The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  He emerged from the alley onto the remains of a broad avenue that ran parallel to the beach. Above the avenue and the line of lower buildings on the far side, the sky was uncannily brilliant, the Milky Way hemorrhaging light. Weeds and what seemed to be large cacti and small trees grew out of the sidewalk and the avenue. A few cars were parked or stranded along the curb.

  He looked behind him, back up the alley. No sounds from the beach. He glanced both ways down the avenue as if about to brave a living street at rush hour, then ran across, dodging shrubs and a reef of prickly pear cacti colonizing a traffic island. On the far side he stopped and considered a side street that ran inland, west off the avenue. Beside a taxi collapsed on its wheel rims, a street-corner signpost tilted way over so that the nameplates were at face level. The name of the side street was illegible but the other, larger plate read JOHN F. KENNEDY AVENUE—a name he knew from the address of the Aphrodite on the discoloured brochures his aunt and uncle kept squared on their telephone table beside a heap of old Varosha phone books. So their hotel had to be a little farther down the strip. For a moment he thought of running in that direction, as if safety must lie in a property to which blood relations still held legal title.

  Now he feels his shirt pocket for his cellphone: gone, as expected. At a trot he starts up the nameless side street, picking his way westward into the dead zone, farther from the soldiers. The street is canyoned by solid ranks of two-storey buildings. Here, too, weeds and bushes erupt from the broken pavement, yet in mid-street the going seems easier, less overgrown, like a deer trail in a scrubby field. He has heard that the patrolling Turks never push more than a block or two into the restricted zone, but this faint path is worrisome. Maybe they do go in. He’s unsure how badly he hurt the older soldier. Hurting the man was sickening. His adrenalin spike subsiding, he’s reverting to what he was a few hours ago, a drunk, sedated man in a twilight stupor; an intentional insomniac. He was touching the woman just minutes ago, trying to haul her body under the fence, away from the nearing soldiers, yet she and the long evening they shared—her voice and breath in his ear at the bar, breeze cooling their sweat as the hatchlings scuttled past—seem utterly unreal.

  Block by block Varosha too seems more unreal, if increasingly visible. The moon has risen behind him, over the sea, and though not yet clear of the beachfront towers, it lends an indirect glow. Where vines and creepers have not engulfed the signage he can read the names of businesses, in Greek, English, or both—a bakery, a steam laundry, a small nightclub, a café whose heavy tables still line the street although the chairs have vanished—and he can tell the makes of the occasional cars melting into the pavement. Some creature flits across his path, rustling through the weeds into an open doorway. He swallows his heart back down. Despite the heat, he’s chilled, his shirt drenched. He keeps stopping, hearing footfalls doubling his own, even stumbling and halting when he does—the echo of his own steps, obviously. Yet the hairs on his nape keep hackling and he takes to turning around every half-block, walking backward a few steps, turning frontward again. On one of these pivots he trips over something and crashes, hip and hand first, to the pavement. He mutes his “Fuck off!” to a whisper, yet it seems to detonate back at him off the walls.

  A humpback half-moon is lifting out of the roofline back there along the avenue and the beach. He stumps onward, a block deeper, then finds his route barred: two sedans, tires totally flat, form a barricade, their rear fenders almost flush with the walls on either side of the narrow street, while in mid-street their grilles face each other, leaving between them an opening just wide enough to squeeze through. The Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar hood ornaments are intact and still shiny. The effect is of a ritual threshold, though one of a crudely makeshift, post-apocalyptic kind.

  This sign of an organizing presence deep in the dead zone—even if the presence must be long vanished—sharpens his sense of being watched. After a look around, he slips through the opening. Beyond it the street seems slightly clearer, as if more often used. A few steps farther and he peers to his left up an alley that connects to a parallel street. Framed in the far mouth of the alley, trotting up the parallel street as if shadowing him, a large, pale, wolflike dog. It glances down the alley toward him. He stops in his tracks, stares up the alley. Nothing.

  Lucid dreams, all of it. You could be dying, you could be dead.

