The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  “They looted our shop, for the crystal vases,” his wife says from the table’s other end. Her drawn-on eyebrows and paisley headscarf give her the look of a cancer patient, though one whose body remains stout and solid.

  “We sold flowers,” the old man calls.

  “Far more than flowers!” she corrects him.

  “The actor Mastroianni bought our roses.”

  “In fact, they were irises. The shop was a few blocks over, toward the church.”

  “Neokli was better off here,” Takkos says in a stage whisper.

  “No other children around,” she adds. “We decided we would not be forced out.”

  “We thought the U.N. would make the Turks leave Varosha,” he says. “So all of our neighbours could return to us. We were wrong. Still…”

  “Those who fled lost their homes forever.”

  “Still, not many Turks came in this far, to loot. And then Sergeant Stratis—”

  “Taki, enough, we mustn’t tell too much yet!”

  Staring down the table at his wife he says, “Then the sergeant joined us, and then they stopped entirely! Elias is Greek, we should trust him!”

  “Some Greek,” Stratis says, scowling under his brows, walleyed with wine. He keeps filling his glass and draining it with choppy, angry movements, squinting out through the fumes of cigarettes that look desiccated with age. Elias tries to ignore his stares. They remind him of something, and then he gets it: the Turks and Turkish Cypriots eyeing him and Eylül in the bar of the Palm Beach Hotel. Yet apart from Stratis Kourakis, the mood seems festive. Are village dinners all like this or is the novelty of hosting a stranger a sort of tonic? They keep referring to him as ksenos—stranger, or guest, or both. His Greek now returning to something like fluency, he’s answering their questions about the outside world. With the conspicuous exception of Kaiti, they seem especially gratified by answers that depict it as treacherous, hypocritical, overwhelming, violent. Most of his answers do. As the night progresses, everyone wants to refill his glass and address him, even Myrto—a nervous, bony, brittle-looking woman who talks sparingly and formally—and Kaiti Matsakis. Tonight, just once, she calls him Trif. In huskily accented English she adds, “I wish you to speak to Aslan and Lale, to learn a little English. For their futures, maybe.”

  “Is that an order?”

  She looks mystified. “Pardon?”

  “Sure,” he says, “no problem. They don’t seem to understand my Greek.”

  “I think only Neokli understands,” she says—no smile, though she does unknot her brow in response to his grin, which he feels in his cheeks as if he’s working a muscle group long out of use.

  Now Kaiti and Stavroula are setting out dessert: pistachios and almonds in their shells, a gleaming wedge of honeycomb from the village hives, apricots, cherries, quartered cantaloupes, grapes, and mespila—golden, large-stoned fruits that apparently grow wild everywhere in the ruins. Takkos Tombazo raps a spoon on his plate and proposes a toast: “Now that we know Elias Trifannis will be staying with us for a while, perhaps a long while, let us welcome him properly.” He raises his shot glass of raki. “Stin iyeia sou—ke banda na ’se gala!” The second half is in Cypriot dialect, but Elias gets the idea. Your health and may you have it always. The old man flings back his shot. The others, except for the glaring Stratis, also cry “Iyeia sou!” and drink, even the twins—one on each of Stavroula’s knees like grandchildren—who hold thimble glasses of wine. Myrto calls out that if Elias needs books, English, Greek, she has many to borrow. Neoklis stares at him with a frank and famished absorption, now and then seeming to grope at his own lap. He smells distinctly goaty.

  Stratis butts out in his dinner plate and leans across the table toward Elias. “You were with a Turk on the beach!” he cries in Greek, as if he has only just now learned of this outrage. Silence breaks out. All the villagers—even those who wear pained looks, Roland, Stavroula, Kaiti—hungrily watch the two men. “There in America,” he says and jabs a long finger westward, “your blood has so thinned, you don’t even know how to hate anymore!”

  “Maybe you should try listening to the news on Roland’s radio,” Elias says.

  “This he will not do,” says Roland, in English. “Though he does keep many journals in his room, from 1974. Strati, parakalo—”

  “To hate one’s true enemies, I mean—to hate purely the enemies of your blood!”

