A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible

by Christy Lefteri

  Let us hail you, O Liberty!’

  Now, with ancient valour rising,

  Let us hail you, O liberty!

  Suddenly the song is replaced with a wave of gun fire and there is silence. The women all look at each other, waiting, hoping that the song might continue, but instead there is a dull thumping like the falling of bodies. Elenitsa cries and brings her baby close to her cheek, and just then the baby starts crying.

  The priest’s shoes creak as Adem continues to walk, as though they have not made many journeys. His feet feel light as he enters the town. He is constantly on the lookout for Engin, wondering if perhaps he has been kept at Bella-pais to mind the prisoners.

  As instructed, he sends the other soldiers off around the town to search the houses. He remains alone, just as he was hoping. He stands in the square of the town and looks around. Flies swarm around dead bodies and leftover food. A cockroach scuttles at his feet. The leaves whisper over blossoming gardens. He stares at the house that used to be Vasos’ and sees the door open wide. He longs to find him there, sleeping in the deckchair amongst the browsing chickens. Feathers rise as a warm wind blows. Dust swirls around him and the salt of the sea touches his nose. He looks over at the Miltiades’ house, shrouded beneath the olive trees. How they have grown. He has also planted a lemon tree, which drips with yellow in the sun. How he wishes to see him, pulling his moustache, staring with that beady eye at passers-by. He stares at the house at the top of the foothill and longs to hear little Yiola screeching like she did and hear the patter of her feet upon the sloping hill. The leaves of a banana tree clatter and a cockroach stops by his feet. Adem touches the photo in his breast pocket. He remembers Kyriaki collecting lemons from the old tree at the edge of the orchard beyond and sees the black soles of her shoes as she stood on tiptoes on a wooden stool, reaching for a branch. That is one of the pictures he always remembers. The ones from the beginning are far better. More powerful than a photograph, as it has the ability to move; sometimes it is just a leaf touched by a breeze, sometimes a lock of hair, sometimes the tips of her fingers, white against the yellow of a lemon. She never takes the lemon. She never turns around.

  He decides to search the houses. He enters the first and sees eight bowls of egg-lemon soup laid out on the kitchen table. The pictures on the walls are familiar; the children have glimmers of other faces, long forgotten. He picks up a spoon and tastes the soup; the rice is sour now and the soup is warm from the heat, but somewhere, striking the back of his tongue, is that distinct, homely taste. Egg-lemon soup for the one returning home or for the stranger visiting, egg-lemon soup for the Easter feast or a Sunday morning, egg-lemon soup for the ill or for the ill at heart. He shuts his eyes, takes a deep breath and walks out of the deserted house.

  In the next house he stares at the frames on the wall: faces of nameless people stare down at him and the silence is thick. He looks around at the stillness of the furniture; at the empty armchairs and the glass of water left on the side table. The room smells of rosewater and mothballs and is dusty in the corners with old cobwebs. As he turns around to leave he notices that an old man has been sitting, unmoving, on a kitchen chair. He is as still as a picture and looks at Adem as if he is a long-awaited visitor. The old man smiles and allows his worry beads to clutter to his lap; he then scratches his ear, takes off his spectacles and brings his hand down over his eyes. He puts his spectacles back on and focuses on Adem’s face. ‘I might as well see the devil clearly before I die; that way I’ll know what to avoid when I cross over.’ The old man’s voice trails off and he smiles again, this time revealing a row of crumbling teeth. He clears his throat and stares unblinkingly at Adem. ‘Maybe you would like some help with your gun,’ the old man says gruffly.

  ‘Why are you still here?’ Adem asks.

  ‘You speak Greek?’ the old man replies, and Adem nods. The old man contemplates for a moment, nods his head, and takes the worry beads into his hand.

  ‘So, you like to get to know your enemy before you shoot their brains out?’ Adem does not reply, but glances quickly out of the window. ‘Under any other circumstances I would have offered you an ouzo, or maybe some sweet comandaria,’ the old man says.

