‘I lowered my head, shuffled my feet and attempted to move inconspicuously to the left so that I would not be facing him directly, but this smile threw me into a gawky frenzy and, as elegant as I tried to be, I ended up lumbering clumsily into the eggs. My foot crunched through the shells and I ended up standing in a pool of raw egg. He heaved himself onto the counter and looked down at my feet, tutting and shaking his head. He jumped back down, grabbed a stool, placed it right next to me and signalled for me to sit down. I lifted my foot out of the egg and broken shells and sat down on the stool. He laughed to himself as he disappeared into the back of the shop and appeared again with a bucket of water, a cloth and a newspaper. I didn’t know where to put my face; I was so embarrassed I could have died on the spot. He knelt before me, gently removed my shoes and wiped the egg off with some newspaper, then dipped the cloth into the soapy water and cleaned my foot. At the touch of his fingers on my skin, my face reddened and my heart fluttered. He scrubbed the sides of my foot with circular motions, then the sole with long sweeping movements, then he held the two ends of the towel, alternately pulling on each end so that he polished the top of my foot. He scrubbed and rubbed and washed as though my foot were a shoe. Then he looked at my shoes, which were tattered enough even before being covered with egg and had been cramping my toes so much that you could see the shape of them moulded into the leather. He measured my foot using his thumb and forefinger, scrunched his eyes and tossed the shoes into the bin. My eyes opened wide, but he ignored me and disappeared into the back again, this time returning with a pair of sparkling new black leather shoes in his hand. The toes were rounded and pretty. He held them up to my face. They were so shiny that I could see the reflection of the window in them. He put them on the floor, knelt down and slipped my polished feet into them then masterfully threaded the laces through the holes with the speed of a professional shoemaker. He looked up at me, tied them and then placed my feet together.
‘I was beside myself. I was engulfed by the smell of leather and polish. I was so enthralled that my heart pounded and my breathing deepened and I silently longed for him to touch me again. My lips parted slightly, but I could not speak. He rose and looked down at me while I sat motionless on that stool.’ Koki stops suddenly and looks around; the women stare, rapt by the story. She is comforted by their interest in her, reassured by their attentiveness, warmed by their silence. Just then the baby’s crying begins and the women’s shoulders suddenly tense. All look out beyond the garden and shift their positions disconcertedly. The crying propels them into the present and shatters the picture of the past.
In the far distance Adem hears a baby crying. The wail drifts like a dark shadow over remnants: the residues of life, the remains of rotting food, the ruins of churches and cold cadavers now dissected by birds and cats and rats. He passes the tree of hearts and the well and the port and the café where the old men used to sit flicking worry beads and sipping coffee. Walking in that morning heat, he imagines the ouzo; cold and clear. Hunched at the shoulders he follows his shadow west into the heart of the town. The heat is worse today, oppressive and red, carrying with it that lost dust from the African deserts. Adem looks up at the red sky and across at the Pentathaktylo Mountains that are now barely visible. Dust is never allowed to settle when diamonds twinkle beneath it, he thinks. Like Africa, Cyprus will always bear the waste of the outsider’s greed.
Once the island had sparkled copper and bronze, prospering in the hands of the Mycenaeans and Phoenicians, but later became the prey of many conquerors; shaken by avaricious fingers and stamped on by covetous feet. All upheaved the dust, those that clutched on from the east: Darius the Great, Ptolemy, Haroun al-Rashid and those that clutched on from the west: Alexander the Great, Augustus Denarius, Richard the Lionheart. They held onto the ends as though it was a Persian rug; at first they laid their thumbs on the edge of the carpet to tell the threads in a thumb’s breadth, for the more there are, the dearer the work is, and, deciding its worth, they pulled and shook and tugged to make it theirs. And though these men of power seized the island at different times, the ghost of their clasp still dented the shores, and the dust still hung in the sky over the cathedrals and mosques they had left behind.
