The Sunrise (33 page)

Aphroditi gathered up her jewellery, carefully put it back on and left the shop.

That night, she lay awake for hours, thinking.

The discovery of her pregnancy both excited and terrified her. She lay with her hands on her belly. It seemed impossible now that she had not been aware of it before.

Somehow she had to find out whether Markos was still in Famagusta. The prospect of seeing him gave her such butterflies that she wondered if the baby was already moving inside her.

Eventually she fell into a dream-filled sleep. Markos was waiting for her on the beach outside The Sunrise, and they walked for miles, hands joined, bare feet sinking into deep sand.

When she woke, her pillow was soaked with tears. Was such joy really beyond reach? Later that day she would return to the pawnbroker. This could be her only chance of happiness.

As Aphroditi made her way through the streets of Nicosia, rain was turning the dust to mud. It was cold and yet humid, a combination that brought coughs for the young and aching joints for the old.

She had found an old waterproof coat of her mother’s. It was caramel coloured and there was a silk scarf in the pocket that she put on to keep her hair dry, knotting it under the chin just as her mother used to. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and hardly recognised the person she had become. Her bump was well hidden beneath her mother’s gathered skirts and shapeless dresses, but she knew that the combination of the outfits and her spreading figure made her look like an old lady. Her reflection, even in broken shop windows, confirmed this.

The pawnbroker seemed happy enough to see her.

‘I’ve found someone to take you,’ he said. ‘On Monday.’

Savvas was returning on Tuesday evening, so she would have preferred to go sooner.

‘It couldn’t be any earlier than that, I suppose?’

‘No,’ the man said roughly, as if reacting to ingratitude. ‘There aren’t many people prepared to do this, you know.’

In what she now thought of as former days, people had never spoken to her in that way. She had status and beauty back then. Nowadays, the basic need to survive had changed the way everyone behaved, and manners seemed to matter not at all.

‘What time shall I come?’ she asked.

‘Late afternoon,’ he said. ‘It’s better to do something like that when it’s getting dark. And I assume you want to come back the same night?’

Aphroditi had not thought about this at all.

‘Yes, yes … I’m sure I will.’

‘We’ll have to settle up now,’ he said, not looking her in the eye but staring blatantly at the hand on which she wore the aquamarine ring.

She pulled it off with some difficulty; her fingers had swelled a little in recent weeks. Its absence made her left hand look bare.

She removed the earrings and put them on the counter. Then the bracelet.

The pawnbroker said nothing. He was waiting for the final part of the payment. Aphroditi had not yet undone her coat, but now she did so and looped the pendant over her head.

He leaned over and took it out of her hands. This was the prize.

‘Do I get …’ she began hesitantly.

‘A receipt?’

She nodded. There was no reason to trust this man. Only desperation had brought her here.

He got out a small pad, scribbled on the top sheet, tore it off and handed it over.

‘In lieu of safe conduct,’ it read.

What else had she expected? Folding the paper, she slipped it in her pocket and said an inaudible thank you.

The bell jangled. An elderly couple was entering as she left. Aphroditi knew them by sight, but there was not the slightest flicker of recognition on their distraught and wretched faces.

The next three days passed with agonising slowness. Aphroditi did not know what to do with herself. She slept late and then walked the streets in the afternoons, sometimes losing herself, often coming up against walls of sandbags. The musty smell of emptiness was all-pervading. It did not matter much where these ambles took her. There was always the possibility of finding a shop selling fruit or a tin of milk, and she carried a string bag for this purpose. These days there were very few things that she felt like eating. She had no appetite for sweet things any more and had not been back to the
zacharoplasteion
since Katerina’s saint’s day, the day she had seen her diamond earrings.

She usually returned from her wanderings late in the afternoon. Having closed the shutters, she slumped, exhausted, in what used to be her father’s favourite armchair. In the semi-darkness she was almost too tired to listen to the radio, which reported on little but the state of the refugee camps and the stagnation of talks between Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders. She had no heart for politics.

