The Cyprus itinerary
Destination: Larnaca, Paphos, Pegeia, Platres, Nicosia: Strovolos and old Nicosia
Transport: 4 Planes, 2 Cars, 5 Buses
Overnight Stays: Mum’s house, Pegeia; The Hotel Cleopatra, Nicosia; Holiday Inn Express, Bilbao
Duration: the last week of the year
Cast: Me, parents, parents’ partners, 1 brother, 2 half siblings, 1 grandfather, 2 pairs of uncles and aunts, 5 cousins, 1 cousin’s partner, 3 helpers, 2 dogs: Lucky and Persie, A legion of cats including: Gingercat, Mme Picasso and Fish
Weather: about eighteen degrees, sunshine and then two days of storms
Covid Protection: 2 vaccines, FFP2 masks worn inside public spaces, hand sanitizer, PCR on arrival, 4 home Covid tests
Essential Documents: 1 EU passport, 1 EU vaccine passport (renamed a Safe Pass in Cyprus), 1 negative PCR, Countless, countless other forms.
Token garment: green leggings with net detail at the knee that traps sand, seaweed and pebbles. When the seaweed dries, it scratches like a tooth
Token food: A giant tahinopita (tahini pie) that lasts for days. I cut ever more baroque shapes to get to the squidgy middle.
Symbol: lion
Reading: A View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro; Manhattan When I Was Young by Mary Cantwell; 26 Grains by Alex Hely Hutchinson; Oh William by Elizabeth Strout
Listening: The Secret Library Podcast; 'Nora Ephron Christmas Spectacular', Sentimental Garbage Podcast
The Journey
It begins in the dark, early hours when my boyfriend walks me to the bus station because of the killers in my head. I had a dream two nights ago, of being kidnapped on this small stretch of river road and wiped out on the first leg of this much anticipated journey to Cyprus. We say goodbye at the bus station, because we’ll be spending Christmas with our families this year. It is five in the morning and I’m too asleep to feel sad or excited or anything at all. My only thought is my itinerary, the two planes, the airport PCR at Larnaca. I hope I get there - it’s been two years since my last visit.
Because Bilbao to Cyprus isn’t exactly a common route, there are two planes – one from Bilbao to Munich; one from Munich to Larnaca. It is an odd connection between one sea-mountain place and another, between two languages that sound the same, but are fundamentally different. As soon as I’m seated in the first plane, I feel my languages mixing up, the Greek wanting to come in and smother the Spanish. The notion that in an hour I ought to try, for the first time in decades, to speak German. I remember about four words. Not so the little girl next to me. She holds her three languages casually, changing between German, Spanish and Basque so often it makes me dizzy.
Munich Airport is a culture in itself. Everything is bigger and more modern; it’s as though they pushed up the ceiling of the previous airport and added gadgets and fancier shops. The people too are taller, girthier. You need an FFP2 mask and a vaccine passport everywhere, even to enter a stationary shop, but for balance, there are also Camel smoking lounges. In the café, jet-lagged travellers seize the Bavarian experience by drinking footlong glasses of beer at 9.30 in the morning. I have tea, accompanied by a swizzle stick of brown sugar. The crystals are large and sound out real notes on the rim of my glass. Someone more talented could compose with this contraption.
After this, there is another plane, a half-hearted, one-nostril PCR at Larnaca airport, a drive to my mother’s house in Pegeia on the West Coast. I will only tell you about the cruise ships that my mother pointed out as we passed Limassol. By night, they are lit up and look like flat art deco skyscrapers.