  Varosha is only a few kilometres across—he must be near the centre, and in fact within a block or so his side street bends north and opens into a moonlit expanse, a wide plaza dominated by a high-domed church on the far side. Entering the plaza he looks left to where the parallel street also enters. No sign of the dog. You saw no dog. He walks on, glancing back and around. The plaza’s heavy paving stones are mostly clear of growth—just hanks of weed and a few scrubby trees pushing up through the cracks—but the facades of the surrounding buildings have all but vanished under creepers and vines, so the plaza could be a basin or old quarry walled in by cliffs covered in foliage, just a few slashes of white showing through. In mid-plaza, a raised bed in which a huge shade tree grows, its dense leafage reaching far out over the pavestones. But as he passes it, he sees that it too has been overrun, the tree dead, a swarm of creepers forming a kind of topiary ghost over the frame of the trunk and branches.

  In his deepening fatigue he’s winded like a sprinter, although he’s only walking, his stick-figure shadow preceding him. Above him the upper walls of the church soar out of a murky understorey of what must be bougainvillea. Under the lip of the dome the moonlit surface is pitted with bullet holes. He walks toward the doors of the church, which are framed by the dense growth. Why would the Turks be keeping the doors clear? The flowers in this light look blue instead of purple, and they’re as odourless as dried or fake flowers, like the bougainvillea along the mud walls of the village his company was entering two weeks ago.

  The door handle is the size and shape of a pomegranate, the brass smooth and clean. It turns easily. He pulls open one side of the double door. A cryptlike odour emerges with a bitter residue of frankincense that for a moment takes him back to boyhood Sundays, the church of the Theotokou in Montreal. He steps inside—a flurry of wingbeats high above. Stained-glass windows admit a dim, diffused light and he begins to make out chairs in the nave on either side of an aisle.

  His scalp contracts, his nape freezes; something hard nudges his skull behind the ear. He smells gun oil and masculine sweat. “Enough!” he says, bizarrely, sticking up his hands. Whoever holds the weapon clears his throat importantly, as if about to make an announcement in a crowded room. Elias expects to hear Turkish and is stunned to momentary incomprehension when a deep, scraped-sounding voice speaks in Greek, ending the sentence with a gruff “Amesos!” At once! “What?” Elias asks. “Oriste?” A ticking of claws outside on the paving stones, then a dog’s panting. He senses another human presence behind the armed man—a second track of breathing, faster, higher-pitched. A child? That voice, an older man’s, speaks in Greek again but now enunciates carefully, as if over a bad connection: “If you are lost in the ruins and have come in here to pray, then pray as our guest. If you are a spy for the Turks, then simply pray. Now hold still while the woman searches you.”

  —

  For the second time tonight Elias feels a strange woman’s hands moving over his body. They run over his legs and buttocks—slipping his wallet out of his back pocket—then climb his sides and twine around his soaked torso to pat his chest, the empty pocket over his tripping heart. The hands seem tentative, amateur.

  “Dhen eimai hamenos,” Elias says. I’m not lost. His male captor laughs and he realizes that what he has just said can also mean “I’m not a loser.”

  “She will blind you now,” the voice tells him in Greek.

  “What?”

  “With a cloth.”

  “I mean, I know this is Varosha. Who are you?”

  “Hold still,” says the woman. She pulls the rough cloth firmly over his eyes and knots it, almo
st gently, behind his head. Her fingers smell of garlic. He is led outside. Breezes cool the heavy sweat on his forehead, above the blindfold. The woman walks slowly on his left side, holding his arm and guiding him—in fact, partly supporting him—while the man’s soft footfalls shadow them, just behind. The dog can be heard trotting ahead. The sounds alter, grow sharper and choppier, the group apparently entering an alley or side street, the air close and hot. Someone is smoking, probably the man. Elias keeps stumbling, groaning. His legs tremble, his teeth chatter.

  “You’re drunk,” the woman says in Greek.

  “I need a drink.”

  Repeatedly they turn, left, right, as though his captors are lost as well.

  “I need to sit down.”

  “Se ligo,” the woman says. Soon. She sounds young, her voice soft but husky in the way of Greek women.

  “The gun,” says the man, behind him. “It was yours?”

  “What?”

  “We heard shots from the beach.”

  “Turkish soldiers.”

