Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (28 page)

Meanwhile things were hardening up domestically; if terrorists could not be brought to justice they could at least be penned out of harm’s way. In early July the Detention Laws were promulgated, making Wren’s task a bit easier, and indirectly I suppose saving a number of lives among the apprentices and schoolboys who were locked up summarily when they could not, for lack of witnesses, be charged. This touched off a series of attacks by Athens radio, which accused us of “Fascism” and even “Genocide.” The living conditions of the detainees became a staple for commentaries and hysterical knife-twisting, and the conditions of life within Kyrenia castle were hotly debated.

We again challenge the Public Information Officer to answer the following question on behalf of the Cypriot people: are there or are there not latrines at the castle? And if there are no latrines, what is the substitute? And one more question: Is it or is it not true that the contents of the metal buckets, used as horrible substitutes for latrines, are emptied at a very short distance from the castle, thereby endangering the health of the detainees? It must be true, Mr. Durrell, unless our sense of sight and smell, as well as the swarms of flies and other filthy insects, deceive us.

This seemed to be going a bit far; I was tempted to ask the Greek Ministry of Information a few choice questions about the general state of sanitation in Greece—which has to be experienced to be believed—but I spared him; Philhellenism dies hard. “Nevertheless,” said the Colonial Secretary, “you’d better go up yourself and have a look, and arrange to have the press taken round to show that though we may be Fascist beasts our sanitation is still sound.” I reluctantly agreed to do so.

The camp had now been moved from the castle to Kokkinotrimithia, and here on the harsh bare unlovely tableland the sappers had run up a few huts and a great wire pen. It looked from far off like an abandoned turkey farm. I rode up with Foster who spoke despairingly of the lack of reason the prisoners showed, of their abso lute contempt of law, of civic morality. “About two-thirds of them could be indicted on serious offences,” he repeated with fussy solicitude, “the little bastards! And they throw clods at visitors and shout ‘Fascist’ at us. Us, Fascists, I ask you!”

It was a sad place; like one of those soulless transit camps near the western desert. The inmates looked a somewhat chastened and bedraggled lot—and a number were by no means infants. I kept an eye cocked for my students. On past form I was convinced I should find the whole of Epsilon Alpha behind bars, but I was relieved to recognize only two, the fat ruffian Joanides and Paul. Joanides was a grocer’s son, and a natural comedian of such talent that I had been forced
to expel him at the beginning of almost every lesson, much to my regret as his sallies (which were all in
patois)
were very funny indeed. He had spent his English hour walking up and down the corridors whistling tunelessly and pretending, when the headmaster was on the prowl, that he was going to the lavatory. He set up a great whoop when he saw me and said: “So they got you at last, Mr. Durrell? I told you you were too friendly with the Greeks. Now they’ve nobbled you.” For a moment I think he really believed it. We entered the pen and he fairly romped up to me. “What are you doing here?” I said with severity, “fool that you are. This is where your folly has brought you, Imbecile.” I asked Foster what he had been doing, and the boy shifted uneasily from one fat calf to the other. His round face fell. “He had a bomb on him,” said Foster sighing with grandmotherly despair. “I ask you, a grenade.” Joanides looked from Foster to me and then back again. He was sad to find us so severe. “Ach! Mr. Durrell,” he said, “it was just a
little
bomb,” extending his index fingers and holding them three inches apart. I passed him by in silence.

Living conditions were cramped but not bad. Probably less hard than they are for many a National Service youth. We toured the huts, examined the food and hot-water facilities. To judge by the books on most of the windowsills and beds a number of the terrorists must have been intellectuals. I saw Myrivilis’s
Life Entombed
and the rare Athens edition of Cavafy; Seferis’s poems
and
Aeolia
by Venezis with my own preface which had been lovingly translated from the English edition. These things hurt me, as I realized for the first time that the appeal of EOKA was not to wrongdoers, congenital felons, but precisely to the most spirited and idealistic element among the youth. They would be the ones to suffer at the dictates of the ringmasters.

Paul was standing in a window, looking pointedly away across that cruel and barren no man’s land of red sandstone. He gave no sign and I did not wish to intrude upon him. I hesitated, and then joined Foster to make a slow circuit of the room, picking up here and there an exercise book or a newspaper. At last I went up to him and put my hand on his shoulder. “Why are you here?” I said.

He was not far from tears, but the face that he turned to me tried to be composed, impassive. He did not speak but stared at me with a look of furious anguish—as if indeed a wolf were gnawing at his vitals. “He had a bomb too,” said Foster wearily. “Bloody little fools! What do they think they gain by it? He threw it in the churchyard by the crossroads. I suppose he thought he’d scare us all out of our wits.”

