"It was good of you to come."
"I was surprised that your father wanted me here." I was sitting in the courtyard of a restored traditional Turkish home on Efeler Street, three blocks up the hill from the old walled harbor of Kyrenia, in Turkish-held Cyprus. Zeki Ceren, the son of Serhan, was looking a bit uncomfortable but also quite handsome. There was quite a bit in him of his father. I think he would have been more comfortable in this setting in a Turkish robe than in the white, almost diaphanous, cotton shirt, riding jodhpurs, and high-top black leather boots. He'd said he' been out riding before I had appeared at his doorstep. The shirt was billowy, showing his deep-tanned skin underneath, including ring piercings in his nipples, which gave me a pause in thought. The riding pants were tighter than I would think was comfortable, but they certainly left little to the imagination.
I wondered if he knew of the actual relationship between his father and me. Would we be sitting here in this lush courtyard beside a burbling fountain and drinking tea if he did? He crossed his legs slowly enough for me to think he wanted me to see the rearrangement of thigh and calve muscles—and bulge at the crotch. He couldn't know about my relationship with his father, and not be interested himself, to be teasing me like this.
"My father spoke of you often, affectionately. He hoped that you would visit him here. And now you're here."
"Yes, now I'm here, although I wish it would be under happier circumstances. The ceremony will be when, exactly?"
"Two days hence, 4:00 p.m., at Saint Andrews at the foot of this street. He'll be buried in the courtyard there. I assume you realize that he followed the British ways—those of his mother—rather than his Turkish father, or he would have had to be buried within a day of his death."
"And you wish me to have a part in the ceremony?"
"Father wished it. And it's all arranged. Saint Andrews is a small, informal church despite its very-English trappings." He gave me a flutter of his dark eyelashes over the top of his tea cup. I wondered once again what he knew and if this was a signal that he liked this situation—me being here. His father had been a professor of Middle Eastern affairs at Georgetown for two terms when I was there. We'd had an affair. I never forgot him after he returned here to northern Cyprus. It had never occurred to me that he wouldn't have forgotten about me either.
At the door, Zeki put a hand on my arm and gave me a sad smile—one nonetheless that reflected a face that, like his father's, was achingly handsome in a dark, sultry way. "I do very much appreciate you're coming. I know my father was extremely fond of you. I'm glad to have met you at last. I'm sorry I received you on an occasion such as this, seemingly frivolously in riding clothes—I was quite fond of my father and I am devastated by his death. Please plan to come back to this house after the burial. My father wanted to pass on something to you."
I could hardly criticize him for not dressing more somberly when we met. He looked downright arousing in the riding clothes. I, on the other hand, was dressed like the American tourist I was. When he'd called to ask me to come see him, I'd already driven my motorbike up to Bellapais to visit the ruins of the abbey there and to sit and luxuriate at the tavern on the city square next to the abbey entrance, the Tree of Idleness. I was in a T-shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals.
When I left the Efeler Street house it was late in the evening. Darkness came late to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus at this time of year, and it was just falling. I could have gotten on the motor scooter I was renting and driven up the road toward the mountain artists' village of Bellapais, hanging on the side of the Kyrenia Mountain range, where I was checked into the Olive Tree Villas complex, but the ancient Kyrenia harbor lured me down to the water. I could hear the music from here. I parked the motor scooter, which gave me an ominous belch when I turned it off, next to the Harbor Club. The establishment was a British-style pub sitting at the bottom of a steep cobble-stoned street and in the shadow of the hulking Kyrenia harbor castle that held down the eastern end of the harbor.
The small harbor itself was an oval, with a ring of docks and waterside open-air restaurants on the southern and western curve, the castle to the east, and a long breakwater across the northern side. A stone jetty pierced the center of the harbor, showing the original harbor had been even smaller than this one. An ancient lighthouse—really just a stone pillar supporting a basin to light a fire—rose from the end of the jetty.
Even at this time of the evening, dinner was only now starting to be served, but the harbor-side tables already were occupied with boisterous Turks and tourists. The area was strewn with multicolored fairy lights along the harbor wall, which illuminated various sizes of sailboats, skiffs, and yachts bobbing up and down just beyond where the edges of the tables ended. Stone building, once merchant businesses and houses rimmed the harbor, parting only a few places to give steep-slope access to the streets above. Originally, the storage and merchant floor were at ground level, facing the harbor, and the merchant's residences were in the stories above, facing back onto a higher street curving around the harbor. The attached row of houses formed the upper town's first protective wall. Now restaurants and gift shops operated out of these original ground-floor storage rooms. The tables were jammed together on the dock during warm weather, which, in Cyprus, was most of the seasons of the year, and were taken back indoors for the winter months of service.
There didn't seem to be any tables appropriate for a single diner. I circled around the harbor and then back again toward the castle without finding someplace appropriate for me to wedge myself in. On the walk back, though, a strong hand reached out, took my wrist, and arrested my progress.
"Have you lost your party, or are you looking for tablemates?"
The voice was deep, heavily accented. I looked around and sucked air in. He was a magnificent brute. Not Turkish; no definitely not Turkish. From somewhere in Scandinavia, and the same with the other men, all tall, muscular, and of military-bearing. They weren't from the officer ranks; they were much rougher and unpolished looking than that—not much more than a step above the thuggish. Serious grunt soldiers.
"I thought to have dinner in the harbor, but there doesn't seem to be any room," I answered.
"Then you aren't looking for someone you're dining with?"
"No, I'm all alone."
"I can hardly believe a handsome man can be here alone. There's room right here, if you don't mind a bit of a rough and randy crowd."
I certainly didn't mind this crowd. They were all smiles, welcoming, and giving me the eye.
"Names Magnus," the blond hunk said. "We're Norwegian, from the UN contingent patrolling the Green Line." Cyprus was divided between the Greeks in the south and the Turks in the north, and although they were starting to get along better than they did when the Turks invaded the island and occupied the north in the mid seventies, a UN force dividing them was still needed. So these were soldiers. They certainly were blond gods—heavenly fit.
"Ross Tagert here," I answered. "From Philadelphia, in the United States."
"Ah, the city of brotherly love. How great is that?" Magnus answered.
Magnus introduced me to the two nearest to where I sat, Filip and Oscar. Both were all grins. Magnus was all touchy feely as well. I made no effort to fend him off. Seeing the spitting image of my old lover Serhan Ceren in his son, Zeki, just a few years younger than I was, had brought up my juices of arousal. I actually wasn't here in Cyprus just to have a part in Serhan's funeral. I also was escaping myself in the States, where I increasingly was finding it difficult to keep the expression of my preferences separate from my professional life. There were times when I almost felt like exploding. I'd come to the Mediterranean for what I planned to be an extensive vacation to free myself for the bonds of responsibility, if only for a short time.
