Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (34 page)

The slanting light was now impacting on the sea to fling itself in a brilliant dazzle upwards at us. When the old man came to join me on the terrace his red turban threw a patch of dancing scarlet on the wall behind us. He crouched down beside me, motionless as a tortoise, unspeaking, and together we gazed into the heart of the darkness which had begun to overflow and trickle out of the valleys towards us. It was a blessed moment—a sunset which the Greeks and Romans knew—in which the swinging cradle-motion of the sea slowly copied itself into the consciousness,
and made one’s mind beat with the elemental rhythm of the earth itself. He said nothing and I said nothing; we simply sat there together as if bereft of the power of speech, watching the night encircle us.

Presently, on the headland opposite where the new house stood roofless as a ruin, in silhouette, a small black figure appeared and waved against the violet sky. Panos’s hail came to us across the bay, diminished by distance and broken by the sea-rhythms on the rocks below. It was time to be going. I had decided to walk back to the house over the headland.

It was difficult to say good-bye to the Hodja who always appeared to be overwhelmed by his loneliness on this bare shore when one was leaving; he clung to one’s hand, or to a corner of one’s coat, a sleeve, a towel—anything, to put off the moment of parting, while he desperately racked his soft brain for a topic of conversation which would detain one. “Will you come back tomorrow?” he asked anxiously. “No.” He made a grimace and rolled his glaucous eyes. “The next day?” I shook his hand firmly and dropped it—but it climbed up my arm to my elbow, like a vine, and clutched it. “On Saturday,” I said, though I knew it to be a lie, for on Saturday I should have left Cyprus, perhaps forever. I had not the heart to tell him the truth.

“On Saturday,” he croaked. “Good. Good. Bring a Turkish newspaper, effendi mine, a Turkish newspaper, please.” He bobbed and mimicked a premature thanks for this favor. “I will,” I said, making a mental
note to post him
Hur Soz
from my office. “And so good-bye.” He took up his little cat, as if for consolation, and shuffled down with me to the spring, muttering under his breath.

I started to walk towards the sunset along that ivory sea-line while he stood, motionless as a lizard, watching me. The shadows came out to meet me, and with them the chill of the earth as it turned on its axis towards the darkness; the island was sinking into blueness as if into some great inkwell. But when I looked back the Mosque still blazed in sunlight, vertical and emphatic, echoing those ancient discoveries in space which still haunt our architecture—the cube, the sphere, the square, the cylinder. And still the little black figure stood, still as a statue, with the little tan cat in its arms, watching me.

By the time I reached the bamboo palisades Janis had lit a petrol lamp, whose blinding white light squashed out the evening around it and lit up the marble table-top with a crystal flare. They both sat there with their heads upon their hands, as if weighed down by an enormous fatigue, and something about their posture struck me; they were sitting so still and silent. Marie’s little radio stood on the marble between them, and it had apparently just been turned off—of so recent a date seemed the silence which had just fallen, had opened between them like a chasm.

“Karaolis is to hang,” said Panos in a small choked voice, croaking as if with an enormous fatigue. Janis
had tears in his eyes. There was nothing I could do but sit heavily silent between them, in the sympathetic silence one keeps for someone who has just suffered an irreparable bereavement. We had all known, and knew that this must happen; never for a moment was the objective logic and justice of the fact in any doubt. Their sorrow was the sorrow of people who had seen someone pursued by the Eumenides of ill-luck; a victim of events which could have turned out differently had they been differently conceived in the minds of those who had precipitated them. Panos lit a cigarette and looked at his own hands as they lay before him on the table. “This is the end of something,” he said. “We shall not be able to speak naturally, look each other in the eye, for a long time to come. O curse it!” Again it was not the injustice of the fact he questioned; the fault was in our stars. He stood up and for a moment his mildness dropped from him; he said, with disgust and fury: “Why were you not honest in the beginning? If you had said, ‘This is a Greek island but we are determined to stay in it, and will fight for it,’ do you think a single weapon would have been raised against you? Never! We know your legal title to the island is unquestionable. But that small lie is the seed from which all these monstrous things have grown and will continue to grow. Everything follows from it:
of course
Karaolis must hang. The Governor is right. I would do the same.…” He stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette on the table and with trembling hands drained his glass
of wine. He stood up. “But it is not Karaolis only who will be hanged; the deep bond between us will have been broken finally.” What he meant, I reflected, was that the image—the mythopoeic image of the Englishman which every Greek carried in his heart, and which was composed of so many fused and overlapping pictures—the poet, the lord, the quixotic and fearless defender of right, the just and freedom-loving Englishman—the image was at last thrown down and dashed into a thousand pieces, never again to be reassembled. In a paradoxical sort of way they were mourning, not Karaolis, but England.

