(Extract)
We are hollowed out. Even the Turkish police that sit outside our structures change after a while. The wonder at being stationed here is eventually replaced by a carved-out look. Our hollowness is contagious.
But this man standing at the barbed border, forbidden from entering, is a different kind of hollow. It is not one carved by gradual time. It is sudden and jagged in the way lightning strikes and misshapes an olive tree.
In the early afternoon light of autumn, the man’s face is sallow. He stares up at my building. I notice, as I always do, the scar halfway down his neck, in line with his right ear. It is a scar I had thought time would disguise yet it remains apparent, a misshapen circle like a small melting coin. His once convex pride is now as concave as his body.
He is alone this time. No wife, sons, daughter, no friends from faraway places. His tears are demarcation lines down his sandbag cheeks. I say demarcation because his fate was secretly marked out a long time ago by a smoking, gambling nurse; one the villagers liked to say was a skliro karithi. Tough as an almond not a walnut, she would correct them, try and crack an almond shell with your teeth.
Now the man is biting the wire. The guard stands up from his reed chair, jolted out of his inert alertness. He warns the man sternly with a Turkish word although it doesn’t matter what word. Tone is language in such circumstances. They know the man, he has been frequenting enough in these recently opened parts of Ammochostos— or Famagusta, if you prefer. But they do not know Pavlos Charalambous like I do, like he now knows himself. I have often wondered if certain moments would ever arrive, like people returning to this land. But I never thought this moment would arrive for Pavlos, when his own past, twisted like the cords of birth, would unbury itself, release itself. I could never reveal his secret. Secrets do not ooze from our decrepit buildings. We are porous, absorbing what we see and hear. We harbour secrets, especially us spirits of abandoned hotels in this occupied land which isn’t occupied. By humans . . .
….. (complete publication of story forthcoming)
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