Gradually, reluctantly, the teaching staff was forced to change its approach. They substituted convincing fictions for the truth. They said the tents were temporary, that they had gone into the countryside on an excursion, and such like. After these new explanations, which the children accepted more readily, they reconciled themselves to the hardships and bore for a while the humiliating adjustments imposed on them… For a while… Because when they realized that the “excursion” was being prolonged for days and weeks, months, they became fretful again, they demanded their rooms, their toys, their comfort… Then many more began to arrive in the “countryside”, in thousands, and to pitch new tents around theirs. The place filled with “excursionists”, who seemed unhappy, angry, ashamed. It was an unnatural, unreal situation. And the children, although they did not understand, felt it. They began to get irritable, becoming anti-social and quarrelsome; they avoided the “other excursionists” who reminded them of their own misery, they envied the children of the neighbouring villages who had not moved from their homes, but above all they hated the foreigners who arrived frequently, all smiles and graciousness and condescension, to see them lined up in front of their tents; and they did not willingly extend their hands either to greet them or to receive the presents which they distributed so generously… On the contrary, on one occasion, one or two weeks before they brought them to the town, when two foreign visitors, accompanied by local officials, began to distribute parcels and presents to the assembly, the children, all together and as though by common consent, threw them on the ground and trampled on them. After this episode, the Administration requested that they be transferred elsewhere, somewhere a safe distance from the problem of the fluctuating people, to a place which, if nothing else, would provide the children with temporary comfort. And that was precisely where they made their biggest mistake. In the end, as it became abundantly clear, it had had the opposite result…
“…yes, precisely the opposite… Don’t be surprised… When we others, with all our senses, with millions of words for so many years now, with newspapers, radio, television, talking and explaining to each other for hours, have not yet grasped our problem entirely, in all its aspects, why should we expect them to do so? That is why I tell you that because understanding proved impossible, the guilt was transferred to us. For whatever happens, we are always responsible. I personally… And they are hostile to me. As though by common consent they avoid touching me, talking to me, you saw it for yourself… Me, who treated them as my children for so many years… As soon as I appear, they stop what they are doing. They do not follow me in the class, nor do they laugh at my stories and jokes… And they make sure I realize it… But what else? Yes, I didn’t tell you that; It is something that terrified me… I discovered that recently, these last few days, for the first time they have begun killing things… Not by accident, or by chance; before they avoided even that; but deliberately, consciously… Little animals and insects, bugs, butterfies, lizards, even… For hours, crouching in the yard, they decapitate insects, torturing them in ways I can’t describe… Sadistically and brutally, with indescribable rage… Even the two budgerigars which they had had for so many years, the only things they managed to take from the school when they left in ’74. Which they adored… Even those… I found them yesterday, torn to pieces, in here, butchered, with pins in their eyes and pencils wedged in their genital organs and their beaks…”
“Didn’t you ask them why they do it?” asked the sergeant, fixing his eyes on the deaf mutes.
“Of course! And I insisted! But there was no response. I told you, they have cut me of completely… Me more than anyone.”
“I don’t understand that. Why you in particular?”
And he really meant it, this phrase, this “you in particular”, now, after all he had heard. It was not possible for them to have beside them one so… so afectionate, so cultivated… yes, that was it, cultivated, not simply educated as he had described her at first, and to show her such heartlessness, so much hostility and ingratitude. He just could not understand it…
“Because I am so close to them, very often I stay twenty-four hours a day with them,” the teacher interrupted but at the same time answered his thoughts. “In the past, immediately after the invasion, I stayed in every evening, for weeks, they wouldn’t let me leave, every time they heard that I wouldn’t be staying overnight there was an uproar. And this relationship, this contact, not only did not bring us closer together, but in the end proved fateful. They lost their self-sufciency, they learned to expect everything from me. From their simplest to their most demanding needs, I had to answer their questions and solve their problems. It was me they kept pestering every evening, to take them back to their school…”
…for hours without end they pleaded. Dozens of hands, fingers that glided and waved beseechingly before her… And she was obliged always to refuse. To keep saying “no, impossible” and to keep trying desperately to justify that refusal… And the more she failed, the more they hated her… And now this! The desperation and the escape. Tonight only four left. Tomorrow perhaps another four or six. And probably all of them the day after tomorrow! All of them had already left in another way, all of them had abandoned her and hated her…
And she dissolved into tears again…
The child from the North approached her and with his fingers raised close to her eyes asked her what was the matter. Why was she crying? He asked her again, insistently, until she noticed him. She replied, also in sign language. She explained all she had said before to the policeman and much more besides, feelings and repentances and remorse, which now, for the first and last time, she dared to express so frankly. At first she formulated her thoughts hesitantly, spasmodically, without coherence. But as she continued, after each new sentence, her confession gradually took shape, gaining depth and speed. Her eyes dried and shone strangely; her fingers began to signal rhythmically, unfolding her soul roughly and passionately; an endless dance on a loom which wove meanings and symbols…
How long this dumb monologue lasted, the policeman was unable to say with certainty. The ten flames which wove before him transfixed him, took away his power to judge, to calculate. Yes, he no longer had any doubt. She was a rare, unique woman, the embodiment of all that is finest in a woman… He stood there dumbfounded and regarded her without knowing whether to give himself up to his admiration or to dismay at the drama unfolding before him…
As soon as she stopped, the boy began; fast and adroitly and loquaciously. Repeatedly. And the more his hands spoke, the more the terror in the eyes of the younger child grew and the more piercing grew the rage in the eyes of the teacher.
