‘I know, but I just feel like going home.’
‘
Please
, Aphroditi. Just for ten minutes.’
It was an order, not a request. Savvas’ voice was unusually firm. Sulkily, she followed her husband towards the unmarked door that led from the foyer to the stairs that took them down to the nightclub.
The muffled sound of applause drifted upwards, and as they walked in via a door opposite the stage, Aphroditi stifled a gasp. The Marilyn Monroe lookalike’s platinum-blonde hair and peachy skin shone out luminously against the purple velvet backdrop. The singer was taking a bow and revealing plenty of her generous cleavage as a man in black tie continued to play, teasing out the melody of the next song on the Moog synthesiser. The stage was carpeted with carnations thrown by the appreciative audience.
She had already been singing for forty minutes, and the atmosphere was sultry with desire, dense with cigar smoke. Markos had picked up that one of the Americans in the audience was celebrating his birthday, and had asked the singer to serenade him as if he were President Kennedy.
For a subsequent song, she turned her attention to Frau Bruchmeyer, perching next to her on the low padded settee. She lifted one of the bony hands, two of its fingers laden with diamond rings, and gazed into the old lady’s eyes like a lover.
‘
Diamonds are a girl’s best friend
,’ she sang.
The audience began to cheer even before the song had ended. The singer was an accomplished actress, too. Now she turned her attention to Markos, who was standing just in front of the bar.
He returned her gaze and smiled, increasingly broadly, as she began her next song:
‘I wanna be loved by you, just you …’
She left the stage for a moment, approached Markos and then led him back with her, continuing to sing. The pallor of her skin and fair hair against the dark curtains was dramatic. Her bosoms were like pale cushions, her voice sweet and sexy but childlike.
When they had arrived, one of the waiters had immediately approached Savvas to take their drink order. He and Aphroditi stood close to the bar, sipping from their glasses. Aphroditi had refused a suggestion to sit down. She did not intend to stay long.
Savvas noticed how the men gazed at ‘Marilyn’ and the women at Markos. It was as if his manager had rehearsed the role, reacting to the singer’s lines perfectly on cue.
More importantly, he observed that the three waiters were constantly busy, refreshing drinks, opening bottles, crushing ice and shaking cocktails. The air-conditioning kept the room at around twenty-five degrees, warm enough to make people thirsty, but not uncomfortable.
Well done, Savvas thought, silently congratulating his manager.
By the time the song was ending, the artiste was singing close to Markos’ ear.
‘Boo boo bee doo!’
she whispered seductively. The music faded away, and for a moment, there was silence except for the clink of one ice cube against another.
She took Markos’ hand and they bowed together as if theirs was a double act. The audience was on its feet, cheering and whooping.
Markos caught sight of his boss’s wife. She stood with her back to the bar, her face as sour as the lemons piled up in a bowl behind her.
Aphroditi touched her husband’s sleeve.
‘I’d like to go now,’ she said, trying to make herself heard above the noise. Her tone of voice was firm, like her husband’s earlier.
Savvas looked at his wife. Aphroditi was the only person in the room not acknowledging the brilliance of the performance. He knew that she still harboured resentment about everything to do with the Clair de Lune.
‘Very well,
agapi
mou
,’ he said patiently. ‘I just need to have a word with Markos and then we’ll leave.’
‘I’ll be waiting in the foyer,’ said Aphroditi.
Even before the applause had died down, she had left. From the stage, Markos saw a flash of a green dress as she disappeared out of the back door. The whole evening was exceeding even his own expectations.
H
ÜSEYIN ÖZKAN BEGAN
work each morning at six when the sun was still low in the sky but already spreading a warm glow. Laying out sunloungers and stacking them up again was mindless work, but he was happy earning his own money and sometimes he even got overgenerously tipped. Many of the tourists seemed to have little concept of the value of the Cypriot pound, but he was not going to educate them.
Hüseyin’s afternoon break gave him time to play an hour of water polo each day, and in the evenings a game of volleyball would take place. When the day was over, the increasingly athletic eighteen year old would buy a cool Keo beer. As the sun went down, he would sit on the sand with his friends and drink it. He felt he had the perfect life.
