Walk

The impassioned call to arms raged through radio static into their home and his father and uncle were gone, north. Coercion is unnecessary when a perceived ancient foe is at the gates and propaganda is your daily bread. But Theo couldn’t go, didn’t want to go. Too young to fight, too old for mothering, he was alone on a chalky path in the mountains beneath a brutal July sun, descending into a valley. Phryganic shrubs, knuckle-shaped outcrops and hardy carob and mastic trees either side, pines higher up, scents of juniper, lavender, thyme, rosemary and blood, his own, from his right ankle but unnoticed till now.

He crouched and plucked the thorn. It resembled a snake’s fang.

Ozan loved snakes. His ambition was to work with them so he could help them by educating people. Theo hoped his dear friend would get the chance, but feared that he was already dead.

*

‘We have ten species in Cyprus. Two are found only here … If you thud the ground it lets them know you’re coming. They love to be near water.’

‘How many are venomous?’

‘Three. The blunt-nosed viper has the strongest venom.’

‘That’s what my uncle killed then.’

‘Killing them makes me so angry. They’re only dangerous if threatened, they don’t just attack. You should tell him.’

‘I will.’

*

Theo loved Ozan. He loved him more than he loved any of his other friends and even more than he loved his father and uncle, who left yesterday to fight and kill anyone who shared Ozan’s ancestry, and only since turning fourteen in February did Theo quite understand what kind of love it was.

His father and uncle hadn’t cared about his friendship with Ozan before, but for nearly a year now he’d been forbidden from seeing him. This had nothing to do with his feelings, it was because Ozan was Turkish Cypriot, or rather Turkish, to them. Theo rejected both labels. To him, he and Ozan were the same – young islanders whose dreams had been paused. He didn’t dare to imagine what would happen if his father and uncle knew his true feelings. When loitering around the kafeneio’s dusty steps where the royal blue paint had been abraded to a pastel imitation by generations of feet, he’d heard what the sweating, shouting, card- and tavli-playing men said about such feelings, the cruel jokes and vitriol, the gossip about why Andreas had really left the village, all of it under a brume of cigarette smoke.

He didn’t use to understand, but now he did. More and more he understood. If they knew, he’d never be a man in their eyes. Yet still they met, clandestinely, like spies, Ozan ignorant of the secret that beat painfully upon Theo’s sternum whenever they were together, a secret Theo couldn’t divulge. 

——————————————————

‘Are you OK? Did I get that bit wrong?’

‘No, no, it’s good, I’m good, just … Could you make me another coffee, please?’

‘Sure. Same?’

‘Sketo this time, no sugar … Sorry, habit. I know you know this word. Thanks.’

——————————————————

A startled wood pigeon flapped out of a bush and flew away, unaware that all guns were aimed at the invaders, as well as those who were rightfully here already, those who were once neighbours, friends, loathed now because they were connected to the invaders by flag, by religion, by blood.

Theo was torn. The villagers’ words and the words that punched through radio speakers contradicted what he’d seen with open eyes, heard with open ears. Fanatics on each side, duped by outside influence, outsiders who didn’t know what it was like to have such good neighbours, such good friends, they whipped the islanders up into curious, patriotic fervours, encouraged them to oppress and ostracise. The once sane and compassionate had now metamorphosed into the savage and callous.

No birds were singing, they were silent, subdued by the heat while the tzitzikia sang and sang, refusing to hush as always. Their relentless shrill chorus articulated the heat itself. Theo whistled along with them as he drew an arrow on the ground that pointed in the direction he was going, towards the mountain his grandfather had specified. The closer it came, the higher it rose, its scree like the hem of that beautiful dress his photographed mother wore on special occasions before he killed her.

The arrow was faintly red where the blood from his fingers had stained it, and specks of white rock glistened on his fingertips. Theo’s universe, this terrain. He’d grown on the land, been moulded by its rhythms. Today was different though, change was stalking him.

Maybe he wouldn’t return home. Maybe he could fly away too, from the top of that mountain.

Or maybe he’d be discovered, beheaded. Rumours of beheadings terrorised the locals and pulled at their deepest dread like an inescapable undertow.

Four hours from home, four hours beneath a pulsing sun. No one walked during summer afternoons, they slept, usually. But how could anyone sleep at the moment.

*

‘Walk into the mountains and climb high up the mountain that glows orange at sunset. They say the house was built inside it.’

