The Great Cyprus Think Tank, page 1
Copyright © 2021 Larry Lockridge
Iguana Books
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Toronto, ON M5S 2R4
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Publisher: Meghan Behse
Editor: Paula Chiarcos
Cover design and drawings: © Marcia Scanlon 2020
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77180-497-4 (hardcover). 978-1-77180-496-7 (paperback). 978-1-77180-498-1(epub).
This is the original electronic edition of The Great Cyprus Think Tank.
to my sister Jeanne,
source of joy and light
PROLOGUE
Whenever my dreamworld turns bleak, I glare at my writing desk and cry out to solitary walls, “I’ll go abroad!” In early 2022 I was no longer dreaming of sphinxes, pyramids, and caravansaries. My night fantasies had given way to dark frustrations. I couldn’t find my classroom and, when I did, was without a syllabus or anything to say, while nameless students peered into iPhones and sullenly drifted off. When I took the elegant stairwell to my gala book launch at the Century Club, I beheld old friends no longer recognizable, for this was our fortieth high school reunion, and I was the emcee. A porter on the Trans Canada told me the Rockies had been leveled because—didn’t I know?—Saskatchewan was the new look for Canada. My worst dream was to survey my image in the bathroom mirror and see that I was sixty-two—worst because upon awakening I sighed at its unnerving truth.
The mind beneath mind that is the wellspring of dreams needed fresh water, and I knew where to find it—in the fabled and parched isle of Cyprus.
My doctorate in sociolinguistics has taught me a nonacademic kind of writer’s life. I pack my bags and set up in an exotic locale, quickly learn the language and native customs, and within a year or two, produce a novelistic memoir. You may already have read some of them. Thanks for downloading another—Bart Beasley’s The Great Cyprus Think Tank.
I was born in 1960 in Ottawa but spent four years in Cyprus while my father, a minor Canadian diplomat stationed in Nicosia in 1970, did what he could to make amends for the earlier British occupation of that unfortunate island. He advised the UN Peace Keeping Force in its deployment of Canadian military fodder. Upon the Turkish invasion of 1974 he took credit for deceiving the Turks and protecting the airport in Nicosia by telling the Canadians to move their pitiable handful of tanks around all night as noisily as possible, with bright lights. Good thinking. The Turks concluded the airport was too heavily fortified to bother with, at least at the time. But the invasion was so stressful that my father suffered a mild coronary and was sent home to Ottawa along with his wife and me, their only child. He died not long after.
Having clocked the years from ten to fourteen there, I found that Cyprus had lodged deep in my memory cells and re-emerged from time to time as a yearning. In 2022 it beckoned again.
As you know, to the amazement of everybody the world over, the island was reunified earlier that year. In a new pan-Cypriot bi-communal federation, restrictions on travel across the border imposed by the Turks in 1974 were lifted. Resettlement of displaced Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots was soon underway, with somewhat less gory jousting over old homesteads than might have been expected. But ethnic animosities persisted, as did other worries—desertification, a diet dominated by British chips, a rising sea level that threatened hatcheries of the famed sea turtles, the slaughter of migratory songbirds, and looting of antiquities for sale on the black market.
I’m not by nature a social engineer or utopianist. One motive was frankly self-interest in whipping up fresh material for this memoir. But I’d also felt at times an urge to do my species some good beyond fictionalized memoirs that leave little trace beyond an evening’s frolic in the minds of a handful of pale, unsatisfied readers seeking ports of call they can never visit because too poor, infirm, or lazy. Then too, there were deficits in my life that prompted my conscience to acts of compensation.
I applied to the Soros foundation to fund a think tank. Let me enlist specialists to rescue the island, I told them. It took only a few hours on the internet to seek out the world’s finest, some of them already familiar with the island, and add their names to the application form. They included a zoologist, a nutritionist, a meteorologist, a neurologist, and an archeologist. My project may smack of presumptuous American world-beating, but keep in mind that I’m Canadian.
