

“
Questions,” I answered defensively.

It was
Stefanos’ turn to raise an eyebrow at me but I wasn’t sure how much information I wanted to give away yet. I moved uncomfortably in my seat and rested my arms on the table so that I could make myself heard without having to raise my voice.

“
My family’s flat is there, untouched,” I offered with a sigh. “It’s still full of my mother’s things, I guess. She had to leave in a hurry. She told me something about… about my birth. Well, it’s left me with a lot of questions and I’d like to see the place where I was born. I think it might give me some clues about where I belong.”

“
I doubt it,” he scoffed.

“
Why do you say that?” I asked alarmed.

“
I doubt it remains untouched. The shops and the houses have all been looted. The Turks and the UN will have taken anything of any value by now. And the places that haven’t been touched by man’s hand have been crushed by nature. There are rats and wild dogs roaming the streets. Trees are growing through the roofs of houses. There are plants and weeds growing through the cracks in the pavement. Even if you could find the place where your family used to live, it would be unsafe for you to enter it.”

“
Maybe. But seeing as I can’t get into Varosha, that all seems irrelevant now, doesn’t it?” The bitterness in my voice surprised me.

Stefanos
shrugged. “Maybe. Before the war, there were thirty-nine thousand people living in Famagusta – that’s the name of the area that Varosha is in.” He leant forward now, elbows on the table mirroring my posture. “Sixty percent of these people were Greek. In Varosha almost
all
of its population were Greek Cypriots. All of the island’s best hotels were there and it was a very important source of income for my family. My grandfather owned a shop and a hotel there. The whole family, including his parents, lived in two rooms while they worked hard and saved hard to buy that hotel. They were a fine family in 1974. They had wealth, they were well regarded by the Greeks and the Turkish, and then they were forced out of their home. They lost everything and had to start all over again.

“
By that time my grandfather was a lot older. He didn’t have as much energy. The things he’d witnessed, the things he’d experienced… He couldn’t do it all again. It destroyed him. He grew old overnight. He died not long after from a broken heart.” Stefanos smiled sadly as he snorted through his nose and shook his head.

“
I really am sorry, Stefanos.” I almost reached out to touch his hand in comfort but stopped short and stroked the stem of my wineglass instead.

“
The hotel he worked so hard for should have passed to my mother but instead she works her fingers to the bone in this shithole while tourists stuff their faces and forget to leave a tip. Not that she’d want that hotel, anyway. Not now. There is nothing for her to go back to now. What good would it be to us? The buildings are crumbling. It would take too much money to make it right again. We do not have that kind of money any more. There are people who lost a lot more than your family did – and a lot more than my mother’s family did. If there was anything there for us do you not think we would all be fighting to get our homes back?”

“
Well of course. I didn’t mean to imply that you wouldn’t. I’m just trying to understand more. Wasn’t there a plan, a few years back, to give Varosha back to the Greek Cypriots who had lived there before 1974?”

“
Yes. But most Greeks voted against it. They have rebuilt their lives, there are new hotels now. Also, who would be responsible for the upkeep of it? The Turkish government should have paid for the upkeep. The Greek government will not want to take on the spiralling costs of regenerating this area.” Stefanos spoke with apparent animosity.

“
But,” I pushed, “didn’t I read somewhere that in the analysis of the votes, previous Varosha inhabitants voted ‘yes’ to the UN plan?”

Stefanos
paused before answering me, obviously weighing his answer carefully, and took a long slug of wine.

“
You have done your research,” he stated, looking down at his glass. “People are sentimental. They thought they would be going back to their old lives when the war was over. They left photographs, wedding dresses, things that they didn’t need then and do not really need now. But as people get older, they want to be reminded of happier times.”

We both looked into our golden wine, lost in our own thoughts.
I eliminated the chatter from the other people in the restaurant and listened to the gentle “hush, hush” of the waves on the beach. Even though I hadn’t lived by the sea since I was a baby, there was something so comforting about the inky blue.

“
Stefanos?” I asked quietly. “At the risk of annoying you further
,
i
s
there any way of me getting into Varosha?”

“
I cannot help you. Please do not ask me this again.” He responded with a hint of anger.

“
Sorry. I just wondered whether you were giving me the standard answer you always give to tourists, or whether you genuinely can’t get in. That’s all. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“
It takes a lot more than that to offend me. I accept your apology.”

“
Hold on a minute,” I raised my voice in surprise. “I don’t believe I apologised. There’s a vast difference between apologising and
explaining
.”

Stefanos
smirked and then drained the rest of his wine, before standing and walking away without another word.

“
Infuriating man!” I thought. I didn’t doubt for a minute that his family had suffered a great deal but his arrogance made it difficult for me to sympathise with him.

I sat for a long while then, alone with my thoughts.
My appetite had disappeared and I no longer felt like eating what was left of the meal in front of me. I had to get into that town. Stefanos might be right; there might not be any of the answers that I hoped for, but until I tried I would never know. His family had been greatly affected by the war but at least he knew about it. I had no idea that my family had suffered at all until recently and now I was desperate to find out more, even if there was a chance that I might not like what I found.

