Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

by Lawrence Durrell

  But I had already begun to see the island as whole, building my picture of it from the conversations of my host. With him I spent three winters snowed up on Troodos, teaching in a village school so cold that the children’s teeth chattered as they wrote; with him I panted and sweated in the ferocious August heat of the plains; suffered from malaria at Larnaca; spent holidays among the rolling vineyards of Paphos in search of vines to transplant; like him I came back always to the Kyrenia range, to cool my mind and gladden my heart with its greenness, its carpets of wild anemones, its castles and monasteries. It was like returning to a fertile island from a barren one—from Cephalonia to Corfu.

  I did not need to know where my house would be found; I was sure that it would be here, along the foothills of this delightful range. But how should I find it?

  Nothing must be done in a hurry, for that would be hostile to the spirit of the place. Cyprus, I realized, was more Eastern than its landscape would suggest, and like a good Levantine I must wait and see.

  Chapter Three: Voices at the Tavern Door

  Everyone pulls the quilt over to his side.

  The hardest crusts always fall to the toothless.

  Work is hard, no work is harder.

  So long as he has a tooth left a fox won’t be pious.

  —Cypriot Greek Proverbs

  AFTER A FEW weeks Kyrenia, for all the formalized beauty of its ravishing harbor, its little streets and walled gardens rosy with pomegranates, began to pall. It is difficult to analyze why—for the Spring was on us and the green fields about the village, still spotted with dancing yellow oranges and tangerines, were thick with a treasury of wild flowers such as not even spring in Rhodes can show. But other considerations intruded, changing its atmosphere. The outskirts of the walls, where still the traces of ancient tombs were clear in the rock face of quarries or cuttings, had begun to bristle with cheap little villas and tarmac roads on the pattern of Wimbledon. Here and there houses already bore the alarming name-signs which greet one from the gates of seaside boarding-houses, “Mon Repos,” “Chowringee,” “The Gables.” The little place was obviously soon to become one of those forlorn and featureless townships hovering on the outskirts of English provincial cities—suburbs without a capital to cling to. There was a building boom on; all land was booming. The regular holiday-makers’ season Kyrenia enjoyed had already imposed on it a rash of unpleasant bars and cafés painfully modeled on those of Messrs. Lyons. It was, in fact, enjoying all the deformities and amenities associated with our larger suburbs at home. Its real life as a Graeco-Turkish port of the Levant was ebbing out of it. Or so one felt.

  In all this one could see something which marked Cyprus off from the rest of the Mediterranean—an agricultural island being urbanized too quickly, before its inhabitants had really decided what was worth preserving about their habits and surroundings.

  Disturbing anomalies met the eye everywhere: a Cypriot version of the small-car owner, for example, smoking a pipe and reverently polishing a Morris Minor; costumed peasants buying tinned food and frozen meat at the local version of the Co-op; ice-cream parlors with none of the elaborate confectionery, the true Levant delicacies, which make the towns of the Middle East as memorable as a tale from the Arabian Nights; an almost total absence of good fish or any fishy delicacy. As far as I could judge the townsman’s standard of living roughly corresponded to that of a Manchester suburb. Rural life remained as a sort of undertow. The peasant was already becoming a quaint relic of a forgotten mode of life. White bread and white collars!

  Yet side by side with this crude and graceless world the true Mediterranean moeurs lingered—but the two aspects of life seemed totally divorced from one another. Crowded buses still brought black-booted peasants with quaint old-fashioned manners into the town, accompanied by their wives and daughters, many of whom sported permanent waves and shingles. There were gypsies, there were tramps and professional poets, to be sure, but their appearances were fugitive and had the air of being illusory. I could not be sure where they lived, where they came from, these figures from the literature of the past. How had they escaped the cloth cap and boots, the cheap overcoat and brief case which—apart from the hunger and despair—had been the only noticeable feature of the people’s revolution in Yugoslavia? It was hard to say—for they were still roughly and talkatively alive. They were still melon-fanciers and tosspots, carrying about with them the rough airs of village life and village ways which one can enjoy anywhere between Sardinia and Crete. Yet there seemed to be something disembodied about them. Somewhere, I concluded, there must be a Cyprus beyond the red pillar-boxes and the stern Union Jacks (floating, mysteriously enough, only over the police-stations) where weird enclaves of these Mediterranean folk lived a joyous, uproarious, muddled anarchic life of their own. Where? Occasionally I stopped people and asked them where they came from: booted and bandoliered sportsmen drinking brandy and leaning on their guns as they waited for a bus; grave priests or turbaned hodjas; baggy-trousered patriarchs holding swaddled infants; women in colored head-kerchiefs. I was rewarded by the names of villages which I memorized. Later I would know exactly where to find woven stuff and silk (Lapithos), or carved cupboards and shelves (Akanthou). Kyrenia was the shopping center for a district.

