Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (5 page)

I entered the cave with circumspection and greeted Clito, whom I had seen before. He stood behind his own bar with a faint and preoccupied kindness graven on his thin face, gazing up at the flute-player with the helpless affection of a moth drunk on sugar water. He held his hand over his mouth to imprison his laughter.

The musician was a large sturdy peasant clad in tall black boots and baggy Turkish trousers of rusty black. He wore a sweat-stained shirt of serge, open at the throat to show a woollen vest which had once been white. He had a fine head and a thick untrimmed moustache; a blue and somewhat vague eye, and at his belt a finely carved gourd for a water-bottle. On his head he wore a sort of bonnet made from a strip of lambswool. He was gorgeously drunk.

At either elbow stood a sleepily smiling Turkish policeman with the air of a mute, waiting to help with
the body when the service was complete; they both made deprecating noises from time to time, saying “You shut up, now,” and “That’s enough,” and so on, but with a helpless lackadaisical air. The fact that both had large glasses of cognac before them seemed to indicate that the law-breaker was not the ogre he sounded, and that this was by way of being a performance repeated regularly. They were used to it. I had no sooner deduced this than Clito confirmed it. “Every time he has a Name Day in his family he drinks. He’s a strange one.” “Strangeness” in Greek means “a character.” One indicates the quality by placing one’s bunched fingers to the temple and turning them back and forth in the manner of someone trying a door-handle. Clito made the gesture furtively and let it evolve into a wave—towards a chair from which I could watch the fun. “His name is Frangos,” he said, with the air of a man who explains everything in a single word.

“Who dares to say I am drunk?” roared Frangos for perhaps the ninth time, blowing with the same breath a squeak or two from his handsome brass flute. More guffaws. He then began a splendid tirade, couched in the wildest argot, against the damned English and those who endured them with such patience. The policemen began to look more alert at this, and Clito explained hastily: “When he goes too far …
pouf!
they cut him off and take him away.” With his two fingers he edited a strip of cinema film. But Frangos seemed to me a formidable person to cut off in this fashion. He had shoulders
like an ox. One of the policemen patted him awkwardly and was shaken off like a fly. “Why,” bellowed Frangos, “do you tell me to shut up when I am saying what everyone knows?” He gave a toot on his instrument and followed it up with a belch like a slammed door. “As for the English I am not afraid of them—let them put me in irons.” He joined a pair of huge fists dramatically. A couple of timid English spinsters peered nervously into the tavern as they passed. “Let them fire on me.” He tore open his shirt and exposed an expanse of breastbone curly with dense black hair with a gold cross nestling in it. He waited for a full half-second for the English to fire. They did nothing. He leaned against the bar once more, making it creak, and growled on, lashing his tail. Renos, the little boot-black sitting next to me, was shaken by giggles; but lest I might find this impolite he explained breathlessly between sobs: “He doesn’t really mean it, sir, he doesn’t.”

Frangos took another stately draught of the white cognac before him and turned a narrow leonine eye upon me. “You observe me, Englishman?” he said with contemptuous rudeness. “I observe you,” I replied cheerfully, sipping my drink. “Do you understand what I say?” Somewhat to his surprise I said: “Every word.” He leaned back and sighed deeply into his moustache, flexing his great arms and inflating his chest as prize-fighters do during a preliminary work-out. “So he understands me,” he said in coarse triumph to the world in general. “The Englishman, he actually understands.”

I could see from everyone’s expression that this was regarded as having gone a bit too far—not only because I was English, but because impoliteness to any stranger is abhorred. The policemen stood up and braced themselves for the coming scuffle. Clito wagged his head sadly and uttered an apologetic
po-po-po
. This was obviously the point where our friend got himself edited like a strip of film. The policemen showed an understandable reluctance to act, however, and in the intervening silence Frangos had time to launch another derisive shaft at me. He threw up the great jut of his chin squarely and roared: “And what do you reply to me, Englishman? What do you think sitting there in shame?”

“I think of my brother” I said coolly.

“Your brother?” he said, caught slightly off his guard by this diversion which had just occurred to me.

“My brother. He died at Thermopylae, fighting beside the Greeks.”

