The Soccer War Page 18

  I ask these women what hurt them most. They say nothing and cover their faces in their black scarves.

  Later they tell me about their sorrow. They tell how suddenly the Turkish army came: it was as if foreign troops had sprung up out of the ground. Airplanes dropped bombs and napalm; tanks rolled along the roads; there were soldiers shooting in all directions. Panic broke out in the villages and people hid in the woods or the hills, wherever they could. Because the Turkish army came from the north, the Greeks began fleeing south. They left everything behind and thought only about saving their lives. Along the road they met Turkish Cypriots heading north. The two streams of people passed each other in silence, both driven by fear, uncertain of what would come next. Houses and vineyards burned all around and they became lost. Nobody knew where they should go, where their people were and how they could reach them.

  One of these women is named Maria Salatas. The soldiers killed her husband because he would not tell where he had hidden their two daughters. The soldiers violated any girls who fell into their hands. The local policeman—a Turkish Cypriot—had helped her daughters to hide in the fields. The woman calls these Turkish Cypriots jikimas, which means ‘ours’ in Greek. Later, Maria was held in a Turkish camp for three months. There was no water and nothing to eat. Turkish Cypriots sneaked food to the Greeks from the village. That village is called Kaputi and the daughters are alive; they are sitting here with us.

  Maria and the other women in the tent think that everything was good before the invasion. Of course, you could find hatred in the villages, but the Greeks and the Turks were used to it. They accepted it. It was a part of their lives; it was an internal, communal affair. An equilibrium of hatred existed in the villages and people knew when to back off to avoid a catastrophe. The Greeks of the village never set out to finish off the Turks and the Turks would never set out after the Greeks. Sometimes the boys would go after each other, and then somebody would be hurt, sometimes killed. But it is the same all over the world. Anyone who knows peasant life knows how starved for events a village is, even if it has to pay for them with its own blood. Is that any reason for the Turkish army to come in with tanks and send the Greeks into exile? They want the army to leave so that things can be as they were. Nobody picks the oranges, the grapes have rotted on the vines, the cattle have surely been butchered and the meat eaten.

  They ask me if I know anything about the missing.

  I know nothing.

  They ask everyone. Several thousand young Greeks disappeared during the invasion. Whether they are alive, where they are—nobody has an answer. There is no proof that they died, but there is no proof that they are alive. The Turks say they know nothing about them. So where are they? Cyprus is a small island; you could hide ten people here, but not several thousand. They cannot bring themselves to think that those boys are buried somewhere. After all, nobody has seen their graves. Someone said that they were taken out to sea and sunk, but the mind cannot accept such things.

  They then showed me their tents. They apologized for the poverty. If I had come earlier, they could have showed me their houses. They had everything in their houses: light and running water and furniture. There was always a garden, and they never ran out of fruit. They talked about these houses, about their villages, as if they were talking about a lost paradise. Their lives had been broken and they did not know to whom to turn. They asked the men, but the men said nothing, shrugging their shoulders. Men can go out into the world and live anywhere, but a woman cannot live without a home. Such a thing was unheard of.

  Evening, night and dawn in Nicosia. Nicosia: charming and sunny and bright. A splendid architecture; just looking at the buildings is a pleasure. Goods from all over the world fill the shops; the Cypriot industry is small, and everything has to be imported. Here and there, traces of the invasion: a wall full of bullet holes, an empty window frame, a burnt-out car. But the city’s losses are not great. People went to work during the days of the invasion, and shops stayed open.

  ‘During the whole war,’ a Polish woman tells me, thinking of the invasion of July and August 1974, ‘I saw people lined up only once. For a porno film.’

  All day, beginning in the morning, the Greeks sit in chairs in front of the little cafés. Until noon they sit facing the sun; at noon they pull the chairs into the shade; in the afternoon they move back into the sun. These are the men—no women. They sit in silence, without a word, not moving, often with their backs turned to each other, but some sort of unseen community exists among them, because when a Greek comes up to one of them from the street and starts to argue, they all begin to argue.

