Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (2 page)

A
t dusk the mute grey destroyer which had been A playing hide-and-seek with us all afternoon heeled abruptly, disconcertingly about and vanished westward into the green ray. We turned from the rail with a sigh, aware that the light was sifting quietly away into the darkness, as casually as the plumes of smoke from the funnel of the ship which carried us. We had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time—those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.

It is now that the traveler seeks to renew, if only vicariously, his sense of connection with the land in letters to be written, documents to be sorted, baggage dispositions to be worked out. It is still warm on deck, and
from the glow of light coming from the saloon I am able to return once more to the pages of Mrs. Lewis, who in 1893 made the same voyage as ourselves, and who, in
A Lady’s Impressions of Cyprus
, has left us a spirited and observant record of life in the island when British suzerainty was only a few years old. She came within a few years of Rimbaud’s visit—the last one. With his talent for tasting every extreme the French poet not only baked himself raw in the oven-like quarries of Larnaca, but succeeded in freezing himself almost insensible on the bony heights of Troodos, building the Governor’s summer lodge, with a small team of mules and workmen. What did he think of Cyprus? He does not say. It was simply a place where a few decently paid jobs existed under the British. His two brief visits have left us a few whining references to the heat and the cold—that is all.

In the same span of time a young second-lieutenant conducted a forlorn battle with the War Office which was to result in the first accurate field-survey of the island. Those antler-like moustaches, those stern but shy eyes, were later to become an international symbol for a whole generation—Kitchener! Poet and soldier, their paths must actually have crossed on several occasions. But that is what islands are for; they are places where different destinies can meet and intersect in the full isolation of time. The poet with his grunting muleteam winding laboriously up through the foothills to the lodge he was building: Kitchener bivouacked with his two clerks and the jumble of theodolites, markers
and tables, in some worn bell-tent among the olives. They have nothing in common save that they share the same nook in time.

Yet there is one fugitive similarity. The handwriting of both men is remarkable for the conscious control it reveals over a sensibility excited beyond the pitch of the normal. Kitchener s is stronger, less sensitive—but then he had already taken refuge in the Army, behind the double-locked doors of a corporate tradition, behind the moustaches, behind a vocation as exacting as that of the Church. From this he drew the strength which Rimbaud denied himself. The French poet was of a different order of bravery, for he was on the run from the Hound of Heaven.…

In Cyprus I stumbled upon many more such echoes from forgotten moments of history with which to illuminate the present. Invaders like Haroun al Rashid, Alexander, Coeur de Lion: women like Catherine Cornaro and Helena Palaeologus … the confluence of different destinies which touched and illumined the history of one small island in the eastern basin of the Levant, giving it significance and depth of focus.

Different invasions weathered and eroded it, piling monument upon monument. The contentions of monarchs and empires have stained it with blood, have wearied and refreshed its landscape repeatedly with mosques and cathedrals and fortresses. In the ebb and flow of histories and cultures it has time and time again been a flashpoint where Aryan and Semite, Christian
and Moslem, met in a death-embrace. Saint Paul received a well-merited thrashing there at the hands of the Paphiots. Antony gave the island to Cleopatra as a gift. Aphrodite.…

I picked Mrs. Lewis off an overturned bookstall in Trieste. There had been a riot after a bomb-throwing, and I was hurrying back to my hotel from the observation-ward of the hospital. The street with its wrecked fruit-stalls and booths and smashed shop-windows was perfect illustration of my state of mind. The boat was to sail at midnight.
A Lady’s Impressions of Cyprus
stared up at me from a jumble of fruit and books, and a whole drift of smashed secondhand discs. There was no one about, though I could hear the grumble and crash of a crowd down towards the harbor. Military patrols kept roaring by. The gutters were running mournfully with wine which on the black tarmac looked like blood. The whole contents of a toy-shop had been blown into the street, giving it all a carnival air. I stopped guiltily, fearful of incurring the penalties of looting should the police return, and picked Mrs. Lewis up. Her faded green cover with its floral device promised me a Victorian travel-account which might introduce me in a most suitable manner to the Crown Colony of Cyprus. But something more than this. I felt she was a sort of omen.

