Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (24 page)

We spent an hour shivering among the windy ruins of Vouni and drinking our wine, while my companion watched the sea boiling and fretting below us under the moon—its ruffled silver feathers flying in the windy tides which beat up from Turkey to shatter themselves on those forbidding headlands and capes, and rumble among the subterranean caves. The coast had become more desolate now and the road wound along it within sight and sound of the troubled waters; every bend was a hairpin cut into the grey mulch of a limestone whose coarse dirty thatch lay damp and inert, heavy with seashells. Once or twice we thought we saw the shadow of a man on the cliffs or among the olive trees and I pulled up, expecting a challenge, for I knew that troops were being moved into this area to support the police, but each time we were mistaken. The whole network of cliffs and promontories lay deserted under an empty sky. Kato Pyrgos, Limonias, Mansoura; we passed slatternly villages tousled in sleep, deserted
farms, deserted fishing nets hanging out to dry on scaffoldings of wooden spokes. The headlights picked up only the flaring legends which decorated the crumbling white walls of the towns, ENOSIS, DEATH TO ARMITAGE, THE BRITISH MUST GO. “These are somewhat new,” said Panos reflectively, “but then the Paphiots were always extremists. But look at this one.” In red paint, not in blue this time, the words WE WILL SHED BLOOD written athwart a coffeehouse wall. Panos sighed and nibbled at a biscuit.… “There’s something in the air,” he said in his dry academic voice, “which makes me wonder.”

The moon had grown old and feeble by the time we reached Polis and a thin severe dawn threatened us from the east, draining the sea of light and freezing the sky to a bloodless white. My companion had been dozing fitfully and now he woke and suggested that we visit the stone of Romeos, Aphrodites beach, before motoring on to the hot breakfast we had promised ourselves in the hotel at Paphos. It was a good idea to surprise the dawn at this forgotten point in history—the hollow curved beach with its great finger of rock raised in patient admonition—and to listen for a while to the oldest sound in European history, the sighing of the waves as they thickened into roundels of foam and hissed upon that carpet of discolored sand.

In the fragile membranes of light which separate like yolks upon the cold meniscus of the sea when the first rays of the sun come through, the bay looked
haunted by the desolate and meaningless centuries which had passed over it since first the foam-born miracle occurred. With the same obsessive rhythms it beat and beat again on that soft eroded point with its charred-looking sand: it had gone on from the beginning, never losing momentum, never hurrying, reaching out, and subsiding with a sigh.

We walked down towards the water together in silence, and were abruptly halted by a sight which, though unremarkable enough in itself, somehow acquired a legendary quality, enacted as it was upon that deserted strip of sand, which still echoed, as it were, in our ears with all the vibrations of a forgotten music. A sea-turtle lay dead upon the beach (some disturbing memory here—was it Orpheus’ lyre? and a lean dog was digging out and feasting upon its decomposed entrails, closely watched by a scabby vulture from a heft of rock hard by. The vulture chuckled and gurgled and ruffled its feathers with hunger, and from time to time, overcome perhaps by the horrible slobbering noises of the dog as it ate, it hopped down and started to share the repast, jabbing and pulling at the turtle with its great beak. At each sortie the dog, trembling with hunger and rage, would turn aside and attack the vulture, which leaped nimbly into the air with a great beat of its wings, and retired to its rock again, crooning and mumbling protestingly.

We drove both dog and vulture off and buried the great creature in a sand dune. Its shell was as heavy
as a paving-stone. And then rubbing our cold hands walked slowly back to the car to feel the first thin rays of the sun upon us, by whose light we finished the last of our wine and biscuits while Panos expounded the meaning of Aphrodite’s legend which he believed had been misinterpreted by the historians. She was a symbol, he said dryly, not of license and sensuousness, but of the dual nature of man—the proposition which lay at the heart of the ancient religions from which she had been derived, and to which her legend itself was the most enduring and poetic of European illustrations. She belonged to a world of innocence outside the scope of the barren sensualities which are ascribed to her cult; she was an Indian.

