The Sunrise (43 page)

‘Someone will take you to Famagusta now. They will wait ten minutes and then bring you back to Nicosia.’

Soon Hüseyin was heading back towards Famagusta, surveying more bomb damage on the way. The driver was a Turkish soldier, more than six feet tall, of a senior rank and silent throughout the journey.

They passed several checkpoints on the road, and each time, after heated discussion, they were allowed through. It felt unreal to be driven through the silent streets of Famagusta. Hüseyin asked to be dropped a little way from home. He trusted nobody and was afraid of letting this soldier know exactly where his party was hiding out. Just round the corner from Elpida Street, he climbed out of the jeep.

‘You’ve got ten minutes,’ barked the soldier.

He ran into the Georgious’ apartment. They were all waiting for him expectantly, and with a mixture of excitement and trepidation he told them what he had arranged.

‘Once we are in Nicosia, Kyrios and Kyria Georgiou will be taken across the Green Line with Maria and Panikos and the children. After that, everyone will be free …’

His words tailed away. Free. What did that mean now?

Hüseyin felt the eyes of all the adults on him. He had nothing more to tell them, but they clearly looked to him for leadership. He had come up with a plan for the next few hours, but he could not see beyond that.

When the tanks had arrived in Famagusta all those months earlier, they had assumed that everything would return to normal. They all knew now that assumptions could not be made.

‘Do you know anyone in Nicosia?’ asked Emine.

Irini shook her head.

Emine remembered that the Papacostas had an apartment in Nicosia but stopped herself from mentioning it. It would not have been appropriate given all that had happened.

‘I’m sure they’ll help us find somewhere to live,’ she said brightly.

Even Emine was not certain whom she meant by ‘they’.

One of the last newspapers that Markos had brought into The Sunrise had shown a picture of a vast tented refugee camp. For Irini and Emine such a place would be worse than hell: nowhere to cook, no privacy, an inferno in summer and cruelly damp in winter. Perhaps they would have no choice.

They were all ready to leave and filed out of the front door. Vasilis was the last. He locked up and gave the key to Irini, then they followed Hüseyin silently, like an orderly procession of schoolchildren.

When they turned the corner, they saw the army truck. It was hard for Vasilis to climb up into the back, but Hüseyin lent him his strength and gave him a leg-up. They sat on the wooden benches facing each other and bumped along the rutted streets that led them out of the city, the objects of curious stares when they passed any soldiers. When they reached the barrier out of Famagusta, there was a long discussion between the driver and the soldiers on duty. Everyone on the truck stayed silent, even the children. Some papers were handed over and then an envelope. None of the passengers watched too closely, wishing they were invisible.

The roar and grunt of the engine precluded conversation, so even Mehmet and Vasilakis were silent on the journey, simply taking in the landscape as they lurched along the road. The orange groves on the outskirts of the city were laden with fruit, but the rest of the landscape seemed parched and barren. It appeared that no seeds had been planted. They trundled past ruined houses, farm buildings and churches. It was strange not to see farmers working in the fields, and there was a noticeable absence of animals: no goats, no sheep, no donkeys.

The outskirts of Nicosia shocked them, just as they had shocked Aphroditi all those months before. It was not a place any of them were familiar with, but for a capital city, it looked derelict and sad. The lorry roared through the narrow streets of the northern suburbs towards the centre.

Although they all looked down-at-heel, people seemed to be going about their daily business here, old men sitting in cafés, women looking in shop windows and children ambling home from school in scruffy shoes.

Eventually they came to a halt. Up ahead they saw the barricade that divided the city. They had reached the Green Line.

For a moment they sat still in the truck, then there was the scrape of the bolts being drawn back and the grid was lowered. Like cattle, they were being unloaded.

Hüseyin jumped down first and Maria handed him little Irini. It was the first time he had held the baby and he had not realised how sweet she smelled. She reached up and pulled at his nose.