A book picked up at such a time and in such a place could not turn out to be merely the vague ramblings of some dreadful nursery governess. I glanced at it and was reassured. A first-class ticket from London to
Smyrna in 1893, she informed me, cost her exactly £17 2s. 3d. Without more ado, I slipped Mrs. Lewis into my pocket beside my passport and my own ticket from Trieste to Limassol, which had cost me £47. There she would stay until I had time to digest her.

A patrol roared out of a side-street and I thought it wiser to be off with my prize. Hurrying through the misty and deserted streets I felt absurdly reassured by the little book—as if I had put myself into the hands of a trustworthy guide. Nor was my confidence misplaced. Mrs. Lewis offered me a splendid picture of Cyprus with which to compare my own experience and impressions.

W
e berthed towards sunrise in a gloomy and featureless roadstead, before a town whose desolate silhouette suggested that of a tin-mining village in the Andes. An unlovely straggle of godowns and warehouses, patched and peeling, fronted the shallow and dirty littoral. Here and there along the flat alluvial coastline, with its unhealthy suggestion of salt-pans (I was not wrong: Limassol lies upon a shallow lake), here and there the eye picked out a villa of some style or consequence in a flowering garden. But even at this early hour the sunlight created a dense haze, while the humid air of the little port came out across the still sea to meet us.

We landed by bum-boat and were charged an inordinate fee for unnecessary porterage. In the gaunt customs-house things were not too bad—but in place of the tremendous roaring and gesticulating, of chaffering and swearing, which one had come to expect from the ports of the Levant, there reigned a heavy and stupefied silence. The officials went about their duties with the air of sleepwalkers. It was surprising to find them collected enough to answer questions. I asked in Greek and was answered in English. I asked again in Greek and was once again answered in English. It was a long moment before I recollected why. I was in the presence not, as I thought, of Turks who either knew no Greek, or would not condescend to speak it: no, I was in the presence of
babus
. To lapse into Greek with anyone who was not a peasant would involve a loss of face. It was rather sad. Just to make sure I asked for the names of the customs officials with whom I had been dealing; they looked faintly surprised, but politely gave me Greek names. I wished I knew enough Turkish to see whether any such inhibition reigned among the Turkish officials.

Outside the customs house a mob of expensive-looking taxis had collected, manned by young Cypriots who shouted at me amiably enough. But altogether the atmosphere lacked
brio
. A vague and spiritless lethargy reigned. I was beginning to think that successive occupations had extirpated any trace whatsoever of the Greek genius when I was relieved by the sight
of a bus with both back wheels missing, lying on its side against a house. It was just like home. Three old ladies were dismembering the conductor; the driver was doing one of those laughing and shrugging acts which drive travelers out of their minds all over the Levant; the village idiot was pumping up a tire; the owners of the house against which the bus was leaning were hanging indignantly out of their drawing-room window and, with their heads inside the bus, were being rude to the point of nausea. Meanwhile, a trifle removed from the center of the hubbub, and seated perilously on the leaning roof of the machine, with contorted face, perched an individual in a cloth cap who appeared to be remorselessly sawing the bus in half, starting at the top. Was this perhaps some obscure revenge, or a genuine attempt to make a helpful contribution? I shall never know.

A grave-looking priest stood on the outskirts of the crowd, uttering the expression “Po-Po-Po-Po” under his breath, gently, with compassion. His lack of frenzy betokened that he had not been intending to travel on the bus himself. He was simply an onlooker, studying the tragedy and comedy of the life around him. From time to time he resettled the black bun of hair on his neck, and muttered “Po-Po-Po-Po” as some new development in the drama became clear, or as the householders reached a new high point of invective.

“Can you tell me the fare to Kyrenia?” I asked him in Greek and was at once aware of two bright surprised
brown eyes staring into mine. “You are English,” he said after a moment’s scrutiny. “Yes.” He seemed taken aback. “But you speak Greek.” I agreed; he seemed taken even further aback. He drew back like a bow-string before launching a smile of appreciation so dazzling that I felt quite bewildered.

The questions which betoken politeness now followed and it gave me great pleasure to find that I could still, after four years, hold a tolerably steady course through a Greek conversation. My host was even more pleased than I was. He dragged me to a café and filled me with heavy red wine. He himself was leaving for England that night or he would have personally made himself respon sible for this paragon, this wonder of an Englishman who spoke indifferent but comprehensible Greek.…

Before we parted he drew a piece of brown paper out of his cassock and smoothing it out with an inexpert hand wrote a message on it to his brother in Nicosia who would, he said, be responsible for my well-being until he himself got back. “You will like Cyprus,” he repeated.