  At dusk the beautiful girls come out for their walk. The girls cannot walk alone; their mothers or grandmothers accompany them. They cannot look around, because that is in bad taste; it creates the impression that they are hunting for boys. The eyes of their mothers or grandmothers are proud, but also wary. From the café terraces, the girls are watched by United Nations soldiers: Swedes, Danes, Finns, big blond boys pink from the sun—good matches, but who can tell if their intentions are honourable? None of these blond boys gets up from the tables, though. They sit drinking their beer, bored, sloppy. Their fair, dull eyes follow the girls until they disappear around a bend in the street.

  In the evening the city empties out and falls dead. It gets chilly. Nobody on the streets, empty pavements, locked gates. Darkness and silence on the border between the Greek and Turkish sectors. One spotlight illuminates the rolls of barbed wire. A second illuminates the Turkish flag. A third—the Greek flag. Beneath the Turkish flag, a soldier. Beneath the Greek flag, a soldier. Silent, hunched up against the cold, machine-guns in their numb hands.

  In the morning, we are on the Turkish side. In Nicosia there is one crossing between the Greek and Turkish parts of the city, where the street is piled with sandbags and the nearby houses are empty, their windows broken. The Turkish district is poor, with many clay huts and less traffic. The Turkish argument is that the Greeks were unfair, that they were marginalized by them.

  A Greek is a skilful merchant; he is a quick, agile intelligence.

  A Turk: he needs time to think; he is closed, slow, patient like an Asian.

  The Greek will outsmart the Turk in commerce.

  The Turk will defeat the Greek on the front.

  From Nicosia we drive north into the land occupied by the Turkish army. A countryside of fairy-tale beauty, with a road that first climbs into the hills, then falls between hanging rocks into a forest and then, suddenly, around a turn, the sapphire sea. Below stands miracles of Mediterranean architecture: the old port of Cyrenia, the white houses, the red roofs, the orange groves. There are no half tones; all the colours are violent, colliding, glaring and shocking.

  The little streets of Cyrenia are empty and many of the houses destroyed with their doors hanging, blown in. A gendarme stands straight as a pillar on every street corner. White helmet, white gloves, blue leggings. He is directing traffic that does not exist. On the Port, it is quiet; the hotels are closed; splendid yachts are taking water. In a shop, you can buy a postcard that shows Cyprus as a part of Turkey.

  Everywhere on the road are troops and more troops. This is an enormous army on manoeuvres. Tanks in motion, self-propelled guns in firing position, fighters at tree-top level. Platoons on the march, companies at double time, battalions attacking. Here is a brigade digging in on open ground, and there is a division storming a rock face.

  This is a threatening army, in a state of constant readiness. There is nothing like it on the Greek side; it is hard to find a Greek soldier.

  Nicosia, night, ten minutes after midnight.

  A shot rings out on the Greek side.

  The silence lasts for a second.

  Then come three shots from the Turkish side.

  Next, from the Greeks: ten.

  And a hundred from the Turks.

  And five hundred from the Greeks.

  And a thousand from the Turks.

  And
a cannon from the Greeks.

  And a heavier cannon from the Turks.

  So 125’s from the Greeks.

  But 164’s from the Turks.

  Thus incendiaries from the Greeks.

  To which, from the Turks, fragmentation.

  One side opens fire with everything it has, and so does the other at the same time, as if on command, suddenly, who knows why, for no reason, senselessly, without logic a sleepy sentry might have dozed with his finger on the trigger or it might have been some lunatic, some provocateur, or somebody just felt like it, on a whim, and that was enough, that one shot at ten minutes past midnight, to plunge the whole of Nicosia into a hell made of cross-fire in the course of one minute, into an exploding elemental fury that falls on the drowsy city like a fiery apocalyptic rain.

  I jump out of bed in my room on the sixth floor of the Nicosia Palace Hotel and look out the window. Two waves of tracers are breaking against each other over the roofs of the city. The walls tremble and the windows sing. People are running up the stairs, dashing through the streets, ducking into doorways. Nobody knows what is going on or what it is about.

  It isn’t about anything.

