Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island

by Lawrence Durrell

  It was Frangos. His charges sped into their stalls like bullets, still pitifully lowing, while he, releasing the tail of the last cow, bestowed a last shriek and a kick on it. Then he stood in his own courtyard, arms akimbo, roaring for water like a lion and cursing everyone for being so slow. Bent double with laughter, his two tall daughters made their way to him bearing a jug and basin. Still growling he seized the jug and emptied it over the crown of his head, gasping and shouting in mock-anger at the coldness of the water, expelling his breath in a great swish like a steam boiler and calling everyone in the house a lazy cuckold.

  “There. That will do,” shouted the old lady Helen, his wife. “We don’t want any more of your foul tongue about this house.” But the two spirited daughters rallied him unmercifully and he made a playful grab at the skirt of one, threatening to spank her. He was like a celebrated actor playing a familiar role to an audience which has seen it many times, knows it almost word for word, and loves it. “Eh, you, motor-bicycle polisher, cuckold, ape, doorpost.”

  “You leave me alone,” said his son-in-law to be, “or I’ll throw you to your cattle, compost-heap.” A series of violent pleasantries in this vein were thrown from balcony to courtyard and back again.

  A small boy, passing outside the house, saw us leaning over the balcony and explained: “Every day Frangos comes back with the cattle like that.”

  “I see,” said Andreas.

  “He calls it the defeat of the Bulgarians at Marathassa. It’s the last charge. Usually we all cheer.”

  I was glad to hear it, though Frangos’s history seemed a bit weak. (I found later that he made up everything out of his own head, and reckoned books not worth a fig.)

  Now he sat with a somewhat portentous air under his own fine tree and his wife brought him a long drink of wine and a clean handkerchief with which to mop his tousled head. His eldest daughter brought a comb and mirror with which he combed his fine moustache. Then he gave a sigh and betook himself to the little domed privy at the garden’s end, where he squatted down and, between epic grunts, conducted a disjointed conversation with his wife. “I hear a stranger has come to stay in the village. Some pest of an Englishman, eh?” She replied, “He has bought Kakojannis’s house. He is on the balcony watching you.” There was silence for a moment. “Ho ho ha ha,” said Frangos at last and then, catching sight of me, gave another great whoop and put up his great paw. “Yasu,” he cried formally, addressing me as if I were in the next valley; and then taking a step towards me he added: “Ho there, Englishman, we drank together, did we not?”

  “We did. To the palikars of all nations.”

  “God be with them.”

  “God be with them.”

  There was a silence. He appeared to be struggling against his innate friendliness. “What have you come to Bellapaix for?” he asked me at last in a loud, provocative tone, but without any real sting in it. It was as if his self-possession were not quite complete: perhaps my brother’s death at Thermopylae had holed him below the water-line.

  “I have come to learn to drink,” I said drily, and he gave a great snort of laughter and banged his knee until the dust flew out of the folds of his baggy trousers. “Do you hear that?” he said, turning to his family for approval. “To drink! Good! Excellent!” Then turning back to me he boomed: “I shall be your master.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And what will you give me in exchange?”

  “Whatever you wish.”

  “Even my freedom?”

  I was about to extricate myself from this small predicament by a sophistry which would not have damaged friendly relations when a welcome interruption occurred. Andreas Kallergis put his face over the wall and said: “Frangos, you rogue, you owe me money,” and a furious argument now broke out about the cost of a barn which Andreas had converted. “I just gave it a kick and it fell down,” shrieked Frangos; “what sort of building is that?” “Anything you kicked would be bound to fall down,” said Andreas. “Why don’t you save your kicks for your good-for-nothing sons?” Frangos beetled. “As for you, you’re not man enough to be able to make a son.” All this in roaring good humor.

