The Sunrise (29 page)

Both Aphroditi and Savvas smiled, though their reasons were very different.

Over the following weeks, provisions became more varied and plentiful and a few more people began to drift back to the city hoping to repair their lives.

A new normality began to evolve. One by one the
kafenia
opened up again. On the day when the
zacharoplasteion
where her mother used to take her after school displayed cakes in its window, Aphroditi felt a surge of optimism. The following day, she took one of the tables inside and treated herself. She still needed to regain the weight she had lost and hoped her craving for pastries was going to help.

News of Famagusta had not been positive so far. There had been little progress with talks. The newspapers informed them that there was still much to negotiate before they could return.

‘We have to be patient, Aphroditi,’ said Savvas.

These words, from the most short-tempered man she had ever known, puzzled her, but when she came in one day and saw him sitting at her father’s big desk, she soon realised what had caused him to say them.

Savvas had found some advantage in what had taken place. In front of him were the floor plans of a building.

‘Is it The New Paradise Beach?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Savvas. ‘It’s another hotel.’

He responded to her quizzical look.

‘I was going to wait before telling you,’ he said, looking both sheepish and pleased. ‘It was too big an opportunity to miss.’

‘What was?’

‘Nikos Sotiriou decided to sell his hotel. He had been wanting to take early retirement even before this crisis, so he offered it to me for thirty per cent of what it’s worth.’

The hotel Savvas had bought was Famagusta’s second most luxurious after The Sunrise.

‘Even by conservative estimates it was a bargain. Some others might come up. So as soon as we can return to the city, we’ll do a few repairs and open again. If I get the other one I have my eye on, it will make me the biggest hotel owner in Famagusta.’

Aphroditi was astonished.

‘But—’

‘I’ve taken out a loan. Not a cheap one, but I promise it will pay off. I am absolutely certain of it.’

Aphroditi felt slightly faint. It was almost beyond belief that Savvas had behaved like this in these uncertain times.

‘But we have nothing to sell to repay the loan …’

‘We won’t have to,’ he said snappily.

A moment passed. Aphroditi said nothing, just stared at her husband. He continued.

‘There’s always this place … your mother has her house in England. And there’s the jewellery sitting in the safe. That’s a tidy sum. Plenty of security.’

Savvas Papacosta’s optimism and the fact that he had acted without consulting her took her breath away.

‘I think I’ll go out for some fresh air,’ she said.

She needed to get away from her husband, and the late autumn weather had even brought a small breeze.

Down in the street, she found herself taking an almost automatic path towards the pastry shop. It was somewhere to go, somewhere comforting. The selection was limited, but a small slice of baklava with a cup of coffee would cheer her, even if it was only for a few minutes. She was totally incredulous that Savvas had risked so much.

As she waited to be served, she surveyed her fellow customers. Most of them were women her age or slightly older, perhaps less
soignée
than they might have been a year earlier, but they had all dressed up to go out. Just as it was for men going to the
kafenion
, meeting friends in the
zacharoplasteion
was a much-needed taste of normality for the ladies of Nicosia. One table in particular caught her eye.

A woman, aged sixty perhaps, with a helmet of backcombed black hair, was chatting to her friends, a group of three women all with similarly over-tended locks. Aphroditi knew her face. With her politician husband, she had been a frequent visitor to the nightclub. She recalled her from the opening party but knew that recognition would not be mutual.

In the dust and disarray of the city, it was miraculous to see these women chatting as if they had not a care in the world. Wafts of heavy perfume emanated from their table. Perhaps one of them was Aphroditi’s own favourite scent, but now the heady mix nauseated her.

The women were noisy and dominating, and their garish clothes and bright lipstick seemed out of place in the dilapidated street. Aphroditi could tell that they had all once been prized for their beauty and were determined not to let their looks fade. With her scrubbed face and her mother’s clothes, she no longer felt part of their world.

Suddenly she noticed something. The youngest of them was wearing a ring. It was the flash of its diamonds in the light that caught Aphroditi’s eye, but only when the woman’s hand stopped waving about (clearly she wanted to draw attention to it) could she get a proper look.