King Evagoras of Salamis was the first to try to unify the Greeks on the island, long before Christ, when the Persians invaded. Adem thinks of the teachings of Isocrates, and Alexander’s campaign to unite all Greeks. Would EOKA be the last? Adem looks at the sky; it is woven with the colour of the earth, like the carpets that travelled over Europe and the East, that were touched by all and ridden on by many on those high commercial waves of the world. The dust falls gently, like rain. Except the comparison could not be further from reality. Rain seems as unreal now as the untouched sparkle of that first copper.
When the reservoirs are dry and cracked, even the priests pray for rain, but now most are probably dead, he thinks. Adem remembers that long drought, long ago. What was the year? Nineteen sixty-three? No. Nineteen sixty-four? The year of all the fighting. He is not sure, there were many.
He looks down at his shoes, now veiled with dust. The road is dry. A goat crosses his path, probably searching for water, its skin white and withered. There is no other movement now, only the trembling heat in the far distance, blurring the edges of the land.
The screaming is insistent, turning into a mechanical, motor-like sound: from helpless baby to machine. The persistent sound is more unrelenting than the cicadas. Its motive resolute. He wishes he could mute it. In fact, he wishes he could mute the world for it is sounds that disturb him the most: the crickets, the cicadas, the shelling, the crying. But not just that, also the ellipsis of sounds, removed like words from the story of the town: the laughter, the muttering, the gossiping, the cacophony of drama, even the birds. He looks at the sky again, and then stops and looks ahead. He has searched the houses already; the next logical place to look would be in the remaining hostage camp of the town. It would not be too far from the first, as Serkan would have needed to commute between the two easily.
Adem continues to walk with his head down. The soldier’s riddle pops into his head. ‘Once made, can never be destroyed, once destroyed, can never be repaired.’ He tries to focus his mind, but it is full of heat and the baby’s screaming. He hunches his shoulders further, takes off his hat and throws it on the ground.
From the far distance, a vehicle appears in the quivering heat. An army truck. It approaches almost statically, as if it were the fuzzy backdrop of one of those bad films in Istanbul. Adem looks around him and runs beneath some trees and into a garden full of open-mouthed clay ovens. He ducks behind one and watches the truck as it approaches. One soldier calls out and the truck comes to a halt about a hundred yards away. Two soldiers jump out with guns and look around. It is Hasad, with another soldier. The latter picks up the cap from the ground and they both look at it. ‘One more soldier down,’ he says, as though it were the punchline of a nursery rhyme. Hasad is not listening to him, though; he steps away and looks around, first into the road ahead, and then into the trees and gardens.
Adem holds his breath. A bead of sweat slides into his eye. He can hear the crunch of the soldiers’ boots. ‘Just think,’ says the soldier, looking philosophically at the cap in his hand, ‘this could be all that’s left of us in the end. I wonder why they always lose their caps. Doesn’t that always seem to be the case?’ Hasad doesn’t answer, but he continues, ‘The whole island will be dotted with caps in the end. Green caps on the hills instead of red poppies.’ Hasad glares at him suddenly with a look of extreme irritation. Even though his body leans to the left, folding itself into his longer arm, he stands resolutely in that heat. ‘Back in the truck!’ he demands and the soldier obeys and climbs in. Hasad takes one last look around and heaves himself up into the front, and the truck continues and subsides into the background. Adem breathes out and relaxes, allowing his body to lean completely on the clay oven. He notices that the screaming has stopped and now, in th
e earthy shade of the trees, he is immersed in the rattling of the cicadas.
He takes a few deep breaths, rubs his temples and stands up. He wishes there was a drop of water somewhere. He must continue; there is no time to waste. He passes the tailor’s old house and sees the same old lampshade in the window, and the baker’s house with the wooden armchair in the doorway and the butcher’s house with the copper basin in the garden. Not much had changed since he left, except things had withered, or corroded or become tarnished with rust, and people speckled with liver spots and silver hair. He remembers the fishmonger’s body and shudders.