The teams were mostly made up of Greek Cypriots, but some of the strongest players were Turkish Cypriot, and he often tried to persuade his younger brother, Ali, to come down to the beach for a game. The fifteen year old, who was taller than Hüseyin, though with a much slighter frame, was reluctant. The simple truth was that he did not want to play in a mixed team.
‘I don’t trust them,’ he said. ‘They’ll break the rules.’
Ali spent more time at home than Hüseyin and had been more influenced by their father’s opinions. Ali knew that Halit Özkan often regretted the fact that they had moved to an area where they were surrounded by Greek Cypriots. He would have preferred to be in the old town, where they would not be in a minority. Ali was aware that his father feared trouble, and when they both read in
Halkın Sesi
of EOKA B’s new activities, he fully expected that violence would spread their way.
As the holidaymakers reclined in the sun, sipped cocktails, swam or lost themselves in the latest thriller, Hüseyin noticed that they were always oriented towards the sea. The sunbeds had to be laid in rows, pointing towards the rising sun. These foreigners did not want to look inland. Even Frau Bruchmeyer, who lived on the island now, saw only its beauty and the paradise created by blue sky and sea.
Although during their short conversations she never forgot to ask after Hüseyin’s mother, she seemed unaware of the knife edge on which the Cypriots were living.
Markos continued to feel uneasy about Christos’ connection with the new movement for
enosis
. It seemed absurd to him that anyone should feel the need to disturb this tourist paradise. He could see from the way the girls sauntered up and down the beach in their bikinis, and how the men casually clocked up ludicrous bar bills, that these tourists, whether from Greece or further afield, did not have a care in the world. In spite of a constant battery of criticism from Christos, Markos maintained his position: why do the one thing that would upset their mother? But above all, why destroy this coastal arcadia?
The Clair de Lune continued to enjoy a full house every night. ‘Marilyn’ sang three times a week, and on the other nights there was a selection of cabaret acts, all previously auditioned by Markos. One of the most popular was a belly dancer from Turkey. Another comprised three performers from La Cage aux Folles in Paris, who achieved the almost impossible feat of doing a cancan on the tiny stage.
As the holiday season continued, and the reputation of The Sunrise and its nightclub grew, Markos brought in singers from all around Greece, some of them big names in Athens and Thessaloniki, and flew others in especially from Paris or London. Savvas continually studied the accounts, and even with the plane fares, he could see that Markos managed to make a large profit. Membership of the club became highly coveted, and after a few months its cost soared. The drinks were astronomically expensive, but for vintage whiskies, nobody cared what they paid.
For the first time in Cyprus, the high prices became desirable in themselves, making the Clair de Lune a place to be seen. People began to queue for entry to a club where cost and status were synonymous and where spending an evening on one of its purple sofas made them part of an elite, the crème de la crème. To people who could afford luxury, the proximity of modest one-storey homes where families still ground their own wheat, grew vegetables and milked their goats was irrelevant. Inhabitants of these parallel worlds had their own reasons to be content.
‘This is what the jet set wants,’ said Markos, when even Savvas balked at the new price list that the club manager was proposing. ‘They don’t want things to be cheap.’
‘But spirits only cost two shillings at the bar in town,’ fretted Savvas.
‘Trust me,’ said Markos.
When film stars began to frequent the place, and soon afterwards a famous Hollywood couple spent two consecutive nights there, Markos knew he had proved his worth on every level. From now on, in his boss’s eyes, he could do no wrong.
Business in the rest of the hotel had continued to grow. In late September, when the hotel was booked to capacity for the first time, with all five hundred bedrooms fully occupied, Savvas Papacosta announced that dinner would now be held in the ballroom.
With a mosaic floor and slender, elegant pillars at the entrance, the ballroom, like the reception area, had been modelled on the recent discoveries at Salamis. Excavations had revealed tombs filled with treasures from thousands of years before. The architectural and decorative motifs of the once thriving town of Constantia, as Salamis had been known in Roman times, had inspired Aphroditi, and she had taken many of the details and applied them to the grandest space in the hotel.
