Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (4 page)

I did not need to know where my house would be found; I was sure that it would be here, along the foothills of this delightful range. But how should I find it?

Nothing must be done in a hurry, for that would be hostile to the spirit of the place. Cyprus, I realized, was more Eastern than its landscape would suggest, and like a good Levantine I must wait and see.

Chapter Three: Voices at the Tavern Door

Everyone pulls the quilt over to his side
.

The hardest crusts always fall to the toothless
.

Work is hard, no work is harder
.

So long as he has a tooth left a fox won’t be pious
.

—Cypriot Greek Proverbs

A
FTER A FEW
weeks Kyrenia, for all the formalized beauty of its ravishing harbor, its little streets and walled gardens rosy with pomegranates, began to pall. It is difficult to analyze why—for the Spring was on us and the green fields about the village, still spotted with dancing yellow oranges and tangerines, were thick with a treasury of wild flowers such as not even spring in Rhodes can show. But other considerations intruded, changing its atmosphere. The outskirts of the walls, where still the traces of ancient tombs were clear in the rock face of
quarries or cuttings, had begun to bristle with cheap little villas and tarmac roads on the pattern of Wimbledon. Here and there houses already bore the alarming name-signs which greet one from the gates of seaside boarding-houses, “Mon Repos,” “Chowringee,” “The Gables.” The little place was obviously soon to become one of those forlorn and featureless townships hovering on the outskirts of English provincial cities—suburbs without a capital to cling to. There was a building boom on; all land was booming. The regular holiday-makers’ season Kyrenia enjoyed had already imposed on it a rash of unpleasant bars and cafés painfully modeled on those of Messrs. Lyons. It was, in fact, enjoying all the deformities and amenities associated with our larger suburbs at home. Its real life as a Graeco-Turkish port of the Levant was ebbing out of it. Or so one felt.

In all this one could see something which marked Cyprus off from the rest of the Mediterranean—an agricultural island being urbanized too quickly, before its inhabitants had really decided what was worth preserving about their habits and surroundings.

Disturbing anomalies met the eye everywhere: a Cypriot version of the small-car owner, for example, smoking a pipe and reverently polishing a Morris Minor; costumed peasants buying tinned food and frozen meat at the local version of the Co-op; ice-cream parlors with none of the elaborate confectionery, the true Levant delicacies, which make the towns of the Middle East as memorable as a tale from the Arabian Nights; an almost
total absence of good fish or any fishy delicacy. As far as I could judge the townsman’s standard of living roughly corresponded to that of a Manchester suburb. Rural life remained as a sort of undertow. The peasant was already becoming a quaint relic of a forgotten mode of life. White bread and white collars!

Yet side by side with this crude and graceless world the true Mediterranean
moeurs
lingered—but the two aspects of life seemed totally divorced from one another. Crowded buses still brought black-booted peasants with quaint old-fashioned manners into the town, accompanied by their wives and daughters, many of whom sported permanent waves and shingles. There were gypsies, there were tramps and professional poets, to be sure, but their appearances were fugitive and had the air of being illusory. I could not be sure where they lived, where they came from, these figures from the literature of the past. How had they escaped the cloth cap and boots, the cheap overcoat and brief case which—apart from the hunger and despair—had been the only noticeable feature of the people’s revolution in Yugoslavia? It was hard to say—for they were still roughly and talkatively alive. They were still melon-fanciers and tosspots, carrying about with them the rough airs of village life and village ways which one can enjoy anywhere between Sardinia and Crete. Yet there seemed to be something disembodied about them. Somewhere, I concluded, there must be a Cyprus beyond the red pillar-boxes and the stern Union Jacks
(floating, mysteriously enough, only over the police-stations) where weird enclaves of these Mediterranean folk lived a joyous, uproarious, muddled anarchic life of their own. Where? Occasionally I stopped people and asked them where they came from: booted and bandoliered sportsmen drinking brandy and leaning on their guns as they waited for a bus; grave priests or turbaned hodjas; baggy-trousered patriarchs holding swaddled infants; women in colored head-kerchiefs. I was rewarded by the names of villages which I memorized. Later I would know exactly where to find woven stuff and silk (Lapithos), or carved cupboards and shelves (Akanthou). Kyrenia was the shopping center for a district.

Meanwhile the British colony lived what appeared to be a life of blameless monotony, rolling about in small cars, drinking at the yacht club, sailing a bit, going to church, and suffering agonies of apprehension at the thought of not being invited to Government House on the Queen’s Birthday. One saw the murk creeping up over Brixton as one listened to their conversations. No doubt Malta and Gibraltar have similar colonies. How often they have been described and how wearisome they are. Yet my compatriots were decent, civil folk, who had been brought here, not by any desire to broaden minds cumbered only by the problems of indolence and trade, but by a perfectly honorable passion for sunlight and low income tax. How sad it is that so many of our national characteristics are misinterpreted! Our timidity and lack
of imagination seem to foreigners to be churlishness, our taciturnity the deepest misanthropy. But are these choking suburbanisms with which we seem infused when we are abroad any worse than the tireless dissimulation and insincerity of the Mediterranean way of life? I doubt it. Yet Manoli the chemist lived in a perpetual ferment of indignation about British manners, British stand-offishness and so on. His particular hate was General Envy. He would perform a little dance of rage as he saw the old soldier sauntering down the main street, patronizing not only the poor Cypriots but the very morning air by the self-confident sweep of his tobacco-stained moustache. “Look at him,” he would say. “I could throw a tomato at him.” Then one day the General asked him how to pronounce the Greek for “potato” and shyly showed him a shopping list which he had laboriously made out in Greek. After that Manoli would flush with annoyance if ever he heard a word spoken against the old fellow. He became, for Manoli at least, a saint; and yet the General, as all who remember him will agree, was a vile old bore with scarce manners and little enough consideration for the world around him. “Such a good, kind man,” Manoli would say after the General’s canonization, rolling his dark eyes and nodding. “Such a
worthy
and
respected
man.” This is what happened whenever Briton and Cypriot met, even to exchange the merest civility.

