Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

by Lawrence Durrell

  There were brown military lorries parked in the little square by the church and the main street was full of an unwonted animation, the red berets glimmering in the sunshine until the cobbled streets looked like a strawberry bed. Pens of barbed wire were being run up and the villagers slowly and patiently gathered into them for searching. Little groups stood about everywhere, looking on and chattering, for all the world as if they were watching the hucksters set up their stalls in preparation for some familiar village fete. Nor could they conceal their admiration for the physique of the brown Commandos who strolled among them, tugging and pushing good-naturedly at the fringes of the crowd like sheepdogs at a trial, still smiling and patient. The whole operation was being conducted in a leisurely fashion with an air of awkward kindness. The village priest, awaiting his turn to be penned with the rest, “like turkeys” as Panos said, had ordered a coffee and a newspaper, and sat firmly on the balcony above the road, with his spectacles on his nose, reading, while at the same table sat two Commando officers, lounging like panthers, waiting perhaps for him to finish before politely shepherding him “into the bag.” Panos looked about him with the greatest interest, his commiseration for the villagers tinged with amusement. “There is Renos,” he said. “He is being pushed. I’m so glad. If ever a man needed a push it was him. How funny. But these Parachutists are like gods tumbled out of heaven. How did they get so big? They are grown in special earth perhaps?”

  The crowd eddied and swirled in one corner about a group of youths, and the soldiers pressed in firmly shouting in the unconscious accents of the worlds most famous policeman. “Pass along there, please, cut it out. Move along there, please.”

  There were several lorries full of troops standing by at ease, wreathed in grins. They set up a ragged whistle as we passed and in answer to my gesture extended a forest of grubby thumbs. A lot of them had roses pinned to their berets. “I can see,” said Panos, “that they have been pinching flowers from Sabri’s rose garden and from Kollis.” “Is that considered looting?” I asked, and he giggled. “But what is all that?” he asked as we passed a lorry piled with pick helves and the awkward old-fashioned riot shields which belonged to the past era of wholesale street rioting. Indeed a couple of the youths were playing grotesquely at a game of gladiators, clad in the steel helmets and wielding what some wag had long ago christened “the Armitage patent anti-Coca-Cola-bottle shield.” They made clumsy passes at each other with pick helves as they circled round and round, their boots striking sparks from the tarmac. Enthusiastic applause came from inside the covered lorries where dozens of pairs of eyes took in this gratuitous piece of clowning. Panos was consumed with interest. “Do they really use that equipment—so like a gardening set?” He had never seen a full-blown riot, and knew nothing of the countermeasures the administration had taken. He listened with great interest as I explained: “The Governor has made a rule that there is to be no shooting unless the troops are shot at. For ordinary riots they use pick helves; for ambushes and anything more military, their professional equipment. But as they never know when they set off for an incident just what sort of incident it is going to be they have to take everything along. Last month outside Paphos they faced bombs and shotguns. Last week in Larnaca they faced schoolchildren. In Lapithos two days ago they had to clear a roadblock of fallen trees and face up to two hundred villagers throwing stones.” Panos gazed at me with wonder and admiration at such spirited planning. “They take everything into account,” he said.

  We were through the barriers now and on the last crown of the hill from which we could glimpse the little barrel-vaulted church of Saint George which marked the landward end of Marie’s property; the spring gushed from the rock below the village, and here several old ladies were doing their washing with complete composure, though the troops were in full view. A baffling air of sleepy normality hung over everything. Birds sang in the hedges, and the first lizards scrambled among the thickets, teased by these sunny premonitions of the summer to come. Panos sighed and settled himself more comfortably after this interlude with its crowded human panorama and liveliness, so foreign to the slow dragging tempo of this spring day. The road looped and coiled twice like a snake and then suddenly untied itself to run, straight as a die, between the carob-groves; and here, marked by a single tall cypress tree, was the turning which led off towards the sea, and the desolate headland where the great house (“Fortuna” it had been christened) was to stand. We chose to leave the car somewhere near the main road and walk down the soft dust pathway between the trees which would lead us, after many a curve and twist, to the headland where the charming little toy church of Saint George stood, glittering white against the backcloth of blue sea. Early lizards scuttered among the stones and the rank grass beside the road was full of the busy clicking and scratching of anonymous insects, stretching down in a whispering wall of green to where the sound of the sea took over—racing blue and fair today, bursting among the grottoes and caves with dull explosions and filling the beaches with the passionate scrabbling of pebbles sucked back in the dark undertow. On the outward breastwork of the magnificent little bay stood the old Mosque where I had spent so many precious hours; Marie’s house was to be built in such a way as to let the windows on the seaward side frame a view of it.

