Visiting the Lady that lives in a cocoon

Elsie Slonim, born 1917 in Brooklyn, author of the book “Lemons from Paradise”

By Heidi Trautmann

Opposite the former Pronto Pizza, in the middle of Nicosia, we were waiting, my husband and I, for someone to take us across into the military zone. Elsie had said so. Elsie Slonim, the writer of the recently launched book “Lemons from Paradise”.

We handed in our passports which were kept at the gate for the length of our visit and followed the red car. Elsie’s car.

Some hundred meters away from the checkpoint we passed the old British Country Club that was opened in 1967 with tennis courts and golf course, still in use as a club today but surely not for the normal public, as Elsie told me. And right there more or less opposite the club house is Elsie’s house, the only one inhabited by a private person within the military zone. The house was built in 1967 the same year as the club house. The neighbour house where the director of Shell used to live, is deserted, as so many others.

The Slonim house is a big and comfortable house with a nice garden kept in order by Mr. Mümün, the factotum of the house who also drives 95 years old Elsie Slonim around to do her errands in the outside world. And there is Ms Nadzieh a Turkish Cypriot woman who is with Elsie since 1974 when she lost her job in one of the neighbour houses during the weeks of war trouble. She crosses into the military zone every day together with Mr. Mümün.

Time has come to a standstill here, you can feel it, even smell it; there is no smell of people living, working, no traffic, no changes since the day the sky above her head darkened with Turkish paratroopers….

“…the Camerons, our neighbours came by to warn us of the dangers of staying in our home; they had heard of an imminent invasion from the High Commissioner and, about to evacuate themselves, urged us to follow their example…but I had no intention of leaving, In this seemingly endless diaspora I had so far experienced during my lifetime I had lost or been forced out of three homes, and I was not to lose another. We informed the Camerons of our decision to stay and finally they decided to stay too.  The following morning I woke up early and looked out of the bedroom window: Imagine my surprise when what I saw was a sky full of Turkish paratroopers, many of them seemingly directing their parachutes towards our garden and the nearby fields. For a brief time there was a total silence, but then the sounds of loud explosions and sirens coming from all directions. My husband alerted my son and his wife who lived opposite us and when they joined us a few minutes later, we all raced into our air raid shelter. My husband’s foresight in stocking the shelter with essentials probably contributed as much to our survival as the shelter itself.

Fighting raged over our heads for three weeks and we rarely left the shelter. The Camerons, we later discovered, spent almost the entire time of the war in their sitting room where, at precisely six o’clock each evening, they drank their usual glass of whiskey. Miraculously they were never harmed although their house suffered damage. Their only complaint, in fact, was that because there was no electricity, they had no ice cubes for their daily scotch-on-the-rocks.”

While Elsie Slonim recounts from her memory the story, which she also mentions in her book, we are served a drink by the two faithful souls of the house, who for the occasion of our visit have stayed on to assist her,… but she herself has done the cooking, she points out proudly to us. There is a certain ceremony at table which reminds me of my parents and the small silver bell that she rang to ask for something or for the next course to be served. As I said, time stood still. I asked Elsie for the reasons that led to the authorization to stay in her house within the military zone. “When after the fighting we heard Turkish voices we came up from our shelter and faced two heavily armed soldiers, one of them was a Cypriot and spoke English: He called out in astonishment: ‘Mr Slonim, what are you doing here, is this your house?’ He was the son of one of my husband’s workers at the Fassouri plantation, it turned out, who still remembered that my husband had cared for his father when he fell seriously ill and also looked after him later on. That was enough reason for the Turkish officer to order soldiers posted around the house to make sure that we were not harassed. The war had ended for us but not the silence and although we hoped that things would change and become normal, the silence remained until today.”

Elsie had come to Cyprus 70 years ago. After her childhood and school years spent in Baden near Vienna her father sent her and her sister in 1939 across the ocean to Boston to stay with relatives to be safe from the Hitler regime. On the steamer she met her future husband David who took her back to Cyprus where he was managing the Fassouri Plantation near Limassol. She knew nothing of the life in Cyprus, knew nothing of the life of a planter’s wife. She was lonely and had no transportation but soon got herself a horse and rode to see her new lady friends for tea. The second world war soon came to Cyprus too and they had to leave for Israel where her parents had already gone to. But the plantation could not be left alone, so her husband travelled by boat between Cyprus and Israel and Palestine, but finally they could return and pick up life there again.

“We so much hoped for a quiet life with the new house built, a piece of land bought near Lapta when the trouble escalated between the two communities, troubles that had started in 1956, with the Eoka and the independence coming….and so forth and then the Turkish army came and with them the establishment of two separate parts with buffer and military zones in-between and that is where I am living now.”

Elsie gives us many stories and anecdotes to taste this evening; with fine humour which she seems never to have lost in-spite the many wars she had gone through and the many things she lost on the way. This courageous humour becomes also apparent in her book. With her energy for life she has survived her husband and her two children; she lives in this house full of memories, old photos and paintings from Hungary where part of her family has lived. Her last companion, dachshund Heidi has also died but she was given another dog to keep her company. There is enough reason to go on. In October she will be going to Austria where she is invited to read from her book and talk about her life. And she might be going to America again where she has a grandson. But her life is where her house is with the ghosts of her past in a surrounding where never anything changes and where she is well looked after by the two faithful people who share so many things with her and also looked after by the Turkish military who immediately come to help her when something is amiss.

Take care, dear Elsie Slonim, you gave us a lot to think about with your book “Lemons from Paradise” (or in German: “Rosen aus der Sperrzone”) which in the North of Cyprus is available at Khora Bookstore in Nicosia close to the Ledra Palace Crossing. You can also contact me for information www.heiditrautmann.com heiditrautmann@hotmail.com or Elsie Slonim directly elsieslonim@yahoo.co.uk