A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible

by Christy Lefteri

  They are all still, with the blankets pulled up now to their chins. A cool breeze blows across the garden and with it comes a floating lantern. Soon the commanding officer is standing amongst the shadows. Koki looks at his army boots encrusted with mud. He lifts his lamp and looks at the faces of the women. The crickets pound behind him. Olympia moves to stand up, but Costandina pulls her back down. The commanding officer spins round to face her and holds the lamp so close to her face that it can be seen reflected in her eyes. ‘Speak!’ he demands in Turkish. Olympia understands and drops her head, staring intently at his foot. ‘Speak!’ he demands again. Olympia shakes her head slightly. He slaps her with the back of his hand. She holds her face and hunches her shoulders. ‘The baby,’ she whispers into her chest, and then she repeats these words a little louder in Turkish.

  The officer laughs. He laughs from his chest and his body shakes. He then stops, moves a little closer, bends down and laughs again so that she can feel his breath in her face. ‘The baby,’ he says, chuckling, ‘I’ll show you the baby.’ He grabs her throat, forcing her to stand. Olympia cries now and struggles to breathe. ‘Don’t cry,’ he whispers in her ear, ‘it won’t last long.’ At this, he leads her by the throat to the back of the garden.

  Adem sits on a rock by the church of Saint Evlavios with his head in his hands and the photograph hanging from his fingers. Soldiers pass by, attending to their tasks, but Adem takes no notice. He straightens his back, tucks the photograph into his palm and stares at it. His eyes loom over Kyriaki’s glassy eyes and with his finger he touches her hair. He then brings it closer and looks at the darker boy by her side. He sighs deeply, looks up at the sky and indignantly tucks the photograph into his top pocket. Ahead, some soldiers stand on the dust plain and throw stones at cans. They cheer triumphantly. Far below, the sea at Pente Mile shimmers with crimson ripples and opposite a red fire rages in the mountains. Although the shelling has stopped, the island is not calm, in fact, as the dust settles in the cracks of broken roads and homes and bones the crevices become deeper and the island seems to rattle and crack. ‘It is only the sound of the crickets,’ says one soldier standing close by, who has been looking his way. Adem nods, but does not reply. ‘We have lost a lot of soldiers,’ continues the soldier and gives Adem a testing, knowing look. This time, Adem looks up at him and notices only a roll of fat beneath his chin, which, from this position, obscures his face. The soldier reaches down and retrieves a box of cigarettes from his pocket. He takes one out and puts it to his mouth. Adem watches longingly. The soldier strikes a match, which glows orange in the darkness, and then looks at Adem thoughtfully. He steps closer and sits on the wall beside him, looking across the falling slopes. The soldier takes out a cigarette and offers it to Adem. Adem reaches out his hand to accept it, but the soldier draws it back again. ‘Something which, once made, can never be destroyed, once destroyed, can never be repaired. What is it?’ The soldier looks eagerly at Adem.

  ‘Serkan,’ Adem mutters dejectedly, and the man chuckles shortly, then looks fearfully over his shoulder. He then looks back at Adem and draws the cigarette further away, as though he were tempting a stray dog with a treat.

  Adem sits quietly. He imagines Engin’s body in the basement of the church and Serkan’s face and Hasad’s distorted words and disjointed body and the body of another young boy; something which he has not allowed himself to remember until now. He shakes his head and presses his fingers into his eyes. He thinks of the bottle of ouzo and wishes to have it in his hand just to ease the cracking and the smell of rotting corpses.

  Adem waves his hand, indicating both his refusal to work out the riddle or to win the cigarette. The soldier nods apologetically. ‘Everyone’s lost their humanity,’ says Adem. ‘We have all become monsters,’ he continues slowly, and the man looks at him sideways. Something has been bothering Adem, eating at his heart and intestines. Something he has done which he can never change. He looks at the man sitting beside him and suddenly feels the urge to tell someone; to confess.

