Betwixt and between

Chapter 1 • PREHISTORY-5

And then, one Saturday evening, Dimitri came back from Paris’s house to find his father sitting in the drawing room with Jenny. He was dressed in his dinner jacket, drinking whisky. She was also in evening dress. After a while, the two of them got up to leave, to visit friends who were giving a dance party to celebrate the carnival. Late that night, Dimitri heard his father come home and go up to bed in his room. The boy, who had looked forward to the Sunday ritual of breakfast in Maria’s room, felt disappointed and indignant. How could he possibly go to Evdoxia on the following day? How would he be able to look Maria in the eye? Dimitri saw himself falling back into the nightmare of concealment and guilt that he had endured when his mother was ill.

As Jenny’s presence became more and more frequent, Dimitri began to avoid Evdoxia and Maria. He knew that he couldn’t bear to see Maria crying, as he had seen his mother cry, nor could he bear to witness Evdoxia’s silent misery.

Political storm clouds were gathering, but even they proved insufficient to distract him from this new threat to an equilibrium so precious to him since the death of his mother. Dimitri ignored the capture of the caique St George, loaded with weapons and ammunition. He ignored the subsequent inquiry, the strikes and disturbances, and tried to concentrate on his lessons. With the help of Mrs Christodoulou he broadened his knowledge of French. She asked her husband’s friends, who frequently travelled in continental Europe for business, to bring him a collection of the poems of the troubadours from Paris, and from Frankfurt a long-playing Deutsche Grammophon with recordings of their songs. A shiver passed through him the first time he heard a live voice, as if resurrected from the dead, after eight whole centuries, singing “Lanquan li jorn son lonc en mai” by his favourite poet, Jaufre Rudel.

On the night before Friday, 1st April, Dimitri was woken by a series of explosions, which startled Tasia and Mrs Katerina, and drove them out of their rooms. They all three instinctively ran to his father’s bedroom, only to find that the door was open and the bed untouched. Dimitri, supposing that for some reason his father had slept at the hospital with Maria, dressed haphazardly and rushed over. A bemused night-watchman let him through, without stopping him. From Paphos Gate you could hear the shrill sound of the siren at police headquarters.

In Maria’s room, Evdoxia was sitting on her mother’s bed with a blanket over her shoulders, and Maria, already dressed, was rapidly washing her face at a small basin. As soon as Dimitri took in the scene he saw that he had blundered. But it was too late. Maria had already grasped what lay behind his unexpected appearance. She used the emergency as an excuse to give him a quick kiss on the cheek, and then hurried away to talk to the security personnel, leaving the two children alone in an embarrassed silence. Evdoxia was the bolder of the two and spoke first.

“Is your father not at home?”

“No. He went to play bridge and I can’t understand why he didn’t come back. Perhaps there was trouble, earlier, and his friends wouldn’t let him leave.”

“Which friends? The contractors?”

Dimitri did not reply. What could he say? Everything had already been said, without the need for words. His shame drove him from Maria’s room, where he had spent so many happy times, and he went back home to wait for his father, who had been anxious about his son and did not take long to reappear. Neither of them gave any explanation for their movements that night, but after that unfortunate Friday, things began to move very fast.

The following week, the Easter holidays began and his father sent Dimitri and Mrs Katerina to the Hotel Splendid in Platres, where he was to join them on Good Friday. The only, and unwelcome, company of his own age for Dimitri was that of Johnny and Laeta Neophytou, who with their mother and their aunt Jenny had installed themselves in the nearby family villa. Then, on the evening of Easter Monday, the night before he went back to Nicosia, Dimitri’s father made three announcements, which left Dimitri at first speechless, and then utterly crushed. The first was that his father was leaving the hospital for a much better paid position as financial director in the Nicosia office of the American Cyprus Mines Corporation. The second, that he was going to change Dimitri’s school, take him out of the Pancyprian and put him into the English School, and the third that, because it wasn’t either easy or desirable for two men - since Dimitri, at nearly sixteen, was almost a man - to live alone, he had decided to marry Jenny, who in every way would be a suitable wife for someone of his age and social position.

Dimitri felt as if his whole world was falling apart, and began to demand explanations. Naturally, he had nothing to say about his father’s job, but it was impossible for him not to assume that his leaving the hospital would also serve another purpose. With regard to the change of school, his father would brook no argument. He insisted that the Pancyprian had become a hotbed for civil unrest. Schoolchildren were writing slogans on the walls and provoking the police. Teachers, even the headmaster, had lost all control. Criminally irresponsible terrorists of the EOKA[1] had turned the Pancyprian into a recruitment camp. According to his information, almost all the pupils from the fifth and sixth form at the High School had, willingly or not, sworn vows of allegiance to the organisation. If Dimitri were to stay on there for another year, until the fifth form, he would inevitably find himself seriously implicated in it as well. At the English School, he would be associating not with hoodlums and revolutionaries, but with young people of his own class; he would be more usefully equipped for his professional and social advancement, and would have the chance to study, not just at the provincial University of Athens, but at one of the best English universities.

