Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  *

  ‘Would you like to sit here?’ I knew I wasn’t going to like the man who was offering me a place at his table the moment I accepted his invitation and sat down. There was a sharp-eyed cockiness about him, and his question was more like an order. But the Yesilada’s dining room was full, and there wasn’t any choice.

  Everybody else on the little 1500-ton ferry was in short sleeves. This man alone, despite the heat, wore a smart three-piece suit, a thick one, that caused his face to glisten with sweat. Doubtless he considered this gave him status, like the immense gold cufflinks the size of overcoat buttons, and the ring studded with what looked like diamonds on his left hand. He was fleshy, with a florid complexion and reddish sandy hair. His English, although not perfect, was very good, so I guessed he was a Cypriot Turk, not a mainlander.

  ‘American? No, you are English,’ he said. Again it sounded like an order. He might have been organizing a game: ‘You are centre forward.’ He told me he had spent nineteen years in London, and now lived in Cyprus. Since the Turkish invasion, he said, the Turkish part of the island had been transformed, and Turkish Cypriots were enjoying an unprecedented, almost unbelievable, prosperity. Tourists were flooding in. The Greeks on their south side of the Green Line, which, since the Turkish invasion, has separated the two communities on the island, were suffering, he said, with evident satisfaction. ‘Are you a tourist coming to north Cyprus?’

  I told him I would go from Famagusta to Nicosia, the island’s divided capital. There I’d try to cross the barbed wire and the Turkish and Greek checkpoints on the Green Line in order to drive down to Limassol, the port on the south coast, a bigger, busier port than Famagusta. That was what the Turkish Maritime Lines woman in Smyrna had suggested. There might be a ship heading for the Suez Canal from there, she had thought; who knew?

  My Turkish dinner companion did not like my plan to bypass northern Cyprus. His expression was sour and disapproving. ‘The other side’ – he meant the Greek Cypriot authorities – ‘will never allow a crossing from north to south.’

  ‘Surely, tourists can cross?’

  ‘Not tourists, no one. Why don’t you spend a nice holiday in Turkish Cyprus? Go to the north. Fine place. Best beaches.’ He sounded like a travel brochure.

  Turkish Cypriot friends had told me that many of them, particularly the young, were disenchanted by the crude manners of the mainland Turkish soldiers. They said that there was little hope of a really good job in the north of Cyprus, and that Turkey itself was bankrupt. ‘Cypriots can get on with Cypriots even if they are Greeks,’ these friends insisted. Older Turkish Cypriots recalled long friendships and former business relationships with Cypriot Greeks, and by now were even engaged in smuggling operations with Greeks across the Green Line.

  I mentioned a little of this to my dinner partner when we had shared the best part of a bottle of red wine. He was indignant. Turkish Cyprus was thriving, he said; everyone knew that. I replied that my Turkish friends, simple, apolitical people, told me that young Turks longed to emigrate to Australia, England, anywhere, to escape the jobless claustrophobia of their demi-state.

  My companion put down his glass with a thump and glared at me. ‘If they say that, whoever they are, they have been brought up by the Greeks! They are traitors! The West helps only the Greeks.’ It was a bitter statement across the fruit salad. By now I realized that my companion was one of those Cypriot Turks who have made a good thing out of the new dispensation. A businessman or a contractor, perhaps working for the Turkish army; a politician or a fat cat in local government. ‘The West helps the Greeks because they are Christians and we are not!’

  ‘That’s not a very wise thing to say.’

  It was a familiar cry. The Greeks echo it; the West favours the Turks, they say, because Turkey is more powerful and more useful to NATO. It’s not an argument; it’s the expression of a complex. I had heard, ad nauseam, similar expressions from Israelis about Arabs, Arabs about Israelis, Indians about Pakistanis, Pakistanis about Indians, and Iranians about everybody.

  I said, ‘The British don’t give a damn who is Christian or who is not. You underestimate the West’s indifference to religion.’

  The Turk was drinking his coffee in agitated sips, his enormous cufflinks glinting in the neon strip of the dining room. ‘The West is obsessed with all those centuries of Greek civilization. So what if they had some old play writers.’ He wagged a thick forefinger. ‘The Turkish army will never leave one inch of what they hold in Cyprus today.’

