The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  On the ground by your boot, a spent shell. It can only be from your C7. The praying man isn’t moving. Bullets zip overhead with a sound like shredding paper. You aim at the man with ferocious concentration as if he is playing dead and means to whip out a shank or pistol and rush you, this little olive farmer. Get the fuck up! I missed you! Your open mouth, dry tongue, coated with the bitter dust. To your left, more firing, more shouts of “Hold your fire!” The squibbing of shots has replaced the snarl of saws—the sappers all belly-flat on the straw-covered earth waiting out the firefight, if that’s what this is. “Man down,” you yell, “get medics!” “What?” “Call that in now!” “Roger!” And Singh, to somebody: “Hold your fucking fire!”

  Somehow you’re there beside the man, rolling him over, straddling the shrunken body, no pulse, pumping the chest just inches from the wound so that it spurts, spattering your throat and face, and you taste blood. Blood on the man’s white beard as well. The force of the compressions half-opens his mouth, his eyes. The whites appear, just the whites, like the vacant stare of a Greek statue. You keep pumping, praying, as if you know anything about praying, while the voices of strangers jabber around you, Trif, Trif, stop it, man, it’s too late.

  —

  Sometime later he and Zeke Barrett, that troubled kid, maybe nineteen, who had fired off a full clip, made their way through the ruins of the grove, not sure where they were going or why. Like bushwhacking in dense forest, pushing through the spiny thickets of intermeshed boughs. The sappers were elsewhere, dealing with the last trees. From here the noise was like a swarm of cicadas. They’d been cutting at waist height, probably for ease and speed—there were maybe four hundred trees to cut down. A gore of resin encircled the edge of each stump. The wood tawny yellow, the growth rings uncountable. Stumps the circumference of a big man’s torso.

  He drifted on—somehow he had lost little Barrett—and passed medics treating a panting sapper, deep gash in the knee, the patella and cartilage glaring white. He must have hit a burl, the saw bucking back. Farther on, a medic with colourless eyes and ginger moustache pumped the chest of a boy, maybe twelve, shot through the forehead, the perforation perfectly clean. His father was kneeling beside him, rocking side to side and wailing. Somewhere a stoned-sounding voice was saying, “They think when they die, they go to Mecca.”

  Trif couldn’t feel the weight of his carbine or armour. Sounds of group lamentation nearby—a different pitch from the chainsaws, though almost in harmony—as if funerals were already in session. Maybe family had gathered around the praying man, back there in the debris. A white goat on its hind legs stood nibbling a fallen bough. As if in imitation, Lozac, his close comrade, now a stranger to him, grey as a corpse, stood holding a twig to his nose. He plucked and bit an olive and spat. “No fucking loss, man.” His C7 was propped against a stump. “Hey, Trif, seriously, your dick get hard in the firing line? Am I fucked up or something?”

  Twenty or thirty steps beyond, medics were clumped around the female second lieutenant, Moore. One medic held up a drip bag of blood, another a bag of saline. There was a sewery smell. The head medic hunched over the lieutenant’s abdomen, blocking Elias’s view. A few steps away a villager lay face down in a slurry of dirt and gore, clutching a machete-like tool. Exit wounds shredded his back. The wounds, the body looked less real than in the movies.

  A machete. We’ll be able to say they were armed after all.

  A medic looked up at Elias. The man’s eyes rounded. “Soldier? You hurt? Over here!” Elias walked on, olives strewn underfoot like casings. With the shade of the grove wiped out, for a generation at least, the sun, climbing swiftly, was oppressive. Heat bludgeoned down. The immense sky was a desert in its own right, equally arid, equally empty but for a shrapnel sliver of moon hovering over the mountains to the east. Soon the choppers would be flying in. He hoped they would evacuate the lieutenant, an officer he’d actually liked, in time.

  The mud wall of the village. A tree that had grown beside the wall had collapsed onto it when cut. On the other side, something moved among the boughs. He didn’t raise his carbine, which drooped from its strap, useless as an arm in a sling. He stepped behind the boughs of another amputated tree. An old woman in dark layers—beaked nose, sunken mouth, like a tiny Cretan yiayia—was shaking olives off a branch into her apron, muttering and spitting as she worked.