One night she rang her mother, who, as usual, urged her to come to England.

‘Why don’t you come?’ she asked. ‘I just don’t understand you. What is there to stay for?’

‘Savvas is still hoping …’

‘But why can’t you go back later on … when everything is settled?’

‘It’s more complicated than that, Mother.’

‘It all sounds very simple to me, dear.’

If only you knew, thought Aphroditi. If only you even had the
slightest
idea.

‘Well, if you see sense,’ continued Artemis, ‘you know there’s space for you here.’

‘I’ll call you again next week,’ said Aphroditi. ‘Bye bye, Mother.’

Their conversations always took a similar path. At the moment when the receiver clicked, both mother and daughter felt dissatisfied.

Finally the day appointed for her journey to Famagusta arrived.

Aphroditi was so full of trepidation that she could not eat. She knew there was a possibility that The Sunrise had been destroyed and the safes broken into. And that something terrible had happened to Markos.

She killed time tidying up the apartment, remembering that Savvas was returning the following day. Then she looked in her mother’s wardrobe to see if there was anything that might make her look less frumpy. By late afternoon, five or six dresses lay discarded on the bed. Neither floral prints nor geometric designs flattered her, and most plain colours seemed to drain her. Finally she chose a shirt dress. Green used to suit her so well, but now it seemed as if nothing could improve her looks. The shapeless, button-through style hid her pregnancy.

As she stood in front of the mirror, she realised how much she now looked like her mother. Although she had her father’s eyes, her stature and shape were uncannily similar to Artemis Markides’. Her hair at least was still dark brown. It had grown several inches in the last months and was drawn back with a clip. She was not yet ready for the short uniform style of most older Cypriot women.

Aphroditi glanced down at her watch. Apart from her wedding ring, it was the only item of any value she still possessed.

The time had passed. She laced up some flat winter shoes, put on her raincoat and picked up her shoulder bag. Inside it she dropped her key, her purse and the receipt from the pawnbroker. Then she went out of the front door.

She paused on the landing, suddenly remembering something. The small velvet pouch with her pearl was in a bedside drawer for safe keeping. She could not leave without it. Perhaps it would be her lucky charm. She nursed the possibility that she might never come back.

She let herself back into the apartment, retrieved what she wanted and left again.

Aphroditi knew that she was taking a huge risk by going into the occupied part of the island, and there was a brief moment of doubt. Was this fair to her unborn child? The belief that she was on a mission to find the baby’s father was the only thing that stopped her from turning back.

I
T WAS FIVE
in the evening and she was due to meet her escort just before nightfall. There was ample time, but she was anxious nevertheless about being late. Something told her that the pawnbroker would not be sympathetic.

Fear and excitement mingled inside her.

The streets were unlit, so she needed to be careful to avoid tripping on broken paving stones or pieces of fallen masonry. As she stumbled along, she realised that the shoes she had chosen felt like boats.

There were very few people around. A cluster of Greek soldiers on one street corner did not appear to notice her as she passed. They were standing in a circle, facing inwards, smoking and laughing, oblivious to anything but the joke that one of them was telling. She saw a mother with two small children. They looked destitute, but she noticed that the little girl was carrying a loaf. She caught its fragrance as they passed.

Aphroditi suddenly felt hungry, but it was too late to do anything about it. Her favourite pastry shop was not far away, but she could not go there now.

Eventually she reached her destination. There were no lights inside the shop, and when she saw that the sign in the window had been turned to read ‘
Kleisto
’ – ‘Shut’ – she had to fight back tears.

For a few moments she stood pretending to peruse the items in the unlit window. The display was piled high with clocks, watches, ornate silver frames, icons, radios and other things that had once been treasured by their owners. Now they just looked like junk.

She was alone in the street.

She imagined her aquamarines stored somewhere inside the shop, or perhaps they had already been sold. There was no time for sentimentality, but she asked herself if she had been conned. All she had was an unsigned scrap of paper.

A moment later she heard the sound of a jeep, and when she turned, she saw that it had drawn up almost next to her. The window was wound down and a man’s voice spoke gruffly.

