CYPRUS
“Lara Bay.” Photograph by Anca Fodor. Used by permission.
Cyprus was my Amazonas. Humidity uprooted all kinds of fragrances from the scorched earth and hung them in the air like clothes on the line. Humidity, then aridity. It messed up the senses. It raised the sex drive in beings and non-beings alike. Even the houses burned with desire; the walls pulsated with it. Waves of heat rose from the ground up, inflaming birds and trees alike, inflaming tables and chairs and churches. Everything under their reign, the sun and sea ordered to be, to become.
Cyprus, with the bedroom filled with the honey smell of the frangipani tree.
I left Romania at twenty-four. I went to Cyprus for work, yet for stretches as long as three months I barely had any. When work hit, it dribbled.
So, I read. I read Llosa’s Captain Pantoja and the Special Services. I read out in the open, book on my desk.
What was I reading?, people asked, passing by my cubicle.
Go fuck yourself, I said.
They smiled as if we were in this together. As if we had sort of raised this ‘Fuck you!’ up in the air together, like a kite above whatever upset them. This way, they didn't have to feel offended.
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The sea hushed a few steps away from the office building. At lunchtime we walked up and down the beach. Not the golden sands of Ayia Napa, rather the steely gray ones of Limassol. It wasn’t a popular bathing spot, so close to the new port, but it was the beach nonetheless and how many people back home in Romania could talk about dragon lizards tossing their heads at office workers disturbing their basking on the rocks in the midday sun?
There were exactly two steps at the entrance to the main office building. I couldn't climb them anymore, I told my physician. He pulled up a questionnaire on his screen. The problem, as he stated it after the clicks had quieted down and the questionnaire revealed the ratio of right versus wrong in me, is that I seemed not to want anything.
I corrected him that I couldn't, not that I didn't. I wanted to want so much, I threw up from the sickness of it.
He said depression.
I said don't write that down. Who the fuck is depressed in paradise, what with that frangipani tree blooming under my bedroom window?
He thought I was worried about stigma. He also said he hadn’t had sex in a month, either. Because of the antidepressants.
I said, fuck the antidepressants.
Not that I didn't trust his diagnosis and prescription; I just didn't believe in giving up sex for feeling better. Not at twenty-four.
I also didn’t believe that the way to declutter my mind was to torch it. Antidepressants were a sure-kill, but at twenty-four, I had time for other methods.
He couldn't feel much anymore either, he said. But he felt sorry for me. He smiled a lot. His smile was the best commercial for SSRIs, for Seroxat.
I said yes, okay. But maybe I didn't want to smile like that, like my facial muscles did that by conscious arrangement. As if I had to remember the order of a smile, deconstruct it, learn its movements, and then parse this knowledge every time I wished to relay it. People often forget to relay a smile’s movement in the eyes, I later learned.
I didn't want to smile with just my teeth, I said. I looked defensive that way.
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I called Iancu back in Romania. I told him how my physician had said exactly what Iancu’d said years earlier when we were eighteen and didn't know tests existed to diagnose our condition. I told him how the doctor laughed a Seroxat laugh, a taxidermy of a laugh.
Iancu was my ex. Iancu said we had switched personalities, as in he was becoming tame and proper, on his way to becoming a surgeon with a wife and a kid already on his back, while I was writing messages to him from a different bed each time.
I owed a lot to Iancu. He once sent me a poem, a translation from Heine, about the torments of my having only liked him. Iancu was like that, handing me Heine and Camus while saying, read it, it’s about you, saying he believed I didn’t feel much at all.
He matched me with his best friend, whom he had also exiled to the side of life where people floated away, balloons whose emotional strings he had cut.
I disagreed. In my opinion, I should have been feeling less. If anything, I was furious all the fucking time. Yet he found me guilty via trial by Camus: I could not, did not actually want people. This meant I clearly could not—did not—want him.
Now that I was going away, I had told him, as he drove me to the Henri Coanda Airport in Bucharest to leave for Cyprus, I had no friends nor family to connect me with yesterday, reminding me, the moment I stepped out of character, that my past was contrary with my new behavior. In Cyprus, I was going to stretch those wants, let them grow out of control like dough left on a sun-blazed windowsill.
I was going to want it all.
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I made it early to the airport. Beforehand, I searched for the island on a map to discover that Cyprus was nested right under Turkey and not close to Greece, as I had thought.
My passport had been issued in emergency mode, for, like many Eastern Europeans, this would be the first time I left my home country. Surrounded by the closed borders of the communist regime until 1989, even when our countries opened, we watched the lines on the map distrustfully, as if the borders were going to close right behind us once out. Eventually, we would take to crossing borders regularly and become remarkably good at it.