  ‘A grim prospect for Cypriots.’

  ‘Well, that’s how it is,’ he said, smiling with great satisfaction and calling for the bill. ‘Have a nice time,’ he said, ‘but you cannot cross Nicosia, believe me.’

  *

  In the morning, watching the misty coastline of Cyprus growing larger, I began to think of my next step. From an assistant purser on the Yesilada I discovered that, after discharging cargo and passengers at Famagusta, the ferry would go on to a Syrian port, Latakia. This was certainly a possibility I had considered; being an Arab port, it would be easier to find a ship there bound for Jedda or the Gulf. But the assistant purser shook his head and showed me a Turkish newspaper of the day before, translating it for me. There had been serious riots in Latakia, and fighting between opponents of President Hafez al-Assad’s ruling Alouite sect of Muslims and his supporters. Assad had sent troops and tanks to the city, and there had been heavy firing and loss of life. Latakia was not the place for a foreigner without a Syrian visa to wander about in looking for a ship to Eastern ports, so I ruled it out immediately. Later I was doubly glad I had. The port was a shambles, people said, with ships held up for two months or more, waiting for berths.

  What about a ship from Famagusta to Haifa, and another from Haifa to Limassol? Limassol seemed a good place to head for, and the land route to it through the Green Line might be closed. I decided to consult the harbour master at Famagusta.

  At the small walled port of Famagusta the police and immigration officials were quick and friendly. They scribbled chalk marks on the metal suitcase and stamped my passport without fuss. A police officer at once offered to lead me to the harbour master’s office, indeed to the harbour master in person. In a small office on the quay I found a young, neat man who was amused by the idea of my ship-hopping to China. ‘Slow boats to China,’ he said, smiling. ‘Would you prefer tea or coffee?’

  ‘I don’t think you can cross to Limassol through Nicosia,’ he went on when tea arrived. ‘Now we have very few ships to Haifa or anywhere else, except to Turkey or Latakia. There’s not much commerce with Haifa.’ Alexandria? ‘None to Alexandria.’ Suppose I reached Limassol? He didn’t think I’d find much there, either, but, if I wanted to try, I could get there via Haifa, and a Turkish or Israeli ship sailed for Haifa from Famagusta once every two weeks or so.

  ‘Nothing sooner?’

  He looked at a list on his desk. ‘We have a very small ship, a coaster, calling here tomorrow, sailing for Haifa after two days. It would be very cramped. I might get the captain to agree to take you.’

  This sounded useful; only a brief delay. But I thought it worthwhile trying first to cross the Green Line to Limassol by land; if I could do so, there would be no delay at all. I couldn’t believe there would be no ships going east from Limassol. On the other hand, what would I find to take me south from Haifa? This route presented the prospect of a chain of Arab ports hostile to shipping from Israel.

  ‘The Israeli Zim Line would take you through the Suez Canal to Elat in the Gulf of Aqaba. You might find something at Elat to take you on.’

  And I might not. The Zim Line could not take me to any Arab port, so how would I get down from Elat to Jedda or to an Arab gulf port like Dubai or Bahrain? From Elat I might be forced to go backwards to Port Said, and Port Said, I had been told by someone, was only a transit port; you couldn’t get on a ship there, you had to be already on a ship – to have boarded it in, say, Athens or Genoa. The harbour ma
ster confirmed this.

  Limassol still seemed the best jumping-off point. I would try to cross to the southern part of the island through the Green Line checkpoints in Nicosia. If I failed, I’d ask the captain of the coaster to let me sail with him to Haifa from Famagusta in three days’ time, and try to move on from there.

  ‘Telephone me from Nicosia the day after tomorrow,’ the harbour master said. ‘I’ll tell you then if the coaster’s captain will take you. I’ll do my best.’

  I found a taxi, a big white Mercedes, and told the driver, ‘Saray Hotel, Nicosia, please.’ We drove past the old stone walls of the fortress Othello is said to have lived in, but probably didn’t, and out of Famagusta across the flat, dusty plain toward Nicosia, the divided capital of this divided, tragic and still friendly island. The early sun was cool on the peaceful surface of the plain.