To explain the engagement to Jenny proved much more awkward. Dimitri did not deny that his father had the right to marry again, but he wanted to understand why it must be to Jenny and not to Maria, with whom there had been an attachment of almost three years. His father said that Eleni’s relatives would certainly be opposed to a marriage with the woman who had been the cause of so much grief to Dimitri’s mother. This provoked a furious response from Dimitri, who found the argument utterly hypocritical. And then his father was obliged to admit the real reason, which was the - in his opinion - unbridgeable social difference between him and Maria. It would turn not only him, but Dimitri as well, into social outcasts. Here the young man’s sense of injustice drove him to such a pitch of indignation that he refused to hear more. He left the room that he was sharing with his father, and went out of the hotel for a while, to walk in the forest and breathe in the clear, cold air.

Two months followed, when Dimitri withdrew into himself in an attitude of silent protest which lasted until the end of the school year. He had stopped seeing Maria and Evdoxia - and anyway, how could he face them? - but he also systematically avoided Jenny, who came more and more often to the house and began to give orders to Tasia and Mrs Katerina. The only people he could honestly communicate with were his aunt, whom he adored, and with whom he corresponded frequently - and whatever his father may have said, she was no more likely to look kindly on Jenny than on any other replacement for Eleni - and Mrs Christodoulou, his French teacher. He escaped ever more deliberately into the mediaeval world of his books, which took him frequently into the Turkish quarter within the Old Town walls. All the most beautiful Gothic memorials to the Lusignan epoch were to be found there. He made it his goal to sketch every one of them: the cathedral of Ayia Sophia, the Bedesten, and the Church of St Catherine.

Apart from his love of architecture, and dutifully regular visits to his mother’s aged aunt, whose house was within the city walls, there was something else that began to bring him out daily to walk along the labyrinthine alleyways of Old Nicosia: it was Machairas’s[2] demon of lechery. In the alleyways around the market place, half-opened doors revealed vistas of narrow corridors lit up by red lamps, and the promise of a paradise of pleasure in the arms of venal women within. Sometimes Dimitri walked on hurriedly past, but then he would all of a sudden slow his pace right down, as if drawn by the unconquerable lure exerted through a half-open door. Tales told by his friend Nikos, who swore that he had passed over these very thresholds, were embellished by what Dimitri remembered from the stories of Maupassant, and further adorned by his own imagination. On one hot April evening, Dimitri finally decided to prove his manhood at least one degree further than his hitherto lonely autoeroticism had allowed. But for all the protective tenderness of the young girl who led him to her bed, Dimitri’s s****l urge did not prove adequate to overcome his aversion to the squalid surroundings. He pretended to complete the act and left, overcome by guilt and thoroughly disgusted with himself.

The great assault on Government House by five hundred students, largely from the Pancyprian, took place without the participation of Dimitri. His school friend told him all the details of the epic battle they had fought against the police and the army, but Dimitri did not tell Nikos about his own inglorious foray into the Old Town.

A few days after the end of lessons and exams, on 19th June, EOKA attacked police stations in Nicosia and Kyrenia using improvised bombs. Two days later, they bombed the police station in Seraglio Square in the Old Town of Nicosia, killing one passer-by and wounding several others. Mr Dorides felt anxious about his son’s safety, since he seemed to be spending every waking moment in that very district. He took a room for Dimitri at The Dome in Kyrenia and sent him there, in spite of his objections, chaperoned by his aunt, who had returned to Cyprus for the holidays. Dimitri was instructed to set aside his useless mediaeval French readings in favour of modern English, which would be of much greater value to him at his new school.

When Dimitri left Nicosia, he had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he had both hoped and feared that if he stayed in town, he would eventually bump into one of the ghosts of his recent and happier past: Maria, Evdoxia or Aspasia, maybe on the corner of some street in his neighbourhood, or in the Old Town. The first two might just be able to forgive him, yet again, for the behaviour of his father; whereas he felt certain that Aspasia would feel nothing but contempt for him for deserting the Struggle.

His leaving Nicosia also meant that he would seriously miss both the literary guidance, and the disinterested friendship which Mrs Christodoulou had so generously shown him. When he was in Kyrenia, he would of course have the companionship of his aunt, who shared his passion for mediaeval monuments and for France, old and new, but he would also have to endure the presence of the nouveau riche contractor and his extended family, including Jenny. On the other hand, at least he would see his father less often; his father, with whom he had lost all meaningful communication since that evening on Easter Monday.