by Jo Bunt
“Is it true that you were born in the Ghost Town?” he shot at me.
“Yes, it is. Why would I lie?”
“Journalists are always trying to get across the Green Line into Varosha. They have a romantic notion of the city but they do not see it for what it is.”
“And what is that?” I asked innocently.
“A symbol.”
“Of...?” I prompted.
“Hatred.”
We sat there in silence, our eyes locked. The silence between us was heavy but neither of us wanted to be the first to fill it. I felt tense. I had somehow wandered straight into a minefield and would have to navigate carefully if I was to escape unscathed.
I filled an empty water glass with wine from the carafe in the centre of the table and passed it to the suspicious young man across from me. He took it without a word of thanks.
“Stefanos, I am not a journalist. Really I’m not. I’m a food writer and I am in Cyprus to write about the food for a magazine in England. My interest in Varosha is entirely personal. I shan’t be writing about anything I find there. That part of the trip is just for me.”
“What do you hope to find if you do visit Varosha?”
“Answers.”
“To what?” he sneered.
“Questions,” I answered defensively.
It was Stefanos’ turn to raise an eyebrow at me but I wasn’t sure how much information I wanted to give away yet. I moved uncomfortably in my seat and rested my arms on the table so that I could make myself heard without having to raise my voice.
“My family’s flat is there, untouched,” I offered with a sigh. “It’s still full of my mother’s things, I guess. She had to leave in a hurry. She told me something about… about my birth. Well, it’s left me with a lot of questions and I’d like to see the place where I was born. I think it might give me some clues about where I belong.”
“I doubt it,” he scoffed.
“Why do you say that?” I asked alarmed.
“I doubt it remains untouched. The shops and the houses have all been looted. The Turks and the UN will have taken anything of any value by now. And the places that haven’t been touched by man’s hand have been crushed by nature. There are rats and wild dogs roaming the streets. Trees are growing through the roofs of houses. There are plants and weeds growing through the cracks in the pavement. Even if you could find the place where your family used to live, it would be unsafe for you to enter it.”
“Maybe. But seeing as I can’t get into Varosha, that all seems irrelevant now, doesn’t it?” The bitterness in my voice surprised me.
Stefanos shrugged. “Maybe. Before the war, there were thirty-nine thousand people living in Famagusta – that’s the name of the area that Varosha is in.” He leant forward now, elbows on the table mirroring my posture. “Sixty percent of these people were Greek. In Varosha almost all of its population were Greek Cypriots. All of the island’s best hotels were there and it was a very important source of income for my family. My grandfather owned a shop and a hotel there. The whole family, including his parents, lived in two rooms while they worked hard and saved hard to buy that hotel. They were a fine family in 1974. They had wealth, they were well regarded by the Greeks and the Turkish, and then they were forced out of their home. They lost everything and had to start all over again.
“By that time my grandfather was a lot older. He didn’t have as much energy. The things he’d witnessed, the things he’d experienced… He couldn’t do it all again. It destroyed him. He grew old overnight. He died not long after from a broken heart.” Stefanos smiled sadly as he snorted through his nose and shook his head.
“I really am sorry, Stefanos.” I almost reached out to touch his hand in comfort but stopped short and stroked the stem of my wineglass instead.
“The hotel he worked so hard for should have passed to my mother but instead she works her fingers to the bone in this shithole while tourists stuff their faces and forget to leave a tip. Not that she’d want that hotel, anyway. Not now. There is nothing for her to go back to now. What good would it be to us? The buildings are crumbling. It would take too much money to make it right again. We do not have that kind of money any more. There are people who lost a lot more than your family did – and a lot more than my mother’s family did. If there was anything there for us do you not think we would all be fighting to get our homes back?”
“Well of course. I didn’t mean to imply that you wouldn’t. I’m just trying to understand more. Wasn’t there a plan, a few years back, to give Varosha back to the Greek Cypriots who had lived there before 1974?”
