Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

by Lawrence Durrell

  Kallias was a strongly built youth of eighteen, with good shoulders and a classical head on them. His curly hair was always crisply trimmed and brushed back from a broad forehead with well-placed blue eyes. His manners were perfect and he always threw his moral weight on the side of good order in class—for which I was deeply grateful. I had heard he was the school’s greatest athlete, and certainly he was deeply respected. It was all the more surprising one day to see him being inattentive and to be forced to confiscate some papers. These proved to be of interest. The first was the draft of an essay for me in which he had been asked to write a letter to a public figure he admired—some world-renowned musician or politician or what-not—in English. His offering read as follows:

  My Dear Reg Park:

  I am admiring you for my health. You are the best body-builder in the world and the crip-dumbells for chest and arms are the fruit of a superb imagination. In my dreams I am always found in London and am much enjoyed.…

  Among the other fragments was his identity card with a picture on it proving Kallias to a be founder member of the Weight-Lifters’ Association of Great Britain, and a half-completed form for a course in Dynamic Tension in which he had been asked the fol lowing questions: “Are you ruptured? Constipated? Breath Bad? Tongue Coated? Pains in the back? Do you tire easily? Are you married?” To all of which he had replied in the negative.…

  In these classes, too, I encountered the same shifting wind of popular opinion which hovered between anti-British intransigence and the old ineradicable affection for the mythical Briton (the “Phileleftheros”) the Freedom-lover, who could not help but approve of Enosis as an idea. Had he not virtually created Greece out of the black dust of foreign tyranny? And then, of his own free will, sealed the gift by handing back the Seven Islands? What could be anomalous in the desire of Cyprus to share the same fate? Even the great Churchill had said it was to be so one day.…

  This was roughly the line of thought. But of course all this feeling was kept permanently at the boil by official direction, by the press, by the heady rhetoric of local demagogues and priests. I asked a teacher why such pains were taken to keep the young people in a state of ferment. “Because,” he said, “we must mobilize opinion for our appeal, and everyone is so slack in Cyprus. Solidarity of opinion is not enough—besides it is there, it exists. But suppose we have to take peaceful action to back up our case, demonstrations, strikes, and so on? Students would play a large part in helping to form world opinion.” “And if they get out of hand?” He smiled. “They will never get out of hand, we have them there” He took up a handful of air in his clenched fist, showed it to me, and replaced it. In those days it cost little to be a hero in words or on paper.

  Paul was seventeen, an orphan. He lived in the school lodging-house, and spent all his spare time in the library studying the ancient Greek poets. His father had been killed in Italy serving with the British forces and the boy still proudly owned a service medal which had been sent to him after his father’s death. He was a thin, solitary boy, burning with hunger for some chance of advancement in life, which he felt to be closing in upon him. He thought perhaps he would like to be a teacher somewhere, perhaps in England. He was never troublesome in class, and indeed did not seem to have many friends. His work was tidy and painstaking, and the teacher who was resident supervisor of the School Lodgings told me that he often found him studying in the small hours of the morning. I won his respect by telling him about the modern Greek poets, some of whom I knew, and showing him the work of Seferis, which astonished and somewhat frightened him. But he was enthralled, and borrowed nearly all my books with the same inarticulate, fervent hunger with which he addressed himself to the blackboard when I wrote on it.

  One day he stayed after the class had gone, ill at ease, and preoccupied. “Can I ask you a question, sir?” “Yes.” “You will not be annoyed?” “Of course not.” He took a deep breath, sat down at his desk, composed his long spidery fingers and said: “Will England force us to fight for our freedom here?” I registered astonishment. “I have been reading an essay,” he said, “in which it says that freedom has never been given, but always taken, always earned at the cost of blood. A people that is not willing to accept the price is not ready for Freedom. Perhaps England understands this and is waiting for us to prove ourselves ready to die for freedom?”

