Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island

by Lawrence Durrell

  But while these fellow villagers of mine brought me knowledge of saints and seasons, of icons and wine, the swallows were beginning to gather—the human swallows which make life endurable for those who elect to live on islands. Life in a small island would be unbearable for anyone with sensibility were it not enriched from time to time by visitants from other worlds, bringing with them the conversations of the great capitals, refreshing the quotidian life in small places by breaths of air which make one live once more, for a moment, in the airs of Paris or London.

  So it was that for a whole day I was able to gossip with John Lehmann on the empty beach at Pachyammos, eagerly questioning him about new books and new writers; or talking of the writers who were to follow him out to Cyprus as we gathered anemones at Klepini or walked through the haunted moonlit streets of old Famagusta at midnight, listening to the ravens sleepily crowing. These are the lucky interludes one enjoys nowhere so much as on an island—to see the Lion Mount, as if for the first time, through the cool rare eyes of Rose Macaulay, herself bound for ruins stretching still further back into time than this Gothic castle in the shadow of which I lived. (“Have you ever wondered how it is that the utilitarian objects of one period become objects of aesthetic value to succeeding ones? This thing was constructed purely to keep armies at bay, to shatter men and horses, to guard a pass. How do we find it more beautiful than the Maginot Line? Does time itself confer something on relics and ruins which isn’t inherent in the design of the builder? Will we ever visit the Maginot Line with such awe at its natural beauty?”) The thoughts of a fellow-writer which tease the mind long after she has gone.…

  But among the swallows were one or two who had built their nests upon this fertile range. I had noticed, for instance, a fair haired girl. She walked about the harbor at Kyrenia with a book and with the distracted air which betokened to my inexpert eye evidence of some terrible preoccupation—perhaps one of those love-affairs which mark one for life. I had seen her, too, in her little green car, driving about the hills with the same princesse lointaine expression. The mystery was only made plain to me when I met her and found that the subdued air of anguish on her face could be traced back to preoccupations which matched mine. She was trying to build a house on a spectacular deserted point opposite the little Tekke of Hazaret Omer—a remarkable site for the choice of a private house. You would think that such a choice betokened an inordinate world-weariness, yet Marie was anything but world-weary. She flashed in and out of Cyprus half a dozen times a year bringing with her the best conversation of three capitals as a staple; and until the house should be ready she had constructed a small hut of bamboos of a strongly Indonesian flavor where she spent her time, reading and writing. We were drawn together by common enthusiasms. I was able to translate for her—for she was still engaged in buying her land from the dozen or so peasants who owned it. And for her part she enjoyed coming up to the Abbey to see how work on my house was going, bringing with her an armful of books with sketches of architecture and garden-layout to add oil to the fire already raging among my villagers. With her blonde head and brown eyes she seemed to them something rare and strange—which indeed she was, being so solitary a creature; and when she kicked off her shoes to walk about the green grass of the Abbey, Andreas would nudge Michaelis at the coffee shop and say: “There goes the nereid again.”

  The nereid and I made common cause, exchanging figures and costings, worrying poor Sabri for advice, and in our spare time swimming together on the rugged rock-beaches round her land.

  But Marie’s design for living differed from mine, for she was an incurable romantic, and moreover a great traveler; her house was to have features of almost everything she had loved between Fez and Goa; recessed doorways with moldings, Arab shutters, a fountain from Bundi, a courtyard from Castile.… The list changed daily but it was always an extensive one, and her enthusiasm was so touching and warming that it seemed cruel to tell her that the workmen in Cyprus could not execute designs so rare. “Nonsense, we’ll make them.” It went without saying that she was a person of fortune as well as a romantic; if Beckford had been alive he would surely have been among her many friends and correspondents—and perhaps he might have assisted at those early deliberations by the sea, or sipping Clito’s country wine in the cool shade of his cave.

