Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

by Lawrence Durrell

  But though I had deserted the village it retained its hold on my attentions and affection in the person of almost daily visitors to the ugly little house; they arrived in a roar of dust at the door, where the good Dmitri deposited them from his bus, to spend an early breakfast-tide with me. Mr. Honey brought me cyclamen bulbs and a report on the bitter lemon trees which needed grafting; Andreas brought a pocketful of new tiles of an Italian type which had recently been imported and with which he wished to beautify the bathroom; the muktar brought me an encouraging account of my brothers dancing at Lalou’s wedding, which had surpassed in grace and agility all the young bloods of the village—and which had been due to ouzo as far as could be judged; and Michaelis brought me his eldest son for whom he wished to find a post in the Government service. Anthemos brought fresh vegetables from his garden. And surprise among surprises, even old Morais turned up one day with a bunch of flowers and a great bag of nuts.

  Nor did the scholars of the Gymnasium abandon the link I had severed when I left my teacher’s post; every morning a couple of grubby youths would bicycle up to the door with some urgent request—to write a letter to a girl or an application to a Correspondence College, or for help with a piece of homework.

  Neither the failure of the Greek appeal nor the mounting tide of strikes and school-lockouts seemed to have affected their sunny good-nature, or the profound belief that the politics of the greater world outside would, like some stage-curtain, part suddenly one day to allow some happy solution to appear—England and Greece, hand in hand, like Punch and Judy, bowing and smiling to the public and expressing an undying affection for one another against which all these hot misunderstandings would fade and give place to a new era of blissful Union. But among the intellectuals in the Gymnasium common-room the temper had grown much uglier and the tone of public opinion was slowly beginning to follow suit. As if to match this new sharpness the voice of the moderates raised itself to a new key of apprehension asking us “not to let things go too far”—though none could specify where they might end, perhaps because none dared to contemplate such an end calmly.

  From the cockpit of my office I had another, by no means reassuring angle of sight, for from here the international position of the case seemed to be deteriorating rapidly. Turkish feelings both in the island and outside had been roused and one began to see, as if sketched in outline upon the peaceful landscapes of the island, the silhouette of communal disorders whose roots, embedded so deeply in the medieval compost of religious hatreds, might easily be revived by the accidental shedding of blood.

  In December troops opened fire at Limassol, under severe provocation, and wounded three youths—an incident, though trivial, which straddled the front pages of the Sunday press in London and convinced the Government that such tactics were politically expensive and should be abandoned. I was heartily grateful, for the effect of this shooting in Cyprus itself was great and caused an instant sharpening of antagonism, and a disgust which was shared by moderate and extremist alike. The situation was becoming envenomed by neglect, inflamed alike by the hysteria of the apprentices and the schools and the poison of the Athens broadcasts. It was clear, too, that the available police forces could barely contain a determined demonstration composed of bottle-throwing schoolgirls, let alone a band of rough Paphiot youths, or members of the Union of Bricklayers. Troops would have the invidious task of turning out to restore order where the law could not.

  But the restoration of order was only one aspect, the public aspect, of our duties; behind it there lay another task of greater magnitude, the tranquilization of the public mind which was now a prey to conflicting hysterias and in a state likely to be ignited by rumor or challenging speech. The climate of affairs was altering subtly, and those who had charge of their direction, now began to feel the tug of pressures for which they themselves had not been prepared. Slowly but distinctly we had begun to slide upon that treacherous surface of rhetoric and passion which for so long had expressed itself in a void of empty gestures, and still there was no sign from London of the urgent approaches such happenings should foreshadow. “Something is going wrong,” said a Greek journalist. “I feel as if I were no longer in control of my arms and legs. We are becoming marionettes, you dancing to London and we to Athens.” There seemed to be no retreat possible from the extreme positions which had been taken up by everyone, and if we the satraps prayed in the direction of London like devout Moslems facing Mecca, our prayers were echoed not less fervently by the vanguard of the Enotists, who were themselves in the grip of forces both domestic and foreign. A strange feeling of vertigo was in the air—as of sleepwalkers suddenly being awakened to find themselves poised on a steep cliff above a raging sea.

