Fiti 1984

Listening to the slow, rattling voice of a mourning villager.

Sitting in the shade in Fiti, where all the men and women are struggling to stay awake. They talk of the inevitability of death, the beauty of it, even. Being old is being dead they say. Death itself is a re-birth.

A very old, blemished and cataracted man sits shyly with knees arkwardly together. He is listless and blank, but probably thinking. Too tired to give or take advice and too old to care, but putting an overall picture of everything together.

Young kids with cropped hair carry elastic slings and loose buckshot in the pockets of polyester shorts. Bubblegum too big for their cheesy grins.

The motorbike engine still rasps in my bones and head. It snaps and crackles at rest from the journey through the mountains in this heatwave. Like a young marathon runner, shaking and slightly delirious.

Pigeons fight for space in the shade of the small, high  windows in the mukhtar’s house opposite this coffee shop. Shit-stained and delapitated shutters swing on rusted hinges, pushed by dry wafts of August air. A breeze that dries the fields and weeds, cooling the pachyderms, silent and jerky in the premium shade. You can see their hearts beat through translucent skin.

The lizards’ movement is that of the people of Cyprus. They hang on to neighbours’ railings, marking their cheeks on the criss-cross grills, listening, talking, picking at the peeling paintwork, exposing the past. Sometimes this sparks a chain of events, a precarious, fragmented memory.

When Elli’s railings were green I was still filling my pockets with marbles and pouring playground dirt into my open knee cuts, fascinated by the viscous pus I could later squeeze out.

Elli’s son was, to us, clearly retarded. A fact we celebrated with the cruel, juvenile satisfaction of young Bamboula boys.

His name was Chrysos. He once jumped from the low garden wall of my grandparents house, trying to somersault through the air and land on his feet. Eagerly we watched him plummet to the pavement, the back of his head cracking the brittle paving stone.

Now, Elli’s railings are red and Chrysos is a basketball player. A good one, too.

I start my bike up and leave Fiti and think about Elli and the green railings, four years before it all happened. Along with thousands of others I was escaping an invading Turkish army. But something, somewhere has obstructed any vivid recollection of the car journey from Kyrenia to Limassol. All that remains is the crackling sounds of a calm but inexperienced radio announcer telling us ‘the Archbishop Makarios is dead’, the black and white newsreeels of armoured vehicles searching, finding and destroying Greek-Cypriot strongholds in the shimmering Mesaoria plain and alien paratroopers falling from above, too many silhouettes to count.

And the picture of the captured men, kneeling in front of the Anatolians with their hands on their heads.

Everything changed after that.