Pegeia by the sea
Cast: my mum, her boyfriend, my brother, Janet, Albert, my uncle and aunt, three male cousins, a dog called Lucky and too many cats to count
There is no place where day and night are so divided as the house in Pegeia. When there is light, between 6.30 and 5, you want to be outside. There are morning swims – mazing through rocks and ridges of seaweed to discover new depths, new shades of turquoise. A drive away, there’s a beach called Lara, where the famous turtles are absent, but we find iris-coloured shells containing gooey molluscs. Are these the ones that made the Tyrrhian dye of the Ancient world? I don’t get round to looking this up; there is too much plastic surrounding the shells, and that must be picked up first. My brother and I leave with an armful each – it is not nearly enough. As we’re driving home from Lara, there’s a mysterious forest fire in a valley. Things burn easily on this land and charcoal is as common a smell as salt. I take a sunset walk and get lost because they’ve changed around the roads and named them after Greek gods. I think it is between Zeus and Hera that I find my way, just before the pitch blackness sets in. From the window I can see the moon is low and the exact shape of an eye. It’s hard to believe this isn’t the origin of everything.
This land is ancient as far as the matriarchal strand of the family are concerned. When we stand at the little port at Agios Giorgios on Christmas day, two generations of married names are crossed out. There are photos of three generations of children at this harbour and all of us have eaten at the fish restaurant above it. I’ve been reading Alice Munro’s half-fictionalised family history, A View from Castlerock. Though she traces her roots through cold places - Scotland, Ireland, Canada - I know what she means when she talks about going home to her family of origin and feeling like a Laidlaw again. There is no-one who is so like you, who will understand you as much. We are all, according to a feature on my Instagram Stories, of the Lion chronotype, which means getting up early, doing our deepest work first and wandering in a daze after four. My partner is more of a Wolf – dead in the morning and livelier with each advancing hour. It seems right that he should be different and my family the same.
Via Platres
Cast: Me, my brother
On the 26th, just before my brother and I leave for the other branch of the family, we hear a sound that can only be described as a roar. While my brother is quick to dismiss it as the boiler, my mum’s partner informs us that it's a lion from a zoo not too far away. The day has already started bizarrely and continues that way when a snot-coloured rental car with a tourist’s red license plate makes us an object of scorn for our fellow motorists. So many of them are flashing their lights that we half-wonder whether the bonnet is open, or if we’re towing a dead cow.
We fiddle with the radio, which features both Greek and Turkish channels, because despite the partition, Cyprus is so small that you will easily be within range of both. We opt for a channel that plays crooners’ Christmas classics instead, and wallow in everything Christmas in Cyprus is not, like chestnuts and snow. The mountain town of Platres is meant to be Chrissmassy in the songs’ style, with its fairy lights and pine-wood chalets resonant of an eternal winter. To me, however, it’s a time-capsule of the previous season, Autumn. I feel this rush of tenderness for the colours I won’t see for another year, the Cinderella sized pumpkins and apple pie in the place we stop off for tea. I think the waitress saw the car, because she’s overcharged us. There’s no way two teas and a slice of pie could reach fourteen euros. On the road, we keep seeing lions - lion statues, mascots, saints’ companions and motifs in my cousin’s earrings when we arrive in Nicosia.
Family Time, Nicosia
Cast: Me, my brother, one grandfather, one father, one stepmother, two half-siblings, one aunt and uncle, two female cousins, one cousin’s partner, one carer, one dog called Persie, after a deceased grandmother, one cat called Fish with one blue eye and one green
First on the agenda, is seeing my ninety-one-year-old grandfather. He has been bedridden for three years and his memory better serves what happened in 1966 than five minutes ago. On each visit to his bedside, he wants to check that I’m still living in Spain, but he forever knows that people in San Sebastián speak Basque and not Spanish. The skin on his hand is papery, with veins as smooth as a polished stone. This indoors life has erased that he grew up as one of seven on a farm and worked as a schoolteacher and professor until he was in his eighties. He imparts wisdom and tenderness; gives me compliments I do not deserve. No, you’re the impressive one, I say back to him. I feel so guilty that I do not do more, that the bulk of his care falls to my aunt and to a woman called Anita. Anita is kind and mellow, with a rich imaginative life. She has made a shrine in the kitchen that features Hindu gods alongside the Holy Mary. She pretends to take business phone calls and reads my aunt’s dentistry books upside-down. This is easy enough to do, as the diagrams are pitched from the angle of a dentist looking into a mouth.