Panikos struggled down next and helped the others – his in-laws, Emine and then Halit. Finally Maria passed Vasilakis to his father and then Mehmet showed off by jumping down on his own. Hüseyin was still holding the baby. He did not want to let her go.

Maria was now standing next him and with some reluctance put out her hands to relieve him of his burden. She could see that the child was happy in Hüseyin’s arms.

The soldier was getting impatient. He was not going to stand there all day waiting for these people, and his fee depended on the completion of the job, namely to see these Greek Cypriots safely across the Green Line.

‘Go!’ he ordered them, pointing to the barrier.

The two families stood looking at each other wordlessly. They were fearful of the soldier’s impatience, but even greater was their fear of saying goodbye. This departure had been so hastily arranged that they had scarcely imagined the moment of separation.

There had to be a final moment, a fleeting flash of time, and their instincts told them how to spend it. Both Vasilis and Halit were holding their respective talismans. Vasilis had put the Georgiou
mati
in a napkin to keep it safe. When he held it out to Halit, as if gift-wrapped in its cloth, Halit automatically handed his
nazar
to Vasilis in return. It seemed a natural transaction. They were similar in size and both made of bright blue glass. The only difference was that Emine had used a red cord to hang theirs, and Irini a blue ribbon.

Emine gave Irini the briefest hug.

‘We’ll never forget how you saved our baby,’ Panikos said to Hüseyin.

Hüseyin shook his head, unable to speak.

The small boys were chasing each other around the circle of adults. Maria held little Irini.

The soldier repeated his instruction but more loudly this time.

‘Go. Now!’

The Turkish words meant nothing to the Georgiou family, but the gesture was unambiguous. Time had run out. They suddenly realised that this was it. This was the end of their life together. For both parties it felt as if they were being wrenched apart.

It was a year to the day since the coup that had set everything in motion, and there could be neither tears nor any further words.

A few passers-by noticed the elderly lady in black and two younger women, one of whom was wearing a Chanel shift. Their children were expensively dressed too. It seemed unlikely in these times that such smart people should be standing around in the street.

To onlookers they seemed one homogenous party, but only some of them needed to follow the soldier’s order. Suddenly they became two groups: Irini, Vasilis, Maria, Panikos and their children moved as one. Emine, Halit, Hüseyin and Mehmet stayed where they were.

The Georgiou family walked towards the barrier, catching sight of some blue-bereted United Nations soldiers on the other side. There was a discussion that they did not hear, but it seemed only a small problem that they had no identification with them. They were soon allowed through.

The Özkans watched their friends until they were out of sight. The Georgious did not turn their heads to look back.

A
S THE GEORGIOUS
crossed the Green Line, both they and the Özkans became part of the statistics.

More than two hundred thousand Greek Cypriots lost their homes in the north of Cyprus and forty thousand Turkish Cypriots were displaced from the south. All of them were refugees.

For neither family could Nicosia be regarded as home. Famagusta was the only place that would ever be worthy of that name. The capital city was merely a starting point for their lives in exile.

Eventually both families were allocated places to live that had been left vacant after the conflict, the Özkans in Kyrenia and the Georgious in Limassol. The towns were on the north and south coasts of Cyprus respectively, as far from each other as it was possible to be.

Even if they had known where the others had ended up, they would not have been allowed to cross the border to meet, and communication between the two sides was almost impossible.

To begin with, the Georgious’ new apartment was less cluttered than the previous one, simply because so many of the possessions they had accumulated over the years had been left behind. The icon, which had seen them through so much, still watched them. So did an evil eye on a red cord
.

It was easy for Irini to replicate some aspects of their home in Famagusta. With Maria and Panikos, they bought a set of similarly mass-produced plastic chairs for the garden, and Irini made a lace tablecloth identical to the one that was still lying undisturbed on their table in Elpida Street. Any possessions that had still been in the house when they first walked in – some photograph albums and a few pieces of china – she stored away for safe keeping in case their Turkish Cypriot owners ever returned.