‘Inside a mountain? Who built it? And how?’

‘Mysteries, mysteries. I never went. The journey is tiring. You can go for both of us. You will be safe there, and maybe you can think and find answers, even talk to God, ask him.’

Perhaps his grandfather knew about his love for Ozan, could sense it.

Theo had no idea who “they” were, these tellers of legends. Belief deserted him at age ten, and he doubted whether this mystical house even existed.

‘What about you?’

‘I will be fine, do not worry. I am just glad your grandmother is not here to see what is happening to our country. Such pain would have killed her faster than the cancer.’

Or perhaps his grandfather wanted to get rid of him so he could take his own life, something he’d spoken impassively about to Theo but not his sons. Theo’s grandmother had finally succumbed to the cancer in her lungs when he was nine. A proper matriarch, tough yet benevolent, her death sent his grandfather to that stale, sombre room where he remained, largely motionless, spellbound by the window’s geometric view of field, fig trees and sky. The years since had pulled his sun-pared face more down, his bones more out. Visible, tactile grief. Deep lines emphasised hazel eyes that leapt from those treetops into the heavens.

*

In the valley at the foot of the mountain that glowed orange at sunset there were hillocks crowned with more thorns and glints from shards of metal or glass in the scorched vegetation. Whites, browns, dilute greens and yellows. A parched country yearning for the relief of late autumnal rains that frequently failed.

Theo picked up a sturdy stick, used his penknife to whittle it into a staff, thudded this on the ground, and then sat under a stunted golden oak to sip from his half-empty canteen and contemplate the odds of finding drinkable water anywhere. Last spring he and Ozan found an engorged river and foolishly, thrillingly bathed naked. 

*

‘I don’t want to get my underwear wet.’

‘Then take them off. I am.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, look!’

Did Ozan know? Did it matter?

From a steep bank, terrified at the prospect of obvious arousal, Theo watched Ozan enter and break the opaque water, the dark olive skin on his back, bum and legs taut over alluring muscles that his own body had not yet begun to grow. Reflected rivers and Ozans flowed through his pupils and into him.

‘Come in you coward! It’s not so cold!’

They splashed and swam and dunked and dove. Theo was thankful for the frigid currents. Afterwards they lay side by side in lush, fragrant grass, sparkling like rescued treasures.

‘Why do you say you killed your mother when it wasn’t your fault?’

‘She died giving birth to me. If I hadn’t come she’d be alive.’

‘But you didn’t control or want this. She wanted you and she loved you, and she loves and watches you always, from up there.’

He stared at Ozan’s outstretched index finger and then touched it with his. A snakelet of water caught the setting sun’s light as it slithered down from one boy to the other. 

*

That day was the last time he’d seen or spoken to him. Events moved Ozan north to his aunt’s three weeks later. Theo somehow blamed himself. 

*

It was a freezing night. His uncle tended the fire, his father chain-smoked in the yard, his grandfather assisted his grandmother, who midwifed her in that room that wasn’t yet stale or sombre. Fretful shadows, beams, straw ceiling, hanging herbs, smells of boiled chicken with lemon, soaked blankets, hot wet towels, too much blood, his mother screaming, screaming. 

*

Theo had created this memory early on, when compelled to visualise that night, and he’d cried stupidly while relating it to Ozan, guilt-ridden in his embrace.  

*

——————————————————

‘Still happy to include the river scene?’

‘Yes, definitely. It’s important.’

——————————————————

Narrow lightning bolt trails and goat droppings decorated the scree. His staff helped him climb, though he also had to scramble, increasingly conscious of gravity the higher he went and the louder loosened rocks and stones tumbled down behind him.

Higher, higher, the air thinner, the heat unabating. Below, it was a tangible thick soup that bubbled and blurred previously defined edges into smudges of colour. His land. Their land.

No villages around here, no houses. He pictured coming across an abandoned house, older in his mind, a soldier, the war still raging. He entered this house and saw open curtains through which lances of light stabbed and faded, a set table waiting for a breakfast that had decayed on the kitchen worktops in forlorn fragments, hastily cleared cupboards, forsaken belongings, silver-framed monochrome photographs and an unmade bed. Footsteps made him turn, petrified and pale. He cocked his rifle, raised it, aimed at the doorway. A reflex action, the shot, an automatic response to the sight of those fatigues. The enemy soldier fell instantly, his strings cut, blood streaming from a chest he had no chance to clutch. This man, this boy was unarmed. Theo dropped to his knees beside him and gently slid the soldier’s helmet back to reveal Ozan’s handsome seventeen-year-old face. ‘Ozan?! I didn’t know it was you! I didn’t know it was you!’ Hysterical, he buried his head in Ozan’s lifeless chest and stayed like that, bloodstained and praying for the house to collapse and entomb them together forever. 

