Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (10 page)

“Anyway,” said the cobbler at last when they had all simmered down a bit, “we still have the water-rights. We have not yet discussed those with the gentleman.” But the gentleman was feeling somewhat exhausted by now, and replete with all the new sensations of ownership. I possessed a house! Sabri nodded quietly. “Later on” he said, waving an expressive hand to Jamal, who was also drinking a well-earned Coca-Cola under a pepper tree. “Now we will rest.” The family now saw us off with the greatest good humor, as if I were a bridegroom, leaning into the taxi to shake my hand and mutter blessings. “It was a canonical price,” said the old greybeard, as a parting blessing. One could not say fairer than that.

“And now,” said Sabri, “I will take you to a special place of mine to taste the
meltemi
wind—what is the time? Yes, in half an hour.”

High upon the bastions of Kyrenia castle was a narrow balcony which served the police officers as a mess. Sabri, I discovered later, was a sergeant in the specials. Here, gazing across the radiant harbor-bar towards the Caramanian mountains, we sat ourselves down in solitude and space like a couple of emperors while a
bewildering succession of cold beers found their way out on to the table-cloth, backed up by various saucers full of delicious Cypriot comestibles. And here Sabri’s wind punctually arrived—the faintest breath of coolness, stirring across the waters of the harbor, ruffling them. “You see?” he said quietly, raising his cheek to it like a sail. He was obviously endowed with that wonderful Moslem quality which is called
kayf
—the contemplation which comes of silence and ease. It is not meditation or reverie, which presupposes a conscious mind relaxing: it is something deeper, a fathomless repose of the will which does not even pose to itself the question: “Am I happy or unhappy?”

He had been jotting on a slip of paper and now he handed it to me, saying: “Now your troubles begin, for you will have to alter the house. Here, I have costed it for you. A bathroom will cost you so much. The balcony, at so much a cubic foot, should cost you so much. If you sell the beams—they fetch three pounds each, and there are eighty—you should have so much in hand. This is only for your private information, as a check, my dear.” He lit a cigarette and smiled gently. “Now the man you want to build for you is Andreas Kallergis. He is good and honest—though of course he is a rogue like me! But he will do you a solid job—for much can go wrong, you know. You will find the cost of cement brick there, and rendering per cubic meter.”

I tried to express my gratitude but he waved his hand. “My dear Durrell,” he said, “when one is warm
to me I am warm to him back. You are my friend now and I shall never change even if you do.”

We drank deeply and in silence. “I was sent to you by a Greek,” I said, “and now the Turk sends me back to a Greek.”

He laughed aloud. “Cyprus is small,” he said, “and we are all friends, though very different. This is Cyprus, my dear.”

It seemed in that warm honey-gold afternoon a delectable island in which to spend some years of one’s life.

Chapter Five: The Tree of Idleness

Perched on a mountain-side, her terraces looking down into the gardens of Cerinia, and across the waters of Adana towards the glens and pastures of the Bulghar Dagh, her situation is no less lovely and secluded than herself. Her name is Peace. Nestling in woods, high above the port, her Anglo-Norman builders called her Peace—convent of Peace—Cloîture de la Paix; a beautiful and soothing name, which the intruding Cypriotes corrupted into Delapays, and their Venetian masters into Bellapaese. Here during many ages, gallant Western men and pious Western women found their rest.

—British Cyprus
by W. H
EPWORTH
D
IXON,
1887

A
NDREAS KALLERGIS PROVED
to be a sort of Shock-headed Peter from a story-book. He lived with his pretty wife in a tumbledown little house among the orange groves below the Bishopric. Though he spoke very fair English he was
delighted by my evident desire to speak Greek, and it was in his little car that I made my next visit to what was to become “my” village, sweeping up through the bland green foothills in true spring sunshine towards where the grave hulk of the Abbey lay, like some great ship at anchor. He too was something of a diplomat and coached me in those little points of protocol which are essential if one intends to make the right sort of impression.

Together we called upon the Bellapaix
muktar
whose house actually formed part of the Abbey and who waited for us on a balcony hung high above the smiling groves which stretch toward Kasaphani. He was a thick-set, handsome man in his late forties, slow in manner, with a deep true voice and a magnificent smile. He stood, impressively booted and belted for the shoot upon which he was about to embark (he was a passionate hunter), lovingly handling a gun while his handsome dark wife dispensed the traditional sweet jam and spring water which welcomes the stranger to every Greek house. He noticed my admiring glance and handed the weapon to me saying: “A twelve-bore by Purdy. I bought it from an Englishman. I waited a year for it.” We turned it upon the kestrels and turtle-doves which flickered down below us over the plain, trying it for balance and admiring it, as he questioned me quietly and discreetly about my intentions. He had already heard of the sale of the house. (“Two things spread quickly: gossip and a forest fire”—Cypriot proverb.) I
told him what was in my mind and he smiled approvingly with calm self-possession, “You’ll find the people very quiet and kindly,” he said in his deep voice, “And since you speak Greek you know that a little politeness goes a long way; but I must warn you, if you intend to try and work, not to sit under the Tree of Idleness. You have heard of it? Its shadow incapacitates one for serious work. By tradition the inhabitants of Bellapaix are regarded as the laziest in the island. They are all landed men, coffee-drinkers and card-players. That is why they live to such ages. Nobody ever seems to die here. Ask Mr. Honey the grave-digger. Lack of clients has almost driven him into a decline.…”

Still talking in this humorous, sardonic vein he led us through the thick grove of orange trees to Dmitri’s cafe, which stands outside the great barbican, and here in the sunlight I had a first glimpse of my villagers. Most of the young men and women were in the fields and Dmitri’s clients were mostly grandfathers wearing the traditional baggy trousers and white cotton shirts. Gnarled as oak trees, bent almost double by age and—who knows?—professional idleness, they were a splendid group, grey-bearded, shaggy-haired, gentle of voice and manner.