This was a complete lie, of course, for my brother, to the best of my knowledge, was squatting in some African swamp collecting animals for the European zoos. I put on an air of dejection. The surprise was complete and a stunned silence fell on the wine-impregnated air of the tavern. Clito himself was so surprised that he forgot to turn off the spigot in the great cask of red wine and a stain began to spread across the dusty flea-bitten floor. Frangos looked as though someone had emptied a slop-pail over him,
and I was rather ashamed of taking this easy advantage of him. “Your brother,” he mumbled slowly, swallowing, not quite knowing which way to turn, and yet at the same time being unwilling to be so easily discountenanced.

“The Cypriots forget many things,” I said reproachfully. “But we don’t forget. My brother’s corpse does not forget, and many another English boy whose blood stains the battlefield.…” I gave them a fragment from a newspaper peroration which I had once had to construe during a Greek lesson and which I had memorized for just such occasions. Frangos looked like a cornered bull, sheepishly turning his great head this way and that. It was clear now that he wasn’t even drunk, but merely mellow. He had been acting the part expected of him on a Name Day. A fleeting expression of shy reproach crossed his face. It was as if he had said aloud: “How damned unfair of you to introduce your brother just when I was getting into my stride. Perfidious Englishman!” I must say I sympathized; but I was unwilling to lose my advantage. It was clear that if I harped on my imaginary brother it would not be long before Frangos could be wrung out like a wet dish-rag. “Your brother,” he mumbled again, uncertain of the proper mood to wear. I saved him now by calling for more drink and he subsided into a smoldering silence at one end of the room, casting a wicked eye at me from time to time. He was obviously turning over something in his mind.

“Englishman,” he said at last, having worked the whole thing out to his satisfaction, “come and stand beside me and drink to the
palikars
of all nations.” This was indeed a handsome toast and I lost no time in honoring it in brandy. It was not long before all of us, including Clito himself and the policemen, were splendidly tipsy. Frangos sat down in the traditional Cypriot fashion upon five chairs, one for the rump and one for each member, and taunted Clito into a few rather unsteady dance-steps. I obliged with a rendering of the “Forty Palikars” which met with great approval. The policemen giggled.

Our evening was at last brought to an end by the appearance of an extremely smart Inspector of Police, a Greek, who in exquisite English, and with an intimidating politeness, asked me to break the evening up. “We might,” he explained gently, “have a breach of the peace.” It sounded a splendid thing to have but for Frangos’s own sake it seemed wiser to defer it, so we issued still amiably arguing and cursing into the moonlight where Frangos, after almost falling into a shop window, finally found his way to the tiny public garden where he unhitched an improbably small horse from an acacia tree and wavered off into the night accompanying his journey with toots on the flute. I gathered that he did not live far away.

Clito, who had accompanied the party, wearing the air of a man concerned for our safety, but in fact because he hated to miss the least of Frangos’s drunken witticisms, now took my arm with an air of loving
commiseration. “You must have one last drink with me,” he said. It seemed wiser to refuse as the hour was late, but he pleaded with me like a small boy who is afraid to be left alone in the dark. “For your brother’s sake,” he said at last, convinced that this at least could not be shrugged off, and led my lagging steps back to his cavern. Several of the spigots had been left on or half on and the worm-eaten floor of the cavern was liberally bepuddled with country wine. He lit a candle, cursing the failure of the electric light which had reduced Kyrenia to darkness that evening. By its dim light I studied the place. The confusion was indescribable; piles of empty cases, bottles and barrels were piled up in every corner, climbed every wall. But his was not really a tavern so much as a wholesale wine-shop with a few chairs for customers who became too argumentative or bibulous to leave: it was understood that before buying a liter of wine one had the right to sample the contents of each and every butt which lined the back wall of the cave. Insensibly samplers turned into tavern-clients, for it is always difficult to make up one’s mind in a hurry, and sometimes it might be necessary to have as many as three or four whacks at a cask before one was sure about it. Hence a few chairs and tables set about for the use of the undecided. Clito turned off all the spigots he could see, administered a well-aimed kick at some which were out of immediate reach, set up a bottle of cognac and two glasses, and sat himself down with a sigh of relief.

“Thank God Frangos has gone,” he said. “Now we can drink to your brother. Long live your brother!”