We sat for a long time in silence while the violet evening gathered about us and the sea hushed upon the headland. The peacocks chuckled among the palms. The white harsh light, filtered by blueness, shone through the doors upon the rooms full of Marie’s treasures.

The day before I had been to say good-bye to the francolin, walking in leisurely fashion up the narrow winding street of the little village which lies without the wooded knoll on which Government House now stands—the site of Coeur de Lion’s first camp outside the then unwalled capital of the island; I was reflecting, as I walked, how different it had been a year before, sauntering up at dusk in a dinner jacket through the unguarded gates with their heraldic lions and into the cold and pretentious portals of the great anodyne building. One might wander for half a day in the grounds without being challenged then; and the
house itself with its warren of corridors seemed empty, tenantless, uninhabited even by servants. Today the scarlet-capped military police manned stout roadblocks. The barbed wire had been renewed; and in a pit outside the front door crouched a red beret with an automatic gun trained upon the house-gate.

When I thought of the relative unpreparedness of the year before I marvelled that half a dozen resolute youths had not broken into the place and blown it up ages before the military took it in hand. Nor could I blame the soldiers who had seen our condition for feeling that we, of the old political regime, were somehow compromised, belonging as we did to that peaceful world of “jogging along,” of
laissez faire
.

It was changed now; the billiard room was full of operational maps and the impedimenta of the three smart secretaries who manned the waiting room outside the great study where the Field Marshal worked.

He received me with the same wonderful warmth and composure and gentleness, unhurried in the midst of the hundred pressures of a task which was both political and operational. I told him of my plans, to take the four months’ leave due to me, and to visit Europe for a while before considering whether to return or not. “I think you should come back,” he said, “when you feel like it—after all this is over.” I regretted only that there had not been time and opportunity to be his guide to Cyprus. “I shall come back for a holiday myself one day,” he smiled. “And by the way, do keep your eye
open, and if you feel we’re going wrong for goodness’ sake don’t hesitate to tell us so.”

But what could I tell him? The very decisions which were operationally necessary to the present situation were political lunacy for whatever must follow upon the present. To try to marry military and political considerations at this stage was like trying to play a drum from a piano score. We had all of us been made the clowns of shortsightedness at home, for now military solutions precluded the political. (For example, the deportation of the Archbishop which was operationally just was politically nonsensical—as he was not only the one true representative of the Greek community who could not be replaced, but his absence left the field open to the extremists. Though his complicity in EOKA was obvious, nevertheless he was the only brake to terrorism and the only person who could curb it.) I could not help reflecting what a sad waste of money and reputations the whole problem had been; and if the peace could only be kept with the help of twelve thousand armed men what security could the island enjoy as a base?…