They gave us a polite good day in voices of varying gruffness, and it seemed to me from the number of crooks and sticks which had collected like a snowdrift in the corner of the tavern that many of them must have deserted their flocks for a mid-morning coffee.
We did not sit under the Tree of Idleness, though the temptation was strong, but gathered about a table set for us under the fine plane tree which spans the terrace of the cafe, and here (as if to introduce me fittingly to Cypriot life) the
muktar
ordered a small bottle of amber-colored brandy and some black olives of a size which betokened comestibles specially prepared against a feast-day. I had already noticed with disappointment that the Cypriot olive is a small and flavorless cousin of the Italian and Greek olive, and I was surprised at the size and richness of the plateful which the good Dmitri set for us. There is only one place in Greece which produces such an olive—and I scored a triumph in pronouncing its name, Kalamata. I earned a respectful glance from the
muktar
for this observation which showed me to be a person of experience and discrimination, and Andreas smiled warmly upon me, making it clear that I had won my spurs by it.

I had been casting covetous eyes upon the Abbey, which I was dying to explore—indeed I was already beginning to feel somehow a part-owner in it—when a short sturdy man clad in the uniform of an antiquity-warden emerged from among the flowering roses and joined us with a smile of welcome. He had the round good-natured face of a Friar Tuck and a brightly quizzical eye, and he addressed me in excellent pointed English. “Your brother,” he told me briefly, “died at Thermopylae. You must have a drink with me, and
see
my
private property.” This was a shaft: aimed at the
muktar
. “It is a good deal more impressive than
his
house. Look at it!”

Indeed the Abbey cloisters with their heavily loaded orange trees and brilliant flower-gardens were a study in contrasts—the grave contemplative calm of Gothic pricked everywhere, as silence is by music, by the Mediterranean luxuriance of yellow fruit and glittering green leaves. “Somewhere to walk,” said Kollis, for that was the newcomer’s name, “to think, whenever you please, to be quiet among the lemon trees.”

The
muktar
must have read my mind for he suddenly said: “Wouldn’t you like to visit it? Go along with Kollis, it won’t take long. Andreas and I will wait here and talk.”

We entered the broad gate of the outer barbican in sympathetic silence, Kollis smiling to himself as if he surmised my own surprise and pleasure. Indeed Bellapaix on that radiant spring morning looked like a backdrop for
Comus
. The great church doors stood open upon the rich shadowy interior with its one colored window which stained the flags with a splash as of spilt wine. Footsteps and voices echoing in the musty interior. We paused to buy a farthing dip before examining the icons in the little chancel. “The church is still in use,” explained my guide, “and that gives the whole ruin life. It’s something more than just an antiquity. It is the village church,
my
church—and indeed your own since you are coming to live here.” Outside
in the courtyard lay the familiar branches of green laurel which would later make incense for the villagers. On the breathless silence of the cool air came the small sounds of the village which later I could identify exactly, attaching to each the name of a friend: Michaelis’s bees burring among the blossoms, Andreas’s pigeons murmuring; the sharp knocking and planing from Loizus’s little carpentry shop; the rumble of an olive drum being rolled along the street by Anthemos to where a bus waited; the high clear voice of Lalou singing to the dirge of the spindle.… They existed for me as sounds without orchestration or meaning, not more human than the whistle of swifts below the Abbey, or the distant whirr of a motor-car spinning down the white ribbon of road below.

The full magnificence of the Abbeys position is not clear until one enters the inner cloister, through a superb gate decorated with marble coats of arms, and walks to the very edge of the high bluff on which it stands, the refectory windows framing the plain below with its flowering groves and curling palm trees. We looked at each other, smiling. Kollis was too wise to waste words on it, realizing perhaps how impossible it would be to do justice to the whole prospect. He told me nothing about it, and I wished to know nothing; we simply walked in quiet, bemused friendship among those slender chipped traceries and tall-shanked columns, among the armorial shields of forgotten knights and the blazing orange trees, until we came into the
shadow of the great refectory with its high roofs where the swallows were building, their soft agitations echoing in the silence like breathing, our own breathing, captured and magnified in the trembling silence with an unearthly fidelity. I found myself repeating in my mind, without conscious thought, but irresistibly—echoes in a sea-shell—some lines from
Comus
, built as this place had been built, as a testimony to the powers of contemplation which rule our inner lives. Bellapaix, even in ruins, was a testimony to those who had tried, however imperfectly, to grasp and retain their grip on the inner substance of the imagination, which resides in thought, in contemplation, in the Peace which had formed part of its original name, and which in my spelling I have always tried to retain. The Abbey de la Paix, corrupted by the Venetians into Bella Paise.… It was to take me nearly a year to gain currency for the spelling Bellapaix, which is as near as one can get today to its original.