His words came back to me with redoubled force later that morning when I stood before the leaning black pillar against which Paul had been chained to receive the brutal thrashing which he no doubt endured with the soundless indomitable fever of his kind. It lies in a nettle-grown depression surrounded by dense greenery and buzzing with flies, a desolate and abandoned place—but then the whole of Paphos rings with desolation and decay; mean villages squatting out history among their fly-blown coffeeshops, deaf to the pulse of legend. Paul’s truth is not mine—and indeed here in Cyprus one is aware, as in no other place, that Christianity is but a brilliant mosaic of half-truths. Is it perhaps based upon some elaborate misunderstanding of the original message which the long boats of Asoka
brought from the East; a message grasped for a while in Syria and Phoenicia, but soon lost in the gabbling of the scholiasts and mystagogues, shivered into a million bright pieces under the fanaticisms and self-seeking of religious gymnasts? Here and there a moving spirit like Julian’s apprehended that the vital kernel had been lost, he did not know what, but for the most part the muddy river ran on, swallowing the rainbow.…

And then for a brief moment an Order like the Templars was irradiated by the light of the message—their defection from Christendom is one of the most fascinating of episodes; by what strange chance did it come about here in Cyprus, informed perhaps by what new sympathies those iron men had formed among the deserted temples and abandoned shrines? We only know that they were charged with assimilat ing Eastern rites and superstitions.… But there is an interesting and highly suggestive passage in the pages of Mrs. Lewis which comes to mind here. “Paphos is still called Baffo, and adoration was paid of old to a stone, called by some of the Roman historians a
meta
, or millstone from its shape.… Now the Templars were accused of worshipping an idol, or whatever the object was, which was called by them Baffometus; and all sorts of rather far-fetched explanations of the name have been brought forward.… But what if it simply meant ‘The Stone of Paphos’? The Templars’ headquarters were within a day’s ride of Baffo.” And what if the stone itself were the black navel-stone
which was later found here—perhaps the very same one which now lies in the Nicosia Museum, gathering dust: an unobtrusive witness to a truth which no longer has power to move us?

These thoughts, so appropriate to time and place, could not long endure the pressure of more worldly things: for I had promised myself to investigate the coffee shops while Panos was busy up at the farm from which he hoped to select his vine. I tried three and in each was served my coffee with a taciturn coolness which in Greeks could be counted as a slight. Radio Athens blared and rasped out its parrot-like imprecations. Hostile dark eyes surrounded me, their spite only lit by a momentary gleam when I said something in Greek. In the third shop I said that I was a German archaeological student and at once the tension went out of the air. “Hitler,” said the waiter, with a knowing air, as if he knew all about him. “How are things there now?” “Not too bad,” I said. “How are they here?” His eyes became sly and hooded, and a crooked smile came to his lips. “Bad,” he said, and shut up, at the same time abruptly switching off the radio in the back of the shop. In the silence our unspoken questions and answers hovered like bats. Yet the discourtesy, the reserve, was somehow not in the people only—it was in the air. The silent groups of young men with their piercing black eyes and shaggy hair had a look of alertness—of enthusiasm tempered by despair.

I met Panos at the hotel and we set off homeward together after reverently placing his newspaper-swaddled vine-shoots in the back of the car. He seemed preoccupied as he smoked and watched the mellow winelands spread away on both sides of the road under the brilliant afternoon sun. “What is it?” I said at last, and he put a hand on my arm. “They are saying very bad things—even untrue things—anything that comes into their heads.” “It’s very Greek,” I said. “But not very Cypriot, my friend.” He sighed once more and threw his stub out of the window. “I am trusting in the traditional good sense of the British,” he said. “It hasn’t failed before. They are slow, of course, exasperatingly slow; but they must have realized by now that while we don’t want Enosis we want to have the
right
to vote for it. Eh?” We tackled the long steep high road eastward, curling in and out of the vine-holdings, still dotted with the smashed remains of the great earthquake which had so mercifully missed the Kyrenia range—though it had passed through Bellapaix with a roar like an express train, shaking even the Abbey. Panos had brought some of the black biting Stroumbi wine with him, and he opened the bottle to sip it as we went along. “You see,” he said, “even I, who have been for so long a faithful servant of the Government—and they have treated me well—even I, who don’t want the British to leave, feel that I must have the
right
to decide the future; I confess I feel annoyed at the way we are being played with. It is not fair, my friend. Behind it
I see some of the traditional contempt for us which I know you—not you—feel, and which makes Cypriots angry. If they let things go on this way you will drive our young men—you know how headstrong they are—into actions which everyone will regret, the Cypriots most of all.”

