My last years in Cairo were hectic. I shall not enumerate the mistakes that started decades earlier when I took over the business from my father. That is of less interest than the result. It is tedious and shows a naiveté that is at the same time, ridiculous and heartbreaking. For the relationship between owner and employee can never be one of partnership and mutual understanding. Early on, I thought otherwise and for many long years I was overly generous to my implacable, smiling and servile enemies. That was not the main reason for my downfall but one of the principal ones.
By their unceasing demands and grovelling, by my unjustifiable capitulations and good intentions, I drove my wage costs to near suicidal levels and when the hard times appeared I was the beaten, harassed captain of a sinking ship. I accept the blame fully and, in any case, I suffered the consequences. Nightmarish days of unending problems and nightmarish nights without nightmares, without a sign of sleep.
In those days of dull and relentless tension, I had a friend I spoke to, often on the phone and met, occasionally, for dinner to commiserate with and draw comfort from, for he, too, was traversing a difficult period in his business affairs. I told him I was worrying so much, I could not sleep. Not even drink would help. My problems invaded and occupied and held my mind prisoner during my time of rest and my exhaustion was such that I feared a breakdown. The trouble was that instead of finding myself in hospital I would probably regain consciousness in jail. I practically owed my soul to private creditors, to huge National Insurance debts, back taxes and dangerously lingering, unpaid VATs. He told me, sleep, at least, was one problem he had managed to solve. He said, the main objective, when one goes to bed, is to avoid thinking about work and all the insoluble, endless problems, which would go on and never end. He managed to do this by thinking about pleasant moments of his past.
Moments that did not cause worry or preoccupy or puzzle or distress. Think, for instance, he suggested, of a pleasant holiday you had. Or a trip. Preferably, as far back as your memory carries you. Something enjoyable that is over and is not likely to cause strong emotions. Go back, in time, and meticulously think out everything in detail. It is amusing, occupies your brain agreeably and keeps out your everyday vexations. Eventually you will tire and drop off to sleep. I guarantee it. It is a natural tranquilizer.
The natural tranquilizer brought a measure of sanity to my life. It did not solve my problems. It arrested my headlong march to dementia. I reduced my nightmares to daytime hours. At night I managed to sleep. I tried it straight away, that same night. I put aside the worries of bills that were due, of cheques that had to be covered, of placating my suppliers for the payments I could not make and started to forage my memory for a painless, pleasant past.
My mother's family originated from Cyprus and in the late forties my parents decided to visit the island, partly to meet a few of my mother's close relatives, but also to spend a few months up in the mountains. I was a thin and sickly child and it was 75
thought the mountain air would be beneficial to my health. An elderly aunt rented a small cottage for us at a resort called Platres and joined us to keep my mother company since my father could spend but very little time with us. That first year, the summer of nineteen forty-eight, we lived in a very primitive sort of village house.
Three rooms, one leading to the next with just a door in between and the kitchen and bathroom outside on a small courtyard. The house could be reached only by a footpath, which was just fine for the little donkeys that brought our vegetables and fresh brown, round peasant bread and our fresh milk and yogurt. The arrivals of those little donkeys were major events of my everyday routine especially if the owner noticed my fascination and fussing about the animals and would hoist me for a small moment on its back and, sometimes, even let me ride it halfway down the footpath, with the odour of delicious freshly baked bread mingled with the donkey smell, in my nostrils. The grocer and the butcher were not far off and the small inconveniences such as lack of warm water were not traumatically serious in those days where television, videos and even transistor radios were still in the realm of science fiction.
That first night, I rode the time machine of memory and visited the little cottage and smelled the pine trees and listened to the chirping birds and the shrill cicadas. I heard the hens of the neighbours laying eggs in their coops and the cock, crow, to welcome daybreak. I moved from one room to the next and saw the small couch in what we had fashioned into a dining room where I slept, on my own, during my father's two-week visit. And the room with the double bed which my mother shared, mutually exclusively, with father and me and the third room of aunt Calistheni and eighteen year old Christina, a servant girl that stayed the full three months with us. The third room led to a back garden with a climbable tree and a view of distant mountains, covered with pine, and in between them when the atmosphere was limpid one could see a bluish, shimmering sea.
During that first summer, you might say, I was getting my bearings. In later years, I became much more formidable, as my health improved. As close to a delinquent as was tolerated in those days. Which was not much, but at least, little by little, these summer holidays helped me get rid of the timidity that plagued me earlier.
Also, at the age of eight, I fell in love. Or, anyway, as close to love as an eight-year-old can get. I made many friends and in particular, a friendship that lasted many years.
