“Let them ask the questions!” I said, shushing the group, which was overloading them with details.
Nancy had brought gifts and handed them out after dinner. Seven-year-old Anastasia, the smallest child, piped up: “Where is mine?”
I love kids!
I had brought one gift: Panos’s Bible. I wanted to present the Bible to Soulla that eve, while I was still strong. I knew I could not speak the words without crying, so I wrote them down on my iPhone and asked Nancy to read. As Nancy took my phone, I began to cry, sniveling so loudly I bowed my head to hide my face. Nancy read:
Dear Soulla,
I will write these words to you, as my voice is weak and my will not to cry much weaker.
At the same time I learned who my birth father, Panos Kelalis, was, I learned he was dead.
Then I parachuted into your life, a true foreigner with an unbelievable story, asking all about him, prying really.
I feared that no one would believe or like me, suspect me of being a gold digger, reject me.
Rather, you responded kindly and shared so much.
Naturally, we talked much of his ex-wife, Barbara, on our last visit. And you mentioned you were disappointed when she came for Panos’s funeral and did not bring the family Bible as you asked . . .
“If you meet her, take it!” you said, perhaps in jest, perhaps not.
Barbara remained a curious figure in my mind, not so much for her egregious actions but rather to see who this American princess was who hijacked my father’s heart.
I wanted to learn from her something about how he loved.
Nancy read the whole story of Pat’s help and Barbara’s response. She read:
As I sat on her living room sofa one day, I squinted in the bright sunlight.
“You are squinting just like Panos,” she said.
So, in the end, Barbara believed in me. Which was not nearly as important to me as having the Bible.
Which I now give to you.
Your goodness has engendered so much more goodness, peace, and strength in my life. Your sharing of Panos has helped give me absolute peace of mind that I do not have a genetic form of ALS, that I don’t have to worry my children will suffer it one day.
I love the stories of how fearless Panos was. They help me feel stronger today. . . .
Soulla, you have filled out in my mind who he was, made me proud to be part of him, made me sad not to know him. Today, I have stories of his personality, photos, personal objects of his, thanks to you and Ellen.
I have an image of him I admire much. I hope, hope to meet him on the other side of life.
I am not fearful of death. I am fearless.
Thank you. Efcharisto.
Soulla sat in stunned silence.
Nadia, the spitfire, asked to see the Bible. “No, I don’t think that’s the one,” she chirped right away.
Avraam inspected it and discovered something Pat, Nancy, and I had missed. A highlighted passage, in fluorescent yellow, about how a wife is to do the husband’s bidding.
Ack! It’s Barbara’s Bible!
“Well, it’s the thought that counts!” I said to the group.
We all had a good laugh. And in that moment, the embarrassment turned into another memory, another story to share under the Chickee hut like wine.
Stelios, George’s son, invited us to a piano recital inside. He played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Anastasia stood by, conducting. I about had Marina married off to Stelios by the end of it. Roll your eyes, Marina, but ’tis true.
George, Nancy, and I had been students together in the University of Florida’s graduate journalism program. Nancy and I had posed as actors in some short films George had to make in his TV production course.
George had found the films and played them for us. There was Nancy twenty years younger, the only difference her hair three times bushier then.
And there was me. So very, very different. My hair blond and bushy, my face plump, not sunken as it is now. And my hands.
The video was of me making a Greek salad. The camera zoomed in on my hands, holding the tomato, cucumber, and onion.
My fingers nimble and thin, the natural nails long and smooth.
Fingers now curling as the muscles weaken. Nails untamed and often dirty, as I am unable to manicure them myself.
What do I do?
What do I do in such bright-line moments, where my handicap whomps me over the head?
Dwell in what there remains to be grateful for.
My hands are snarled, but I can still touch. I cannot hold, but I can feel. I have my connection to the world, which ALS will never take away.
I had one more journey to take in Cyprus. A journey home. A trip full of sights. Sounds. Tastes. Touch. A journey to delight my senses.
Senses forever mine.
Turtle Beach
On my first visit to Cyprus, Soulla had told me of an extraordinary day she and Panos spent together around 1996. They had visited sites from their childhood in northern Cyprus: first a beach Panos had loved, then a monastery.
Soulla showed me a photo of Panos standing in a breezeway at the monastery, framed by arches.
“I want to go there,” I said.
For that is how you summon spirit. To go.
I did not realize the impact of what I had asked.
Since 1974, Cyprus has been a divided island, with a Greek side and a Turkish one. Even the capital Nicosia is divided. As rigidly split as East and West Berlin once were, so is Nicosia today.
The war between Greece and Turkey, two nations with a long history on the island, had been intense. Both nations sent their armies. Many died. Tens of thousands more were uprooted from their homes.
Every Cypriot remembers those days, even the children who have only heard the tales.
“My mother was hanging clothes on the line,” a Turkish friend, Firat, told us, recounting a Greek bombing run. “She ran out of her flip-flops, she was so scared.”
