Papamichael’s antique store held a dreadful fascination for Hussein. He felt like an intruder there but he could not leave it alone. It had a wide arched shopfront on Ektoros Street, on the way to the Famagusta Gate. With the grating up, it opened directly onto the street: no windows or door, just shelves of junk receding into the cool darkness. Back there, somewhere in the shadows, old man Papamichael sat (at least that’s who Hussein assumed he was). A fuzzy radio on beside his ear, an ancient magazine at his hand, one eye ever on the store in front of him, like a giant in his cave, watching his treasure.
Not that he seemed to treasure any of it. The man certainly didn’t seem to mind Hussein picking his way down the aisles, turning over the odd things he found there with no intention of buying them, even if he had had the money to spare on them.
And it was hardly treasure.
Here was a shoebox full of old postcards, written and sent and read and forgotten decades ago. Fond wishes and curt dismissals, holiday destinations and comic animals, “I miss you dearly” and “please send money”. Lives slivered into leaves, shards of the past, a pack of glimpses, as from a moving train, of friendships and families long forgotten.
Here was a stack of melamine coffee cups, decorated with stylised flowers. A pile of coffee mornings, of polite pleasantries, gossip, trivialities, the tiny threads of conversation out of which neighbours are woven.
Here was a pile of tin signs, advertisements in Greek and English and Turkish. Languages at war with each other, in contention for attention. Drink this, buy that. A clatter of slogans against each other.
Through it all, Hussein hunted, but he could not quite tell for what. He wanted some answer to what this place was, to where he fit in it. He sifted through those shelves like a museum, trying to fit together the history from which all these discarded remnants had been left over. Trying to fit all these nothings back into a something.
He was a nothing, after all, meant nothing, had nothing. Not even the clothes on his back: the too big shoes, the brightly-coloured shirt with English letters across the front: G - A - P - these had been donated. He had no history of his own anymore and was hungry for it. His own history had stopped.
This is what drew him to Papamichael’s over and over again. There were plenty of antique shops in the Old Town, but a lot of the objects on these shelves were in extraordinarily good condition. Papamichael seemed to have a knack for finding goods still in their packages, as yet unfaded by the sun, unused and unbroken. An old newspaper, miraculously unyellowed, prophesying war, a military medal, polished and gleaming, a souvenir tea towel, still in its cellophane, featuring tourist destinations you could visit no longer.
Because of history.
Two streets north from here, an insignificant side road stopped suddenly in a wall of concrete filled barrels, topped with barbed wire and a blue and white striped sentry box. Beyond that: nothing. Silence. A street of empty, ruined houses. Flowers dropped from gaping windows, pigeons rustled among beams bare to the sky. The ghost of a street lined with the corpses of houses. The Dead City.
That is what one Greek had named it to Hussein: The Dead City. The buffer zone, the green line. There had been, as Hussein understood it, a civil war and the only way that had been found to stop it was to take away the front lines. To freeze the war in its place. Across the middle of the island ran a strip of stopped time, of abandoned houses, deserted fields and ghost towns. A neutral zone into which no one went, apart from peacekeepers. And cats.
The cats, Hussein noticed, made a sanctuary of the war zone, safe from cars and dogs and people. A city solely for them.
Hussein envied them. He felt like a non person like him belonged in the non place of the dead city. Perhaps there he would be released from time, from the impossibility of spending it, when you have no life to spend it on. Instead all he could do was sift through the detritus of other people’s time in Papamichael’s store, drift through other people’s lives in the streets, wander a city that belonged to other people, aimless, doing nothing, being nowhere.
Early one morning, unable to sleep, he found himself in the street behind Papamichael’s. There was a cafe there and they had left their chairs and tables out in the street over night. He could sit there, listening to the busy sparrows, at least until someone came to open the cafe.
He slowly became aware, under the quarrelsome chirping of the birds, of another sound, lower, a grumbling voice, muttering to itself. Just the other side of that fence, there. He stood up, careful not to make a sound, and edged closer. There was a gap in the wooden slats that made up the fence, and he peered through.
It was a tight little yard, piled high in the corners with bric-a-brac - old tin baths, child’s bicycles, road signs. The back of Papamichael’s, he realised. A door was open and in it sat the old man himself, wearing just a vest and pyjama trousers, smoking a cigarette. In his lap he had a plastic tray on which he was sorting through a bundle of trinkets, odd little bits and pieces.
But what transfixed Hussein was the parliament of cats that sat around him. They all sat neatly, tails wrapped around their forepaws, in a rough semi-circle, all staring at him with that quiet, uncomprehending insouciance that only cats can pull off.
As Hussein watched, another cat came over the top of the fence to his left, dragging along in its mouth a man’s hat, of all things. The cat pulled the hat after it into the semi-circle, up to the old man.
The old man spoke to the cat and it dropped the hat at his feet. He picked it up, turning it round in his hands, keeping up an approving commentary. It was an old fashioned sort of hat, Hussein though, a Homburg or a Trilby or something like that. The sort of thing he had only ever really seen in old black and white films.
