by Lawrence Durrell, 1957
I learned about this book from The Island of Missing Trees book about Cyprus. It’s by Lawrence Durrell, the eldest brother of the Durrell’s in Corfu. I’ve read Gerald Durrell’s books and love them. I liked this one, too. That is one talented family! Lawrence bought an old, charming place in Cyprus and lived there from 1953-1956. The village he lived in is called Bellapaix. He takes us through the early months of living with his friend and his family in Kyrenia, then hiring a Turk businessman, a very shrewd “rogue,” to find him his charming abode in Bellapaix, then hiring locals to refurbish and modernize the place. It is the happy, fun part of the book. He then covers troubled times. The Greeks wanted their independence from Britain and to be united with Greece, called Enosis. But the local Greeks also loved the British people individually. The British Government refused to listen to the Greek Cypriots and that was the beginning of the end. Lawrence saw it all, living with and working with the locals, working for a British news agency his last two years in Cyprus, and even being consulted for his expertise on the local situation. All for naught. It was a tragedy and is a warning to listen to the people.
Here’s a funny part. Lawrence is sitting in a tavern and there is a very drunk Greek who is picking a fight with Lawrence.
“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.”
Here’s another funny part, when the Turk is going to take Lawrence to see the home for sale in Bellapaix:
“I could see that he was most anxious that I should not judge his professional skill by what might turn out to be a mistake. Together we galloped across the rain-echoing courtyard and down the long flight of stairs by the church to where Jamal and his ancient taxi waited. The handles were off all the doors and there ensued a brief knockabout scene from a Turkish shadow-play among the three of us which finally resulted in our breaking into the vehicle at a weak point in its defenses. (Jamal had to crawl through the boot, and half-way through the back seat, in order to unlatch for us.) Then we were off through a landscape blurred with rain and the total absence of windscreen wipers. Jamal drove with his head out of the window for the sake of safety. Outside, the rain-blackened span of mountains glittered fitfully in the lightning-flashes.”
Here’s a page on the conflict in the hearts of the Greek Cypriots – on the one hand, they were being told by the Athens radio that the British were the hated enemy, but on the other hand, they were living daily with Brits that they dearly loved.
“Even the signs and portents of the day were less disquieting because always the fine manners of the Cypriots were there to disprove the noisy contentions of Athens radio–whose envenomed shrillness had not yet reached meridian. The villagers listened with a kind of uncomprehending pleasure to the strange, yet familiar accents of this metal God which tried to convince them that they were other than they were–peaceful, order-loving, and secure in life and person. They listened as uncomprehending children might listen to the roll of distant drums which competed with the gentleness and timidity of their hearts in their insistence on other values based in hate, in spite, in smallness. Who was the enemy, where was he to be found, the tyrant who had liberated Greece? They watched me with speculative curiosity as I walked up the main street with the three small sons of my builders, one carrying my books and paper, another a loaf of bread, a third the mended primus I had retrieved from Clito that afternoon. . . . Try as they might they could not marry the two images. Wherein did my tyranny lie, I who was so polite and who was teaching my daughter Greek? It was a great puzzle. And if they accepted me, were they not to accept the other Englishmen they knew–each Cypriot had a dozen personal friends among the tyrants whom he had come to respect and love. And even if they tried to hate the Government, the very abstraction resolved itself into the faces of officers whom they knew, servants of the crown who spoke Greek, who had built them a well or a road. The problem was to locate the enemy, for Athens said that he was everywhere, but in the island itself he had dissolved into a hundred fragments whose context was personal meetings and personal affections. The villagers floundered in the muddy stream of undifferentiated hate like drowning men. They were glad to hear the government abuse like children who exult when one, bolder than the rest, cheeks the headmaster. It was exciting. But they were also assailed by the undertow of misgivings and anxiety when they heard the demagogues speak of bloodshed, of fighting, and of sacrifices. They too were sleepwalkers whom the bombs awoke, and whose resolution was hardened deliberately, day by day, by those who understood to the full the technique of insurrection.”
Here he is describing a drive across Cyprus. His friend, Marie, is driving him to an appointment in Government Lodge in Troodos, so they leave Bellapaix early in the morning, before dawn.
“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 toward 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 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 report 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.”
Here he is discussing the political problems with a Greek friend of his, while drinking coffee and cognac in a cafe in the Turkish quarter of Nicosia:
“”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.”
His brother, Gerald, comes to visit him at the house in Bellapaix:
“At the house I found my brother had arrived with his wife and a mass of equipment–including everything except bags of salt and colored beads to suborn the natives. He was somewhat aggrieved to find that I had buried him at Thermopylae but on the whole took its implications very well; after all, it meant free drinks, the proper reward for family heroism. The village rejoiced in his resurrection, and even Frangos was not so huffy about the deception as I had feared. Moreover, within a matter of days, he found to his own surprise that his Greek–which he had imagined gone–returned hand over fist, and this gave him direct access to the affections and understanding of our neighbors and friends. Moreover, with film and sound equipment, he now began an exhaustive survey of the village and its life so that everyone began to nourish absurd dreams of Hollywood contracts and stalk about with an air of deliberation, “acting”; even Mr. Honey whom I would never have dreamed was so frivolous.