She turned and regarded him with despair and anguish which the policeman was unable to interpret. Despair and anguish which he soon saw transformed into rage and blind hostility.
“But what on earth is going on? Will you tell me?” he finally managed to ask.
But the teacher paid him no heed. She stared, mesmerized, at the hands of the boy, which continued the confession. And suddenly, without any warning, her hand rose and abruptly fell heavily on the cheek of the boy. Her fingers raked his skin.
“Why?” the policeman asked her, imprisoning her hand, which was preparing to rise again.
“Why did you do that to them? Do you know what you’ve done, you wicked child? Do you know what you’ve done?” she asked the child, struggling to free herself. And her voice was choked with sobs.
“What has he done?” asked the policeman.
She did not answer him. She did not even hear his voice. He shook her hard. He stared insistently into her eyes. “I asked you what happened,” he repeated. “Please, I must know…”
“He helped them to escape… He sent them…”
And her voice failed again.
“Where? Where did he send them?”
“Back to their school…”
“But their school, isn’t it… at Salamis? He sent them to the Turks?”
“For
me, for my sake… For me! He says he did it because they hated me!…”
She turned to the child who was holding his sore cheek. She spoke to him again with words, forgetting that she was speaking a language that was unknown to him.
“What does it matter to you if they hated me? What did it matter to you?”
The boyish fingers moved again. They said: “They were destroying their lives, they were more unhappy because they didn’t understand. I wanted to help them…”
“Sending them to death?”
“Explaining death to them… That was the only way for them to understand. I tried other ways… In the yard… With the ants and the cats, the birds… They didn’t understand… Neither pain and violence, nor death… You raised them in lies and the truth didn’t touch them… That’s why I sent them over there, to see for themselves, to understand… It’s the only way they’ll learn…”
“What you did was criminal…”
“Perhaps. But there was no other way… Now they’ll grow up. If they live, they’ll be men and women…”
“How can you talk like that? Like a grown-up!…”
“I’m the most grown-up in here… I’m an old man!”
And he looked each of them in turn in the eye.
“I must inform headquarters at once,” said the sergeant.
“Where is the phone?”
His voice interrupted their dumb dialogue, which he was unable to interpret, just as he was unable to perceive how and when the ferocity, the hostility in their eyes was succeeded by sympathy, perhaps even love.
“At the end of the corridor, in the office…” the teacher replied.
And while the sergeant was still gazing at her, perplexed, from the door, before going out, she turned again to the boy:
“Do you know that you may have sent them to death?” her hands asked again, without the former sharpness, with less blame and more complaint.
The reply upset her again, enraged her, although she had heard it before.
“No, no” her hands protested. “Who told you that? Life has value! Whether we fully understand it or not … it is not necessary for us to know death in order to love life… Stop, I don’t want to hear that again… Stop… I did not want you to do something like that for my sake… Never! Do you hear? They hated me enough, without that… It was no reason for you to send them into the fire, just so that they would understand me… Who am I? An incompetent teacher, that’s what I am, an incompetent and irresponsible teacher…”
The hands of the boy moved again:
“Now they will learn to love you… As you deserve… They will learn to love their lives… Life… They will learn to respect death…”
“They will never learn all that; how many of us have learned it?” the fingers of the teacher said slowly, as though wound down, and she sat utterly exhausted on the bed.
Her hands rose slowly towards the childish head. Her eyes pleaded for him to be wrong, for her frightful certainty to be proved false…
From the collection:
The Unseen Aspect, Kinyras Publications, Nicosia 1979
Translated by David Bailey
The Unseen Aspect
…he stopped the car and got out. To his left, blood-red with azure reflections, the sea; in the distance, half sunk in the water, the sun; to his right and behind him, a green strip of land, perfectly geometrical, a symmetrical carpet spread in an inhospitable, bone-dry valley, scattered with shells and rocks, barren for a thousand years or more, since the time of the great drought which filled Cyprus with reptiles and monasteries.