  We parted in amity, shouting and screaming at one another, and set off down the hill. At the first corner stood a shy little girl of about fifteen, with very beautiful dark eyes and long hair in pigtails. She advanced on us as timorously as a squirrel, holding her hand behind her back. Her hesitation was touching as she sidled up. Behind her back she had a small wicker basket with a bundle of shallots in it and a blood orange; in her other hand a bunch of wild anemones wrapped in the broad leaf of an arum lily. These gifts she handed to me saying: “My father Morais sends these to you and says welcome to your new house.”

  I felt inordinately proud of having earned this gesture and thought it worth cementing with a counter-gift, so I detached the heavy pocket-knife which I had bought the day before from my belt and gave it to her with an appropriate message.

  When we got down to the little square by the Abbey we found it crowded, for by now the village had come home from work. Knots of coffee-drinkers lounged perilously under the Tree of Idleness, gossiping. I scanned their faces closely for marks of the spiritual ravages caused by idleness and it did seem to me that several looked upon the point of sleep. The tavern was full now, and Dmitri with his curious disjointed walk—like a sailor on a heaving deck—was dispensing drink and coffee as fast as he was able. The tower of the Church took the tawny golden light softly upon its ancient face, so that the stonework now looked as if it were made of the compressed petals of the rambler roses which bordered the walks. Kollis and the muktar were taking their coffee soberly at a corner table where we joined them with our sheaves of calculations.

  “I will get these people to build for you,” said Andreas quietly, “your own villagers. There are one or two good masons here—like Thalassinos over there—and Loizus for the woodwork. But it will take me time to work out a detailed tender. When would you like to start?”

  “This week.”

  “So soon?”

  “Yes. I will tell you what money I have and you can work out what can be done with it.”

  I had already noticed that costing in Cyprus was an altogether vague affair by European standards. Prices fluctuated hopelessly according to shortages; if a consignment of European goods were held up, and the shops empty of it—say paint—the price could double in a matter of weeks. The trick was to make one’s outlay in raw materials all at once. Local contractors, through lack of capital perhaps, tended to build wall by wall, thus putting themselves at the mercy of price fluctuations in material. This accounted for the number of English people who claimed to have been cheated by contractors. In fact, with costing so hopelessly out of ratio, a contractor very often found himself woefully out in his calculations—and during my reconstruction period on more than one occasion the masons could in fact have cheated themselves by several pounds. All this was the fruit of my conversations with the sapient Sabri. “What we must do is to buy the brick, mortar and cement, for the whole job; get it up the hill; then see where we stand.”

  I had divined that this method also suited the wage-structure of the workmen. It was not that wages fluctuated but that the other community needs drew off workmen from one project to another. There was no question of contracts. In the season of olive-pressing or carob-gathering the whole village turned out in a body—and at a blow one lost masons, carpenters, plumbers, everyone. Therefore, in order to build reasonably, one had to plan in short bursts, for such times as one could assemble a whole team. Otherwise work dragged—the absence of a foreman or a carpenter might keep a whole team of masons hanging about while a window-frame or door-jamb lacked, and while the carpenter who should have built it was out in the fields attending to a crop of apples, almonds or carobs. All these hold-ups cost money, and the art of building was to limit them.

  All this had to be legislated for; but meanwhile the raw materials must be brought to the site. The goo
d Sabri could provide the bricks and concrete, but as no lorry could reach the house, we would need donkeys and mules with panniers to get the stuff up the hill. It was here the muktar came in, for he was to mobilize the teams with which we could achieve the desired result at short notice.

  We sat now like a jury and selected our men by eyes—Pambos, Kalopanis, Dmitri Rangis, Korais: gallery of whiskers and eyebrows such as one would never see outside Drury Lane. Andreas Menas undertook to supervise, and Michaelis to lend voice and color to the unloading site at the house. I felt that the two ends of the rope, so to speak, were in good hands. There would be no hanging about with Andreas at the foot of the hill and Michaelis at the crown. One by one the gallery of ruffians was consulted and engaged. Soberly we assessed costs. It seemed to me that the transport problem would demand an intensive ten days’ work; after that we’d have our building materials to hand and we could then tackle the builders.