‘Papacosta?’

She nodded.

‘Get in.’

Nobody opened the door for her these days. It still seemed strange sometimes.

The driver had left the engine running, and the moment she climbed into the passenger seat, the vehicle moved off again.

Without any preamble, he informed her of the schedule. He sounded Greek rather than Greek Cypriot.

‘This is what happens. I take you to a crossroads about ten miles outside Nicosia. Someone picks you up from there and does the next twenty miles. After that, you’re taken on foot—’

‘On foot?’ exclaimed Aphroditi. ‘But—’

‘It’s not far. You won’t be on your own,’ the driver said impatiently. ‘Then with any luck there’ll be someone at the wire.’

With any luck. It sounded so casual, but what could she say? What choice did she have now?

She hugged her bag to her. The jeep had already reached the edge of the city and the road was rough and gravelly, worse than in the past. She tried to see if the landscape had changed in any way, but it was impossible in the darkness to make out anything much. They jolted along, sometimes swerving to miss a pothole.

The driver made it plain that he had no interest in talking to her. Most of the time he seemed to be looking out of the side window rather than the windscreen, which terrified Aphroditi.

They passed no other cars on the road, and in what seemed like no time, the vehicle stopped. The driver drew on his cigarette. Aphroditi turned to him for an explanation, noticing for the first time that he looked about eighteen. The youth did not speak, but rudely indicated with a nod of his head that someone was waiting up ahead.

Having opened the door, she swung her legs round and dropped to the ground. The other vehicle had no lights on and its engine was not running. There appeared to be nobody in it.

She walked nervously towards it, her heart beating furiously. The jeep had already driven off. When she got closer, she could see a figure in the driver’s seat. He was fast asleep. She tapped on the window and the man woke with a start. Without even looking at Aphroditi, he berated her for being late. Being entirely in these people’s hands, she was in no position to argue.

This driver was more ill-tempered than the previous one. He said little, but the stream of curses he uttered under his breath identified him as a Greek Cypriot.

‘Have you taken other people to Famagusta?’ she asked nervously.

‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Nobody wants to go back there. Too dangerous.’

This stage of the journey seemed to take an age. The driver’s cigarettes made her nauseous, but to her great relief she eventually felt the deceleration of the car.

‘This is where you get out,’ he said, pulling on the handbrake.

‘But there’s no one here!’ she protested.

‘Well it’s as far as I go,’ he said flatly.

Aphroditi wondered how many people had taken a cut of her payment. Certainly none of them seemed to have been paid to care.

‘But I can’t just stand here in the middle of nowhere,’ she said, determined to hide her alarm.

‘I’m not waiting around,’ he said. ‘That’s not what I’ve been paid to do.’

‘But isn’t someone meant to be meeting us here?’

‘I don’t know what you’ve arranged,’ he said rudely. ‘I was told to get you to this place, and that’s what I’ve done.’

The thought of being abandoned in this lonely spot filled Aphroditi with terror. She was about to give up her plan and ask if he could just drive her back to where they had come from.

‘That’s Famagusta,’ said the driver, pointing. ‘You can walk from here.’

Out of the window she saw the forbidding outline of a city. She had not realised they were so close. There it was. Her home. The place she had loved, now in darkness.

Then she saw a figure coming towards them. It was a man. He seemed to have appeared from nowhere. Slim, medium height. For a fraction of a second she thought it was Markos. He was coming to meet her! She put her hand on the door handle and was about to let herself out and run towards him.

A moment later the man was close enough for her to see that she had been mistaken. He looked nothing like the man she loved. There was not the slightest resemblance.

‘I suppose that’s your guide,’ said the driver.

She got out of the car and without saying anything slammed the door behind her.

Now that he was close up, Aphroditi wondered how she could ever have imagined that this man was Markos. He was around the same age but more thickset, and she noticed that he had several teeth missing. He had a fixed expression, his mouth set in a frozen smile. The dark gaps between his teeth made him look sinister.