The Soros foundation knew a good idea when it saw one and, within weeks, was depositing large sums in my checking account at Chase on lower Broadway. This wasn’t my money, but it felt good to see my account plump up beyond a midlist author’s best imagining. I was teaching creative nonfiction at NYU as an adjunct and barely paying rent for a modest one-bedroom at 68 Carmine Street.
I’ll spare you two years of logistics. The Cyprus Think Tank took up residence in Káthikas, a small village in the west overlooking ancient Páphos. We numbered five geniuses plus me.
You may already know us from the singular episodes we occasioned during our brief tenure on the island, having gained influence within the new pan-Cypriot government. The Minister of the Interior was amused by my scheme, viewing it as crackbrained but harmless enough. And she was happy to receive a handsome subsidy from Soros, which could have purchased the entire island with cash on hand.
My special interest in Cyprus, beyond saving it and writing this memoir, was the literary connections—not native writers but the outsiders Arthur Rimbaud and Lawrence Durrell, who lived for brief spells on the island. The French poet was the negative lure, Durrell the positive. Rimbaud gave up verse at the age of twenty as the most precocious writer in the history of literature. He turned his back on the whole enterprise. What boots it? Whenever I suffer writer’s block, I say to myself, Rimbaud knew he need not write more, so why should I? Durrell kept writing beyond The Alexandria Quartet, but never again so well.
I had good reason to believe that Rimbaud left a notebook on Cyprus. I wanted that notebook, I wanted it! And I wanted to visit Béllapais in the North where Durrell had lived, thinking his shade might breathe words into me. I needed them.
Another lure was William Shakespeare, most of whose Othello is set in Cyprus, probably Famagusta. I couldn’t know early on how much this tragic drama would impinge on my farce.
In its contradictions Cyprus is a haunting enigma. Yes, it has everything—from splendid antiquities of the many cultures that have flourished there, to an enchanted geography of mountains, deserts, and beaches, to legendary cities, monasteries, mosques, and castles, to the celebrated haloumi cheese and zivanía brandy. But it suffers the worst consequences of climate change, the ethnic enmities that have spilt kraters of blood and still simmer here and there, the loathsome residue of rapacious mining and industry, the public-health menace of a greasy British diet, and the geopolitical disadvantage of proximity to both the Middle East and Africa, a pawn caught in the interplay of larger powers. It’s not much of a stretch to say that in Cyprus we find Planet Earth in miniature. After the ordeals of Brexit, with its improbable focus on a 310-mile internal Irish border, and the coronavirus pandemic, with its promiscuous feasting on a 24,901-mile ring of hapless humans, I feel it’s time to return Cyprus to the map of global awareness. If you stick with my memoir, you’ll be getting a parable of the human race in the early twenty-first century for ninety-nine cents.
And I promise you adventures I couldn’t have made up, including dark forces intent on sabotaging my benevolent scheme. I admit to having little imagination but do have a memoirist’s habit of jotting everything down at day’s end. If you doubt my reliability, I’ve taken inspiration from Rimbaud and have tucked my own notebook somewhere in the vast library of the Oneida Community Mansion House in upstate New York, where my story ends and where I wrote this memoir over a period of three weeks. If you find my notebook, read it and decide for yourself whether I have exaggerated. But the staff doesn’t permit removal of anything from their library, even for private reading in one of their rental rooms. A ghostly impersonator of the Oneida Community founder, John Humphrey Noyes, will track down and bring to justice anybody who violates this rule. Unless you relish confronting a religious lunatic, I’d advise you to let my notebook rest unmolested among the relics of print culture that gather dust in the stately Mansion House left by the polyamorous utopians, who remind us that utopias come but mostly go.