 ——————————————————

‘You did well with this part. I wasn’t sure about including it, because the Greek is tricky, and the content is, maybe …’

‘Thanks. It did give me a fair amount of trouble, but I finally settled on that as the closest to yours. I like it, if that still means anything to you.’

‘Now now, you know that still means plenty.’

——————————————————

Eventually he stepped onto an uneven rectangular plateau the size of a football pitch, panting heavily, hands on hips. His T-shirt and shorts had stuck to him, sculpted by his recently tangier sweat into a statue’s robes. The heat was winning.

More dry scrub, sentinel-like pines, some olive and carob trees too. Non-human life continued in the strangest places, oblivious to war and suffering. It had enough of its own problems to deal with, thank you. Though, were they to remain missing, the discarded bodies of the missing would in time feed the earth.

How long could he climb for, searching for a house that probably didn’t exist, for answers that didn’t exist, for questions he didn’t know how to ask. Maybe it would be better if they caught him. Maybe he deserved to die. A sacrifice no one needed.

These thoughts were interrupted by the sound of several dislodged stones hurtling down the mountain beyond the incline to his left.

He was no longer alone.

No voices, but he was definitely no longer alone.

And there was nowhere to hide.

As quietly as he could, he shrank down until he was lying flat. Trembling hands unfolded his penknife. He wished Ozan were next to him. Ozan would be brave. Ozan would die a hero, not on his belly in the dust.

Would they capture him, and question him, or kill him immediately?

“Be a man for God’s sake! You’re too old to act like this now, too old for tears,” his father’s voice pricked him from the past, sharper than that thorn he’d earlier plucked from his ankle.

A knife and a staff, he could do some damage with those.

Fear fizzed in his joints.

His throat gurgled.

He wasn’t ready.

Not yet.

A resounding bleat, a pair of twisted horns, a long brown head. From between dangling ears, disinterested amber eyes dully regarded him.

The goat continued to ruminate as its friends appeared, one black, one a mottle of dun and white. Intelligent creatures also keen to avoid discovery, they deliberated, Theo waited, barely able to breathe. Goats didn’t necessarily mean humans, he told himself. Goats routinely escaped to the wild, adaptation was effortless, for them.

Satisfied he was no threat, they started rummaging, so he army-crawled like the villagers he’d observed practising in the fields, up the incline through hoof-disturbed dust.

Nothing and no one there. The descending goats had gained the plateau via a rugged ledge that skirted a precipitous crag.

Minutes later, while traversing this ledge, Theo wondered if he too could return to the wild, live up here with the goats, a pioneer, a true mountain man, at least until it was safe to go down. If that day ever came.

This side of the mountain was in shade and fortunately cooler. He forged on.

After half an hour, what had been a soft breeze turned into surly wind and the ledge narrowed dramatically, forcing him to press his back against the rock face and continue crabwise. Past his toes the distant world simultaneously surged and dragged him towards it. To slip now would be the end. He saw birds and reptiles feasting on his carcass. He saw his bleached bones.

No more, no further.

Too hard, turn back.

Rapid impressions. Short, careful sidesteps. Staff thuds to test the ledge’s solidity. And then, at last, something new, a triangular cleft a few metres ahead.

‘… built inside it.’

Maybe there, in that cleft. If he could just make it there. But the wind.

‘I LOVE OZAN!’ he bellowed into it.

Go back! the wind howled in reply.

More sidesteps, more thuds.

Go home!

A believer might have interpreted that wind as God’s fury. Not Zeus, not in 1974, a different omniscient watcher God, one whose books told Theo that He wouldn’t like what he felt for Ozan, a boy, and a believer too, so surely he couldn’t love Theo the way Theo loved him. When they’d borrowed and read each other’s books, alone, together, certain parts repeatedly, Theo saw that Ozan’s didn’t acknowledge the love he felt either, the love that still sometimes confused him, which seemingly meant they couldn’t acknowledge it, shouldn’t acknowledge it. Forbidden to love another human.