He tried to make out the small settlement; his eyes, dim and tired, betrayed him. Anyway, what good would it do now? He would only return here if he heard that an earthquake or a storm, in a moment of frenzy, had dishevelled and sunk in the sea this utopian green carpet. Until then…
He lit a cigarette and sat at the wheel. His fingers sought the starter; he changed his mind again, got out, threw away the cigarette, selected a hard stick from the ground and advanced decisively towards the melon fields and the greenhouses.
He invaded the green area, trampling the tender shoots, the unripe melons, which split open under his feet. He chose the spot with the lushest growth and started uprooting the plants with the stick. He hit at them as if they were vipers, he kicked them, he pushed them aside and continued to dig until the end of the stick hit something harder than a root, an obstruction that he could neither break up nor get round. At last! That was it! He put in his hand and felt the unseen point of resistance. His fingers sank into two muddy holes. He pushed them further in, bent them to hook the object and pulled hard. As he straightened up, covered in mud and worms and roots, the skull of a sheep or a dog hung from his fingers…
“Wherever you dig, two inches below the ground, you will find them: bones and stones and reptiles.” In his confusion and rage he remembered her voice again; only then, on the day that Maria had first spoken to him it was not with vindictive mania that he uprooted and destroyed but with curiosity to get to the bottom of things, to confirm that this green was just the covering of that which he knew and which he had always sought in “his lunar landscape.” That is what he had called the barren area ever since he was a child. And suddenly, returning after two years’ absence, he had found it transformed by this boring, tiring, completely unimaginative green.
On that day, too, he had had in his hand, as now, a skull, the jawbone of an animal, a mule or an ox. Her voice surprised him; he had been sure he was alone, before an oddity of nature, a mirage… He looked up; he saw her standing above him; her eyes dark; her teeth revealed by a wonderful smile, sparkling just like the sea now. He got up and told her that for years he had been coming here frequently, that he loved the area and used to paint it; but today he found it unrecognizable. “What do you paint here?” she asked him. The landscape, of course! The shells, the rocks and the roots … Nature’s refuse, which, when you look at it carefully, has a beauty of its own, a uniqueness given to it by death. Sometimes he portrayed it on canvas, or he photographed it, and sometimes he wasted hours studying it, enriching his collection with the most interesting items, those that during the process of decay and afterwards in its quiescence had taken on or simply reminded him of shapes of life that were new, unconnected with and foreign to the original nature of the remains.
“How I would like someone to describe my own remains like that someday…” she said and set off for the settlement. He followed her, forgetting the open car, his tools scattered in the field, the radio on. They proceeded together, along the edge of the green patch, being careful not to hurt anything that was green and alive. She asked about his art, what had made him take up painting, about his ideas on the direction art would take after the war, the purpose of faith and beauty and creation in a country at a time when everyone was trying to rid themselves of every ideal. He answered her vaguely with commonplaces and clichés, just to encourage her to continue asking and he began to steal glances at her, to fix in his mind her strong-featured face set off by a cascade of jet-black hair, her compact body, so youthful and dynamic in her jeans and her man’s shirt, loosely tied at the waist. From the moment he had confronted her, while he was bent over and digging the earth, he had felt a piercing pain in the chest, a fever and a compulsion: to catch her swinging hand, to lead her away to the depths of this utopian field and on the greenery, which covered and masked death, to hold her, to subjugate her beneath his body, to take revenge for what she and her people had done to his mysterious landscape.
Despite his attempts as they were walking towards the settlement, he did not learn whose plans and toil had achieved “this undesirable miracle,” as he called it. “Even if I wanted to tell you, your hostility puts me off,” she replied. And she added, “It would be better if he told you himself. He will defend it better than I can.”
Mr. Barnabas, the man who, as he learned shortly, was responsible for the transformation, was a well-built old man of about sixty-five. Mar
ia called him Grandfather. “He is both the happiest and the saddest person I know,” she told him as they approached the house. She smiled at another thought and added: “The liveliest corpse you will meet in your life…” They found him sitting on the small veranda of a prefabricated house at the edge of the settlement, a house identical to the other thirty or so little houses which were scattered around the estate, standing on regular small islands of concrete. As soon as he saw them the old man smiled and the girl bent and kissed his forehead. “This is Grandfather.” After they had been introduced, the old man asked her to run and feed the baby who had been crying for some time, and then would she prepare two coffees for them?
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