by Paul Theroux
All the Turks were on board the Akdeniz, so eager to leave, and in such a mood of celebration that even from my cabin I could hear them singing, their voices and their plonking instruments vibrating in the ship’s steel hull, making the thing throb with music of the Arabesque.
Sometime in the night I heard the sounds of departure—clanking chains, the lines slipping and straining in the winches, barks in bad English from ship to shore and back again, and then the reassuring drone of the engines and the ship rocking slowly in the deep sea. Then uninterrupted sleep was possible.
Dawn was bright, the glare of a dusty shoreline and a fortress, a Gothic church in the distance among rooftops, Northern Cyprus. It was not a province of Turkey—silly me for thinking so—but a sovereign state, the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, bankrolled and backed and guarded by Turkey, the only country in the world which recognizes it. It was about a third of Cyprus. The southern part was Greek, and the Green Line, guarded by United Nations soldiers, divided the two. Ever since this partition there had been peace on Cyprus.
Famagusta had been renamed by the Turks Gazimagosa—the Gazi an honorific term for a warrior, since the town had come through the war with valor. It was a small town, and its port was located in the old part, surrounded by a Venetian wall. It was very ruinous, all of it, and my impression was that Turkish North Cyprus was having a very bad time. Walking slowly with Samih Pasha, Fikret and Onan, it took us thirty-five minutes to see the whole of Gazimagosa, including the church, which was no longer a church: the Gothic cathedral of St. Nicholas had been turned into the Lala Pasha mosque by the grafting of a minaret onto one of the spires.
“This is it,” Samih Pasha said, tweaking his mustache. “So we go to Girne.”
“You come with us, effendi,” Onan said. “We worried about you in Israel when we didn’t see you.”
Greek Kyrenia was now Turkish Girne. It was about sixty miles away. The four of us found a taxi, and I let the Turks haggle with the driver. They came away saying, “No, no. Ridiculous!”
The driver had said that he could not take us for less than eight hundred thousand Turkish liras. This was $25—an outrageous amount to the Turks. I did not say that it seemed reasonable, because I was curious to know what their solution would be. It was a seventy-five-cent ride in an old bus to Lefkosa (Nicosia), a city that had been bisected by the Green Line. From there we would have to catch another bus to Girne.
On a bus that swayed down an empty road, past unplowed fields in the November heat of Cyprus, the wobbly wheels raising dust, the passengers dozing, the landscape looking deserted and arid—water was scarce, the last harvest had been terrible, the little nation was ignored by everyone—I was thinking how odd it was to be here, traveling across this bogus republic. The bus was uncomfortable, the road was bad, the food was awful, the weather was corrosive. But I had never been here before, which was justification enough; and I felt a grim satisfaction in being with a little Turkish team of men who kept telling me they worried about me when I was out of sight.
It was only an hour and a half to Lefkosa. The onward bus was not leaving for another two hours. In spite of his age, Samih Pasha walked quickly into town. He said he was eager to see the Green Line.
“Have you been here before?”
“Yes, but not on the ground,” he said, smiling. When he smiled his big mustache lifted in a big semaphore of happiness. “I was flying.”
In the ethnic fighting of 1964 and again at partition in 1974, it had been Samih Pasha’s task to fly his F-100 fighter plane from one end of Cyprus to the other, from his air base in Turkey. The object was not to engage Greek planes—the Turkish air force dominated the skies—but to break windows.
“I am flying at ten meters,” Samih Pasha said, “and when I get over Lefkosa I let out the afterburner and make a big noise—an explosion, you can say—and all the windows break!”
“Greek or Turkish windows?” I asked.
“Both! Impossible just to break Greek windows!”
And he described with pleasure the way his fighter jet streaked low across Cypriot airspace, scaring the bejesus out of the Greeks, and reassuring the Turks, who (so it was said on this side of the Green Line) had been systematically oppressed by them.