But even he did not envisage anything as dire as the fears I was secretly entertaining—for he too, like the satraps, was thinking in terms of a serious riot or two which would be quelled as the riots of ’31 had been; the unnecessary injustice of it was what upset him. Like many Cypriots he seemed to be almost indifferent to the Athenian factor—perhaps because his view was a parochial one, based on the little community in which he lived. “What does baffle me,” he went on, “is the English newspaper, because it shows me that the Government has not grasped the most elementary fact about the problem. It speaks always about a small band of fanatics incited by self-seeking priests; but if Makarios were really self-seeking how much better off he would be in staying quiet, head of an autocephalous church? If Enosis came he would be a nobody, like the Archbishop of Crete. No, whatever else you think about us surely you understand that Enosis will ruin us financially? Do you think it is gain we are after?” His plaintive weary old voice went on, articulating the questions which so many Cypriot Greeks must have been putting to themselves at this time, without rancor or venom: colored indeed by sorrow to see such
misunderstandings grow up about facts which seemed self-evident. How to explain them?

After all, self-determination was an article of faith for the Commonwealth, was it not? If India and the Sudan could claim it, could not the Greeks of Cyprus? “I ask myself,” he said sadly. “And because it may be inconvenient now we are prepared to wait—to wait for years if necessary—on the bare assurance that one day we can vote,” and he added with a smile, “against Enosis probably—who can tell? Many of us are doubtful about a change. But the
right
, the bare
right
—you would win the island by granting us that.”

We reached Kyrenia at dusk and despite our weariness elected to have one glass of wine with Clito before bedtime. Here we were joined by Loizus “the Bear” and Andreas “the Seafarer” who were both waiting for the bus up to the village. “The Bear” had been buying wood for the balcony window frames upstairs and was pleased with his expedition. His tongue loosened under the influence of the white wine and he unbent enough to make a few gentle little jokes. But then the news came on the radio and the talk drifted round to the one subject which nagged the public mind like a toothache. “I’m so sick of Enosis, I really am,” said an old beggar in the back of the shop. “What will we do with it when we get it?” Loizus smiled and said: “Gently now. It is for our children. But there is no hurry, even the Archbishop says so; besides the British are our friends” (touching my arm) “and they will see that we get a square deal.”

Afterwards we drove up through the shadow-dappled glades towards the Abbey while Andreas sang a melancholy little song in a small tuneless voice and Loizus hugged his purchases like a child with Christmas presents. The evening was very still, and the cool silence of “The Tree of Idleness” engulfed us like a mountain pool. Sabri was up there, sitting under the leaves contemplating a black coffee, waiting for me with particular information about carob-wood—he had saved me a special load. “Sit, my dear,” he said gravely, and I sat beside him, soaking up the silence with its sheer blissful weight. The sea was calm. (Somewhere out of sight and sound the caique
Saint George
, loaded with arms and some ten thousand sticks of dynamite, was beating up the craggy coast by Cape Arnauti, making for a rendezvous near Paphos.) “It is so peaceful here,” said my friend, sipping his coffee. “But for these bloody Greeks Cyprus would be peaceful; but we Turks haven’t opened our mouths yet. We will never be ruled by Greece here; I would take to the mountains and fight them if Enosis came!” O dear!

The next morning I presented the Government with a brief political report in which I tried to condense the fragments of all these conversations into something which might interest the policymakers. The conclusions I had reached were roughly these: the present situation might be captured yet and manipulated while it was still in its operatic phase, so to speak, and capable of being turned to advantage with fair words. There was
a good chance of our gaining perhaps fifteen or twenty years on the bare promise of a democratic referendum. This would be a valuable gain—indeed an inestimable one—for it would give us time to overhaul the entire administrative machinery as well as the police; neither was fit to take the strain of a modern emergency. And while (
pace
Potter) I was prepared to believe that the Cypriots were cowards and would never show fight I was gravely alarmed at the thought of Cretans or Rhodians coming in to show them how; I had seen something of them, and in the present state of the police I wasn’t sure that public opinion, as yet sluggish and inert, couldn’t be roused by example. The state of our unpreparedness for any real crisis was frightening.