  “That’s a problem,” the man says from deep in his throat; it’s as if his larynx is packed with pea gravel. “In the morning you will tell us everything.”

  They stop and there’s a clank and faint creaking, a gate or heavy door. Beyond it the air is cooler, moister, thronged with springlike scents and the insistent chittering of some bird he doesn’t know. Another door and he’s in a sound-muffled space that smells of dust and mice. The clatter of shutters opening. His blindfold is unknotted. A small dark room, or cabin. Dim light enters through a recessed window covered by a grille. Beneath it there’s a bed, and suddenly Elias is finished, his whole body sagging, crutched on his captors (a second man seems to have joined them now). No more able to help or resist them than if he were a paralyzed casualty, he’s lowered onto the bare mattress. Someone brings a cup to his lips—it’s the woman, her shadow, the smell of garlic from under her fingernails.

  Spring-cold water with a chalky taste.

  “Efharisto,” he mutters.

  They leave him. A sound of something being pushed against the door outside. The stars in oddly deformed constellations flare down through the grille and he lies panting up at them while blood shunts behind his eyes. He tells himself he is not hallucinating, though possibly he is, and maybe that would be better. Forget that hope—the worst things are never a dream. Finally he goes still and begins to sink, as though in a warm, enveloping lagoon of opiates; rapture and remission. Then a face rises toward him out of the dark—the bloated features of a drowned woman breaking surface. It shocks him fully awake, arms and legs thrashing.

  And yet seconds later he is slipping away again.

  —

  To the ancient Greeks, death meant the loss of everything. What Charon ferried across the river into Hades was no immortal soul, no self-aware survivor enjoying a post-mortem promotion to a better state. At death a person’s vital elements—eros, bodily desire; thymos, a spirited sense of will and worth; and psyche, consciousness—dispersed and left only a faint remnant, a shadow with no name, no character, no memory of its former condition. This eidolon existed, if it could be said to exist at all, in a state of perpetual and wandering coma. When the dead appeared to loved ones in dreams it was this shadow that the dreamer saw. Son of night, brother of sleep. As for the shades themselves, they didn’t dream—as if they were stalled forever in that deepest, delta-wave phase of sleep, when sleepers know no more than the dead.

  —

  A local had told her of a maritime abyss off the southwest coast of the island that was the deepest spot in any sea in the world. She seems to be there, at the bottom. Yet now somehow there is light. Another quadrant of her mind realizes: flashlight, its blunt muzzle probing closer, accompanied by the voices of men who, she remembers, mean her harm, her and somebody else, she can’t recall whom, a foreigner, big, soft-spoken, very drunk, almost handsome when he smiled. Smiling rarely. (There was a tugging on her shoulders, the foreigner saying her name, September, which must be her name—it comes back to her, her name is September—and he was attempting to drag her somewhere but seemed to give up and disappear as the voices closed in.) Now she is standing among the voices, examining her own body in the sand, prone and with her face skewed sideways, eyes open. She looks down at her own eyes and wills them closed. They close. She sees nothing more. Is she dying? a man asks, and another says, She’s dead, the slut. She is not sure which man is correct and she tries to interject, to voice her confusion, but they talk over her. The one with the light in his trembling hand keeps it focused on her and she feels the heat of the light trembling in her wound.

  The slut. This time it’s said not with venom but with a halting, provisional quality, as if the speaker is testing out a word he might try using in a courtroom, or at a court martial. Now the voices sound less drunk, more frightened. She too: more conscious, more frightened.

  One is for leaving her here. One is for heaving her over the fence into the dead zone and hiding or burying her. The one with the light, who sounds kinder or merely less indignant, thinks they ought to call ahead for help, then carry her back to the hotel and say that the Greek killed her. No—the Greek attacked her and we tried to shoot him but we hit her by mistake.

  Not we, says the older voice, you. You shot her. The voice is weak and winded, diminished. The Greek attacked her, we tried to help, the Greek attacked me, you tried to shoot him, you hit her. Simple enough? We’ll bring her back now. And if she is still alive, she probably won’t be by the time we get her back.