By a strange coincidence, our neighbours on the sloping dirt road at the end of our footpath had the same surname as us. It was not a surname that was common and the similarity did cause a stir and my mother struck an acquaintance with our namesakes.
They were native Cypriots from Larnaca and had a handicraft enterprise of embroideries and lace. In their summer vacation they mixed business with pleasure and opened shop next to our grocer and did some leisurely commerce on the side, mainly with foreign tourists. What few of them showed up in Platres, in those days. I mention this, not to deplore, but to mark the death of one kind of craftsmanship and skill that was very close to art and beauty. They had some truly extraordinary tablecloths and napkins and other exquisite items to grace a house. Quite superfluous in the age of the hamburger and the stains of ketchup.
Apart of that lovely shop, our namesakes had four children. Loukis, a thirteen or fourteen year old boy, handsome, sinewy and tall, was the youngest. Three older girls preceded him. Yvonni, Paulina, and Aleka. Remarkably, all the children were good looking though the parents were not special. But Yvonni, the youngest, barely a year older than Loukis was a gift from heaven. She was so beautiful that even now when I think of her, even now that I know she died years ago, I feel a pang in my heart. She was slim and at fifteen still girlish, not a woman. Love must have made me 76
seem retarded because I could not take my eyes from her face nor control my blushes nor exercise my tongue. Surprisingly, I made friends with her before Loukis. Her parents used to place a few chairs outside the shop in the evenings and friends would sit around for a chat. My mother was, frequently, present at those pleasant informal gatherings and there I met her. She tried to be nice to me by asking a few questions and trying to start a conversation but I was tongue-tied and her efforts were fruitless.
A few days later, I was on an errand and met her in the village and we walked back home together. That time, my tongue loosened just a mite and I answered a few questions and uttered a few sentences and lost what was left of my heart. She told me to go next morning to their house where her brother had formed a gang and a number of boys played all sorts of games and enjoyed themselves. Next day, I did not have the nerve to go and stayed at home and later in the day Yvonni called to fetch me and introduced me to the gang. Loukis, who was the leader, and his adjutant, took me in a shack which was the gang's headquarters. They sat on two chairs behind a wooden table, fished out some paper and a pencil and, while I, the new recruit, stood at attention, opened a file on me and asked me all kinds of relevant and irrelevant questions. I shall never forget the way they turned and, round-eyed, looked at one another when I told them my surname. I was, finally, accepted in the gang, probably due to my surname or Yvonni's urging, though I was much younger than the other boys. And I also enjoyed a measure of protective attention from Loukis and managed to see Yvonni very often and revel in her friendly greeting and ravishing smile.
So, in my middle age, I mentally revisited the house and the shack and the woods, which we called "zounglou" or small jungle, the setting of our many games, and the mini ravines and crevices where we did our daredevil climbing and miraculously never broke a hand or a leg. And the clearing nearby where a student of theology held Sunday school and ignored me so totally that I ceased to go there after two or three sessions and I am now an atheist. I visited the shops next to our grocer, one of which sold toys and another that sold hand made shoes and stood, like I used to stand, and watched the craftsmen cut the fine leather for the shoe and the thicker one for the soles and the hand-sewing with thick, long, curved needles and waxed strong thread and the gluing of the heels, slowly, almost lovingly bringing a shoe to life, to our life. I visited the shop that reeked of cooking oil and honey where I ate sizzling loukoumades, doughnut honey puffs, every afternoon, and moved along the road where mother and I took our daily walk past houses with gardens full of pots of flowers, past the Forest Park Hotel, a miracle of luxury at the time, with private tennis courts, a swimming pool and a live, resident, foreign band whose only song that survives in my memory is The Maharajah of Mocado. And then on to a tiny café right at the edge of the village, on the road to Troodos, which was called the Acropolis, edge of the town, and served the most delicious walnut preserve I have ever tasted.
The tranquilizer worked. At least, I slept well even if I did wake with feelings of dismay. To wash and shave and dress and go to meet the enemy. To my purgatory.
To try to extract what was owed me by my clients, to pay my more urgent debts, to persuade my suppliers that they would be paid in a few days and so deliver new raw materials, to bribe and tip the government officials that came to collect arrears, to send them away empty handed but with a little personal gain, to quarrel with my foremen for the defective production, to hear the lame excuses over and over again.
From eight to eight, six days a week. How did I not go mad? My wife could not bear it any longer. After my children left for studies abroad, she requested a transfer from the organization where she worked and left me to stew in my own juice. I do not blame her. I had reached the point of borrowing money from her to keep the business 77
going in the hope of better days. You see, I was never able to shake off my naiveté and an infantile optimism. Five years I lived alone with occasional short visits from my children and my wife. Each visit happy but sadder than the one before. My situation increasingly desperate. I was on a sinking ship with a fighter's hope. How did I manage to keep up hope when I felt like a beaten dog? Whipped from all sides.