  FLIGHT

  With a jolt and a stifled cry he wakes from a hard, drugged sleep. Deep in his gut a clot of dread and grief, or something bitter like grief. He passed out around dusk—in spite of several more Greek coffees—and so missed the dinner where he was supposed to meet the villagers. He still can’t quite believe in them, or it. Yet here he is. It might be anywhere from midnight to an hour before dawn. The grille-covered window above his face frames a panel of sky so misty with stars it might be a photo taken by telescope. Silence but for the alien song of that bird in the courtyard.

  For two weeks now, every time he has failed to stay awake, the dream: he or his eidolon plodding through a labyrinth of high mud walls, sure that there must be a route branching through the darkness to safety. Yet any route he chooses soon defaults into corridors all descending into a kind of arena, or vast atrium, lit up as if with stadium floods: the olive grove, the same bloody scene replaying. How conscientiously his brain works at getting it exactly right, over and over! (But why not work to change it, delete it?) He senses the playback might go on every night for years—an unfaceable future. Maybe it’s looping in the back of his mind twenty-four hours a day, waiting for him to re-enter the cinema of sleep.

  He sits up, gropes for the jug of water on the floor by the bed, brings it to his lips. He opens his throat and chugs every drop. For a moment he entertains a fantasy of trying to find and rescue the hospitalized Eylül; he would be arrested, maybe shot, long before he reached her. But to let himself be held in these ruins, incommunicado…That man, Roland, with his argument about protecting Eylül, it all seems sophistry now in this darkness. Rationalizations are daytime creatures, less plausible by night. He can’t just sit here while liars accuse him in absentia. If he means to fight off sleep for the rest of the night, what better way than by getting up and walking? He recalls seeing on a map that Varosha’s southern edge adjoins the Green Line, the Republic of Cyprus just across it.

  He rushes the jug back to his mouth as he retches, losing most of the water he just downed. On the floor by the bed he finds the candle and matches that the woman delivered after his interrogation, along with a bowl of stewed lentils, a white undershirt, flip-flops so old that the rubber is brittle and light as sponge toffee, a second blanket, folded sheets stamped POSEIDONS INN, a bar of cracked soap and a roll of newsprint toilet paper of the same vintage. Still wearing sunglasses she said curtly, “Ta podhia sou,” and when he lifted one foot to show her the sole, she looked away and then handed him a phial of brown liquid and some gauze and tape. In a softer voice she told him to put on the flip-flops and led him slowly out into the courtyard, a garden of aromatic herbs, fruit trees and trellised grapevines, enclosed on three sides by numbered rooms and on the fourth side an exposed stone wall framing a wide wooden gate. Pointing toward room number four she said, in English, “The privy.” (In his room there’s a sealed door that must once have opened on a bathroom, back when this place, obviously an inn, had plumbing.)

  He lights the candle and looks around his near-empty room. Still no sign of his shirt, jeans, or wallet. They don’t yet trust him not to flee. In boxer shorts, undershirt and the brittle flip-flops, his feet socked in gauze, he holds up the candle and tests the room’s doorknob. It turns easily, as if oiled, though the door itself, when he edges it open, screams on its hinges. The strange bird falls silent. He holds his breath. From the moon-shadows under a lemon tree across the courtyard, a pale shape stirs. There’s a rumbling growl. “Endaksi,” Elias whispers. The growling stops and something begins thumping the ground, a tail.

  Several small tables have been align
ed to form a long table in the flagstoned centre of the courtyard. On the tables, a few candle ends and empty bottles. In his drugged slumber he heard nothing of the phantom villagers’ dinner. Beside his doorway—at his feet—they’ve left something under an old ceramic room-service cover. He crouches painfully. From the top of the cover he removes a spoon and threadbare napkin and uncovers the food, a dish made with some kind of meat, root vegetables, and greens. Though he feels queasy, he makes himself take a few mouthfuls with the spoon. The food is delicious, velvety with oil and fat. The dog rises and slinks over, not menacing in manner but self-effacing, its ears flattened, tail down. It’s not nearly as big or wolflike as it seemed last night. A few steps away it pauses, black eyes alert and shining in the light of the candle he holds. The sweet, eager face of a fruit bat. “Ela na fas!” he whispers and the dog surges in and starts bolting the food. He scratches the matted fur of its ruff. The dog makes muffled, ecstatic snorts as it eats.