The truth is that both the British and the Cypriot world offered one a gallery of humors which could only be fully enjoyed by one who, like myself, had a stake in
neither. Never has one seen such extraordinary human beings as those who inhabited the Dome Hotel; it was as if every forgotten Victorian
pension
between Folkestone and Scarborough had sent a representative to attend a world conference on longevity. The figures, the faces, the hats belonged to some disoriented world populated only by Bronx cartoonists; and nothing could convince one more easily that England was on its last legs than a glimpse of the wide range of crutches, trusses, trolleys, slings, and breeches-buoys which alone enabled these weird survivals to emerge from their bed-rooms and take the pale spring sunshine of the Kyrenia waterfront.… Shadowy and faded plumage of dejected fowls and crows shuffling through the sterile white corridors towards a terrace laid with little tables and religiously marked “Afternoon Teas”; or the strange awkward figures of honeymooners sauntering hand in hand under the fort—convalescents from a prenuptial leucotomy. Alas! the Cypriots did not see how funny they were. They were merely aghast at their age and the faded refinements which they exemplified.

Conversely the British saw a one-dimensional figure in the Cypriot; they did not realize how richly the landscape was stocked with the very sort of characters who rejoice the English heart in a small country town—the rogue, the drunkard, the singer, the incorrigible. Here and there the patriarchal figure of some booted worthy seemed to strike them for a moment, like a fugitive realization that here was a
figure belonging truly to his landscape. But the fitful understanding died there, under the label of “quaintness,” and was dispersed. Perhaps language was the key—it was hard to say. Certainly I was astonished to find how few Cypriots knew good English, and how few Englishmen the dozen words of Greek which cement friendships and lighten the burdens of everyday life. There were, of course, many honorable exceptions on both sides who struck the balance truly. Scholars of wild flowers and students of wine and folklore already had something in common which overstepped the gaps created by lack of knowledge. But generally speaking the divorce was complete, and the exceptions rare; all too many of us lived as if we were in Cheltenham, while some had been there as long as five years without feeling the need to learn the Greek or Turkish for “Good morning.” These things are trivial, of course, but in small communities they cut deep; while in revolutionary situations they can become the most powerful political determinant.

But I was on a different vector, hunting for other qualities which might make residence tolerable, or might isolate me from my fellows. My attitude was a selfish one, though wherever I saw our national credit prejudiced by an inadvertent word or action I tried to restore the balance if it were possible by soothing ruffled feelings or interpreting the significance of some action which had been misconstrued. It is fatal in the Levant to be too proud to explain.

But this digression has led me away from my topic—the music of a flute, which one day issued from the shadowy recesses of Clito’s cavern, and restored my confidence in the belief that topers did, in fact, exist in Cyprus. My dissatisfaction with the existing Coca-Cola bars or pubs had for some time been nagging me, persuading me to try to find a modest tavern whose habitués would correspond more nearly to the sort of people I had come to live amongst. In Panos’s world there had been good fellowship and kindness, but also a middle-class restraint and poise which were in the final analysis, wearying. The lives of his friends were lived according to a pattern already familiar to me; the middle bourgeois of France or England live just such lives, among the circumscribed politenesses of people who have face to lose and positions to keep up. Panos’s was the world of the quiet scholar of means in a small village. I wanted to see a little further into Cypriot life, to canvass its values at a humbler level.

The feeble insinuations of a shepherd’s flute directed my steps to the little wine-store of Clito one fine tawny-purple dusk when the sea had been drained of its colors, and the last colored sails had begun to flutter across the harbor-bar like homesick butterflies. It had been the first really warm spring day—the water cold and bracing. It was good to feel salt on one’s skin, in one’s hair, salt mixed with dust between one’s sandaled toes. It would be another hour before lamp-light, and by now the harbor walk would be full of people taking
their dusk aperitifs. I was on my way to buy a torch battery and a roll of film when the flute intervened.

It was obviously being played by someone with an imperfect command over it; it squeaked and yipped, started a line again, only to founder once more in squeals. The music was punctuated by a series of shattering disconnected observations in a roaring bass voice of such power that one could feel the sympathetic vibrations from a set of copper cauldrons standing somewhere in the innermost recesses of Clito’s cave. Bursts of helpless laughter and a labored altercation also played an intermittent part in the proceedings.