This completed, he led me to the taxi rank and selected a cousin of his, a large contemptuous-looking young man, as a suitable driver to take me to Kyrenia. We parted effusively and he stood in the main street waving his umbrella until we turned a corner of the road. Father Basil.

The cousin was made of different stuff; his biting air of laziness and superiority made one want to kick him.
He answered my politenesses with grunts, gazing at me slyly in the mirror from time to time. He chewed infinite gum. He rasped his unshaven chin with his thumb from time to time. Worst of all, he drove badly. But he inadvertently did me a good turn, for as we reached the last point where the road turns inland from the sea and begins its sinuous windings among the foothills, he ran out of petrol. There was a spare can in the boot so that there was no cause for alarm; but the respite, during which I got out on to the road to light a cigarette, was useful in another way—for we had stopped directly under the bluff where the remains of ancient Amathus stand today. (Mrs. Lewis had eaten a watercress sandwich there, while brooding upon its ancient history.)

“What is that place?” I asked him, and hardly bothering to turn his fat and ugly head he replied, “Amathus” in a voice full of apathetic disdain. I left him whistling tunelessly as I climbed a little way up the bluff towards the site of the temple. The position of the acropolis is admirably chosen, standing as it does above the road at the very point where it turns inland from the sea. Priest and soldier alike would be satisfied by it. From the summit the eye can travel along the kindlier green of a coast tricked out in vineyards and fading away towards the Cape of Cats and Curium. Here and there the great coarse net of the carob tree—a stranger to me. I noticed that some of these trees had been planted in the middle of fields reserved for barley or corn. They
were presumably to give the cattle shade against the pitiless heat of August. But altogether the carob is a curious tree with its red flesh; branches torn from it leave wounds the color of human flesh.

My driver was seated disconsolately by the roadside, but his whole manner had changed. I was at a loss to explain his smiling face until I saw that he had unearthed my little volume of Greek folk-songs from among the newspapers I had left on the back seat. The change in him was quite remarkable. He suddenly turned into a well-educated and not unhandsome young man, full of an amiable politeness. He was prepared, if necessary, to stay here all night. Would I care to explore the ruins thoroughly? There was much to be known about them. It was at this point that Coeur de Lion actually landed.
*
“I know this from my brother, who works in the Museum,” he added. As for Amathus, it was up there that Pygmalion.… He plunged once more into the boot of the car and emerged with a bottle of
ouzo
and a length of yellow hosepipe which I recognized as dried octopus. We sat beside the road in the thin spring sunshine and shared a stirrup-cup and a
meze
while he told me, not only all he knew about Amathus, but all about himself and his family with an attention to detail which would have been less wearying perhaps were I planning a novel. The only point of interest in this conversation was the continual reappearance in it of an aunt of his
who suffered from palpitations of the heart and had to live on the top of Troodos; but the excellent
ouzo
and his general affability transformed the journey—freeing me at a stroke from my irritation and enabling me to look about me with a fresh eye.

We moved slowly inland now along a road which winds steeply through a green belt of vine-country, through little whitewashed villages bespattered by the slogan ENOSIS AND ONLY ENOSIS. I felt that it was too early for me to probe the national sentiments of my host and I avoided comment upon this ubiquitous piece of decoration. From time to time lorries passed, or smart saloon cars, and there was not one which did not earn a greeting from my driver. He lowered his window and shrieked across the intervening space as we passed, only to lean back once more and explain, “That was Petro, a friend,” “That was my aunt’s cousin,” “That is a friend of my uncle.” It was admirable practice for my Greek. “You would like him,” he never failed to add, politely including me in the exchange of courtesies. “He drinks like a fish. What a drinker!” We passed a succession of topers in this fashion, quietly finishing our own bottle of
ouzo
in sips and discoursing vaguely in the manner of old friends. “You seem to know everyone,” I said admiringly, and he accepted my compliment with a self-deprecating smile. “Cyprus is a small island. I think I have relations in every one of the six hundred villages. At
least
six hundred free drinks,” he added meditatively.