Bitter Lemons of Cyprus Read online

  Walking up the dark road with me one night Andreas said: “Tell me, sir, soon England will solve all this and we can be at peace—is it not so? I am getting worried about the boys; at school they seem to spend all their time singing nationalist songs and joining demonstrations. It will all end soon, will it not?” He sighed, and I sighed with him. “I am sure we will come to understand one another,” I said. “I don’t say you will get Enosis because of our responsibilities in the Middle East; but I’m sure we will come together.” Andreas pondered. “But if we have offered every facility for bases does that not satisfy England? Must she maintain sovereignty over Cyprus? Why? We say to her: take as much as you want, build what you like, stay forever, but let us have our island. At least if not today, tomorrow, in twenty years.…” The question of sovereignty was always the basic complex and I had been forced to design a sophistry to meet it. “Your brother has a piece of land, Andreas. You love him. He loves you. He tells you to borrow it and build a house on it for your family. ‘Build what you like,’ he says, ‘and it will remain yours forever.’ Now, while you love and trust him—who knows? Strange things happen in the world. Would it not be wiser to keep the title-deeds of the land before spending your capital in building on it? That is what England feels.”

  This answer he found at once satisfying and troubling. “I see,” he said slowly. “We have a proverb,” I said (it was in fact a Turkish proverb retailed to me by Sabri), “an English proverb which says: ‘In business never trust anyone—not even your own kin.’ Andreas smiled at this. “I thought you were a more trusting people,” he said. “Now I know why you are called Foxes for your cunning,” and he presented a forefinger briefly at his temple as a tribute to the perfidiousness of Albion.

  * Cypress Handbook, 1919.

  Chapter Eight: The Winds of Promise

  The fox in her sleep dreams always of chickens.

  If the baby doesn’t cry, Mother won’t suckle.

  One does not go to Hell to light a cigarette.

  —Cypriot Greek Proverbs

  MY APPOINTMENT, SOMEWHAT to my surprise, was ratified in the late spring, and was bidden to the Government Lodge in Troodos for my first meeting with the Governor. Marie elected to drive me up the mountain switchback as her racing car made much better time than mine on the steep gradients, and we set off one faultless morning, to sweep across the Mesaoria towards the foothills before the sun had fully breasted the bastions of the Gothic range and set the dust rising from the brittle and arid soils in which, by high summer, nothing more would grow until the autumn rains. The ugliness of the plain was, so to speak, at the height of its beauty—a range of tones vibrating with the colors of damson, cigar-leaf, putty, and gold-leaf. Here and there upon a skyline, diminished by distance and somehow made the more significant for being so isolated and so small, a team of camels oozed across the dusty screen. Their riders wore colored turbans, spots of cobalt or crimson or that resonant dark blue—a vitreous marine blue—which is so characteristically Turkish in tone.

  We ringed the black elephantine bastions of Nicosia, stopping only to buy a bag of yellow cherries, and set off like the wind across the plain once more, trailing our banner of dust, to where in the foothills the road began its harsh and sinuous ascent into the cool airs and oak forests once dedicated to Jove. We were in good heart, for despite the disquieting newspaper reports of demonstrations and speeches, rumors were in the air of new approaches, new assessments.

  The mountain villages are beautiful—and today Kakopetria, for example, folded in upon itself, coiling round the rim of a mountain torrent, shaded by enormous white poplars, looked hauntingly peaceful; but higher up, the rocky banality of the range is unrelieved by any man-made features—while a village like Amiandos made us catch our breath in pain. It lies against the side of a mountain which has been clumsily raped. The houses, factories, and shacks are powdered white as if after a heavy snowfall; mounds of white snow rise in every direction, filling the cool still airs of the mountain with the thin dust of asbestos. Men and women walked about in this moon-landscape, powdered into ghoulish insignificance by the dust. A man with a white wig and white moustache shouted “Hullo” as we passed.

