my war narrative

I was about 5 years old then. Why, yes exactly 5. The year was 1974. A summer evening. We were either having dinner or, my mother and sisters were busy setting the table, or to be exact, the sini, a large round copper tray which is laid on the ground, and around which the members of the family would sit down on their knees. We didn’t have electricity then, and the only means of illumination was oil-run lanterns or lüks, a lantern with a pressure pump that you could see in households of rich people, but which we had since my father needed one in the adjacent coffee-house he had been running. Kocausta the muhktar, the village headman, came up that night and inspected the sky with anxious eyes as if he was waiting something ominous, something terrible to appear and destroy the whole village he was in charge of. To me, then, he seemed a general in command of huge troops, in his uniform and all. I remember him talking to my father and murmuring a word of two, trying his best lest others should hear a word.

There was a black out. The whole village was in utter darkness except for a few faint lights coming up from some houses.

ın the dark you hear the frogs croaking in the brook that ran through the village. a cow mooing here and there. A goat doing his best to be heard so that he could be served a bucket of water. You could even listen to the humming sound of cars on the main road by the sea.

There was a war.

There was a war in Cypruce. How could I know what war meant being only five? The words war, Cypruce, Mehmetçik, Lefkoşe, bombardment did not convey so much meaning. I heard them on the radio. I remember people sitting under the shade of acacia trees with black moustaches, sweating in August heat in my father’s coffee-house using such words. Smoking their cigarettes, with crossed legs on the wooden chairs, they would have a laugh then. There was a war but it was far away. Some hundred kilometers away. Out at sea.