Avraam was thirteen years old when the Turkish army neared his home. He, his three siblings, and his parents got in the family car and headed for safety in the pine forest of a mountain range hours away.
“My father said, ‘We will stay here tonight,’ ” Avraam recounted. “And I said, ‘Where here?’ ”
They slept in the pine forest for a month, expecting to return home any day.
They never could.
The United Nations brokered a demarcation line, the Green Line. Greeks to the south in the Republic of Cyprus; Turks to the north in the self-declared (and never internationally recognized) Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. No one could cross between the two.
The island was divided—as divided as I was from my birth father, the man I sought to know.
Panos and Soulla were Greek Cypriots from the north. In 1996, neither had been to their childhood homes in more than twenty years. Then Panos received a rare opportunity.
A renowned pediatric surgeon, he saved the life of a Turkish minister’s son. The minister, grateful, asked what he could do for Panos in return.
Panos asked that he and Soulla be allowed to cross the border and visit sites from their childhood.
They were granted one day, under military escort. That’s how strict was the divide.
By the time of my first visit in 2010, tensions had eased. The Green Line remained, but George and Yioula had been allowed take me across the border for a day.
I had not understood how difficult this was for them. Asking Greek Cypriots to cross to the Turkish side was akin to asking a Cuban exile to take you back to Cuba. The sense of loss, both personal and cultural, was profound.
As we crossed the border, Yioula summarized her feelings in a whisper: “A thousand sighs.”
On that first trip, we drove past Yioula’s childhood house
in Famagusta, a place usurped by a Turkish family. George had tried to dissuade her, but Yioula had been adamant. She looked intently, but spoke not a word.
Afterward, we headed across a desolate landscape to the eastern shore of the island, following the path Panos had taken with Soulla in 1996. Like them, we had only hours. I had not known the story when I arrived, and I could only fit a day into my schedule.
On this second trip, I was determined to return to northern Cyprus. To immerse myself, unlike the first time, in the places Panos had loved. In the Saint Andreas monastery, from which the medal I now wore as a necklace—Panos’s medal—had come.
And on Turtle Beach, where, as Soulla told it, Panos had taken off his shoes and danced on the golden sand, his arms over his head, twirling with joy.
The eastern Karpaz Peninsula, where Panos was raised, is hilly, rocky, dusty, and desolate. Few people live in the region, especially since the Turkish invasion, and the land is not cultivated as on the Greek side. You can drive and drive the lone road and see nothing but rock and brush, brown fields and bramble.
Then you emerge a hundred feet above a cove, where sapphire blue water melds to teal.
A dozen turns, then back again through miles of brown fields and bramble before another bend reveals a larger cove, where sapphire melds to teal and teal to turquoise.
A hand-lettered sign in the middle of nowhere indicated we had arrived: “Hasan’s Turtle Beach Ok for cars.”
We turned onto a sand road that wended down a hill toward the shore. About halfway down, we pulled up to an open-air eatery, the only building, and parked.
Then stepped out into a postcard.
The day was so clear, we could see the mountains of Turkey forty miles away. There was not one cloud. Sun shone on every inch of the panorama, lighting the expanse of Mediterranean before us a brilliant blue.
At the oceanside, I have so often marveled at the colors.
The Pacific’s deep violet, seen from the edge of a cliff in Hawaii with John.
Every shade of aquamarine in the waters around the Bahamas, the shallow flats like blue beach glass as Nancy and I flew overhead.
The Atlantic Ocean, my ocean, has more hues of green than blue. In my mind, green is good for bedrooms, but not oceans. An opinion stemming from childhood memories of endless days afloat in blue, blue pools. If a pool was greenish, it was dirty.
But the color of the Mediterranean at Turtle Beach.
Oh, the color!
Not a navy blue nor a royal blue. A sapphire blue. A jewel with hints of teal and turquoise, the full spectrum spreading for miles beyond a gold-tinted beach.
I asked to be parked in my wheelchair right there by the car, under a tree, wanting just to sit and sear that image into my mind.
I could see why Panos adored the spot. I adored it too.
The water was more than a football field of sand away. I told John I wanted to remain there and not go down to the beach.
Hasan (the manager of the eatery) and John lifted my wheelchair over bumps on the path to the thatch-roofed restaurant. We ordered beers and kebabs, out of the sun but squarely in the scenery.
The beach could have held thousands of people. There were perhaps twenty there.
The others left me and went down to the shore to swim. From my vantage point, they looked like specks in the sand.
I thought of that quote by Isaac Newton, when he compared himself to a boy playing at the seashore, focused on the shells, “whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
I thought how fine my view at the top was, where I could see the color, the expanse of the sea. I actively tried to make it okay not to be able to get down there and swim and dance on the sand.
That is the secret I learn more of every day. Not to want things I cannot have or cannot do.
Remove the want, and you remove the pain.
John and Nancy returned from their swim. “How was the water?” I asked.
“Perfect!” John said. Calm, clear, and warm.
John said the view underwater was boring, nothing but sand. No fish. No mollusks. Not even rocks.
