He imagined that their goal was the vault. No doubt the Turkish Cypriot, who was still with the soldiers, had given them the tip-off, but Hüseyin doubted he was going to get any of the reward.
Hüseyin watched for a few minutes before retreating. What was going to happen next was of no interest to him. He knew the safes were impenetrable even with the keys. He had no way to retrieve the gun now, so his priority was to find food.
He retreated up a side street, feeling that he had witnessed more than enough brutish behaviour. Even though the soldiers’ violence was directed against concrete and glass, it was ugly and filled him with fear.
The first general store he came to had been stripped bare. There was nothing except for a few bars of soap and some salt. In the second, he scoured every shelf. Hidden at the very back of the last place he searched were two tins of anchovies. They would have been easy to miss. He put them in his pocket. In the next shop he found a few tins of chickpeas and a small sack to carry them in. He noticed that all the dried goods – rice, beans, flour and sugar – had been consumed already. Quantities of mouse and rat droppings had been left in their place. The Sunrise had been a haven indeed.
He continued his search, going into three or four more shops; in each he found the same piles of animal droppings, shredded paper and cardboard that had once been the wrapping for biscuits and sugar. After two more hours of walking the streets, all he had found were three tins of tomato paste and two of condensed milk. Tired and disillusioned, he returned to Elpida Street.
As he stepped over the threshold, the silence told him that he was alone. He put his hand over his nose. It stank. He remembered walking in after the soldiers had ransacked it, but months later it was much worse.
Putting the small sack of goods over his shoulder, he crossed the street to the Georgious’.
‘Your parents are upstairs,’ said Vasilis.
As Hüseyin put the supply of food down on the garden table, Irini came out.
‘What did you find?’ she asked, knowing that everyone would be hungry.
‘Just tins,’ he said. ‘Everything else has gone.’
‘I am sure we can make something nice with those,’ she said. ‘Will you bring them inside?’
One by one, Irini took the tins out of the sack and read the labels. Some of them were looking rusty, but she knew the contents would still be good.
‘Did you see what happened to our herbs?’
Hüseyin shook his head politely.
‘They’ve
grown
!’ she said, struggling to sound positive. ‘Look at this basil! And the marjoram!’
She picked up two huge bunches of greenery that had been sitting in the sink and offered them to him to smell. The combined fragrance was intoxicatingly sweet and fresh.
He buried his face in them to hide his emotions. A few hours earlier, when they had left The Sunrise, he could not even look at Irini Georgiou. The tears had been coursing down her face. Her grief was a great burden to him. He knew he was responsible for it, and even his knowledge that it was self-defence would never assuage his guilt. Now here she was bustling bravely about in the kitchen telling him what she was going to cook from these meagre ingredients.
Making meals for them all was Irini Georgiou’s refuge, but when the cooking was completed and the meal had been served and eaten and every knife and fork put away, her sadness would still be waiting for her, like a coat hanging on the back of the door.
He handed her back the bouquet of herbs and hoped she had not noticed how his eyes were glistening.
‘With these, these and these,’ she said, pointing at three of the tins, ‘I can make a bean stew. And there is still some honey, so we will even have something for dessert this evening. Well done, my dear.’
Hüseyin turned away. The affectionate way in which she spoke to him, almost as if he were her own son, was unbearable.
‘Will you tell your mother that I’ll have something ready in an hour?’ Irini called after him.
Hüseyin took the stairs two at a time.
On the first floor, he almost fell into his mother’s arms.
‘
Canım
, are you all right?’
‘Out of breath, Mother,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
She hugged him. Behind her shoulder, he wiped a tear away on his sleeve.
‘I found some food,’ he said. ‘It’s downstairs with Kyria Georgiou. She’s cooking.’
‘I must go and help her.’
‘I’m sure she would like that,’ said Hüseyin, for the sake of something to say.
‘Oh,’ said his mother, almost as an afterthought. ‘This is their son Christos’ apartment. If you don’t want to share a room with Mehmet, then there’s always upstairs …’
‘You mean Markos’ apartment?’
Emine realised immediately what she had suggested.
‘I’ll sleep on the couch,’ Hüseyin said.
