Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island

by Lawrence Durrell

  This however did not seem as easy as it sounded; twice we were recalled from the tarmac just as we were about to make our run, by telephone calls from the Prime Minister, and twice the Secretary of State made a good-humored journey back to the telephone in the lounge.

  Then at last we were up, in slow swerves and gyres, into a soft magical sunset over England. There was a general settling down and taking off of coats. “Whisky and soda?” Sir John posed his Iliad strategically on the porthole as he accepted the offering. Our ears began to tune themselves to the hum and whistle of the machine; smiles and gestures to replace words. The pilot came forward, stood to attention, and saluted smartly as he handed the Secretary of State a piece of paper. “It’s just come through, sir,” he shouted. “I thought you might like to see it.” I thought this must be some thrilling communication from the P.M. and was quite alarmed when the Secretary of State groaned in anguish and clutched his head. What did this portend? War, perhaps, had broken out. “England all out for 155,” he cried passing the paper to Sir John who pursed his lips and looked vaguely at it, unable to respond to the news with quite the same wholeheartedness. “What a rotten show.”

  After an hour of acclimatization and rest the food and drink disappeared and the red dispatch cases were brought forward and their contents spread out upon the table. The party fell to work with a will and carried on through the darkness until I began to doze myself.

  We refueled at Naples on a deserted field full of hollow darkened buildings with here and there a flare picking up the rounded flanks of some great charter aircraft. Cyprus with its problems did not swim up at us until about nine the next morning, brown and misty and framed by the singing sea. Regretfully the Iliad was put aside, the dream surrendered for the reality; my own paperbacked P. G. Wodehouse had lain untouched in my coat pocket. (I had been too ashamed to bring it out in such distinguished company. We highbrow poets have our pride.)

  For the next two days there were conferences and meetings, indecisive in themselves perhaps, but valuable in giving the Secretary of State a chance to meet the personalities whose different attitudes made up the jigsaw of the Cyprus problem. I was amused too by the consternation in the Secretariat when the great man disappeared at dawn one morning. It appeared that he had gone to Lapithos for an early bathe, and to drink a coffee with some peasant cronies at the little tavern; a typical and delightful touch in the middle of so much boring work. He was back by 9:30.

  That morning a time-bomb blew up the Income Tax Office harming no one; there was great dismay when it was learned that all the Income Tax returns for the year had not been blown up with the office. Another and later bomb at the Land Registry Office was discovered in time and rendered harmless. In this atmosphere of tiresome hazard the consultations continued, and more and more the question of self-determination emerged as the key factor to the political aspect of things—though of course this was now only another way of saying Enosis, since the Greeks were in a majority of five to one.

  The Tripartite Conference was everywhere rumored to be a trap, baited by an unacceptable constitution with no safeguards for a future freedom of suffrage on the Union issue; the Archbishop flew the short leg to Athens to keep the uneasy Papagos on the white line. Athens now seemed to have become quite uncertain of itself, for the question had begun to threaten the internal stability of Greece, and the stability of the very faction we had assisted into power and helped to fight the Communists. We were in danger now of letting the Right wing founder in Greece—and this process was being blissfully helped by the Cypriot Greeks who had never had any experience of foreign relations and who pressed for firmer international action. By now, of course, public opinion in Greece was in a very excitable state and anything smelling of moderation sounded “unpatriotic.” Greek cabinets depend on the state of public opinion for their stability in a way that no other government does. Tail was wagging dog, Nicosia was wagging Athens. And behind it all a thundercloud was gathering over Greek-Turkish relations. These were urgent, indeed pre-eminent considerations; against them, it seemed to me, a bomb or two in Cyprus was a mere secondary feature. It was a relief to know that the Greek Government had accepted the invitation to London without asking for the conditions demanded by both the Archbishop and the Communists. It was a measure of the urgency with which the situation was viewed from Athens. They were in a nasty jam; but then so were we in Cyprus.

