He was laid to rest in the crowded little graveyard adjacent to the small Anglican church on the fringes of the Kyrenia Harbor in Cyprus. My mother had shown no interest in interring him in the States—or even in attending the burial ceremonial in Cyprus. But I thought that, in any event, this was a fitting place for him to be buried. This was where he belonged. He had taken his stand here and lived the last decade of his life here. I just wished I had been part of that last decade. Of course, that was as much my fault as it was his.
There was nothing simple about being the son of the novelist Malcolm Stephenson, who simultaneously was the most reclusive of men and the most revealed of men. Ten years ago I was living here too. And then my father made his decision of the life he wished to live openly, and my mother and her children were suddenly on a plane to New York, never to return again.
The world had been forgiving of my father—or, more likely, had embraced his notoriety—and his novels had skyrocketed in popularity thereafter. I never quite understood why, because this was when he entered his melancholy period, a period in which he was incapable of ending a novel with any sense of satisfaction or resolution—at least as far as I could see. It's as if my father was more popular for not being able to gain happiness and stability in life—and, of course, for his lifestyle.
There were only four other people at the funeral service other than me. The rector of the church was wearing a confused look, not quite able to know what to say about my father's life. My father was a renowned novelist, with an international following, so I guess the clergyman felt duty bound to say something significant—but given the life my father had chosen to lead, I'm sure he felt uncomfortable in whatever he said. I was just grateful that my father was well known enough not to be denied burial here. Then there was the landlady, the woman who had responsibility for renting out the hillside villa up in Bellapais that my family had occupied for five years and that my father now had lived in for an additional ten. It was the villa that my father claimed was his inspiration and that he refused ever to leave. And he didn't leave it until the day after he died.
And there was me, of course, attending out of duty and out of curiosity, and, yes, in a last-ditch effort to try to understand my father—to try to grasp why he had thrown it all over for the life of a hermit and writer of dissolution and sadness.
I could understand his lifestyle choice—the radical change he had made—because I had chosen that myself. What I couldn't understand was why it was so hollow. He declared the change, and he cut himself off from his wife and children, but then he seemed not to have done anything about it. He had moved on to an empty life of casual sexual encounters, and, if his reviewers were to be believed, he didn't get the solace out of his subsequent books that the popularity of them should have brought him.
The third person attending the internment wasn't really there at all. A not-young, but equally not old, handsome and trim Turkish gentleman, who looked vaguely familiar to me and who was elegantly dressed and of a sad demeanor was hovering on the fringes of the graveyard. He quite evidently was here for this funeral—but he kept back to the walkway beside the small chapel and seemed torn between coming forward and leaving. He obviously wasn't comfortable with attending an Anglican ceremony. And he looked far too sophisticated in bearing to be any part of the local Turkish Cypriot scene at all.
The fourth person present brought an irony to the proceedings that my father would have loved and surely would have used to good effect in one of his novels. An impatient and bored Turkish Cypriot workman, the man who would fill in the grave as soon as the rector's rambling and disjointed homily ended, was standing next to me, in the spot my mother would have occupied if she'd ever forgiven my father enough to appear in Cyprus again, and was muttering to himself in guttural Turkish—no doubt trying to jolly the rector into getting on with it so he could fill in the grave and be home in time for his supper.
When the clergyman had at last worn down in midsentence and on a rising tone that made it seem that nothing had been resolved—yet another image that my father, I think, would have found appropriate and amusing—I turned to depart and saw, somewhat to my surprise—but not for any reason I could assign to it—that the Turkish gentleman who had been holding back was gone altogether.
At the gate, after the rector had given me more-or-less empty words of solace that made him more comforted than they made me, I stopped and talked briefly with the ancient landlady of my father's villa, Layla Ergun, who lived down in Kyrenia. She told me that my father had seen his impending death and had not railed against it—which was more comforting to me than anything the rector had said—and that his rent was paid up until the end of the month. And she said that, of course, I was welcome to stay in his villa until then and to put his things, such as they were, in order and to take away anything of his that I wanted.
I hadn't thought until then that I'd want anything that was his, but as she spoke to me, I realized that I did, indeed, want to connect with my father again, if only in death. That otherwise I would not have come. I realized that I could not separate from the hurt and pain he had inflicted on the family ten years ago, just as my mother and sisters couldn't, but that I could not put him out of my mind as they so conveniently had done. Perhaps it was because I had made a similar decision to his—or perhaps it was because I felt in that final period of his writing—the period that brought him fame after so many years of writing in obscurity—he was searching for me just as I was searching for him. That, knowing the direction I had taken, he was trying to reach out to me and prevent me from making some mistake he had made. All of his final books were based on a mistake, a missed connection—and they all included a father and an unreconciled son. And always there was the father's regret—which gave me hope. I needed, if I could, to find out what my father might have been trying to say to me. And I felt that the answer to that must be up there in that villa on the mountainside above the village of Bellapais.
Even when we'd lived in the villa, I had felt that it was a living, breathing organism and that it gave life to the muse of anyone living there. That was a logical conclusion. It had been the villa where the English novelist Lawrence Durrell had penned the classic
Alexandria Quartet
series, and later the portraitist Valery Cramner and novelist Mark Amalfi, famously doomed lovers, had lived there as well. It was why my father had brought us to Cyprus and had let the villa. And, in some way, he was right about the villa's influence on the creative spirit, because my father's writing had not come into international acclaim before the books he wrote while in residence here.
It was dusk before I ascended the narrow country road up into the Kyrenia Mountains hovering about the ancient Cypriot harbor town of the same name. Fairy lights in the trees surrounding the outdoor café in the Bellapais square had already twinkled on and the men of the village were gathering for their evening of sitting and watching when I reached the lower square in my father's battered Triumph convertible and made the hairpin curve up to the upper village where my father's villa teetered on the edge of a precipice overlooking Kyrenia and the Mediterranean.
The heads of the men lingering in the café and drinking coffee and beer and discussing the same topics they had done for twelve centuries all came up in surprise as I passed in the car. And I could understand this. For the briefest of moments I could understand that they had visions of my father—dead for a week—returning to the villa. The villa had somewhat of a "haunted" reputation I knew from having lived in it previously, and, with its connection with international authors and artists—not to mention a long train of residents who had lived a somewhat notorious and dissolute lifestyle—the villa and its occupants over the past century no doubt constituted the most excitement this traditional Mediterranean mountain village had known since Richard the Lionhearted sliced through it with his sword.
When I reached the villa, I turned on lights, all of which suffered from an inadequate wattage that, rather than irritating, gave a soft glow to the interior and flickered in a manner that gave the impression that the walls were breathing. After placing my bags in the master bedroom and taking a quick familiarization tour around and finding that it had changed little since I was last here as a teenager, I settled myself at my father's desk in the main room, which served as living room, study, and formal dining room.