“It was time, too, for a change of domicile, for my new duties would forbid my being so far beyond the reach of a telephone; and though sorry to go, I was glad to surrender the house to my brother and to count on enjoying the weekends spent there. If my sadness was mixed with relief it was because I knew that the minute he started collecting the whole place would be alive with lizards, rats, snakes, and every foul creeping thing the Creator invented to make our lives uncomfortable here below. No one who has not smelt an owl at close quarters, or seen a lizard being sick, will have any idea what I mean!”
Here he touches on the Turks which are a minority in Cyprus. The Island of Missing Trees was mainly about the civil war on Cyprus between Greeks and Turks, which must have happened in the aftermath of independence from Britain.
“Sabri [the rogue Turkish businessman who found Lawrence his home in Bellapaix] was up there, sitting under the leaves [of “The Tree of Idleness”] contemplating a black coffee, waiting for me with particular information about carob-wood–he had saved me a special load. “Sit, my dear,” he said gravely, and I sat beside him, soaking up the silence with its sheer blissful weight. The sea was calm. (Somewhere out of sight and sound the caique Saint George, loaded with arms and some ten thousand sticks of dynamite, was beating up the craggy coast by Cape Arnauti, making for a rendezvous near Paphos.) “It is so peaceful here,” said my friend, sipping his coffee. “But for these bloody Greeks Cyprus would be peaceful; but we Turks haven’t opened our mouths yet. We will never be ruled by Greece here; I would take to the mountains and fight them if Enosis came!” O dear!”
As the political realm disintegrates further, he writes:
“The worlds I lived in now were like three separate ice floes gradually drifting apart on the Gulf Stream; the world of Government House or the Colonial Secretary’s lodge–a world of fairy lights gleaming on well-tended flowerbeds under the great stone lion and Unicorn; a world where groups of well-groomed men and women tasted the rational enjoyments life had to offer to slow music, passing upon freshly laundered grass as green as any England can show, outside time. Then the world of the office with its stereotyped routines and worries. Lastly the village, composed around the Abbey as around the echo of a quotation from Virgil, in which an amputated present was enough and the future nobody’s direct concern. Once or twice I thought I remarked a trifling frigidity among the villagers which might have indicated a change of tone; but I was wrong. If anything they had become less rather than more critical of foreigners. There was something else underneath it, too, like the pressure of a wound, a pain which they carried about with them like a load. If the situation met with any response here it met only with a sad reproach from the dark eyes of the old men. They had stopped saying, “Hey, Englishman,” in the old jaunty cocky way, but they had not yet abandoned the word “neighbor”–only it was beginning to feel weighty, impregnated with sadness. These things are hard to analyze.”
Here he is talking about the terrorism that infected the island:
“They came and went [his British friends], and much of the old magic was still there for them to experience–for there were still lulls, empty days, full moons which were bombless. One needs about a month to catch the particular flavor of terrorism which is made up of quite intangible fears–feet running down a road at midnight, a silent man in a white shirt standing at a street-corner holding a bicycle too small for him, a parked car with no lights, a factory door ajar, the flick of a torch in a field. Terrorism infects the normal transactions of life. The horror of deliberate murder, of ambush or grenade, is at least purging–the pity and the terror are in them, and the conciseness of actions which can be met. But the evil genius of terrorism is suspicion–the man who stops and asks for a light, a cart with a broken axle signaling for help, a forester standing alone among trees, three youths walking back to a village after sundown, a shepherd shouting something indistinctly heard by moonlight, the sudden pealing of a doorbell in the night. The slender chain of trust upon which all human relations are based is broken–and this the terrorist knows and sharpens his claws precisely here; for his primary objective is not battle. It is to bring down upon the community in general a reprisal for his wrongs, in the hope that the fury and resentment roused by punishment meted out to the innocent will gradually swell the ranks of those from whom he will draw further recruits. Here is the dangerous ground, for the margin of effect is a narrow one; the theory of collective responsibility worked out in terms of fines, arrests, curfews, can only run for a length of time, and will build up opposing pressures to match those applied to a situation. In other words, the use of force might prove as sterile for us as the political expedients we had tried in the past, building up before the bows of the Government a heavier and heavier wave of opposition with each succeeding drive forward. I could not judge the truth of this for myself, I hoped it would not be so; but it seemed that the great danger in the measures I foresaw our having to take might be, precisely, the creation of Greeks where before there had only been Cypriot Greeks–for if we were not fighting Greece itself we were certainly fighting the spirit of Greece….”
Here is a paragraph near the end when he has decided to leave Cyprus:
“I walked down to the harbor where the still water was full of frozen lamplight from the houses round about it under a black rubber star-cancelled sky. It was very peaceful, yet all around us in the darkness now the island was slowly erupting in little spots of hate and the operational lines at the office would be scratching out their messages. “A bomb at the Cinema in Larnaca…two men killed in a coffeehouse…a bomb at a carpark in Paphos…a sentry murdered in Famagusta….” Infinitesimally small flashes of hate like the spark of single matches struck here and there in the darkness of a field, none strong enough to ignite the whole, thank God, yet there, ever present, as a reminder of the sullen weight of the people’s wish. My footsteps echoed softly upon the seawall. I was, I realized, very tired after this two years’ spell as a servant of the Crown; and I had achieved nothing. It was good to be leaving.”
An interesting note: Wayne’s English tennis buddy, Richard P., has a mom or a mother-in-law who lives in Cyprus, too, so the Brits are still there.
Excellent writer. Not as fun as Gerald’s books, but gave me the sense of Cyprus under the Brits and the troubles that come from a sense of injustice on the part of the Greek Cypriots coupled with the pride and arrogance of the ruling British.