  To our right, northwards, the high mountain ridge I had seen so often ran like a dragon’s back into distant cloud and haze. Also to our right, parallel with the straight road to Nicosia, lay the impassable Green Line, wholly visible only on a map, but viewable in detail in places where soldiers rested guns on the white barrels of roadblocks and signs warned that it was dangerous to approach. This was the cruel weal across the face of Cyprus left by the whip stroke of the Turkish invasion.

  *

  The guns and the barbed wire in this idyllic place brought back the memory of a winter in Cyprus just before the Turkish invasion in 1974. In the spring of that year, walking in the wilder hills above Kyrenia, I came across a strange phenomenon: a woman’s string handbag suspended from the branch of an ancient carob tree. Soon I found a grove with other objects hung about: an elderly umbrella, a plastic shopping bag, a stone, a shoe. Far from the neat antiseptic villas of the British tourists on the shore below, far from Greek Orthodox and Muslim Cyprus, Cypriot peasants were still scrupulously striving to propitiate the spirits of this antique island as they had been for thousands of years.

  In this new, divided Cyprus, in a new version of peace, I did not have to be overly superstitious to feel that something had been killed here. Among those groves, shrivelled to charcoal by the Turkish shelling, the spirits of Cyprus, I thought, may be dead for ever.

  I drove through the Turkish lines to the pretty port of Kyrenia in the occupied north. As far as the eye could see, Turkish shelling had blackened green hills like burned toast. Turkish troops goose-stepped past a newly erected bust of Ataturk, their eyes empty and moronic, dangerous as cobras. Their commanders had already flogged some of them for looting and rape.

  When I drove up to a beautiful Greek village I’d known, I found it empty. It was a corpse: deserted, looted, silent. A gutted tank stood outside the church door, and two mules with no one to feed or water them tugged desperately at a vine.

  ‘A dead place,’ I said to a Turkish officer.

  ‘Dead place, yes,’ he said glumly.

  Later, on the Greek side, I watched Turkish villagers moving north from houses they’d inhabited for decades. Their farm animals and tractors had been sold to their neighbours, Greek peasants, but they had loaded less precious possessions, such as Singer sewing machines and saucepans, on trucks provided by the United Nations. From years of habit, the old people had carefully padlocked their front doors with shaking hands, as if they had only gone out for a stroll and would be back for dinner. Their villages became so many earthbound Marie Celestes. Through curtains flapping against barred windows, I could see food on the tables and fires still smouldering in grates, but not a cat or a dog or a hen. Life had fled before the glow expired in these ancient hearths.

  There were worse things down in the great central valley nearer the capital, Nicosia. There the mass graves of massacred Greek Cypriot peasants were being uncovered. (There were similar graves on the Turkish side, too.) In Nicosia itself the young Greek soldiers cried for revenge and older people cried for grief. The keening could be heard around the city’s school bulletin boards with their long lists of those still missing and the shorter ones of the newly traced dead.

  Driving once more across the plain to the divided capital, I seemed to hear those cries now.

  *

  Although divided, Nicosia hadn’t changed much in the year and a half since I’d been there. In spite of the pitiless killing and the madness of the destruction, I was still fond of it because of the Turks and Greeks I still knew there.

  In old Turkish Nicosia you can look through open doorways at men cobbling, women sewing in cool, arched, stone-walled rooms, or at children playing in courtyards from which slender palm trees reach for the sky and bushier trees and shrubs spread shade. Here the older and poorer people live in space and greenness; the nouveaux riches pay through the nose for persuasive architects to slap together jerry-built houses and flats, hot boxes sitting in acres of brick rubble. Through old wooden doors one sees the precious things in unpretentious lives: sewing machines, photographs on dressers of smiling girls in wedding dresses and frowning young men in uniform, TV sets with bugle-shaped vases of plastic flowers set on them, coloured photographs of the mosque in Mecca, and chandeliers overhead like tinsel tiaras. There is no squalor.