We walked down one rubbly street and up another, past some shops just closing for the lunch time siesta, to the United Nations checkpoint: a sentry post, a shed, a barrier, and a bilingual English-Turkish sign, STOP/DUR.
“I’d like to pass through,” I said to the soldier in the blue beret who stood holding an automatic rifle.
“No.”
“I just want to see Greek Cyprus and come straight back.”
“It is impossible.”
“You see?” Onan said. The others had watched me. They were much too polite to ask the soldier.
A woman came out of her house nearby and said hello in English. Her house had a colonnade in the front, and a pretty porch. I asked her whether she had crossed the Green Line, which was fifty feet away. No, she said, not for twenty years.
“This house was given to me by my father,” she said when I complimented her on it. “That was in 1930. Over there”—she pointed across the street to some abandoned houses—“was an Armenian family, and some Greeks. But they left.”
“Were they forced out of their houses?” I asked.
She got my point, and without replying directly to the question, she said, “My house in Limassol [in Greek Cyprus] is wrecked. They took my antiques. They took my Mercedes car.”
I was sorry that I had gotten her onto the subject, because the others left me listening to her litany of complaints. I sympathized. This had been a prosperous capital and now it was a wreck of a place, and we stood on a blocked road, among deserted houses, and the old woman was saying, “They won’t find a solution—not soon—”
A wall of atrocity photos was on display, under glass, on the Turkish side of the Green Line. They were blurred and smudged, some of them hard to make out. But the captions told the whole story, sometimes with sarcasm:
—A Greek Cypriot priest who forgot his religious duties and joined in the hunting and killing of Turks
—A Mother and Her Three Children Murdered by Greek Cypriots in the bath of their house in Nicosia
—Mass Grave
—Refugees
—Burned Village
—Frenzied Greek Cypriot Armed Bandit
—Dead bullet-riddled baby—Life was hell for us in 1963–74. We cannot return to those days.
“That is true,” Fikret said. “It was really bad. They tortured people. The Greeks burned Turkish villages. They made us suffer.”
“Aren’t you glad you had General Samih, three-star window-breaker, to help you?”
“This man,” Samih Pasha said, tapping his head and squinting at me, “he is always writing things down. I ask why?”
He had seen me scribbling atrocity captions. I said, “Because I have a bad memory.”
We walked to a restaurant, Sinan Cafe, farther down the Green Line. It was half a cafe, for it had been split in two by a wall that blocked the street; this main north-south road was now a dead end. On the wall a sign said, 1st Restricted Military Area—No Photographs! with a skull and crossbones.
Fikret and I drank a coffee. The owner said, “Want to look over the wall. There’s a good view from upstairs.”
We went to the second floor of his house and peered over the Green Line into Greek Cyprus. I could see ruined rooftops, broken tiles, no people; but in the distance was a tall pole flying the Greek flag, in defiance. As though in reply, from the Turkish side there was a Muslim call to prayers, the long groaning praise of Allah.
“Fikret, what do you think of Greeks?”
“Greeks in Turkey were prosperous, because they were good businessmen,” he said. “We do not hate each other.”
“But Greece is in the EC.”
“They don’t belong there, but neither does Turkey,” he said. “We are still a back
ward country. Does the EC want another headache?”
The four of us bought fifty-cent bus tickets at the Lefkosa bus shed and went another twenty miles over a mountain range towards Girne, on the north coast. The shoreline was rocky, and the land rose to black and rugged cliffs. Samih Pasha described how Turkish troops had landed just west of here in 1974. He pointed out the caves in the cliffs where they had hidden themselves and ambushed the Greeks, driving them south. We stopped at Bellapais.
“The quietness, the sense of green beatitude which fills this village,” Lawrence Durrell wrote of Bellapais, high above Girne, not far from the Crusader castle St. Hilarion, where Richard the Lionhearted spent his honeymoon. In his house there, described in Bitter Lemons, Durrell began writing his Alexandria Quartet. Nowadays Bellapais is perhaps more remote and dustier than it has ever been, but it is still very pretty. Villages endure destitution better than towns, and rural poverty can perversely seem almost picturesque.
