Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island

by Lawrence Durrell

  I still visited Panos whenever I could, to sit and drink his heavy sweet Commanderia on the terrace under the Church of the Archangel Michael. He had changed, had aged. Did all our faces reflect, as his did, the helpless forebodings we all felt for the future? I wondered. He spoke gently and temperately still of the situation, but obviously the failure of the Conference had been a blow to him. “There is no way forward now,” he said. “It is too late to go back to the point where you missed the catch. Things are going to get worse.” He was not deceived by my false assurance and empty optimisms. “No,” he said. “This marks a definite point. The Government will have to drop palliatives and act; that will be unpleasant for us. Then we shall have to react as firmly.” He mourned, as so many Greeks did, the lost opportunity when the Foreign Office refused to substitute the word “postponed” for “closed” upon the Cyprus file. Everything, he thought, had followed from that. His view of the future was not reassuring, but then neither was mine. Only the village with its calms and quiet airs lulled my fears. But here, too, the invisible thread was shortening. “I feel uneasy about you coming up here,” said the muktar quietly. “Have you any reason to?” “None. But we hardly know what’s going on inside ourselves any more.” Old Michaelis was in good form still, and still told stories with his old flair over the red wine. He hardly ever spoke of politics, and then in a low apologetic voice, as if he feared to be overheard. Once he said with a regretful sigh: “Ach, neighbor, we were happy enough before these things happened.” And raising his glass added: “That we pass beyond them.” We drank to the idea of a peaceful Cyprus—an idea which day by day receded like a mirage before a thirsty man. “You know,” he said, “I was told of a telegram which Napoleon Zervas sent to Churchill saying ‘Old man, be wise: Cyprus promised to Greece is thrice British.’ * He grinned and put a finger to his temple. “Note carefully he said ‘promised’ not ‘given.’ There is the matter! Yesterday the promise would have been enough. Today …” He made a monkey-face to suggest a lot of people all talking simultaneously. It was an admirable illustration of the situation.

  It was some time during that month that I myself nearly fell a victim to gunmen, though whether by design or at a hazard I do not know. It was my own fault. The nights were worn threadbare by telephone calls or bomb alerts, and sleep was impossible until the small hours. Happily there was a small bar called the Cosmopolitan almost opposite the house on the main road, and here one could have a drink and meet journalists after filing time. I used to go along there every night at eleven or thereabouts, where I was usually joined by one or other of my friends or accompanied by Richard Lumley. I usually sat, too, in the same place, to be near enough to gossip to Cyril the barkeeper and his delightful French wife. One night the dog started barking, and Lazarus the waiter went out of the back door to see why. The whole place was surrounded by dense and gloomy vegetation, thick untrimmed bushes and trees which gave it a desolate air. The waiter came back white as a sheet and almost fainting, stammering: “Get away from the window.” He had seen three masked men leveling something from a bush outside. I had a heavy torch, and Cyril and I, impressed by the man’s very real fear but not really believing him, went out to have a look. Reluctantly Lazarus came to the balcony and pointed out the place. It was in a thick bush. The grass did look a bit trampled. But not ten paces away, between two trees, was a lighted window which I recognized as the window of the bar. “Lazarus,” said Cyril, and he too now sounded scared, “go and sit in the seat of the Kurios.” The waiter obeyed, to appear a moment later, lit and framed (“like a photograph” said Cyril grimly), in the window. We returned thoughtfully to the bar where the shaking Lazarus was pouring himself a brandy, and interrogated him further. He had come out on the balcony, he said, and found the dog barking at a bush behind which there were three men in masks. They had some sort of weapon—from his description it sounded like a Sten; they stared at him for a moment and then “sank into the ground.” The whole of the little knoll was densely wooded and offered an easy escape. The episode was most alarming.