  Meanwhile the British colony lived what appeared to be a life of blameless monotony, rolling about in small cars, drinking at the yacht club, sailing a bit, going to church, and suffering agonies of apprehension at the thought of not being invited to Government House on the Queen’s Birthday. One saw the murk creeping up over Brixton as one listened to their conversations. No doubt Malta and Gibraltar have similar colonies. How often they have been described and how wearisome they are. Yet my compatriots were decent, civil folk, who had been brought here, not by any desire to broaden minds cumbered only by the problems of indolence and trade, but by a perfectly honorable passion for sunlight and low income tax. How sad it is that so many of our national characteristics are misinterpreted! Our timidity and lack of imagination seem to foreigners to be churlishness, our taciturnity the deepest misanthropy. But are these choking suburbanisms with which we seem infused when we are abroad any worse than the tireless dissimulation and insincerity of the Mediterranean way of life? I doubt it. Yet Manoli the chemist lived in a perpetual ferment of indignation about British manners, British stand-offishness and so on. His particular hate was General Envy. He would perform a little dance of rage as he saw the old soldier sauntering down the main street, patronizing not only the poor Cypriots but the very morning air by the self-confident sweep of his tobacco-stained moustache. “Look at him,” he would say. “I could throw a tomato at him.” Then one day the General asked him how to pronounce the Greek for “potato” and shyly showed him a shopping list which he had laboriously made out in Greek. After that Manoli would flush with annoyance if ever he heard a word spoken against the old fellow. He became, for Manoli at least, a saint; and yet the General, as all who remember him will agree, was a vile old bore with scarce manners and little enough consideration for the world around him. “Such a good, kind man,” Manoli would say after the General’s canonization, rolling his dark eyes and nodding. “Such a worthy and respected man.” This is what happened whenever Briton and Cypriot met, even to exchange the merest civility.

  The truth is that both the British and the Cypriot world offered one a gallery of humors which could only be fully enjoyed by one who, like myself, had a stake in neither. Never has one seen such extraordinary human beings as those who inhabited the Dome Hotel; it was as if every forgotten Victorian pension between Folkestone and Scarborough had sent a representative to attend a world conference on longevity. The figures, the faces, the hats belonged to some disoriented world populated only by Bronx cartoonists; and nothing could convince one more easily that England was on its last legs than a glimpse of the wide range of crutches, trusses, trolleys, slings, and breeches-buoys which alone enabled these weird survivals to emerge from their bed-rooms and take the pa
le spring sunshine of the Kyrenia waterfront.… Shadowy and faded plumage of dejected fowls and crows shuffling through the sterile white corridors towards a terrace laid with little tables and religiously marked “Afternoon Teas”; or the strange awkward figures of honeymooners sauntering hand in hand under the fort—convalescents from a prenuptial leucotomy. Alas! the Cypriots did not see how funny they were. They were merely aghast at their age and the faded refinements which they exemplified.

  Conversely the British saw a one-dimensional figure in the Cypriot; they did not realize how richly the landscape was stocked with the very sort of characters who rejoice the English heart in a small country town—the rogue, the drunkard, the singer, the incorrigible. Here and there the patriarchal figure of some booted worthy seemed to strike them for a moment, like a fugitive realization that here was a figure belonging truly to his landscape. But the fitful understanding died there, under the label of “quaintness,” and was dispersed. Perhaps language was the key—it was hard to say. Certainly I was astonished to find how few Cypriots knew good English, and how few Englishmen the dozen words of Greek which cement friendships and lighten the burdens of everyday life. There were, of course, many honorable exceptions on both sides who struck the balance truly. Scholars of wild flowers and students of wine and folklore already had something in common which overstepped the gaps created by lack of knowledge. But generally speaking the divorce was complete, and the exceptions rare; all too many of us lived as if we were in Cheltenham, while some had been there as long as five years without feeling the need to learn the Greek or Turkish for “Good morning.” These things are trivial, of course, but in small communities they cut deep; while in revolutionary situations they can become the most powerful political determinant.