When they gathered round Irini and Vasilis’ table to eat, there was scarcely enough room and extra chairs had to be brought downstairs. Vasilakis sat on his father’s lap and the baby on her mother’s. Mehmet perched on a small stool.
Hüseyin volunteered to sit in the garden and keep watch. They could not drop their guard now.
Irini brought out a plate for him.
‘Can you still smell them?’ she asked.
He bent low over the dish. The aroma of the herbs rose up into his face.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Thank you, Kyria Georgiou.’
Within five minutes, his plate was clean.
Inside, Vasilis poured himself and Panikos a glass of
zivania
.
‘
Stin yia mas
,’ they said, clinking glasses.
Vasilis was happy to be home again. He had missed the strength of home-brewed firewater. The vintage whiskies and French cognacs in the Clair de Lune had been no substitute. They all ate hungrily.
They had got used to the grandeur of The Sunrise, to the porcelain, crystal and silver, but this felt more natural to them: the streaked, shuttered light, the lace cloth, the slightly chipped plates and the touch of elbows round a small table.
The icon was back on the special shelf where it belonged and the
mati
kept watch over them all. The photographs were where they had always been and Irini had even found time to dust them all, deliberately avoiding the gaze of both her sons. They looked out at the lens. Markos: deceased. Christos: missing.
By the end of the following morning, Hüseyin knew the truth of the food situation. He had risen early and walked every street in the neighbourhood, going in and out of every food shop. Most of them did not need to be entered forcibly. Doors were already ajar. He remembered the ones that had been a rich source before they went to The Sunrise, but any dry goods had meanwhile been devoured, and most tins taken, he assumed by soldiers.
When he returned, he found his mother with Irini at her kitchen table.
‘Where have you been, darling?’ said Emine. ‘We’ve been so worried!’
‘We thought something had happened to you,’ added Irini with concern.
‘I was looking for food,’ he answered. ‘I thought you would know where I had gone.’
‘But you were so long …’ said Emine.
‘I’m sorry you were worried,’ he said. ‘But …’ He hesitated. The reality was that he had found almost nothing all morning. In desperation, he had even broken into people’s homes to see whether anything edible remained.
Just as he had observed months earlier, there were houses that remained precisely as when their owners had taken flight. In one, plates were stained with the residue of a meal; in another, some dried-out flower petals were scattered in a neat circle around the base of a vase. A baby’s bib and an apron were slung carelessly across the back of a chair, discarded before the inhabitants had fled. All around were signs of normal life interrupted by the suddenness of flight. There was a stillness in these homes, as though their owners might walk in at any moment and resume their lives.
The houses that had been looted felt very different. They reminded him of the state of his own home. Chairs were not neatly tucked under tables and plates were not patiently waiting for soup or
kleftiko
. Furniture had been reduced to sticks of wood and china lay in pieces. Cupboard doors were wide open and valuables had been removed. Rumours that people had hidden money and jewellery inside mattresses or under floorboards meant that the Turkish soldiers had sometimes ripped homes apart. Though the vast majority of the houses belonged to Greek Cypriots, the destruction had been equally frenzied in Turkish Cypriot homes.
Over all of them hung an odour of staleness, damp and decay. If buildings were mortal, these were dying or dead.
Whatever the state of the place he walked into, Hüseyin had a single purpose: to see if there was anything edible. The pickings were not rich. In the entire morning, he had found four rusty tins that would scarcely feed them all for a single meal.
The two women watched him expectantly. He felt almost uncomfortable beneath their gaze. Ever since Markos’ death, he had been conscious that the adults had been looking to him for guidance.
‘This is all there is,’ he said, putting the tins on the table in front of them.
Irini and Emine stood silently. They could not conceal their disappointment.
‘There is next to nothing out there,’ said Hüseyin.
‘Go and find your father and Kyrios Georgiou,’ said Emine.
The two men were having a cigarette on the rooftop of the building. They had found some stale tobacco in a tin in Christos’ apartment.
When Hüseyin arrived, he had a moment to observe them before they noticed him. Their heads were inclined towards each other as they spoke. So much had changed.