Finally, having examined it, the old man flipped it up onto his own head at a jaunty angle. He thumbed an oily sardine out of a tin on his tray, and pitched it over to the cat that had brought the hat. Then he stood and took the tray back into the darkness of the store, leaving the cats staring at the empty doorway.
They stayed for a moment, as if waiting to see if the audience was truly over, and then, one by one, sauntered away. Hussein watched until the last one went.
Hussein was back the next morning, of course, but not at the cafe. He was sat, before dawn, shivering but still, in the shelter of a shuttered doorway, watching the barrier across the street, barring the way into the dead city.
And there it came. A scrawny little black cat, favouring one leg as it slipped through the barbed wire and jumped down from the barrels, in its mouth a length of ribbon from which hung a delicate little cameo.
Hussein watched it go, hugging the walls and slinking across the road towards Papamichael’s. Then he looked up at the buildings around the barricaded street, considering the drainpipes, window sills and roofs. Finally he got up, stretching his cramped legs, and went for a walk. Out through the remains of the city walls, up through the quiet streets of houses, into a cemetery of closely packed mausoleums, a suburb of the dead, where he dozed on a bench in the warmth of the sun, waiting for nightfall.
That night, crouched in the shadow of a crumbling wall, he sat on a roof, overlooking the barrier. There it came. The flicker of movement in the monochrome of the street lights, a cat, jumping up the emplacement, winding through the barbed wire and down into the ruined street beyond. And Hussein followed it.
There was a street party going on outside the town hall, and up on the roof Hussein had still been able to hear the distant thumping of the music. But down here in the dead city, he could hear nothing. The silence was oppressive. All around him were the signs of noise. Bits of rubble in the street, doors and shutters hanging off their hinges, holes blown in walls and windows stoppered up with sandbags.
Hussein recognised these signs. That wooden box let into the sandbags was for a machine gun. That collapsed roof and shattered windows were where a shell had dropped. That gaping doorway where a family had fled, saving their skins but leaving their lives behind.
All of these were noises, loud, terrifying, heart-rending noises and none of them audible. All of them hanging there, in the darkness, unheard. Stoppered up in time, waiting to be let loose.
Hussein knew what this silence was: it was the silence of something about to happen. He could feel it straining against the walls of the empty houses, massing in the shadows. It was the silence of something not making a sound. A silence that followed him on noiseless cat paws, matching his feet step for step, matching his lungs breath for breath, his heart beat for beat.
This was the silence of the phone not ringing, the letter unopened, the words not yet spoken. The silence of a bomb still falling, of a doom still undecided.
He stood in the dead street, every muscle tensed for the exclamation that was not coming. Something did not shift in the dark houses around him. Something did not change, something did not move. He started running.
His panicked footsteps did not echo. The sound was flat, dead. He ran down a street, turned a corner and then leapt through an empty doorway into a dark hall, through a still and bare room and out again through a windowless gap. Nothing, the house was stripped bare, the street a featureless ruin of itself. No sign of life, none of those lost objects the cats had carried back. Not a stick of furniture, not the outline of a missing picture, not a name on a street or a number on a door. Just this great and terrible silence, that did not want him here, even him, a no one who had nothing. He did not belong here, in the dead city.
He stood at a crossroads, alone in the noiseless moonlight. And a shadow moved. A portion of night slipped softly by him, two green stars stopped and looked back at him, winked and were gone.
The lame black cat.
And he followed it. And there came, from somewhere ahead, the sound of voices. Low and muffled. He could not tell the language, but they were human voices. There was life, somewhere in this dead city. There was sound.
And he went toward it.
The old man squinted at the photograph the cat had brought. Photographs were a pain. Harder to shift. Harder even than postcards. People liked things. Jewellery and crockery and clothes. Those they could make their own. But postcards and photographs and letters, those too obviously belonged to other people. Had too much history in them. Too personal.
Still, young people liked them, these days. Old photographs. They were a novelty to them with their phones. They put them up in their bars and cafes, he had seen them. Manufacturing a history they did not own. Though this one did not look old, of course.
And what was that?
Men standing around a market stall, some shop front. A century or so ago, judging from the clothes. Maybe more. A man in a three piece suit, another in a starched collar and apron. Proud of their business, the heaps of fruit around them, pleased to have it commemorated by this photographer. In the background a butcher stood under the skinned legs of lamb hanging over him, a man in a fez, holding a donkey’s rein. And there, at the back.
A man in a broad striped shirt, no tie, and across the front of it, three letters in English. G - A - P. The old man recognised him. The Syrian, the refugee who had haunted his shelves, cluttering up his store and never buying anything. What was he doing there? In the old photograph?
He must have followed the cats. Followed them wherever they went. Over the green line, that zone of frozen time, into the past they brought these treasures back from.
Well, this treasure was useless now. No one would believe it. No one would want it now, with this man in it, in his sweatpants and sneakers, standing in history with all of his modernity. He didn’t belong there.
He set the photo down and shook his head at the cat that had brought it. It did not get a sardine.