by Ward Just
FAMAGUSTA
15
THAT’S WHAT I know of that long-ago summer under the high-topped tents, an unfinished season sure enough. By the end of the decade my parents had given up the Midwest and moved to Florida, where my mother gave lessons in feng shui and my father practiced coming out of a fairway sand trap with a five iron; and a, decade later they were both gone. When they moved south, I had no reason to visit Chicago and never did again. Still, wherever I went in the world I was careful to check the papers for a Chicago dateline, and over the years understood that the city was having something like a renaissance. It was in the Herald Tribune that I found a two-line obit of Ozias Tilleman and, a little later, two paragraphs on Georg Brunis. One of the Cordes girls married a tennis professional and I always checked the tournament summaries to see how he had done; but by the early 1960s he had slipped in the rankings, and disappeared from the sports pages. In the last year of the Eisenhower administration, Charlie Smithers got an ambassadorship, one of the Caribbean nations. Much later, my old day school hired a new headmaster, a Melville scholar from Hotchkiss or St. Paul’s, one of those two.
Quarterday, the North Shore, Lincoln Park—that world is lost to me now. It began to diminish when I went away to college and acquired an adult life—the University of Chicago was good at that—and continued to diminish over the years. It’s a fact, as I predicted, that from time to time Aurora dances in from the wings of my memory and I recall the mysterious gesture she made that afternoon in her apartment and, weeks earlier, the soft sound of her bears tumbling from the bed, Benny Goodman’s clarinet rising from a car radio in the park. Whenever I see one of Brando’s pictures I remember his grave expression as he listened to the doctors Bloom describe the manner of Jack Brule’s death. Each presidential election is cause for reflection on the accidental encounter with Adlai Stevenson on Astor Street, a middle-aged man in a suit one size too small, bound for a rendezvous with a woman in Libertyville—or so I hoped. These recollections last no more than a few seconds, a snapshot as opposed to a film, and then I return to the here and now. Mysteries have an allure for me and I have always been reluctant to delve too deeply into Aurora’s, a reporter “digging” into the “story” for the “truth.” Searching in a dark room for a black hat that isn’t there, as a cynical colleague of mine once put it. Sometimes you make too much of things, Aurora said to me more than once, and she wasn’t the only one, exasperated by my lack of intuition and, all too often, by my excess. When you are trying to understand the way the world works and have so little to go on, you make what you can from the materials at hand, and so it’s natural to infer quite a lot from almost nothing. Intuition is the subtitle for experience. You believe you have found someone to trust who will trust you in return, no small hope. And when you give away a piece of your heart, you’d like to believe it’s being safely kept, since you can never get it back. I have never had the slightest illusion that I could bend the world to my will, and I refused to bend to the world’s, and so I have lived a kind of shadow life.
Then, many years later, my work brought me to Cyprus.
I finished my business in Nicosia by early afternoon and decided to take a roundabout route to Famagusta, visiting some of the places I had seen decades before. The day was fine, the sky a Mediterranean blue, warm enough so that I could put down the top of my rented Alfa. I drove north over the mountains to Kyrenia, St. Hilarion Castle gloomy on a mountaintop miles away. I made the journey in no time at all, had a snack at the port, and hiked up to Bellapais, Lawrence Durrell’s village of earthly delights. In the old days I often took tea with a poet who lived there and in time came to depend on him for political intelligence, the endless back-and-forth of the Greeks and the Turks on the divided island. The poet described conditions on Cyprus in language so richly ambiguous that I regularly quoted him in my reports to the Secretary-General, himself a man of no little subtlety, who used to say that at the United Nations ambiguity was a sacrament and its graceful expression a virtue of the highest order, and if the poet ever got to New York he wanted to give him lunch. But the poet was disinclined to leave Bellapais for any reason, though mightily tempted by the Sec-Gen’s invitation. Do you happen to know His Excellency’s sign, Wils? When I said Virgo, the poet raised his eyebrows and laughed and laughed. He was long dead now but I found his house with no difficulty. It was owned by an Israeli expatriate who kindly invited me in and was very pleased to learn that his retirement villa had once been a poet’s workshop. The garden was filled with butterflies coasting among the lemon trees, just as I remembered it.
