NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (70 page)

“Israel is no more a Jewish country,” Spillman said disgustedly. “It was special before, but now it is like all other countries. Just wanting money. Everyone talks about money.”

He was speaking into the darkness. Israel was somewhere in that darkness.

“I think there will be civil war,” he said. “Jews against Jews, the orthodox ones against the others, the settlers against the others. The Arabs will just watch us fighting.”

Spillman was in the cheap seats in the big smoky lounge at the center of C Deck, surrounded by his heap of bags—shopping bags mostly, in which he carried all his possessions. One of them was an instrument he called a “melodeon”—a fat flute with a keyboard which made a kazoolike sound. Goodhearted man that he was, he spent part of the day serenading the others in the cheap seats. Jewish songs, Gypsy songs, and old favorites such as “Blue Moon” and “O Solo Mio.”

There was a bald toothless Israeli with a dog on his lap in the cheap seats, and a German family with a small baby, and some backpackers, and some Greek Cypriots, and part of a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land, and a Dutch couple which had just been on a kibbutz. There were some Arabs, too. The Israeli with the dog said that he had been a soldier his whole life. “I have fought in three wars!” The German family had set up a field kitchen in some spare seats and were forever dishing up food for their baby and themselves. The Slovakian pilgrims traveled with a small bearded friar who said mass in one of the lounges every day. The prettiest pilgrim was a girl in her twenties who carried a wooden cross as tall as she was. Tacked to it was a holy card, the size of a baseball card, with a saint’s picture on it. She heaved the cross in a slightly defiant way, the winsome
Slovak, smiling, carrying this enormous cross among the querulous passengers.

There were other passengers, too, in the cabins. Some of them had strange stories to tell, but I met them later. The
Sea Harmony
was an unusual ship for the way people were thrown together. The bad weather did not help either—it was cold and windy, the sea unsettled. It was not a cruise, but rather a way for these people to get from one side of the Mediterranean to the other, or to stop along the way.

I had paid a little extra to have my own cabin. That was my only luxury. The food was awful. The weather was grim. The Greek crew was truculent and unhelpful, and the Greek passengers even worse—two of them sat in the lounge shouting into cellular phones, making interminable calls. They smoked. They demanded that the Burmese play tapes of Greek music very loudly. Because the decks were cold and windswept, there was no refuge anywhere. But I had my cabin.

The wind was blowing the rain sideways on our approach to Limassol, and the weather continued cold and rainy, such a novelty, after the parched landscapes of Syria and Israel, all these muddy sidewalks and puddled streets and weeping trees. I had been eager to see the Republic of Cyprus, after having traversed Turkish Cyprus. It had been impossible for me to go directly from one to the other, and so this thousand-mile detour had been necessary. But had it been worth it? Yes, I thought so, because I had seen how Turkish Cyprus had been lifeless and deprived; and now I saw that it hardly mattered, for Limassol, with its tourists and its Royal Air Force base at nearby Akrotiri and its embittered Greeks, was unattractive and seedy. Turkish Cyprus was like a Third World island of soldiers and self-help; Greek Cyprus was a rather ugly and bungaloid coastline, the most distant outpost of the European Community, another welfare case.

The larger islands in the Mediterranean are miniature continents, the French historian Fernand Braudel said. He cited Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Cyprus as good examples of this. I could see how this might be so. A single island might have many microclimates, and regions and dialects if not separate languages; and a mountain range that was like a continental
divide, and a wild or sparsely settled interior. They were so complex they seemed vast, and each section of coast was different. But the partition of Cyprus made it smaller. It had broken into two mean fragments, a pair of true islands, each with its own culture and language. The large complex island of Cyprus had become two simpler and much less interesting places, in the twenty years since the Turks had asserted themselves in the north and the Greeks in the south.

I walked from the port to the town, buying my breakfast on the way, fruit here, juice there, and at last bought a copy of the day-before-yesterday’s
Daily Telegraph
and read it over a cup of coffee in a cafe across from Limassol’s front, while the wind whipped the waves onto the promenade.

