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A DAY IN THE LIFE OF LEFKE
By,
Leonard A Stone
My teacher’s flat is
located in Gemikonađi, in the Lefke area, here in Northern Cyprus. It is
close to a wide, empty bay. The bay lies in a trance and opens out onto
blue miles of water, where the Mediterranean Sea, beating up from
Turkey, grinds and crushes its wares on the rocky coast: an intoxicating
conspiracy of light, air and blue sea.
I have been teaching
International Relations at the nearby Lefke European University for
nearly five years. It is a small, private University, with just over one
thousand students. We teach in English.
Today was another hot,
end-of-May day – 34 centigrade. I had a dream earlier, during my early
evening siesta. The problem with dreams is that they are real, they
happen; yet dreams are insubstantial! The colours and contours of the
eastern Mediterranean stain my sleeping world: bright white, sky blue,
marine blue, olive-tree silver-grey, the purple of Morning Glory; and a
jumble of pastel shades – red, pink, yellow, and lilac. Stark elementals
surround me: rock, air and sky.
Like Durrell, I believe
that we do not live single lives, but several contemporaneous lives. An
individual is a series of reference points for space and time. Cypriot
space and time shape one of my lives.
At evening time the
Mediterranean water invents moonlight. I am sitting on my balcony. I see
a Mercedes taxi crawling up this narrow street and then come to a halt –
an iron cockroach. I can hear Turkish being spoken. It is melodious, but
in the evening air my neighbour’s comments, a middle-aged married
couple, are emptied drop by drop on the silence. His voice is deep; hers
is high. A slight breath of hot air rustles the leaves of the nearby,
squat fig tree. The watermelon is cold; it chills the back of my throat
like an iced tea. I feel physically tired, but also in a speculative
mood. I remember that the philosopher Paracelsus said that thoughts are
acts. An owl cries, as one of those ephemeral devils, the mosquito bites
my thigh.
The Cyprus problem has
occupied my thoughts during my stay here. This late evening, as on any
other there are too many interrelated factors to contemplate:
nationality, land, sovereignty, security, ethnicity, religion and
culture. These factors crawl over each other like wet crabs in a basket.
Perhaps the solution is obvious and is flapping around our heads like a
loose sail: a compromise based on a mixture of federation and
confederation. The able human being knows that cooperation is the name
of the game: humans should be united in a cloud of cooperative knowing.
This is the mark which maturity lays upon his or her shoulders. This is
a simple idea in its essence – as simple as the primary relationship
between rain and soil, between seed and tree. A delicate relationship
that is all too easily broken.
It is deep into the night.
A thin sliver of moon is present. I watch the morning star, hanging like
a translucent dewdrop in the east. A noiseless star atop a calm sea
which washes one’s dreams: an overlapping of the edges of reality and
dreams. My chattering, friendly neighbours are now at sleep. Dazed and
baked they will rise soon enough. A melancholy silence reigns. I feel
calm, having surrendered myself to the flux of time and space –
something that Socrates had difficulty in achieving as he suffered from
epileptic fits. A finger of dawn. To bed, to sleep.
The university semester is
coming to an end. I taught for two hours this morning. None of the
classrooms have air conditioning. At one o’clock, I call a taxi –
Mercedes - and travel the short distance to the large open-air Mardinli
restaurant, which sits nearby on the coast. A swim first. In the warm
clear sea, as sluggish as it is immortal, I look down and notice a shoal
of small silver-white fish, offering the image of a group of silver
slithers. They disappear in a split-second. The sun is blazing. I leave
the sea and stand irresolute on its edge under the shade of the
restaurant’s wickerwork roof. A cigarette is both calming and heady. I
see a small fishing boat in the distance, heading west around the
headland and moving like a dancer, a vessel of silk. Its crew no doubt
drink the wind.
