Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

by Lawrence Durrell

  My companion was silent now, as he climbed into the branches of a tree to look down with delight upon the rolling relief map below with its bearded curves of lowland falling downwards at one corner to the sea-line, and then climbing and sweeping away towards the sky-blue edges of the world where the Karpass threw up its snouts of stone, and the boundaries of the peninsula were marked by the crash of water on stone and the plumes of spray turning in the air. “I shall be sixty next year,” said Panos, “what a pleasure it is to get old.”

  The white wine tasted sharp and good and as he raised his glass Panos gave me the toast of the day: “That we may pass beyond” (i.e. the present troubles) “and that we might emerge once more in the forgotten Cyprus—as if through a looking glass.” In a way, too, he was toasting a dying affection which might never be revived—one of those bright dreams of deathless friendship which schoolboys still believed in, of an England and Greece which were bondsmen in the spirit.

  How stupid such figments sound to the politicians and how vital they are to young nations!

  “You know,” said Panos quietly, “I received a threatening letter from EOKA—a second-grade letter.”

  “How do you mean—second-grade?”

  “There are different types. First there is just a warning letter. Then there is a letter with a black dagger and a definite death-threat, which encloses a razorblade. That is what I got. I expect one of my pupils decided to get his own back by trying to frighten me.”

  “What would they have against you?”

  Panos poured himself another glass of wine and watched his cigarette-smoke disperse in the still air. He was still absently smiling with his eyes, as if at the memory of our first glimpse of Klepini with its petal-starred glades. “My dear fellow, how should I know? In these situations everyone informs on everyone else. There is no circumstance of my private life not open to view.”

  “Perhaps because I stayed with you—though I haven’t visited you more than once since the serious trouble started.”

  “I know. I guessed why and I was grateful.”

  “Then why did you come out today?”

  He stood up and dusted the chalk-marks off his sleeve. He heaved a long sigh. “Because I wanted to. Life is going to be intolerable enough with all these curfews and fines and strikes; it would be unendurable if one had to obey the dictates of the hotheads. And besides, I am only one of dozens who have received such letters, and nothing has happened to them.”

  “But I am a Government Official.”

  “Yes, that is true.”

  “They might suspect you of giving information.”

  “What do I know? Nothing. It is true I am not as patriotic as most people, though I believe that Enosis is right and must one day come; I am a Greek, after all, and Cyprus is as Greek as … Vouni. But of course I shrink from violence though I see that it will certainly bring Enosis sooner than polite talk will.”

  “How do you mean?” He stretched himself upon the rock now, face downward, and thrust out his hands until his fingers were buried in the dense clumps of anemones. “O Lord!” he said, “I promised myself not to talk politics. But sometimes you ask such silly questions. Can’t you see? First there was no Cyprus problem. Then a few bangs followed and you agreed there was a problem, but that it couldn’t be solved ever. More bangs followed. Then you agree to try and solve it, but in fact only to bedevil it further. Meanwhile however EOKA has seen that a few bombs could change your inflexible ‘Never’ to ‘sometime’; now they feel they have a right to provoke an answer to the question ‘When?’ They are not politically as stupid as the authorities believe them to be. They have, in fact, very much shaken the British position and they realize it. The peasants of your village have two little proverbs which illustrate the present state of Cyprus perfectly. Of a stupid man they say ‘He thought he could beat his wife without the neighbors hearing.’ In this case the neighbors are your own Labour Party, UNO, and many others; we are provoking you to beat us so that our cries reach their ears. Then, from another point of view, your operations against the terrorists must be conducted across the body of the Cyprus people—like a man who has to hit an opponent through the body of the referee. As you say in Bellapaix, ‘He can’t gather the honey without killing the bees.’ How, then, can you gather the honey of a peaceful Cyprus?”

  We began to gather great bunches of the flowers now and stow them in the wicker basket; and while I carefully dug out the bulbs I needed for my garden Panos contented himself more easily, winding his cool wet stems about with the broad leaves of the arum lily. “We could go on like this for weeks,” he said, “and even today if we worked at it we couldn’t make any impression on the field.” He was walking about from point to point as he picked his flowers, matching the various shades as he did so, composing each handful with a skill that showed practice. I could already see them glowing in the blue Lapithos vases which decorated a shelf in the kitchen, strategically placed beyond the reach of his children. After they had gone to bed he would take the flowers down and place them before him as he fell to work upon the great piles of grey copy-books with their school essays in spidery Greek straggling over the pages; and sighing, pause for a moment to refresh the “eyes of his mind,” as he said, with a glimpse, in them, of the Klepini groves.

