A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible

by Christy Lefteri

  Stepping out into the rising dusk, they pass the white cotton-field and the white field of bleating sheep and walk beneath a tunnel of eucalyptus trees until they reach the café where the Greek men sit. An old man looks contemplatively at the floor while rolling his walking stick between his palms, another flicks rosary beads, another sips coffee. All three stop and look up as they enter the café. One whispers something to the other and the other grunts. Inside, a younger man sits beneath a spinning fan and tosses cards onto the table. He has sweat on his forehead and along the front of his white vest, where a mass of curly black hair juts out from the top and sides, reaching his armpits. He holds a card in his hand and looks up. He does not sit any straighter, he is still slumped back in the plastic chair with his stomach spilling out of his clothes, but his eyes widen in acknowledgement of their presence, about all the energy he can muster.

  ‘Good evening,’ says Koki, and the man nods ever so slightly, throws down the card and moves his large hand across the table and picks up a toothpick. He puts it in his mouth. ‘We need a taxi,’ Koki continues and the man nods again and heaves himself out of the chair, chewing on his toothpick. They follow him out of the café to a house across the street where the man bashes a fist onto its white shutters, probably around seven times, all the while chewing on his toothpick, as though this were the normal procedure, until a man with a thick grey moustache and a black waistcoat opens the windows, looking hot and irritated.

  ‘Taxi,’ the café man says bluntly. ‘Those two,’ he says simply, pointing a stubby finger in their direction, and the other man stretches his body out of the window so that he can look at them better. He looks confused. Thinks for a moment, contemplates seriously, purses his lips and then nods. ‘OK, OK,’ he says, closes the window, disappears inside for a while and then emerges again, from the front door this time, holding a box of cigarettes in his hand. He nods at them briskly and then takes his keys from his pocket and signals to a white, battered saloon, parked half in his garden with its boot jutting out into the road. He opens the doors, rolls the windows down, and they climb in and are immediately engulfed by heat and the smell of cigarettes and strong cologne. A wooden crucifix hangs from the rear-view mirror and swings as the car starts and reverses into the road behind. The driver puts his hand onto the back of the passenger seat and looks back. ‘Where to?’ he says.

  ‘Limassol Port,’ replies Koki, and they set off, past the street lined with houses, along a dust road and onto a smoother road, running south, parallel to the sea. They drive in silence as they pass the pebbled shores of Lachi and the rocky cliffs of Paphos and the Baths of Aphrodite on the Akamas Peninsula where the goddess used to take her beauty baths in the pool of the grotto, beneath the shade of the fig trees. And soon, as the sun disappears for another night behind the slithering body of the sea, they rumble past the industrial-looking plains of Limassol and towards the port. There, large vessels filled with plastic containers creak, and west, along a small gulley, little fishing boats, and beside them, shelters for the coastguards. Lights flicker and cigarettes glow from beyond, as men load a ship with cargo. The driver stops the car half on a rise of pavement, and swings open the door. He releases a gasp of air, straightens his shoulders and inhales deeply. They are met by the salty air of the sea. Then Koki reaches into her bag and retrieves some money. The man refuses to take it and smiles at them. ‘Good luck,’ he says sadly. Koki thanks him and steps out onto the harbour with Maroulla. The driver also steps out of the car and walks towards a guard who is leaning on some cargo at the edge of the harbour. They mutter a few words to each other. The driver then gets back into his car and rumbles away, and the guard walks towards them and ushers them both to the east side of the harbour, where, from the darkness, emerge the forlorn faces and torn garments of hundreds and hundreds of refugees.

  Maroulla gasps and they both freeze for a moment and look at the people, blossoming from the floor of the harbour, swaying slightly, as silent as roses. By their feet an old lady rocks and from somewhere in the middle an old, gruff voice, full of phlegm and full of tears, sings,

  And I was born a shepherd,

  Born amongst the flock in the barn,

  And my poor body

  There will die.

  Goodbye, pine and oak,

  Myrtle, we envy that you don’t know death,

  Or the white of old age,

  And when I die,

  Put my body in the flock’s spring,

  Where beside it grows the tall and beautiful cypress.