At lunch, there are multiple siblings and cousins, all within a photocopy’s difference of each other. There is a collagen and cuticle overload on this side of the family – big eyes, full lips, heavy hair and winter skin that’s the tone of light olive oil. On the inside, there’s the family sensitivity, the sudden withdrawal that follows a stream of chatter, the ego waiting to be trodden on. We all know exactly where to tread, and sometimes do, even if we could judge better. Later, on a bus journey, I will listen to a podcast that discusses how the movies get sisterhood wrong – they make it touchy-feely, all hair-stroking and crawling in and out of each other’s beds, when it’s really more about comfort tinged with sharpness. We are more comfortable with each other than we will be with anyone else, and yet because we’re similar, there’s this sense of needing to self-define, of not wanting to be lost in the crowd. Out of no-where, my dad produces an extra godchild.
All the seats at the table are full, and yet there’s space for those who sat here previously. There are two family stories about Limassol, a port-town that was historically a place of prostitution and one where all women could be taken advantage of. My great-grandmother, a woman who I remember for her long fish braids, was there in 1920. She stood out for being tall and blond and fishmonger a harassed her - tin enohlisen. While what he did to her has been lost, perhaps intentionally, what she did to him remains vivid. She beat him senseless and knocked all his fish off the counter before stamping on them. She caused such a scene that people outside rushed in. They thought that the fishmonger was beating her, so they beat him too. By the end of the day, she was a local celebrity and her brother, who was also in town, heard of her triumph through the grapevine. My grandmother and her sister, who were raised by this woman, continued to think of Limassol as she did. Even as times changed, they maintained it was a dirty place. When my cousin came home from the second day of a finance job there, saying that the boss had not yet given her much to do, my grandmothers began asking if other girls worked with her. They trusted my cousin, but were not beyond suspecting that her Limassol employer would try to hire her out.
Nicosia, Borderland
Cast: Me, two cousins, one brother, one great aunt and her husband, one second cousin, one coat-seller, the Turkish soldier of legend
This same cousin drives me and her sister to the old part of Nicosia, where there is a vintage coat sale that she found on Instagram. In truth, this cousin is the sunniest of all of us with the greatest ratio of sweet to sour. I don’t intend to buy a coat, but come along just for the ride. Darkness has fallen, though this time it has the marmalade smear of city light. This part of town is close to the border with the Turkish side of Cyprus. The closeness of the Turkish flags, the minaret that appears to be on the other side of the border, makes me wary, and I begin to wish the coat-buying business over quickly. I have inherited my family’s ancestral fear of Turks – the people we were fighting with for centuries – and no matter how evolved I become, I’m never neutral in this space. As we sip limoncello and try on the jackets that the seller brought from Milan, I imagine Turkish soldiers peering over at us. There is another family story about my mother having to do P.E. in full view of Turkish soldiers, because there was a thin strip of no man’s land between the edge of her school playground and the other side. As I try on a blue wool coat that would fit three generations inside, I think about all the binaries I’ve grown up with. Greek and Turkish; this side, over there; good and bad. This divided city has bisected my consciousness, filled me with black and white thoughts. It might be the same for a Turkish woman on the other side of the wall.
The next day, my brother and I go back to the borderland, which is near the hotel we are staying at, because there’s no room at the family inn. It’s a different place under a blue sky - there are cats and succulent plants and even hipsters. I see that the blue-capped minaret is on this side of the border and appreciate how random the division of the island was in 1974, given that Turks and Greeks had been living alongside each other for centuries. I have always loved turrets and for me, the minaret is a type of turret. I remember the flavour of Elif Shafak’s anthropomorphic minaret in The Architect’s Apprentice – something to do with the tower being a sort of dreamer, though I would fudge the exact words. I think of my father too, who cooked a page-long Turkish cauliflower recipe for us the night before. Despite, and perhaps because of being besieged by the Turks when he was young, my dad holds the attitude that you might as well take the good things from them too. Turkish recipes use similar ingredients to Greek ones, but they strike me as more elaborate - the culinary equivalent of jewellery worn by rich old ladies.