  It is a matter of that one shot.

  Everybody is on his feet at UN headquarters. The alarm is sounding in the UN barracks. UN liaison officers get the Greeks and Turks to agree on a ceasefire as of 0:45. At 0:45 the fire-fight goes quiet. But the order has not reached all the outposts; some Turk is still firing, and so the Greeks resume fire, and then the Turks open up with everything they have, and there is such a noise that you can’t hear anything, and that hellish cacophony goes on into its second hour with people taking cover in cellars, lying on the floors, in shelters, under cars, and those who live closest to the front are scrambling towards the far ends of the city, while the UN gets the Greeks and the Turks to agree to a ceasefire as of 2:05, and again the fire-fight pauses, but this time some Greek has not received the order and keeps banging away with his machine-gun so that for a moment only his lonely series is trickling across the sky, but that’s enough for the Turks to go on, and so one more time they open up, tirelessly, letting the Greeks have it, and now the Greeks come back with the full force of their fire, with all the steel they can throw, and for the third time the UN arranges a ceasefire, for 2:45, and this time the order gets all the way down the line, the shooting stops, and silence envelops the city.

  The morning after that night, the Greeks are sitting motionless outside the little cafés, saying nothing, as if nothing had happened. At noon, they move into the shade. At dusk, the beautiful girls come out for their walk, accompanied by their mothers and grandmothers. The big blonds from the UN watch them, but they do not move and keep drinking their beer. In the evening the city empties and there is nobody on the streets. Two soldiers, a Greek and a Turk, stand at the border between the sectors. They stand in silence, hunched up against the cold, with machine-guns in their numb hands.

  THE OGADEN: AUTUMN ’76

  A scorpion bit me at night. I crawled into the tent in the close, stifling darkness and lay down on the cot. Neither flashlight nor matches. Anyway, the commandant is ordering us to cut down on light so that we don’t give away the position of our camp. They might be lying in a ring a step away and waiting, with their eyes to their gun-sights.

  Something moved suddenly on the sheet in the place where I had put my head. I thought it was a lizard. It could not be a cobra, because the movement was too light, too feeble. One more twitching of something close to me, a rustling, and silence again, dead. It went on like that, quiet, soundless, invisible, but I could feel that it was going on very near, even coming nearer. Suddenly there was an explosion in my forehead, deafening, as if someone had smashed my head with a hammer. Excruciating. I leapt up and started to scream: Scorpion! Scorpion!

  Marcos ran in a moment later, and then the soldiers. One of them turned on a flashlight. A flat, grey, venomous repulsiveness lay on the sheet. The soldiers cautiously gathered up the sheet, put it on the ground, and began to stamp on the scorpion. Others looked on, as if they were observing a ritual dance for the expulsion of an evil spirit.

  My face began to puff up instantly. The soldier shone his flashlight at me and now they all looked gravely at my violently swelling head which was growing like dough in a mixing bowl, the eyes getting smaller and smaller until they must have vanished, sunk, because I stopped seeing. They looked at me standing before them: a hundred mouths, monstrous, wailing in pain, not belonging to myself, isolated from me.

  But what could be done? Scorpions sting people like mosquitoes. Those who took a heavy dose of venom died. From here to the nearest hospital was two days on the road. Lie down, said Marcos. They left me alone in the tent. I sat on the cot afraid to move, so that I would not agitate the scorpions, not give them any sign of myself. They crawled along the ground in the darkness. up the flaps of the tent, dragging their barbed abdomens behind. From that night on, through my whole stay in Ogaden, I could not free myself of them. They spawned in the sands, emerged from under rocks, lurked on the trails. I wanted to get out of there, but we were imprisoned in the desert and had to wait for a chance to escape.