  To all the opposing tensions there was only one answer—inaction—until such time as the reforms we considered necessary should be “implemented,” to use the delicious phraseology of the schoolmen. But if a renovated Public Relations department was to take me six months to build how much longer would it take, for example, to build a police force? It was not simply that it had to be recruited and trained, and its terms of service reformed: there was nowhere even to house the hypothetical body of the force. Decades of masterly inaction had reduced the common amenities of the island to an almost Turkish state of desuetude; the telephone system for instance was hopelessly out of date. We could not equip hotels with telephones: how then were the police to expand their communications network—by heliograph? Wherever one turned one came up against some insuperable obstacle of the kind which only the determination of a Hannibal could have shifted; but the regulations precluded our use of dynamite though our adversaries later were to labor under no such limitation.

  Walking about at dusk in the iron parallelogram of Famagusta, these thoughts became absurdly mixed with evocations of past history, no less cruel and turbulent than the times in which we lived. Treading the deserted and grass-grown turrets of Othello’s tower one could gaze down at the ships unloading in deceptive peacefulness, or turn and remark along the shallow coastline the white scar of Salamis, whose bony ruins also testified to the inexorable pressures of time and history which every hero has thought to suspend by some finite perfect action. Always it ended in something limited and grotesque like the skin of Bragadino, stuffed with straw: a dusty relic whose origin the Venetian worshipper no longer remembered, but which was still perpetuated here in this ruined fortress the invader had attacked—had eaten the heart out of like a cheese. These fat pompous military walls had sheltered one of the richest mercantile communities in the world. One hundred and fifty acres of grass-grown desolation.

  There still exist traces of some twenty churches of which all but two are in utter ruin. There is also a wretched konak and prison, a barrack-yard, with piles of stone cannonballs, a small bazaar, and here and there among the ruins the huts of about a hundred Turkish families, whose chief subsistence is obtained from patches of garden-land which they have cleared of stones. All else is utter, absolute ruin—vast heaps of stone, enough to build a modern town. Imagine a city bombarded until all its buildings (save those of exceptional strength) were destroyed, and add to this the effects of an earthquake. Except for the absence of the slain, the present scene differs little from that witnessed by the victorious Turks as they entered the city under Lala Moustapha on the 5th of August 1571, after nearly a twelve-months’ siege. Were Famagusta altogether without inhabitants it would be less impressive in its desolation than it now is as seen in the twilight—nothing stirring but the owl and the bat, and perhaps here and there, haunting like ghosts the narrow lanes, a few pale fever-stricken women in their Turkish veils and long white mantles, who might well be taken for the last survivors of a city where war, famine and plague had done their worst.

  So writes the modest engineer Samuel Brown in 1879.

  The fever and the veils have gone, of course, but little else has changed today except that the grass is greener, and young saplings crowd the huge moat, and the liners moo like cattle beyo
nd the reefs. It is still the most haunting town in Cyprus, saturated with the memory of its past—a windmill turning rustily against a cornflower-colored sea. The cries of children bathing in the shallow sea outside the famous, useless monuments to a military glory which silted up here in the Levant, generation by generation, only to decline and perish abruptly at the bidding of history—whose cruel shoals and whirlpools were once again at work sapping the age we had inherited from those forgotten captains and merchants: we also children of a sea-born power whose many bridgeheads were being slowly invested by the sea we had tamed and yoked.

  The old Gothic cathedral wearing its uncouth horns of minarets glowed softly in the fading light, amber as a honey-cell against the peacock’s eye of sea. It was the ideal place in which to reflect upon the vanity of human affairs. I used to walk about its grassy galleries with my friends or duty-companions, enjoying the silence which grows up between sentences uttered among the ruins of time; and conscious that one day our history must touch and marry its own, to join the great confluence of tides which meet forever at the point where present meets the past in a death-embrace.