And obliged to act jaunty and carefree. At least, I had learnt to sleep at night.
I remembered our trips out. The four-hour train journey to Port Said, a beautiful, clean colonial-style city, the sense of foreignness starting from there. The cosmopolitan atmosphere, the English Canal Zone soldiers ambling by on their day off, the French employees of the Compagnie Internationale du Canal de Suez, the horse-drawn carriage drive to Gianola for refreshment and pastry. The chaotic port with merchandise moving in and out on rattling horse drawn carts, the cavernous customs building where we had to wait for hours while the routine somehow unravelled and eventually someone would arrive and meticulously search our belongings and then the wonderful ride on a launch, maneuvering between giant liners to reach our own modest, little Fouadieh and up its rickety, suspended staircase to the main deck, to be shown our cabin and then, the anxiety over, to enjoy the few remaining hours in the port, watching ships come and go and head for the entrance of the Suez Canal and custom and police launches weave their way between the ships on undoubtedly important errands in the murky sea full of bluish, pulsing jelly-fish. What a sense of adventure I felt as the ship left port at four in the afternoon and after bypassing the huge bronze statue of De Lesseps, headed for the open sea. What a thrill! Forgotten emotions which would have remained buried and lost but for the unearthing of memories to battle my insomnia. Strolling on deck with my mother who would not let me out of her sight, gazing at the sea for hours, insatiably, having an early dinner at sundown, sleeping on the top bunk in our cabin, waking up early to make out the indistinct outlines of Cyprus at six in the morning, in the cool breeze, in the haze, and finally having them solidify and concretize little by little on our two-hour approach to the port of Limassol.
On the second summer we lived in the same cottage, again, with Aunt Calistheni who, with her cotton white hair and splendid white teeth seemed immune to the passage of time and Christina who had hardly changed in nine months and was, poor thing, as skinny and unattractive as before. With Loukis across the footpath. The gang, minus a few members, resuming its activities and the re-igniting of my adulation for Yvonni. That summer, when my father came, he searched, found and booked a much grander house for the following year. We kept returning to it for three consecutive years till the summer of fifty-two, which was the last time I ever went to Cyprus. And so, I dreamt before I slept, every night, like an unfolding TV serial, of those lovely carefree summer days in Platres and pushed away my gargoyle tormentors of the daytime and, finally freed of them, was able to close my eyes, my inner eyes, and go to sleep.
I had recovered somewhat. Did not feel I would go mad. Started seeing Sophie more frequently. I would pick her up at around nine, a few blocks away from her house, and we would drive to some deserted spot, drink from a bottle of whisky I would bring along and make love in the car. It was a hidden, illicit affair for I was still married and the bonds with my wife and children though frayed, still held. It was not easy to throw away a life, which had its passions and happy days. Had produced children which I adored and felt helplessly and hopelessly inadequate towards them. It was my wife that kept them going. Looked to their needs and studies. But even then, neither of us had an alternative. At our age, what new beginnings could we hope to 78
make. And every time we discussed divorce, it was like the impending death of a loved one. Wrenching and heartbreaking. Even at our worst, we never took the step.
We never could decide.
Sophie lived with her son. He was just starting out on a career and was the man of the family. He looked after her and her reputation in the small, tightly knit Greek community of the time. Her husband had suddenly and unexpectedly died recently, and I had neither gone to the funeral nor offered my condolences to her and when we came face to face, by chance, at a club many months later, I was dreadfully embarrassed as I muttered my sympathies. We had never been close friends but my boorishness was unforgivable. The very next day, I went to her shop and tried to patch things up. I more than succeeded. She offered me coffee and spoke of her loneliness. I understood her perfectly for I was another victim. Sometimes, I take the car and just drive around, she said. I cannot stay at home any longer. My son has his life and I hate to feel that mine is over. I suggested that perhaps it would be less lonely with me sitting next to her in her drives and she smiled and our illicit nighttime promenades commenced, both of us hiding the fact from our families and our milieu and accepting the relationship as a partial deliverance from loneliness with no past and no future.
She was a beautiful woman, this Sophie, and I got on well enough with her although my wife always said that she was bitchy and a shrew. But then I always took her opinions on other women with a grain of salt. Sophie was probably several years younger than I was and had kept her shape and her looks despite her recent affinity to drink. It was unfortunate and a discomfort that in the Cairo of those days one could not go to a hotel for a love joust and since we could not safely use our flats, for the eyes and ears of conservative societies are unusually sharp, we were obliged to do what comes naturally in the car. But they were lovely, these secret, whisky-soaked, passionate promenades. Sensual and liberating. They drained our frustrations and many a time when I returned home had no need to switch on the program, Memories of the Lost Summers of Platres.
