It’s almost midnight here in Larnaca and I should be turning my brain off. I’m looking out across the black Mediterranean from the outrageous comfort of a massive bed in a top-floor suite. We arrived late last night from Rome and the hotel had to upgrade me as they had stuffed up the booking. This luxurious suite was the only one left. Twist my arm.
Despite sleep sneaking up on me, the day’s sunny, brittle beauty comes flooding back. My sister and I had gone down to the beach across the road from our hotel. It was wild and windy, and underfoot, the sand I expected was replaced by a grubby carpet of brown dirt. Not nice for an Aussie boy. I said I’d go back and do some uni work that I had brought with me. Linda threatened to get a cab to a much better location, which made me cave in to driving her instead; the study could wait. I’m glad I fell for her wily ways. We drove about 40 minutes up the coast and found ourselves floating in the warm, clear waters of a rocky cove. We chatted about everything and nothing and remembered our childhood swims before life took us on separate journeys.
The day drifted by and the brittle sunshine dissolved into a golden afternoon. The white, chalky hills of Cyprus softened to a glowing rust. We drove along the coast again and found a seafood taverna. We ended the day by licking our fingers with a slightly gorged satisfaction. Mine tasted of lemon, salt and charred fish, yum!
Yes, back in the homeland we never really had. Not fully, anyway. Cyprus represents a place of beginnings which our parents always reminisced about. A place they left begrudgingly and, in the process, created a kind of time capsule. A memory that could never evolve or change in the way it really did without them. A memory of their youth in a home full of stories about people who did unforgettable things, some wonderful and grand, others disgusting and scandalous. These stories made them wish that they could be part of them, to add to them, but they couldn’t. They were now enslaved in a culture in which they were, at best, tolerated; at worst, slandered and vilified for being so different. That made the homeland seem even more like a place to long for.
We’ll meet up with the relos real soon, for now it’s just us. Tomorrow we’re off to Nicosia, the capital whose body is split in two by barbed wire and men with guns. Living in that town must be like living with a disability. It must eventually become normalised, at least if you pretend it’s not there. We tourists see it though; locals have to get on with their lives. It’s a Cypriot thing: centuries of practice. The big boys have had all the playing cards, even the trump cards.
It’s been twenty years since my last visit and the place has really changed. Lots more hotels and tourism, but the infrastructure like roads, footpaths and public spaces is often still rough and third-world-ish. There’s an incompleteness here that jars you, especially when you’re from places like Sydney or Amsterdam. The swank hotels along the coast seem almost rude.
I shouldn’t judge the place too harshly though, I’ll always be an outsider despite having experienced the culture and the old towns pre-invasion and pre-hyper tourism. I remember village life half a century ago on my first visit as a nine-year-old; the midnight walks to church with a swinging kerosene lamp, the singing and dancing, the stone houses with dirt floors, the donkey rides down the mountain to swim in a dazzling blue sea, the warm love of family. I’d like to find some of those things again. For now, it’s good to be reminded that I had actually known some of what was.
