NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (61 page)

“There is an old Arab saying,” Habiby said, “that the Jews celebrate their feasts around gardens, the Christians around kitchens, and the Muslims around graveyards.”

A peace conference was going on at that moment in Casablanca, to which Yitzhak Rabin had been invited. I asked Habiby what he thought of the Israeli prime minister’s contribution.

“He talked too much. He should have proceeded slowly,” he said.

“You mean he was demanding too much?”

“No. He didn’t realize where he was,” Habiby said, throwing up his hands. “He was in Morocco, not Israel. He was among Arabs. But he talks to these Arabs as though he is talking to his own people.”

He was referring to Rabin’s manners, his characteristic bluster. “Being tough and businesslike, giving orders.”

“That’s it. But a little politeness would have been helpful.”

“I suppose he is feeling confident now that he has made a peace agreement with Jordan.”

“It should still be possible for him to show some politeness,” Habiby said. “Now they are committed. But instead of all this public boasting and all the urgency, why not use a little tact?”

Tact was a scarce commodity in Israel. Suspicion was so ingrained, and fear so common, that every sphere of life was affected, and the absence of faith and goodwill made people brusque. Israelis had struggled to arrive at this point, but life was still a struggle, and they perhaps saw, as Habiby had said, that they had no one else to rely on; the only allies Israelis would ever really have would be the Palestinians.

“Charmless,” I said. It was a word that summed up the atmosphere of Israel for me.

“Yes,” Habiby said, and gestured with his cigarette. “As for the peace agreement, I am not hopeful. I have doubts. But there is no going back.”

He had written, “We, Israelis and Palestinians, are already fated to be born again as Siamese twins … true solidarity with one is contingent on true solidarity with the other. There is no alternative.”

“What brings you to Israel?” he asked.

“I’m just traveling around the Mediterranean. At the moment, I’m on a Turkish ship,” I said. “It’s in Haifa—leaving tomorrow.”

“I have been traveling myself,” he said. “I must stop traveling or I’ll never write anything.”

“I know the feeling. Monotony is the friend of the writer.”

Yossi joined the conversation, first in English, then in Hebrew. Several times I interrupted to say that we ought to be leaving—after all, I had visited on such short notice. More food was brought. We ate. Habiby roared, describing the pompous attitude of Israeli politicians. Yossi nodded—yes, he agreed, it was awful.

Later than I intended, Yossi and I left, the whole Habiby family turned out to see us off and make us promise that we would come back again.

“You see, Arabs? The door is always open,” Yossi said in an admiring way. “We come there, the door is open. Cigarettes for me. Some food, thank you. Coffee, yes. Some more. Please, thank you. Take some extra.”

“You like that?”

“Oh, yes. Is good,” Yossi said. “The Arab door is always open.”

We got lost again, but Yossi was calmer. He stopped and instead of shouting out the window he got out of the car and asked directions. A man said that he would show us the way, if we followed him. We were taken down a dark narrow road through the Balfour Forest, and then on a different route to Haifa.

At Haifa, Yossi was reminded again of the hospitality at Nazareth.

“We lock our doors,” he said. “Jews don’t have open doors. No pastry. No food. No coffee.”

“What do Jews have instead of open doors?”

“Just hello. A little talk. Then good-bye.”

He kept driving, and he had second thoughts. He suspected that he had given me the wrong idea.

“But sometimes an open door is bad,” he said. “You want to talk to your wife, eh? People doing—what is Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“Laughing.”

“Yes. Laughing. It is bad. Open door can be bad. And look,” he said, and nodded at the heights of Haifa just ahead of us, Mount Carmel, the populous cliffs. “Those streets have names. Those Jews have numbers.”

He drove me to the port. He became sentimental again. “It was nice how they served us. Food. Coffee. That was nice,” he said. “You know that man was talking politics to me?”

“What did you say to him?”

“I told him, don’t ask me. I don’t know about politics.”

Instead of eating on the ship I found a restaurant and spent the last of my shekels on a meal. Every meal I ate in Israel was delicious, and I had found the Israeli countryside an unexpected pleasure. The restaurant was almost empty, like the streets; like everything else in after-dark Haifa. Everyone was home, watching TV, doing schoolwork, worrying.