  ‘I killed a child,’ he says, and the other man scrunches his nose against the sun. ‘It was early morning, the first day of the invasion. Serkan had captured some men and had them kneeling in a row ready for assassination, and I remember one of the men suddenly jumped up and started running. Before Serkan could respond the man was already obscured by the trees in the lemon grove. Serkan ordered me to kill him so I went after him. When I entered the orchard all was still and I stood there looking around. I thought of firing my gun so that Serkan would think I killed him, but just then I saw him move; he dashed from one tree to another and had a rifle in his hand. I thought my life was in danger; because of that something shifted within me. It was as swift and easy as changing a shirt. I suddenly saw the face of a killer before me, a monstrous enemy; the poison of the war had got into me and I pursued him like a warrior. I could hear the crunching of his footsteps and followed him to the other side of the grove to a clearing just beyond the town, and when I got the first glimpse of him I fired. I pulled the trigger and the man froze for a second, then he fell, face down, to the ground. I had shot him right through the heart. I ran over to where he lay and turned him around and when I looked at his face I realised that he was just a child. He hadn’t even developed a beard yet. He had his whole life in front of him and I killed him because I am Turkish and he was Greek. But when I looked at his face, as he looked up at me blindly, I couldn’t see what separated us.’ Adem stops there and clasps his hands together in silence for a few moments. The other soldier does not speak.

  ‘I held him for a moment and closed his eyes. I felt so awful that I found a rose and placed it on his chest. And then I left. I left him lying there while my life continued.’ Adem looks over at the man now. The man lowers his head and doesn’t say a word, he stares at the ground. After a while he stands up and leaves. In his place he has left a cigarette and a match. Adem looks up to thank him, but he has gone. He strikes the match on the wall, lights the cigarette, inhales the smoke deeply, exhales and watches the men playing through a shield of smoke. His head pounds, his nerves crack, his heart rattles. His fingers holding the cigarette tremble. He thinks of his life in Istanbul in his parents’ empty house with that old typewriter and that torn armchair and those matted dreams. He should have stayed in Cyprus. What a coward he was. How he left. How he turned his back on her when she wanted him to stay. They would have killed him. He remembers that grey look in her eyes, glinting like metal, hardened over the years, even at her young age. He remembers that red hair consuming her and poisoning her thoughts. He cannot leave without her again.

  Adem stands up, looks at the soldiers playing and throws his cigarette on the floor. He looks over his shoulder and begins to go towards the road that leads from the mountain into the town and promises to himself that he will find her. In fact he will never leave this place without her.

  Day 5: 24 July 1974

  In the prisoners’ house, it is a bright morning. The rooster at the back of the garden rises to attention and salutes the sun with a hearty cry, showing its victory over the night. Maroulla has stepped out into the garden and is holding the green book in her hands; she looks ahead, imagining the rose on the hillside sparkling red. Most of the women stir now and Maria stands up and joins Maroulla on the veranda. She takes a deep breath and lifts her chest as though she is about to cry out like the rooster. The cry pierces the silence again. ‘The solar emblem of the Greeks,’ says Maria, squinting ahead at the rooster, ‘a sacred sign to Apollo, Zeus, Persephone and Attis. He sings for us and we will be victorious.’ The little girl looks up at her, closes the book, tucks it into her apron and enters the house.

  The sound of the rooster is replaced by another sound. A screeching howl riding the waves of sunshine. The desperate shrill of an abandoned baby. Most of the women look down in desolation as the shadows quail from the sun. The baby cries and cries, but nobody answers. There is no end to its tears, no respite to its feelings of emptiness and
unfulfilled needs. Nobody comes, nobody answers, nobody soothes. The baby howls endlessly from beyond the garden. One woman bites her lip, another digs her nails into her palm, and another cries; for they know they cannot reach the baby. They think of the blackness of its world. They know that if he lives he will never recover from such desolation. The empty world will be etched on his brain like ancient pictures in a cave.

  Soon the baby stops crying and once again the cicadas can be heard rattling as a hot wind blows and the broken bones of old flowers are swept across red soil. It is at this time that Olympia appears, walking from the back of the garden. She adjusts her grey bun, straightens her collar and walks as straight as she can. She enters the house with her head held high and sits on a chair. The dog shuffles over and sits straight and alert by her side. Olympia crosses one leg over another. She is a schoolmistress ready for her morning class, except that she sits with an unconvincing authoritative air, her presence uncommanding, her fingers trembling on her knee. And though her features are firm and her eyes dry, there is a necklace of bruises clasped round her neck. Like a gift of bad intent. When the women stare she lifts her hand and touches the necklace, like a lady of glamour, elegantly, as though it was encrusted with amethyst or topaz. She lowers her hand gracefully to her knee, encompassing it protectively as one would an egg. She is a grey, sculptured statuette, the goddess Artemis on the hunt with her dog by her side, a figurine of days gone by, an effigy of grace and strength, though in this case, it is feigned.