Suddenly, there’s a rush of things to do. A mask to be put on to visit my grandfather’s sister. A warm egg to be collected from a chicken’s bottom. Lowering the mask to eat a piece of Christmas cake, where the chopped walnuts remind me of large-print font, because her eyes and hands are weaker now and she can only cut crudely. I don’t even like Christmas cake, but I have the feeling that I want to treasure this piece. On the stove, is a saucepan with blue flowers painted on it. She says she got it in Czechoslovakia. The country has not existed for a long while, but the saucepan looks brand new. The swing outside is now fifty years old. They’ve made this house themselves, my great aunt and her husband, and they repair everything so it looks new. The bathroom where we go to wash our hands is startling white and straight out of a 60s film.
They’ve passed on their gifts to their daughters and grandsons. Our second cousin, who is now a graphic designer, has written their names above the door of his studio. Evidence of his talent is on the other walls. There is a Silicon Valley style quote about ‘if you can dream it, you can do it’. According to the family rumour mill, he and his parents and brothers have chosen not to be vaccinated because they believe in conspiracies. I am so glad I never go on Facebook, because I like them and would not want to see this side of their characters. We talk about everything else. Not being vaccinated makes life hard in Cyprus, where you cannot even enter a supermarket or sit at an outside terrace without a Safe Pass. I wonder what it’s like for them. I feel sorry that’s it’s difficult and at the same time, think it’s right that they should be stopped from putting others in danger. I am so on the fence about everything.
After this, there are the rushed goodbyes. The guilt at leaving my aunt to manage this - my grandpa and her sick husband. Her perfume is oud, a strong, narcotic scent that would meet you in the night. It’s the longing to return to herself.
Goodbyes
Cast: Me, my mum, her partner
There is a bus trip back to the West, where I refind my mum and her partner. There are sunny walks and stormy walks. My mother stakes out the land, the art deco baths in Kato Paphos where she swam on her school lunch breaks, the beach where her mother’s friend neglected the current and almost caused them to drown, the fish restaurant that drove her uncle’s out of business. She talks and talks, dropping stories about people on every side of the family, making them even more complex, more troubling than they were before. As if they were not huge enough already. In truth, I preferred them as cosy, mysterious figures that could be looked at with a child’s adoring gaze and safely pushed into the background. I should be curious and appreciate the stories, but instead feel a sense of existential angst. As though I could spend my life transfixed on my family and not be able to do anything myself. I have always wanted to make my own path and I think that’s why I had to go away. Maybe that’s selfish, but I don’t know how to be otherwise.
While I’m with my family, I think of an elegy that one of my favourite writers Sara Baume wrote for her grandmother: 'grandma was a tiny, quiet, spiky person. She never really expressed emotion but she made thousands of beautiful things throughout her long life.' I was moved by this description because although Baume’s grandmother does not possess the warmth that conventionally makes a person loveable, Baume insists that she deserves recognition all the same, that her handiwork is her means of enriching the world around her. We must value people for the goodness they have, and not judge them as deficient because their gifts take an unexpected form. Baume’s grandmother could be so many people in my family, myself included. Maybe someone will remember us as generously.
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I fly back or should that be away? on New Year’s Eve. As early as Larnaca airport, my languages start mixing again and I’m using unnatural conditional-tense constructions in Greek, as though preparing to re-enter Spanish. Munich airport looks like a child’s room at bedtime; the lights low and the blinds mostly down. It is the opposite of the 23rd. I manage to get myself a festive dinner anyway, of oily smoked salmon, salted pretzel and rich berry smoothie. There is turbulence on the flight to Bilbao, but the little boy in front of me whoops, making me think the sudden drops are thrilling. Up here is the most fun anyone will have on an omicron-laced New Year's Eve. It's such a relief to not have to plan anything else.
I get to my hotel in Bilbao just in time for midnight. There are fireworks shooting out of the bushes and exploding into the sky. They give me this warm sense of not being forgotten. I enjoy my solitude for about twelve hours and then feel this missing limb ache at being separated from my family. I miss them terribly for a few hours. Then, I get used to them being gone, get on with life.