  It was an eerie feeling too to walk back to the house alone that night down that corridor of darkness with only here and there a frail puddle of light from the street-lamps. The whole quarter was deserted, and my usual companions had not appeared. Doubtless the press corps had hurried off to the scene of some new incident. As I turned off the tarmac on to the gravel I was even more alarmed to hear footsteps behind me, following me at a leisurely pace. Now the whole front of my little house was lighted, and offered an even better firing position than the bar-window might have done, surrounded as it was with scrub and orange trees. I felt it wiser to face a possible attacker in the darkness of the lane, consoling myself with the reflection that even if I was unarmed he would not know it and would assume I was. And I had the powerful torch. I stopped now, and the footsteps stopped too in the darkness. Frightened as I was, I felt absurdly glad that my heart was not beating faster than normal—thanks to the excellent double brandy Cyril had given me. I held my right arm as far away from me as possible and started running back the way I had come, towards the invisible man; after five paces I switched on and picked him up, shouting: “Hands up.” He had nothing in his hands and was smiling good-naturedly. “Mr. Durrell,” he said reproachfully. As I came up and searched him I recognized him, though by now I had forgotten his name; he was the taxi driver who had driven me across the island when first I arrived, the cousin of Basil the priest. He seemed surprised and delighted. Apparently he did not know me by my name either. “I am guarding you, sir,” he said.

  “Guarding me?”

  “My taxi is behind the Cosmopolitan at the taxi rank. Cyril told me that you were leaving, and that some men had been after you. He told me to be answerable for your safety, so I was following you to see you came to no harm.”

  It was a great relief. I took him back to the house and we drank a whisky by the fire before saying good night. The next day I borrowed a pistol from a kindly Scots major in the police. It was both a consolation and an obscenity but it symbolized the trend of events perfectly, for Cyprus was now no longer a political problem so much as an operational one—and its cares were soon to be confided to someone who was a match for the hazards it presented.

  September was another milestone on the road. “Since UNO has excluded any other means to regain our liberty,” read an EOKA pamphlet, distributed in Larnaca, “we have nothing else to do but to shed blood, and this will be the blood of English and Americans.”

  The attacks on police stations sharpened. Rioting and the hoisting of Greek flags everywhere kept the police busy. The first terrorist murderer (Karaolis) was arrested and charged. The Executive Council sustained an irreplaceable loss in the resignation of Sir Paul Pavlides, whose good offices and un-self-seeking counsel had been invaluable up to now. He too could see no way forward. Achilles was nearly murdered by two armed men one morning as he drove to work; they opened up on him from either side of the car at a range of three feet, while he was stuck in the driving-seat unable to draw his Browning. It was a lucky escape. Renos Wideson’s father, a magnificent and uncompromising old man who alone dared to say publicly what so many people thought—that Enosis was all very well but could wait—was nearly murdered by a gunman. (In all, three attacks were made on him to which he responded with great spirit. The fourth time he was shot dead at point-blank range.)

  To the alarms of the night were added the daylight terrors of the open street, where small groups of students patrolled on bicycles, suddenly opening fire with pistols. And yet between these incidents the calm, the good nature, of everyday life was restored as if from some fathomless source of goodwill, banishing the fear these incidents had created. The sun still shone; and in perfect September sunshine the yachts fluttered across the harbor-bar at Kyrenia, the groups of drinkers sat around the cafes in idle conversation. The whole thing had the air of some breathtaking deception. There was no way of matching the newspaper pictures of bodies lying in their
own blood upon pavements crowded with shattered chairs and glass, with the serene blue of the Levant sky, the friendly sea rubbing its head upon the beaches like a sheep-dog. The casual visitor was always surprised to see men bathing now under the protection of rifles. Autres temps autres moeurs. I could not help reflecting wryly that had we been honest enough to admit the Greek nature of Cyprus at the beginning, it might never have been necessary to abandon the island or to fight for it. Now, it was too late!

  Chapter Twelve: The Vanishing Landmarks

  There is no borrowing a sword in war time.

  The Clergyman’s son is the Devil’s grandson.

  Every gypsy praises his own basket.

  —Cypriot Greek proverbs

  WITH THE POLITICAL issues irremediably landlocked by the implacability of Turkish opinion, both metropolitan and domestic, the island was now to be turned upon another course, away from the academic exchanges of the council chamber towards crueler extremes. From the problem child of the politicians it was to become the field of operations of the soldier. The replacement of Sir Robert had not been unforeseen, though it was misinterpreted by those who did not yet realize how fundamentally the whole problem had been altered by the failure of the London Conference.

