In the Sea in Her Dress

She climbed out of a window at sixteen to marry the man her parents had refused.

My grandmother, Antigone.

The car smells of cigarettes and four children.

It is Sunday morning again, which means all six of us will load ourselves into the car and my father will drive us to my grandmother’s house in Larnaca, on the southeastern coast of Cyprus. My three brothers and I are squashed together in the back seat, each of us fighting for territory. No one wants the middle. The middle belongs to the smallest one, which means it always belongs to me.

My father smokes as he drives. The window on his side is rolled down and the cigarette smoke is carried out of the insides of the car. In the winter, the windows stay shut and he smokes anyway. None of us thinks to complain. It is the late seventies, maybe the early eighties, and children breathe in whatever their fathers smoke.

The road from Nicosia to Larnaca is straight and flat and uninteresting, and it takes an hour to get there. Every Sunday we pass the same dry fields, the same unfinished buildings just sitting under the searing heat. My brothers fight over a comic book. My mother turns around every so often to tell them to stop. My father drives away with one hand on the wheel, a slight squint in his eyes, and a cigarette dangling between the fingers of the other hand, listening to the crackle of the radio. I’m at the front edge of the seat with my hands holding the sides of my parents’ seats and staring at the road ahead from the windshield. Eventually, the blue of the sea flashes between the bends, and all four of us begin chanting, “There’s the sea! There’s the sea!”

When we pull into the yard, the door is open before we are even out of the car. My grandmother is there, waiting with her arms open for our arrival. Her name is Antigone. She lives in a house in Larnaca that the state gave her after the war. The house belonged to a Turkish Cypriot family who was displaced in the other direction in 1974. Somewhere in the north, other families are living in the houses Greek Cypriots left behind. This happened without consent, without agreement. My grandmother carried what she could salvage from her life and made this house hers. She planted trees in the yard and she raised chickens.

The house is a very basic one. Across the yard stood a small structure, and that was the bathroom. Inside, the walls are plain. The kitchen is a small room with an old table and a few chairs and a stove that has seen many long winters. Religious icons hang on one wall; such is the usual decoration of every Cypriot grandmother’s house of that generation. There are a couple of framed photographs, her husband and her when they were young with their six children, when everyone was still alive. Her husband died before the war. One of her sons died too, both of them taken by heart attacks in their thirties and forties. By the time she lost her house in Famagusta, she had already lost two of the people that were meant to grow old, there, in that house, beside her. She points to the photographs sometimes when we ask questions, and she tells us stories about what her husband and son were like, in a gentle voice. The dead are in the room and they are loved and they are not weighing it down.

She also tells us about her elopement. She is sixteen, or seventeen, or perhaps eighteen; the age changes depending on the telling. Her parents have refused her the man she has chosen. He is from a different village, not the match her parents were imagining for her. She does not accept their refusal. She climbs out of a window to meet him. He is steadying a donkey. She mounts behind him, and they ride fifteen kilometres down the mountain. They don’t come back until they are married. By the time her parents see her again she is my grandfather’s wife, and he is the one she chose, and the choice cannot be undone. She tells this story sitting at the kitchen table, holding our hands or pinching our cheeks, smiling at our faces as we listen.

“You are my treasures,” she tells us, “You are beautiful and clever and the most beloved children in the world.”

I don’t have to do anything to earn my grandmother’s love. The love is not contingent on the cleanliness of my hair or the quietness of my voice or the tidiness of my room. The love is there, when I walk through the door, it is there while I’m eating, while I’m playing in the yard, it is there when I make a mess, and it is still there when I walk out the door. I am six, or seven, or eight, and I think every grandmother is like this. She is not like every grandmother.

In the summers my parents drive me down on a Sunday and pick me up the following Sunday. The mornings begin in the yard. She is already awake before I am. Sometimes I find her in the kitchen having her coffee; other times, she is in the chicken-shed at the back, collecting the eggs the hens have laid during the night. There are five or six chickens inside a wire-mesh coop roofed with corrugated metal. Their enclosure smells of straw and feathers. She lets me go in with her and shows me how to lift a hen gently to see if there is an egg under her. The eggs are warm when you find them, warm in a way eggs from a fridge never are. I carry them out, cupped in my hands, two at a time, as though they are small living creatures.