At the airport, one by one, our group gathered. Introducing each other as we arrived, we hoped to retain all twenty-something names. Up until that moment, none of us had ever met or talked with, never heard about one another. Rapidly, we swarmed into a compact mass, effortlessly speaking our new private language, our language of the uprooted.
His name was Andrei, he said. Andrei’s eyes flew over the crowd, searching for someone to associate with other than those sending him off: his parents, sister, and girlfriend. Someone who knew nothing about him. A partner in transformation. Right there, we were snakes shedding our old skin: no pain, no one but each other to take note of the metamorphosis.That’s who Andrei was after. That’s who we were all after.
We landed at night. Outside of the plane, the air was dense, almost unbreathable. Humid and salty and heavy with scents of oleander in bloom and wild thyme, sun burnt bushes and rocks and dust.
On our way to the apartment complex, we saw only what the bus lights brought into being a few meters in front: the reflective white stripes on the road, the blaze of billboards, so many green Carlsberg billboards, the tunnel vision of nature on both sides of the road, an uninhabited land with its vast fields of dry earth, a world stopping abruptly at the reach of the light beams.
Gabriel kept turning to me from the seat in front. Why didn’t I join the group photo they took right after we landed. He said it; he didn’t ask.
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By the end of August, the Mediterranean was the primordial soup from which I had been born, walking out of it like Aphrodite. Not that I was beautiful, but I was creation. Under the maddening sun igniting the pebbles burning my skin, interminable days inflaming organs and thought, it felt that way: that I had been created out of this sand and this sea and its salts.
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Andrei burned miles with me. Naked, the Aphrodite rocks nearing from the distance—his beaten-up Supra making its way down something we interpreted as road, but which wasn't. Andrei walked out of this sea, he was that beautiful. I guess we were all trying to shed something of our past, but Andrei wanted to shed it all. He was going to become brand new, brand different, brand opposite. He was going to reinvent himself the moment he stepped onto the plane we had all boarded, bringing us to Cyprus.
Andrei was transitory, his beauty rose in me a feeling of well-being that faded as soon as he went out of sight, like heat fading when moving away from a burning stove.
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Gabriel, on the other hand, burned like the August sun. Even in winter, when he flew to Austria and never asked me to come along, he scorched. I’d stay behind with Andrei, go to the beach, send Gabriel photos of naked me baking in the December sun, and tell him about the Russians who were diving into the sea as if it was mid-summer.
He'd send back pictures of snow and he'd win.
Inseparable as we were, Gabriel separated from me on any whim and left me dazzled, as if struck down by a fever that made no sense.
Andrei endured and waited, because in Andrei’s mind we were equally unfaithful, with his fiancée across the Mediterranean. It was all in his head and he walked about in that reality as if infidelity were a movie set.
Re-take after re-take.
It made no sense.
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Gabriel, meanwhile, was mad with leaving. Mad with escape. I was mad with Gabriel.
I think Gabriel flew out of Cyprus so much because he wanted to be around people who didn't say mix-tape or good-book or the such. I, like the other expats, was no exception. He levied tax on my having grown up in a house with naked walls, save for a small oil painting of a forest path at sunset and, behind a red curtain, a rack heavy with preserves.
Words don't feed poverty, I told him when he talked about the house he grew up in, a house ceiling-high with books.
The last trick Gabriel pulled was to lay out the island's map and draw the outermost coastal roads in red marker. That's what we should do, he said, the island. Gabriel had a lot of ideas that proved one thing or another about Cyprus. Mostly the reachability of its ends. Physical ends, like the beach—always the beach. The shore, the sea. Like he was madly trying to step foot on each and every stone, marking everywhere. But it wasn’t only the physical ends he was chasing. He ran bets, like how many times this week we ate fish meze, or lamb kleftiko, or goat cheese. He made it sound like that was a bad thing and I'd say something in acknowledgment, like a four-year-old whose world makes no sense, but she wants to impress the grown-ups by pretending to have understood things thoroughly. I understood shit. But he liked to count—put a number on everything. Although I didn’t know what the point was, I played along, tracing my fingers where he marked on the map in red to prove how easy a task coming to the end of a place is. And he was right.
After that, Gabriel left.
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I started seeing Myro. A few weeks into the relationship, talks of expanding the first floor of his parents' house as an apartment for us came up. They build those houses in Cyprus with the reinforcement steel sticking out of the roof, waiting to become spacious living-rooms and bedrooms for their grown-up kids’ families.
I put a cap on our time together. I started all my relationships of that time with the end in sight; I only dated for three months. After that, the excitement siphoned out and what was left wasn’t enough for me. I was excited about beginnings; I had no patience for acts two and three. Let it hang in the air. Do not resolve conflicts. It was easier to leave when the air was simmering with drama and resolution was nowhere in sight.
Resolution stunk too much of finality.
Gabriel liked to say that I was a bibelot to Myro, perked up on the highest shelf. An ornament to own and show.
