Point of Inflection: Nicosia | Lefkosia, 2018 -
Anastasia Kalos
Πνίξε με στον βυθό της καρδιάς σου - TY
(Drown me in the depths of your heart)
Nicosia is known for its ornate doorways. Some go back to the 1800s. Dated in ornate wrought iron, I read the years and imagine the people who had once lived within the old dwellings, which are now renovated for residents who are guided by their smartphone. Other houses feature doors that are chained and locked. Years or decades have passed since anyone has set foot within these silent homes, and I imagine the musty fragrance permeating the walls. I see myself living among the secrets within, briefly stepping into a fantasy of uprooting myself from the southern hemisphere and transplanting myself to a city that has felt the footfalls of the Crusaders.
Earlier in the day I had walked through the museum that documented Nicosia through the ages and stopped at a glass display of a Crusader sword. Its length and size drew my attention. The strength, courage or madness that held this sword. Immediately it is the reimagining of a long-gone era, the sweat on the brow of the crusader of the Order of the Knights Templar, the adrenalin churning through viscera as he felt its weight within each stride. As I stand in my lightweight sneakers gazing through the glass display, images stream in my mind of clashing swords, days old sweat and entrails that mark battles. Once outside, the clash of aromas continues. Old blends with new. East meets west. Subatomic collisions of languages, flavours and aromas as the call to prayer can be heard over the UN Buffer Zone. It’s easy to fall here. You blend in and there are hardly any shadows cast by lofty clinical skyscrapers. You are transplanted to a past as you eat börek at the caravanserai of Büyük Han. It may not be yours, yet is buoyant, plentiful and embracing, whispering of adventures.
It is easy to forget one’s point of origin. To be on the other side of the world within a location that has seen many attempted takeovers yet continues to thrive and maintain a momentum as each moment ticks by. It is in the laneway that I see the first piece of graffiti. A quest of sorts by the author of the title of this piece which throws me into my own quest. I know TY and yet I am a stranger. Is TY male? Female? Does it matter. What matters is that I’m captivated or captured by the random graffiti. I stop, re-read it a few times thinking I will remember, but I know myself a little better, so I take out my phone and take a picture. A picture among others that I will keep for a few years to come, perhaps until my last day on this earth.
Νοιάζεσαι για μένα όσο σου λέω μόνο ναι - TY
(You only care for me when I only say yes)
Quite often you question the present moment and how you arrive here. He and I venture out after the sun settles for the day. September is humid, reaching an eye watering 35 degrees most days. I’ve stopped blow drying my hair as the heat makes my heart lurch, and not in a romantic way. It’s easier to tie my hair up and leave it like that despite seeing so many Cypriot women accustomed to the weather, styled and glammed up for the evenings as I trudge around in my T-Shirt, jeans and sneakers.
We weave through streets and laneways, and it’s at a nondescript and dim lane that I encounter TY again.
Decades have gone by, and now as I read the graffiti, I find myself transplanted back in time, to the moments of acquiescence. Am I acquiescing now as we walk through the streets? Am I relying on him too much? Have we been together for such a time that resignation has set in, to the point where I no longer question where we are heading. Annoyance spikes a little and I open my mouth to ask the essential question, as my calves are feeling the thousands of steps of the afternoon.
Where are we going?
- We’ll find a place to eat.
There are places nearby.
- But I don’t like them, we’ll find something better.
Nothing fancy.
- No, but I want to see if some places are still open.
I doubt the same places will be open after forty odd years.
- You never know.
We’ve been walking around forever.
- Just a little longer.
Okay…
It has always been about the okay. It has been about many things. It’s what happens when you reproduce. It’s what happens when you keep a house together.
Wait, I say.
- What.
I must take a photograph. TY again…Look.
- That stupid graffiti?
It’s not stupid.
I notice how he rolls his eyes with impatience and boredom. They call it the death of a thousand cuts. I’m reminded of all the yesses of my life up to this point.
- I don’t understand how you get so childlike with stuff like this. If anything, it’s scribbles.
It means something to TY, I say. To me it has its importance. It’s a statement. A voice.
- It reminds me of vandals with nothing better to do…
It reminds me of the times I forgave you for opting to stay out with your friends because a newborn didn’t interest you. “I can’t do anything much when they’re so little,” you said, and I said okay…Yes, I hear what you’re saying. The time I continued with the homely duties, collecting all your socks off the floor when you missed the laundry bin by a few centimetres despite knowing it was there. The time I had to borrow to buy groceries, because you lost all sense of time at the casino…
Who are you TY? Why is it that your quotes strike me at my core?