Limassol was as unlike a town in Turkish Cyprus as it was possible to be, and yet if anything it seemed more hollow and dreary. It was, I suppose, the cheesy fun-fair atmosphere that tourism had forced upon it, and the weird jauntiness, the forced high spirits and fake geniality that can make a visitor lonely to the point of depression. Spillman had told me he was going fruit shopping at his favorite market and then straight back to the ship. There was nothing else to buy, only horrendous souvenirs, unpainted plaster statues, mostly nude women, but also animals, busts of anonymous Greeks; paperweights made of varnished stones, copper saltcellars, toy windmills, dishcloths depicting Cypriot costumes and maps, dolls in traditional dress, doilies, tablecloths, egg timers, letter openers, ashtrays labeled
Limassol
, and every souvenir plate imaginable. There were many images, in plaster, on dishes, modeled in plastic, of the goddess Aphrodite. Legend had it that Aphrodite had risen from the waves off the west coast of Cyprus.
The Golden Bough:
“The sanctuary of Aphrodite at Old Paphos was one of the most celebrated shrines in the ancient world.” The images on sale depicted a sulky and misshapen Barbie doll rather than the goddess of love.

The day before yesterday’s
Mirror
, the
Sun
, the
Daily Mail
and other British papers were available. Bus tours were advertised to various parts of the island. Signs said “Traditional English Pub,” and “Full English Breakfast,” “Fish and Chips,” and “Afternoon Tea.” There were bleak hotels on the promenade and some derelict mosques on the backstreets. There was something old-fashioned and fifties-ish about Limassol, as though like the newspapers the town too had an air of the day before yesterday.

The Greek Cypriots I spoke to were friendly and forthcoming, and
as angry with the Turks as the Turks I had met on the north side of the island had been with them. Each side expressed its anger in the same words.

“I have a lot of property in the north, but I have no idea what happened to it,” a Greek woman told me. I had heard something similar from a Turkish woman, her exact counterpart, in the north, on a street in Lefkosa, who had fled from Limassol.

And there was Mrs. Evzonas. Twenty years ago, in Famagusta (now Gazimagosa), she said to her husband, “Let’s get out of here.” There were Turkish planes flying overhead, and Turkish ships in the harbor. They took a two-hour drive to Limassol and hunkered down. “We’ll go back when it’s safer.”

She told me, “We thought it would end soon. How did we know that it would last this long?”

In two decades the Evzonases had not been back, nor had any of their friends. But this is a legitimate republic, recognized by other countries. I made phone calls to the United States from the public phone booths. And because of the brisk tourist trade it was possible to make a living here in a way that in Turkish Northern Cyprus was out of the question.

“I would like to go back, but how can I?” Mrs. Evzonas said. “With my passport it is impossible.” She shrugged. “We are stuck here.”

“This was once a small town,” a man named Giorgio said to me in Limassol. “In 1974 it was nothing. But so many refugees made businesses, so it began to get bigger.”

I told him I had been to the town he knew as Famagusta.

“They say it is a ghost town,” he said.

He wanted me to agree, and he was right of course, but how could I tell him that in its ghostly way the town was more weirdly attractive than this?

The
Sea Harmony
was not leaving until late that night. The driving rain had discouraged me from leaving town, and so I hung around, and when the rain slowed to a thin drizzle I walked east along the coast, working up an appetite, and then returned and had a traditional English beer in a traditional English pub and met Mr. Reg MacNicol from North London who was on a two-week holiday (“We come for the weather”) and when I asked too many questions he exploded and his florid face grew redder
and he said, “You Yanks give me the pip! Life’s a compromise! Utopia doesn’t exist!”

I took a bus back to the ship, where the Slovakians were kneeling in the midst of another solemn mass in the lounge bar.

“I bought these for you,” Spillman said, handing me some Cyprus tangerines.

A woman nearby said, “I know you. I saw them interrogating you in Haifa. They took you away.”

“You’re very observant,” I said.

“I was afraid for you,” she said. “Hi. I’m Melva. From Australia. I’ve lived a really cloistered life. All this is new to me.”

She was another loner on this ship of loners, a solitary traveler, and she was as pleasant and as odd as the others. Tall, calm, observant, she shared a cabin with two other women, strangers to her. She had been cheated in Turkey and ill with suspected pneumonia in Egypt and spent two days in an Israeli hospital. “They threw me out. I had a temperature of a hundred and two and they said, ‘You must go now.’ I went to one of those grotty hotels and nearly died.” But she was game. I asked how she was now. “I’m coming good!”

