Новелла Павлоса Памборидиса раскрывает скрытую историю разделения Кипра через призму памяти и женской судьбы

There is a river beneath Nicosia that almost nobody can see. Once part of the city’s natural landscape, its course was diverted centuries ago. Its dried bed eventually became Ermou Street, a thriving commercial thoroughfare, before history transformed it again: barbed wire appeared amid intercommunal violence and the street became part of the Green Line – the scar that continues to divide Cyprus. It is an effective image with which Cypriot author Pavlos Pamborides opens And a Wake-up: something buried but still present, a history rendered invisible without ever really disappearing. That idea runs beneath the entire novella. Originally published in Greek as Τζιαι πόψε in 2020, and now translated into English by Despina Pirketti, And a Wake-up centres on Nicholas, an 18-year-old National Guard conscript stationed on Nicosia’s Green Line in the early 1990s. He belongs to a generation born into division rather than one that remembers its creation. The young soldiers stationed along the buffer zone have no experience of a Cyprus before the divide. They inherit the abandoned buildings, military posts, flags, slogans and unresolved histories of those who came before them. From this confined setting, Pamborides constructs something considerably larger: a story about what happens when history is inherited not as something safely contained in the past, but as an unfinished demand placed upon the present. A border outside – and another within At first, Nicholas’s military existence is strikingly ordinary. There are tedious shifts, cigarettes, food, backgammon, crude jokes, petty military rules and the forced intimacy of young men spending their days together with rifles in their hands. Pamborides is very good at capturing the absurd contradiction of the Green Line. It is one of the most politically charged landscapes in Cyprus, yet for the teenagers guarding it, it is also boredom, routine and a countdown until the end of a shift. That mundanity is important because And a Wake-up does not begin by announcing itself as a grand novel about the Cyprus problem. Instead, history creeps in and Nicholas begins hearing a voice – the “Other”. Initially its presence can be read as a symptom of psychological fragmentation. Nicholas himself wonders whether he is mentally ill and contemplates psychiatric treatment. But the Other knows stories. As those stories accumulate, the reader is placed in much the same uncomfortable position as Nicholas. We cannot be certain whether we are witnessing mental illness, a haunting, inherited memory, buried knowledge emerging from the subconscious, or some combination of all of them. Pamborides does not rescue us from that uncertainty and instead lets the novella become far more interesting than a straightforward historical narrative. Nicholas is guarding a border while simultaneously losing confidence in the borders separating memory from imagination, history from mythology, the living from the dead and himself from the voices of previous generations. The divided island gradually acquires its human counterpart in a divided consciousness. History as inheritance The stories Nicholas hears begin unsettling what he understands about Cyprus and, crucially, about his own family. Pamborides enters difficult territory here, while the ‘heroic’ vocabulary surrounding nationalism, resistance and sacrifice rubs against stories that are considerably less comfortable and shaded by fear, opportunism, violence, shame, desire and wrongdoing. And a Wake-up is not a simplistic exercise in tearing down heroes or lifting antiheroes. The author consciously makes truth itself unstable. The Other may be revealing what has been suppressed, but he is also bitter and potentially unreliable. Nicholas does not know how much to believe. Neither, entirely, do we. The effect is to make the reader suspicious of certainty itself and he raises the uncomfortable question of what happens when a society remembers some parts of its trauma with extraordinary intensity while other memories become almost impossible to accommodate? The novel is interested in both remembrance and forgetting but perhaps most of all in the territory between them, where stories have been repeated so many times that it becomes difficult to separate memory, identity and mythology. This becomes particularly potent because Nicholas’s crisis is also generational, given did not fight the anti-colonial struggle, neither did he create the divisions he is guarding. He did not live through the events that continue to determine the island’s political and emotional landscape. Yet he is expected to carry them. What young men inherit Nicholas and his fellow conscripts are barely adults, but they have already been inserted into a lineage of soldiers, fathers, fighters, martyrs and national duty. They inherit a vocabulary in which courage and masculinity are closely intertwined. Fear and weakness is something they are taught to overcome or conceal, at the same time duty is something owed not only to the military or nation but to the men who came before. Nicholas therefore doesn’t only inherit the ‘Cyprus issue’, but also the expectations about what a Cypriot man is supposed to do with it. Pamborides repeatedly punctures those expectations through the bodies of his characters. Men sweat, panic, lust, boast, become frightened and behave ridiculously. The distance between the heroic male of national mythology and the vulnerable human being inside the uniform becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. As the military review draft already identifies, the soldiers are “barely adults” carrying conflicts created before their birth. There is humour in this, sometimes very dark humour as an escape from the harshness of reality. Without it, the novella could easily buckle under the weight of nationalism, partition, religion, mental disturbance and historical violence. Pamborides repeatedly