  The little lodge that Rimbaud built lies, as do most of the Government quarters, in an unhealthy-looking ravine choked with pines, and denied any one of the thousand magnificent views in which the range abounds. It seemed like an H.Q. carefully chosen against the fear of air attack. The building itself has nothing to commend it except the memory of its author whose work is commemorated in a finely worded plaque, for it is of traditional Public Works design, and resembles any one of a thousand such villas in the Indian hill-stations. Indeed the whole of Troodos looked like some unlovely and ill-considered hill-station, with its primitive latrines and general air of hopeless desolation. The thought of spending a holiday there, even in one of the three or four well-found hotels, would hardly commend itself to any but the bedridden. One would yawn oneself to death.

  The Governor was a large, quiet and deeply attentive man with a record of excellent public service, well briefed in the island’s past history and anxious to make some considered offering towards the present discontents, if only they could be isolated and analyzed. If he had a faintly aggrieved air it was because he suspected he was being made a fool of—for he had been reading the nationalist press only to learn with pain and astonishment that our rule in Cyprus resembled something thought up by Attila, and that we were dedicated to plucking Hellenism out by the roots and decreeing a “perpetual enslavement of Greeks.” “Where do they get all this stuff?” he asked. It was easy to answer though not to excuse; the fires of Enosis could not be banked unless every Greek peasant could be made to feel enslaved, and what facts would not bear out emotions based on fictions might achieve. Most of this fire and brimstone came from the pulpit, but quite a lot came from people politically on the make, like the Mayor of Nicosia, who exhibited much of the weird polarity of feelings I had observed among the students of the Gymnasium. In other words, while he wanted Enosis he didn’t want it immediately; and while he hated the foul oppressor he sincerely and genuinely loved England, and his well-merited O. B. E. was a much-cherished decoration. (After almost every speech the English newspaper attacked him and suggested that he return it as an earnest of sentiments expressed; but he did not comply with the demand.)

  The Governor himself was in several minds about the situation; on the one hand people assured him it was serious, on the other the day-to-day transactions arising out of it suggested the crazy discontinuities of some Irish farce. One thing, however, was clear: all this blasting and bombardiering was conducive to disaffection, and this must be stopped. He was advised that a serious warning should be issued to the press and public to toe the line, accompanied by the offer of a constitution, and the wheels had been set in motion to effect this. I asked if I could see the text, but as my appointment was not yet effective, this might have been a breach of privilege. I told him, however, that at the moment it would be wiser not to give any excuse to make the Greek appeal one that could point to evidence of illiberality within the island, or of victimization. Moreover, dealings with the press were always tricky, as the press constitutes a world-freemasonry, and nothing could more quickly influence public opinion for or against a measure than the attitude of the press. We talked soberly along these lines before I took my leave to find Marie idly eating cherries under a pine and flipping the pages of an architectural manual.

  I had found Sir Robert moderate, just and painstaking; and if I had any reservation at all it was only that I felt that the problem was not being regarded as a European political problem but as a purely Colonial one. The angle of vision was one which took no account of Athens and Ankara—and here, it seemed to me, were the two nodes of the thing which determined the international aspects of it. Colonial officials, trained to direct rule, will always find this difficulty in dealing with problems outside the rule of order, and which in the final analysis c
an be bent to compliance by the use of force. Those who work in sovereign territory have to cultivate a suppleness and dissimulation, a tactical mind and a reserve because no issues can be forced: they must be engineered. The difference is between the craft of a fly-fisherman and someone who dynamites from a rowing boat.

  The key to the whole thing was the acceptance by Athens of the Enosis case as meriting international consideration. As far as I could see most of the officials were still thinking in terms of the riots of ’31 which did not spread into island-wide disaffection precisely because this factor was missing—Greek acceptance. In a sense everything now was vitally changed; yet our political approach had not appraised the change. It was summed up for me by the words of a fellow-official at the lunch party which followed: “I’ve seen all this before. You’ll see, we’ll let them go so far and then simply smack them down.” The trouble was that the hypothetical smack would echo now at the United Nations, in the ears of those whose attention could be more quickly drawn to “colonial oppression” than to an Indian famine; above all, it seemed necessary to provide no martyrs who would foster the Greek case. The island was, in fact, quiet despite the strikes and demonstrations; the press was free; there was nobody in prison for a political offence; life was normal. Moreover the Greeks were apparently presenting their case with such an overwhelming politeness and friendliness that the whole thing might pass over the heads of the public world in silence. It was essential not to envenom it any further until the results of the appeal could be judged.