  It was concern about her plans—for it is one thing to knock an old house about, but quite another to build from the ground—which made me so happy when Pearce Hubbard turned up, clad in his gold thread jeans of local weave, dark shirt and sandals. I knew him by name through many common friends, but we had never met. With his delightful insouciance (it seemed unfair to have the looks of a matinee idol, plus brains and taste) he burst in upon me as I was making heavy weather with a bank statement, and refusing to countenance any excuse, insisted that I must accompany him to Lapithos to meet Austen Harrison. He knew Bellapaix well and was a close friend of Kollis with whom he shared a passion for roses, and on this visit I recall he had filled the back of the car up with a wobbling forest of potted plants in the midst of which I sat, feeling rather foolish. As we bounced and swayed towards Lapithos he told me of his own Turkish house there and of how he and Harrison, for their sins, had become residents of Lapithos and owners of old houses. As architects their work took them about the world a great deal and Cyprus was a useful jumping-off place in which to have a drawing-office; it was also the ideal place to spend a summer, he added wryly, and he had sent his family out on several occasions. “And now that you are here,” he added, offering me a fellowship in the wine and landscape, “it’s going to be splendid. I’m not here very much myself, but Austen spends a good part of the year in Lapithos. I know you’ll like him and I hope he’ll like you. He’s an awful recluse—can one blame him? One wouldn’t come so far from the haunts of man if one were a gregarious or clubby type. And his house will fill you with despair—may give you an idea or two. By the way, go a bit deeper, another ten foot for the end of the balcony, just to be sure. You don’t want the whole thing to sit down one rainy day in the sludge and refuse to move—or to turn over on its side when you are giving an ouzo party on the roof.”

  “Did the house seem fairly sound?” I asked nervously, though I had sworn not to try to cadge a free consultation from him. Pearce laughed. “Depends on what you mean. An English builder would have apoplexy. But it’s as sound as mine or Austen’s—no, not quite: we’ve rebuilt extensively. How long do you intend to live?”

  I was content with the implied reassurance and flattered by his approval of my general plan.

  But all this was swallowed up in despair and envy when we entered Austen Harrison’s house and found its romantic owner seated gravely by his own lily-pond, apparently engaged in psychoanalyzing a goldfish. He was a noble personage, with his finely minted Byzantine emperor’s head and the spare athletic repose of his tall figure. But the austerity was belied by a twinkling eye and brisk lively humors. One felt immediately accepted; and as I sipped a drink and listened to his conversation I suddenly realized that I was in the presence of the hero of South Wind or an early character from Huxley. He represented that forgotten world where style was not only a literary imperative but an inherent method of approaching the world of books, roses, statues and landscapes. His house was a perfect illustration of the man. He had taken over an old Cypriot wine magazine, or perhaps stable, and converted it with a tenderness and discretion which made the whole composition sing—the long arched room lined with books, from whose recesses glowed icons; the shaded terrace with its pointed arches, the summer house, the lily-pond. All this was an illustration of philosophic principles—an illustration of how the good life might, and how it should, be lived. For him too the island life was only made endurable by friendly visitants from the world outside and I was delighted to find we had friends in common who came through almost every year and stayed for a day or two specially to make the pilgrimage to Lapithos. Of these Freya Stark and Sir Harry Luke remain as forever identified in my min
d with the place, for each of them had something special to give me.

  Pearce Hubbard’s own house was hardly less delightful. It was virtually next door, and it was here that we convened for that first memorable dinner by candlelight, given flavor and shape by good food and better conversation, and extended far into the night in a garden full of the scent of limes. Here they gave me news of other friends with a Cairo or Athens background who had just passed through or were due to arrive, each with his burden of information. Patrick Kinross, for example, whose book on Cyprus is not likely to be superseded as a brief and extraordinarily comprehensive sketch of the island and its problems, was due to visit them next week. Later Freya Stark herself would come.… It was clear that Austen Harrison had built himself a khan or caravanserai on one of the main highways of the world.