All the Turks were on board the
Akdeniz
, so eager to leave, and in such a mood of celebration that even from my cabin I could hear them singing,
their voices and their plonking instruments vibrating in the ship’s steel hull, making the thing throb with music of the Arabesque.

Sometime in the night I heard the sounds of departure—clanking chains, the lines slipping and straining in the winches, barks in bad English from ship to shore and back again, and then the reassuring drone of the engines and the ship rocking slowly in the deep sea. Then uninterrupted sleep was possible.

Dawn was bright, the glare of a dusty shoreline and a fortress, a Gothic church in the distance among rooftops, Northern Cyprus. It was not a province of Turkey—silly me for thinking so—but a sovereign state, the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, bankrolled and backed and guarded by Turkey, the only country in the world which recognizes it. It was about a third of Cyprus. The southern part was Greek, and the Green Line, guarded by United Nations soldiers, divided the two. Ever since this partition there had been peace on Cyprus.

Famagusta had been renamed by the Turks Gazimagosa—the Gazi an honorific term for a warrior, since the town had come through the war with valor. It was a small town, and its port was located in the old part, surrounded by a Venetian wall. It was very ruinous, all of it, and my impression was that Turkish North Cyprus was having a very bad time. Walking slowly with Samih Pasha, Fikret and Onan, it took us thirty-five minutes to see the whole of Gazimagosa, including the church, which was no longer a church: the Gothic cathedral of St. Nicholas had been turned into the Lala Pasha mosque by the grafting of a minaret onto one of the spires.

“This is it,” Samih Pasha said, tweaking his mustache. “So we go to Girne.”

“You come with us, effendi,” Onan said. “We worried about you in Israel when we didn’t see you.”

Greek Kyrenia was now Turkish Girne. It was about sixty miles away. The four of us found a taxi, and I let the Turks haggle with the driver. They came away saying, “No, no. Ridiculous!”

The driver had said that he could not take us for less than eight hundred
thousand Turkish liras. This was $25—an outrageous amount to the Turks. I did not say that it seemed reasonable, because I was curious to know what their solution would be. It was a seventy-five-cent ride in an old bus to Lefkosa (Nicosia), a city that had been bisected by the Green Line. From there we would have to catch another bus to Girne.

On a bus that swayed down an empty road, past unplowed fields in the November heat of Cyprus, the wobbly wheels raising dust, the passengers dozing, the landscape looking deserted and arid—water was scarce, the last harvest had been terrible, the little nation was ignored by everyone—I was thinking how odd it was to be here, traveling across this bogus republic. The bus was uncomfortable, the road was bad, the food was awful, the weather was corrosive. But I had never been here before, which was justification enough; and I felt a grim satisfaction in being with a little Turkish team of men who kept telling me they worried about me when I was out of sight.

It was only an hour and a half to Lefkosa. The onward bus was not leaving for another two hours. In spite of his age, Samih Pasha walked quickly into town. He said he was eager to see the Green Line.

“Have you been here before?”

“Yes, but not on the ground,” he said, smiling. When he smiled his big mustache lifted in a big semaphore of happiness. “I was flying.”

In the ethnic fighting of 1964 and again at partition in 1974, it had been Samih Pasha’s task to fly his F-100 fighter plane from one end of Cyprus to the other, from his air base in Turkey. The object was not to engage Greek planes—the Turkish air force dominated the skies—but to break windows.

“I am flying at ten meters,” Samih Pasha said, “and when I get over Lefkosa I let out the afterburner and make a big noise—an explosion, you can say—and all the windows break!”

“Greek or Turkish windows?” I asked.

“Both! Impossible just to break Greek windows!”

And he described with pleasure the way his fighter jet streaked low across Cypriot airspace, scaring the bejesus out of the Greeks, and reassuring the Turks, who (so it was said on this side of the Green Line) had been systematically oppressed by them.

We walked down one rubbly street and up another, past some shops just closing for the lunch time siesta, to the United Nations checkpoint: a sentry post, a shed, a barrier, and a bilingual English-Turkish sign, STOP/DUR.

“I’d like to pass through,” I said to the soldier in the blue beret who stood holding an automatic rifle.

