August in the Vanishing City

One

THREE MONTHS BEFORE PETROS’ RELEASE from the army, the Turks kill a Greek soldier on the Green Line in Nicosia. The boy bleeds out in the weedy Dead Zone near Ledra Street, behind sandbags and rows of barbed wire, where boarded-up brick buildings from colonial days stand mute as they have for decades, their doorframes and shutters rotted away by the passing years.

Greek medics try to go in, but the Turks shoot over their heads, refusing to let them move forward. Forty minutes pass from the moment they cut him apart with machine gun fire to the arrival of the United Nations troops to retrieve him. In his hand they find a brown bag holding a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of Cyprus brandy, and everyone just shakes their heads. What was he thinking, the poor boy, that he had made friends with the other side?

It is not the first time that soldiers arranged to exchange gifts across the Green Line, their judgment clouded by the boredom of those long, hot brown hours—stale, fly-infested hours that stank of tired nationalism, pointless waiting and absurdity.

It is of course the Greeks who bring gifts. The Turks have nothing, especially the boys from deep Anatolia, who, they say, are literally starving when they come to occupy this foreign land that they are told is Turkish.

The Turks say the boy had ignored an order to halt—and who knew what was true?

Correctly speaking, the Turk who shot him was doing his duty. Petros’ uncle Michalis says this, one day when Petros and his cousin Elias are on leave, eating roasted chicken and potatoes, salad and pickled caper greens—the ones with thorny stems that stick in your throat—at Michalis’ hotel by the beach. Never trust a Turk, he says.

It is at that moment that Petros realizes how impossible it is to die significantly anymore. Once, he thinks, no one forgot a hero, and all soldiers were heroes, but that has not been true for a long time. Now a soldier’s death has no more meaning than that of a reckless boy on a fast motorcycle who tries to pass a lumbering fruit truck too quickly and runs headlong into oncoming traffic.

But that conversation comes later. In the days immediately after the killing, when death is still fresh in the air, Petros and Elias are still stationed near the Famagusta border, along a different part of the Green Line. The barracks and observation point are in an old building that seems to sweat blood and leak strange memories; Petros sleeps poorly.

Unlike in old Nicosia, here the Dead Zone stretches for hundreds of meters between the two sides, across dry rolling hills—scrub that could have been anywhere in this part of the world. Beyond that, from the building’s roof one can see all of Varosha, the city of the vanished—a coastal suburb south of Famagusta, now a modernist mausoleum, the largest ghost town in the world. Looking from a distance, at first you don’t see it. The city looks like many others in this part of the world, a mix of apartment high-rises and coastal hotels and low, one- and two-story, flat-roofed, cinder-block buildings—buildings, to be sure, that have seen better days. It is only through binoculars that you realize there is no traffic, no movement, that the windows are broken and the streets are swallowed in weeds.

Unlike the rest of northern Cyprus, they say the Turks took Varosha by mistake during the invasion—a giant accidental bite—when they called in airstrikes on Greek artillery positions in the city. They called in airstrikes and flattened buildings, and the children screamed and the people fled, yelling they will kill us all. And the tanks rolled in, and in a few months the whole city was wrapped in cyclone fencing and barbed wire and abandoned to lizards and feral cats, a rotting bargaining chip that the other side hoped to give back in return for the stubborn world finally admitting that Northern Cyprus was Turkish and pretending the rest hadn’t happened. Now, it lies empty still, a testament to the madness of war—a grand, accidental experiment to see what strange things happen to human places when all the humans leave.

Petros sleeps poorly. It has been three weeks since they arrived, and every night since, he lies awake thinking about how close he is. There is a house, he thinks, a few kilometers from here, where my parents lived. He closes his eyes as if he can remember the place; but all that his memory delivers him is a smell, musty at first and then salty, like the smell of seaweed and the ocean.