The food arrives: red
mullet with a green salad. On the next table is an acquaintance
expressing a sardonic look. He is of medium height and around forty
years of age, with a large head with a straight nose and a slight
sculptured moustache, along with perfectly formed eyebrows atop dark
eyes, and with brown cheeks. A thick pelt of black hair covers his
forearms. The middle-aged, silver-haired friendly patron, suited and
bespectacled, hovers in the background. On another table, covered by a
large white tablecloth, sit a group of tanned, fidgety children, like a
litter of cats. Their plump mother, with a grouchy persona, and dressed
in a flowered blue frock, supervises the meal with a rapid series of
hand gestures. She wears a musical comedy frown. On a small table
located in a corner of the restaurant sits a solitary, thin, balding,
saturnine young man, a teacher: a timid lover with chalk on his sleeve,
and with a narrow style of loving. Apathetically I flick at a fly.
My acquaintance is somewhat
typical of the Cypriot Turkish man: impatient with slowness and quick to
sympathise. A healthy, downtrodden man, getting the better of a largely
inhospitable world by principled cleverness. A generous, humorous and
hearty hero, with little sense of self-analysis. The Turkish Cypriot
possesses a bitter, yet worthy dualism: an outer confidence combined
with a restless interior, which will not allow him composure. Compared
to the British, Cypriots actually have a thinking character. The ex-pat
Brits on the other hand do not have to think: they depend upon developed
abstract principles.
Through my sunglasses I
look out onto the dark sea. Cypriot history dwells in its swell. The
past is in any case difficult to interpret; it rolls about with every
roll of the ship; like a cargo that has worked loose. I return home
courtesy of another Mercedes taxi. It kicks up stones and dust as we
leave by way of the restaurant’s tree-lined drive. I need a siesta.
In my afternoon dream I
converse in broken Turkish and English with my rotund, elderly taxi
driver friend. He is telling me that the hard, cutting edge of
experience has driven the romantic from him. He gestures with one
elegant hand and says that there is no philosophic compensation for
growing beyond the reach of love: he will not experience the single
second where we recognise our complement in someone else. The thing
itself, that, is gone. I sympathise and complement him on his
erudite mind, a mind with the pollen still fresh upon it. I wake.
The evening is warm. The
air is pierced by the smell of fierce garlic. Once again I am seated on
my balcony. I drink from a slightly chilled glass of Yakut red wine. In
a swift possessing and speculative moment in time I feel the whole of
Cypriot history: its philosophers, columns, the ideas, the bronze heroes
covered in showers of silver arrows, ships, conflicts, armies,
divisions. Perhaps in history nothing is really ever solved. The same
set of problems cross history’s divides: fear, sadness, laughter, death,
love, and summers of indolence and winters of deduction. In this way we
are chained to a universal fate: fato profugus (fate’s fugitive).
A universe where love and war is declared, and undeclared. A whole field
of lived relations. In part a science of unknown relations, implying
experience that cannot be stated. Just like the music of Bach, just like
marriage.
A dog grumbles and shakes
its chain, while the unmistakable sound of a sheep-bell clonks dully in
the distance. I follow my wine with a glass of water, pressing it
against the palate. Like Mediterraneans I actually taste the
water. The demands of the body, like our loves in this life, loves which
we have negotiated, tie me once again to the world of simple operations.
When I leave this island
the Cyprus problem will no longer tax me as it has these past few years.
But to think of leaving is a sad thought. More than this it is an
unappetising thought: about as appetising as a tinned salad. In a few
weeks I will leave to have a vacation in London. This is not a consoling
thought: it is in fact about as consoling as the sound of an untuned
instrument.
Living our life forward,
but only understanding it backwards.
A flock of pigeons wheel in
the twilight. Their wings slap. I feel the tanned, satiny and rough skin
of my left shoulder: as smoothly rough from the sea-salt as
Nottinghamshire lace. I have decided that the northern Cypriot land is a
living entity. The land here resembles an architect’s plan: no edges and
all contours. In a way I am not experiencing Cyprus, but Cyprus is
experiencing me. One day Lefke may not remember me, but I will continue
to remember Lefke. That is my love.
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* Dr
Leonard A Stone is an honorary life-member of the Environmental Society
of Lefke.
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