He approaches the first prisoners’ camp and decides to walk round it in case there are soldiers passing. He passes the area safely and easily enough and reaches an opening, where a few houses face each other to make a small square. Adem touches his jacket pocket where the Bible is and takes a deep breath. Just then he hears the rumbling of wheels. He freezes suddenly. An army truck just behind the houses. He sees the flash of green in between walls. He darts into the front garden of the houses and looks around for the best place to hide. There isn’t much time. The rumbling increases as the truck approaches. In the garden is an olive tree whose trunk is too thin. The wall lining the garden would not be high enough to hide him properly. He decides to try the door and to his relief it is open. He slips inside and jams it behind him. If they found him now, surely they would kill him. All soldiers should be contained within their regiments. What would he be doing, wandering the streets of Kyrenia on his own? What business did he have in these areas when he has not been commanded to be here?
Adem hears the truck approaching and reaching a halt. He moves through the still shadows of the house into the front room, props himself up on the floor and looks out of the window. Three men step out into the heat. There seems to be no one else in the truck. They do not enter the house from the front, but wander round to the back and disappear amongst the bushes and lemon trees. There is a sudden dissonance of clucking and flapping wings. In a short while there is silence, then the men return, holding a young girl by the arms. They stuff her into the belly of the truck, jump in and head off again. He is sure that they will bring her back shortly. It is safer to wait.
Richard wakes up in his brown studio flat with the sun shining on his face. A pigeon cries on the windowsill and the rush-hour train lumbers heavily below. This time he has woken in his bed. It has been years since he has slept in his bed and stared at the cracks on the ceiling from this position. He notices how the crack that once reached the midpoint of the room has now crawled almost to the other end. There is a sinking feeling in his stomach as he realises how much time has passed.
There is much noise in the block this morning. People coming and going: doors opening and closing, a girl laughing, the clunk of pram wheels on the steps, a dog sniffing at his door as it passes, the flap of sandals on the floor. And the sounds from outside carry a similar chord of jolliness: people’s voices sound happier, music thumps from cars and open windows. Richard wonders if it is a national holiday he has forgotten about. The sun is hot on his face. Ah ha! Of course! The damn curse of five minutes’ sun! We leave our damp holes like blind moles and squint along the street until the rain begins again. He turns away from the light. A phone rings in the distance and a cockney voice far below boasts about Jamaican tomatoes, Spanish bananas and Serbian lemons. Stupid man.
Richard heaves himself up and brings his feet out of the bed. He looks down. His slippers are there. He had remembered to place them there last night, just like he used to; in the days when he still had hope. Hope and slippers come hand in hand. When there is no hope one does not care about wearing slippers, the cold slabs are good enough, there is no real desire for warmth. Is there hope now? None whatsoever, he decides. Not from now on, anyway. But maybe for walking in his former footsteps. The sickly hope of nostalgia; a walk along old avenues, the feeling one gets when watching a slide show of the past.
He puts his feet into his slippers, stands up and meanders to the sink basin. Looking at himself in the mirror, he pats the sides of his hair with the palms of his hands and picks up his toothbrush. After brushing his teeth he moves to his wardrobe, takes out his brown jumper and grey trousers and dresses himself, slowly, carefully. He has already decided that he will go back to the café. It is the only place he can be now that the small island is being ripped apart. He imagines it desolate and shelled and his beautiful little girl … she would be a woman now … tall and fiery, with sad, watery eyes. Just like him. And that little island was exactly where his carefully tied laces got caught in the dried thorns and his thoughts became trapped in the heavy net of vines and the barb of carob trees. ‘But that is what islands are for,’ he says in a voice that he imagines would have resembled Lawrence Durrell’s, ‘places where destinies can meet and intersect in that full isolation of time.’ But his feelings cannot be so detached. Although both he and Durrell had stepped, during the same decade, onto the same port of Limassol, into a dense haze of morning sunshine, Durrell had managed to keep his feet steady along the curling, cobbled streets. Richard had failed to follow this very simple, unspoken path bestowed on the traveller and soldier alike; somewhere, he had stopped walking, forgotten his journey and planted himself in the soil of somebody else’s field. Don’t sprout where you haven’t been planted, Richard thinks, remembering an old Greek proverb.