Myro talked about things I couldn't understand, like staying in place. I used to blame Myro, that his wants were too minor, too few.
I wrote him poems in French. He didn’t know a word of French but listened to my poems nonetheless and then we fucked. That's all there was with Myro, really. That and solitude. Myro thrived in simplicity, Myro thrived close-to-home. I thrived in being dissatisfied. Neither of us convinced the other of their creed, although I stayed with him far longer than three months. He had no clue I wished him the victory.
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A point came after that when I couldn't sleep anymore. When I began to devour space. I burned distance like a junkie.
Under the sun igniting sea and stone, blades of light hitting raw nerve as early as five in the morning, despondency was out of its element. Sorrow's only manifestation was a lethargy which needed an outlet.
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Myro didn't understand. Myro couldn't grasp sorrow. He could grasp anger. Some mornings I'd get messages from Myro telling me he needed his car.
I ignored him. I drove. He screamed at me to exhaustion via text messages stringent with uppercases. I drove even further and came back home even later, patches of sunburn around the ankles, the wrists, the back of the neck.
I drove until my eyes burned. The sea reflected light in doubles and triples, yet I'd always find myself near the shore. I was shades of red and greasy white sunscreen. And I was happy. The happiest I've ever been. And it made me angry.
I drove Myro’s car like it was stolen. Parked it as if I'd abandon it right there, then made for the waves with nothing but a bottle of water I’d yanked from the freezer that morning. That's all I ever kept in the freezer. Chunks of frozen water in plastic bottles and Absolut vodka I'd stock from the duty-free. When the hot pebbles dug patterns into my soles, I twisted them to the sides, walking as if on sticks. There was no way to dig my toes into the wet layer underneath, like I did on sand.
Where I stopped, there was rarely sand.
I dived and roasted and at lunchtime I retreated under the shade, if I found any. If not, I'd position the car so that at least I'd create a strip where the sun searched but did not reach—but it was rarely a good idea. The car so hot, it added to the scorch. Sometimes I'd sleep on the backseat. Sometimes the day was moving, so I threw the doors wide ajar and let the sea breeze run in and out, as if the car were its playground.
Myro hated for me to drive alone, dive alone, so I lied to him—made it sound even more daring. The island was safe. Locks were pretty much like car window wipers in Cyprus. One didn't need them much. But a woman bathing naked and alone, that was another thing altogether. I'd patch lies into my stories when I'd return, just to enrage him. Sometimes I'd weave lies within lies.
Myro didn’t accept my sorrow—made it sound small, petty. So, I played that game where I pretended I didn’t understand him either.
I played him to exhaustion.
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From the highest ends of the island, I took flight. I jumped. When tongues of flame licked at my soles, crawled up my legs to settle inside the pit of my groin, desire sprung me up in the air as if I were just breaking in wings in that moment—and they weren’t going to last. Knees at my chin, eyes closed shut. I was fever drilling the bed of air. I was inflamed red skin and brittle-dry hair. About to hit the water, each pore on my skin suffocated in its own drought. And when I hit, when my body wounded the sea, the union, it sung. My burned skin hissed relief and I dived as if the light had dragged me up, only for the sea bottom to pull me down with greater determination. Claimed by both, I rested in the in-between.
I was eternal.
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By the time Myro stopped promising me any sort of life together, I’d driven three old cars to spare parts.
In the end, I drove to one place only, over and over again. I drove to this place on the coast of Polis with the eucalyptus grove a few meters away from the beach. Every year, in April, the twenty-something of us who were on that original plane from Romania to Cyprus drove to this place to celebrate that one more year had passed. It wasn’t much of a place, to think of. A gray beach with a sea that borrowed the pebbly color of the sand. The eucalyptus leaves landed onto the surface and formed a brown mass that rhythmically advanced, then retreated from the shore. The leaves stuck to the skin around our ankles when we’d walk out into the water. By the third year we’d halved in number. Gabriel was gone and Andrei was making plans to get married and go back, too. And after a while we were but two or three remaining expats and we didn’t celebrate anymore.
But I drove back to that place again, over and over, alone.
The sea there sent me into vertigo. I wanted out of her embrace, but each swell fastened me tighter to her. I wanted her to know I, too, could abandon her, follow those who had left.
Instead, I laid on my back in the sand.
The hot sand permeated my skin and infused it with the sweet fragrance of the heated eucalyptus bark. Patches of washed-out sky reached down to me through the eucalyptus leaves. Elbows deep in the dust, waiting for my skin to dry—to reveal those white, crunchy flecks of salt—I watched the sea and the sea uttered back each time a different message.
Anca Fodor’s fiction has appeared in the The Waking, Water-Stone Review, Western Humanities Review, and Willow Springs. She has been a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers.
Born in Romania, she now lives in Germany with her husband and daughter.