“Yes. But most Greeks voted against it. They have rebuilt their lives, there are new hotels now. Also, who would be responsible for the upkeep of it? The Turkish government should have paid for the upkeep. The Greek government will not want to take on the spiralling costs of regenerating this area.” Stefanos spoke with apparent animosity.
“But,” I pushed, “didn’t I read somewhere that in the analysis of the votes, previous Varosha inhabitants voted ‘yes’ to the UN plan?”
Stefanos paused before answering me, obviously weighing his answer carefully, and took a long slug of wine.
“You have done your research,” he stated, looking down at his glass. “People are sentimental. They thought they would be going back to their old lives when the war was over. They left photographs, wedding dresses, things that they didn’t need then and do not really need now. But as people get older, they want to be reminded of happier times.”
We both looked into our golden wine, lost in our own thoughts. I eliminated the chatter from the other people in the restaurant and listened to the gentle “hush, hush” of the waves on the beach. Even though I hadn’t lived by the sea since I was a baby, there was something so comforting about the inky blue.
“Stefanos?” I asked quietly. “At the risk of annoying you further,is there any way of me getting into Varosha?”
“I cannot help you. Please do not ask me this again.” He responded with a hint of anger.
“Sorry. I just wondered whether you were giving me the standard answer you always give to tourists, or whether you genuinely can’t get in. That’s all. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“It takes a lot more than that to offend me. I accept your apology.”
“Hold on a minute,” I raised my voice in surprise. “I don’t believe I apologised. There’s a vast difference between apologising and explaining.”
Stefanos smirked and then drained the rest of his wine, before standing and walking away without another word.
“Infuriating man!” I thought. I didn’t doubt for a minute that his family had suffered a great deal but his arrogance made it difficult for me to sympathise with him.
I sat for a long while then, alone with my thoughts. My appetite had disappeared and I no longer felt like eating what was left of the meal in front of me. I had to get into that town. Stefanos might be right; there might not be any of the answers that I hoped for, but until I tried I would never know. His family had been greatly affected by the war but at least he knew about it. I had no idea that my family had suffered at all until recently and now I was desperate to find out more, even if there was a chance that I might not like what I found.
It had been a month since my mother had dropped the bombshell on me that turned my life upside-down. I was in a vulnerable place already and had gone to her for help but what she told me ripped my world apart. I almost couldn’t bear to think of her at the moment. On one hand I loved her as much as I loved anyone in the world. She had been there for me at every turn. And yet, on the other hand, she had deceived me. She wasn’t who I thought she was. And if she wasn’t who I thought she was, then who on earth was I?
I had never known my father and Mum had very few photos of him. Even their wedding photos had been left behind when we were evacuated from Cyprus. The only picture I had of them was a photo-booth picture taken when they were about seventeen and still in England
. Mum was sitting on his knee and they were grinning at the camera, blissfully unaware of the heartache that the future had prepared for them.
It had been just mum and me for the longest time. Mum got plenty of attention from the opposite sex but never let anything get too serious until she met Jack. He asked her to marry him one Christmas, and although Mum looked annoyed at him for asking, eventually she said “yes”. Mum and I looked at wedding magazines but even then I could tell that Mum’s heart was never in it. She sought a divorce from my father, Eddie, in order to marry Jack, but said that if at any point I said “No” she would call the whole thing off.
In the end, it was Mum that called the wedding off. She said he’d ruined everything by asking her to marry him. She said she couldn’t commit herself to anyone like that again. Before long, we were packing up and moving on.
Mum didn’t talk about her past very often. From what I could gather, she had moved to Cyprus as a young bride with her doting husband Eddie, but, for reasons she had always been cagey about, things had gone quite quickly sour. She would never be drawn on facts, but would only say that he left her soon after she had given birth and she never saw him again. She didn’t know where he was but the last she heard he had moved around a bit with the army and then retired to Cyprus to run a bar.