drags the ‘monumental’ back into the everyday, showing the reader that history may be enormous, but somebody still has to finish a night shift. Whose suffering becomes history? Women occupy much less narrative space than the men in And a Wake-up, but that imbalance itself becomes revealing. The character of Dina is particularly important. It would spoil too much to detail what happens around her. What matters is the way her story gradually exposes another dimension of conflict and the vulnerability of women in worlds organised around male violence, reputation and political struggle. Dina is talked about, judged, desired and interpreted by men while stories accumulate around her sexuality and her past. Her presence raises one of the book’s and history’s most disturbing questions. Who gets to control the story of a woman once her body has become entangled with conflict? Pamborides doesn’t keep the violence of history confined to battlefields, he exposes it as it enters homes, relationships and bodies. And while male sacrifice can be transformed into public heroism, women’s suffering can be absorbed into rumour, shame or silence. That asymmetry gives the novella another layer without turning it into a didactic argument about gender. Faith, religion and meaning Religion provides another possible framework through which to understand what is happening to Nicholas. At Stavrovouni Monastery, the stillness and ritual of monastic life offer a dramatic contrast to the militarised world of the Green Line. Questions of death, judgement, God and the fleeting nature of human existence enter the story. For a moment, faith seems capable of placing Nicholas’s turmoil within a larger order but the Other resists that explanation too. It is characteristic of Pamborides that every time Nicholas appears to approach a system capable of explaining his experience, the ground shifts beneath him. Nation, family, the army, religion and medicine all offer a vocabulary for understanding the world, but none can contain it completely without conflicting with the other. The result is not nihilism so much as profound uncertainty. The hero is being asked to choose what is true while increasingly doubting the mechanisms by which truth is established. Aphrodite’s island is almost a character itself with eras, interests, ethnicities and narratives sitting on top of one another. The accumulation can occasionally become dense, particularly for a reader unfamiliar with Cypriot history. I could say this happened to me, too, even though I’m deeply familiar with it. At moments, the historical material threatens to crowd Nicholas out of his own story. It dawned on me that, perhaps, Nicholas himself is being crowded by history and maybe, Pamborides is intentional. Maybe, the reader is supposed to experiences omething of the same suffocation. The feeling of being born into a place where the past is not over, where every street, family and political symbol seems capable of opening onto another story. Which brings us back to Pamborides’s buried river. Late in the novella, that vanished waterway takes on an almost dreamlike significance, imagined as returning through the ruined landscape and washing over what has accumulated there. Some kind of deus-ex-machina or spiritual purification. And simultaneously, we all know that some things cannot simply be washed away. It would have been easy to make Nicholas a vehicle through which the author reveals the “real” history beneath official history. Instead, the reader is continually deprived of firm ground. The Other tells stories, but can we trust him? Nicholas doubts his own mind, but does that make what he experiences untrue? Holding multiple truths at once Family love can coexist with ideological burden. Patriotism can coexist with wrongdoing. Victims can be imperfect. People remembered as heroes remain human beings. Its irreverent, often coarse humour also prevents history from becoming sacred and untouchable. Soldiers swear, eat, fantasise and desperately want their shifts to end and through each passage military authority becomes somewhat ridiculous. Despina Pirketti’s English translation preserves much of that immediacy creating resonance for diaspora readers. A Cypriot Australian may know the island differently from Nicholas, but the central experience Pamborides explores around receiving a homeland through stories told by older generations is recognisable. Diaspora memory is itself often inherited through fragments from grandparents’ stories, family silences, commemorations, photographs, political convictions. Pamborides wonders throughout the book what the meaning of remembering serves. A community can meticulously remember what was done to it while struggling to confront uncomfortable acts committed within its own history. And memory that is transmitted without examination can become another inheritance, similar to trauma carried through families, institutions, political language and ideas of identity by people who were not alive when the original wounds were inflicted. Waking up Pamborides was born in Nicosia in 1975, into precisely that first generation after the island’s defining rupture. Through Nicholas’ mind he asks: ‘How do you live inside the consequences of something you cannot personally remember?’ The English title, And a Wake-up, comes from the language of military countdown – the way a conscript counts the remaining nights before release. Within the book, it begins as an ordinary expression of impatience as well as a crack in the Matrix, a slit through which awakening can be achieved. And awakening is not necessarily comforting. That may ultimately be the effect of Pamborides’ novella. It does not tell readers what they should think about Cyprus, nor does it offer reconciliation as a neat conclusion. It asks whether remembering a nation’s wounds is enough if we are unwilling to examine the stories built around them. What have we inherited as memory and what have we inherited simply because nobody ever dared to question it?