Saturday was laundry day in Larnaka.
By nine in the morning, the sun shone benignly upon me as I carried a hold-all filled with my week’s dirty clothes.
Anna, a five-foot-nothing scrawny blond from Poland, in her thirties, oversaw the laundry room at the Petrou Brothers Apartments. She would wash, dry and iron my clothes for 12 euros—a pittance I always jokingly complained about, to which she always retorted, if I thought her service too expensive, perhaps I should wash her clothes in return.
“How’s your family Anna?”
“John’s still out of work. Maria’ll start Grade 1 in September.”
“When are you going back to visit them?”
“Perhaps next year.”
Each summer she said the same.
On Saturdays, all shops closed at noon. If I delivered my laundry first thing in the morning, Anna would have it done by then. This left me time to potter around town. Today, I went searching for a fan to combat the high 35-degree weather.
Even in this heat, nowhere was there a fan to be found. Giving up, I trudged south along the boardwalk and wandered into the Turkish enclave. A farmer’s market supplied me with dates and figs. I treated myself to sheftalia, Cypriot meatballs in pita bread with salad. It was served by a youth sporting a bright red Manchester United football shirt in his family restaurant cast in medieval stone. The boy was studying engineering at Manchester University, returning home every summer to work here with them. The Mancunian brogue he had acquired contrasted sharply with his dad’s colloquial Greek—a telling harbinger of how father and son would grow apart in the coming years.
My Saturday ritual in Larnaka was no different from that of my summers in Dar-es-Salaam, also a harbour town. Studying in England, I would fly to visit my divorced father in Africa. Saturday mornings I would deliver our laundry to the dhobi (laundryman), then kibbitz with shopkeepers until noon, when I would meet my dad at his office. As in Larnaka, all businesses closed at that hour. The two of us would repair to Khalid’s, a rundown, greasy spoon filled with poor Africans, but boasting the most delicious of barbeques in town, accompanied by fresh-baked thick, sponge-like naans. I longed to recapture the long-lost charm and simplicity of my hometown.
In Larnaka, at the crossroad of the Turkish and Greek quarters stood, of all things, a Chinese furniture store. Passing it, I doubled back. Today its large window displayed every describable version of a fan, from gigantic red and gold dragon fans spanning six feet, to dainty hand-painted ones. I sighed with relief and entered.
Before I could say a thing, the female owner implored me to share some freshly steeped tea.
“It’s Oolong. The best.”
Amid the perfume of burning incense, she performed a centuries old ceremony, first rinsing the tiny, gilded porcelain cups with the same steaming tea she would then serve.
We sat in high-backed, red-lacquered wooden thrones carved in effigies of Chinese villagers with a matching round table and let our two worlds ebb and flow between us.
If only for a moment, I had captured the grace and charm of my youth.