All the sugar she had just consumed seemed to surge through her body.

She saw a yellow diamond, perfectly circular in shape and the size of a small coin, surrounded by smaller ones, also yellow, set in platinum. There could not be two similar rings on the island. There was no mistaking it. It was hers.

Aphroditi was paralysed. There was no question of going up to the woman and accusing her of theft. Sitting in her mother’s old-fashioned clothes, trying not to be noticed, it was the last thing she could do.

Trembling like a leaf, she paid her bill and left. How had her ring ended up on this woman’s finger? It was not merely that she felt robbed. It was something even more pressing.

What had happened to Markos? How could anyone have retrieved that ring from the safe without his knowledge? Now more than ever, she needed to know.

Aphroditi took the shortest route home, her legs shaking so much they could scarcely carry her.

I
N FAMAGUSTA, THE
habit of visiting the Georgious soon became a daily one for Emine, who was always carefully escorted by Hüseyin and in the company of Mehmet. Little Vasilis was as excited as Mehmet to have a new playmate, even when they ended up playing games of soldiers, an activity that he did not really understand.

Everyone had got used to keeping their voices low. The skies were quiet now, but if they grew complacent about the danger they were in, then all might be lost. There was nothing to indicate to them what was happening outside the city.

‘Do we really need to stay now?’ Irini asked Markos.

‘If the soldiers don’t know we’re here,’ he answered, ‘then we’re probably better off here than anywhere else. We have food and we’re safe.’

‘How do we know what’s safe out there?’ asked Emine. ‘If Markos is right about this dividing line, there might be chaos everywhere.’

‘If the line is meant to be separating Greeks and Turks, there’ll be plenty of people on the wrong side of it, I suppose,’ Irini reflected.

‘We could go north of the line,’ said Hüseyin. ‘We still have family and friends in Maratha.’

‘If you suddenly appear out there,’ interjected Vasilis, ‘you’ll be putting us in danger too. They’d come looking for others.’

‘Well in any case, nothing has changed for me,’ said Emine. ‘Until Ali comes back, I’m not leaving.’

Once Vasilis became involved, the discussion grew heated. Maria picked up Vasilakis and went into the bedroom, where the baby was sleeping. Mehmet was left once again to listen to the sound of adults arguing.

‘Why don’t you fetch your father, Hüseyin?’ suggested Markos. ‘We should see what he thinks too.’

Halit was sitting smoking on his doorstep. He looked very much at ease, just as he would have been in his old life. When he saw Hüseyin, he immediately castigated him.

‘Why did you leave them alone there?’

He could never put to one side his anxiety over what might happen to his wife and children in a house full of Greek Cypriots.

‘Will you come, Father?’

‘What? To that
Greek
house?’

‘We’re talking about whether to leave. It affects all of us,’ he insisted.

‘Us? Which
us
?’

‘Please. It’s important. Just for a few minutes.’

‘Well I’ll come, but I won’t sit down.’

Looking around him, Halit stubbed out his cigarette and crossed the street with his son.

Everyone except Vasilis stood up when Halit entered the room, and Irini greeted him warmly.

‘Welcome to our home,’ she said. ‘Let me make you some coffee.’

Halit remained standing, just as he had said he would. The others resumed their discussion about whether the departure of the Özkans was a good idea. They had scant information on which to base such a decision.

As Halit was about to say what he thought, they all heard the same sound. The slamming of car doors. It was close by but not directly outside. Then came voices.

They all froze. Turkish soldiers had not been on patrol in their street for some days now and they had been feeling safe. There was shouting, the sound of hammering, a door being kicked in, the groan of gears being crunched into reverse and then more yelled instructions. After twenty minutes or so, everything went quiet again. It had seemed a long time.

Irini, Vasilis, Panikos, Emine, Halit and Hüseyin all breathed a sigh of relief. Maria and the children were still in the bedroom and oblivious.

‘I think they’ve gone,’ Hüseyin whispered finally. ‘Let me go and see.’