  We picked and picked until the back of the car was brimming with flowers—”like a village marriage” as Panos said—and then sank back upon our thrones of granite to unpack the bread and the meat.

  The sun was approaching mid-heaven and the great lion pads of rock among the foothills were already throwing forward their reflections of shadow. Panos put away his spectacles and fell to cutting up the coarse brown loaf, saying as he did so: “On days like this, in places like these, what does it all matter? Nationality, language, race? These are the invention of the big nations. Look below you and repeat the names of all the kings who have reigned over the kingdoms of Cyprus; of all the conquerors who have set foot here—even the few of whom written records exist! What does it matter that we are now alive, and they dead—we have been pushed forward to take our place in the limelight for a moment, to enjoy these flowers and this spring breeze which … am I imagining it?… tastes of lemons, of lemon blossom.”

  As he spoke there came the sound of a shot among the olive-groves, the echoes of which rolled about for a while on the range, sinking and diminishing as if they described the contours of the land in sound; then the silence closed in again, and everything was still save for the rustling foliage in the trees around us. We looked at each other for a long second. “I thought the shotguns were all in,” I said; he smiled and relaxed his pose as he lit a cigarette. “It was a shotgun all right,” he said, “and quite near.” With a sudden soughing of wings three jackdaws passed over our heads, as if alarmed by something in the valley beneath. “Last year one would not have turned one’s head,” said Panos with a chuckle, “and look at us. It’s some poor fellow shooting at crows to keep them off his fields.”

  A small foreshortened figure now appeared at the cliff-edge and stood looking down the slope towards us. He had a shotgun under one arm, and he appeared to be listening as he watched us. I said nothing, and without his spectacles Panos “had no horizons” as he always said in Greek. “There is a man,” I said quietly, and as I spoke the figure started to stroll towards us at a leisurely pace, holding his uncocked gun in the crook of his arm. As he came nearer I saw that he was dressed in the conventional rig of a village farmer and wore a game-bag at his belt. His heavy brown snake-boots with their corded tops made no sound in the deep grass. Through the open neck of his shirt I caught a glimpse of the heavy flannel sweatshirt that all peasants made a point of wearing, summer or winter. He walked slowly towards us across the glade at a deliberate and unhurried pace, only stopping for a few seconds every ten paces, the better to eye us. “He is coming this way,” I said. Panos did not put on his spectacles, but propped his chin with his hands, and began to swear under his breath. I had never
heard him use bad language before. “I swear,” he explained, “at the humiliation of having to feel afraid in the presence of an unknown man—a sensation so foreign to Cyprus as to be quite frightening in itself, the very idea of it. God! what have we come to?”

  I did not answer, for the strange man was standing still, indulging in one of his regular little pauses. He had a large square head with a thatch of greying hair upon it. The wide wings of his black moustache were swept back and up from his mouth. He cocked a barrel of his shotgun now with a clumsy sort of gesture, intended no doubt to be unobtrusive. The sound of the hammer clicking back was quite audible—like someone cracking his knucklebones. “Measure for measure,” I said, and slipped the little pistol under the napkin on my knee, consoled by the cold butt under my fingers and at the same time disgusted—for Panos’s sake. He observed the gesture and made a wry mouth. “That won’t be much use,” he said. I went on eating my sandwich and watching the newcomer lazily out of the corner of my eye. He had stopped now and stood undecidedly beside the trunk of a carob tree. “Ho there,” he called in a deep hoarse voice, and I knew at once from his tone that we had nothing to fear. Sticking the pistol still wrapped in the napkin back into the basket I raised the demijohn of wine and gave him the traditional Cypriot greeting. “Kopiaste—sit down and join us.” He relaxed at once, uncocked his gun, and stood it against the tree before walking over to us.