On most other nights, though, it had not only become a necessity, it had become an addiction. There was no end of detail I would unearth, no end to the delight I felt. I could no longer assign every experience to a precise time but this did not upset me for I was not writing history. I was going through the paces of a mental exercise, conserving my psychic health. Best of all I remembered our last year in Cyprus. The third, in our new house, up high on the side of the mountain, with a superb view and the scent and sounds of the forest. My life had changed, my character had changed. I had lost my timidity, had acquired a sense of independence that separated me from my mother, that cut the apron strings. Or so it seemed for how independent can one be at twelve? I had boundless energy and, just for a laugh, I was tempted to compare myself to Alexander the Great and boast that just as Macedonia was too small for him, so was Platres too small for me. There was no crook or cranny, no road or footpath, no hotel or house, no waterfall or furrow, I did not know. I was practically ubiquitous. You would see me at one end of the village and when you moved to the other, I would be there.
Things had, indeed, changed. When we settled into our new house, I left the gang. I made new friends. In any case, the gang thinned out and dispersed. Loukis had grown. He was more interested in girls than games. But I did drop in to see him whenever I was close to his home and the tender friendship remained. Our surname bound us like family and the bond survived for many years until I grew up and the age difference was unimportant. We met several times in Egypt and in Greece until stupidly, regrettably, we lost touch and track of one another. Yvonni got married that 79
last year but I hardly ever saw her any more and my love only came to life in her presence. I was too busy to think of her otherwise. She died a few years later and together with the shock and distress I felt at her death, I thought of her husband and his heartbreak and was glad I was not he.
I had new friends and a new love. Friends as kinetic and energetic as myself.
Two or three close ones and acquaintances galore from all strata of the village. From village boys who had not crossed its borders to boys from wealthy families who were spending their summer vacations in Platres. Boys my age and boys older than myself.
I had learned to talk the Cypriot dialect, which differs slightly from ordinary Greek and was learning new things which were shocking, confusing and incorrect and was mouthing swearwords whose meanings I did not understand. And I was in love with horses.
It had started casually and amusingly this new passion. At the beginning, I was placed in front of the rider who hired the horse and off we would go for a placid clippety-clopetty promenade with my mother briskly pacing at our side, performing the double function of taking her exercise and supervising my safety. In time, my horsemanship improved and horses coloured and flavoured my summers as much as any friendship. Especially in the last two years when older and stronger was trusted to go with the horse on my own. I traveled to neighbouring villages and explored footpaths on the mountain and raced like a madman with other amateurs of speed and horseflesh. It was on such a stroll, on horseback, that I was misinformed on sex but awoke from an overlong slumber, I awoke to the fact that such a thing existed.
It may be hard to believe that a boy of twelve had no inkling to the facts of life. That any one at that age can be so abysmally ignorant. And yet that was the case with me. Brought up in a prudish environment, with the media of today, which wise up even four-year-olds, non-existent. Having attended a junior school, where the most senior citizens were my classmates, I did not, evidently, believe in the stork but imagined that once a marriage was celebrated in Church, a benevolent God would send a baby to the woman for the propagation of the species to be delivered by a Caesarean. Of course I had a fascination of the female body and was all eyes when my mother undressed in front of me. Of course I peeped at keyholes and when mother bathed me and soaped my genitals, my penis grew hard and erect. But I did not manage to establish a connection. Perhaps, I was not all that smart. In any case, that particular day, my riding companion asked me if I knew what my mother and father did in bed. I asked, what, and I got the answer, that they strip naked and play around with each other, which sounded very interesting though I was sure my parents would never indulge in such unseemly conduct. Then, he continued, your father puts his thing in your mother's behind. I do not exactly remember my reaction but the shock was shattering. I did not believe him but I could not get it out of my mind for months and months. And when, the following autumn I went to senior school and was exposed to the endless variety of dirty jokes and words and gestures of the older boys and the more precocious younger ones, I continued for some time to think that fucking was putting your thing in a woman's behind.
Oh Sophie, what beautiful little games did we not play? We met for sex, net and clear, without any pretensions to finer sentiments and mawkish sentimentality.