But the town of Girne had the same look of desolation as the larger settlements I had seen in this embattled corner of the island. Empty streets, scruffy shops, empty hotels. I went to the largest hotel, on the seafront, just to see whether I could make a telephone call. The woman at the switchboard said it was impossible.
“You can’t call outside of here,” she said. “No one recognizes us!”
Samih Pasha and Onan and Fikret commiserated with the woman, saying it wasn’t fair. Yet it interested me that this portion of island in the Mediterranean was regarded as such a pariah that it had no contact with any country beyond its borders; and its greatest enemy was on the other side of the Green Line.
Suddenly Onan said, “We have to go. We will see you later.”
Watching him hurry away with Samih Pasha, Fikret said, “They will go to the Officers’ Club to eat.”
“Onan’s a soldier?”
“I think, yes. Bible Man was in the army before.”
“What about us? Bean soup at some awful place, eh?”
Fikret shrugged. He did not complain. We went to a restaurant and had bean soup and salad and rice. The waiter was perspiring in the heat, his hair plastered to his head. A man carved slices from the upright log of grilled meat chunks called a doner kepab and mocked us for not trying some of the greasy scraps. A beggar woman crawled inside the door and sang pathetically, I am in trouble—Allah sent the trouble to me, until the man standing at the meat log threatened her with his meat fork.
“I want to ask you about marriage,” Fikret said.
Now I knew why he had seemed so preoccupied. I said, “What’s on your mind?”
“I have been thinking about marriage.”
“How old are you?”
“Forty-six. But I have never been married,” he said. “How old should the woman be?”
“Have you had a woman friend?”
“A young one. She was twenty-eight, a nurse,” Fikret said. “She was too young for me. I told her to go back to her young man. But she was nice. And she was my height.”
The height issue was important to Fikret. He was rather short. I said, “Why do you want to get married?”
“I don’t like to be alone. I live with my brother,” he said. “He is not married. He is discreet. But—” He leaned closer. “Please tell me what to do.”
“Find a friend, not a wife,” I said. “Don’t think about her age. If you like her and she likes you, everything will be fine. Maybe you will marry her.”
This did not console him. He was still fretting.
“My life is not getting any better,” he said.
“Fikret, don’t look so desperate.”
“I think my life is getting worse.”
We went to a cafe down on the seafront for dessert and were served by a pretty waitress. Fikret smiled. I urged him to talk to her. She was a Turkish immigrant, having fled from “Bulgaristan”—Bulgaria was full of Turks, Fikret said. He named six former Soviet republics as Turkish, and the Chinese province of Xinjiang? “That’s Turkish, too.” He talked awhile with the waitress. But she was married. She had gotten married just a month ago. Fikret shrugged. Just his luck.
“This seems a sad place,” I said, as we walked along the shore afterwards. “Why is that?”
“It is isolated,” he said with such suddenness I realized that the word was in his mind. He felt isolated too, and sad.
On the way back to Gazimagosa, across the plains, Fikret said that one of the most famous Turkish fortune-tellers lived in that town. Her name was Elmas—the Turkish word for diamond—and she was noted for being so prescient that people came from all over to have her read their palms. Not just Turks, but people from many countries.
“They send her plane tickets and money, so that she can visit,” he said. “She knows everything.”
“Let’s find her,” I said. “We can ask her about your future.”
But, looking for her in Gazimagosa, we were told that we were too late.
“After five o’clock Elmas does not say anything,” a Turk in town told us. “You can find her, but she will not speak.”
We walked in the failing light through the town towards the port. When night fell, Turkish Cyprus was in darkness, because electricity was so scarce. Children chased each other in the dark, screeching miserably, the way children in the water howl and thrash, pretending to be drowning.