It had been a month since my
mother had dropped the bombshell on me that turned my life upside-down. I was in a vulnerable place already and had gone to her for help but what she told me ripped my world apart. I almost couldn’t bear to think of her at the moment. On one hand I loved her as much as I loved anyone in the world. She had been there for me at every turn. And yet, on the other hand, she had deceived me. She wasn’t who I thought she was. And if she wasn’t who I thought she was, then who on earth was I?

I had
never known my father and Mum had very few photos of him. Even their wedding photos had been left behind when we were evacuated from Cyprus. The only picture I had of them was a photo-booth picture taken when they were about seventeen and still in England. Mum was sitting on his knee and they were grinning at the camera, blissfully unaware of the heartache that the future had prepared for them.

It had been
just mum and me for the longest time. Mum got plenty of attention from the opposite sex but never let anything get too serious until she met Jack. He asked her to marry him one Christmas, and although Mum looked annoyed at him for asking, eventually she said “yes”. Mum and I looked at wedding magazines but even then I could tell that Mum’s heart was never in it. She sought a divorce from my father, Eddie, in order to marry Jack, but said that if at any point I said “No” she would call the whole thing off.

In the end, it was Mum that called the wedding off.
She said he’d ruined everything by asking her to marry him. She said she couldn’t commit herself to anyone like that again. Before long, we were packing up and moving on.

Mum didn
’t talk about her past very often. From what I could gather, she had moved to Cyprus as a young bride with her doting husband Eddie, but, for reasons she had always been cagey about, things had gone quite quickly sour. She would never be drawn on facts, but would only say that he left her soon after she had given birth and she never saw him again. She didn’t know where he was but the last she heard he had moved around a bit with the army and then retired to Cyprus to run a bar.

I
had assumed that I looked a little like him. I certainly didn’t look at all like my mother. She burned with a fierce blonde fire and clear fresh complexion that made her look years younger than she was, whereas I was tall and gangly with dark eyes and hair. I’d learned to love my long legs now but when I was a child I hated them. They seemed to grow before the rest of me, giving the impression of a new-born foal.

The snapshot I had in my drawer of Mum and Eddie in the seventies was in black and white but he certainly didn
’t look as dark as me. Of course I understood why now. He wasn’t really my father. I suppose he never had been. After all, he had never held me, soothed me or cleaned my scraped knee. And now, as it turned out, he wasn’t biologically my father anyway. The thing that broke my heart was the impact this news had on my relationship with my mother.

To find out that the only person in the world that I thought I could trust
one hundred percent had been lying to me all of my life, well... it’s difficult to put it into words. The pain is so sharp that mere words are not enough to describe the feeling. Any word that could come close would still have to be taken and planed until it formed a point that could slice into your heart and sever your dreams. Right now my foundations were unstable. It would only take one small push for me to crumble to the ground and lie there until the earth swallowed me up under the dirt and the moss and the fallen leaves.

Mum knew that I had returned to Cyprus but I
’m not sure she fully understood what was driving me. We hadn’t really talked much lately and I’d been dodging her calls. Dom had been talking to her in hushed sound-bites. I could hear him saying “she just needs space to grieve” and “she’s got to take it one day at a time” and “I think she turned a corner today”. But what did he know? He cooed and soothed but he couldn’t truly understand everything I’d been through. It hadn’t happened to him. It had happened to me. Of course, the news from my mother paled into insignificance against the backdrop of our other trauma. The other thing. The baby.

Without that, Mum probably would never have been forced to drop her own personal bombshell.
Not only did her confession hurt me for its own sake but it was made imperceptibly worse by the timing, as if this news was overshadowing my own personal loss and pushing it out of the way, as if it didn’t matter. I lost a baby.

Lost. Hah! That
’s a joke. “Lost” makes it sound inconsequential like a lost earing. Something misplaced, always with the potential to be found again. I did not lose that baby, it was taken from me. Following an interlude of elation and excitement, the ensuing heartbreak was of apocalyptic proportions to me. For Dom too, yes, and my mother, I suppose. We all suffered in our own way. I fell apart, Dom locked it all away, and Mum, well she managed to make it all about her as usual.

If I
’m good at anything, it’s compartmentalising. I can put anything into a metaphorical box, lock it up and push it right into a dusty alcove at the back of my mind. Every time I think of the baby I can feel the physical pain in my heart and my stomach so I shut down the thought, put it back in the box and decide to deal with it another time.

Dom and I had been trying for a baby for four years.
Long years. As a woman who likes to be in control, for whom
que sera, sera
was a dirty phrase, I’d done everything expected of me. I lost weight, got fit, cut out caffeine and alcohol, started taking supplements and folic acid. I bought a fertility crystal, hung it in the bedroom window and started taking my temperature daily to monitor when I was ovulating. I made Dom cut out alcohol and take selenium tablets to boost his sperm count. A friend of ours joked that perhaps we should just think about having sex instead.

When nothing happened we sought the help of a fertility specialist who put me on drugs to help ovulation.
Four months later and we got the result we’d been hoping for. I bought every book that Waterstone’s had on healthy pregnancies and treated my body as an elite baby-making factory. My excitement was matched by Dom’s as we started counting the days and stroked my blossoming stomach. For a few weeks I was content. A few weeks, that’s all.