  Adem continues to stare out of the window, then, without warning, he pulls his gun out, runs across to the old man and pushes him to the floor. The old man rattles like a heap of bones and holds his arms up to his face. ‘Put your head down and don’t say another word!’ Adem demands and the old man obeys. Adem points his gun just above the old man’s head. Footsteps are heard approaching and Adem shoots. Four soldiers enter the house. ‘Another one down,’ says one, glancing quickly at the old man on the floor. ‘It’s hard to know if there are still some hiding,’ says the other. Adem does not reply. The soldiers look around, sniff the air like dogs and stride out of the house.

  On the floor the old man exhales. He opens his eyes and looks up at Adem. Just above him is a hole in the barrel of wine; it leaks upon him like blood. He looks up at Adem. ‘Thank God it was red,’ the old man says, ‘and to think, I almost brought the white.’ Adem offers him his hand and helps him back into the chair. Soaked in red, the old man sits for a moment in silence, nodding his head as if he has acquired some new knowledge. He looks at Adem and nods his head once more. It is a slow nod, slow and uncertain, like the nod of someone that has just accepted something long repressed.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ Adem says.

  ‘This is my home,’ the old man replies.

  ‘They will kill you,’ Adem insists.

  ‘In my home,’ the old man replies. He flicks the rosary beads in his hand and mutters beneath his breath. The old man’s gaze is impatient and full of fire. His skin, withered and rusty, as if he has been knocked about the world a lot; his face furrowed, weatherbeaten. He tosses the rosary beads up so that the top end flicks onto his thumb. He then looks down and takes each bead individually, rolling it between forefinger and thumb, then separating it and pushing it onto the other side. He does this until there are more beads on the left than on the right. ‘You cannot separate the waves or the years,’ he says suddenly. ‘They all roll into one.’ He looks down at the beads; without the blazing of his eyes, his face suddenly appears still, like old, eroded wood. Adem remembers his father beating at the keys of the typewriter, his face as smooth as stone until the day he died.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Adem asks.

  ‘Georgios Kyriakou,’ the old man says, ‘but most people know me as Psaroboulis.’

  Adem looks at the old man more closely. ‘You were a fisherman,’ he says definitely.

  ‘I am more than a fisherman, I live with the sea. I’ve ridden its fury. The sea never forgets.’ The old man looks up and belatedly bashes a fist onto the table, as if there are still more unspoken thoughts rocking inside him. The rosary beads rattle. His eyes alight, he looks around quickly, as though searching his surroundings, like a lighthouse. ‘My life and the waves and this house are tied together. I built that boat with my own hands many years ago and she could sail the Aegean a hundred times. I’m sure she is safe. Thank God and the saints that I never keep her at the main port.’

  ‘Forget your boat. They will find you,’ Adem says.

  ‘And why are you not they?’ The old man looks hard into Adem’s eyes as though he were looking out to sea. He searches them fiercely.

  ‘Don’t you remember me?’ Adem says, and the old man narrows his eyes further. ‘I once made your shoes.’

  ‘Ha!’ the old man says. ‘You are that bastard who left the redhead. You played and then you left!’ The old man chuckles and then coughs into his fist.

  ‘It wasn’t a game. I loved her. If only they would have let us be, we could ha—’

  ‘You could have what? Married and lived happily ever after. Ppaa! A Turk with a Greek! Don’t get me wrong, my boy, I have Turkish friends but …’ The old man looks down, flicks his rosary beads and thinks for a moment. ‘Her life was awful without you. They treated
that girl so badly.’

  At these words fury rises from Adem’s chest; these people’s antagonism seemed to know no end. They got rid of him and yet they still could not just let her be. The resentment he feels mounts up and he is suddenly maddened by pictures of the past flashing through his mind. He takes a step closer to the old man. His stance has changed: his features sharper, his eyes, somehow, darker. ‘I had to leave. Don’t you see, I had to! They put me through hell!’ Adem’s face is red now, with the rage that was stirring up inside him now rising to the surface. ‘How dare you judge me!’

  Adem’s eyes burn now, with torment, with hatred, with rage. The past crashes against his mind and the words he has wanted to say for so long come gushing out. ‘Look at me!’ he says, thumping his fist on his chest, ‘I’m just a man.’ He pulls at his collar, ripping the first two buttons off, revealing a gold pendant. ‘Just because I wear this moon and star did they have to engrave their hatred onto me?’ His voice is so tempestuous and at the same time, so full of sorrow, that the old man is taken aback. ‘Look at what they did to me and you tell me if you would have stayed!’ His voice trembles and so do his hands as he unbuttons his shirt and pulls it down with his jacket.