It isn’t a real memory (Petros was born after the invasion); it comes from a picture of his mother and father when they were young, which lies among dozens of others in the old chest at the house in Nicosia. In it, his father is wading knee deep in the water, carrying Petros' mother out to sea. Behind them there is a building, right on the beach, and a row of sunbathers. His father gazes out toward the ocean, and his mother's mouth is half open as if about to laugh. Then he pitches her into the water, and she jumps up, chasing him. Petros imagines this part, even though his parents had always been too old for that kind of roughhousing. It is possible that the picture itself is imaginary—has he ever really seen it?

Hours go by. Finally he pulls the single sheet back and rises, standing at imaginary attention for an imaginary moment, and stares into the darkness. Then he drops to the floor and begins: one, two, three ... thirty, forty, fifty. At one hundred pushups, he pauses for ten seconds to control his breath so as not to wake the others, and then he begins again. Two hundred later, he stops again, his triceps aching. He is no longer the skinny, sweet boy with the sunken chest and sheepish eyes, and never will be again.

Images rise in his mind as he continues, causing him to lose count—images of his mother, his father, Famagusta as he imagines it—images and the ghosts of bad feelings and bad moods that he pushes away, again and again. When the morning wake up call comes he springs up, a satisfying pain rippling through his torso, not even remembering when he had finished or what his new record is.

Hours pass in dull rotation. Petros sits in a dark shaded room, smoking a cigarette, sipping a shot of red zivania from the bottle his fellow soldier Antonis brought from the Kykkos monastery a few days earlier. His face and chest are damp from the heat.

At the next table, the other soldiers—his friends—are playing pastra. How many times have they asked him to join in? But Petros has lost his taste for card games. Across from him, he stares at a cracked wall, its white paint peeling, a line of ants running down its face. It is past lunch time—when will Kostas get back with the damn food? It’s too early to drink, someone says.

What?

"Hey malaka, says Antonis, it’s too early to drink."

Leave it to the alter-boy—rule-bound, sincere and religious, in spite of the cursing—to cut off the mid-day drinking.

Petros takes another sip and rubs his forehead.

Petro, says Kostas suddenly, Your cousin tells us you knew the boy? He speaks with ferocious urgency, as if knowing the answer to this question is an emergency which, Petros thinks, it is not.

Elias speaks without looking up from his cards. What kind of an idiot would do such a thing?

Petros looks for a moment at his cousin—his cousin, his best friend, practically his brother—and feels the old nauseating knot of resentment churn and tighten in his stomach, as if trying to ring the zivania out like a sponge. He recently heard a rumor about Elias—a rumor about his cousin and a girl—the girl, the one thing that means more to Petros than his hatred of Turks.

Antonis puts his cards down, stands up and, without asking, takes the bottle of zivania and Petros’ glass off of the table and goes away to the kitchen. He is right—at some point, it will be time to switch tower duty, better not to be drunk—but how realistic is that? Minutes pass before Antonis returns with a tray of four demitasse of Cyprus coffee and tall glasses of water.

Did you know him? Kostas asks again.

Petros refuses even to shrug, lifting the cup to his lips and sipping the bitter mud, feeling the grains in his mouth, on his tongue. The room is bare and they are waiting, waiting for what, no one is sure—food, yes, but what else? The next order, the next assignment, the next location, which could come along at any minute, or not. Petros doesn’t want to think about any of it anymore. Soon he and some of the others will be on leave, getting drunk and maybe lucky with the foreign tourist girls in Ayia Napa. He closes his eyes and imagines it… the beach, the half-naked bodies, lying on the sand…

Stop asking him, says Antonis. How would he know him? He would have said something, anyway.

Petros stares at the wall, but he is no longer thinking about the boy—he doesn’t want to think about the boy. No—now he is thinking about the girl, his girl—or at least the one he has sworn to make his own.

Elias wonders aloud why a soldier would do such a thing.

He must have had sympathy for them, says Kostas. He means the Turks.

I have sympathy for them, says Elias. That doesn’t mean I would commit suicide to deliver them a bottle of brandy.

