THEY DIDN’T REALISE…

To the missing Panayiotis

He was like this cypress tree,
had fair hair and eyes the colour of the sea;
and he was wearing an olive green shirt,
perhaps you saw him?
G.Moleskis


The final passenger was an old lady. She was waiting with her bags on the steps of the confectionery on the corner, number 3, exactly as noted down on the driver’s list.

“Are you for Limassol, Grandma?” the taxi driver asked, just to be sure. It had happened to him more than once, he said, to take the wrong person to the wrong town, especially some old people, and especially at the time when half the population was in a state of oblivion.

“Limassol,” she said “number 10, Achilles Street, next to the clinic of … I always forget the man’s blessed name …”

“All right, Gran”, said the quick-witted taxi driver, who had hundreds of names from history imprinted on his mind.

“Priam!” the old lady suddenly remembered. “Of all names!”

A general “Hm!” was heard, like a joking assent.

“That’s what they baptised him, what can the man do?” said one of those on the back seat, stroking his pot belly in satisfaction that today he had chanced upon a character to break the monotony that for years had been his travelling companion. The daily passengers of the inter-city taxis, those whom the company respectfully calls “regulars”, usually resemble people with low blood pressure, who feel tired in the morning but, come afternoon, they are ready to activate the malice which is lurking, as yet unmanifested, inside them. Some of them are nothing more than vegetables. When, however, they come across a “sucker” they wake up and lead others into their petty indelicate charades.

“Where have you been, Gran?” he asked casually, looking out at the trees going by like big cicadas who flee on hearing a noise.

“For my son,” the old lady replied and they all intelligently believed their ears, simply understanding that the old lady had been to visit a son of hers.

“Where are you from, Grandma?” It was the driver’s turn. Till then he had been letting his fingers play nonchalantly on the steering wheel, as the wheezing, middle-aged Mercedes swallowed up the kilometres.

“I’m a refugee, son, from Famagusta.”

The two girls on the back seat, next to the “regular”, whispered something to each other without paying attention to all this. The man next to them retreated into himself again when he saw that his line had not hooked anything of interest. He could only look sideways at the thigh which, evidently involuntarily, was resting lightly against his leg. It seemed, however, that he did not want to believe that this was the case, so he shortly brought his leg closer to the girl’s. Her insides churned over but an observant eye would have easily ascertained that even the effort to push him away was too much for her. Perhaps because inside her there was a bigger force than anything else that was going on around her. But nothing further was needed; the considerable experience of her neighbour enabled him to retreat in time to the condition of a vegetable.

To the driver’s question if her son lived in Nicosia and if the confectionery on the corner was his, the old lady replied,

“Oh no. Where would the poor boy find a confectionery?” explaining immediately that her son was a soldier. “He has just gone into the army … a fine lad.”

In the meantime she had taken out of her bag a worn photograph in a plastic cover and she handed it round the taxi.

“He’s really handsome, Gran. You must be proud of him”, said the younger of the two girls on the back seat cheerfully and gave the photograph back to the old lady, for her to put it ceremonially back in the plastic cover from which she had carefully removed it. The other girl murmured something in her ear and the two of them immediately became serious.

The human-vegetable had sensed something in the air and commented:

“Your son will be quite old now, with all those deferments, the rascal. How old is he?

“Twenty two!” she said. “He’s just qualified as a vet.”

There was a momentary chill in the taxi. The pregnant girl, next to the “regular”, felt a sudden shudder as though the motherhood, that for some months had begun to swell up inside her, was melting away. Her face was flecked with beads of sweat. And at once intuition told her to draw her legs closer together so that they now, of necessity, came unstuck from those of the person next to her. She felt a desire to get out of the taxi there and then, yet intuition told her a second time that she must hold on a little longer.

“And where have they got him now?” the regular went on, slow as he was, to catch on.
The second girl, who could still hear the other girl’s words in her ear, longed to say to them both Be quiet, damn you … Shut up!

The old lady, as if wound up, was giving her account of the place where they had her soldier son, without, however, making clear the exact location of the place … And then the pot-bellied man, insistent, said,

“Wherever he is, they treat them all right nowadays. In case the little darlings complain…”

The old lady, worn out from the all-night vigil and hunched up awkwardly, turned suddenly and looked at him with bleary eyes, saying,

“If you want to know, they don’t treat them well at all! Another woman, whose husband is with my son, told me last night that their legs are chained… like slaves, they treat them. Breaking stones all day, that’s not a life… They are dying of thirst, poor things, in all that sun… And they flog them too…”

The girl, who was in even greater pain now, had read a similar account in the evening paper just before getting into the taxi. An account by some French travellers who had visited Eastern Turkey a few months previously. They had even taken photographs, but when the guards spotted them they had, the article said, pulled out the film and smashed the camera.


The taxi stopped in front of the clinic. The girl got out carefully, supported by her young cousin, and walked to the entrance, as if in a state of total exhaustion.

The old lady got out too; her house was close by, she said. She sat down on the steps and waited. Across the blurred screen of her eye, there passed hundreds of lost sons who, for years now, could only be found in photographs glued to the hands of the other women. She did not move from there until the girl came back and said that her cousin was all right.

“And the child?”

“It’s all right too,” came the rather hesitant reply.


Christos Hadjipapas



From the collection of short stories “Eros en Kamino”