  Adem turns around. Etched deep into the skin of his back, reaching from shoulder to shoulder and running the length of his spine, is the branded scald of the Christian cross. The remnants of scorched flesh callously embroidered on his body in leathery crevices. The raw pain set for ever into the disfigured engravement of this symbol of sacrifice. ‘Am I such a devil that I have to have Allah watching me from the front and Christ watching me from the back? I’m imprisoned between these two bars.’ With his back still to the old man, his face drops. His body shakes and he hunches with the weight of these two worlds: his shoulderblades jut out, defacing the shape of the cross even more. Adem pulls up his shirt and jacket, covering the scar, but stares at the ground. ‘They came in one night as I was working, five or six of them, they took the poker from the furnace.’ Adem turns around and the old man looks into his red eyes.

  Adem’s shoulders are still hunched. The old man stands up and walks to the cupboard, opening it and grabbing a small bottle of ouzo. He holds it up, opens it and hands it to Adem. Adem looks at the old man timidly and takes the bottle. He drinks some. The aniseed burns his throat. The old man touches his arm. ‘Take it with you,’ he says, searching Adem’s face again. Adem closes the cap and slips the bottle into his inside jacket pocket.

  ‘You saved my life,’ the old man says. ‘Just as my old friend Mustafa once did. We were nine, playing cowboys and Indians. He was an Indian. I was a cowboy. Yet he threw me to the floor as a stone, about the size of a starfish, catapulted towards me. Could have broken my nose. Friends ever since. Lived down the road until three days ago.’ The old man’s eyes fill with water, but the fire still blazes within them like the reflection of the sun in the sea. He swallows hard. ‘If there is anything … What can there be? But if there is anything. I’ll be here until they kill me.’ The old man’s voice is obstinate, his tone adamant. He flicks the beads. Adem nods and leaves the old man sitting in that chair, flicking the beads and inhaling that distant salt of the sea. Adem can smell it seeping from his own pores as he exits the house. The smell of salt and fish. So familiar. The mist of every memory. The vapour that followed him through life. Mediterraneans don’t have a shadow; they have a haze from the sea, one of the few phrases his father loved to say, words that, as a boy, Adem found intriguing. He thought his father didn’t have a shadow because he never stepped out of the darkness.

  Adem turns back and looks at the old man’s house, then down at his own shadow, grey and defined in that afternoon light. With effort, he straightens his back, his shirt and his jacket, watching his shadow change shape and walks like a man with chains on his ankles.

  He thinks about her again and continues strenuously into the next house; it is just as hopeless, there is no sign of her anywhere. On every wall faces of nameless people stare down at him and the silence is thick.

  Until he reaches a particular house, set aside as though it has been discarded. He remembers that an old lady had lived here whose name he cannot recall. As he walks through the door he steps on a knife on the floor. He bends down and picks it up. It is a normal kitchen knife with a plastic handle; sharp at the tip. A photograph on the mantelpiece suddenly catches his eye. He is sure of what he has seen, but he is not prepared for it. He looks away for a moment and catches his breath. He looks back, and those grey eyes are wide and stare back at him. He walks towards it and picks it up. There is a boy of seven or eight standing beside her; he is holding her hand. He is darker than she is, he does not have her hair or her eyes, but he has the same smile and the same point at the end of his nose and that slightly square jaw. Her face seems longer than it was and more gaunt. There are grey shadows beneath her eyes and lines on her neck, but her hair is still the orange of flames. He holds the photograph still between the fingertips of both hands. The shadows move in the breeze. The walls of the house pulsate and so does the blood in his ears. He turns the photograph round. 1971. Did she get married? He looks again at the boy, at the curve of his hairline and those dark eyes …

  ‘Empty?’ says a deep voice behind him. Adem turns around. A soldier from his group stands at the doorway, his rifle tucked beneath his arm. A short, round man with sloped shoulders and arms that curve slightly outwards when he stands straight, like a skirt. He lifts his arm and wipes the sweat off his forehead. ‘I’ve done all the houses here,’ he says and squints his eyes against the sunlight that floods in through the window opposite. ‘Apparently they found loads of them nearly scorched to death in those fields, and some on the outskirts.’ Adem nods and tucks the photograph into his pocket as the other man looks behind him into the kitchen. ‘Water?’ he asks and Adem answers, ‘No.’