They heard his footsteps and turned towards him.
‘Hüseyin!’ said Halit, smiling.
‘Will you come downstairs?’ he asked.
‘When we have finished our cigarettes,’ responded Halit. ‘Is there something your mother wants me to do?’
Hüseyin shrugged. There was a sweet breeze that day and he felt it brush his face as he turned to leave.
A few minutes later, the five of them gathered in the Georgious’ apartment.
‘Hüseyin has something to tell us.’
‘I think we have to leave.’
‘But why?’ asked Vasilis.
‘We don’t know what it’s like out there …’ added Halit.
‘There’s no food here,
Baba
. It’s time to go.’
His words were blunt. It was the truth.
They all looked at each other. Even now, growing hunger was telling them that Hüseyin must be right.
‘We’d better tell Maria and Panikos,’ said Vasilis.
‘But how can we just walk out?’ asked Irini. ‘It can’t be safe.’
Hüseyin, who had seen the behaviour of the soldiers, knew that it was not.
‘If we leave here,’ said Halit, ‘we have nothing. We have nothing at all.’
‘And Ali won’t know where to find us … nor Christos,’ said Emine.
‘We have our smallholding,’ said Vasilis. ‘And our trees.’
‘But nowhere to live,’ Irini added, almost inaudibly.
Panikos had appeared at the door. He had left Maria upstairs with the three children and had been listening.
‘If Hüseyin says we have to leave, we should listen to him,’ he said. ‘The children are hungry all the time. And if there is already no food out there …’
‘But we have to find safe passage,’ said Vasilis. ‘We can’t just walk out of here.’
‘And who is going to give us that?’ asked Panikos. With two small children and a wife, in a city occupied by Turkish soldiers, he was full of fear.
Once again Hüseyin found that all eyes were on him.
‘Give me until tomorrow,’ he said. ‘But be ready to leave when I come back.’
They all looked at each other. There was little to prepare. The icon, the photos and the
mati
would be repacked. There were no other possessions that seemed of any importance.
Hüseyin raced up to Christos’ apartment. Stuffed down the side of the sofa where he had slept was the necklace. He emptied it out of the pouch and held it up to the light. Even he, with his lack of knowledge about such things, admired its beauty.
‘Hüseyin!’
When he looked round, he saw that his mother had followed him. Her eyes were blazing.
‘Hüseyin – where did you get that necklace?’
‘Markos … it was in his pocket when I killed him.’
‘Let me see it,’ she demanded.
Hüseyin had rarely seen his mother so angry. He handed her the necklace; she examined it for a moment and looked at the distinctive clasp.
‘There’s only one woman in Cyprus who owns anything like this,’ she said. She had recognised it immediately as Aphroditi’s.
Hüseyin was anxious that she was not going to give it back to him.
‘These sapphires are all we have now, Mother,’ he pleaded. ‘I need to sell them to get us safe passage.’
She looked at him thoughtfully, and then at the necklace that she nursed in her hands. Like Hüseyin, she could see that this provided their only chance. Somehow, one day, they would pay Aphroditi back.
‘Something you should know,’ she said, ‘is that these are not sapphires. They’re blue diamonds. It’s the necklace that Aphroditi’s father gave her for her wedding.’
‘So if I can sell them, they’ll definitely buy us our safety?’
‘I hope so,’ said Emine. ‘I think they’re very rare.’
She did not want to know the details of Hüseyin’s plan, but she trusted him to have one.
‘Will you cut my hair?’ Hüseyin asked. ‘I need it really short.’
Emine did not ask any questions.
They found a pair of scissors in Christos’ bathroom, and as proficiently as she could with such inadequate tools, she sliced off her son’s hair.
Irini was in the
kipos
when he passed by. With everything so overgrown, she felt safe to sit here in the warmth, with the sun filtering through the canopy of early summer leaves. She thought Hüseyin was going out on another excursion to find food and crossed herself several times, saying a little prayer for his safety. Her old habits had begun to return.
H
ÜSEYIN HAD A
single purpose. First he had to find a soldier’s uniform. As a civilian, he would have much less chance of making his way safely to his destination.