  But my poor body there will not die …

  But my poor body there will not die.

  His voice rises out of the darkness and drifts out to sea and the crowd remain silent.

  *

  Evening in London and Richard sits in the armchair, staring at a flickering television. It is an episode of It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, a favourite of Richard’s. Another example of Britain’s fading imperial status. Far from home British soldiers would rather dance and sing than fight. Richard thinks for a moment about his grandfather’s impossible longing for the old British Empire. Richard’s lips are dry and the taste of acid suddenly fills his mouth. He swallows hard. The room is full of orange light from the streetlamps, and there are still drops of rain on the window from an earlier drizzle. The audience laugh in the background. Richard remembers his grandfather’s coin collection and how he used to line them up on the table and wipe them with a white handkerchief whilst talking about values and traditions and the privilege and duties of the British Empire. Richard stands up, meanders to the window, pulls up the rusty latch and opens it halfway. A soft breeze blows in bringing that smell of buses and tarmac. A sort of grey smell, like the smell of a ten-pound note, or the Underground, or what one would imagine the pavement to smell like. It doesn’t matter where you are in London, it always smells the same; Harold Wilson at Downing Street would be greeted by the same smell, as would the street vendor and the woman that sleeps in a bag at the corner of Queen Victoria Street. He moves his toes inside his slippers.

  He looks over at the cardboard box, at his cold cup of tea and looks then at the neat little pile of money in the gold money-clip. You know you’ve beaten the table when you’ve won the money-clip. Nikos would have had no choice but to go straight home. Richard smiles a little. The other men had sang and clapped and stamped their feet on the ground. ‘A new winner now!’, ‘Someone has defeated Nikos the Great!’, ‘A British man has won a Greek man’s game.’ Panikos had opened a new bottle of ouzo and they had drunk till the crack of dawn. Now, there is only a bitter taste left in his mouth. ‘I have Granny Smith’s!’ the man downstairs calls. ‘Fresh, crunchy Granny Smith’s.’

  Richard stands up, walks over to the sink basin, splashes his face with water and pulls his eyelid up, noticing the slight yellow of his eyeballs and the greyness of his skin. Fresh air is what he needs. Maybe he’ll move away, up north somewhere in the country and live out his days facing the hills or those purple moors the Yorkshiremen always speak of. Or, on second thoughts, maybe he could just throw out that cardboard box and buy a coffee table. No, he needs to change his life. She must have read the letter by now; he just has to face the fact that Kyriaki is not coming. He splashes some more water on his face, wipes it with the towel, throws off his slippers and sits on the arm-chair to put on his shoes. He then grabs his umbrella and raincoat and leaves the bedsit. He waits for the bus, climbs on, pays his fare, takes a seat and watches the lights of London flicker by as he approaches Soho. He stands up as they reach St Anne’s Church and decides to jump off one stop sooner. A little walk will do him good. He looks up at the beautifully bleak church, part of the Diocese of London, and glances at parts of its churchyard around the tower. And attached to it, like a peacock’s tail on a stallion, Shaftesbury Avenue, brimming with colours and the curious eyes of travellers, and the indifferent eyes of the Londoners, and the hopeless glare of the old tramps. Richard decides to take this route and crosses the street with
a pair of pink-haired punks holding a stereo between them.

  Apart from some drying puddles on the pavements, it is a warm, dry night and the same old man sits on a little table outside the café, flicking rosary beads and watching the passing traffic. The man nods as Richard enters. Vakis, who is sitting, rather dejected, by the counter, beams brightly and stands up to greet Richard, ‘My friend!’ he says. ‘My hero!’

  Suddenly, Yiakovos, who is sitting by the window, smashes a fist onto the table. ‘You should taken his underwear too!’ He chuckles hard with a mouth full of bread. ‘We no see him now for two weeks, like time Angelo come from Derby and won his car! Has any one ever seen a chip-shop owner with Royals Royce?’ Yiakovos finds his own words hilarious and laughs hysterically whilst trying to chew the bread and stamps his feet in sheer excitement on the floor. Vakis and Richard cannot help but laugh too. Just then Paniko emerges from the kitchen with two coffees and greets Richard with a broad smile.