  *

  Richard sips the coffee. It is cold now and tastes thinner. He places the cup back into the saucer and looks out of the window at Old Compton Street. There, in the City of Westminster, parcelled between the red phoneboxes and buses and cigarette butts of Oxford Street and Piccadilly Circus, he feels a sudden sense of security. This familiar road in Soho, knotted with its craftsmen and tailors and silversmiths, red lights, stilettos and prostitutes, shimmers slightly beyond the window amongst a grey drizzle. Except he has never looked upon it through this window before. He has never been able to accumulate the courage to enter a Greek café and taste again that bitter coffee. Shop shutters creak in the wind, horns bellow, cars and buses rumble past, but all somewhat idiosyncratically, with undertones of foreign tongues. Just outside the window a Mediterranean lady drags a small screaming boy by the wrist, shouting foreign words, and a man calls something from a window above the tailor’s. Richard can hardly believe, amongst all the bustle, that Soho was once a hunting ground, an area of farmlands and fields and tiny cottages. In the seventeenth century, the Greek Cypriots fleeing from the Ottoman Empire were of the first wave of settlers. And here they still are, he thinks. Bloody Greeks!

  He lifts the coffee cup again, brings it to his mouth, remembers it is cold and places it down indignantly. The café is starting to fill up more. He taps his fingers, irritated, wishing they would go so he could talk to Paniko. But the anger inside him, despite his attempt to ignite it, fades, and is replaced by a sadness which starts in the pit of his stomach. He is immersed in the smell of olives and koubes, garlic and lemons, sweet shamishi and lokoumades, and that rusty whiff of money and cards and rolled-up tobacco, all encompassed in this tiny shop. This café is like a little porthole, like many others along these streets, into Cyprus; it was as if the Greeks had planted lemon trees into the landscape. And once again, there he sits, just as he had done so many times before, so long ago, there he sits beneath the grapevines, by the white arch, overlooking the magenta flowers and clay pots and green shrubs at the bottom of the hill, longing always for Marianna. She occupied his every thought in those lonely days at the b
arracks; she was all he thought about, even before he had touched her.

  He suddenly remembers the night back in 1947, the night of the Easter feast. As the bouzouki strings resonated through the night and wine glimmered a ruby red in the candlelight, he had sat there trying not to look at her as she dipped in and out of the crowd, smiling and laughing and dancing. He remembers her carrying a tray of whiskies, and kneeling down to offer him one, and then again, she was gone, just like she always was, lost somewhere amongst the dancers and the music and rings of smoke.

  It was late when he decided to leave. Most people were sitting down with empty glasses and ashtrays full of cigarette butts. Even Paniko had disappeared somewhere and the musician played sombre songs as an old man sang to himself. Richard stood up quietly amongst the shadows and made his way to the back of the olive trees towards the gate to leave. But at that point he had felt a hand pulling him into the bushes, and there, shrouded in the trees, in the thickness of the night and the echoes of the songs and the crickets, somebody pressed their lips onto his. Stunned at first, he jerked backwards, but her body rose and she kissed him again. She held his face with her hands. He felt the brush of her hair on his cheek. She smelt of oranges and baked bread and the lingering of old perfume. He pulled away, and ‘Marianna’ was all he said as he looked into her round black eyes in the moonlight. Then she leant over and kissed him again, pressing her stomach onto his. For those few moments he was lost in a balmy, blue fantasy, and he allowed himself to enjoy the touch of her olive flesh, warmer than the night.

  Then she stopped and pulled away so that he could see her standing amongst the speckled moonlight. Richard leant in to kiss her again, but she stepped back and lifted her arm so there was a quick flash of the marble-white of her underarm, then she leant forward, lifted his soldier’s cap, touched his hair with her fingertips and laughed. ‘Like oranges,’ she said. Placing his cap back on his head, she turned her back to him so that he could see the curvature of her spine beneath her linen dress. She paused for a moment, looked at her feet, said something to herself beneath her breath, tutted and sighed as though she were in some sort of struggle in her mind, and then started to walk away.