  The women stare and do not speak. Olympia holds her stance loyally. The air is thick with dust from the wind. Litsa stands, takes a blanket and places it onto Olympia’s knees. Olympia accepts the gesture and adjusts her stance, placing her hands on top of the woven blanket. The dog sighs and rests its head on its paws. It is clear that the women know neither what to say nor where to look. Their eyes dash about the room and Maria crunches on her nails. Litsa contemplates for a moment, then sits beside Koki. ‘Why don’t you continue your story?’ she asks encouragingly, and the women’s eyes dart in their direction with sudden interest. Koki looks around at the eager faces and is soothed by the sudden change of atmosphere. She nods and adjusts her posture. Maroulla runs from near the doorway and sits down next to her. Koki coughs lightly and looks again at the women; they wait expectantly.

  ‘It was a few years after Cyprus gained independence,’ she begins. ‘Yes. After Makarios had been resurrected like Christ. After the EOKA leaflets stopped flapping like birds over the fields and the Turks and Greeks had a hope of living side by side. It was the year when it all went wrong, the year that fighting broke out around the island and the communities split into two. It was also the year that the shoemaker died. The year of 1963, when my life began and ended.

  ‘Every Saturday Pappa gave me jobs to do. On this particular day I was to go to Vangeli’s kafenion to post a letter to Pappa’s brother, Theio Nikos, who had moved to Archway, London, to try and make some money, as he too, like Dimitri, had been a struggling farmer; and this letter was to congratulate him on the birth of his new baby boy and his promotion in the clothes factory where he worked. A double celebration. I was also instructed to take Pappa’s shoes to Mario the shoemaker as the soles had been flapping like dogs’ tongues for about a month. Mario would not fix them sooner as he had to mend the farmer’s boots first. My last job was to take a basket full of eggs to a woman in our neighbourhood who would dye them red for the Easter feast.

  ‘Of course, the real post office had closed down long before I was born, during the end of Ottoman rule when hospitals, schools and printing presses were scarce, so we were forced to make do with the poor efforts of Vangeli, the café owner, instead of travelling for three-quarters of an hour to the only real post office, on the other side of Kyrenia, which had been rebuilt since the British occupied the island.

  ‘It was the beginning of March, and the people had not yet been lured to the cool shower of shade: in his black cassock the priest stood beneath the frowning arches of the church, talking with an old widow, who was also dressed in black; she had contorted her face and was complaining about the detrimental effect fasting had on her health, and I could not help watching them as I passed: two shadows of religion, one straight, one curved, she talking with her hands, he nodding his head, impassioned in discussion beneath this fallen smile. If you looked closely enough, you could see the world changing.

  ‘“Good morning, Koki!” Pater Yiousif waved dutifully, but the old lady felt no need for such an obligation and did not even grunt. I lowered my face to the ground, arms full of eggs, feeling very aware of the way I was walking, and kept my eyes on my feet until I could hear the faint plucking of the bouzouki trickling gently up the hill as soft as rain, as grey as rain.

  ‘Old Bambaji the Turk sat on his veranda playing and singing in Greek the same macabre ballad that I had heard him sing every day.’ Bamabaji was not really a Turk, she explained to the younger girls, his name had come from ‘linobambaji’, what they called the Greeks who converted to Islam in the hope of an easier life during the Ottoman Empire. ‘But not even he could bring himself to wave. He stopped for a moment to look at me as I passed and then the music sank down the hill and the words faded.

  ‘I followed the path through a basket of white, terraced houses tipping either slightly upwards or slumping downwards. The street had no name then, as the English road name had been painted black. I walked until I could smell the armpits of the sailors and until I reached Vangeli’s café: the crumbling hut with blue shutters, built to face the shadows and not the sun; where four men sat outside on a table, beneath the red Coca-Cola plaque, smoking rolled-up tobacco over their morning coffee.

  ‘“What’s this, Vangeli, no kaimaki? What kind of coffee do you make?” said Hadgipetros, with his dark, leather-like skin. He held his coffee out in protest and the other three men, looking down at their own, nodded in agreement; but Vangeli did not stir and remained indoors, leaning on the counter over a newspaper.

