He had rarely been to Famagusta and was not familiar with its layout, so it took him an hour to find the main street. From here, he reckoned he could find the seafront.
Rats scuttled about in the shadows. It seemed that they had taken over in this city. He saw a troop of three running along together purposefully, unbothered by his presence. From nose to tail they were a yard in length.
He knew to keep close to the buildings. As he was making his way down a street full of shops, he disturbed a snake. He must almost have stepped on it. Since childhood, when a viper had crept across his bed, he had had a phobia. When this one slithered away, leaving a trail in the dust, he let out an involuntary cry of fear.
He no longer felt safe being near the buildings and edged slightly further out on to the pavement. It took him from obscurity to visibility. When an army jeep turned out of a side street, the two soldiers travelling in it saw him immediately. He stood there, blinded by their headlights, not even attempting to run away as the vehicle roared towards him and screeched to a halt. Soldiers leapt out, shouting at him, waving guns and screaming abuse. There was an air of anarchy about them, a madness brought about by months of doing almost nothing except guarding an empty city where nothing stirred except vermin and reptiles. They could smell some action and their excitement was palpable.
The Turkish Cypriot slowly put his hands up. The soldier who had been driving prodded him in the chest with the butt of his gun.
‘You!’ he roared. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘What are you doing here?’ repeated another at a higher pitch.
Both of them suspected him of some involvement with the disappearance of their colleague.
‘Answer us!’ the first one hollered. ‘An-swer-us!’ He was almost spitting in the man’s face.
‘He’s Greek!’ laughed one. ‘He doesn’t get it!’ He was dancing around, ready to use the excuse that his questions were being ignored as a reason to become violent.
‘I do understand,’ came the reply in Turkish. His voice quavered so much that he was not certain if they would understand him.
One of the soldiers took a step towards him. Just because this man spoke Turkish, it did not make him a friend.
‘Keep hold of him,’ he barked to his junior.
The Turkish Cypriot did not struggle. There was no point given the size and strength of the soldiers, and within moments they had a full confession from him. The man had nothing to lose and everything to gain. They might even help him to find Markos Georgiou if he promised them a cut in the deal. He imagined that the diamonds were still at The Sunrise, and if they were lucky, there might be still more valuables. The possibility of personal gain was irresistible to all of them.
When Hüseyin spotted the soldiers and their prisoner, it did not take a moment for him to work out what had happened. Although The Sunrise looked dead from the outside, Markos’ middleman had obviously known where the valuables were coming from.
He realised that they were all in danger now. They would have to leave the hotel.
The only thing that stood between the two families and the Turkish soldiers were the substantial iron railings. There had been too many places that were more easily looted for them to make such an effort, but now they probably knew that it would be worth their while.
The three of them watched the soldiers drive off. The prisoner had gone with them. When the jeeps could no longer be heard, the men turned towards each other.
‘We need to leave tonight,’ said Hüseyin. ‘We can’t wait.’
In the past months, Hüseyin had grown wiser than his years. Even Vasilis deferred to this young man, glad to have someone else to assess the situation, just as in the past he had been happy for Markos to take the lead.
Halit, by contrast, argued. He could not be told what to do by his own son.
‘But we’ve been safe for all this time,’ he said.
‘I think that’s over now. And even if they are lenient with us, there is no saying how they will treat the Georgious.’
‘Your mother won’t want to go,’ he snapped, as if this would sway Hüseyin.
‘If Kyria Irini goes,’ he said firmly, ‘then Mother will want to leave too.’
There was a simple truth here. Halit did not contradict it.
The three of them went downstairs to rouse their respective families. It was not yet five o’clock in the morning and everyone was sleeping.
Vasilakis and little Irini were curled up together, innocent, their lashes flickering against their cheeks as though they were having the same shared dream. Maria picked up Irini and Panikos scooped up Vasilakis. Neither child woke up. Their parents needed nothing else. No possessions were worth packing or delaying for.
Mehmet often slept with his mother, as his bad dreams regularly caused him to walk the corridors of the hotel in his sleep. In his mind, bombs were landing on the beach, spraying up storms of sand and combusting everything around him. From the day that peace on their island had been shattered, thousands of Cypriots had been haunted by similar recurring nightmares. Images of bombers flying overhead and the threat of annihilation were hard to shift for adults and children alike.
Emine slept lightly, so it required little to rouse her. She took the nazar from the wall. As she left the room, she noticed Aphroditi’s handbag still on a chair. She took out the velvet pouch and the purse, leaving the key inside.
For Irini, the precious things were her mati, a picture of Christos and her icon.
The only thing that Hüseyin took with him was the necklace.
Within five minutes they were all assembled.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Irini.
Nobody had really thought.
‘Home?’ said Halit.
The word sounded strange and empty. Everyone looked at each other. It no longer meant what it used to, but for now it was somewhere to go.
‘I always hoped we would leave this place one day … but not like this,’ said Irini tearfully. ‘It’s come so suddenly …’
Vasilis knew that his wife would be thinking about her son’s body. How would she give him the proper memorial? Pray by his grave? Could she walk away from his bones not knowing if she would ever return?