The ballroom was circular, to reflect the shape of the ancient amphitheatre. Around the edge of the room were a dozen female figures. The limestone originals were no more than thirty centimetres high, but Aphroditi had commissioned hers to be larger than life-size, so that they appeared to be holding up the ceiling, like the caryatids at the Erechtheion in Athens. Each of them held a flower in their right hand. She had resisted the temptation to paint them in the bright colours that would have been used on the originals. She wanted the colour to emanate from the walls, where she had designed a repeated pattern of a woman’s face with garlands of foliage, in gold and green. The face had been faithfully produced to mirror the original in the Salamis gymnasium, and yet it looked eerily like Aphroditi herself. Huge eyes gazed from all around the room.
She had even commissioned copies of a chair that had been found in one of the tombs in the ancient city. The excavated fragments were made of ivory, and the cool, smooth texture of the original material had been reproduced in wood. With meticulous attention to detail, an artisan had spent two years on the pair of chairs, reproducing the ornate plaques that embellished them. Everyone marvelled at the carvings of the sphinx and of the lotus flowers. An upholsterer had been given free rein with the padded seats and had chosen gold silk to match the gilding that had been applied to the sphinx’s crown. The chairs were sat on by Aphroditi and Savvas at the top table. They seemed like royalty on their thrones.
The two pieces of ornamental furniture were not the only
objets
that had kept the best artisans of Nicosia busy. The gossamer curtains that hung from the very high ceiling had been embroidered with gold thread to match the gilded foliage painted around the walls.
It was a temple to materialism in which some, but not all, of the ancient conventions had been respected. The materials were probably more lavish than those used to construct the originals on which this costly pastiche was based. Aphroditi had combined all the elements that had impressed archaeologists at Salamis and brought them together into one room.
‘
Agapi
mou
, do you like it?’
‘Well I think our guests will love it,’ said Savvas tactfully, the first time he saw the finished result, with the drapes in place and the tables arranged in a fan shape round the room.
‘Don’t you think it’s glamorous?’
‘Yes, my darling, it’s definitely that.’
Crystal glasses, white porcelain plates and brilliantly polished cutlery all caught the light from the chandeliers and sparkled.
In the circular floor space in the middle there was a huge but completed copy of the celebrated Salamis mosaic of Zeus disguised as a swan. This was intended for use as a dance floor – most importantly for the first dance of a bride and groom – or sometimes for theatrical or orchestral events. Aphroditi’s ambitions for this space were unlimited. Famagusta had a tradition for theatre and the arts, and she wanted the hotel to be known for something even more spectacular, for a level of performance that no one had seen before.
To mark the end of the summer season and the beginning of their first autumn, Aphroditi realised a dream. She invited dancers from London to perform
Swan Lake
. On this mosaic, in such a setting, it would be unique.
Savvas was nervous.
‘Darling, it’s a very expensive thing to do …’
‘We need to have events like this, Savvas. We’re the biggest but we have to be the best as well.’
Dancing on mosaic tessellations was far from ideal, but Aphroditi was determined to find a way. The compromise was that the dancers would only perform highlights.
Swans
, said the invitation simply, and when the VIP guests came from around the island to Cyprus’ most glamorous hotel, they were, once again, speechless at what the couple had achieved.
Few there had seen classical ballet danced in the round, and when the prima ballerina finally came to her graceful, tragic end, they found themselves gazing at a dancer who appeared to be enveloped in the wings of the swan. She and the mosaic had become as one. The audience was on its feet, applauding and calling for an encore. Even men dabbed their eyes.
‘It was perfect,’ admitted Savvas, ‘and everyone loved it, but I do have a few doubts about the cost …’
‘It’s not just about money,’ said Aphroditi.
‘It
is
, actually, Aphroditi. In the end, that’s the only thing it’s about.’
Aphroditi had heard the same words from her father over the years and hoped they were both wrong. It rendered so much of what she did futile. How could the effect of the gold-leaf finish and the unforgettable spectacle of the dying swan ever be measured? On this matter the couple increasingly disagreed.