— Chapter One —
AT THE TAVERNA
The evening of April 1, 2024, four members of our think tank converged on Taverna Imoyeni, the finest eatery in Káthikas, where I had placed an order for a twenty-four-plate meze, good ploy for quick conviviality and proven remedy for jet lag. Our archeologist, Melusina Frei, was delayed by a strike of her fourteen sea divers, and our neurologist, Albert Vygotsky, was arrested when taken for a terrorist at the Athens airport. The houses of those who arrived were well-stocked with zivanía. When we hobbled into the taverna, it was clear we had all a drop taken of the island’s famed white brandy.
We quickly turned our conversation to matters of substance, as befits a think tank, but
“A track record sort of thing?” asked our nutritionist, Jasmine Ivory, sitting across from Darcy and monitoring him as one might a live lobster.
Darcy practiced vegetarianism and scooped up local animals wherever he traveled. Our rented domiciles would soon be full of stray cats to keep snakes at bay. Wearing safari clothing that resembled Stewart Granger’s in King Solomon’s Mines, he was a devotee of zoologist Gerald Durrell, younger brother of Lawrence. His graying walrus mustache, lively jowls, and combative personality went before him through many viral YouTube videos where he could be seen hand-smacking at rapacious hunters, indifferent zookeepers, and sadistic children pulling tails of dogs, cats, and lemurs. On Cyprus he had already intervened at Cape Lára, rescuing sea turtles from tourists. He was happy to return to rescue migratory songbirds—the locals pickled and ate millions of them. Also the mouflon, the great-horned sheep that had almost disappeared into stew in the nineteenth century. These admirable passions, when redirected to world politics, prompted even the sympathetic to wish he’d keep his fucking voice down.
“Right you are,” replied Darcy. “Kissinger and the CIA gave the Greek junta the green light to oust Makarios. A good man was replaced by Nikos Sampson. The creep shot Turkish Cypriots for sport, got himself photographed standing on one as a trophy. Anybody want to see the photo?” Silence. “No wonder Turkey invited itself down to lend a hand to its own. Not that I liked the invasion or the Turks. Those blackguards bumped off thousands of Brits at Gallipoli.”
“Come on, Darcy,” said our meteorologist, Gayle Drake-Larkin, raising her voice to match his. “Turkey was just waiting for a pretext to invade, and Kissinger was happy to serve it up. Way to go, Henry. But that invasion was hardly justified, you know. Thousands died for no reason at all, thousands were displaced. And Kissinger was a snake. A large cat should have eaten him. Turkey had strategic military bases dear to Henry’s heart. He saw to it that the Greek Cypriots would get their gooses cooked.”
I’ll not break in here with a history lesson, telling you all about Archbishop Makarios, for instance. It’s complicated. Look it up on Wikipedia under “History of Cyprus since 1878,” if you like. For now, just keep in mind that the 1974 invasion resulted in the Turkish occupation of one-third of the island and its de facto partition, with severe dislocation of Greek and Turkish Cypriots alike. Nicosia became a divided city with a hideous wall you’d climb over at your peril. The sole issue the world’s governments agreed on was that the Turkish occupation wasn’t legal. Only Turkey thought otherwise and gave its self-created zone full diplomatic recognition. Anything circular about this?
“Shouldn’t that be geese?” asked Jasmine. “I can do a first-rate goose, or geese, for that matter.” She was trying to change the subject. It’s unseemly to bring up the Turkish invasion, and some of our neighboring diners knew enough English to stare at us. One party asked for another table.
“Any way you look at it,” continued Gayle, “that invasion was a bummer.”
“Yeah, I agree, a bummer,” said Darcy, pulling in his sails. “Just because a few Turkish Cypriots were being offed was no excuse for human wave attacks. The wildlife in the North went underground. Animals know when it’s time to head for cover. Same thing happened after your presidential election in 2016. The long-eared myotis bats were terrified of Trump and holed up in their tree cavities . . . No, I’m not kidding!”
“Don’t leave your island out of the picture,” cautioned Gayle, pushing up her Snoopy hat. “If there hadn’t been a British occupation for eighty years, no Turkish invasion down the road. You Brits taxed the poor Cypriots to death to pay off a stupid debt to a sultan, and what you did to their agriculture really sucked. That’s just for starters.”