  But our own present was forever tugging at one like a hound which nothing could quiet, and racing along the firm straight arrow of road towards the capital I would once more become aware of the thousand preoccupations of office waiting for me, and the noisy contentions of demagogues and illiterates which had begun to fill the empty theatre of world affairs with the shrill waspish voice of the times—nationalism. I would apprehend too the cobweb of lies and half-truths which were beginning to manufacture themselves in minds which, twelve months ago, would not have recognized the island’s name.

  Back across the Mesaoria, the hot barren plain with the single fortress lying in the middle—its roads radiating out from all directions, starfish-wise, Nicosia was merely a crude echo of the sea-dazzling city we had left; and its current associations so qualified its own very different beauties that I had often to refresh myself in the knowledge of it by taking solitary walks along the ancient bastions or through the crowded markets. Sitting in the long grass among the spiked and abandoned British guns on the Kyrenia wall, I would watch the Turkish children flying their colored kites in the quick fresh evening wind which ushers in the summer twilights of the capital. Or sitting on the leads of Saint Sophia watch the black well of darkness slowly flicker into light, candle by candle, like Easter worshippers in some immense dark cathedral greeting the risen Christ.

  Events now were drawing in, closing in upon us, and hardly a day went by without the arrival of some new visitor or some new and disturbing fragment of news. “And to think that all this,” said a Greek journalist, “comes about from a coolness between Eden and Papagos.” This was the latest Athenian explanation of our state—for no Greek can interpret policy in anything but personal terms. “So Papagos was mortified. So Papagos says: ‘By God, here we Greeks have been walking about on tiptoe with our bladders bursting with the Cyprus question for thirty years, not daring to relieve ourselves because of the affection we have for England… why should we contain ourselves a moment longer?’ So he goes to UNO because he knows that you will have trouble here.”

  Rumors, disturbing in their implications, had begun to scuttle about the fents and warrens of the old town—the labyrinth of streets which lay within the Venetian walls. Rumors of landings, of the training of saboteurs, of resistance. But as yet they remained without substance and the disturbances of civil life pursued their refractory course in dreary demonstrations, riots and bottle-throwings which the good-natured and exasperated soldiery and police alike countered with shields and staves, with gas shells and arrests.

  Everyone was new to the game, was an amateur. The foreground of the picture was still crowded with the kind of detail which made such a success of the early Keystone comedies—elaborate games of cops and robbers across the moat. The Girls’ Sixth, led by Aphrodite, charging across the bridge to pelt the police with Coca-Cola bottles; benighted police auxiliaries defending themselves behind extraordinary shields (specially run up for them by the Public Works, no doubt) which resembled Woolworth fire-screens. The headmaster of the Gymnasium being beaten up by his own sixth form for showing lack of patriotism—and being forced to appeal for the restoration of order to the very authorities he had sworn to overturn. Perplexing conferences at Government House, nestling among the green lawns and carefully tended beds of English flowers, where these scenes of apparent frivolity and ludicrousness (who ever heard of a revolution of schoolchildren?) were gravely evaluated. So few were the broken heads and so many the broken bottles that the whole atmosphere was charged with an inadvertent air of carnival. “You see,” explained the very schoolteacher who had grasped the air before him to show how well-controlled the gymnasia were, “you see, we can’t control them. I’m afraid to go to class any more. The big boys are really ugly. Can’t the Government do something?” This conversation was conducted behind the counter of a haberdasher’s shop in Ledra Street to the background orchestration of broken glass and yelling as Aphrodite led another desperate charge of the Girls’ Sixth against the thinly held bridgehead which spanned the moat. The whole street was ankle-deep in bottles. Across the road, on the periphery of the battlefield, the British Institute remained obstinately open, its director quietly watching from a balcony. From time to time a breathless student who had tired of throwing bottles or sprained an arm would slip into the library for a quiet spell of study as if nothing in the world were amiss. The crowds moved roaring up and down the streets, screaming for liberty like maddened bulls. An English spinster mounted rather precariously on a bicycle, however, rode straight through them; they parted, cheering, and when she dropped a parcel, a dozen members of Epsilon Alpha dived for the honor of picking it up and restoring it to her. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” said a newspaper correspondent, running for his life along the moat, pursued by the Girls’ Sixth. There were brilliant scenes rich in all the unrehearsed comedy of Latin life; as when the police experimenting with the new and exciting weapon they had been given—the gas shell—rilled their own headquarters with tear-gas and had to evacuate it until the wind changed. “They don’t mean any harm,” said a Greek grocer dodging adroitly as a brickbat whizzed past him into a shop-window, “It is just the people expressing themselves.” Then getting down under a counter he added, “They are very polite people really, but they want self-determination.”