Nancy gushed about the underwater light, like a kaleidoscope of blue and yellow glass.
Perspective. It’s all perspective.
We had more beer and kebabs and finally, reluctantly, left in the late afternoon to drive to our hotel on the Turkish side of the border. We did so mostly in silence, save for periodic eruptions of laughter.
Nancy, operating the right-side-drive van (Cyprus had long been a British territory, and they still drove on the British side of the road), instinctively expected the turn signal to be on the left side of the wheel. Each time she flipped it, she turned on the windshield wipers.
They’d swish across the dusty glass. “Okay, I am going to concentrate!” Nancy said. “And not do that again.”
She did it the whole drive.
A slight haze set in. The sea turned more black than blue. The sun set over the ocean, reflecting so intensely there appeared a bump in the horizon where the light met the water, as if the sun was pulling a wave into its light.
The evening haze colored the mountains a gray blue. At one point we saw six fingerling slopes, each subsequent one a paler blue-gray, a shadow of the others.
An extraordinary sight to end our extraordinary day, tracing the footsteps of an extraordinary man.
Saint Andreas
The monastery sat on a cape extending into the Mediterranean Sea. Apostolos Andreas. A place of history. A pilgrimage for the Greek Orthodox faithful, who sought the healing power of Saint Andreas.
Author Colin Thubron, in his book Journey into Cyprus, noted that as early as 1191 AD, an abbey had stood on the site. Today a fifteenth-century chapel covers its healing wells. Legend has it that the water sprang beneath the feet of Saint Andreas as he landed on the shore.
In 1972, when Thubron wrote, the giant square of huts around the monastery accommodated visitors by the hundreds. “For St. Andreas is a great miracle-worker, and this is the Lourdes of Cyprus.”
Thubron described a carnival atmosphere as people flocked there for blessings and miracles. He witnessed a throng of baptisms being held with the “drive of an industry,” the faithful lifting their children to kiss the icons there.
That must have been the Saint Andreas of Panos’s childhood, the memory he loved and sought.
But by 1996, Saint Andreas was not the monastery of Panos’s youth. When the Turks invaded in 1974, dividing the country and cutting eastern Cyprus off from its Greek population, churches became a casualty. Visit a village in the Karpaz region today and you will see plants growing out of church roofs and cat and pigeon dung coating its sanctuary.
There are bright and shiny mosques now, built for the new population, their minarets visible above village homes.
The Saint Andreas monastery was not spared. Walls were crumbling, revealing ancient stones pitted by neglect. The huts that had housed pilgrims were filled with debris. On the day of our visit, feral cats, skinny dogs, and two wild donkeys were the only other pilgrims.
“That’s the most depressed-looking cat I’ve ever seen,” Soulla’s daughter Alina said.
The archway where Panos had stood for his photograph looked forsaken. Plaster chipping away. Paint flaking. A desolate place, not the happy place it had seemed with my birth father standing within it.
Yet I smiled, as I could feel him here, in this place he loved.
I could imagine the monastery full of the faithful, Panos among them, kissing the golden icons, standing close as the priest chanted and swung the bell-adorned orb full of burning incense.
I imagined smelling the sweet incense on Panos as he kissed me good night.
That is how you summon spirit.
That is how you close a divide.
The holy w
aters of San Andreas still flowed, despite the monastery’s decrepit state. Down many steps, near the seashore, was a font.
I asked John to help me to where the holy water flows. He carried me in his arms down a set of stairs, breathing heavily, trying not to slip on the worn stone steps.
I had visited the Saint Andreas Monastery in 2010, on my first visit to Cyprus. We arrived in the late afternoon. I had time for little more than a photograph, in the exact spot where Panos had stood for his photo, and a walk to the font.
As the sun fell away in the west, I placed Panos’s Saint Andreas medallion, the one in his pocket when he died, in my withered left hand. I held it under the stream of cool water.
“Hello, God,” I prayed. “Please solve this mystery. Please let it be something other than ALS. Please let my children keep their mother. For they have done nothing wrong.”
I took a photograph of my hand with the medallion in the palm, water running over it.
Then stood there, silently. Hoping.
On this second visit, I thought I might pray for a miracle.
Yes, I believe in miracles, I concluded on the drive to the monastery.
I had only to look at my mother. She was a miracle, to have been so close to death and to be alive today.
Yes, I believe in miracles.
But I didn’t expect a miracle.
Nor did I feel I deserved one.
My mother had been a faithful worshipper all her life. I had not. My mother had always been mindful of God, while I had not.
John set me down to rest himself about twenty stairs away from the holy water font. “That’s okay,” I told him, “You don’t need to take me further.”
A full moon rose behind me above the Mediterranean. I could barely turn to see it.
The trip to Cyprus accelerated my weakening. I could no longer turn my body. I could no longer hold things in my right hand. My left foot for the first time entirely buckled when I put weight on it without my brace. My speech was so slurred I was reluctant to talk.
“So sad,” I slurred, as I sat with John, looking over the decrepit monastery.
Until I Say Good-Bye Page 21