I motored east to Famagusta, driving slowly because I was searching for a village I knew well in the early 1960s. It was my coming-of-age village, the place where I found my métier. I was awakened early one morning by the concierge of my hotel. Please, Mr. Ravan, can you go at once and try to stop them from killing each other? He gave me directions to the village and I did go at once, arriving just before dawn. It was a Turkish village and the Mukhtar was dead, lying under a tree with a bullet hole in his chest. Rigor mortis had already set in and I remember that his hands were rigid, raised one inch above the ground where he lay, as if he were levitating. The villagers gave me an account of the batde, an atrocity. They showed me pictures of other atrocities in the Turkish community over the years, one picture after another of dead women and children and an occasional adult man, all the corpses mutilated. They kept the pictures in a scrapbook. The Greek marauders had come from over the hill; they lived in the adjoining village. So for the better part of a week I shuttled between the two communities, trying to get a sense of what had actually transpired. The Greeks asserted that the Turks had struck first, and they had the corpse of a Greek woman to prove it. They, too, had photograph albums of past atrocities and insisted that I inspect each one, and learn the names and ages of the dead. The wrong was never-ending. It would take centuries to settle the scores that needed settling and the island would know no peace until the accounts were squared and the Turks back in Turkey where they belonged; and the Turks said the same of the Greeks. They were an impossible people, their victimhood inspiring a kind of grandiose self-love. No people had ever suffered so greatly, endured so much, while an indifferent world looked on. Can no one aid us in our mortification? The aroma of burning charcoal hung over both villages, a pall I came to identify as the smell of poverty. So my heart went to them and I promised to help.
I had a contingency fund and spent all of it. I arranged for a squad of our blue helmets to conduct periodic patrols and eventually I secured a cease-fire and a protocol of the sort of behavior each community expected of the other. Trust and the perception of trust; and I swore them to secrecy. This was my first assignment outside the building in New York. I had only a watching brief from the Secretary-General’s office and by inserting myself into this local dispute I had violated my instructions. If one of our peacekeepers had been injured or killed or if the operation had become controversial, I would have been fired and deserved to have been fired. The press never got wind of the cease-fire, and if the Greek and Turkish authorities in Nicosia knew of it, they never said anything. When I returned to New York a month later, the cease-fire was still holding but there was so much violence elsewhere on the island, no one noticed. I never explained myself, then or later—not to the poet, not to the Sec-Gen, not to Ambassador Stevenson, not even to my family—and so it was that I came to understand what my father had meant when he said that a magnanimous act needed no amplification. I had all these thoughts in mind when I went searching for the village, in vain as it turned out. The island had changed, and the village was very small in any case. But the aroma of burning charcoal was everywhere.
I drifted through the Kyrenia Mountains and to the plain that led to Famagusta, the medieval city that lay like a mouth under the Pinocchio’s nose of the Karpas Peninsula. The poet said that the tourist officials liked to compare Famagusta favorably to Carcassonne and Dubrovnik, but that was because they had never be
en to Carcassonne or Dubrovnik. Famagusta’s golden age was the fourteenth century and the years since had not been kind, the usual capitalist mischief. Still, I had found it pleasant enough with its ruined churches and bustling markets, reminders of the various foreign marauders, Egyptians, Venetians, Genoese, Ottomans, and British. The city had taken a terrible pounding during the war. The poet spoke of Famagusta the way my father spoke of Quarterday when he was a boy, God’s own acre until it was transformed into a sprawling suburb glued together by shopping malls, auto dealerships, restaurants, and bulbous office buildings designed by the three blind mice. I came over a rise and saw Famagusta Bay in the distance, sultry in the gray light of late afternoon,freighters on the horizon, barely visible through the smoke that lay over the city. Aleppo was little more than two hundred miles to the northeast.