We have them for breakfast, fried in olive oil with bread. The yolks are a deep orange from whatever the chickens feed on in the yard. She pours me a glass of milk and watches me eat with the kind of attention that is the centre of her love. She is not watching to monitor me. Watching me is simply what she most wants to do, so she does it. After breakfast we go to the sea, which is a hundred metres from her front door. We walk down the narrow road, my hand in hers, until it opens onto the beach. The beach is a strip with large, grey pebbles, with no umbrella or kiosk.

My grandmother doesn’t know how to swim. She’s a Cypriot woman of her generation who spent the first decades of her life inland and the rest beside the Mediterranean, and nobody ever considered teaching her how to swim. She doesn’t let this stop her. She walks into the sea in her dress. A cotton black dress, falling below her knees, is what she always wears. She doesn’t have a swimming costume. The water creeps slowly up the dress until it reaches her thighs, and there she stops. She stands in the sea with the dress floating around her legs, the saltwater darkens the cotton, while she watches me swim further out and back again toward her. I splash her and she lets me. She laughs and doesn’t make a move to resist my playfulness.

When I’m ready to come out she walks out beside me. With our bare feet on the protruding pebbles, we put on our flip flops and go back to the road towards the house. We arrive and she hangs her dripping dress in the yard to dry and changes into another one before she makes lunch. This is a day spent with my grandmother, and there are many like it. They are all roughly the same. Nothing happens in any of them, and that sameness is the gift; there is only a grandmother and a child in a yard with chickens, and the sea down the road. Meals appear at regular hours, and the afternoons pass under the trees she planted to turn a house into a home.

She tells me stories about her childhood, her early married life in Varosha, the seafront town of Famagusta, full of people before 1974, hotels along the front, before everything was lost. She tells me about my grandfather and how he made her laugh, how he was young and alive. She tells me about the elopement, again. Then she tells me about the war in 1974, how she packed what she could in a few hours and left, never to return. I don’t remember her telling me that my grandfather fought in Greece during the Second World War. I do remember her telling me that she still has the key to the house in Varosha. No family was ever moved to her house. She tells me how the army put a fence around the town and let no one back, a whole town with no one living in it, the buildings still where their owners left them. These things aren’t told in a sorrowful tone. The losses exist in the narration of her life, but they are not the heart of it.

When I’m back home in Nicosia, in my mother’s spotless kitchen, with its angled cushions and sterile floors, I do not consciously compare the two women. I only know that the air feels different in my grandmother’s house, that she says things no one else says to me, and that when I sit at her table, nothing is being asked of me. My mother loves me. I have said this and I will say it again. My mother loves me in the register she has, with meticulous hair, unblemished rooms, driving me to lessons, never saying she is proud. The two women learned different steps to the same dance. What I understood then was that some Sundays we drove to Larnaca and the door opened and the woman who lived inside was excited to see me, and that she said so with words and with the way she watched me eat. That woman gave me something I could not name and could not get anywhere else. She gave it to me freely.

From the sea off Protaras, where I sometimes swim these days, I can see Varosha. Ten kilometres across the water the town is still standing, the tall hotels along the coast, and nothing moving. I swim out and look at it. Somewhere inside that silence is my grandmother’s house, behind the fence, and the door her key opened.

She is in the sea in her dress. I’m ten metres out, swimming back to her. Her dress is dark with the wet, and her silver hair is uncovered, left to dampen in the salty air. She is squinting at me against the sun. She is, in this moment, exactly herself. She’s the girl who climbed out through a window for love; the woman who buried a husband and a son; the refugee who walked out of Varosha carrying what she could; the old lady who planted trees and raised chickens and stands in the sea in her dress because the sea is there, and she cannot swim, but she will not be kept out of it. She’s also my grandmother. And now she is standing there, watching, waiting for me to swim back to her.