Until I Say Good-Bye (22 page)

Turtle Beach

O
n my first visit to Cyprus, Soulla had told me of an extraordinary day she and Panos spent together around 1996. They had visited sites from their childhood in northern Cyprus: first a beach Panos had loved, then a monastery.

Soulla showed me a photo of Panos standing in a breezeway at the monastery, framed by arches.

“I want to go there,” I said.

For that is how you summon spirit. To go.

I did not realize the impact of what I had asked.

Since 1974, Cyprus has been a divided island, with a Greek side and a Turkish one. Even the capital Nicosia is divided. As rigidly split as East and West Berlin once were, so is Nicosia today.

The war between Greece and Turkey, two nations with a long history on the island, had been intense. Both nations sent their armies. Many died. Tens of thousands more were uprooted from their homes.

Every Cypriot remembers those days, even the children who have only heard the tales.

“My mother was hanging clothes on the line,” a Turkish friend, Firat, told us, recounting a Greek bombing run. “She ran out of her flip-flops, she was so scared.”

Avraam was thirteen years old when the Turkish army neared his home. He, his three siblings, and his parents got in the family car and headed for safety in the pine forest of a mountain range hours away.

“My father said, ‘We will stay here tonight,' ” Avraam recounted. “And I said, ‘Where here?' ”

They slept in the pine forest for a month, expecting to return home any day.

They never could.

The United Nations brokered a demarcation line, the Green Line. Greeks to the south in the Republic of Cyprus; Turks to the north in the self-declared (and never internationally recognized) Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. No one could cross between the two.

The island was divided—as divided as I was from my birth father, the man I sought to know.

Panos and Soulla were Greek Cypriots from the north. In 1996, neither had been to their childhood homes in more than twenty years. Then Panos received a rare opportunity.

A renowned pediatric surgeon, he saved the life of a Turkish minister's son. The minister, grateful, asked what he could do for Panos in return.

Panos asked that he and Soulla be allowed to cross the border and visit sites from their childhood.

They were granted one day, under military escort. That's how strict was the divide.

By the time of my first visit in 2010, tensions had eased. The Green Line remained, but George and Yioula had been allowed take me across the border for a day.

I had not understood how difficult this was for them. Asking Greek Cypriots to cross to the Turkish side was akin to asking a Cuban exile to take you back to Cuba. The sense of loss, both personal and cultural, was profound.

As we crossed the border, Yioula summarized her feelings in a whisper: “A thousand sighs.”

On that first trip, we drove past Yioula's childhood house in Famagusta, a place usurped by a Turkish family. George had tried to dissuade her, but Yioula had been adamant. She looked intently, but spoke not a word.

Afterward, we headed across a desolate landscape to the eastern shore of the island, following the path Panos had taken with Soulla in 1996. Like them, we had only hours. I had not known the story when I arrived, and I could only fit a day into my schedule.

On this second trip, I was determined to return to northern Cyprus. To immerse myself, unlike the first time, in the places Panos had loved. In the Saint Andreas monastery, from which the medal I now wore as a necklace—Panos's medal—had come.

And on Turtle Beach, where, as Soulla told it, Panos had taken off his shoes and danced on the golden sand, his arms over his head, twirling with joy.

T
he eastern Karpaz Peninsula, where Panos was raised, is hilly, rocky, dusty, and desolate. Few people live in the region, especially since the Turkish invasion, and the land is not cultivated as on the Greek side. You can drive and drive the lone road and see nothing but rock and brush, brown fields and bramble.

Then you emerge a hundred feet above a cove, where sapphire blue water melds to teal.

A dozen turns, then back again through miles of brown fields and bramble before another bend reveals a larger cove, where sapphire melds to teal and teal to turquoise.

A hand-lettered sign in the middle of nowhere indicated we had arrived: “Hasan's Turtle Beach Ok for cars.”

We turned onto a sand road that wended down a hill toward the shore. About halfway down, we pulled up to an open-air eatery, the only building, and parked.

Then stepped out into a postcard.

The day was so clear, we could see the mountains of Turkey forty miles away. There was not one cloud. Sun shone on every inch of the panorama, lighting the expanse of Mediterranean before us a brilliant blue.

At the oceanside, I have so often marveled at the colors.

The Pacific's deep violet, seen from the edge of a cliff in Hawaii with John.

Every shade of aquamarine in the waters around the Bahamas, the shallow flats like blue beach glass as Nancy and I flew overhead.

The Atlantic Ocean, my ocean, has more hues of green than blue. In my mind, green is good for bedrooms, but not oceans. An opinion stemming from childhood memories of endless days afloat in blue, blue pools. If a pool was greenish, it was dirty.