How strange that a place that had been so important, even illustrious in history, could be so decrepit. The north coast was associated with Richard the Lionhearted, who had led his Crusaders in a victory that gave them command of three castles at the edge of the Kyrenia Mountains, which they held. The Venetians had built the town’s fortifications. The original of Othello had done some of his soldiering here. More recently this eastern coast was noted for its beaches. Lawrence Durrell had written his book Bitter Lemons not far from the spot in Girne where Fikret said, “It is isolated.” Now it was a backwater, with U.N. soldiers guarding the Green Line and twenty-seven thousand Turkish troops hunkered down in the hinterland.
This was one of the few places the Akdeniz stopped, where the local food was worse than that on the ship. At dinner we saw Samih Pasha and Onan, who had just arrived back from Girne and the Turkish Officers’ Club.
Onan said, “I have been feeling bad because we left you.”
“You had to do your duty,” I said. “I had not realized that you were a gazi.”
“I am not a gazi,” Onan said. Samih Pasha had begun to laugh.
I said, “I know it must be important to you to discuss your battles with the other gazis in the Officers’ Club. And of course the Pasha had to do the same, reliving his famous window-breaking attack on Lefkosa.”
I kept it up, jeering at them for abandoning Fikret and me in Girne. Onan remained stern and apologetic. Fikret laughed—it was good to hear: he laughed so seldom.
Samih Pasha peered at me and said, “There is something about you.”
The weather turned windy after we left Cyprus, but there were fierce storms elsewhere in the Levant, the captain told me. Storms could be terrible here. “The waves breaking across the ship, so it is like a submarine.” Alexandria was a difficult harbor to enter in a storm. “One time I spent five days going back and forth, one hundred miles east, one hundred miles west, before we could go in.”
The Akdeniz became for me like a seedy hotel in which I was an old-time resident. A Turkish hotel: the food, the music, the greetings, the courtesies, the wives in their old-fashioned frocks and shawls, the old soldiers, the young boy who spoke English well and was funny, the old woman—possibly crazy—who ranted at me in Turkish, “My name Ali” doing my laundry and overcharging me, then pretending to be surprised when I tipped him, the waiter who looked like Tom Selleck, the barman who said, “The usual?” The round of odd meals, cucumbers for breakfast, big meaty lunches, obscure stews at night.
The General, Samih Pasha, was always at the head of the table. I encouraged him to tell us war stories, and he obliged. His stories
usually emphasized the courage of Turkish fighter pilots in NATO exercises. Where accuracy was concerned, the crucial factor in fighter bombing was nerve.
“You have to be brave,” Samih Pasha said. “Going maybe five hundred miles per hour. If you are not brave, you release the bombs too soon. The brave ones release bombs at the last minute for a hit, then count one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three, and pull the stick.” He grinned, the tips of his mustache rising. “The G-force take you. Maybe you black out. But you are climbing.”
The Italian pilots were appalling, the Greeks even worse. The Turks on the other hand were so deadly that in a bombing raid of four planes the first two planes obliterated the target, leaving nothing for the last planes to bomb.
Samih Pasha’s high military status as a three-star general had gotten him a special passport. He did not need a visa to enter Germany. He had a multiple-entry visa for the USA. He showed me his military passport.
“Good passport,” he said.
“That’s not just a special passaport,” I said. “That’s a Pasha-port.”
He thought this was screamingly funny, though neither of the other Turks laughed.
At another meal I began baiting them about the Greeks. We had just been to Cyprus and seen the misery of the Turks on this divided island. And what about the Armenians?
“Ignorant people in Turkey might say things,” Fikret said. “But if you live with Greeks and Armenians you see they are good people. You understand them. Prejudice is ignorance.”
“I agree,” Onan said.
“And people who live far away from them have images of them that are untrue. But we like them.”
“But what about their Turko-phobia?” I said.
“That is understandable,” Fikret said. “Why should we blame them? Armenians too—we should understand, though I am sorry to say they believe that part of Anatolia belongs to them.”
In spite of my needling, the only criticism they offered was that it was said that Greeks and Armenians did not trust each other. “But we don’t know if this is true.”