  In them at least Marie found guides and advisers in the formidable task of building the “perfect house for a writer to live in”; they tempered her enthusiasm without damping it, and kept her as far as possible within the golden mean. The three of them, in fact, shared one quality in common: they were all magpies. And traveling about as they all did they were able to indulge their taste, and bring back to Cyprus a bewildering medley of objects, from Egyptian musarabiyas to Turkish mosque-lamps. They were steadily stripping the Arab world of its chief treasures, as Pearce said, and soon their houses in Cyprus would have everything, except the mosaics of St. Sophia. My own ambitions were more hedge-hopping and my means forbade me to indulge in such delightful fantasies—happily perhaps. But I enjoyed these treasures vicariously, so to speak, and appreciated nothing more than one of the great palavers which went on when one or other of the friends had arrived back in Cyprus with something exotic—Persian tiles, Indian fabrics, a Kuwait chest, or simply perhaps the design for a window or door triumphantly stolen from Fez, Algiers or Istamboul. Its position in her house which as yet did not exist, was a subject of the most earnest, heart-warming debate.

  We drove back that night from our first meeting with the “hermits of Lapithos” with a profound content, and as the moon was late and high, turned off the road to spend an hour in the owl-haunted ruins of Lambousa, an old church standing in magnificent desolation upon the echoing stony beach below Lapithos. Here, walking about in the ruins, eating the sweet brown grapes we had stolen from Pearce Hubbard’s table we talked of our houses, of the books we were going to write, and of the lives we should be able to live here in the sun: within reach of each other on this eloquent range of hills. The owls whistled and the sea banged and rubbed under the moon. We were full of the premonitions of a life to be lived which could offer, not merely leisure in sunlight, but a proper field in which to read and reflect, deploy words and study. Marie was to leave for India next morning (she always left like this, without a word of warning, to reappear after a month or two as suddenly) and felt disinclined to sleep, so we drove back along the silent coast and down to the little mosque, blazing like a diamond on the rocky peninsula opposite her wattle hut. Here we bathed in a sea still full of cold currents, smarting to the flesh, and drank the last of a bottle of red Chianti which we found in the hut. The dawn was breaking before we were ready almost, rushing out of the night-sea beyond Cape Andreas, a steeply mounting flush upon the bronze faces of the mountains. A dense dew lay upon everything as we drove back through the silent fields to Kyrenia for breakfast. There were to be many such mornings, many such evenings spent in good fellowship and wine, before the vagaries of fortune and the demons of ill luck dragged Cyprus into the stock market of world affairs and destroyed not only the fortuitous happiness of these friendships but, more tragically and just as surely, the old tried relationships on which the life of the little village itself was founded.

  But none of this was as yet apparent upon the face of things—and the brown smiling summer with its gross damps and fierce sun led us towards the languid flowering autumn of the year, hinting in the ripeness of figs and grapes, the emergence of snakes and lizards, of the winter to follow. Marie and Pearce vanished. Boris and Ines came. The work on the house was well advanced and I moved in, the better to supervise, to extract a poet’s pound of flesh for every penny spent—I was getting short of money. But the plan was maturing and the place itself becoming even more beautiful than our haphazard plans and sudden afterthoughts had let me dare imagine.

  The two floors of the house now began to represent themselves in their true colors as winter and summer floors. Below, a great fireplace, small kitchen, study and bedroom; above, the indescribable terrace which would later be shaded by its own vine; a large rambling old-fashioned studio room, a small hall with a fireplace, and an alcove set deep behind a pointed arch from the window of which my small daughter, if she sat up in bed, could gaze out at Turkey and see the fort of Kyrenia framed like a watercolor. Brick by brick, stone by stone, window by window, I watched it all put together by my friends with a sense of familiarity that one has sometimes when a poem “comes out” of its own accord like an equation, without having to be tortured or teased. It all flowed from the magical black moustache of Michaelis, the brown fingers of “the Seafarer,” the lisp and stammer of “the Bear”; and as the work went on my neighbors dropped in to appraise it and to exchange pleasantries with their friends and relations who were building it. Here, too, in autumn came visitors and there was a fine fire of flesh-rosy carob wood to greet them, whose flames jumped and glowed on the old doors and moldings and screens. A few shelves of books too gave the sense of permanent habitation.

  In that warm light the faces of my friends lived and glowed, giving back in conversation the colors of the burning wood, borrowing the heat to repay it in the companionable innocence of unpremeditated talk. Freya Stark, whose journeys to the wilder parts of Turkey brought her happily to Cyprus en route, illustrated for us the wit and compassion of the true traveler—one, that is, who belongs to the world and the age; Sir Harry Luke, whose gentleness and magnanimity of soul were married to a mind far-reaching and acute, who was fantastically erudite without ever being bookish, and whose whole life had been one of travel and adventure; Patrick Leigh Fermor and the Corn Goddess, who always arrive when I am on an island, unannounced and whose luggage has always been left at the airport (“But we’ve brought the wine—the most important thing”).