  The paradox, of course, was that in the technical sense they were freer under Britain than the Athens Government could afford to let them be—but who would believe that? And then, again, while they enjoyed almost perfect civic freedom, they had no say in their own affairs from the point of view of popular suffrage—an intolerable state of affairs for the heirs of Byzantium. They existed under tutelage, under laws composed by some invisible body of lawgivers in Government House, which none of them had ever seen. This was a crucial point purely psychologically—and it gave the island life a strange flavor of stagnation, though the administration was just and conceived with conscience and regard. A feeling of foreignness, of alienation from themselves, persisted: somewhere, dimly, they felt that this weird, padded, essentially suburban life was not theirs. Somewhere the values they sought would be found to depend on the spare, frugal Mediterranean pattern of things—the light-intoxicated anarchy of Greece always leaped at them like a panther. But the more we talked of these things, the less easy was it to pin them down and formulate them—for they depended on values inherent in a whole way of life, the Byzantine way, not the European. And yet what they most wanted they also feared. A Greek life was the life of a lean wolf, offering no security or material advantage; unsound in administration, torn by the fluctuations of poverty and self-seeking; terribly insecure. “How can the Cypriot want Enosis?” the English residents of Cyprus who knew Greece kept asking themselves. One can well understand them. Military service in the Greek armed forces? Crippling taxation? Bankruptcy? Poor administration?

  Surely it was all founded in a childish bad dream from which they would awaken one day and realize that they could enjoy perfect Greek freedom within the Commonwealth—enjoying the best of both worlds? Was it not all due to a lack of education?

  These are the sort of questions I inflicted on Maurice Cardiff in his lovely Turkish house on the outskirts of the town where I enjoyed a free lunch several times a week—a real blessing, for my budget was a slender one. But he himself, with his long experience of the Balkans and his knowledge of Greece, had already asked them of himself and answered many of them; though his findings fell for the most part upon deaf ears.

  To my vague and questioning remarks he responded with concrete ideas, concrete assessments of a situation which he regarded far more seriously than I: his work gave him a stake in it. Our tenure in Cyprus had perhaps been one of folly and neglect—but both words could be summed up in the phrase “poverty.” Financial and political poverty had gone hand in hand. He nodded when I suggested that the administration had never had the brains either to see what bubbled beneath the deceptive surface of Cyprus life or the money to do anything about it. How could we answer Cyprus in the demands she made unless we could give her what she felt, obscurely, dimly, we had to offer—a stake in the larger world? The youth of the little island was bursting with brains, talent, and an industry honestly comparable to that of the Germans or Italians. There was no outlet for it. Our educational system was vestigial, limited, more out of date even than the gymnasium system in which I was working. Yet it was staffed by devoted and loyal men, who had spent years teaching the lesser breeds their alphabet.

  The one clearing-house for ideas which the island lacked—apart from a Senate—was a university; but even this was not enough. In Nicosia there was not even a public swimming bath let alone a theatre, or a bookshop where one could buy a French newspaper.… These things came to me with the force of a revelation. Yet they were there, self-evident: and factors which contributed to though they could not cause the general air of suffocating inertia which pervaded everything.

  In a se
nse it was our failure to project the British ethos, to make available to the Cypriot the amplitude of our own civic and cultural resources, which had contributed to his sense of neglect, to the frustrated feeling he had of being an outsider. The basic failure lay somewhere in our inability to include him, and his set of values, in the British family. In England he could be a waiter; but in Greece—“starving Greece”—Cyprus had a stake, indeed had given the Foreign Office a head, not to mention two generals, and a host of administrators, lawyers and so on. They “belonged” there; to the British they were a “bunch of Cyps”—as one might say “Chimps.” At least these were the impressions which I gained from those long afternoons when, ashamed of trading on Cardiff’s warm-hearted hospitality, I spent my lunch hour in the fragrant smoke and turmoil of the great market, enjoying a kebab from a meat-stall, or a pie whose filling detonated between one’s teeth with the savor of garlic and sage as one bit into it; afternoons spent rambling round the great Mosque with a fellow-teacher or student—or for contrast spent lunching in one of the hostelries where the British business community gathered and where one could surprise public opinion in its raw, unfermented state over a glass of Pilsener. All these elements fused slowly together to give me a composite picture of Cyprus as she was today, and to explain why she was in the state in which she found herself.