Vasilis said the only thing she wanted to hear.
‘I am sure we can come back and find him.’
Irini was the only one who wept as they left. All the others had their minds fixed on the next hour of their lives.
They crept out of the fire door and towards the beach. Hüseyin unlocked the gate and the families went their separate ways, hoping that this would help them avoid detection.
The sun was beginning to come up and the light allowed them to see the decrepitude of the streets that they had not walked all those months. Only Hüseyin and Panikos were familiar with the sight. The others were horrified.
After the spring rains, weeds had sprung up between paving stones and through cracks in the road caused by bombs. Damage to buildings was more extensive than any of them had remembered. The roads were littered with debris and unwanted goods that even the looters had abandoned. Paintwork had peeled, shop signs had fallen, metal balconies had been ripped from buildings and doors kicked in. It was harrowing to see their once beautiful and thriving city in this condition.
The two parties made their way as quickly as they could. They had agreed on their routes before setting off and approached the street from different directions.
Closer to home, there was blossom on the trees and bougainvillea rampaged across many of the houses, their blooms large and blousy. The sight of them was unexpectedly cheerful and softened the overall sense of decay.
The Özkans reached Elpida Street first. Their home was just as they had left it on the day the Turkish soldiers had done their damage.
Halit stepped over the broken fragments of the front door.
Inside, a thick pall of dust lay over everything.
Emine stood with her hand clasped across her mouth. The vis
ion of home that she had cherished during their stay at The Sunrise had not been this. The pan of pilaf that she had left on the stove all those months ago had gone through the stages of putrefaction and decay. Mice had left just a few shreds of paper from bags of rice and flour, and the cupboards were dark with droppings. Rats had burrowed into upholstery and destroyed the curtains for their nesting materials.
Leaving Mehmet and Hüseyin downstairs, Emine and Halit went up to the first floor. It was no better. The smell was pungent and the mattresses and bedclothes were torn to pieces. The open doorway had been an invitation to all the neighbourhood vermin.
‘Well, we need to make a start,’ said Halit. ‘There’s work to be done. Let’s tidy up first and then see if we can repair the door.’
Hüseyin was looking at his mother. She was shaking her head from side to side.
‘We can’t stay here, Halit,’ she said. ‘They have destroyed our home.’
‘But this is where we live.’
‘Perhaps we will have to go somewhere else now,’ said Hüseyin. ‘It won’t be the first time we have moved.’
Hüseyin was usually reluctant to contradict his father, but the attack on their home was not just an attack on its fabric. It was a violation of their sanctuary, and this sacred status could never be restored.
The Georgiou party was slightly slower than the Özkans. Maria was carrying the baby and Panikos took Vasilakis on his shoulders. Vasilis limped along with his stick, Irini fretting that the constant tap-tap-tap would be heard. Eventually they reached Elpida Street. Their four-storey building looked just the same as it had done when they left it, except that the plants were now either dead or overgrown.
The six of them passed through the low iron gate. Rust seemed to have taken its toll and it needed oiling. Vasilakis was excited to be back in his grandparents’ garden. His small tricycle was still sitting in the corner and he ran towards it shrieking with glee.
‘Vasilakis!’ his mother hissed. ‘Come here. Shhhhh!’
The whole family stood immobile. None of them had any desire to go inside. It was not what they might find that they dreaded, but what they knew they would not. The absence of Markos and Christos weighed heavily on them.
From the general look of the place, it seemed that Turkish soldiers had not bothered to break in. Doors and shutters appeared intact.
Irini glanced up at the empty hook above her. Mimikos. For her, there could never be another songbird.
The pain of return was even more intense than she had expected. The kipos was where she felt her elder son’s loss most keenly. It was where they had sat together each morning, where he had sipped the coffee she made for him, where he had embraced her, where he had sung to her more sweetly than any canary.
As Vasilis and Panikos retrieved the hidden spare keys, she sank quietly into a seat. She saw her husband go inside their apartment and Maria and Panikos taking the children upstairs.
A short time later, Maria was back. She was forcing a smile.
‘Everything is just as we left it,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit damp and dusty, but nobody has been in there. We’ll have it back to normal in no time.’
Vasilis had re-emerged too. He wore his usual unsmiling expression.
‘Just as it was,’ he said bluntly. ‘But a bit dirtier than usual.’
His wife normally kept everything meticulously clean and tidy, so even a small amount of dust would be noticeable.
Irini continued to sit.
‘Are you not going in, Mamma?’ asked Maria. She put her arm around her mother’s shoulder.
Irini Georgiou shook her head silently. She could not bring herself to stand up. This place they had all returned to could no longer be called home. The building that they had created for their families and their future felt to her like a broken orange crate, splintered and unusable.
The fate of Christos was still unknown. His apartment had been empty for some time even before they had left. With absolute certainty she knew that the floor above it would never again be occupied. The parental dream of these spaces being filled by daughters-in-law whom they would try to love, and broods of children, was not going to come true. There were lives and futures that would never happen.