  It lay now, folded inside its containing wall, like a gull resting on a stormy sea, the whole peninsula behind it with its tortured anfractuosities of white rock giving back the brilliant light like a mirror. I saw the small black spot which was the Hodja move ant-like across the whiteness, followed by his cat, diminished by distance to a black pinhead. They were going to the spring? The bareness and purity of the place were as lucid as a theorem in Euclid—the little shrine of the seven forgotten generals or saints (opinions varied as to their origins and qualities), which had welded itself to the white headland, joining the white of plaster and limewash to the whiteness of the natural rock—picked clean as a bone by the winter sea. It was as if some animal or Titan of unimaginable size had eaten and excreted a mountain of seashells, translated into this calcareous rock, which stretched down into the sea, worn razor-sharp and bearded with weed which swayed and ruffled with the sea’s breathing. The coast itself had been cut out with a fretsaw, idly and purposelessly whittled by a preoccupied god.

  Yet the richness of limestone fed with fresh springs had crept down to each headland, giving it a fat scalp of good earth in which the young wheat could find a purchase less than a hundred yards from the barren sea-margins. Marie’s house for example—a wheat field swept up to her back door, yet the front windows opened upon the bare stony promontory whipped by the waves.

  The roofless house, with its promise of great cool rooms opening upon the water, stood empty now. The workmen had left early today, abandoning the desolate heaps of lime and sand and pruned rocks out of which it would all be finished. Janis was at the end of a field digging. He shouted and loped unevenly towards us like a camel across the furrowed earth, eager to unlock the bamboo palisades which surrounded the little temporary huts where Marie lived while she was waiting for “Fortuna” to be completed. “God be with you,” said Janis with delight, shaking hands all round and exposing a mouth as devoid of teeth as an oyster in a shapeless grin. I introduced my companion and told him that we had come to study the arrangement of the trees, which seemed to delight him even more. He jumped up and down in an ecstasy of willingness to please, like a monkey on a chain. But first the laws of hospitality must be observed strictly. He unlocked the gate and led us into the little loggia with its fantastic palms where the two peacocks talked in undertones, and setting chairs for us, poured us glasses of sherbet—which in Greek still preserves a haunting trace of Aphrodite’s name, for it is called Aphros or Foam. Drinking, we completed the politenesses due to convention before I told Panos that I would go and bathe while he did his tour of inspection. “I know it will be cold,” I said, “but I have only a few days left before I leave the island. Don’t deny me the pleasure.” Panos gr
inned. “Pleasure or torture?” “One partakes of the other.” “Good.” No Greek can resist aphorism; its form will make him believe it to be true, even if it is false. “Good,” he repeated rising. “Then I shall go off with Janis.” The old man bobbed and curtseyed again. “Willingly. Willingly.”