“Are you in EOKA?” I asked.

“We are all EOKA. All Cyprus,” he said in a low controlled voice. “If he wants to know why I threw it in the churchyard tell him because I was a coward. I am unworthy. But the others are not like me. They are not afraid.” I saw suddenly that what I had
mistaken for hatred of my presence, my person, was really something else—shame. “Why are you a coward?” He moved a whole step nearer to tears and swallowed quickly. “I was supposed to throw it in a house but there were small children playing in the garden. I could not. I threw it in the churchyard.”

Superb egotism of youth! He had been worried about his own inability to obey orders. It is, of course, not easy for youths raised in a Christian society, to turn themselves into terrorists overnight—and in a sense his problem was the problem of all the Cypriot Greeks. If Frangos had been given a pistol to shoot me I am convinced that he would not have been able to pull the trigger. “So you are sorry because you didn’t kill two children?” I said. “What a twisted brain, what a twisted stick you must be as well as a fool!” He winced and his eyes flashed. “War is war,” he said. I left him without another word.

I interviewed two committees, each consisting of a group of three elected youths, whose duty it was to be responsible for the opinions of their pen. They had little to complain of, though they complained hotly and manfully about everything. I heard them out, wore them down, and at last listed their grounds for complaint—the most serious of which was that the crowded conditions prevented them from studying for their examinations! Most of them were due to take G. C. E. this year. When I told Foster this he took both hands off the steering wheel and put them over
his ears. “Don’t,” he pleaded in anguish. “Don’t tell me any more. They are
mad
. I can’t take it. First they throw a bomb, then they want to pass their School Cert., and I’m a Fascist because they can’t!” He moaned and rocked from side to side. “It’s like being a male nurse in an institution. Are all the Greeks as mad as this lot?”

The answer, of course, was yes. “Well, I’m out of my depth,” said Foster, “and the sooner I get back to U. K. the better.” I must say I sympathized with him.

The days passed in purposeless riots and the screaming of demagogues and commentators; and the nights were busy with the crash of broken glass and the spiteful detonation of small grenades. The Turks began to get restive. Sabri’s eyes darkened and flashed as he spoke of the situation. I had driven over on Sunday to collect some wood for the house. “How much longer are they going to tolerate these Greeks?” he demanded. The day before there had been a serious riot and he himself had turned back a mob of Turks bent upon setting fire to the Bishopric. (Sabri was a very gallant man: I once saw him dive fully clothed into Kyrenia harbor to rescue a Greek fisherman’s child in difficulties.) “We Turks would not tolerate it,” he said as he sat, unmoving among his perambulators. “You must take sterner measures. Fines. Severe sentences. I know these people. I was born here. They will come to heel. We Turks know the way.” But of course the methods of 1821 were hardly possible to contemplate today, and the Greeks knew it. If we had
been Russians or Germans the Enosis problem would have been solved in half an hour—by a series of mass murders and deportations. No democracy could think along these lines.

And then, how recognizable were the Cypriots of today from those of yesterday? That evening a Dutch journalist repeated to me a conversation he had had with a Greek consular official in which the latter said:

To be honest we never thought the bastards would show fight. We never dreamed all this trouble would come about. We backed them up morally because we think their claim was just; but never materially. It’s entirely a Cypriot show, and it has astonished us. Cyprus is like a man who has been told he is impotent for generations; suddenly he finds himself in bed with a lovely girl and discovers that he isn’t—he can actually make love! We thought it would be all over in a month, but now we think it will really go on.

He had forgotten, he said, that the quality of obstinacy was something which the Cypriots did not share with metropolitan Greeks.… And so on. True or false?

From all these fragmented pieces of the original life of Cyprus—the quietness and certainty of ordered ways and familiar rhythms—it was impossible now to assemble a coherent picture, even up at the Abbey where the coffee drinkers still sat, drenched in the Gothic silence and coolness of those idle afternoons,
against a wall with its livid cartoons which urged them to throw off their imprisoning web of sleep and act.