But the color of the Mediterranean at Turtle Beach.

Oh, the color!

Not a navy blue nor a royal blue. A sapphire blue. A jewel with hints of teal and turquoise, the full spectrum spreading for miles beyond a gold-tinted beach.

I asked to be parked in my wheelchair right there by the car, under a tree, wanting just to sit and sear that image into my mind.

I could see why Panos adored the spot. I adored it too.

The water was more than a football field of sand away. I told John I wanted to remain there and not go down to the beach.

Hasan (the manager of the eatery) and John lifted my wheelchair over bumps on the path to the thatch-roofed restaurant. We ordered beers and kebabs, out of the sun but squarely in the scenery.

The beach could have held thousands of people. There were perhaps twenty there.

The others left me and went down to the shore to swim. From my vantage point, they looked like specks in the sand.

I thought of that quote by Isaac Newton, when he compared himself to a boy playing at the seashore, focused on the shells, “whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

I thought how fine my view at the top was, where I could see the color, the expanse of the sea. I actively tried to make it okay not to be able to get down there and swim and dance on the sand.

That is the secret I learn more of every day. Not to want things I cannot have or cannot do.

Remove the want, and you remove the pain.

John and Nancy returned from their swim. “How was the water?” I asked.

“Perfect!” John said. Calm, clear, and warm.

John said the view underwater was boring, nothing but sand. No fish. No mollusks. Not even rocks.

Nancy gushed about the underwater light, like a kaleidoscope of blue and yellow glass.

Perspective. It's all perspective.

We had more beer and kebabs and finally, reluctantly, left in the late afternoon to drive to our hotel on the Turkish side of the border. We did so mostly in silence, save for periodic eruptions of laughter.

Nancy, operating the right-side-drive van (Cyprus had long been a British territory, and they still drove on the British side of the road), instinctively expected the turn signal to be on the left side of the wheel. Each time she flipped it, she turned on the windshield wipers.

They'd swish across the dusty glass. “Okay, I am going to concentrate!” Nancy said. “And not do that again.”

She did it the whole drive.

A slight haze set in. The sea turned more black than blue. The sun set over the ocean, reflecting so intensely there appeared a bump in the horizon where the light met the water, as if the sun was pulling a wave into its light.

The evening haze colored the mountains a gray blue. At one point we saw six fingerling slopes, each subsequent one a paler blue-gray, a shadow of the others.

An extraordinary sight to end our extraordinary day, tracing the footsteps of an extraordinary man.

Saint Andreas

T
he monastery sat on a cape extending into the Mediterranean Sea. Apostolos Andreas. A place of history. A pilgrimage for the Greek Orthodox faithful, who sought the healing power of Saint Andreas.

Author Colin Thubron, in his book
Journey into Cyprus
, noted that as early as 1191
AD
, an abbey had stood on the site. Today a fifteenth-century chapel covers its healing wells.  Legend has it that the water sprang beneath the feet of Saint Andreas as he landed on the shore.

In 1972, when Thubron wrote, the giant square of huts around the monastery accommodated visitors by the hundreds. “For St. Andreas is a great miracle-worker, and this is the Lourdes of Cyprus.”

Thubron described a carnival atmosphere as people flocked there for blessings and miracles. He witnessed a throng of baptisms being held with the “drive of an industry,” the faithful lifting their children to kiss the icons there.

That must have been the Saint Andreas of Panos's childhood, the memory he loved and sought.

But by 1996, Saint Andreas was not the monastery of Panos's youth. When the Turks invaded in 1974, dividing the country and cutting eastern Cyprus off from its Greek population, churches became a casualty. Visit a village in the Karpaz region today and you will see plants growing out of church roofs and cat and pigeon dung coating its sanctuary.

There are bright and shiny mosques now, built for the new population, their minarets visible above village homes.

The Saint Andreas monastery was not spared. Walls were crumbling, revealing ancient stones pitted by neglect. The huts that had housed pilgrims were filled with debris. On the day of our visit, feral cats, skinny dogs, and two wild donkeys were the only other pilgrims.

“That's the most depressed-looking cat I've ever seen,” Soulla's daughter Alina said.

The archway where Panos had stood for his photograph looked forsaken. Plaster chipping away. Paint flaking. A desolate place, not the happy place it had seemed with my birth father standing within it.

Yet I smiled, as I could feel him here, in this place he loved.

I could imagine the monastery full of the faithful, Panos among them, kissing the golden icons, standing close as the priest chanted and swung the bell-adorned orb full of burning incense.

I imagined smelling the sweet incense on Panos as he kissed me good night.