  When they went off on their tour of inspection I lingered for a while in the quietness of the loggia enjoying the distant boom of the sea on the cliff-head and thinking how pleasant a place Fortuna would one day be in a future empty of politics and the shabby discontents and cruelties it engenders. Janis had unlocked the rooms where Marie lived and idly I entered them to note how dusty the bookshelves had become, and to tell over the various treasures whose history I knew and which would one day find a place in the great house: the Spanish chest, Moorish lattice, Indian paintings and stuffs, Egyptian and Turkish lanterns, and books everywhere piled up in heaps, the rare companions of a solitude not self-imposed but sought. A mirror and comb from Bali, a Tanagra, an iron statuette of Krishna, a mandala painting—these things had caught the hem of her dress on some speedy emphatic journey across the world and had come here to take up a lodgement in the cool rooms of her house. These are the sort of things which the writer carries about like talismans, to remind him of lost experiences which he must one day re-evoke and refashion in words. This dancer from Bali echoes the past with all the fidelity of a seashell held to the ear.… The sea-wind stirred the curtains, reminding me of the bathe I had promised myself.

  I took a book from the shelf, copying her own habit though I knew I should not read, and unearthed my bathing slip. The path to her private beach led down through a small natural amphitheatre to a wall of rock which marked the sea-boundaries—and all along it the heavy screen of wattles which were to make a windbreak shuffled and scratched. Here stood the little bamboo hut which served both as a changing room and as a summer bedroom. A lizard lay asleep on the bamboo couch looking like a Greek politician waiting for an opening. As I undressed my eye noted the empty Chianti bottle, the red fan, and the gourd dippers—they echoed those improvident and happy afternoons of two years ago; a striped towel and a Penguin history of Architecture, stained and cockled with sea-damp, lay on a seat fashioned from the trunk of a palm tree. They repeated, more clearly than words could, the names: “Pearce and Dante.” An empty bottle of Riesling with a sediment of oil in the bottom said: “Paddy Leigh Fermor” (here during a tremendous freak thunderstorm we had sat, drinking wine and oiling ourselves against the sunlight we knew would follow it, while the rain slashed the slatted bamboo roof to ribbons and Paddy sang the trailing, ululating songs of the Cretan mountains, punctuating each strophe with a swig of Chianti). On a nail hung a tear-bottle.… But my movements had disturbed the lizard which abandoned the couch and retired to the roof.

  Despite the high sea running the lagoon itself was calm save for a slight swell. The wind was north which meant that the western headland took the full force of the sea and sent down the smooth lolling aftertow into the bay. The Spring water was cold and pained one—as a drink of iced wine will hurt the back of the throat—but it was delicious. I abandoned myself to the running tide, not swimming, but simply keeping afloat, to be drawn smoothly out into the bay from where the whole screen of luminous mountains was visible. The sun had cleared them now and they were taking on that throbbing dark mauve which inhabits the heart of a violet. The trees had turned silver and the slices of corn-land to the east gleamed kingcup-yellow and shone like bugles. I let myself be drawn slowly but surely towards the little mosque, which glittered before me as if carved from rock salt, but veined by the winter damps in a dozen tones of grey and yellow. The Hodja stood watching me from his balcony with his cat in his arms—a patch of vivid black like a raven’s wing. I raised my hand in a salute and he answered it at once. Then he turned and walked down the path to the seashore to wait for me as I drifted unhurriedly towards the pitted and perforated shelf of rock which prevented the full force of the sea from exploding on the walls of the Mosque. Hereabouts it was as if some great rock-carpenter had been busy, carving out shelf upon shelf of metamorphic limestone, and stepping them downwards to the sandy bottom of the lagoon, three fathoms deep. Once jagged and serrated like teeth, these tables had been ground smoothly down and papered over with brilliant fucus and immense wigs of seaweed which stirred like gonfalons in the movements of the current. The top of this natural table was full of rock-pools, flushed out by the lazy tides, and abounding in shrimp and crab and the smaller varieties of fish. The capricious tides threw them up on to these stone tables and fell back, to leave them marooned, and here the barefoot shepherds roamed occasionally to see what they might capture for the pot.

  We were alone this afternoon, the Hodja and I, with only the sea and sky for company. He divested himself of his festering shoes (the simile from Rimbaud was not inappropriate in this context) and hitched up his robe as he tiptoed across the slippery weed-covered floor, carefully circumnavigating the rock-pools to reach the edge of the shelf where I lay, arms and legs spread out in sixty feet of emerald and fire opal. His huge head wobbled on its stalk, gleaming with sweat, like a toadstool. “Welcome,” he said, raising his paws in the mouse-gesture. “Will you stay tonight?”