“Want to play cards?” she asked.

She taught me an Australian card game called “Crappy Joe,” which was a version of two-handed whist that had interminable variations. Each successive game became more complicated in terms of the combinations needed to win. Her parents had played it almost every night for years in the western Sydney suburb of Emu Plains.

“Aw, I was married for twenty-six years myself, but my husband and I just went in different directions. I had to get away.”

She was dealing the cards for another hand of Crappy Joe.

“You make it sound urgent,” I said.

“He was stalking me,” she said. “At night I’d look out the window and there he’d be, staring in, his face so frightening. I’d be driving somewhere and look in the rearview mirror and he’d be behind me. I went out with a chap—a very nice man. My ex-husband went to his office and threatened him. ‘Don’t you dare go out with my wife.’ ”

“He sounds dangerous,” I said.

“That’s what I told the police. That he was obsessed. He’s got three rifles. But they said, ‘He hasn’t done anything, has he?’ ‘He keeps stalking me and staring at me through the window,’ I said. But that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t prove anything. He hadn’t done anything physical, see.”

In the rain and wind the ship pulled out of Limassol harbor, and I was glad I was here and not there.

“I got so worried I decided to leave,” she said. “I went to India, to Egypt, to Greece. Maybe he’ll leave me alone when I get back.”

She won the hand, gathered the cards, let me cut them, shuffled them and leaned over.

“Maybe I’ll never go back,” she said.

The ship was rolling as it sailed around the coast of western Cyprus, past Aphrodite’s birthplace and Cape Drepanon and the last horned cape on this island of hornlike capes, Arnaoutis, and then into the darkness towards Rhodes.

Rhodes—Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, a giant bronze figure: was this my compelling interest on this island? No, it was not. How could it be? It was just an old story. The thing had been erected twenty-three hundred years ago, it had been knocked down sixty-five years later and sold off as scrap. So much for the Colossus of Rhodes.

But not far from where this monstrous statue once stood, Spillman the Belgian was saying to me, “I will buy a chicken. I will drink some water. I will play music for the people in the town square. After one cup of tea I will return to the ship. At six o’clock I will take food. Some fruit. Some cheese.”

“You are very well organized, Mr. Spillman.”

“I do make planations of my daily life,” he said, his English faltering, “so I do not make a depression.”

As he walked along, distracted—perhaps hungry—his English became a sort of homage to Hercule Poirot.

“You can tell by my visage that I am a Jewish? Attention, I buy some parfum for my muzzah!”

This and more was my experience of Rhodes. The old walled city of Rhodes was one of the most beautiful I had seen in the Mediterranean, the Palace and Hospital of the Crusader Knights were graceful as well as powerful. The water was brilliantly blue, and mainland Turkey was visible just across the channel. But all this was a backdrop for my walk with pigeon-toed Spillman. I admired him for having ingeniously compensated for his spells of depression. He liked his life, and providing he did not deviate from this route through the Mediterranean in which fruit markets and cheese stalls loomed larger than ruins, his life was happy. I began to reflect on how in the way I was traveling there was an unusual and apparently disjointed process at work. There was something immensely more interesting to me in hearing about Melva and Ted’s divorce, and the spooky behavior of her crazed ex-husband, than in hearing a story of—well, as we had just left Limassol, let us say the tale of Richard the Lionhearted’s marriage to Berengaria of Navarre in 1191, at Limassol Castle, a building which had been practically demolished.

I could not deny that the setting mattered. The Rock of Gibraltar to me was a French tourist on a ledge at the top pinching an ape. I remembered Van Gogh’s Arles because I was almost run down by a high-speed train at Arles Station, while entranced by almond blossoms. In Olbia, Sardinia, a Senegalese scrounger told me in Italian how in Africa (which he visited regularly) he had two wives and six children: “Not many.” In Durrell’s Kyrenia, Fikret the Turk suffered over his bean soup and said, “I have been thinking about marriage … Please tell me what to do.” I could not now think of Jerusalem without seeing a Lubavitcher Jew in a black hat and coat hoisting his orange mountain bike into an angry Arab’s cabbages. My lasting impression of Dubrovnik was not its glorious city, but rather its bomb craters and broken roofs and the Croat Ivo saying, “I came home. Because home is home.”