He did not seem aware that a certain incongruity lay in such a toast. I echoed him solemnly, however, and raised a glass.

The front door of the wine-shop had been firmly locked behind us when we returned and it was some time before there came a knocking at the wooden panels. We were by this time deep in an argument about the growing of mushrooms—I cannot for the life of me think why, there are so few in Cyprus. Clito was laying down the law, and had actually banged the table to emphasize a point, when he heard his wife’s voice in the street outside. He froze. “What is it, dear?” he said in a small voice—the voice of a gnat attacked by the vapors. His wife replied in a clear voice. “What are you doing in there? I want to come in.”

Clito put his fingers to his lips and said: “Just stock-taking, my love.” There was an ominous pause during which we both emptied our glasses and winked at each other. It was an unconvincing statement on the face of it—for the whole tavern, and indeed its owner, bore the unmistakable signs of belonging to that ideal world where income tax and stock-taking have never been heard of. To my surprise his wife gave a cackle of good-natured laughter. “You have become a great man of business, have you?” she said, and Clito answered, “Yes, dear,” with a mixture of meekness and injured dignity. “Why can’t I come in?” asked his wife in a
friendly voice full of indulgence to the great wine merchant. “Because,” said Clito with a touch of asperity (he was on stronger ground here), “there is a little disorder in our shop.” It was putting it mildly.

Over the bar hung a Victorian print. It was divided into two panels in the manner of a Byzantine icon. On one side sat an old gentleman in the prime of life, with elegant nankeen trousers and an opulent spread of gold watch-chain. A curled head of hair, neat whiskers of the mutton-chop variety, and spotlessly laundered cuffs, set off his appearance. He was seated jauntily before a roll-topped desk out of whose every drawer poured a cascade of five-pound notes which drifted about his ankles. He was smiling and held one thumb inside the flap of his tweed waistcoat. Under him was written in Gothic script the legend: “I sold for Cash only.”

In the opposite corner sat another man, so yellow and cadaverous as to appear to be in the last stages of consumption; his rusty, moth-bedeviled business suiting and wrinkled dicky suggested extremes of dreadful indigence. His frayed cuffs and yellow teeth, his bald head and purple eye, showed to what lengths he had been driven by his refusal to adopt simple business maxims within the grasp of all. He too sat at a roll-topped desk—but out of every drawer poured frightful IOUs which had never been honored. Under him was written in letters of fire “I sold for Credit.”

I examined these two monitors while Clito engaged his good-natured wife in further explanations, none of
which sounded very subtle to me. But she was obviously a good-tempered woman and after a while she left us to ourselves, after extracting from him a promise that he would not be late home.

“She is really a very
good
woman,” said my host grudgingly. “But
much
trouble,
much
fuss, and brain—
finish
.” From time to time, as a compliment to me, he dropped into a telegraphic English. He added in Greek: “We nearly starved, you know. Our shop is still not a going concern. And a lot of work, too.”

The bottle of cognac was low and I now recognized in it, despite its colorless innocence, a formidable adversary which, if taken too lightly, would unhorse me completely; another bottle I thought would have seen us both comfortably to hospital, so I seized my host’s arm as he was about to wring the neck of one, and suggested a change to wine.

“Wine,” he said, and his voice was charged with a professional tenderness. “Such wine as Clito has you will not see in Cyprus. Such wine.” He leaped up like a faun and smacked a cask with the flat of his hand until it gave off a resonant boom like a distant eructation of Frangos among the olive-glades. “Wine from Paphos” (bang), “Wine from Lefka” (bang), “Wine from Limassol” (bang). He walked up and down the row of casks like someone playing an arpeggio on a xylophone. “And all fresh country wine, sent to me by my family, unbottled, free from chemicals.” He sat down and added in a small deflated voice: “So cheap too, but nobody buys it.”

My curiosity aroused, I had him lay me out a dozen sample glasses which were filled, albeit somewhat unsteadily, from the line of spigots. There were, in all, about eight varieties of wine and cognac and we took our time, quietly going over the properties of each one as we drank it; Clito dwelt long and lovingly on the pedigree, the soil, the landscape and the character of its makers. His disquisition was so full of poetry that in some cases he made a sample taste a good deal better than it in fact was; but I was in no mood to cavil.