  ‘At the point when Hadgipetros’ eyes narrowed and reclined into reddening cheeks, Kyrios Chrysanthos, the eldest man, sitting opposite Mehmet, noticed me standing by the entrance of the café. “Koki! How is our little English flower?” The rest of the men followed his gaze and looked my way, where I stood probably as red as a single English rose, on those grey, uneven pebbles, and as misplaced as that same rose would have been sitting in a delicate glass vase in the centre of the Cypriot man’s table; and I remembered then that the ancient Greeks knew the rose only as a white flower until the grieving Aphrodite, mourning over Adonis’ death, picked a rose from the ground and pricked herself on its thorn, causing her blood to drip like dew onto the petals and stain it forever red.

  ‘“Well actually,” I replied, “I am definitely not English and I can’t possibly be a flower.” The men remained still for a moment and then exploded with laughter, and I noticed Kyrios Chrysanthos’ coffee spilling onto his trousers as his body shook.

  ‘I ran into the coffee shop and approached Vangeli, who was still leaning over the counter with his back to me, sweating profusely; I coughed slightly but as he didn’t turn I peered over his shoulder, stealing a glance at Eleftheria, which contained a photograph of Archbishop Makarios. Suddenly noticing me, he pulled the paper nearer to his wet clothes and smacked my ear with his large hand so that it burnt and warbled. “What do stupid little girls need to know about politics? Eh, women, you are the problem with the world, trust me there is a woman behind all wars.” He raised a large fist into the air and then stuck out his thumb, followed by his forefinger. “Eleni of Troy, Samson and Delilah, Aphrodite who sparked the Trojan War by offering Paris the Queen of Sparta! They stir the world with their spoons, and the men do mad things or the really stupid ones fight for them. Either way it is all women!” At this he stubbed a finger onto the newspaper. “See! All women. Their fault!” And at this he grabbed a handful of nuts from a tray and threw them into his mouth. “Well?” he said, and I put the lette
r onto the desktop and waited as he retrieved a stamp from behind the counter, licked it with his peanut tongue and smacked it onto the envelope, where I could see one side had not stuck properly, due to the residue from his mouth. “Leave it with me,” he said and resumed his position over the newspaper.

  ‘I slipped out of the café as silently as I could and proceeded to follow the path to the sea, trying to avoid the group of youngsters that leant on a white wall, for if they had seen me they would have thrown stones at me, or, worse, dead snakes. They were still angry with the English, so they hated me. I was one of them because I looked like them. Like always, I was a target. Sometimes they even threw dead rats. That was worse than the snakes for they stank of decay and sewers.

  ‘I ran to the shoemaker’s and when I arrived Mario was not there, someone else had taken over. That’s where I met him. The person that would be the height of my happiness and the pit of my pain. The one who would give me hope and yet be the cause of my utter desolation. The one who would be my companion and yet be the reason for my lifelong loneliness. The one who would start my life and end it. He was everything I had ever wanted; he gave me the little things in life that everybody else has and takes for granted. He talked with me, walked with me and laughed with me. When I was with him I felt like a normal human being rather than a devil or an object of hatred. Apart from my father, he was the only person in the world who accepted me. But it wasn’t just that, I loved his mind and the stories he told and his moodiness and even the way he hid from life and looked upon me for support, for motivation. Through his eyes I became somebody else.

  ‘When I walked in he was standing at the counter, rubbing the brown leather of a shoe with a shoebrush. He did not look up immediately, so I put the eggs down on the floor and placed Pappa’s shoes onto the open newspaper on the counter. His clothes were brown and black so that he blended with the earthy leatherness around him in that dusty, sticky room of shoes and polish and newspaper print. He put the shoebrush down and picked up the rubber glue-brush, dotting it gently onto a scratch on the leather, then he ran his finger delicately along the seam of the sole. I pushed the shoes closer to him and coughed. He looked up suddenly as if he had just realised that I was there. He was young, maybe a few years older than me; his skin was dark and his eyes a honey-hazel that caught the streaks of light from the doorway and window opposite. He smiled and I signalled to the shoes with my eyes. He put the brown shoe down, reached to his left and took Pappa’s, all without removing his eyes from my face. He then shook his head, very slightly, and rubbed his right eye, smearing brown shoe polish over his face. I tried not to laugh and pursed my lips tightly, but he saw my beaming face and thought I was smiling at him, so he smiled back again. And that was the problem. He smiled. Nobody but Pappa ever smiled at me; no one except the other kids at school, or the girls that drank lemonade beneath the lemon tree, or Dimitri’s son Andreas, but that always preceded mocking laughter or snide giggling.