The first few times I was in Cyprus I tried to reach Consuela but she was never at home. The phone went unanswered. My last visit was many years ago but I was busy and never made the call. We had not seen each other since Jack Brule’s funeral and it’s fair to say she slipped from my mind. Cyprus itself moved to the world’s back burner, a perennial problem that was hopeless but not serious; and now here I was again with yet another fresh approach to the never-ending wrong. This time I was determined to see her, and when I called she picked up at once. We did not recognize each other’s voice and spent a few confusing minutes making recognition noises. When that was done, I asked her to dinner. No, she said. You come here.
It’s time we caught up with each other.
It’s been forty years, I said.
She said, Come at seven.
Then she added, Why are you here?
I work for the UN, I said. I’m here on business.
Dirty business, she said, and laughed. You really work for the United Nations?
Have done for as long as I can remember. I walked out of the University of Chicago with a law degree and an introduction to Adlai Stevenson.
Did he help?
He did, I said. Chicago boys stick together.
The UN, she said. I can hardly believe it.
It suits me, I said. I’m a sort of referee. They call it conflict resolution but you and I would call it mediation. Referee. Her laughter began back in her throat, a husky chuckle. I said, I’ve tried to call but you’re never at home.
When was that?
Years ago, I admitted.
I lived in Athens for a while. And New York for a while. I lived in one place and another. Here and there.
But you’re back now, I said.
I’m home, she agreed.
I’m happy to hear your voice, Consuela.
And I’m happy to hear yours, Wils.
Her villa sat atop a hill overlooking the water. The westerly wind had blown away most of the smog. She was some distance from Famagusta, only the glare of the lights of the busy port a reminder of its industrial presence. I had brought some wine and a bottle of Cinzano, surprising myself that I had remembered the Cinzano. I parked the car and walked up the path to a low iron gate, opened the gate, and followed the path around a whitewashed bungalow. There were other villas round and about, some dark, others occupied. It did not seem a fashionable district. The night was warm and the sea air damp, insects active around the windows of the house. From the interior I heard recorded music, and unless I badly missed my guess, Consuela was playing the Goldberg Variations. I turned the corner, the sea suddenly in view. The moon was rising somewhere over Syria, its golden light playing on the surface of the Mediterranean, most ancient of seas. Consuela was sitting in a canvas chair, smoking a cigarette and looking out over the water, wearing a bright red caftan and sandals. She was deeply tanned. Her white hair was freshly coifed, her perfume the vaguest addition to the salty climate. She had added weight but she was instantly recognizable, her profile and the way she held her cigarette, and her theatrical air, even when sitting quietly alone and smiling at something private. My failure to find the Turkish village had discouraged me, but now I was glad that I had come. I hesitated a moment, looking at Consuela serene in the moonlight and wondering if she, too, was apprehensive.
I said, Connie.
She did not stir except to tap the ash of her cigarette into a saucer.
I said again, Connie, and touched her on the shoulder.
Oh, Wils, she said, rising with difficulty. When she tilted her head to one side I saw the button in her ear, a hearing aid. You’re here at last, she said, and we kissed on both cheeks. When I handed her the wine and the bottle of Cinzano, she laughed and said, You remembered.
Of course, I said.
You look the same, she said after a moment of appraisal.
And so do you, I replied.
Well, that’s out of the way, she said.
Consuela led me inside and pointed to the ice bucket. I set about filling glasses with ice, and for now those were the only sounds in the room. It was evident that we had only one subject but the time had not arrived for its exploration. When I handed her a Cinzano and soda, my eyes strayed to a side table and a framed photograph of a handsome middle-aged man in a bathing suit, a towel around his neck and a child’s pail in his hand. My husband, Consuela said, following my eyes.
Max and I live in Athens, she went on. Famagusta is not to his taste. He prefers Rhodes. So when I come here he goes to Rhodes and we rendezvous again in Athens. Max is ah art dealer and we have been married now almost fifteen years. There was one other husband before him but that husband left me and I do not care to talk about him. Consuela’s tone reminded me of Aunt That from so many years ago, her disappeared husband, Worm, Welch, some eponymous name; and I wondered how many disappeared husbands there were in the world, millions probably, scattered on every continent.