  Marcos and I flew to Gode in a light airplane. Disembarking from the airplane was like riding a coal-shovel towards a stove. We escaped straight under the wings, into the shade. The police came and began the body search, the poking, the pawing, looking for guns, checking passes. I did not have a pass. My predicament was ambiguous. I had flown from Addis Ababa at the last moment, without any certainty that I would reach Ogaden—a province closed to foreigners. Go ahead, said Y from the Ministry of Information, I’ll send word by radio to let you in. I met the boy named Marcos in the airplane. He was carrying pesticides to be used against some insect that nibbled corn. I thought that if I stuck close to Marcos, he would pull me through all the checkpoints. To buy my way into his favour, I helped him carry the box full of pesticide. In general, I behaved as if I had been assigned to him officially. I tagged along somewhat impudently, but I had no Ethiopian documents and I knew no one in Ogaden. How was I going to get around without a car in that hell where walking a hundred metres is a major effort, and where was I going to sleep, since there are no hotels there? But what I feared most were the suspicions of the police and the soldiers. A white man in this front line zone at the end of the world—what’s he doing here?

  Show your papers.

  I have no papers.

  Well, then, let’s go to the barracks for the interrogation.

  The airplane took off, leaving us alone in the sun with the pesticide. We covered our heads with newspapers so that we could stand the molten heat, so that we wouldn’t fall over, it was so hot. The Ogaden desert burned all around and now, high noon, there was no sign of life. We were looking at the most uncomplicated of images, reduced to two planes: at the bottom—a band of earth; higher, into infinity—the expanse of the sky. In the middle, two drops of sweat—Marcos and I.

  We waited a long time until a Land-Rover drove up and a tiny bearded man got out. That’s Getahun, the commandant, Marcos told me. We loaded the box as if we were in a slow-motion film, every movement an ordeal, and we drove off in an unknown direction, like a boat wandering over the sea. They spoke in Amharic and I understood not a word. We moved slowly through billows of dust, our vehicle pitching from side to side.

  ‘So who are you?’ asked Getahun.

  I told him.

  ‘Do you have a paper?’

  ‘No, but they’re sending word by radio.’

  He fell silent, and later he went on talking with Marcos. We were in the drought zone. In the place where the Ethiopian government was organizing camps for the starving and the thirsty, for those who had managed to save themselves from death. A few people, like Getahun and Marcos, were fighting their own war here for the lives of the dying nomads.

  Every morning Getahun went to the camp to urge the people to go out into the desert. We’ll dig a canal, he would say, the wa
ter will flow, the corn will grow. They did not know what a canal looks like or how corn grows. A murmur would go around the crowd and Getahun would turn to the interpreter to ask what they wanted.

  They do not want corn. Their diet is meat and milk. They want camels.

  But don’t you see, Getahun would say, your camels died off.

  Yes, that is true, it all happened by the will of Allah.

  The crowd then melted away, disappearing somewhere into their shelters, into the bushes, collapsing into the shade. Getahun did not give up. So he began from the beginning, every day. There was inexhaustible patience on both sides—his explaining and their listening. Weeks passed and nothing happened. They received a daily ration of a half-kilogram of corn. They ate part of it, because they had nothing else, and they set some of it aside without telling anyone and sold it on the black market: they were saving up for camels. Whoever managed to save up the price of a camel, or even a few goats, would disappear into the desert. Often this meant certain doom, death from thirst, never seeing anyone again, but nature was stronger than the instinct of self-preservation. For them, life meant movement, conquering space, and when they stayed in one place they withered up and died.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia extended his control over regions to the east and south of the territory that traditionally made up the land of Ethiopia. One of his conquests in this campaign was the province of Ogaden, which the Ethiopians today call the province of Harer and which the Somalis call Western Somalia. Since the inhabitants of Ogaden are Somali nomads, Somalia demands the return of the province.

  The border between Ethiopia and Somalia exists only on the map; in fact it can be crossed at will, as long as one does not come into contact with an outpost of one of the armies, and these outposts, few in number, lie at intervals of dozens of kilometres. Neither of these countries has the means or sufficient military forces to guard its border rigorously. It is possible to drive one or two hundred kilometres into the depths of Ethiopia without being detected. The same is true on the Somali side. Fixed points are scarce in this terrain: a few small, impoverished settlements, clay shelters lacking light and plumbing. Whoever holds a settlement controls the entire surrounding territory.