But the shots which rang out on the afternoon before the London Conference opened should have dispelled any hopes I entertained of a dramatic and satisfactory solution to our troubles. The death of P. C. Poullis in the open street after a Communist rally, not only virtually put Wren’s Special Branch out of commission, but later provided the Greeks with the first of the Enosis martyrs in the person of Karaolis, a mild well-mannered youth in the Income Tax department of the Government. The grotesque, the unreal, was rapidly becoming the normal. The hush of Cyprus, which had, for so many generations, been the calm unemphatic hush of an island living outside time but within the boundaries of a cherished order, had changed: the hush of a new fear had gripped it, and the air was darkened with the vague shapes and phantoms of a terror which the Government could no longer dispel or hold at bay. The political liberty of the subject was a secondary consideration where one could not offer bare security of person in the open street. We were penetrated at every point; Security in the professional police sense had become as vague a term as the personal security of the subject. The six thousand civil servants themselves now began to feel the squeeze of the terror; an invisible pistol dogged them. There was no question of loyalties—for everyone was loyal. But no informer could pass the barrier without being discovered and that
meant death; conversely not to obey a terrorist command might also mean death. What was the position of a secondary schoolboy who had signed the EOKA oath and who one day found himself in a small room with three masked men who ordered him to place a time-bomb or commit a murder—
or else pay the price?
The police depended upon Cypriots for intelligence; they were penetrated. In the administration it was the same. The Colonial Secretary himself had a Cypriot secretary—devoted and loyal as she was. Secure confidence was everywhere prejudiced, and everywhere there grew the sensation of the walls closing in upon us.

But the key was finally turned upon Cyprus by the London Conference, where the Turkish attitude, which had now become as hard as a rock, could not be shifted by a degree; nor was anyone disposed to imitate Hannibal and try a little vinegar. My worst fears were realized, though here again I was guilty of misjudgment, for the Turkish case was not merely politically expedient to follow; it linked itself in other ways to pacts and agreements outside Cyprus, affecting the Arab world. Could one afford to cross Turkey? Either way we were confronted by a hedge of thorns. We had undermined the stability of Athens and indeed our whole Balkan position by an earlier refusal to take the Greek case on Cyprus seriously; we might, in any late attempt to unwind the spools of policy back to that point, unsettle the Turkish alliance, and prejudice the whole complex of Middle Eastern affairs in which this
great Moslem power played such an important part. We had allowed too much time to pass, and Turkish public opinion was now in the grip of a hysteria which, though less justified, was as strong as that which was gripping Athens. The Turkish case, as such, did not of course carry as much weight as the Greek though one could sympathize with the Turks of Cyprus. Nevertheless it was difficult to understand how a hypothetically Greek Cyprus could constitute a graver military threat to Turkey than did Rhodes or Thasos; and the two hundred thousand Turks in Thrace do not seem to find life harder than the corresponding number of Greeks living in Turkey.… But national hysteria makes a poor counselor, and the shocking riots which followed in September in Turkey made the argument seem hollower than ever, and revived in a flash the ancient barbaric animosities which lie buried in the hearts of Turks and Greeks, and which both until now believed dead for ever.

But the fruitless Conference had cut the frail cord which held us still attached, however tenuously, to reason and measure. So long an orphan administratively, Cyprus was now cut adrift, a political orphan, to float slowly down the melancholy
couloirs
of Middle Eastern history, blown hither and thither by the chance winds of prejudice and passion.

I still visited Panos whenever I could, to sit and drink his heavy sweet Commanderia on the terrace under the Church of the Archangel Michael. He had
changed, had aged. Did all our faces reflect, as his did, the helpless forebodings we all felt for the future? I wondered. He spoke gently and temperately still of the situation, but obviously the failure of the Conference had been a blow to him. “There is no way forward now,” he said. “It is too late to go back to the point where you missed the catch. Things are going to get worse.” He was not deceived by my false assurance and empty optimisms. “No,” he said. “This marks a definite point. The Government will have to drop palliatives and act; that will be unpleasant for us. Then we shall have to react as firmly.” He mourned, as so many Greeks did, the lost opportunity when the Foreign Office refused to substitute the word “postponed” for “closed” upon the Cyprus file. Everything, he thought, had followed from that. His view of the future was not reassuring, but then neither was mine. Only the village with its calms and quiet airs lulled my fears. But here, too, the invisible thread was shortening. “I feel uneasy about you coming up here,” said the
muktar
quietly. “Have you any reason to?” “None. But we hardly know what’s going on inside ourselves any more.” Old Michaelis was in good form still, and still told stories with his old flair over the red wine. He hardly ever spoke of politics, and then in a low apologetic voice, as if he feared to be overheard. Once he said with a regretful sigh: “Ach, neighbor, we were happy enough before these things happened.” And raising his glass added: “That we pass beyond them.” We drank to the idea of
a peaceful Cyprus—an idea which day by day receded like a mirage before a thirsty man. “You know,” he said, “I was told of a telegram which Napoleon Zervas sent to Churchill saying ‘Old man, be wise: Cyprus promised to Greece is thrice British.’ * He grinned and put a finger to his temple. “Note carefully he said ‘promised’ not ‘given.’
There
is the matter! Yesterday the promise would have been enough. Today …” He made a monkey-face to suggest a lot of people all talking simultaneously. It was an admirable illustration of the situation.