He padded towards the door, drew the latch across and stepped outside. In a moment he was outside his family’s home. There was debris around it and he realised almost immediately that it was their front door that lay in splinters on the street.

He walked across the threshold. Even though he could see that there were items missing, the overturned tables and chairs and the spilled contents of drawers and cupboards made the house seem more cluttered than it had been before.

His father’s precious backgammon board had gone, frames were missing from the walls and the fridge had been removed. The store cupboards had been opened. A chest of drawers where his mother kept some silk cloths had been pulled open and the contents taken. Their small bust of Atatürk had been dropped on the floor, but the valueless
nazar
was intact, so he grabbed that as he left.

He ran back to the Georgious’ house to break the bad news.

‘You know what this means?’ exclaimed Emine.

Nobody spoke for a moment, but the truth had dawned on them all.

‘They will know someone was living there.’

When Hüseyin returned to the house with his father and touched the warm pan of pilaf that his mother had cooked for eating that evening, he knew she was right. Even the fragrance of the cinnamon that still hung in the air would have told the soldiers that the house was inhabited.

Back at the Georgious’, where Emine was being comforted by Irini, the two families now discussed what they should do.

‘They’ll be back,’ said Vasilis bluntly. ‘If they know people were living in that house, they’re going to be looking for them.’

‘And they might even come hunting for others now,’ said Halit.

‘So we all need to get out of here?’ asked Irini.

Everyone in the room looked at each other with fear and uncertainty. The only sound was the baby crying. She was completely recovered and her cries were lustier than before.

After a few moments, Markos spoke.

‘I think we need to leave this street. But …’

‘But what?’ asked his mother. She had already removed their icon from the wall and put it in the pocket of her apron. There was a growing sense of urgency in the room.

‘I don’t think we should leave Famagusta.’

‘What?’ Halit Özkan was incensed that this Greek Cypriot was telling him what he should do. ‘It’s different for us than it is for you! Why shouldn’t we leave?’

‘Halit, no …’ said Emine.

‘I don’t think we have a choice now.’ He appealed directly to his wife.

Markos felt a prickle of anxiety. The last thing he wanted was for the Özkans to leave. He felt it was safer for his own family to have them close by; moreover, he needed more time. He was still working out how to profit from his effective ownership of The Sunrise and the enormous riches in its vaults.

‘Just a moment,’ he said, thinking quickly. ‘There’s something I need to show you.’

He ran up to his apartment, two steps at a time. In less than a minute he was back with an old newspaper in his hand. It was in Turkish.

‘I found this,’ he said. ‘Some soldiers must have dropped it so I picked it up.’

In spite of his resolution to remain standing in the Georgiou house, Halit sank down into the nearest seat.

‘My dearest,’ gasped Emine. ‘Whatever is it?’ She could see from the expression on his face that something terrible had taken place.

He looked up at her but could not speak.

Hüseyin crossed the room, took the newspaper from his father’s hands and stared at its front page.

‘
Aman Allahım!
’ he whispered. ‘Oh my God! It’s our village …’

He looked at his mother and then once again at the front page. It was dominated by a picture of people digging. They were members of the Red Cross, and soldiers in United Nations uniform stood watching them.

The headline was stark:
‘MASSACRE IN MARATHA’.

Beneath the photograph there was a detailed account of what had happened. The atrocity had taken place some weeks earlier, on 14 August, but the full scale of it had only been discovered when the bodies were exhumed many days later.

Eighty-eight mutilated corpses, badly decomposed, had been found in a pit. Mothers were still clutching babies, the youngest less than a month old, and there were signs that some of the women had been raped before they were slaughtered. Bodies were decapitated and several were missing one or both of their ears.

Damage to the corpses showed that they had been bulldozed into the pit where they were found.

Emine came round to the other side of the table and pulled the newspaper from her son’s hands. As she read it, tears streamed down her face.

A Greek Cypriot eyewitness said that all the males over fifteen years of age had been marched out of the village. Only old men had been allowed to stay. According to the man who had volunteered the information, the perpetrators were both Greek and Greek Cypriots. He thought they might have been EOKA B.