  Meanwhile things were hardening up domestically; if terrorists could not be brought to justice they could at least be penned out of harm’s way. In early July the Detention Laws were promulgated, making Wren’s task a bit easier, and indirectly I suppose saving a number of lives among the apprentices and schoolboys who were locked up summarily when they could not, for lack of witnesses, be charged. This touched off a series of attacks by Athens radio, which accused us of “Fascism” and even “Genocide.” The living conditions of the detainees became a staple for commentaries and hysterical knife-twisting, and the conditions of life within Kyrenia castle were hotly debated.

  We again challenge the Public Information Officer to answer the following question on behalf of the Cypriot people: are there or are there not latrines at the castle? And if there are no latrines, what is the substitute? And one more question: Is it or is it not true that the contents of the metal buckets, used as horrible substitutes for latrines, are emptied at a very short distance from the castle, thereby endangering the health of the detainees? It must be true, Mr. Durrell, unless our sense of sight and smell, as well as the swarms of flies and other filthy insects, deceive us.

  This seemed to be going a bit far; I was tempted to ask the Greek Ministry of Information a few choice questions about the general state of sanitation in Greece—which has to be experienced to be believed—but I spared him; Philhellenism dies hard. “Nevertheless,” said the Colonial Secretary, “you’d better go up yourself and have a look, and arrange to have the press taken round to show that though we may be Fascist beasts our sanitation is still sound.” I reluctantly agreed to do so.

  The camp had now been moved from the castle to Kokkinotrimithia, and here on the harsh bare unlovely tableland the sappers had run up a few huts and a great wire pen. It looked from far off like an abandoned turkey farm. I rode up with Foster who spoke despairingly of the lack of reason the prisoners showed, of their abso lute contempt of law, of civic morality. “About two-thirds of them could be indicted on serious offences,” he repeated with fussy solicitude, “the little bastards! And they throw clods at visitors and shout ‘Fascist’ at us. Us, Fascists, I ask you!”

  It was a sad place; like one of those soulless transit camps near the western desert. The inmates looked a somewhat chastened and bedraggled lot—and a number were by no means infants. I kept an eye cocked for my students. On past form I was convinced I should find the whole of Epsilon Alpha behind bars, but I was relieved to recognize only two, the fat ruffian Joanides and Paul. Joanides was a grocer’s son, and a natural comedian of such talent that I had been forced to expel him at the beginning of almost every lesson, much to my regret as his sallies (which were all in patois) were very funny indeed. He had spent his English hour walking up and down the corridors whistling tunelessly and pretending, when the headmaster was on the prowl, that he was going to the lavatory. He set up a great whoop when he saw me and said: “So they got you at last, Mr. Durrell? I told you you were too friendly with the Greeks. Now they’ve nobbled you.” For a moment I think he really believed it. We entered the pen and he fairly romped up to me. “What are you doing here?” I said with severity, “fool that you are. This is where your folly has brought you, Imbecile.” I asked Foster what he had been doing, and the boy shifted uneasily from one fat calf to the other. His round face fell. “He had a bomb on him,” said Foster sighing with grandmotherly despair. “I ask you, a grenade.” Joanides looked from Foster to me and then back again. He was sad to find us so severe. “Ach! Mr. Durrell,” he said, “it was just a little bomb,” extending his index finger
s and holding them three inches apart. I passed him by in silence.

  Living conditions were cramped but not bad. Probably less hard than they are for many a National Service youth. We toured the huts, examined the food and hot-water facilities. To judge by the books on most of the windowsills and beds a number of the terrorists must have been intellectuals. I saw Myrivilis’s Life Entombed and the rare Athens edition of Cavafy; Seferis’s poems and Aeolia by Venezis with my own preface which had been lovingly translated from the English edition. These things hurt me, as I realized for the first time that the appeal of EOKA was not to wrongdoers, congenital felons, but precisely to the most spirited and idealistic element among the youth. They would be the ones to suffer at the dictates of the ringmasters.