  “Why Sir Teacher,” he said reproachfully as he took Panos’s hand. “Why did you not say it was you?” Then he turned his dark curious eye upon me and explained gruffly, “The Sir Teacher stood godfather to my second son.” Panos was now sitting up and putting on his glasses the better to enter into the spirit of recognition. “Why Dmitri Lambros,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been shooting crows,” replied the newcomer, with a flash of white teeth in a face as dark as a plum cake. “I know it’s forbidden,” he added as if to forestall an inevitable question. “But up here …” he waved a hand in the direction of the mountain, “we are so far away. You can hear a car as it turns off the highroad at the bottom of the hill. Plenty of time to put it away.” He winked and with a brief word of thanks raised his glass with a friendly nod at me before drinking deeply and exhaling his breath in a rapturous “Ah! that was good.” He wiped his rough brown hands with their ragged nails on his thighs before accepting the hunk of bread and meat which Panos offered him, asking as he did so, the dozen conventional questions which, like the opening moves of a game, must be made before any real conversation can begin in peasant Greek. His naturalness and the frank roughness of his glance were pleasing, and I could see from Panos’s expression that he held the man in good esteem. In his game-bag reposed three bedraggled and crumpled corpses of the jackdaws against which he had been waging war, and these he showed us with some pride. “I’ve got a good eye,” he explained.

  “How are things up at the village?” asked Panos, and I was not surprised to hear him answer “Quiet as the grave” for the village was far more secluded among the foothills even than my own. “Of course,” he added after a moment, “we’ve got one or two of Them. They watch us. But so far there has been nothing. But of course if the English hang this boy Karaolis.…” Panos interrupted him gravely to say: “The Kurios is English,” and Lambros turned upon me a pair of dark sweet eyes, full of a sort of bravado. “I guessed—in fact I have seen him down at the land where the Desposini Maria is building a house, have I not? And her man Janis is my cousin. So you see, nothing can be hidden in Cyprus!” He lit a cigarette swiftly and deftly and sat back on his haunches blowing out the smoke with a long exhalation of rare pleasure. “Why is there so much feeling about Karaolis,” I said, “since everyone knows he was guilty?” He looked thoughtfully at the ground and then raised his face to mine, gazing earnestly into my eyes. “Guilty but not culpable,” he said. “What he did was for Enosis not for gain. He is a good boy.” I sighed: “This is wordplay. Suppose a Turk Hassan killed someone on behalf of Volkan and then said it was for Enosis.” He stroked his moustache with the backs of his fingers. “The Turks are cowards,” he said. Panos sighed. “Don’t be a twisted stick, Dmitri, it is true what the Kurios says. Crime is crime whatever the motive.” The man shook his head slowly from side to side like a bull and gazed up through lowered eyebrows. His mind refused the jump; Karaolis was a young hero. Once again I could not help remarking how absent was any conception of abstract guilt—abstract justice. Who could discern in the thought-processes of a modern Greek the exercise of a logic which was Socratic? They thought like Persian women, capriciously, waywardly, moving from impulse to impulse, completely under the domination of mood. Had Karaolis been killed outright he would still have been canonized as a martyr but everyone would have accepted the fact and shrugged it off—to get shot is part of the penalty for shooting. A martyr no less, his death would have been accepted as part of the hazard of ordinary life. But the long-winded processes of the European juridical system were an intolerable bore, an incomprehensible rigmarole to a people which valued action first and the pallid reflections thrown by its moral values afterwards. Here, they thought, comes the old hypocritical Anglo-Saxon mania for trying to justify injustice. The boy was a hero, and they were trying to slip a noose about his heroism. “We know the truth,” he said, setting his jaw obstinately, and Panos glanced at me with a twinkle and an expression which said: “Argument on this topic is useless.” I knew it was.

  We changed the subject now before it bred a taciturnity and ill-nature which would have been foreign to this chance meeting among the carob trees, and spoke about village affairs which were nearer to his heart. Helen and Maria, the daughters of the schoolmaster, had married last week, and their wedding was the most sumptuous they had had in the village for years. The wine flowed like a canal. “Even now after five days my head rings with the wine,” he said smiling, rubbing his chin with a tanned hand. It had been like old times. And in the afternoon some English people had come to look at the church; at first the children shouted “EOKA” and were inclined to throw stones, but when they found the strangers spoke a little Greek and were “gentle” everyone felt rather ashamed. So while they were in the church the children gathered flowers for the lady and they left with bundles of them in their arms, smiling. “Such are the children of my village,” he said proudly, thrilling at the mere thought of hospitality upheld in the face of intense antagonism. Then he added, turning to me: “Such are the Greeks.” I knew this too.