  “I’m finding enough to hate,” Elias says, “without inheriting it from my—”

  “He who cannot hate purely, how can he love?”

  “Kai vevea!” Takkos exclaims, helping himself to more raki. “Stratis speaks well here. It’s as if life could exist without death…truth without lies…” But receiving some signal from his wife he adds, “Then again, our guest is only young, and a soldier on leave.”

  “Anyone paid to kill the enemies of rich men and presidents, not the enemies of his own blood, is no soldier but a mercenary!” Stratis thumps the table on his last word.

  A few seconds of pregnant silence, then Elias says, “You’re right.”

  “What?” Stratis turns his head, cups an ear with his hand. “Your Greek…”

  “I said you’re right.”

  As if vanquished, not vindicated, Stratis deflates back into his chair. Stavroula Tombazo calls out something in dialect and within seconds, in the Greek way, the mood has swung full compass again, although Elias’s nerves stay on alert, and Stratis, low in his chair, keeps brooding and muttering. Kaiti brings out another pitcher of wine. Roland appears at Elias’s side with a battered little guitar and says, in English, “I believe you mentioned that you can play?”

  “I did?”

  “You were half asleep.”

  Just weeks ago he was singing for his platoon, yet that now seems like another man’s memory. Roland says: “I can only strum quite roughly, Trif. I am not musical. Play for us.”

  “An order from my captors?”

  “You know it’s more complicated than that. And this is hardly Babylon.”

  Elias takes the small guitar and turns it in his hands. “Quietly, right?”

  “We are in a courtyard and a thousand walls are between us and the outer fence. Sing as you like!”

  “So we’re really in no danger?”

  “Ah, very good, you said ‘we’!”

  “If the soldiers come, I’ll be in trouble too. Maybe worse than the rest of you.”

  “Please,” Roland says. “The colonel looks out for us. Rarely, a military airplane flies over, far above, and we have to stay indoors. But foot patrols are few and quite peripheral. Stratis would disagree—he has always believed our risk more urgent, and perhaps he likes to think so—but I believe the only real danger now is you, were you to emerge and reveal our existence.”

  “If I talk when I leave here, it won’t be about this village. Who’d believe me?”

  The bass E is missing, the other strings rusted and a tuning peg chipped off, yet the old guitar’s sound is not bad. The courtyard acoustics help. Before long his heavy sleep debt, along with the wine and the deep strangeness of the situation, make him feel like he’s playing songs in a dream, as he often used to back when his dreams were like other people’s. He keeps blanking out on lyrics and chord changes he has known for years, but his audience, these genial jailers, don’t seem to notice. They drum the table, applaud and cry “Bravo!” Even Stratis looks a little appeased, though when he asks Elias to play certain traditional Greek songs and Elias admits he doesn’t know them, the man locks his ropy arms across his chest and sags deeper into his chair.

  Another round of toasts. Elias’s tenor, a high voice for a large man, grows bolder and his playing more instinctive. For the first time in a while he feels almost part of something. To his medley of blues, including “St James Infirmary” and “Ain’t No Sunshine,” Roland tries to sing along. Every song picks its sequel. Now he is being urged, of course, to play Leonard Cohen. “It looks so small in your large arms,” My
rto says and he wonders if he has misheard her Greek. The self-enclosed Kaiti permits herself a wry smile and claps in time, the girl Lale off-time. Aslan clings like a jockey to the back of the dog. They lap the table and Argos peers up with a strained but tolerant expression as Elias sings about The Partisan—that soldier who has often changed his name, lost wife and family, is a prisoner of the borders…All the faces seem lamped from the inside too, even that of Stratis nodding in his chair, a dozing sentry, and this could be decades ago, everyone dressed in period clothing, or it’s another age entirely, the folk of a remote village crowded around the outsider who brings gossip, music, and fresh blood.

  At the end of the night as he gets up, the wine-dulled pain in his feet and ankle rebounds and he can barely stump back to his cell, or room.