  “I can’t,” I said sadly. “I must go back.”

  He ducked up and down, his head imitating the jogging motion of a camel, his underlip thrust out in commiseration. “I have wine,” he said wistfully. I reached out and grasped the carpet of soft weed, and hanging for a long moment to adjust my body to the swing of the sea, hoisted myself dripping and panting on to the shelf beside him. We tiptoed back the way he had come, over the slippery shelves to the firm dry rock. “I have some papers,” he said, “which I wish you to see, to help me fill in.” I had a drink of fresh water from the spring and climbed the rock with him to the little white terrace, now brilliantly situated in the very eye of the sinking sun which had set fire to the misty slopes above Lapithos. The light flowed out from the horns of the mountain, squeezed out laterally now, in a shaft of thin pencils, touching in the unsubstantial silhouettes of the fortresses and capes with a dream-like unreality. The terrace with its whitewashed walls was a glittering sun-trap, and here the old man brought me a single uncomfortable chair to sit on, above the hushing of the sea and the faint tingle of wind which snatched at the old Turkish pennant, holding and releasing it, blowing and lapsing. The long dusk began to settle with a shiver, and one of the silver peaks began to nibble the disc of traveling light—throwing a deep cool penumbra of shade into the valleys. Soon the light evening wind would be rushing across the Mesaoria to set the windmills turning in Nicosia; the homing yachts would flutter and tremble outside the Kyrenia bar; and Sabri on his little balcony at the police mess would glance at his watch and incline his cheek to take the breath as he sat contemplating the hard enamel of the water and the Turkish mountains huddled in shadow like a flock of sheep.

  Dusk began early on this side of the Gothic range for we lay in shadow while the mid-heaven still blazed with sunlight; it slanted downwards to us, refracted and diffused, pouring down not primary colors but the cool tones which shadows give to olive trees and barren rock, soaking up the light along the peaks like blotting paper. As the sun fell, darker and darker streaks would come to blur visibility with the soft ashen tone of charcoal-crayon rubbed into a drawing by the soft thumb of a draughtsman. Somewhere in the dark recesses of the smelly little room where he slept, the Hodja’s radio gave out the muffled strains of a Turkish song, like the shrieks of a cat in a bag. Then he closed the door and the sea-silence fell once more. He joined me in the sunlight, walking with that histrionic shuffle in his benighted shoes. In his hand he clutched a large wad of papers which at first sight looked like Income Tax forms—though at a salary of ten pounds a year I could not see his having to pay Income Tax. “I must fill these in,” he said, “to get money.” He spoke in his gobbling Greek letting the reptilian lids of his eyes fall shyly.

  They were Fo
otball Pool Coupons, flamboyantly printed. God knows—Allah alone knows—where he had got them from, or what thoughts passed through his muddled old head as he turned them over and over, crouching at his wood fire while the radio brayed. “Money,” he croaked again, holding on to the main theme connected with them by a sheer effort of will. He rubbed horny thumb upon fingers to illustrate his meaning in Greek, repeating “Parades … bolika” (“Oodles of dough”). But alas I did not know how to fill them in for him, never having done one in my life. Worse, I could not explain how they worked when he pressed me—for his Greek consisted of a few rudimentary words which had to be supplemented by mimicry. Aware of the hopelessness of the task, I nevertheless kicked an imaginary football about the terrace for a moment, but he shook his head hopelessly, still croaking “Money. Money,” like Poe’s Raven, and then turned desolately away to shuffle back to his little room and replace them, no doubt, under his mattress, like talismans from the great incomprehensible world outside where people wrote cabalistic things in pencil on a paper and were suddenly, inexplicably enriched. Watching that magnificent sunset I thought how touching were these incongruities which overlapped each other so swiftly in the common life of the island.