The Pillars of Hercules

I was sorry that I had gotten her onto the subject, because the others left me listening to her litany of complaints. I sympathized. This had been a prosperous capital and now it was a wreck of a place, and we stood on a blocked road, among deserted houses, and the old woman was saying, “They won’t find a solution—not soon—”

A wall of atrocity photos was on display, under glass, on the Turkish side of the Green Line. They were blurred and smudged, some of them hard to make out. But the captions told the whole story, sometimes with sarcasm:

—A Greek Cypriot priest who forgot his religious duties and joined in the hunting and killing of Turks

—A Mother and Her Three Children Murdered by Greek Cypriots in the bath of their house in Nicosia

—Mass Grave

—Refugees

—Burned Village

—Frenzied Greek Cypriot Armed Bandit

—Dead bullet-riddled baby—Life was hell for us in 1963–74. We cannot return to those days.

“That is true,” Fikret said. “It was really bad. They tortured people. The Greeks burned Turkish villages. They made us suffer.”

“Aren’t you glad you had General Samih, three-star window-breaker, to help you?”

“This man,” Samih Pasha said, tapping his head and squinting at me, “he is always writing things down. I ask why?”

He had seen me scribbling atrocity captions. I said, “Because I have a bad memory.”

We walked to a restaurant, Sinan Cafe, farther down the Green Line. It was half a cafe, for it had been split in two by a wall that blocked the street; this main north-south road was now a dead end. On the wall a sign said, 1st Restricted Military Area—No Photographs! with a skull and crossbones.

Fikret and I drank a coffee. The owner said, “Want to look over the wall. There’s a good view from upstairs.”

We went to the second floor of his house and peered over the Green Line into Greek Cyprus. I could see ruined rooftops, broken tiles, no people; but in the distance was a tall pole flying the Greek flag, in defiance. As though in reply, from the Turkish side there was a Muslim call to prayers, the long groaning praise of Allah.

“Fikret, what do you think of Greeks?”

“Greeks in Turkey were prosperous, because they were good businessmen,” he said. “We do not hate each other.”

“But Greece is in the EC.”

“They don’t belong there, but neither does Turkey,” he said. “We are still a backward country. Does the EC want another headache?”

The four of us bought fifty-cent bus tickets at the Lefkosa bus shed and went another twenty miles over a mountain range towards Girne, on the north coast. The shoreline was rocky, and the land rose to black and rugged cliffs. Samih Pasha described how Turkish troops had landed just west of here in 1974. He pointed out the caves in the cliffs where they had hidden themselves and ambushed the Greeks, driving them south. We stopped at Bellapais.

“The quietness, the sense of green beatitude which fills this village,” Lawrence Durrell wrote of Bellapais, high above Girne, not far from the Crusader castle St. Hilarion, where Richard the Lionhearted spent his honeymoon. In his house there, described in Bitter Lemons, Durrell began writing his Alexandria Quartet. Nowadays Bellapais is perhaps more remote and dustier than it has ever been, but it is still very pretty. Villages endure destitution better than towns, and rural poverty can perversely seem almost picturesque.

But the town of Girne had the same look of desolation as the larger settlements I had seen in this embattled corner of the island. Empty streets, scruffy shops, empty hotels. I went to the largest hotel, on the seafront, just to see whether I could make a telephone call. The woman at the switchboard said it was impossible.

“You can’t call outside of here,” she said. “No one recognizes us!”

Samih Pasha and Onan and Fikret commiserated with the woman, saying it wasn’t fair. Yet it interested me that this portion of island in the Mediterranean was regarded as such a pariah that it had no contact with any country beyond its borders; and its greatest enemy was on the other side of the Green Line.

Suddenly Onan said, “We have to go. We will see you later.”

Watching him hurry away with Samih Pasha, Fikret said, “They will go to the Officers’ Club to eat.”

“Onan’s a soldier?”

“I think, yes. Bible Man was in the army before.”

“What about us? Bean soup at some awful place, eh?”