  By now, terrorism and disorder could no longer be met by appeals to sweet reason, and the hopes that international decisions might obviate the sort of measures which the state of things demanded. Extremes must now meet if the whole structure of civic life and administrative order were not to be prejudiced for ever; and on this sharp wind Sir John flew in to take over. “Fly” is the word, too, for he had all the deftness and dispatch of a francolin, and the keen clear bird-mind of one trained to decisions based in a trained power of the will. His little hovering aircraft aptly symbolized the powers of this visitant from outer space.

  Small of person as Lawrence was, though perfectly proportioned, he had the graces of a courtier combined with the repose and mildness of a family sage. Up at the Abbey, Kollis showed me with great excitement the schoolboy’s autograph album in which the new Governor had written his name, plain “John Harding” in a hand which showed not only the firm uncomplicated lines of his character but some of the unselfish and enthusiastic zeal of a child. “Why,” said my friend, and this was to become an echo everywhere (even repeated by Makarios), “did they not send us such a man a long time ago?” Why indeed!

  Upon the disorder and dishevelment of an administration still wallowing in shortages and indecisions he turned the pure direct eye of a soldier with a simple brief—the restoration of public order, the meeting of force with force; and he was followed swiftly by his soldiers, whose splendid professional bearing and brown faces—still smiling and kindly—brought a fresh atmosphere to dusty purlieus of the five towns. Skillfully and smoothly the chessboard was altered, the pieces rearranged. The new Governor, in a series of swift flights, took in all there was to be seen in the five towns, gathered what he could of information and counsel from the administration, and made his dispositions with the speed of long practice. With one hand, so to speak, he reopened negotiations with the Ethnarch (for it would be folly not to appeal to whatever goodwill and reason remained, and there was plenty); with the other he completely underpinned Wren’s force with his Commandos, offering them a much-needed support until such time as they could be brought up to strength and made the effective guardians of civil security. The old-fashioned administrative scheme of the Secretariat went by the board at once to keep pace with the times and eventualities. To the telecommunications cobweb which now covered Cyprus he added an operational H. Q. inside the rusty wires of the old Government building which was directly in touch with his office in Government House. These were the terms in which the next stages of the game were to be played.

  If no agreement could be reached on a Constitution we should be forced to sit down and sweat the lead out of our skins. I must confess to having had misgivings about the talks, for it was clear that the Turks had effectively blocked the light of day, and would never be persuaded to accede to any constitutional demands which the Greeks found acceptable. But it was necessary to keep the door open, even if it was not wide open, and here the Field Marshal performed a feat which would have done credit to a master among diplomatists. That his efforts to persuade the Ethnarchy to accept a constitution met with failure is not surprising. He had nothing to offer—indeed he was cumbered by formulations so abounding in double negatives, in triple-dyed reservations, that anyone—not merely a Greek—might feel that they had been designed to make a fool of him; moreover they invited the Archbishop to take up a position which would not only have been immediately repudiated by every other Greek and Cypriot as prejudicing the future of suffrage on Enosis, but which did not even guarantee an elected majority in the legislature without the permission of the Turks! The Turkish position by this time was so well known that the talks could hardly do anything but break down, as they did. But one’s heart went out to the patient and truly lion-hearted little man who had undertaken once more to rake about in the dirty dustbins of politics for fragments which might be joined together before they were irretrievably thrown out and lost. It was a peaceable task for a soldier, and he performed it with the same swift lucidity and perfection of timing that characterized his professional duties in the craft to which he had been bred. Neither failure nor success can move such spirits whose sense of duty is their only religion.

  But the rest now belonged to the slow and hideous annals of siegecraft—for with the coming of the soldiers the spirit of resistance itself gradually spread, igniting the sleeping villages one by one. They had once been passive and uncommitted to the struggle imposed on them by the political ringmasters, though their sentiments had always lain with the rebels. It had become necessary to rake out the hot ashes in search of the embers still capable of setting fire to the rickety and worm-eaten old house which Cyprus was and still is. In default of police intelligence this could only be done by the massive methods of saturation—to literally soak up the fire-power of resistance as blotting-paper soaks up ink.