  MORNING AT THE PALM BEACH OFFICERS’ CLUB

  Colonel Erkan Kaya reclines in a beach chair of salmon-pink canvas slung on a collapsible wooden frame. Like a solar panel his flat, hairless torso is angled at ninety degrees to the sun. Morning sun: the only sun there is on this otherwise ideal beach. The Varosha Greeks did many things right when they constructed their seafront strip, but uncha­racte­risti­cally they failed to consider the sun. (Or, perhaps, characteristically; they’re an impulsive tribe, argumentative, fickle, anarchic, all traits the colonel finds appealing.) The Greeks built their hotels and apartments high and right on top of the shore, which means that by noon, 1 P.M. at the latest, the sun dips behind the high roofline and leaves the beach in shadow.

  Tiny rhinestones of sweat glint on the colonel’s brow and clean-shaven upper lip—a touch more sweat than usual, though it’s not unusually hot. His laptop computer sits hibernating on a plastic beach table to his left. To his right, on a nicer side table, there’s an antique Greek Cypriot tray of buffed copper bearing a thimble cup sludged with coffee grounds, a half-full glass of ice water, an ashtray that needs clearing, and a shot of raki.

  Kaya has had no choice but to monitor the Turkish Cypriot news sites all morning. He has had to make some calls. An unusual day. For one thing, it started soon after dawn, when his orderly knocked on his bedroom door on the top floor of the club—the usual four taps, though this time each was progressively louder. Timur Ali knows never to wake Kaya when he’s asleep or dozing, except in case of emergency, a state of affairs that has occurred just twice in the past eleven years (holidaying officers; open bar; near-drownings). In some confusion Kaya called Ali in. Ali brought him a cup of coffee, or rather Nescafé—a clear sign of the man’s haste. Kaya sat up in bed and sniffed the Nescafé as Ali swung open the shutters and the light of sunrise detonated in the room, formerly a hotel suite where, it was said, the French director Jacques Tati and the British actress Julie Christie would often stay, although never—as Kaya sometimes quips to his guests—at the same time.

  In the early ’80s this place, a forty-minute walk south of the Palm Beach Hotel, was selected to be an officers’ club. It was tidied up, its bar and restaurant refurbished, guest rooms readied for the use of Turkish officers in Cyprus and from bases as far away as the Syrian border, on leave, honeymoon, or family holiday. Guests never took to it. Their laughter echoed hollowly off the rotting towers that backdropped it. At noon ever
y day, when the ruins began eclipsing the deserted beach, their premature shadow seemed a kind of horror-film darkness oozing out of the dead zone. At times, battle tanks would trundle down the shore toward the club and then, just a kilometre short, pivot toward the shallows and sit there monotonously shelling the sea. At night sometimes, the crash of a balcony collapsing. Many found this atmosphere unsuited to a honeymoon or family holiday.

  By the early ’90s the club was all but abandoned. When Kaya took up his post in 2001, on the death of the mild, quiet colonel who’d presided over Varosha since the occupation began, he set about re-repairing the club, a costly proposition and one that few men, he guessed, could have persuaded the defence ministry to underwrite. Down came the faded dining-room portrait of a presidentially grim Atatürk; up went another in which the great man leered down at the viewer (it was the image from the older ten-lira notes). Today the club remains as underused as ever but Kaya has been able to nudge the figures enough that the defence ministry is not yet concerned. Eventually they will notice; he will deal with the problem then.

  In 2002 he moved his quarters down here from Famagusta—the ancient port town just north of Varosha—where his predecessor stayed and where his subordinates prefer to remain. Somehow he found this setting congenial, as if he were a sanguine last Byzantine governor feasting and fucking in the ruins. In a way, the club was his private estate, although now and then there were guests, and a few times a year a horde of visitors would descend for the wedding of a general’s son, or a meeting, or some other function. The club cook was superb at fixing the Persian, Italian, and French dishes that Kaya especially loved. Now and then he enjoyed intimate visits from singers or dancers whom Timur Ali drove down the beach from the Palm Beach Hotel. They were not prostitutes. Most of them knew Kaya. He was pretty sure that they would accept his invitations even if he didn’t always slip them a gift (one or two hundred lira) in the small hours, before Timur Ali stoically jeeped them back up the beach. But he saw no reason to test his theory; he enjoyed his generosity as much as they did.