  Yiakovos’ prediction proves to be true. The night passes and Nikos is nowhere to be seen. Richard sits with Vakis, picking at juicy portions of melon and salty halloumi as they listen to bursts from the radio, as the customers, from time to time, attempt to get a signal. There are muffled words about the oil crises and news about President Nixon. This is shortly followed by information on talks in Geneva, between Constantine Karamanlis of Greece, Bulent Ecevit of Turkey and James Callaghan of the UK. The men in the café prick their ears and sit up; there is mention of a peace deal and something about Cypriot refugees reaching British soil. ‘Damn it, Panikos!’ calls Yiakovos. ‘Get Richard to buy you a new radio with Nikos’ money!’ Despite his frustration at having not heard the news announcement properly, he finds his own words hilarious and stamps his feet on the floor again.

  Richard smiles, takes a cigarette from his box and shakes his head. ‘I have something else in mind. I will put Nikos’ money to proper use.’

  ‘That a first!’ laughs Yiakovos. ‘Is only ever been used for two things,’ he says, holding up two fingers. ‘Sex and gambling!’ But while Yiakovos is laughing Paniko glances over at Richard, and Richard looks back at him and nods as though he is answering Paniko’s thoughts.

  A ship is rising and falling in the darkness. Faces, red with anger and tears, sway on the deck. The girl imagines a ship full of roses. Red roses with the shimmery dew of night. In the distance Cyprus is now but a flicker of fireflies, or stars, or fairies. Its lights shrink, dissolve into the darkness as the ship rolls, rolls, rolls away. The refugees look upon their home for the last time with eyes full of tears and hearts full of fear and minds full of memories and horror. A woman sobs, a child cries, a voice mumbles ‘No, no, no’, an old man, withered on the deck, forces himself to stand. His limbs shake, his legs no thicker than a branch; he pulls himself up onto the rail and reaches out his hand. He sobs like a child who has lost his mother. He sobs as his home is plunged into darkness for ever more. ‘Goodbye, my sweet Alasia!’ he calls, and his voice is carried over the sea, louder than the waves, louder than the wind, as loud as the myths and the stories and the memories that live amongst them. ‘Goodbye, my sweet Alasia,’ he calls once more, and his voice flies high, first like a dove, then an eagle; the shadow of the refugees’ souls merging with the night. ‘Goodbye, my sweet Alasia,’ he says for the last time, and for the last time he feels the air of his home on his face. Abundant in those black waves. In that dark sea. Deep as light. The ship rises and falls. Rises up as heavy as heat and falls as light as rain so that the mind and the stomach cannot help but do the same. In this turmoil, this is the place where the soul can get lost, where one is a fool enough, or human enough to think that it is in fact the waves that are rising and falling. On the deck, in that immense darkness, the old man sings,

  ‘Within, my dear, within a rose-petal blanket.

  Within a rose-petal blanket is the way you should slumber.

  A star, my dear, a star fights with another star.

  A star fights with another star, the sun fights with the moon too.’

  His voice drifts over the red faces like a cool breeze as the ship rises. The women bring their blankets tighter over their shoulders. The ship falls. The old man is silent. The white of the moon catches the sails and his hair. It is silent for longer than anyone can bear, silent until the children weep and the women cough and the old men puff on their cigarettes.

  Day 8: 27 July 1974

  Another grey morning and the bedsit is drab with the colour of rain and that grey tint of money. Richard has separated his winnings into piles on the cardboard box. The money-clip is on the windowsill. A taxi rolls by on Queen Victoria Street, past the memorial, and a flock of seagulls flies high above the Thames and dives left, towards Trafalgar Square, to pick up the first crumbs of the day.