  (I am condensing the impressions not merely of days, but of months—for though the administrative shuffle and reshuffle had now become a daily feature of life [“worm cut in half and wriggling”] I did not feel that I had any further effective place in the scheme of things. We had long since passed the shoals and narrows of policy where special knowledge or statecraft could avail us, and were heading for the open sea.)

  The long roads to the coast became swollen with army transport as the bathing parties went down to the beaches, reminding one of the transport-jammed trails leading up to the Western Desert. Red berets and green now added their blobs of primary color to a landscape once dominated by Greek sky-blue and Turkish magenta. The deserted beaches around Kyrenia and Famagusta were full of the brown bodies of soldiers at rest, swimming away their leisure.

  The life of the towns endured the new climate of affairs with the same deceptive normality—the smiles and gestures of impenitent friendliness were fewer, but they were still there, the last fragile handclasp of parting. Only my little village lay obstinately outside the frame of things, saturated by the smoke of wood fires in an early autumn, its inhabitants drowsing away the noons at their spindles. But they were no longer talking village affairs, weddings, baptisms, for the radio bulletins poured in upon them, drenching them with news they might never have known of searches and curfews and killings in the various quarters of the island. Then, too, masked men had visited them to collect arms, frightening the wits out of them. “I thought they were Easter mummers,” said Anthemos, “and then I became afraid of the firelight shining on their masks. They said: ‘Dighenis wants all the shotguns.’ They were armed. What could we do? We handed them over—all except Petro who had hidden his. They were not from here, you know. Nobody recognized them. They came in a car and left it on the threshing-floor.”

  I met Andreas sitting in a corner of Clitos little cave, hunched up over his drink and
silent. At my greeting he turned a vacant weary face to me and tried to smile. He looked shrunk up and all of a sudden much older. He said in a whisper: “The boy has gone. Said he was going to the mountains. I tried to keep hold on him—what could I do? There are no schools, and always this business of strikes and riots. He has changed very much. You know, I was going to come in to your office and ask you if you couldn’t get him arrested as a terrorist—put away somewhere safely. But Dmitri’s bus wasn’t going. Anyway I didn’t have the money. And also I was torn, you understand, trying to understand if I was right or wrong. Now they will catch him and kill him.” Tears came into his eyes. He swallowed them down and smiled as Clito came over with a bottle of brandy. He had told nobody, it seemed, and telling me was in its way a relief. He cheered up a little after a couple of brandies, and we walked down the little twisted streets to the harbor arm-in-arm.

  “How different it was,” he said, seeing the long row of parked lorries and the crowded spit of sand which was all Kyrenia had in the way of a beach. “But praise be, the village is still the same, neighbor. It hasn’t changed. And even you can come there and find everything quiet.” But for how long, I wondered?

  Christmas came with its cloudy skies and the skirling rain, bringing new tones to the Gothic range, making us forget the long painful nights of tedium with their sporadic excitements and alarms. The gradually growing pressures upon the terrorists began to react upon the civil population, upon industry, business and entertainment. Curfews plunged the old town in darkness no less than the bloody incidents which were now an almost daily feature of our lives. Roadblocks with their laborious searches began to fragment the clumsy road haulage systems upon which local industry relied to feed the villages and the ports. Tourism flickered fitfully for a while, and then went out. Stage by stage the island became an armed camp, spreading the sense of suffocation in restricted movement, passes and permits, limitations on traffic; and in the wake of the bonny soldiers came the contract police—big heads, big feet, and big appetites. Pistols became part of the tenue de ville—what every well-dressed man must wear; bulging like pouter pigeons, sagging at the buttocks, dragging at the shape of coat-pockets and trousers. Bulpit, Gorge, and Piles; Dubbin, Bulk, and Shove; we laid our pistols on the bar of the Homer Palace and called for a double with the air of bing-bing artists in a Western. Visitors from Kenya and Malaya, and those who pined for the Mandate, found themselves breathing familiar air. There was nothing left to recognize in Nicosia now—the old town shuttered, dark and dead, the joints outside its walls swollen with new faces. Most of the poppy-shallow cabaret girls had gone, too, and those who remained only did so presumably because they could not resist the thrill of feeling a pistol pressed against them as they danced.