Before Irini could speak, Emine appeared, followed by Halit and Mehmet.
‘You can’t imagine the mess over there,’ she said. ‘You should see what the mice have been up to! They’ve done worse things than the soldiers.’
She took a seat next to Irini and put a hand on her friend’s arm.
‘We can’t stay there,’ she continued. ‘It’s been totally destroyed – and it stinks.’
Irini looked at her.
Vasilis reappeared in the kipos to find his wife. It was uncharacteristic of Irini not to have followed him inside. He would have expected her to have put on her housecoat by now and to have started dusting and cleaning.
He saw her still sitting, with the Turkish Cypriot couple close by. Mehmet had run upstairs to find Vasilakis.
‘Irini?’
‘Emine and Halit need somewhere to sleep,’ she said. ‘So do Hüseyin and Mehmet. Can you find the keys for Christos’ and Markos’ flats?’
Vasilis silently did what his wife had asked and handed over the keys.
‘A thousand thanks, ahbap, my friend,’ said Halit to Vasilis. ‘May Allah bless you.’
Irini stood up and went into her house to start cleaning. She could not sleep in a dirty home.
Their words and actions were almost inaudible, but even if they had spoken in normal tones or slammed a door, there was nobody to hear. There were no soldiers in the vicinity. Most of them had been dispatched to The Sunrise.
When his father and brother had left for the Georgious’, Hüseyin had gone to find something to eat.
‘The stores can’t all have been emptied,’ said his father. ‘And if you can find some tobacco …’
Hüseyin made his way through the streets, passing several places that he noted for later. His priority was not food.
There was something he now realised he had left at The Sunrise that he wanted to retrieve: Markos’ gun. It was beneath his mattress and it might give them some protection. They had nothing else. While he was there, he would also grab a few food supplies.
Before he could even see the hotel, he knew something unusual was taking place. Apart from the occasional passing of a jeep, the streets had been governed by silence during their time at The Sunrise. Today, this had changed.
The sound of building work had been a common one right up until the war, with new hotels and apartment blocks constantly being erected in Famagusta. Today he heard that sound again, but as he turned the corner, he realised that what he was hearing was destruction rather than construction.
In front of The Sunrise there were three bulldozers standing ready, revving their engines. To the side of them were four men, each one operating a pneumatic drill. The sound was ear-splitting, even from a distance.
The drills were being used to undermine the gateposts and the iron railings, and the operators were discovering how solidly Savvas Papacosta had built everything. They had to dig down at least three feet below the ground.
Every so often they stood aside to allow the bulldozers, groaning and roaring as they swivelled from side to side, to scoop up the debris.
At a distance from the din stood a group of at least a dozen soldiers. As the gates came down and a wide enough section of the railings fell, one of the bulldozers crashed its way in. The soldiers cheered and applauded as they followed the monster. Hüseyin watched as it began to tear down the metal grid that protected the front of the hotel and smash its way through the glass behind. There was something anarchic about the soldiers, something savage about their enthusiasm for this brutal destruction. Several of them began to fire their guns into the air.
He imagined that their goal was the vault. No doubt the Turkish Cypriot, who was still with the soldiers, had given them the tip-off, but Hüseyin doubted
he was going to get any of the reward.
Hüseyin watched for a few minutes before retreating. What was going to happen next was of no interest to him. He knew the safes were impenetrable even with the keys. He had no way to retrieve the gun now, so his priority was to find food.
He retreated up a side street, feeling that he had witnessed more than enough brutish behaviour. Even though the soldiers’ violence was directed against concrete and glass, it was ugly and filled him with fear.
The first general store he came to had been stripped bare. There was nothing except for a few bars of soap and some salt. In the second, he scoured every shelf. Hidden at the very back of the last place he searched were two tins of anchovies. They would have been easy to miss. He put them in his pocket. In the next shop he found a few tins of chickpeas and a small sack to carry them in. He noticed that all the dried goods – rice, beans, flour and sugar – had been consumed already. Quantities of mouse and rat droppings had been left in their place. The Sunrise had been a haven indeed.
He continued his search, going into three or four more shops; in each he found the same piles of animal droppings, shredded paper and cardboard that had once been the wrapping for biscuits and sugar. After two more hours of walking the streets, all he had found were three tins of tomato paste and two of condensed milk. Tired and disillusioned, he returned to Elpida Street.
As he stepped over the threshold, the silence told him that he was alone. He put his hand over his nose. It stank. He remembered walking in after the soldiers had ransacked it, but months later it was much worse.
Putting the small sack of goods over his shoulder, he crossed the street to the Georgious’.
‘Your parents are upstairs,’ said Vasilis.
As Hüseyin put the supply of food down on the garden table, Irini came out.
‘What did you find?’ she asked, knowing that everyone would be hungry.
‘Just tins,’ he said. ‘Everything else has gone.’
‘I am sure we can make something nice with those,’ she said. ‘Will you bring them inside?’