  Judge my surprise then when I came down the hill one August morning to find that the Bow Street runners had affixed to the door of the tavern a majestic document couched in Mandarin which offered a constitution together with a serious admonition against disaffection—all in the style pompier so beloved by jurists, and officials. Neither admonition nor constitution was very clear, and as I joined a bearded group of shepherds round the placard all lip-reading with ferocious concentration, I could not help sharing the sigh of sheer bewilderment that went up. “What does it mean?” said Dmitri in heavy bewilderment. “Does it mean we can’t speak of Enosis any more without going to prison? Sing the Anthem?” I could not enlighten him; yet that is what it appeared to mean, though the terms were wide and vague. Moreover the constitution appeared to be the draft of a draft, intended to allure rather than confuse: yet containing as far as I could see no concrete formulae susceptible of acceptance or rejection. The whole thing had a puzzling sort of air.

  In Kyrenia I saw small groups clustered about other copies on doors and boards—the text took about ten minutes to read. All was bewilderment.

  In Nicosia amazement was tempered by an irrational amusement. “Does this,” asked a journalist, “mean that we cannot quote dispatches from the English press containing the word ‘Enosis’?” I was heartily grateful that I had not yet taken up my duties, since I could not have answered the question. A junior official whom I met, however, seemed in high spirits. “Have you seen the proclamation? That’ll show them! Stop all this nonsense once and for all. Then we can get back to the job of just jogging along.” Jogging along! The dream of everyone whose career depends on gravitation rather than apti tude. The Empire just jogging along down a country lane among the hawthorn hedges, in blossom time.…

  I jogged along to the wine company for which I had been doing some copywriting, to draw my pay and pay my respects to my millionaire. I found him regarding the daily newspaper on his desk with an air of carefully controlled hysteria. “Have you seen this?” he whispered. I nodded. He prodded the document with his finger carefully, as one might prod an animal to see if it were quite dead or not. “Not a month ago,” he said, “I lunched with Hopkinson in London and assured him that, despite all appearances to the contrary, Cypriots would seriously consider a constitution provided it were really liberal. But this is something for Zulus.”

  His view was fairly general, as far as I could see, among those who genuinely wanted to set a term to agitation: who were, in a sense, on our side. At this time there were very many; and this temperate view of things must have been shared by at least half the peasants. I deduce this from one fact: I never saw the slogan ENOSIS written up anywhere without finding immediately underneath it some reference to “Heretics”—i.e. those who were against it. At first it was “A MURRAIN ON HERETICS.” Later it was to become “DEATH TO TRAITORS.” Death in word and in fact.

  At the Secretariat all was silence and emptiness. The Government by tradition spent the summer in the mountains and it would have been deemed loss of face to concede the necessity of staying in the capital for the trifling crises of the moment. There was nobody here to consult save the officer of the watch, so to speak, who was linked to Government House in Troodos by telephone. He had no views on the Proclamation, and appeared not to have been informed of its existence; he had no glosses to offer upon it, and contented himself with giving me detailed instructions as to how to reach my satrapy—the Public Information Office, which was then located opposite the law courts on the edge of the Turkish quarter, in an old building full of mirrors: a place which would have delighted Pierre Loti.

  This too was closed and the staff on holiday, so I took myself by sunlight to the hospitable porch of Maurice Cardiff where I found him admonishing a vine which showed signs of escaping from its trellis. “Am I mad,” I asked him, “or is this Proclamation rather a risky thing to do?” He laughed. “We are all mad,” he said. “It’s clear you don’t understand Cyprus.”