  Elias stands and crosses the courtyard to the gate. The night isn’t warm enough for just boxers and an undershirt, but he will be moving fast, he thinks, despite his soreness and sickness. On the face of the gate, a dark iron latch. He tries easing it upward. No good. He tries downward, gingerly, expecting it to grate loudly when it moves. It won’t move. He looks over his shoulder: the dog exuberantly licking the plate, which rattles over the flagstones. He turns back to the latch, leans down, holds the candle to a large, medieval-looking keyhole. He tries the latch one more time, up, down. From behind him a light clicking—claws on the flagstones as the dog trots over. Now the door of one of the rooms scrapes open. He tosses down the candle and it goes out and he leaps and grips the top of the gate with both hands, something sharp there cutting his fingers. One scrabbling foot finds a toehold on the latch and for a moment his full weight is on it. It gives with a shocking clank, like an anchor chain snapping. The gate swings outward with him clinging to it. He lets go and drops awkwardly into the street, twisting an ankle. He swings the gate closed before the dog can escape. A hoarse voice cries, “Stomata!” He has lost a flip-flop and shakes the other off and runs limpingly up the street to his right, whatever direction that is.

  —

  The dog catches him within a block. He hears it gaining—galloping, panting—and feels the leaden panic of a child pursued in a dream. He stops, turns around and braces. The dog bounds past him in the moonlight, then slows and peers back at him, mouth agape and tongue lolling, as if urging him to catch up. It seems to be simply a dog happy for its freedom out here under the moon. The street looks orderly, clear of detritus, the walls whitewashed and free of growth. Now a sound of slapping boot soles and that pea-gravel voice calling, “Stomata, allios tha rikso!” Stop or I’ll shoot. Roland’s warning about the dog has turned out to be hollow, but the old soldier seems another matter. Elias turns down an alley, the dog trotting alongside, and by the time they emerge onto another street they’re among ruins, the pavement weed-cracked and stony, the gauze on his feet tearing loose, his cuts reopening. His ankle feels more sprained with every step. He pauses, looks up at the teeming stars to get his breath and his bearings, finds Polaris, the moon to the west, sky lightening to the east. He and the dog turn right down a side street, southward. “Argos, pou eise?” the pursuing man is shouting from a long way back, and whistling too. “Argos, ela!”

  They emerge into the overgrown plaza, like the hub of a topiary city made of vines, wild grape and bougainvillea. There are even topiary cars, a few bicycles, a bus. Only the doors and upper parts of the church are free of growth. As they run across the plaza, footfalls, he hopes his own, echo behind them. On the other side he stops and looks back. Nothing. The dog, who must be Argos, is looking back as well, with an air of perplexed concern. “All right, boy,” he tells him, “go! Na fyge!” Elias turns and continues south along a disintegrated avenue but the dog stays with him, a bit behind now, Elias trying in the moonlight to pick his way through shrubs, weeds, jagged debris, stepping as if on live coals. The tires of abandoned cars appear liquefied, their chassis submerging into the ruins. An owl shrieks close by. When he looks back for Argos (the dog lagging, head down, planting his paws fastidiously) he can see his own feet are leaving a faint, sporadic blood trail.

  The overgrown shops and houses thin away. He and Argos pass the cubic hulk of a large brick building, gaping holes for windows. It might once have been a school on the edge of town. Suddenly they’re in open country and soon the road is indistinguishable from the parched, stony earth to either side. The light of the moon, which casts long shadows, shows a Nazarene nightscape as if in a Christmas card: a few olive trees, scrubby tamarisks, low treeless hills covered with herbs that he doesn’t see but can smell in the cool air, oregano, thyme, sage, Greek mountain tea. There’s a hoofbeat clatter and a flash of motion from the top of a knoll. A troop of small goats without bells scrambles away. The dog looks over but makes no move to give chase. Is he trained not to?