I had assumed that I looked a little like him. I certainly didn’t look at all like my mother. She burned with a fierce blonde fire and clear fresh complexion that made her look years younger than she was, whereas I was tall and gangly with dark eyes and hair. I’d learned to love my long legs now but when I was a child I hated them. They seemed to grow before the rest of me, giving the impression of a new-born foal.
The snapshot I had in my drawer of Mum and Eddie in the seventies was in black and white but he certainly didn’t look as dark as me. Of course I understood why now. He wasn’t really my father. I suppose he never had been. After all, he had never held me, soothed me or cleaned my scraped knee. And now, as it turned out, he wasn’t biologically my father anyway. The thing that broke my heart was the impact this news had on my relationship with my mother.
To find out that the only person in the world that I thought I could trust one hundred percent had been lying to me all of my life, well... it’s difficult to put it into words. The pain is so sharp that mere words are not enough to describe the feeling. Any word that could come close would still have to be taken and planed until it formed a point that could slice into your heart and sever your dreams. Right now my foundations were unstable. It would only take one small push for me to crumble to the ground and lie there until the earth swallowed me up under the dirt and the moss and the fallen leaves.
Mum knew that I had returned to Cyprus but I’m not sure she fully understood what was driving me. We hadn’t really talked much lately and I’d been dodging her calls. Dom had been talking to her in hushed sound-bites. I could hear him saying “she just needs space to grieve” and “she’s got to take it one day at a time” and “I think she turned a corner today”. But what did he know? He cooed and soothed but he couldn’t truly understand everything I’d been through. It hadn’t happened to him. It had happened to me. Of course, the news from my mother paled into insignificance against the backdrop of our other trauma. The other thing. The baby.
Without that, Mum probably would never have been forced to drop her own personal bombshell. Not only did her confession hurt me for its own sake but it was made imperceptibly worse by the timing, as if this news was overshadowing my own personal loss and pushing it out of the way, as if it didn’t matter. I lost a baby.
Lost. Hah! That’s a joke. “Lost” makes it sound inconsequential like a lost earing. Something misplaced, always with the potential to be found again. I did not lose that baby, it was taken from me. Following an interlude of elation and excitement, the ensuing heartbreak was of apocalyptic proportions to me. For Dom too, yes, and my mother, I suppose. We all suffered in our own way. I fell apart, Dom locked it all away, and Mum, well she managed to make it all about her as usual.
If I’m good at anything, it’s compartmentalising. I can put anything into a metaphorical box, lock it up and push it right into a dusty alcove at the back of my mind. Every time I think of the baby I can feel the physical pain in my heart and my stomach so I shut down the thought, put it back in the box and decide to deal with it another time.
Dom and I had been trying for a baby for four years. Long years. As a woman who likes to be in control, for whom que sera, sera was a dirty phrase, I’d done everything expected of me. I lost weight, got fit, cut out caffeine and alcohol, started taking supplements and folic acid. I bought a fertility crystal, hung it in the bedroom window and started taking my temperature daily to monitor when I was ovulating. I made Dom cut out alcohol and take selenium tablets to boost his sperm count. A friend of ours joked that perhaps we should just think about having sex instead.
When nothing happened we sought the help of a fertility specialist who put me on drugs to help ovulation. Four months later and we got the result we’d been hoping for. I bought every book that Waterstone’s had on healthy pregnancies and treated my body as an elite baby-making factory. My excitement was matched by Dom’s as we started counting the days and stroked my blossoming stomach. For a few weeks I was content. A few weeks, that’s all.
The twelve-week scan showed nothing in my womb at all. I quelled my panic and fixed the sonographer with a stern gaze.
“I’m sorry. It happens sometimes.” She stroked my arm.
“What does?” I asked, forcing her to vocalise her doubts.
“Sometimes the body miscarries without us knowing it,” she sang in a high-pitched, breathy voice you hear women using with pre-schoolers. “I’m afraid you aren’t pregnant.”