But then much is a matter of destiny; if we were to sweat the lead out of Cyprus the Governor was the one person to achieve it. Moreover, given a few happy strokes of luck he might draw EOKA’s teeth in time, and genuinely win the peace he had been sent to keep. What he needed was not the counsels of specialists or the lucubrations of political wiseacres but something
as clear and uncomplicated as his own direct vision of necessary expedients. He had not been sent to complete the wreckage of the Balkan Pact or shake nuts and bolts out of the frail skeleton of NATO. His mission was to police and hold a turbulent island, and all secondary consideration which we might produce at this stage could neither give him comfort nor do anything save contribute to infirmity of purpose. He needed, in fact, someone to wish him luck in a tedious and thorny task which offered neither the hope of peace nor the honors of war. And wish him luck I did on the old culverin with wooden wheels which stands under the lion and unicorn over the front door—a relic which Henry VIII had once sent to de L’Isle Adam, Grand Master of the Order of Saint John; another warrior like him who had propped the tottering fortunes of the Crusaders in their battle against the infidel. The soldier inhabits his own field of merits and his morals are founded in obedience to those for whom matters of life and death are not debatable issues, but must be acted upon. The francolin fitted warmly and naturally into the great gallery of human beings whose portraits made up the history and changing fortunes of this marginal place. That fine head belonged to the historical tapestry of Cyprus—very English in its warm coloring and lively composure. He belonged to that trace of forgotten captains whose sense of destiny had made them free men, committed to history; men who combined the power to turn perfect verses and in the same
breath to order the pyre which was heaped about the feet of Saint Joan to be lit: if it was part of an operation whose enthralling science demanded that they disinherit pity.

But these thoughts had led me far from the two silent figures at the stone table, throbbing with the breathing whiteness of the petrol lamp. For them the foreground of this peaceful and happy place where they had lived so simply, drinking wine, picking wild flowers, marrying and burying—the whole had suddenly become darkened with the air itself, by blood.

“We must be going,” said Panos softly, at last. Janis too rose, throwing a sprawling shadow on the white walls. They sighed deeply and stood for a moment in deep thought before following me out. The sea burned in the eye of the night like an emerald. “Good-bye,” said Janis, his old loving formality clouded now by the shadows which had gathered about us. “Go with the good,” I responded as we moved out into the dense dusk carrying our own silhouette with us for a few yards before it was swallowed by the night which lay now, spilled everywhere about us in the cavernous shadows of olives and carobs. We left the rock-bound silence of the headland behind us and picked up the car which was already damp with the night dews.

Panos did not speak and I drove the four miles back to his village in a silence which I felt matched his mood. There was nothing resentful in it—it was the silence of profound sorrow.

I dropped him at the edge of the long flight of white stairs under the Church of Saint Michael, unaware that we should never meet again. He thanked me and placed his hand for a moment on mine; then, shaking his head sadly, he walked up the stairs bearing his great armful of flowers from Klepini. I had a glass of wine with Clito—who served me with tears in his eyes, but unspeaking; and then walked back to the seashore where I had left the car in the rich cool darkness of that perfect spring weather. All the sights and sounds of Kyrenia came to me with a new and poignant brilliance, as if experienced for the first time. The balconies spanning the conversational streets with their pattern of humble intimacies, now silent as the vines which climbed everywhere; fishermen mending nets by elf-light; a man hooping a barrel; a grey-headed man stringing a mandolin; a Turk in a wine-red fez; two boys playing hopscotch; children sleeping like sculptures below the bastion of the castle; a man blowing upon a tray of embers which was covered with sweetcorn; a little boy padding about with a thurible from which a wisp of laurel-smoke ascended—in Clito’s the drinkers took a pinch of smoke with finger and thumb and made the sign of the cross with it; a coffeehouse sweet with the sound of cage-birds, where the
nargilehs
were piled in a rack like muskets in a magazine—you brought your own ebony mouthpiece before choosing your favorite one to smoke.

I walked down to the harbor where the still water was full of frozen lamplight from the houses round
about it under a black rubber star-cancelled sky. It was very peaceful, yet all around us in the darkness now the island was slowly erupting in little spots of hate and the operational lines at the office would be scratching out their messages. “A bomb at the Cinema in Larnaca … two men killed in a coffeehouse … a bomb at a carpark in Paphos… a sentry murdered in Famagusta.…” Infinitesimally small flashes of hate like the spark of single matches struck here and there in the darkness of a field, none strong enough to ignite the whole, thank God, yet there, ever present, as a reminder of the sullen weight of the people’s wish. My footsteps echoed softly upon the seawall. I was, I realized, very tired after this two years’ spell as a servant of the Crown; and I had achieved nothing. It was good to be leaving.