  Paul was standing in a window, looking pointedly away across that cruel and barren no man’s land of red sandstone. He gave no sign and I did not wish to intrude upon him. I hesitated, and then joined Foster to make a slow circuit of the room, picking up here and there an exercise book or a newspaper. At last I went up to him and put my hand on his shoulder. “Why are you here?” I said.

  He was not far from tears, but the face that he turned to me tried to be composed, impassive. He did not speak but stared at me with a look of furious anguish—as if indeed a wolf were gnawing at his vitals. “He had a bomb too,” said Foster wearily. “Bloody little fools! What do they think they gain by it? He threw it in the churchyard by the crossroads. I suppose he thought he’d scare us all out of our wits.”

  “Are you in EOKA?” I asked.

  “We are all EOKA. All Cyprus,” he said in a low controlled voice. “If he wants to know why I threw it in the churchyard tell him because I was a coward. I am unworthy. But the others are not like me. They are not afraid.” I saw suddenly that what I had mistaken for hatred of my presence, my person, was really something else—shame. “Why are you a coward?” He moved a whole step nearer to tears and swallowed quickly. “I was supposed to throw it in a house but there were small children playing in the garden. I could not. I threw it in the churchyard.”

  Superb egotism of youth! He had been worried about his own inability to obey orders. It is, of course, not easy for youths raised in a Christian society, to turn themselves into terrorists overnight—and in a sense his problem was the problem of all the Cypriot Greeks. If Frangos had been given a pistol to shoot me I am convinced that he would not have been able to pull the trigger. “So you are sorry because you didn’t kill two children?” I said. “What a twisted brain, what a twisted stick you must be as well as a fool!” He winced and his eyes flashed. “War is war,” he said. I left him without another word.

  I interviewed two committees, each consisting of a group of three elected youths, whose duty it was to be responsible for the opinions of their pen. They had little to complain of, though they complained hotly and manfully about everything. I heard them out, wore them down, and at last listed their grounds for complaint—the most serious of which was that the crowded conditions prevented them from studying for their examinations! Most of them were due to take G. C. E. this year. When I told Foster this he took both hands off the steering wheel and put them over his ears. “Don’t,” he pleaded in anguish. “Don’t tell me any more. They are mad. I can’t take it. First they throw a bomb, then they want to pass their School Cert., and I’m a Fascist because they can’t!” He moaned and rocked from side to side. “It’s like being a male nurse in an institution. Are all the Greeks as mad as this lot?”

  The answer, of course, was yes. “Well, I’m out of my depth,” said Foster, “and the sooner I get back to U. K. the better.” I must say I sympathized with him.

  The days passed in purposeless riots and the screaming of demagogues and commentators; and the nights were busy with the crash of broken glass and the spiteful detonation of small grenades. The Turks began to get restive. Sabri’s eyes darkened and flashed as he spoke of the situation. I had driven over on Sunday to collect some wood for the house. “How much longer are they going to tolerate these Greeks?” he demanded. The day before there had been a serious riot and he himself had turned back a mob of Turks bent upon setting fire to the Bishopric. (Sabri was a very gallant man: I once saw him dive fully clothed into Kyrenia harbor to rescue a Greek fisherman’s child in difficulties.) “We Turks would not tolerate it,” he said as he sat, unmoving among his perambulators. “You must take sterner measures. Fines. Severe sentences. I know these people. I was born here. They will come to heel. We Turks know the way.” But of course the methods of 1821 were hardly possible to contemplate today, and the Greeks knew it. If we had been Russians or Germans the Enosis problem would have been solved in half an hour—by a series of mass murders and deportations. No democracy could think along these lines.

  And then, how recognizable were the Cypriots of today from those of yesterday? That evening a Dutch journalist repeated to me a conversation he had had with a Greek consular official in which the latter said:

  To be honest we never thought the bastards would show fight. We never dreamed all this trouble would come about. We backed them up morally because we think their claim was just; but never materially. It’s entirely a Cypriot show, and it has astonished us. Cyprus is like a man who has been told he is impotent for generations; suddenly he finds himself in bed with a lovely girl and discovers that he isn’t—he can actually make love! We thought it would be all over in a month, but now we think it will really go on.