  The hermit Paris must dwell around here. Could he be tracking Elias and the dog? Elias keeps looking back. The Green Line can’t be far. To the southwest a larger hill looms up and he makes for it, on the balls of his feet now, at times crying out involuntarily. His sweat is cold, his jaw trembles. They approach a black and cylindrical mass that seems to swallow the moonlight and reflect nothing back—the crumpled, creosote ruin of a jet fighter. Impossible to read the insignia. Someone has planted a cross beside the remains of the cockpit, and though the wreckage must be from 1974, the cross is white as if freshly painted.

  There’s a faint yet piercing whistle from behind him. Argos stops and cocks his ears, looks back, glances up at Elias, then turns and bounds away to the north. Now Elias can just make out a figure who seems to be loping southward in his direction. Old or not, the soldier is overtaking him. He can think of no option but to climb this larger hill and hope that from the top he can see the Green Line, and that it’s just on the other side. He tries to run. Searing pains in his feet and ankle wring grunts and obscenities out of him. He starts up the slope, rocky and tussocked with gorse and thistle, limps through a tiny stand of olive trees and hopes it might hide his route from the man below. After winding around a few boulders, he has to scramble upward on all fours. Another minute and the slope levels out—he’s already at the top. The hill can’t be more than fifty metres high. Yet the view from up here is extensive—to the east the sky is brightening over the sea, the southern end of the beach strip, silhouettes of a few last hotel hulks, an abandoned crane. The border that he’d hoped might run just behind the hill seems to lie a good kilometre to the south. It might as well be a hundred. His soles are cut up, his lungs labouring as if he just summited a Himalayan peak. He can just make out the dead zone’s fence and beyond it two more fencelines running west to east, framing a road of gravel or sand, pale in the twilight, ending at the shore: the U.N.’s Green Line. On a hillside behind it, a cluster of white houses with a few lights shining, a town in the Republic of Cyprus. He sags onto one knee, then sprawls sideways and lies groaning, looking up at the last stars. There’s a panting sound. The dog looms above him, blocking out the sky, regarding him with a quizzically cocked head, then licks his face. Elias hears boot soles crunching over stones. He shuts his eyes and says, “Kalimera.” Good morning. A harsh, cracked voice replies slowly in Greek, “I was hoping you would run on, so I would have no choice. Instead you lie down and wait for me like a woman.”

  Elias sits up, pushing the dog back. The man wears a beret over crewcut grey stubble and aims a polished, cocked revolver at Elias’s bloody feet. “Yiati dhen to grafeis st’archidhia mou?” Elias says. Why don’t you write it on my balls? The man’s heavy moustache hides the expression of his mouth, but his squint tightens and he aims a sharp kick at Elias’s swollen ankle. The pain explodes as red-hot light before his eyes.

  —

  The sun is high by the time he hobbles back into the wide plaza near the village with Argos, the dog, at his side and his captor b
ehind them, smoking and gruffly singing songs in Cretan dialect, verse after verse, as if to celebrate the capture. Yet the tunes are mournful. So are the words, at least the ones Elias can pick out. Old battle hymns, tragic love songs. Fuck the man for singing them. Fuck the man for singing so well.

  Roland and the young woman, Kaiti, appear ahead, approaching them past the front of the church with its bullet-pocked dome. “Ah, Elias,” Roland calls out in a thin, winded voice. “I am relieved to see you in a single piece!” He shakes out a thin woollen blanket and wraps it around Elias’s bare shoulders.

  “Oriste,” the young woman tells him, here, and tries to hand him his flip-flops. She won’t meet his eyes. He doesn’t want her to. Now she seems to realize that he can’t put the flip-flops on himself and she crouches, muttering “Panayia mou!” as she sees his feet at close range. She sets the flip-flops on the paving stones and very gently slips each foot into place. He flinches but won’t let himself cry out. She says in Greek, in an impatient tone, “One of you on either side of him—take his arms. Stratis—did you not think to help him?”