  But I was on a different vector, hunting for other qualities which might make residence tolerable, or might isolate me from my fellows. My attitude was a selfish one, though wherever I saw our national credit prejudiced by an inadvertent word or action I tried to restore the balance if it were possible by soothing ruffled feelings or interpreting the significance of some action which had been misconstrued. It is fatal in the Levant to be too proud to explain.

  But this digression has led me away from my topic—the music of a flute, which one day issued from the shadowy recesses of Clito’s cavern, and restored my confidence in the belief that topers did, in fact, exist in Cyprus. My dissatisfaction with the existing Coca-Cola bars or pubs had for some time been nagging me, persuading me to try to find a modest tavern whose habitués would correspond more nearly to the sort of people I had come to live amongst. In Panos’s world there had been good fellowship and kindness, but also a middle-class restraint and poise which were in the final analysis, wearying. The lives of his friends were lived according to a pattern already familiar to me; the middle bourgeois of France or England live just such lives, among the circumscribed politenesses of people who have face to lose and positions to keep up. Panos’s was the world of the quiet scholar of means in a small village. I wanted to see a little further into Cypriot life, to canvass its values at a humbler level.

  The feeble insinuations of a shepherd’s flute directed my steps to the little wine-store of Clito one fine tawny-purple dusk when the sea had been drained of its colors, and the last colored sails had begun to flutter across the harbor-bar like homesick butterflies. It had been the first really warm spring day—the water cold and bracing. It was good to feel salt on one’s skin, in one’s hair, salt mixed with dust between one’s sandaled toes. It would be another hour before lamp-light, and by now the harbor walk would be full of people taking their dusk aperitifs. I was on my way to buy a torch battery and a roll of film when the flute intervened.

  It was obviously being played by someone with an imperfect command over it; it squeaked and yipped, started a line again, only to founder once more in squeals. The music was punctuated by a series of shattering disconnected observations in a roaring bass voice of such power that one could feel the sympathetic vibrations from a set of copper cauldrons standing somewhere in the innermost recesses of Clito’s cave. Bursts of helpless laughter and a labored altercation also played an intermittent part in the proceedings.

  I entered the cave with circumspection and greeted Clito, whom I had seen before. He stood behind his own bar with a faint and preoccupied kindness graven on his thin face, gazing up at the flute-player with the helpless affection of a moth drunk on sugar water. He held his hand over his mouth to imprison his laughter.

  The musician was a large sturdy peasant clad in tall black boots and baggy Turkish trousers of rusty black. He wore a sweat-stained shirt of serge, open at the throat to show a woollen vest which had once been white. He had a fine head and a thick untrimmed moustache; a blue and somewhat vague eye, and at his belt a finely carved gourd for a water-bottle. On his head he wore a sort of bonnet made from a strip of lambswool. He was gorgeously drunk.

  At either elbow stood a sleepily smiling Turkish policeman with the air of a mute, waiting to help with the body when the service was complete; they both made deprecating noises from time to time, saying “You shut up, now,” and “That’s enough,” and so on, but with a helpless lackadaisical air. The fact that both had large glasses of cognac before them seemed to indicate that the law-breaker was not the ogre he sounded, and that this was by way of being a performance repeated regularly. They were used to it. I had no sooner deduced this than Clito confirmed it. “Every time he has a Name Day in his family he drinks. He’s a strange one.” “Strangeness” in Greek means “a character.” One indicates the quality by placing one’s bunched fingers to the temple and turning them back and forth in the manner of someone trying a door-handle. Clito made the gesture furtively and let it evolve into a wave—towards a chair from which I could watch the fun. “His name is Frangos,” he said, with the air of a man who explains everything in a single word.