  He had forgotten, he said, that the quality of obstinacy was something which the Cypriots did not share with metropolitan Greeks.… And so on. True or false?

  From all these fragmented pieces of the original life of Cyprus—the quietness and certainty of ordered ways and familiar rhythms—it was impossible now to assemble a coherent picture, even up at the Abbey where the coffee drinkers still sat, drenched in the Gothic silence and coolness of those idle afternoons, against a wall with its livid cartoons which urged them to throw off their imprisoning web of sleep and act.

  But the shots which rang out on the afternoon before the London Conference opened should have dispelled any hopes I entertained of a dramatic and satisfactory solution to our troubles. The death of P. C. Poullis in the open street after a Communist rally, not only virtually put Wren’s Special Branch out of commission, but later provided the Greeks with the first of the Enosis martyrs in the person of Karaolis, a mild well-mannered youth in the Income Tax department of the Government. The grotesque, the unreal, was rapidly becoming the normal. The hush of Cyprus, which had, for so many generations, been the calm unemphatic hush of an island living outside time but within the boundaries of a cherished order, had changed: the hush of a new fear had gripped it, and the air was darkened with the vague shapes and phantoms of a terror which the Government could no longer dispel or hold at bay. The political liberty of the subject was a secondary consideration where one could not offer bare security of person in the open street. We were penetrated at every point; Security in the professional police sense had become as vague a term as the personal security of the subject. The six thousand civil servants themselves now began to feel the squeeze of the terror; an invisible pistol dogged them. There was no question of loyalties—for everyone was loyal. But no informer could pass the barrier without being discovered and that meant death; conversely not to obey a terrorist command might also mean death. What was the position of a secondary schoolboy who had signed the EOKA oath and who one day found himself in a small room with three masked men who ordered him to place a time-bomb or commit a murder—or else pay the price? The police depended upon Cypriots for intelligence; they were penetrated. In the administration it was the same. The Colonial Secretary himself had a Cypriot secretary—devoted and loyal as she was. Secure confidence was everywhere prejudiced, and everywhere there grew the sensation of the walls closing in upon us.

  But the key was finally turned upon Cyprus by the London Conference, where the Turkish attitude, which had now become as hard as a rock, could not b
e shifted by a degree; nor was anyone disposed to imitate Hannibal and try a little vinegar. My worst fears were realized, though here again I was guilty of misjudgment, for the Turkish case was not merely politically expedient to follow; it linked itself in other ways to pacts and agreements outside Cyprus, affecting the Arab world. Could one afford to cross Turkey? Either way we were confronted by a hedge of thorns. We had undermined the stability of Athens and indeed our whole Balkan position by an earlier refusal to take the Greek case on Cyprus seriously; we might, in any late attempt to unwind the spools of policy back to that point, unsettle the Turkish alliance, and prejudice the whole complex of Middle Eastern affairs in which this great Moslem power played such an important part. We had allowed too much time to pass, and Turkish public opinion was now in the grip of a hysteria which, though less justified, was as strong as that which was gripping Athens. The Turkish case, as such, did not of course carry as much weight as the Greek though one could sympathize with the Turks of Cyprus. Nevertheless it was difficult to understand how a hypothetically Greek Cyprus could constitute a graver military threat to Turkey than did Rhodes or Thasos; and the two hundred thousand Turks in Thrace do not seem to find life harder than the corresponding number of Greeks living in Turkey.… But national hysteria makes a poor counselor, and the shocking riots which followed in September in Turkey made the argument seem hollower than ever, and revived in a flash the ancient barbaric animosities which lie buried in the hearts of Turks and Greeks, and which both until now believed dead for ever.

  But the fruitless Conference had cut the frail cord which held us still attached, however tenuously, to reason and measure. So long an orphan administratively, Cyprus was now cut adrift, a political orphan, to float slowly down the melancholy couloirs of Middle Eastern history, blown hither and thither by the chance winds of prejudice and passion.