“No.”

“I just want to see Greek Cyprus and come straight back.”

“It is impossible.”

“You see?” Onan said. The others had watched me. They were much too polite to ask the soldier.

A woman came out of her house nearby and said hello in English. Her house had a colonnade in the front, and a pretty porch. I asked her whether she had crossed the Green Line, which was fifty feet away. No, she said, not for twenty years.

“This house was given to me by my father,” she said when I complimented her on it. “That was in 1930. Over there”—she pointed across the street to some abandoned houses—“was an Armenian family, and some Greeks. But they left.”

“Were they forced out of their houses?” I asked.

She got my point, and without replying directly to the question, she said, “My house in Limassol [in Greek Cyprus] is wrecked. They took my antiques. They took my Mercedes car.”

I was sorry that I had gotten her onto the subject, because the others left me listening to her litany of complaints. I sympathized. This had been a prosperous capital and now it was a wreck of a place, and we stood on a blocked road, among deserted houses, and the old woman was saying, “They won’t find a solution—not soon—”

A wall of atrocity photos was on display, under glass, on the Turkish side of the Green Line. They were blurred and smudged, some of them hard to make out. But the captions told the whole story, sometimes with sarcasm:

—A Greek Cypriot priest who forgot his religious duties and joined in the hunting and killing of Turks

—A Mother and Her Three Children Murdered by Greek Cypriots in the bath of their house in Nicosia

—Mass Grave

—Refugees

—Burned Village

—Frenzied Greek Cypriot Armed Bandit

—Dead bullet-riddled baby—Life was hell for us in 1963–74. We cannot return to those days.

“That is true,” Fikret said. “It was really bad. They tortured people. The Greeks burned Turkish villages. They made us suffer.”

“Aren’t you glad you had General Samih, three-star window-breaker, to help you?”

“This man,” Samih Pasha said, tapping his head and squinting at me, “he is always writing things down. I ask why?”

He had seen me scribbling atrocity captions. I said, “Because I have a bad memory.”

We walked to a restaurant, Sinan Cafe, farther down the Green Line. It was half a cafe, for it had been split in two by a wall that blocked the street; this main north-south road was now a dead end. On the wall a sign said,
1st Restricted Military Area—No Photographs!
with a skull and crossbones.

Fikret and I drank a coffee. The owner said, “Want to look over the wall. There’s a good view from upstairs.”

We went to the second floor of his house and peered over the Green Line into Greek Cyprus. I could see ruined rooftops, broken tiles, no people; but in the distance was a tall pole flying the Greek flag, in defiance. As though in reply, from the Turkish side there was a Muslim call to prayers, the long groaning praise of Allah.

“Fikret, what do you think of Greeks?”

“Greeks in Turkey were prosperous, because they were good businessmen,” he said. “We do not hate each other.”

“But Greece is in the EC.”

“They don’t belong there, but neither does Turkey,” he said. “We are still a backward country. Does the EC want another headache?”

The four of us bought fifty-cent bus tickets at the Lefkosa bus shed and went another twenty miles over a mountain range towards Girne, on the north coast. The shoreline was rocky, and the land rose to black and rugged cliffs. Samih Pasha described how Turkish troops had landed just west of here in 1974. He pointed out the caves in the cliffs where they had
hidden themselves and ambushed the Greeks, driving them south. We stopped at Bellapais.

“The quietness, the sense of green beatitude which fills this village,” Lawrence Durrell wrote of Bellapais, high above Girne, not far from the Crusader castle St. Hilarion, where Richard the Lionhearted spent his honeymoon. In his house there, described in
Bitter Lemons
, Durrell began writing his
Alexandria Quartet.
Nowadays Bellapais is perhaps more remote and dustier than it has ever been, but it is still very pretty. Villages endure destitution better than towns, and rural poverty can perversely seem almost picturesque.

But the town of Girne had the same look of desolation as the larger settlements I had seen in this embattled corner of the island. Empty streets, scruffy shops, empty hotels. I went to the largest hotel, on the seafront, just to see whether I could make a telephone call. The woman at the switchboard said it was impossible.

“You can’t call outside of here,” she said. “No one recognizes us!”