  —

  He wakes to the manic, whistling chitter of that strange bird—a nightingale, Roland has told him—coming from the courtyard, but louder and clearer. The door is open, a golden runner of moonlight laid over the tiles. The bed trembles. Someone is kneeling against it: little Neoklis, that unmistakable centaur smell. Did he climb the courtyard gate to get in? Where is my guard when I need him? Still drunk, he feels paralyzed. Neoklis drapes an arm over Elias’s bare chest, then rests his ear and cheek on the arm. His left hand moves in his own lap, in the dimness beside the bed. “Parakalo,” he is panting, Please, please. His breath smells of sour wine and cloves. “Neokli,” Elias whispers, afraid of what will happen if he pushes him away—will there be screams, cries for help? “Neokli, stamata tora, parakalo!” Stop now, please! But hearing his own parakalo echoed back to him seems to excite Neoklis further and now he repeats ardently, “Parakalo!” The mattress vibrates faster. “Parakalo!”

  Elias exhales, resigned, and gently rests a hand on the burning, upturned side of the little man’s face. In next to no time, Neoklis is standing in the doorway, nodding, his face blacked out by the moonlight behind him. “You play Leonard Cohen for us again tomorrow?”

  NOVEMBER: THE TENNIS SET

  As Kaya walks toward the red clay court behind the club, lazily smoking, he sees something remarkable: no sign of Captain Polat. He checks his watch: 12:11. Timur Ali has told Kaya that the earnest young captain usually arrives at the court a good twenty minutes early. Kaya himself tends to arrive five or ten minutes late, not so much as a gesture of authority or because he dislikes Polat—though in fact he dislikes the captain more all the time—but because he is metabolically incapable of hurry.

  He sits down on the bench between the net post and the court’s high chain-link fence, unzips his racquet cover and notes a second surprising thing: he’s feeling edgy, impatient, as if he has smoked a full pack of cigarettes in the last hour, instead of just this one. After a final deep drag he flicks the butt through the fence and glances at his wrist: 12:15. The huge shadow of the Odyssey Hotel that looms behind the court’s west baseline is already advancing toward the net. He has made Polat play on the west side for game after game, partly out of fairness (the sun is a real handicap, especially when you serve), but also because he, Kaya, so loves to feel the sun on his bare torso and face, especially at this time of year, when the hours of light are shorter.

  It strikes him that he can’t remember the last time anyone kept him waiting, whether on-duty, off-duty, or in his pre-army days. It seems everyone hankers to please him. Even his superiors. For years he has felt it. But this captain, Aydin Polat…there’s something different about him and it’s worrying the colonel more and more. Among other things, he keeps asking awkward questions about the restricted zone and the (officially dead) foreigner.

  Kaya pulls on his headband too forcefully and it slips over his eyes like a blindfold. For a moment he sits there, slumped. Why did they have to send me this man? He hears footsteps now, amplified by the ruins—the loose clapping of Polat’s feet in the overlarge tennis shoes Kaya has lent him.

  Kaya thumbs the headband up off his eyes. Captain Polat halts in front of him, salutes stiffly. He’s gasping, his plump, pitted cheeks red. The loaned racquet and white shoes—their uppers oddly breaded with sand—go comically with his uniform, pistol belt, and that big peaked cap on his massive head. As always, he looks like a child kitted up as a soldier.

  “My apologies, sir! We were to start at 1200 hours.”

  “Don’t mention it, Captain.” Then, to his own surprise, Kaya adds, “Why the delay—was there a problem?”

  “No, sir.” Pause. “Yes, sir—there was—that is, there might well be.” With owlish insistence he stares down through his little glasses, as if Kaya ought to know.

  “Well, what is it, Captain?”

  “I took the liberty of re-inspecting the perimeter to the north, sir, metre by metre. I found something unusual, at one of several places where the fence is…the fence is in urgent need of repair, sir!” Polat’s voice gets louder as he goes, as if righteous disapproval is overcoming him. “There are signs—faint footprints, also larger impressions—that a person has slipped back and forth under the fence. Possibly several persons. The bottom of the fence can be lifted right out of the sand!”

  “I see.” Kaya assumes he means the place where the villagers slip through and down to the water on certain nights, to bathe and fish. “Probably it was just a couple of the guards going in to have a look around,” he says. “I’ll have Ali speak to the sergeant about it. Shall we play now?”