——————————————————

‘The religious stuff might upset her.’

‘Leave it.’

——————————————————

He reached the cleft and stumbled gratefully backwards into a dim, damp space where shy plants clung to the walls and the ground was spongy, moist.

There it was, in a circle of rock and light, a natural hollow in the mountain, as though at the bottom of a well.

His grandfather hadn’t lied, merely exaggerated. The mystical house was just a shack made of reclaimed wood and corrugated tin, puzzlingly kept company by a withered almond tree.

Theo stood, full of aches, calves tight.

Only one way in and one way out of this place, which had a tranquil, dense atmosphere totally removed from the suddenly irate wind and sheer drop seconds away. Sweat was stinging his brow.

He selected a stone, threw it onto the roof. Muffled echoes.

No answer.

‘Hello? … I’m just a boy …’

Apeiron had been carved into the unsecured simple batten door. It creaked open.

A bare pillow was propped in the far corner atop a dirty mattress that occupied the whole right side. There was a window at the rear, taken intact from another house, and a school desk, the chair on its back in the dust, a layer of which covered everything. Candlestick, icon, Bible, pencils, neat stack of paper. Theo opened the Bible – See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed – closed it.

Each sheet of paper had been filled with indecipherable characters, tapering columns and concentric circles that were broken by regular gaps. Mazes, or targets. The work deteriorated as he leafed through, becoming smudged scribbles crossed out violently, the lines darker, thicker. The last eight pages were completely grey-black, shaded from corner to corner.

In a yellow cupboard he found blank paper, candles, matches, a woollen quilt and numerous sealed containers of water, almonds and dried figs.

The mattress was surprisingly comfortable. Exhausted, he soon slept and dreamed of Ozan. Ozan would love it here. They could live here together, far away from everyone, safe, protected by nature, happy. 

——————————————————

‘… Wonderful. Thank you so much.’

‘My pleasure. I was worried I’d been a bit liberal with my translation in places … I still think you could have translated your own work.’

‘No, my written English isn’t so good. Anyway, I wanted it in your words, this change was important for me. It’s great, really. I appreciate the difficulties.’

‘Are we leaving kafeneio and tzitzikia or changing them to cafe and cicadas?’

‘Well, she’s from Scotland … Yes, why not, she’ll understand. And, if she wants, hopefully this will help her and their children understand what he meant to me, how he helped me become who I am, and that I never forgot him.’

‘Did you speak to each other in Greek?’

‘Greek and Turkish. English words we used like a code. Nobody around us knew it well, they refused, because of what the British had done in the past.’

‘… Definitely Theo rather than I?’

‘Yes. I wasn’t that boy after those weeks, I was someone new. The person I was supposed to be.’

‘I can’t believe you stayed up there for a month.’

‘Me neither. I lost so much weight. Did I tell you the first drafts of this are from that month? Very different of course, but the ideas still, the feelings.’

‘You did.’

‘When I came back down it was all over. My grandfather and uncle were dead, and the island was divided, so I couldn’t cross, to find Ozan. And then years pass, and time … Only now, with the internet … She said he spoke of me. Even more so towards the end.’

‘It’s sad you never loved another man like that.’

‘Until you. No, I didn’t. Not fully, not properly.’

‘And why do you think that is?’

‘I didn’t allow myself to. Felt I didn’t deserve it. A punishment, for hiding, for being a coward … I had to explain to my father that I’d been told to hide. A man who’d just lost his father and brother. Not once did I ever mention Ozan … My father never knew. I’d planned to tell the fresh soil over his grave, whenever that happened, but couldn’t even bring myself to return for his funeral. I will now though. Tell his grave I mean. Just because.’

‘… Can I have the letter and envelope.’

‘… Here. I handwrote it. So much more personal, no?’

‘You really do have beautiful handwriting.’

‘Thank you, chryso mou. You’re always so kind.’

‘… I definitely can’t change your mind? The treatment these days—’

‘No, no. I have no stomach for it, unlike my spirited grandmother. And I’m more than old enough. Plus, my flight is already booked. It’s finally time to return. I couldn’t live there as a coward forced to hide myself from those who knew me, as though in that shack forever, but I believe I can return there to die at least. I’m not a coward. I lived. I just lived.’