That is how you summon spirit.

That is how you close a divide.

The holy waters of San Andreas still flowed, despite the monastery's decrepit state. Down many steps, near the seashore, was a font.

I asked John to help me to where the holy water flows. He carried me in his arms down a set of stairs, breathing heavily, trying not to slip on the worn stone steps.

I had visited the Saint Andreas Monastery in 2010, on my first visit to Cyprus. We arrived in the late afternoon. I had time for little more than a photograph, in the exact spot where Panos had stood for his photo, and a walk to the font.

As the sun fell away in the west, I placed Panos's Saint Andreas medallion, the one in his pocket when he died, in my withered left hand. I held it under the stream of cool water.

“Hello, God,” I prayed. “Please solve this mystery. Please let it be something other than ALS. Please let my children keep their mother. For they have done nothing wrong.”

I took a photograph of my hand with the medallion in the palm, water running over it.

Then stood there, silently. Hoping.

On this second visit, I thought I might pray for a miracle.

Yes, I believe in miracles, I concluded on the drive to the monastery.

I had only to look at my mother. She was a miracle, to have been so close to death and to be alive today.

Yes, I believe in miracles.

But I didn't expect a miracle.

Nor did I feel I deserved one.

My mother had been a faithful worshipper all her life. I had not. My mother had always been mindful of God, while I had not.

John set me down to rest himself about twenty stairs away from the holy water font. “That's okay,” I told him, “You don't need to take me further.”

A full moon rose behind me above the Mediterranean. I could barely turn to see it.

The trip to Cyprus accelerated my weakening. I could no longer turn my body. I could no longer hold things in my right hand. My left foot for the first time entirely buckled when I put weight on it without my brace. My speech was so slurred I was reluctant to talk.

“So sad,” I slurred, as I sat with John, looking over the decrepit monastery.

He looked at his watch. “It's 7:40,” he replied, misunderstanding my remark.

The moon rose higher over the Mediterranean, and the monastery fell toward darkness. Alina drove our car across the gravel parking lot to pick me up.
Crunch, crunch, crunch
, as I slowly stepped to the car, John holding me upright. I was grateful I could walk at all.

We arrived back late at the Theresa Hotel, tired and hungry.

We had found the hotel in 2010, as we drove along the coast near Yalusa, the Greek village where Panos was raised. No one had been at the desk when we rang the bell, but an older man soon came, carrying snails. He had been out hunting for them.

He was Erdogan, the owner of the inn. He had known Panos's father, a teacher at the elementary school.

“Your friend grandfather came from Karava near Kyrenia,” Erdogan later e-mailed Nancy. “He loved Yalusa. He rent a house and continue his life, a teacher at elementary school. He had good contact with villager. He help them to make tobacco. They build big factory to save the tobacco. After he worked in organization for to give money to the villager. The Yalusa people loved him.”

The Theresa Hotel was a no-star inn, with white plastic furniture and bare lightbulbs and mismatched sheets. But its open-air restaurant sat in a five-star spot, on a hill overlooking the sea.

This corner of Earth was luminous.

We ordered a seafood mezze, expecting subpar fare in the spare surroundings. Sorry, Erdogan, but 'tis true.

A tattooed waiter in a muscle shirt brought the plates. First, a fresh chopped salad of ruby red tomato and cucumber. Then a lentil and rice salad. A bulghur wheat salad. Fresh hummus, yogurt, and pita. Black salty olives. Beer.

Then the main course began. First, a mound of prawns, each one as big as a fist, their antennae curling over the edge of the plate. Fresh fried calamari. A pile of small silver fish. There was no room left on the table.

We ate and ate, passing the plates. John peeled the prawns for me. We mastered an eating system in Cyprus, where he fed me at every meal. Rather than preparing a small bite and waiting for me to swallow, he left me chewing and returned to his meal. I softly tapped him when I was ready for another.

Tap, tap, tap. I tapped away, delighted with the meal.

We were stuffed when out came the waiter with a pile of filleted fish and lobsters.

Tap, tap, tap!

The meal ended with a platter of watermelon and plums. We sat, drinking, smoking, talking.

We had hired a two-person Cypriot film crew to film our trip to the north. Stella, the sound tech, said she would like to share something with us, a song.

Now, Stella is a wisp of a young woman with long, thin limbs, high-top sneakers, and a boyish haircut. One place we went, she was mistaken for a child.

On Erdogan's terrace, she closed her eyes and opened her mouth and sang a cappella. Sang in a voice I could not believe came from that fragile body. Sang in perfect pitch a song in Greek about a woman whose sailor love was leaving for sea.

I understood not a word. Yet could have listened forever.