Dispatches from Nicosia: Birds, Cats, and the Cyprus Talks

1.
Running the river path of Nicosia some mornings ago, I stumbled across two kittens. One small, orange, scrawny; the other gray and white. Both had a single weeping eye, yet the gray kitten seemed sadder. I watched long enough, the pair struggling forth on the bare sunbaked road before the path gives way to dry dirt hills covered with cracked irrigation tubing. Long ago I learned there is no way to visit a place or be visited by a person and stay unchanged.

Only two weeks earlier on a boarded-up Sunday street, my children and I similarly came across a barely breathing bird fallen on the ground, veins and legs red, a fledgling baking on a 106-degree afternoon when nothing stirred in Nicosia, one of the world’s last divided capitals. You walk from the end of Europe into a Turkish-controlled zone just by flashing your passport. Nicosia is torn into three as if the children of divorce in which the exes just cannot get along: the southern predominantly Greek Cypriot side; the U.N. buffer zone marking the Green Line between two halves; and then the northern part southerners call the Turkish-occupied zone while Turkish-speaking northerners call it Turkish Cyprus.

I am here to research, among other questions, the poet . The entire enterprise bears an imprint of ridiculousness the poet himself might have appreciated: rumors abound regarding whether Cavafy, that dignified dandy of a poet who wrote such strange confessions about same-sex eros with such a clear eye on posterity, ever visited the island. He had a niece; he came. Others say, strongly, no, he is confused with , who wrote about the nightingales of Platres, but Cavafy in Cyprus? No! And yet he has odd references in his poems which at least show a comfort with the island’s profound geography. A Kyrenian painter, he says in one place, or speaks of sailing seas of Cyprus and Syria. Cavafy writes less of birds and Cyprus, more of desire. While, during our bird debacle,