  And these experiences I took to the quiet courtyard and rush-grown private water tank around which Cardiff’s old house had been built, to discuss them with him over a glass of retzina, recently received from Athens, or some of the light good table wine of Cyprus; and indeed to temper the preoccupations which grew out of them with the more congenial private gossip about common friends and the books—the endless books—with which we passed our innermost time.

  By now he and his wife Leonora were frequent visitors to Bellapaix; they brought their friends—and often found other common friends camped at my mother’s convivial fireside, trying their skill upon some choice offering of Clito’s. My return to the old house in the hills every night was a perpetual joy: not only to know that a new outwork of bricks or a windowframe had been laid in my absence, but also to have the excited uncertainty about whom I should find already there, sitting in the firelight, waiting for me. Sometimes it was Marie, freshly back from Paris or London, loaded with books; or Ines with her falcon’s beauty strumming the guitar and singing some magical passage from flamenco; or Sir Harry gravely discoursing on chapters in Cyprus history which lay outside the dull dusty present—the severed head of Oneseilos buzzing with honeybees, or Berengaria being crowned in Limassol, or that odd King of Neo-Paphos who invented an early form of fan by anointing himself with Tyrian oil, which his doves adored, in order that their fluttering wings should keep him cool during meals.

  And the Abbey itself was there, fading in the last magnetic flush from the horizon, with its quiet groups of coffee-drinkers and card-players under the Tree of Idleness At full moon we dined there, barefooted on the dark grass, to watch the lights winking away along the fretted coast and the great bronze coin shake itself free of the sunset-mist and climb with slow, perfectly punctuated steps into the nether heaven, bubbling into the great rose-window of the eastern wall like a visitant of the Gothic world. Here in the striped darkness, dotted with pools of luminous moonlight, we walked and talked, the smell of roses and wine and cigars mingling with the humbler scent of the limes, or the whiffs of bruised sage coming to us from the face of the mountain behind where Buffavento rose slowly to meet the moon, like a mailed fist. And somewhere upon the outer silence would come the haunting liquid music of a flute perhaps, its five-tone scale like a thread spun upon the silent air between the pines.

  How could such a sun-bruised world be transformed, be any different? It was hard to believe, listening to the silence-ennobling voice of Pearce or Marie upon the darkness of the old cloisters. Or at midnight taking a car and riding along the deserted coast, clad in nothing but bathing-costumes, to where the deserted mosque lay, perched over the water, solitary as a sea-bird, its shut tered windows flaring at the moon.…

  Twice encamped on a moonlit beach I was woken by the sound of a guttering caique-engine and the voices of fishermen (as I thought), who had drawn inshore to mend their ragged seines; and once, under the shadow of a great carob tree near the mosque, I saw two lorries drawn up off the shore-road, silent and without lights, and full of men who were not smoking. They were teams, I thought, of carob-pickers getting away to an early start in order to deal with some remote holding perhaps. I had forgotten these things almost as soon as the little car rolled off among the olives to breast the main road for Kyrenia. They constituted a firmly closed door—closed as irrevocably as the Cyprus question was in the minds of our mandarins in London—and only to be abruptly opened by the crash of dynamite months later.

  The house grew, Marie’s wattle encampment became a settlement, a walled garden full of premature trophies which would grace the house when it was completed: Indian peacocks, parrots, carved chests, inlaid lamps, infant palms. The hermits of Lapithos made friendly incursions to advise and counsel—and inevitably left her brimming with new ideas. Lamplight, wine and good conversation sealed in the margins of the day so that one slept at night with a sense of repletion, of plenitude, as if one were never more to wake.