  They brought with them fragments of history and legend to set against the village lore; Sir Harry meditating on the double-sexed Aphrodite whose priests wore beards and whose worshippers inverted their dress—and wondering whether the extraordinary number of hermaphrodites on Cyprus did not perhaps betoken some forgotten race, bred for the service of the temple. Through them I caught a glimpse, not only of Cyprus as she is today, but of the eternal Cyprus which had for so long attracted the attention of travelers like them. And the biography of a saint heard from the lips of Sir Harry married like a cloth with the same story heard from Michaelis in his dialect form, so that my notebook became cross-hatched with material drawn from both. Let me add a page or two from it, since it lies to hand.

  (a) From the balcony, towards four, by westering sun light: plum-dark mountain roses: green wooden table in the rain: slurring of bees: chime of tea-cups: H.L. talking well about King Harry and the building of the Abbey which lies below anchored against the side of the cliff, bruise-grey. “Both Latin and English are poorer than Greek in having only one word for life, ‘vita’ and ‘life,’ whereas Greek has two, ‘Zoe’ and ‘Bios.’” He described the way the Levant had undermined the Gothic north—religion foundering in license. Even the good fathers of the Abbey lapsed, were found to have several wives. A bishop had to ride up here on a mule to tick them off!

  (b) The only oath binding to vampires, according to Manoli, is “by my winding-sheet.” But Cyprus is not rich in vampires, is richer in saints. Estienne de Lusignan in his “Description” says there are 107 island saints, not counting those whose names he does not know, and of foreign saints whose bodies rest in Cyprus, 315. There are six monasteries in happy possession of some
wonder-working icon or holy relic.

  (c) This morning woke, believing that the house was on fire, but it proved to be the sound of silkworms feed ing in Lalou’s little house—a noise like a crisp forest fire traveling through dry scrub as the little creatures gnawed their way through the great parcels of mul berry leaves. Lalou says that the white mulberry in my garden is excellent for feeding. Up to the second molt they are fed with leaves from the ungrafted mulberry. They have never heard of lettuce leaves for feeding silk worms, it seems.

  (d) Scene of the wildest comedy next-door when Fran gos in an excess of high spirits picked up the cherished motorbike of his son-in-law and proceeded to jug gle with it. He tripped on a terrace and suddenly the machine flew into the apricot tree where it lodged pre cariously—it is only a two-stroke. Screams, yells, drama. If it fell out it would be broken. Ludicrous attitudes of Frangos climbing tree with rope to snare it before it fell. Son-in-law in tears. A safe landing, however, with a smart blow on the shin for the son-in-law which put Frangos in a good humor for the rest of the day.

  (e) The silkworms die with a dreadful crackling and sobbing and a noise of sinews being ground; the family sit round the great copper cauldron and skim off the product on to hand looms—great spools of butter-colored silk thick as a man’s thigh. And Lalou sings in the high true voice. “Though my lover come from never so far away, my heart will recognize him by his smile.”

  (f) Last night the sound of the front door closing upon breathless chuckles and secretive panting, then the voice of Paddy Leigh Fermor: “Any old clothes?” in Greek. Appeared with his arm round the shoulders of Michaelis who had shown him the way up the rocky path in darkness. “Joan is winded, holed below the Plimsoll line. I’ve left her resting halfway up. Send out a sene schal with a taper, or a sedan if you have one.” It is as joy ous a reunion as ever we had in Rhodes. After a splendid dinner by the fire he starts singing, songs of Crete, Ath ens, Macedonia. When I go out to refill the ouzo bottle at the little tavern across the way I find the street com pletely filled with people listening in utter silence and darkness. Everyone seems struck dumb. “What is it?” I say, catching sight of Frangos. “Never have I heard of Englishmen singing Greek songs like this!” Their rev erent amazement is touching; it is as if they want to embrace Paddy wherever he goes.