I flinched at the words. “Iampregnant. Ifeelpregnant. I know that I am.”
“It is possible you still have some pregnancy hormones present but there is no foetus, I’m afraid.” She looked resolutely away now as if she could sense that I was going to be one of those awkward patients. “If you could take a seat in the waiting room someone will be out to talk to you in a minute.”
To be fair to her, she did look genuinely upset for me but I still felt she was just bad at her job. There had to be a baby there. Therehad to be. I could smell everything around me, I felt sick every morning without fail and my breasts were tender. There was no way I had lost this baby without knowing it.
The matronly lady who took us into a side room explained everything that the sonographer had said but with a harder tone, as if this was meant to convince me. I asserted my views that I had not had a miscarriage so she made me produce a urine sample for a pregnancy test. She returned within five minutes.
“You’re still showing a strong pregnancy reading, which is concerning. There is a possibility that this pregnancy is ectopic.”
“Ectopic?”
“Yes, it means the foetus is growing outside of the womb.”
“I know what it means,” I snapped. “What happens now?”
“I want you to come back in tomorrow so we can monitor hormone levels to see whether the foetus continues to grow or has indeed miscarried.”
Dom and I gripped each other’s hands with dread. The sickness I felt now had nothing to do with the pregnancy. It was pure, soul-crushing fear.
The following day’s blood tests showed hormone levels still increasing but not at a level that would be consistent with a healthy pregnancy. Despite their urgings I refused to be admitted to hospital.
I knew then in my heart of hearts that the pregnancy was ectopic, although I didn’t say it out loud. I’d had some pains in my side that I had assumed were normal pregnancy twinges. I just wanted to enjoy the last day of being pregnant even if nothing was going to come of it. The next day’s scan showed bleeding in my fallopian tube and I was whisked down to surgery where they removed my fallopian tube, my baby and my future.
It was another one of those situations where words don’t su
ffice. More than that, I don’t even want to try and describe it. I don’t want to even think about having to sign the consent form that said “sure, take my baby”. I don’t want to open those particular floodgates for fear of being washed away. Don’t make me go there. I just can’t.
When I awoke following the surgery I felt different. There’s no way of explaining it to someone who hasn’t been pregnant but there is a feeling you get when you are carrying a child. I had felt at ease in the world, like I had finally found my place within it. I felt altogether calmer, like my previous worries had all been put into perspective. Now I just felt empty. Physically and mentally empty.
Dom asked me to stop referring to it as a baby. He said it was never a viable pregnancy so there was no point attaching a personality to it. That’s when I realised that he could never understand. A woman falls in love with her baby long before a man possibly can. From the moment of conception a woman’s life is already changing but the man doesn’t feel the impact until a long time later. Sometimes not until he feels the baby kick under his hand in his partner’s stomach or, more often, not until he holds that child in his arms.
I turned to Mum but Dom turned to his work. Maybe that was the beginning of the end for us. Or maybe we would get through this trial and get stronger. Only time would tell. But first, before I could work on our relationship, I had to find out who I was and that quest had brought me to the island of my birth.
I looked around me then and felt suddenly exhausted. I motioned to one of the waiters and mouthed, “Bill please.”
I knew what I had to do and I couldn’t put it off any longer.
Chapter eight
Cyprus, 1974
Pru let out a yelp of surprise as she swung open her front door and came face to round flat face with her landlady who lived downstairs.
“Kyria Kostas! You made me jump!”
“This come for you.” She held a narrow neatly wrapped brown parcel in her hands. She was unsmiling and looked weary standing before Pru. They had a perfectly amicable relationship but it rarely went past the polite acknowledgement stage. Pru didn’t understand how this woman came to own the beautiful apartment block she lived in. Pru had never seen a husband around and Kyria Kostas’ only income seemed to come from Pru and Eddie.