  On the cardboard box, resting on a small saucer, is a cup of Greek coffee. Cold now. But Richard is still drinking it. He reaches forward, takes the cup in his fingers and takes the last sip, tasting the bitterness of the dark residue at the bottom. He looks into the cup and turns it over in the saucer, spinning it three times. Then he leans back in his chair and waits. What for? He wonders. He never knew what for. But those damn Greeks always like to wait. Always waiting. Mostly in cafés and beneath trees. Waiting for the sun to set and bring relief from the heat. Or else, for it to rise. Or for the rain, which never comes. Or for the crops, which will grow only when the sun is fair and the rain comes. Always waiting for the wine to ferment or the mint to dry or the silk butterflies to fly and die. Always waiting. Always waiting. Just like him. Richard looks down at the little cup. He sits up abruptly and picks it up indignantly. He looks inside at those sullen marks, at those snakes and ladders. There is always bound to be a snake and a ladder, he thinks. He remembers Amalia passing her finger up, over the ladder, and down, into the mouth of the snake. She would smile about the ladder and then shake her head in rebuke. ‘One cuckoo doesn’t bring the spring,’ she would say.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he would reply, ‘I don’t even have one cuckoo, let alone the spring!’ and she would call him a gloomy Englishman and laugh heartily with the lungs of a cockerel.

  Richard looks into his cup. A cigar. Prosperity. An air balloon. Drifting to new places. A cup. Be thankful for what you have. A fence. Of course! What contradictions! thinks Richard. He clatters the cup back onto the saucer and leans deep into the armchair. His foot taps on the floor. He pushes himself up and walks towards the bed, crouching down and reaching beneath it to retrieve the box of trinkets. He looks down at the brass, embossed figure of a frog, resting on a rock. He opens the box and looks again at his mother’s gold locket and his grandfather’s old coins and then at that array of British Central Africa stamps, dull purple and olive-green, grey and carmine, blue and mint. And the rusty pocket knife, and beneath all, the recipe. A recipe from Amalia, now torn at the edges. He remembers the day she gave it to him. She had looked at him seriously and said, ‘Your cup shows a bowl of soup, you will be welcoming visitors. I must show you how! Too many beans is no good for the situation, if you know what I mean!’ and she had smiled broadly and plodded off to the kitchen, expecting him to follow.

  Richard looks down at the roughly written recipe: ‘Egg-lemon soup.’ He smiles. ‘First we need eggs and chicken and lemons,’ she had said, grabbing two baskets and a large knife. The co-op meant nothing to her. ‘I no give money for something I make better myself,’ she had said. Although she always accepted the beans. Richard had continued to take her cans, even after he returned, and she had always accepted them begrudgingly, giving them a look of disgust, but then tucking them into her cupboard. At eighty years old, the woman could have survived anywhere, she even made her own olive oil, and her own blankets from cotton that she had picked from the fields. Richard remembers now the sweet, dried-syrup fruits she used to make and serve to him on a little fork balancing in a glass of freezing cold water, and how he would eat the sweet and then down the sugared water. He suddenly tastes the bitter
ness in his mouth again. He looks down at the recipe, folds it neatly and stands up. He takes off his slippers, puts on his shoes, looks out of the window and decides he will not need an umbrella today.

  Outside, a soft breeze blows, carrying white puffs of clouds across London. Richard walks for twelve minutes to the east, towards the tall pillars of the Royal Exchange building, between the converging streets of Threadneedle and Cornhill. He then follows the road to where the Baltic Coffee House once stood, a rendezvous for merchants and brokers for hundreds of years. Many deals had been made over coffee. Richard smiles now and remembers walking hand in hand with his grandfather, all those years ago, as he told him stories about each street and explained to him how the history of the nation was carved in every stone and how even the chronicle of trade drifts with the aroma of every coffee grain. ‘Much can happen over coffee,’ his grandfather used to say. Richard thinks about his conversations with Paniko these last few days, and suddenly his grandfather’s words take on a whole new meaning. Without thinking twice, he spins on his heel and walks briskly towards the first travel agent’s he can find, and without hesitation walks towards a woman at her desk, waits for her to get off the phone and books himself a holiday to Paris, leaving tomorrow. A short flight and a great hotel by the Eiffel Tower; as easy as that! What had he been afraid of all these years? Terrified to make a move, to get on a plane, to make a decision, to live his life. Things have to change and this is the first step! In Paris he’ll eat and walk and relax and make decisions about his new life.