  “You mean, guards have been looting, sir?”

  Kaya sighs under his breath and looks beyond Polat, as if an ally might materialize out of the heat waves rising off the clay.

  “Sir, if they are looting—looting is a crime!—they ought to be—”

  “I know, Captain—looting is a crime. As I said, I’ll have Ali—”

  “Possibly it’s the foreigner, sir.”

  “What, the Canadian?”

  “He could still be at large in there!”

  “But Captain, I told you, I sent men in to search.” As he lies again about a search, Kaya stands up and looks down at his adjutant. “As I told you, they found blood but no body. We can only assume he’s long dead—he was wounded, there’s no water in there, no food, nothing. Just think for a moment. If he’d lived and escaped, he’d be all over the news by now—in newspapers, TV interviews, especially once they got him home. But even in Canada they’re saying he drowned, likely a suicide.”

  Kaya is a touch surprised at how readily the young man’s government has accepted the official Turkish line and given up on him; it seems they’re eager to avoid offending a rising economic power by pursuing the matter.

  “Right, then,” says Kaya. “I’ll take the sunny side.”

  Polat, still wearing all his gear, meets Kaya’s eyes with something close to insolence. His patchy moustache is dewed with sweat.

  “May I ask, sir, how the radical journalist seemed this morning?”

  “How did you know I went to the hospital?”

  “I questioned the chef, sir.”

  “Frankly, Captain, it’s none of your business!” As usual, Kaya finds it impossible to speak curtly for more than a phrase at a time: “Since you ask, though—her vital signs are stronger and the doctors are reducing the barbiturates. She should be conscious within a few days. But I’d rather—”

  “Then you’ll interrogate her?”

  “Interrogate her? I’ll inform her about her lover’s drowning and confirm that she doesn’t mean to talk about the incident back in Turkey. Which she won’t, I’m sure.”

  “But she has a history,” Polat says excitedly, “as a troublemaker! About Cyprus, of course, but—but also about the, the—as she calls it—Armenian genocide. And our troops defending themselves in that Kurdish village, last winter.”

  So Polat has been digging online when not re-inspecting the perimeter.

  “This is different, Captain—it’s an intimate matter. The woman’s personal reputation is at stake.”

  “Nevertheless, sir, I want…I would like to accompany you
.”

  Kaya tries switching tactics. Improvising an easy grin he says, “Captain, I order you to strip, put down your weapon, and pick up your racquet.”

  Polat’s baffled eyes blink behind the spectacles, but after a moment he salutes and obeys.

  On the court he is inept. Until now he has seemed deaf to any advice and exempt from all improvement. He’s all head, his small body a mere extension or prosthesis; he’s visibly thinking and rethinking every shot and then, too late, trying to get his limbs to obey. Usually Kaya deliberately blasts some of his own forehands long, lets Polat’s better shots get past him, and even double-faults on purpose, all to make sure the little captain wins a couple of games per set. Despite his feelings about Polat, he can’t help encouraging him, calling out sincere praise at his infrequent good shots.

  But today the captain is playing much better, with a kind of possessed intensity. Though he runs as awkwardly as ever—his loaned shoes clownishly flopping, his glasses held on with a strap—he’s getting to the ball faster. He grits his teeth as he lunges for shots. Each flailing serve, forehand smash or two-handed backhand is punctuated by a grunt that echoes off the ruins. There’s even topspin on his forehand. Kaya was intending to spot him the first couple of games, a gesture of conciliation, but Polat is playing so far above his level that he actually earns the wins. True, Kaya is not himself. By game two his double faults are unintentional, partly because he refuses to go lighter on the second serves. His forehands are harder than usual, and less accurate. The conversation before the set has left him shaken. It seems Polat will not relent or be finessed in the required direction.

  Kaya wins the third game easily and decides he’ll spot Polat a lead in the next one before getting serious and sweeping the game and the set. But a few more flubs on his part, and a sharp, sideline-kissing return on Polat’s, and Kaya is down 3‒1.