We offered our sensuality and passion and reaped glorious fulfillment and, in my case, short reprieves from my purgatory. Unashamedly, we reached the very edges of the normal and even assailed some of that strange territory beyond, which mingles pleasure with pain, mental and physical, pleasure with agony. The little boy, who learnt of sex on a horse in Cyprus, earned his wings in the confines of a car or, 80
sometimes, in summer, in any sheltered emptiness of the desert he could safely occupy for a few hours, and soared in the heady heights of the world of the senses.
Yes, Sophie, we did share lovely nights together and, little by little, I did grow to love you. And I felt so vulnerable because I also loved my family, until my business gave me my final blow and I had to leave you. We always knew that it would be so but we had stopped believing it.
That summer of fifty-two, on the 23rd of July, a band of army officers staged a successful revolution in Egypt and sent a fat, selfish and indifferent king into a comfortable exile in Italy where he would continue his unexceptional days and hedonistic nights until his death. A corrupt democracy was replaced by a left-leaning, progressive, egalitarian, patriotic, and eventually, inevitably, corrupt dictatorship. My mother felt sorry for the king's change of address and reduced status. He did leave behind an immense fortune and an awful reputation which the rumour-mill of the revolution blackened even further while, at the same time, emptying his palaces of their treasures. The newspapers of the island started concocting hurried, spicy biographies of the king and I became an avid reader of some of the more racy ones. I read all the uninteresting details of his political lack of spine vis-à-vis the English overlords, of his pocketing of commissions on every national deal, of his purchase of defective arms which caused the 1948 defeat of Egypt at the hands of the newly created state of Israel. And all the highly fascinating details of his private vices which set my cheeks aflame. How Pouli Bey, his personal Italian procurer, rounded up beautiful women for him, how he arranged for naked troupes of dancers to entertain him, how, even, his thing was of immense proportions. I tried to figure out and understand all these incredible happenings and, even if I did not quite succeed, I could not help wishing I were in a little corner, somehow, in the palace, to witness the goings on. That was, of course, the second best option to being the king himself.
That summer rolled by with substantial and novel tensions between my mother and me. She was constantly trying to rein in my new streak of wildness and impose a modicum of discipline. She did not like the new swear words I used and on one occasion when I threw out a "ghamoto", fuck it, I received a slap on my face. When I shouted it out again and again, in pique, several times, I was beaten so severely, we both ended crying together. It was an outburst of all the accumulated frustrations I had heaped on her with my behaviour. Being late for lunch, slipping off to meet the boys during my midday rest, staying up late at night without a sign of my whereabouts and so on. Yes, I smile at the innocence of my transgressions, at the calibre of my delinquency. At the maternal tenderness and love and care that was meted out with the punishment.
My business situation, eventually, became untenable in Egypt. Apart from my clientele and government and production problems, I was unable to meet the payroll and when I tried to reduce bonuses and fringe benefits, I was faced with a full-fledged insurrection. There were demonstrations and a whole lot of hysterical yelling and the police was called and I was accused of sending funds abroad instead of paying my poor workers. There were idiotic interrogations by State Security in the style, Why don't you want to pay your employees, ya khawaga? Khawaga, a term of address reserved for Christians. I shall not delve into details which are too depressing to be farcical, which they often were, and I shall only say that one day, I could not take it any more. I decided to drop everything and leave. I made a deal and a power of attorney to one of my clients who took a major part of our production and was itching to get his hands on the business and went and booked an airplane ticket for the very next day.
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I called Sophie up and we met at night, same time, same place. I was agitated, feverish, trembling. She sensed something was terribly wrong. She put her hand on my forehead and asked me if I was ill. I told her, In a sense, and she started crying because she knew of the mental tortures of my everyday life and guessed correctly that I was about to put an end to them. Inevitably, too, an end to us. I caressed her hair and she slapped at my hand. I hate you, she said, for abandoning me to my loneliness.
And then she stopped crying and looked at me earnestly. I have plenty of money, she said, let me help you. Sophie, my love, I cannot take your money to give it to the government and my creditors who have sucked me dry and I cannot endure this life one day longer. The movement was so quick I could not avoid the slap she belted across my face. I hate you, she said, you bastard. I was part of this life that you cannot endure. Stop the car. I did. She got out, slammed the door and the last glimpse of her was of a beautiful, mature, desirable woman hailing down a taxicab.
Love, hate. Opposites. Sometimes, one and the same. I loved you too Sophie and I, too, was deeply hurt. I, too, lost something I would never taste again. A small corner of paradise reserved for the living. The lucky ones. Sometimes.
In Greece, I entered the realm of normality. It took some adjustment for everyone involved, my wife and children, in our changed circumstances, but it was, finally, the life that was destined for me. A peaceful family life with its mild ups and downs and very little need for natural tranquilizers. Every once in a while, I resorted to them,