Όταν άρχιζα κάτι, εσύ πάντα ήξερες πώς να το τελειώσεις - TY
(Whenever I began something, you always knew how to end it)
I look at him, he looks ahead. Despite our shared decades, we interact like platonic friends. He takes on the streets to show me the way and he becomes lost in the far reaches of the past, one where he played out here on the streets as a child, yet he balks at the mere thought of crossing the green line and taking a bus to see the other side. It fills him with dread, he says. It reminds him of 1974, he says. I tell him that we are in the 21st century now, that it has been decades since that time. What is there to worry about? He is uncertain, he says, he simply feels it still. It lurks in his bones; plays tunes on his nervous system and the idea of roaming to areas he is no longer familiar may as well be a court martial. It’s a stretch, I say. I agree with him regardless. There is no point to argue and at the same time I feel like someone has placed a glass over whatever flame ignited within me.
New places have this effect. Although old, there is the newness of experience that enters the skin through the air, which tickles each sensitive hair receptor. This frequency reverberates on a cellular level, igniting a cascade of chemicals that fire the brain. Then there are smells that surround us despite all the new shops in Ledra Street. Centuries old, dating back to millennia. Odours that a French perfume nose may struggle to distinguish, but they’d know that they are there in the background. Old notes playing ancient songs.
We are here, yet we are apart.
We are here, walking on the same streets but our footfalls are mismatched.
I have one option, which is to agree as I am a foreigner here, despite speaking and understanding the language. This is a place I’d happily lose myself in. Much like a lover that ignites the tendrils of one’s soul, except our time here sits on the farther reaches of love.
No, I won’t take any photographs of the barbed wire fences marking the green line [but I do, I do it in a covert fashion, to mark the spot].
You’ll be caught, he says.
I’ll just say I’m taking photographs of the pretty cats. He rolls his eyes.
There are so many cats in Cyprus. So many cats in Nicosia. So many cats just about anywhere, even over on the other side of the green line. They give birth to manifold kittens. They’re adorable and you want to adopt them all and follow as they go on about their daily lives. Others despise them for their existence. Pests. Vermin. I admire them for their tenacity.
TY crosses my path again, this time on Pythagora Street.
Yes, I think. I understand it completely. I think of the years that have passed, and the distance that can magnify within relationships. The fatigue that sets in after so many yes moments. Agreeing for the purpose of agreeing. Taking that odd extra breath, to tell yourself that it’s not so terrible sinking into the familiar, even if it feels like quicksand most of the time, such that the world beyond seems to belong to other people, for you to be the spectator.
Αυτό το χάος δεν με ξέρει - TY
(This chaos doesn’t know me)
I tapped the void on the shoulder, introduced myself and waited. It provided no answer, but to continue its amorphous momentum. In my imagination, chaos formed a motile sphere which pulsed with eons of potential energy. I decided to give it a tap.
You there?
No answer.
A short while after returning, as the world entered a new global pandemic, I had found myself packing up my life in what seemed like the middle of the night and running away to rejoin the circus of single life.
In the far reaches of the night, when the mind is busy reorganising itself or defragmenting, scenes are edited and played out. Symbols come forth from all neural corners. I wake with a sudden jolt and remember that I am in my own bed, at a new location and alone, which starts to grow on me a little. I did not realise that the quiet can become so loud. Some days it is deafening, and crowds out rational thought. The need to escape breaks the Richter. It will be a while before the long-haul flight to a new time zone.
Any return to the singular life is preceded with sorting. Clothes, towels, appliances and other mundane things. Who gets the fridge? Who gets the TV? Thank goodness we never owned property. There are photographs that mark a shared history. Such swift journeys are now at the swipe of a finger, and it is via a screen that I reunite with TY and return to my sojourn to the land of Aphrodite.
Scrolling through the images, I see streets, doorways, stray cats, monasteries, forts, azure beaches, museum displays and the neat Greek graffiti that held me in suspense.
I recite the graffiti in the first language I knew:
Αυτό το χάος δεν με ξέρει - This chaos doesn’t know me
I smile and inwardly reach out to the amorphous void.
Hello, you don’t know me…
But I know you very well…
At that instant, I swear I felt it pulse.