  It was now too that I met the Colonial Secretary of the island at Austen Harrison’s lunch-table, where he proposed that I should apply for the post of Press Adviser, then about to fall vacant. There was much that needed doing in the field of public relations and it was felt that someone knowing Greek and having a stake in the island’s affairs might do better than a routine official. The idea was exciting, and indeed would solve all my problems, giving me the scope to finish the house as it deserved to be finished and the leisure to explore all that remained as yet unknown in the island. Indeed it seemed an unhoped-for stroke of luck and I suspected that the original idea had not been the Government’s but had originated in the mind of Austen Harrison or Maurice Cardiff, both of whom were most anxious about the shape of things and eager to see some sort of solution to a problem which threatened the ordinary day-to-day life of the island which we all treasured so much.

  Moreover at this time I felt that perhaps such errors as there were might lie in assessing the situation on the spot, in lack of adequate reporting on it. I had no means of knowing what sort of liaison the Government maintained with London, but I knew that in the field their information was largely based on reports from their own departmental officers which, while factually accurate, lacked political pith and the sort of interpretations which are essential if high-level dispatches are to be what they should be—namely guides to action. More than this, the problem of Cyprus as it was developing was one of several dimensions, and the effect of a coffeehouse conversation in Nicosia could not be evaluated unless one could see it from three angles at the same time, namely from Athens, London and Nicosia. How could semiliterate peasants, with a purely parochial outlook, be expected to do this?

  In this field I might certainly be of use to the Government and play a small part in bringing about the sort of solution which I felt, we all felt, must be round the corner.

  I was full of optimism, living as I did in both worlds—the noisy urban world of Greek Nicosia with its mounting tide of strikes and demonstrations, its demagogues and self-elected heroes whose shrillings filled the still cloudless air like the whizzing of gnats round some stagnant pond; and the no less Greek world of the village, lumbering quietly among the foothills, with its ancient bemused courtesies and unworldly kindnesses. Asleep.

  Even the signs and portents of the day were less disquieting because always the fine manners of the Cypriots were there to disprove the noisy contentions of Athens radio—whose envenomed shrillness had not yet reached meridian. The villagers listened with a kind of uncomprehending pleasure to the strange, yet familiar accents of this metal God which tried to convince them that they were other than they were—peaceful, order-loving, and
secure in life and person. They listened as uncomprehending children might listen to the roll of distant drums which competed with the gentleness and timidity of their hearts in their insistence on other values based in hate, in spite, in smallness. Who was the enemy, where was he to be found, the tyrant who had liberated Greece? They watched me with speculative curiosity as I walked up the main street with the three small sons of my builders, one carrying my books and paper, another a loaf of bread, a third the mended primus I had retrieved from Clito that afternoon.… Try as they might they could not marry the two images. Wherein did my tyranny lie, I who was so polite and who was teaching my daughter Greek? It was a great puzzle. And if they accepted me, were they not to accept the other Englishmen they knew—each Cypriot had a dozen personal friends among the tyrants whom he had come to respect and love. And even if they tried to hate the Government, the very abstraction resolved itself into the faces of officers whom they knew, servants of the crown who spoke Greek, who had built them a well or a road. The problem was to locate the enemy, for Athens said that he was everywhere, but in the island itself he had dissolved into a hundred fragments whose context was personal meetings and personal affections. The villagers floundered in the muddy stream of undifferentiated hate like drowning men. They were glad to hear the Government abuse like children who exult when one, bolder than the rest, cheeks the headmaster. It was exciting. But they were also assailed by the undertow of misgivings and anxiety when they heard the demagogues speak of bloodshed, of fighting, and of sacrifices. They too were sleepwalkers whom the bombs awoke, and whose resolution was hardened deliberately, day by day, by those who understood to the full the technique of insurrection.