Gradually too she re-created something that resembled her beloved
kipos
back in Famagusta. With the sunshine and spring rains, things grew quickly, and soon jasmine trailed around the door and gerania rampaged from her pots just as they had done before. She cultivated peppers, tomatoes and herbs, and within two years they would be picking bunches of grapes from their own vine.

It was almost a relief to Vasilis that he no longer had his land. He found it hard to walk far these days and could not bend to dig and weed as he had done before. Many other people from Famagusta were resettled in Limassol as well, so it was not long before Vasilis found some of his old friends. They reconvened daily as before, but in a different
kafenion
, talking of past times and dreaming of future ones.

For the Georgious, the loss of almost every material thing they owned was nothing compared with the loss of their sons. Each day Irini lit three candles in church: for Markos, Christos and Ali. As time passed, her faith had returned even though Christos had not.

Vasilis was determined to be realistic. They might never know Christos’ real fate. It had been discovered that some of those who had been killed in the brief civil war around the time of the coup against Makarios had been included among the number of missing, buried by fellow Greek Cypriots in unknown places.

‘He might have been one of those,’ said Vasilis.

‘I just have a feeling,’ said Irini. ‘And while I am still dreaming of him, I won’t give up hope.’

Hope was all she had.
Elpida
.

Routine tasks and daily rituals became Irini’s survival mechanism, along with the joys of helping Maria and Panikos look after their children. They provided huge distraction and gave her great joy.

The Georgious lived with the constant anxiety that their house was not their own and that the real owners might come to reclaim it. One day they thought that moment had arrived.

There was an unexpected ring on the bell. Walking slowly, Vasilis went to see who it was. In the old days in Famagusta they had always left the door open, but things were different here.

When he opened it, he wondered if he needed glasses as well as his walking stick. It was a young man. Haggard. Dirty.

Vasilis felt his legs weaken. It was as much as he could manage to say his son’s name.

The two men embraced and Christos realised that he was taking most of his father’s weight. Vasilis seemed to have aged so much since he had last seen him.

Hearing her husband calling weakly to her, Irini hurried in from the bedroom.

‘
Yioka mou, yioka mou, yioka mou …
’ she repeated over and over again as the tears flowed.

Christos had been released from a Turkish prison camp where he had been for many months, and for a while had been unable to track his parents down. It was disorientating to find that the place he had called home was now behind barbed wire, and it had taken him some time to locate them.

He seemed very fragile in both body and soul, but when they told him the news of his brother’s death it seemed to break him completely. He retreated into the darkness of his parents’ spare room and for more than a year never went beyond his mother’s
kipos
.

As Christos was beginning to return to life, the family suffered another blow. Vasilis had a fatal stroke.

‘At least we were with him,
yioka mou
,’ said Irini to Christos. ‘And he knew we were there.’

With the help of her daughter and son-in-law, Irini managed to remain strong for the sake of her son. She had been wearing black since the day Hüseyin had found her the mourning clothes in Famagusta, and she would always do so.

For some time, Panikos had been mulling over an offer from his cousin, who had lived in the UK since the late 1960s. His chain of electrical shops was expanding and he needed Panikos’ expertise to manage three or four of them.

It was hard for Panikos to broach the subject with his brother-in-law. Christos had found work as a car mechanic easily enough, but his mood had remained dark. When Panikos finally plucked up courage to mention the proposition, however, he realised that Christos was ready to make a new start too.

‘What can I do here?’ said the disillusioned young man. ‘Except sit and contemplate how it all went wrong.’

He carried a great guilt with him, too, that his friend Haralambos remained missing while he himself had been freed.

With hindsight, Christos criticised the organisation he had joined for aiding the coup against Makarios.

‘We just opened ourselves up for invasion,’ he said. ‘And look what happened.’

Even Irini proved receptive to the idea of making a break with her beloved island.