  The sun was in mid-heaven now, and the wine low. It seemed a crime to leave the cool deep grass and the shady trees; but if Panos was to see Marie’s land we should be on the move. “Dmitri,” said Panos, whose mind was still busy with his flower-calendar, “there is a favor I must ask of you.” The man smiled delightedly. “Anything, Sir Teacher,” he said, pronouncing the most revered title in vernacular Greek with pride. “You know the little ruined mill above the village? There is a glade there by the stream where the mushrooms grow. Set some of your famous children to pick me a basketful and bring them when next you come to Kyrenia, will you? And tell them I will send them sweets in exchange.” “With the greatest pleasure,” said Lambros standing up and pitching away his cigarette.

  I turned the car while Panos packed the food away in the hamper and gazed ruefully at the demijohn. “It’s amazing,” he said. “We’ve drunk nearly half. Let us have one more glass for the parting.” We stood in a circle under the great carob and raised our glasses. “Health,” cried Lambros, and we echoed him; and then, as if anxious to provide a phrase which would bridge the unhappy gap between himself and the hated-loved foreigner, he stuck out his hand to take mine and said, “All will be well one day.” “All will be well,” I echoed.

  He retrieved his gun and stood in full sunlight to watch us go, one hand raised in salutation. I let in the clutch and the car rolled smoothly down the gradient towards the sea, its tires crunching on the bony gravels and ribbed stones of the village road. It was quit
e hot now and the mountains had turned pale and feathery as the ground-mists reached them from the damp plain. At the last hump before we joined the main road I paused for a minute to watch the long carved coastline stretch away into the haze, trembling and altering in the bluish afternoon as the light of a star will. Saint Epictetus lay below us with its white belfries and cubist houses; just beyond the long stone tongue of land on which Maries house had already begun to grow up, gleamed fitfully.

  Sabri was still smoking under his carob on the main road. He waved to us and shouted: “There’s a search on down the road. In Saint Epictetus.”

  “They will be looking for arms,” said Panos quietly. This also had become a feature of our lives, an expected and normal part of the daily routine.

  We rolled on down the green and sinuous roads while Panos peered into the dry beds of torrents to spot flowering hibiscus and oleander below the dusty culverts. After so many years he undoubtedly knew every bush, every individual clump of lentisk or sage, so that our journey was sharpened at every turn by the expectations of his memory. On the last curve but one before the little village, which lies among flowering trees, secretively folded in upon itself, we saw the first soldier. High on a bluff above us, standing lazily against the sun, with his Sten slung loosely in the crook of his arm and his red beret gleaming like a cherry among the silver olives. I raised a thumb in racial recognition and he smiled, jerking his own laconic thumb in the direction of the village and then patting the air lightly as if to say “Go slowly.” Panos took a childish delight in soldiers and unerringly recognized him as a Parachutist. “The new Kingdoms of Cyprus,” he said, “are made up of principalities where berets of different colors rule—green for the mountains, red and black for the Gothic range. We are getting used to them.” The idea gave him pleasure. Nor was he disposed to be peevish when we came upon a roadblock in the shape of a barbed wire hurdle manned by a couple of stalwart children who did not look above eighteen; one stood by with a rifle while the other came forward and saluting politely took my identification papers. His broad southern accent and shock of yellow hair were pleasing characteristics to happen upon so far from England. A self-conscious moustache was trying to attach itself to his upper lip. He read my papers carefully, moving his lips slowly, and then handed them back and saluted again. “Is the gentleman with you a local, sir?” he asked, and Panos nudged me delightedly. “Did you hear—he called me a gentleman,” he said in a whisper; and leaning out he said: “I am Grik schoolmaster.” He never allowed an opportunity of practicing his English to slip by. The young soldier looked grave and frowned. “Well, I’ll have to search you, ‘op out,” he said, trying desperately to sound unkind. Panos was delighted. It was obvious that he adored being searched. “Yes, Yes,” he said eagerly. “Search me.” And stepped into the road to be frisked by the two youths, and to turn his wallet inside out at their behest. I must say they were efficient as well as thoughtful. They made a note of the time and of the car’s number. “Okay, Dennis,” said the large one, “let them in.” Then he turned to me and said wistfully, “Lovely lot of flowers you got there, sir,” his English eye resting gloatingly upon the back seat of the car piled high with blossom. Panos’s spectacles gleamed. “Yes. You wish? I give you some,” and before the young soldier could say any more he found himself, to his embarrassment, holding several great bunches of Klepini anemones. He made a vague gesture of handing them back, saying: “I’m on duty now, sir,” but I had already let in the clutch and we were rolling down among the trees to the village, leaving him alone with his problem and the smiles of his companion.