  All this planning had been conducted with admirable despatch, thanks to the muktar, and now, abandoning Andreas’s little car, I accepted the invitation of Kollis to walk down to Kyrenia with him, through the cyclamen-carpeted groves, among the cherry trees, to where the good Panos would be sitting with his glass of Commanderia on a quiet terrace above the violet sea.

  Chapter Six: The Swallows Gather

  Very soon the atmosphere grew convivial, and the priest, swilling his wine, began to sing in a strong Greek baritone:

  The horizon opens,

  The sky is filled with light,

  Jerusalem rejoice,

  For Christ is risen.

  ‘Jesus, he gone up,’ the schoolmaster explained.

  The Mukhtar followed, wailing folk melodies in a high almost falsetto tenor voice:

  The world goes round and round like a wheel …

  Men come together and then they separate …

  And then …

  All knew what happened then, and joined in the refrain.…

  —The Orphaned Realm by PATRICK BALFOUR

  IT WAS NOT long before the mule-teams began to travel up the narrow streets of the village, each I bearing its grunting burden of pierced concrete bricks or dusty sacks of cement; from the eyrie I had established in the lemon groves high above the Abbey I could watch them from an eagle’s angle of vision as they slipped and staggered up the stony incline. From the cyclamen-bewitched patch of shadow where I spent my day now they looked like ants hastening back to the nest, each with a grain of wheat in its jaws.

  Spring had lengthened into summer now and soon the wheat would be winnowed on the old threshing floors, freeing the specialists who would be responsible for relaying the balcony and putting in windows. I had already met some of them: first there was Thalassinos, “the Seafarer,” with his quiet dour manner and clipped moustache. He was in his early forties, and maintained throughout the work an earnest and prosaic air. I was all the more surprised to catch him in a fantasy of his own invention—for every Sunday he appeared in the coffee shop in clothes of his own design: tall top-boots made in soft suede, jodhpurs, and a check tweed coat set off by a hard collar and a tie of American design with a chorus girl in flames hand-painted on it. He strolled about with an air of distinction in these clothes which were much admired.

  Little Loizus—”the Bear”—was a pillar of the Church and a very serious fellow altogether. His deportment betrayed the sidesman, and he spoke in a series of gentle hesitations, stops and starts, like an intermittendy functioning Morse transmitter. He was afflicted by the tiresome village moralizing instinct of the “rustic” novel; and worse still, bedevilled by his considerations for first principles. If you asked him to build a window he would lick his lips and begin in a faraway tone: “Now windows for the ancient Greeks were holes in a wall. To them the question of light …” he would drone on; only when he had established the Platonic idea of a window and traced it up through the Phoenicians, Venetians, Hindus and Chinese, did he emerge once more on to the tableland of the present and add: “I can’t because I’ve broken my plane.” But he was gentle and industrious, and had an endearing way of putting out his tongue as he tried to get his spirit-level to show a true surface—which it almost never did.

  Mr. Honey was another new acquaintance with marked idiosyncrasies. He was tall and lean and very shortsighted; and he walked about the village swaying gracefully and manipulating his long graceful hands in gestures which reminded one of a lady of fashion in the period of Madame Récamier. His long dark face with its glazed eyes betrayed a fond vague happiness. He was the grave-digger; but as nobody died in the village he had a lot of time free for self-examination, and since a man must eat he had turned his talents to the digging of cesspits at so much a cubic meter. He was the philosopher of main drainage. “What is the meaning of life?” he asked me once in a tragic slurring voice. “It all goes in here,” raising a bottle of wine to his lips for a long swig; “and it all goes out there,” pointing to the pit he was digging. “What does it all mean?” Poor Mr. Honey! I have often pondered on the subject myself.