  Across this pantomime world, however, there stalked a specter which took no account of the clamorings of schoolchildren or the counsels of moderation which were being directed at the troubled world from every side, like hoses at a fire—the specter of insurrection.

  It was after dark when my telephone rang and the quiet voice of the Colonial Secretary ordered me to hurry to his office. The Secretariat was dark as I drove in under the magnificent eucalyptus tree which spanned the hollow square upon which the building was constructed, and, leaving my car, climbed the worm-eaten old staircase which led to his office. With the same amused composure with which he greeted every turn and twist of events he now told me that information had been received that a caique loaded with arms and ammunition had set off for Cyprus, for a landfall near Paphos. We sat in silence for a moment while he lit his pipe and settled the papers on his desk. The fire crackled in the old-fashioned grate, and from somewhere in the middle distance came the pecking of a typewriter with its grotesque insistence on a world where there were still reports to be made and papers to be filed. I sighed. There was no comment to be made on something which we had expected and feared for so long. “We must try and intercept it,” he said at last, and I could see that he too was thinking of that long bare coastline with its cliffs and bays deserted under the moon which stretches down from the horn of Cape Arnauti to Paphos. A thousand possible points of entry for the resolute smuggler.…

  Chapter Ten: Point of No Return

  What they are they were; and what they were they are—an indolent, careless and
mimetic people, but without a spark of Turkish fire, without a touch of Grecian taste. With neither beauty of body nor sense of beauty in mind—with neither personal restlessness nor pride of origin—with neither large aspirations nor practical dexterity of hand, they live on in a limpid state, like creatures of the lower types clinging to life for life’s own sake; voluptuaries of the sun and sea; holding on by simple animal tenacity through tempests which have wrecked the nobler races of mankind.

  —British Cyprus by W. HEPWORTH DIXON, 1887

  IT WAS NOT by a smugglers’ moon that we traveled westward towards Paphos, for we were in search of something less exciting than lawbreakers, but the knowledge that somewhere along that spectral coast a landing was to be attempted, filled the journey with an excitement it would not otherwise have had. Though the wind was icy the high-riding moon in a clear sky give one the illusion that spring had broken as we followed the loops and gradients of the coastal road, leaving Lapithos drowsing among her lemon trees and climbing slowly towards the bare saddle on which Myrtou lies, the car’s pale headlights tempering the steely grey of olive trees with chalky yellows and mauves, penciling in the empty roads and the sleeping villages as we flashed through them. The air smelt of snow and lemon blossom, and old Panos beside me huddled gratefully in the duffle coat I had loaned him, talked quietly and methodically of the vine which he was going to select for the balcony from a special vineyard near Kuklia. We had set off by night upon an impulse, taking with us some wine and biscuits to sustain us for the three hours’ drive; it would be perhaps the last chance Panos would get before the school term began again to visit the obscure holding which had once belonged to his grandfather, and where the famous vine of his choice still grew.