The man far below boasts about Syrian melons now, and a couple of dogs bark at each other from across the vast landscape of fences and washing lines. He rummages under his bed and looks for Durrell’s Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, which was his loyal guide and companion after he had bought it at a fair in 1958, just as A Lady’s Impressions of Cyprus had been for Durrell himself. Back then, he could not help but feel an excessive affiliation with the man, he had clung onto the book with some hope that he might be able to rekindle a little of that romantic fictionalisation of the Englishman in his crown colony, experiencing the smell of almonds and peach blossoms, enjoying salty cheese and sweet wine, basking in the shade of the vines while making mental timelines of the various conquerors. He finds the book in a box with other trinkets, such as his mother’s locket and his grandfather’s old coins and stamps and a rusty pocket knife and a recipe on a torn piece of paper. The book is just as he had left it, with the dog-eared cover and certain pages folded neatly. He turns a few pages, flicking past publishing and printing notes to where the story begins, and there, beneath desiccated drops of coffee, are the beloved and familiar words, ‘Journeys, like artists, are born and not made.’ He contemplates for a moment, tucks the book beneath his arm and exits his flat, passing the man with the Russian coconuts and walks, once more, across St James’s Park, up through Piccadilly and right into Soho towards Old Compton Street.
However, this time, he does not enter the café immediately, but stops by the secondhand bookshop, where a pickled-looking lady sits frugally on a stool behind a counter, reading a book. She takes off her spectacles as the bell above the door rings and looks at Richard as if he had just entered her home uninvited. ‘Yes?’ she says, in a tone that reinforces her irritable disposition. Richard looks at the book in her hand – Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) – walks towards her and places Bitter Lemons on the counter. ‘That’ll be fifty pence,’ she says, her skin creasing extravagantly as she smiles and a lavish yellow illuminating her teeth. Richard steps back. Her breath smells of used cigarette ends.
‘I just brought this in,’ he replies. ‘I’m handing it in,’ he reiterates, stressing each word clearly.
‘Oh, well, you win some, you lose some,’ the lady responds, looks at the book, tosses it onto a pile and looks down again, intently, at the open book on the counter.
Richard exits the bookshop and continues along Old Compton Street to Amohosto Café. Due to the temperate weather, Paniko has put a small white table outside the shop, where an old man sits with a coffee, flicking worry beads contemplatively. His foot taps on the t
armac. He nods at Richard as he enters the café. The shop is filled with the usual break-fasters, preparing for a long day in the factories. Richard notices that the man in the brown suit is not here today. But the fat man is in the same seat by the window, sucking audibly on a mint. Richard avoids him and finds a table on the other side of the room, near the counter.
Richard sits down and keeps his eye on the kitchen door, waiting for Paniko to appear. Instead Elli, Paniko’s wife, sprints out with two trays in her hands. Richard met her only a few times when he first returned to England, but since then they had had many phone conversations, when she had called looking for her husband. Like a fly, now she whizzes round the room depositing coffees and cakes on various tables, every so often removing a pencil from behind her ear and taking a new order. As usual, she wears all grey, with that large gold crucifix round her neck. She passes Richard’s table, stops, removes the pencil from behind her ear and rests it on the pad, ready to write. She looks up impatiently and then smiles sadistically. ‘So, it’s you at last! The one who holds onto my husband’s bullocks so tightly.’ At this she clenches the fingers of her left hand into the shape of a claw as if she is squeezing something. Her features distort. ‘How about some lokoumades today? They still sizzling in the pan.’ Richard creases his brow, seeking further clarification. ‘Donald balls,’ she says. Richard creases his brow further. ‘Donald balls,’ she repeats impatiently. ‘Donald balls!’ she stresses, but at the look on Richard’s face she pushes an open palm toward him, saying ‘Na’, to indicate her resignation at his stupidity and walks away, shaking her head.
A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible Page 18