  But the absence of squalor is not enough. You can see why young men want to leave for places where they think there’s a bit of life – London, Hamburg, Sydney. A Turkish Cypriot friend once said to me, ‘There are men here of thirty who are still virgins. Muslim tradition prevents them, on pain of death or a terrible beating at the hands of the girl’s brothers or father, from touching a Turkish girl. They’d do anything to get their hands on a foreign girl, but, of course, it’s not always possible. You have no idea of the intensity of the frustration here.’

  Perhaps the mass graves are partly a symptom of the frustration. Repression and massacre, that legacy of a claustrophobic religious tradition.

  The British vice-consulate on the Turkish side is a moderately grand building; before the partition it was the residence of the British high commissioner, and now also houses the British Council. A visa officer showed me to his room, and from there I telephoned the Greek Cypriot Information Department, a Mr Hadjiyannis. I explained why I wanted to cross over, and he said, of course, come across to the Greek side if I was proposing to travel to Limassol for the purpose of a book. Could I cross that morning, I asked. ‘Yes. Come to my office,’ he said.

  As I put down the telephone a reddish-haired man with a moustache and freckles wandered in and said, ‘Can I help in any way? Do you need transport?’ He was obviously an Englishman.

  ‘I want to cross the Green Line. The Greek information people say it’s all right. If you could drop me at the Cleopatra Hotel?’

  ‘I’ll take you with pleasure. I’m the British Council rep, by the way, Richard Le Fanu.’

  ‘I knew a Le Fanu some years ago in Aden, an admiral of the fleet. Sheridan Le Fanu, the writer of horror stories, was his grandfather or great-grandfather. Yours too, probably.’

  ‘Yes, old Sheridan’s an ancestor.’

  We drove to the Turkish checkpoint near the bullet-chipped walls of the old Ledra Palace Hotel, which before the fighting had been one of the famous hotels east of Athens, a home away from home for journalists, officials and diplomats in transit, and for foreign tourists who, year after year, visited Cyprus for its peace and quiet. Now it was a United Nations barracks occupied by Canadian soldiers. On its balconies their towels and bathing suits were hung out to dry.

  At the checkpoint, while Le Fanu spoke to a Turkish policeman who knew him, a voice said, ‘Mr Gavin, you are leaving us?’ A fat, smiling Turk came up to me, and I recognized Inspector Ali, an old friend.

  In the winter preceding the invasion, I had toured the north of the island with the idea of buying a small house there. One day I stopped to give a hitchhiker a lift; he turned out to be Inspector Ali. In return for the ride, Ali invited me to meet his family in their cluttered flat outside the old walls of Nicosia: a jolly wife, two roly-poly daughters, a teenage son offering me orang
eade under the clothes line on their diminutive balcony. It had been easy to visit them regularly until the Green Line barriers went up, but on my last two trips to Cyprus I hadn’t managed to cross the barriers to visit them. It was a pure fluke that I was seeing Ali now. And now there was no time to stop and reminisce about the good old pre-invasion days.

  ‘Ali,’ I said, grabbing his hand, ‘I have to go. I’m travelling to China. I’ll be back in a few months’ time to tell you about it.’

  ‘We’ve moved to Kyrenia now, all the family. We would like to welcome you when you come back. My salaams to China.’

  I shook Ali’s hand and Le Fanu drove me through the roadblock. A hundred yards on, the Greek police said they’d had a message from Mr Hadjiyannis’s office to let me through. They wrote my name in a book and said, ‘Okay. Bye-bye.’ Le Fanu drove on toward the Cleopatra Hotel. I was through the Green Line; there was no reason now to return to Famagusta.

  ‘You see, they’re nice people in Cyprus.’

  ‘Once again I’m grateful to a Le Fanu. Do you realize you have the hair of the Elphbergs?’

  ‘Elphbergs?’

  ‘The royal House of Elphberg in Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda was famous for its red hair. It was one reason why Rudolf Rassendyll managed the impersonation, remember?’

  Richard Le Fanu laughed. ‘My God, I’d forgotten that. Yes, the Le Fanus have that red hair.’

  ‘I suppose Sheridan had it, even if his stories turned other people’s hair white.’

  ‘Stories like “Green Tea”!’ That monkeylike thing crouching in the corner!’