Maybe carrying a degree of British guilt over Cyprus, Darcy conceded with a grunt and grinned. They were having a tiff but he seemed to like Gayle. You get a gaggle of geniuses together at your peril. I hoped they would get along.
Twenty years earlier, Gayle had worked as a precocious teenager with Al Gore on An Inconvenient Truth and was savvy about politics. Adjunct professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of California, Davis, she didn’t wish to be tied down by an academic career. Was a reckless overachiever who performed in air shows, doing upside-down figure eights and terrifying nosedives in a rehabilitated World War II Grumman F8F Bearcat fighter. She earned extra cash as a skywriter. New to Cyprus, she was eager to do something about the desertification that forced the humiliated Cypriots to buy secondhand water from Greece, itself parched.
“You Brits left two legacies,” said Jasmine. “Driving on the wrong side of the road and fries—I mean chips as you Brits call them. Waiter, please remove the chips!”
Michalis skulked away with four platefuls, and Darcy looked aggrieved. These were the first of many mezes Jasmine waved away that evening. With dishes she allowed, she took ample portions but played with them more than she ate them, tucking one piece of food under another.
“I’ll hound the Minister of the Interior again about chips. Have you looked at the Cypriot waistline? It’s that ancient Venus figurine all over again, really fat.”
“Jasmine,” I said diplomatically, “could I suggest that you not knock Venus after Melusina arrives. Her career hangs on finding Venus—you know, Aphrodite.”
“I hope the marble Aphrodite gives Cypriot women a new aesthetic. Their husbands might spend less time at tavernas, more in thalami . . . What do you think, Darcy?”
There was a hint of flirtation in Jasmine’s question—that reference to Greek bedrooms and a certain lilt in her voice—but Darcy was too much in a funk over chips to notice. He sighed.
“Sorry to send your chips away, Darcy,” said Jasmine, “but face it, they’re cooked in lard and hardly vegetarian.”
He again conceded the point with a grunt, adding, “This island is tough going for the likes of me, but it’s too bloody hot for carnivores. No sense stuffing yourself with kléftigo, pastourmás, gourorunópoulo, and lougánigo if you’re being broiled by the sirocco!”
Jasmine laughed and was clearly warming to Darcy and his brash energy—the first upsurge of romantic currents that will unsettle my story.
“I’m with you there, dude,” she said. “One crusade of mine is to get the locals to eat more glystrida, rókka, and taro root. Also koliandro sprigs.”
“Please call it a mission, Jasmine,” I put in. “You’ve been here twice before. Cypriots aren’t keen on crusades. Remember Richard the Lionheart took umbrage over how his sister and fiancée were treated by the Byzantine prince and plundered the whole island. Sold it as a down payment to the Knights Templar. Same knights taxed the surviving Cypriots to pay the balance and cut the heads off resistant taxpayers. Thousands of heads. A fine piece of work, that first crusade. The others weren’t any better.”
“I draw the line at glystrida,” said Darcy, “but the other inedibles I’m willing to eat. One crusade—er, mission—of mine is to rescue the ambelopoúlia, poor bloody beasties.”
“I’m with you there,” said Jasmine eagerly. “Let’s conspire on this. There are other ways the Cypriots can get their protein. Problem is that pickled songbirds are so tasty, so I hear. Byron loved the Italian version, beccaficos. No conscience. But I love Lord Byron. You Brits produced some knockout poets.”
Growing up Black in a white Georgetown community, Jasmine didn’t confront chitlins and deep-fried chicken, but she studied nutrition at Indiana University and was appalled by the Hoosier diet of fried Spam, hog jowls, and carrot Jell-O. She had suffered eating disorders in her youth and was still a borderline anorexic. Eventually, she became a food activist who felt that something should be done about Cyprus, where diet was a public-health scandal.