Memories rush to Petros’ mind—of Elias on one of those fast motorcycles, running off the road, flying through the air into a wheat field near Astromeritis; of Elias almost falling off a sheer rock face he was scaling near the birthplace of Aphrodite while trying to impress a Danish girl he met on the beach.

Maybe he was lonely, says Antonis.

Maybe he was ugly, says Elias, too ugly to get a girl ...

Even ugly boys can get girls in Cyprus! Kostas protests. He himself is heavyset, thick around the midsection and committed to the view that he has as much opportunity with women as his friends.

Okay, he was ugly and fat, says Elias, shy and scared of girls. Elias himself is never scared of girls, but he has sympathy for boys who are—he is always concocting elaborate schemes to get one of them laid, introducing them to the latest Swedish or German or English tourists he has picked up on the beach. He tries to help Petros too—he has tried so many times.

So what if he’s fat, says Antonis. That’s no reason to kill yourself. Doesn’t he have a family who loves him?

His family—let’s say—died in the war, and the only ones left are communists who he can’t talk to, because he hates communists.

He hates communists but loves Turks? says Kostas.

He doesn’t love Turks, says Elias, but he has sympathy for them, because his father once told him a story—wait, wait, let me finish—a story about how he was saved by a Turkish family in the war.

There is clamor and shouting at the sentimental absurdity of this speculation—sentimental not because such things had not happened, but in spite of the fact that everyone knew they had.

Hey Petro, tell us something, says Elias. Tell us something about this boy who got himself killed to give the Turks a cigarette.

Petros slams his coffee on the table hard enough that chunks of thick, wet sludge leap from inside it, splattering themselves on the table like a brown bloodstain. I knew him, he says. Each seething word creeps slowly off his tongue—each word a wild animal, provoked and dangerous. I knew him. He was not fat, he was good looking, a good-looking boy—a sweet-faced kid, with a family—my mother knows them, we used to see them sometimes in Kakopetria.

No one speaks for a moment; everything stops, even the breeze. Sweat collects in armpits, running in beads down ribcages. Every one of them feels for a moment as if he is burning, they are like living kleftiko, slowly roasting in a sealed-up furnace, as Elias described it a while back.

Elias speaks first. You’re a liar, he says. You didn’t know him. He’s not even from Kakopetria. He swallows heavily. But you’re right about everything else, he wasn’t fat, or bad with girls, he was a charming kid.

So there it is—it is Elias who had known the boy; Elias who is looking for something by making up stories and trying to bait them into saying something, God knows what or why.

Tell us, says Kostas. But at that moment there is a clamor from the tower and an officer shouts down that it is Elias’ turn on watch, and that he’d better move his ass, he is being watched, no doubt about it.

The moment passes, and none of the boys bring up the dead soldier again. A sweet-faced boy died for a reason they can’t understand, and the days creep by like sleepy wild animals.

Two

THIS IS AYIA NAPA: OPEN-air bars, music, drinks, beaches and banana-boat rides. In the sky, skinny-legged girls in bikinis dangle softly from quiet parasails, tugged along by motorboats driven by sinewy, well-bronzed boys. On the beach, the all-but-naked bodies bake, reveling in the mysterious marriage of innocence and debauchery that seems embedded in the startling beauty of this place.

Night falls, and the pale, translucent sea whispers. You can hear it even now, underneath the chest-rattling bass-thump of techno music from the clubs, music that spills forth and shakes the streets; even now, behind the sound of stumbling, drunken voices, rolling down the narrow alleys; even now, when the mute neon lights scream their joyous kitsch to the world, as if they could shout out the dark. But even they cannot drown out the sea’s peaceful whisper.

It is here Petros sees her, not far from the beach. A glimpse of her in profile, as she turns away into a streaming mass of people, the soft sway of her hips disappearing in the crowd outside of Starsky’s club.

It is here he sees her, and for the first time that day he is truly awake; truly awake for the first time in weeks. He throws the half-smoked cigarette to the ground and rushes forward, rushes to follow her, not caring that he is leaving his friends and fellow soldiers back inside the club, that they will wonder where he is. Nothing matters—he races down the street, the muscles of his legs and chest straining against his tight, recently sunburned skin.