  These, too, together with Andreas and Michaelis, were my first historians of Cyprus, and hardly a day passed without my learning something about the island’s past; each added a piece of the common fund of knowledge about Cyprus which belongs to the large vague jigsaw which Panos had established for me. It is the best way to learn, for my informants told me these things in their own tongue, and acted them as they did so. I can never think of St. Barnabas reproving the naked pagans at Paphos, or praying for God to blight the ancient shrine of Aphrodite, without seeing Michaelis’s curling moustache as he dipped his shaggy head in an illustration of prayer, or with flashing eyes apostrophized the pagans in the very words of the saint: “Hey, you, walking about like plucked chickens with your private parts open to heaven … have you no shame?” His illustration of the thunder-flash was dramatic, too; looking heavenward in terror from under his raised forearms with their clenched fists as the great radiance of the Light dawned in the sky. “Bang! went the saint, and Bang! Bang!” Then spreading his fisted arms he gazed slowly at the ruins caused by Barnabas’s prayers, pityingly, uncomprehendingly, raising here a head and there an arm of a pagan to see if they were dead. They were. The heads and arms fell listlessly back into position. It was all over! Later, on the road to Tammasos, Paul and Barnabas sat down to a frugal lunch consisting of olives. The trees which stand there today grew from the pips they spat out. Andreas himself had been a workman in Paphos when they discovered the coneshaped black stone, idol of Aphrodite, in some abandoned byre. According to him the youths of Paphos still go out at night and anoint the stones of the temple with oil and almond-water on a certain night of the year, while women leave their rings and fragments of their petticoats as ex votos against barrenness.

  Heaven knows how true all this was: but it was true for them. And the bibliography of Cyprus is so extensive and detailed that the truth must somewhere be on record.… That could come later, I felt. I preferred to learn what I could from the lips of these peasants with their curious mediaeval sense of light and shade, and their sharp sense of dramatic values. Oddly enough, too, their stories proved true sometimes when they sounded utterly improbable; Andreas, for example, in describing ancient Cyprus to me produced a homemade imitation of a hippopotamus walking around and browsing in my courtyard which was worthy of Chaplin. It was nearly a year before I caught up with the report of the dwarf hippopotamus which had been unearthed on the Kyrenia range: a prehistoric relic. It was only justice, I suppose, that I myself should be disbelieved by them when I claimed to have seen a brown seal floating lazily in the tepid summer water by the little mosque where later I used to bathe.

  No, they were not often wrong; and their versions of historic events had the merit of giving me a picture-gallery of faces to interpret the events by: I still see the Governor Sergius being converted to Christianity by Michaelis—only he wears forever the gaping rustic face of Mark the concrete-mixer as he leans on a shovel to watch the storyteller.<
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  It was a way of traveling, too, by standing still; or rather by sitting still, under an olive tree with a can of wine beside one. Michaelis had suffered from the stone, and his great pilgrimage in search of a cure was a saga in itself. He had stumped up the verdant crown of Olympus to try the wonder-working image at Kykko; had panted along the dusty road which is ruled across the green plain to the dry well where Barnabas’s bones were found, near Salamis. He had consulted the withered head of the martyr St. Heracleides in its glass case, touching the red velvet with his finger to take some dust from the relic which he sniffed up into his right nostril: without avail. Everyone told him he would have to submit to the knife. But somehow he couldn’t believe that the island saints would let him down, even though the mineral springs might fail him. (I learned of their qualities, which he illustrated by a series of grimaces—so that each spring has an accompanying picture. Worst of all, Kalopanayotis provoked intestinal rumblings which suggested something even more powerful than the prayers of St. Barnabas. Banging his fist on a lintel he imitated these tremors, and added: “Days and nights of remorseless bombardment after only a pint of it.”) But at last he found his cure; on the dramatic scarp where Stavrovouni rises he said his prayers to the holy relic which he said was part of the cross of the Penitent Thief, bequeathed by Helena, the great and good Empress. (“Empress of where?” “I don’t know.”) In a dream he was told to live for two months only on the juice of the Prodromos apples and cherries, and this at last cured him.