  “Who dares to say I am drunk?” roared Frangos for perhaps the ninth time, blowing with the same breath a squeak or two from his handsome brass flute. More guffaws. He then began a splendid tirade, couched in the wildest argot, against the damned English and those who endured them with such patience. The policemen began to look more alert at this, and Clito explained hastily: “When he goes too far … pouf! they cut him off and take him away.” With his two fingers he edited a strip of cinema film. But Frangos seemed to me a formidable person to cut off in this fashion. He had shoulders like an ox. One of the policemen patted him awkwardly and was shaken off like a fly. “Why,” bellowed Frangos, “do you tell me to shut up when I am saying what everyone knows?” He gave a toot on his instrument and followed it up with a belch like a slammed door. “As for the English I am not afraid of them—let them put me in irons.” He joined a pair of huge fists dramatically. A couple of timid English spinsters peered nervously into the tavern as they passed. “Let them fire on me.” He tore open his shirt and exposed an expanse of breastbone curly with dense black hair with a gold cross nestling in it. He waited for a full half-second for the English to fire. They did nothing. He leaned against the bar once more, making it creak, and growled on, lashing his tail. Renos, the little boot-black sitting next to me, was shaken by giggles; but lest I might find this impolite he explained breathlessly between sobs: “He doesn’t really mean it, sir, he doesn’t.”

  Frangos took another stately draught of the white cognac before him and turned a narrow leonine eye upon me. “You observe me, Englishman?” he said with contemptuous rudeness. “I observe you,” I replied cheerfully, sipping my drink. “Do you understand what I say?” Somewhat to his surprise I said: “Every word.” He leaned back and sighed deeply into his moustache, flexing his great arms and inflating his chest as prize-fighters do during a preliminary work-out. “So he understands me,” he said in coarse triumph to the world in general. “The Englishman, he actually understands.”

  I could see from everyone’s expression that this was regarded as having gone a bit too far—not only because
I was English, but because impoliteness to any stranger is abhorred. The policemen stood up and braced themselves for the coming scuffle. Clito wagged his head sadly and uttered an apologetic po-po-po. This was obviously the point where our friend got himself edited like a strip of film. The policemen showed an understandable reluctance to act, however, and in the intervening silence Frangos had time to launch another derisive shaft at me. He threw up the great jut of his chin squarely and roared: “And what do you reply to me, Englishman? What do you think sitting there in shame?”

  “I think of my brother” I said coolly.

  “Your brother?” he said, caught slightly off his guard by this diversion which had just occurred to me.

  “My brother. He died at Thermopylae, fighting beside the Greeks.”

  This was a complete lie, of course, for my brother, to the best of my knowledge, was squatting in some African swamp collecting animals for the European zoos. I put on an air of dejection. The surprise was complete and a stunned silence fell on the wine-impregnated air of the tavern. Clito himself was so surprised that he forgot to turn off the spigot in the great cask of red wine and a stain began to spread across the dusty flea-bitten floor. Frangos looked as though someone had emptied a slop-pail over him, and I was rather ashamed of taking this easy advantage of him. “Your brother,” he mumbled slowly, swallowing, not quite knowing which way to turn, and yet at the same time being unwilling to be so easily discountenanced.

  “The Cypriots forget many things,” I said reproachfully. “But we don’t forget. My brother’s corpse does not forget, and many another English boy whose blood stains the battlefield.…” I gave them a fragment from a newspaper peroration which I had once had to construe during a Greek lesson and which I had memorized for just such occasions. Frangos looked like a cornered bull, sheepishly turning his great head this way and that. It was clear now that he wasn’t even drunk, but merely mellow. He had been acting the part expected of him on a Name Day. A fleeting expression of shy reproach crossed his face. It was as if he had said aloud: “How damned unfair of you to introduce your brother just when I was getting into my stride. Perfidious Englishman!” I must say I sympathized; but I was unwilling to lose my advantage. It was clear that if I harped on my imaginary brother it would not be long before Frangos could be wrung out like a wet dish-rag. “Your brother,” he mumbled again, uncertain of the proper mood to wear. I saved him now by calling for more drink and he subsided into a smoldering silence at one end of the room, casting a wicked eye at me from time to time. He was obviously turning over something in his mind.