She is not supposed to be here; she is supposed to be in that tiny village in the mountains past Platres, where the air is cool and the nightingales never let you sleep; where rich, young kings once ran to escape the heat and drink brandy sours; where the poet claimed to have met Helen and she told him she never went to Troy.

She is not supposed to be here; she is supposed to be standing in front of that one-room school, trying to convince poor mountain village kids of the importance and nobility of Greece, the reality of local saints and their miracles, how to multiply fractions. She is supposed to be there, because that is where he imagines her, day after day when he falls asleep. He imagines her there, just after the bell rings and she steps out of her room and is surprised and happy to find him waiting for her there. He falls asleep imagining it, wakes up believing that it will someday be true. In truth, he is not even sure when the school year ends. Is it June again already?

She is supposed to be there but now she is here and he cannot wait to catch her, see her, look into her eyes again.

She has occupied a place in his heart for as long as he can remember.

Petros’ love for the girl Joanna is woven into his earliest memories. She, his sister’s best friend, the girl with light-brown hair and watery eyes (eyes, he thinks, that you could swim in; eyes you could drown in). An unusually fair girl among the dark Cypriots; a fair-haired girl who carried her own darkness inside.

They were refugees together, in those early years after the war—living at first in tents, and then on the living-room floors of one relative, friend, or another. At a little house in Strovolos, Petros and his sister and a half-dozen cousins and friends lay splayed out and sweating on mattresses on the living room floor—Joanna among them. She was his sister’s age, not quite five years older than Petros; old enough to see and remember things that Petros forgot.

During the day they played hide-and-seek in the back alleyways, or, if it was too hot, Monopoly inside on the floor, with the shades shut and fans blowing while the adults took their afternoon naps or snapped beans in the kitchen for dinner. Joanna helped him count the money, trade properties, build hotels, when he was still too little to understand. She took his side, told his sister Anna to be nice to him.

At night Joanna and Anna sat up and talked, shadows and faint light on their faces, gossiping in hushed whispers, about things he didn’t understand. He would drift off and then wake with a start; convinced he would never sleep, he rushed out crying to his mother and uncles—all of them still awake on the veranda smoking cigarettes and watching subtitled reruns of Charlie’s Angels on a little, thick-screened, black-and-white television.

Irritated, one of the uncles would stand up, come in and shout at the girls, and Petros would feel sorry—sorry because even then he could see how sad and confused Joanna was, how much she needed and clung to those whispered conversations with her best friend.

Joanna’s father was not there; he had gone missing when the Turks came. Like so many others, he picked up a rifle and marched out to face them, even though after the coup there was no government and barely an army to tell them where to go and fight. After the war, Joanna talked about her father as if he would return—as if he were just about to come back, tomorrow or next week. All the adults cried when she said this, especially Joanna’s mother. Joanna said it was because they didn’t understand. In fact, she said with a whisper, she had seen him—he had come to her in the night, touched her face, told her that he was okay, but that she mustn’t tell anyone.

Shortly after that she disappeared then too—for eight years with her mother, off to the cobblestone streets of Salonica, Greece, the city of the white tower where they had family of some sort. By the time Petros saw her again, her illusions were gone; there were none left alive, she said, and anyone who thinks differently lives in a dream. There was a terrible look on her face as she told Anna these things—a hollow blank look, like a blackboard wiped clean, with only the faintest residue of chalk dust in the corners.

By then Petros’ own father was gone, dead of heartbreak and sadness and too many cigarettes and ouzo. Now we understand each other, he thought. We know life without fathers. No, her eyes said. It is not the same.

Eight years; and then one day Joanna and her mother walked back into his life—into their tiny courtyard in Kato Lakatamia’s refugee housing and she smiled at him—that soft, gentle smile, the way she had when they were young. Without thinking he jumped up, and threw his arms around her, only to feel the shock in his gangly, 14-year-old body that underneath her pink oversized sweater she was now a woman, overflowing with soft curves. He pulled back, surprised, and spoke rapidly to cover his embarrassment. I know you missed me, he said.