  “But seriously.”

  “But seriously.”

  “I mean if I were a nationalist leader longing to give UNO some examples of illiberality I would immediately provoke a demonstration and get several hundred schoolboys locked up. It would be an admirable political gambit. Unless you think the Government is only blustering and would be too timid to act.”

  “Worse than that. The Cypriots themselves are too stupid to take advantage of it. You’ll see.”

  The phone rang and I was left pondering in the sunlight, inhaling the deep scent of magnolia blossom. He returned with a grimace and said: “You may see martyrs yet. The press has decided to go on strike for a week; there are to be demonstrations. Perhaps they’ll have some martyrs to take to UNO after all.”

  These were depressing enough omens for a newly appointed official to ponder on. I was grateful that my duties were not to begin for a few weeks. I went down to the Turkish quarter and sat down among the carters and bus-drivers for a coffee and cognac in the very shadow of the Bedestan, the most haunting corner of Nicosia. Here I was joined by Stephanides and Glykis from the terrible class Epsilon Alpha. They appeared not to have heard of any Proclamation—but as neither enjoyed reading it was not surprising. “My father tells me The News at night,” said Stephanides, and added under his breath, “when he doesn’t drink too much.” He thought the world of his father.

  I remembered how the old man one day, wiping his hands on his leather apron, had winked and said: “Enosis? Yes. I could settle it this afternoon. Cede the place to Greece on condition that you can lease it back for a hundred years at a nominal rent. Crown the King in the Cathedral and tell everyone to shut up—He’ll do it for you.” It sounded easy, and yet in these days a comic opera solution would have been not beyond the bounds of possibility. But once it had become an International Problem … what then?

  “Well,” said Glykis tilting back his cap and gazing up at the irrational beauty of a Gothic cathedral which sprouted tall minarets, symbolizing at a single blow the beauty of Cyprus which rests upon incongruities, “well! The Lusignans were here for three hundred years and Venice for eighty-two. The Turks stayed three hundred, the British seventy-eight. What does it all mean?” What indeed?

  Lying across the sea-routes of the world she had always been the direct concern of any maritime power whose lines of life stretched across the inhospitable and warring East. Genoa, Rome, Venice, Turkey, Egypt, Phoenicia—through every mutation of history she was sea-born and
sea-doomed. And now for us she was no longer the galleon she had been to Venice but an aircraft carrier: a ship-of-the-line. Could she be held? There was no doubt of it, if she must be; the problem was not there. It turned upon another point. Could she be held by force and not guile?—because in default of political accommodations we would find ourselves in the situation of Venice. I didn’t know.

  Troublesome as gadflies, I chased away these thoughts with their annoying persistence, and turned my back on the capital and its buzzing coffeehouses, taking the long curling road towards the Gothic range, its mountains drawn back like harps against the noontide sun. The bright uplifted blade of the sea greeted me as I pierced the blank stone wall of the pass, dispersing these gloomy intimations of a world outside this tangerine-scented sunshine which would so soon close down upon us with the ring of an iron door.

  Escaping to Bellapaix was like entering a walled garden; on the last crown of the road there was a small reception committee of ardent nationalists aged about nine who danced along beside the car shouting: “Union” in heartrending accents, and never failing to add as my identity was established: “Yasu, neighbor.” They would race each other breathlessly to the Tree of Idleness in the hope of carrying a parcel up the hill for me—for my mother’s liberality in the matter of homemade cakes and doughnuts was by now proverbial. The last turn of the road was like coming to rest in a favorite painting, opposite the café under the great tree; for as the engine stammered into silence the massive volume of the Abbey’s quietness welled up around one like music, encapsulating the voices of the village, the clink of glasses, the slap of cards, or the more distant sound of ravens in the trees. And detaching themselves from the groups of quiet coffee-drinkers came my friends, one by one, to bring me a rose, or a new idea for tiles, or a letter which had just arrived.