She smiled and adjusted her sweater to hang off one shoulder again.

Joanna, he rushed to tell her, there’s so much you missed! Color television, new roads, a Pizza Hut! She nodded, her earnest, kind eyes open wide, as if to reassure him that what he was telling her was important, even as he was suddenly aware only of a stain on his shirt and a constellation of red bumps on his gleaming adolescent face.

Then she heard the voice: her best friend, Anna, coming down the stairs. Both of them cried out at the same time, rushing into each other's arms. Later Petros stood silent outside Anna’s room, his ear to the door, heart racing as the girls gossiped and played the recent hit songs — Live is Life, Suzana—on the cassette player.

In the years that followed, he spent many evenings that way, his ear to Anna’s door, listening for the thin sweet sound of Joanna’s voice, waiting for the rare and precious moments when she would laugh at something Anna said—truly laugh, a wild squeal bursting forth before she could choke it off—and Petros would smile, breathing shallowly, praying they didn’t hear him and at the same time wishing they did; wishing that they would call him to come sit with them, even for a few minutes.

Anna accused him often of spying, but he denied it with such conviction that he almost believed himself. He was not eavesdropping—just pausing for a moment between here and there. Was it his fault if they were so loud that he overheard?

In those next few years, he saw her often; she and Anna were fellow students, training to be teachers at the pedagogical academy. They would spend hours together studying and listening to music and talking about things that Petros pretended not to care about. He only thought he loved her then; he knew for certain later.

There: he sees her again.

I am searching for you, he thinks. Searching for you in Ayia Napa.

A glance from the side, she turns a corner and he follows. She looks for a moment as if she is laughing in a crowd of other boys and girls whom he does not know. She is arm in arm with someone, a boy, but he cannot see their faces. It is her—it must be, he thinks, but why would she be here, with people he does not know? The crowd turns the corner, passes under the dusky glow of the lights, her name rises in his throat, to his lips, but is choked out against the relentless beat of the music. It cannot be her, but he is sure that it is. He is sure in the way you are sure when you want something so badly, so fiercely, that the desire for it to be true makes it so.

And yet—why is she here? The question fills him with dread. If she is here, it is not to see him. Someone else.

There is a rumor. There is a rumor about the girl and his cousin Elias, and Petros believes it. He believes it because he knows his cousin; knows his cousin’s faith in passion and recklessness and in following his heart, whatever damage it does. It is, after all, these things that Petros loves most about him; these are the qualities without which Elias would not be who he is.

It was Elias who gave Petros the courage to grow his hair long and pierce his ear when they were both still in high school, even after their mothers broke down and cried and yelled at them, begged them and swore that they had destroyed them, ruined their lives. It was Elias who took him on a motorcycle ride for the first time, smuggled him cassettes of Bob Dylan, old Rembetika music and Pink Floyd’s The Wall as if they were precious contraband. Petros listened and understood, and the world had meaning again. They played backgammon and chess in the cafes, read Seferis and Cavafy, argued about philosophy, complained that Cyprus had lost its soul to American culture and greed (never mind that Elias’ father, uncle Michalis, was getting rich in the hotel business). It was Elias who taught him how to drink and play cards. It was Elias who taught him that there were more important things in life than money.

And, it was Elias who taught him how to pick up women—how to scan a tourist bar and see opportunity, how to seize the moment and walk up to a foreign girl, smile at her and pretend you barely speak English.

No. There must be another reason.

He thinks he has caught sight of her again: a girl in a crowd of friends. He sprints toward the crowd, pushes through the angry boys and grabs her arm, but it is not her: the stranger he touches turns around and recoils, her strange, foreign face shocked and disgusted, and Petros backs away. Sorry, he breathes, his chest heaving.

Sod off! she spits. Greek plonker!

The drunken British soldier who stands next to the girl