The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  Polat is showing clear signs of growing confidence. Awaiting Kaya’s serve, he crouches low at the baseline, grimacing with concentration, racquet poised (it’s Kaya’s racquet, actually—his best one). As for Kaya, he’s watching himself grip the ball and toss it up and pull back his racquet, all with debilitating self-awareness. Although he’s no veteran player, during officer training he mastered the game’s basics with his usual ease. His ability to relax, even when learning new things, has made him a quick study all his life. Now something is wrong.

  He smashes the serve long, sends the second one straight into the net, and for the first time in his life while playing a game he utters an obscenity. Then he double-faults again. Trudging numbly along the baseline, pulling a ball from the pocket of his shorts, he hears Polat call, “Should we switch sides after this game, sir? It’s unfair for you to have the sun in your eyes every game.”

  “I’m fine, Captain. But thank you. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He drills in an ace, one of his best serves ever, a beautiful point. But on his following serve, trying for a repeat, he fires wide, and then, still refusing to lighten up on his second try, he double-faults again. Fifteen−forty. He scores another point—rushing the net for a smash when Polat returns a serve too softly—but then loses the game when he tries to repeat that nice play and sends the ball just long.

  “Was that in?” he calls, though he’s almost certain it was not.

  “Ah, no, sir. Just out.”

  He can’t imagine the high-minded captain fibbing about such a thing.

  “Good game, Captain.”

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t switch sides, sir?”

  In the deferent tilt of the man’s head is there something taunting? His features are unreadable because of the sun in Kaya’s eyes. At any minute, though, the sun will be dipping behind the ruined penthouse of the Odyssey Hotel and today Kaya, losing 4−1, is happy about it.

  In the next game he breaks Polat’s serve, and in the game after that, serving without the handicap of the sun, he plays better, calmer, and wins again, after several decent rallies. Polat still leads, 4−3, though the momentum is Kaya’s.

  In the eighth game Polat plays with frenzied determination, grunting like a wounded man on every serve and shot, his face ominously reddening. He gains a point with an ace, his first ever, then earns another with a weirdly backspinning return that fools Kaya. But then Kaya comes back with two quick points. The sound of Polat’s breathing resounds off the ruins, so the court feels ever smaller, a squash court. An exchange of points and they’re at deuce. A long rally ensues, the best ever, ten, fifteen, twenty shots, and Kaya begins to feel exhilarated, as if by the growing skills of a protégé. Finally he sweeps a gorgeous forehand into the back corner and Polat dives, misses, and lies sprawled near the baseline, his glasses knocked askew. Kaya feels a twinge of regret that the rally is over and Polat, it seems, utterly beaten.

  “Are you all right, Captain?”

  Polat says nothing. He adjusts his glasses, retrieves his racquet and pushes slowly upright, his hands on the clay.

  “Good rally, Captain.”

  “Thank you, sir,” says Polat thickly. “Your advantage, sir.” Polat limps back to the fence to collect the balls. He frowns down at his watch before positioning himself to serve. One knee of his fatigues is torn. As always, his windup is tight and ungainly, but the serve is respectable. Kaya returns it smoothly and not too hard to Polat’s forehand—it seems deep down Kaya would like to share another good long rally before finishing the man off, though at this point in the set he really shouldn’t risk it. Naturally he risks it. Polat hacks furiously at the ball and it sizzles back over. Kaya is too far up. For a moment he thinks, Volley it, then decides to back up instead, then realizes the ball will probably go long. He lets it whistle past. He watches it meet the clay at the very back of the baseline, a fraction out of bounds, he hopes, he thinks, although it’s a close call—a linesman’s call.

  “Sir? Was it in?”

  It was out, just barely, almost certainly, he thinks, and he need only say so and the game will be won, the set tied. Against his own contorted will he calls back, “I really can’t be sure, Captain. It was a very nice shot. A centimetre long, I think, but I can’t be positive.”

  “It did look in from here, sir.”

  He watches Polat carefully. Both men stand motionless, like duellists awaiting a signal. “In that case, Captain, we’ll replay the point.” Kaya lobs a ball across the net so Polat can repeat his serve. Without moving, Polat catches the ball off the bounce, then looks down and inspects it, as if hoping to find evidence of some kind—a speck of baseline paint?—and suddenly this angers the colonel very much.

  “Captain, I believe your shot was long, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. You may repeat your serve now.” And good luck to you, thinks Kaya, who means to show no mercy the rest of the way. But Polat is still studying the ball in his hand. No. It’s his watch he’s looking at, again.

  “Sir, it’s already 1300 hours.”

  “That’s fine, Captain—Ali will tell Ömer to hold lunch for us.”

  “If it’s all right with you, sir, I think I will miss lunch today.”

  “Miss lunch?” Kaya can’t imagine why anyone would consider doing such a thing. For a moment he forgets about the past forty minutes: “It’s cannelloni today, Captain! And pastries and grappa for dessert. Are you unwell?” In fact, Polat appears to be on the verge of heatstroke. Maybe he really should stop playing. It’s unusually hot for mid-November and Polat stubbornly declines to drink water between games.

  “I’ve just realized there’s some—there’s a task, sir, I’ve left undone.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you!” Ha ha.

  “Request permission to be dismissed, sir.”

  “From a tennis game?”

  “It’s 1300 hours, sir.”

  “Captain Polat…”

  “Perhaps we could finish the match tomorrow, sir.”

  “Set, not match. We can finish it now. It won’t take long.”

  Silence. Polat still hasn’t moved. He seems to be staring hard into the net.

  At last Kaya exhales, lets the racquet droop in his hand.

  “All right, Captain, go ahead.”

  —

  Kaya has a swim and a shower and by 1340 is dressed and at the table on the club’s shaded veranda. The smells of garlic and basil from the kitchen are marvellous, but when the cook, Ömer, brings out the cannelloni, Kaya can’t savour it in his usual way. Timur Ali is dining with him. This used to be an occasional arrangement—one with which Ali has never seemed fully at ease—but since Polat’s arrival, Kaya has had Ali dine with them daily. After a week or so, Kaya realized he was insisting on this routine mainly to tweak Polat, who thought it irregular and improper. Better yet, Polat is intimidated by the old orderly, who glares at him with bloodshot eyes, mouth hidden by his moustache, whenever the captain asks Kaya too many questions. (Ali himself probably finds Kaya too lax but is of a generation where obedience to a superior is unquestioned.)

  Without Polat here to badger Kaya, the meal passes in silence, and slowly. The non-drinking Ali is no talker and today Kaya is preoccupied. A few steps off across the chrome-bright sand, the sea appears stuporous, unmoving in the heat, not a wisp of wind. At least when Polat is here, Kaya can enjoy the sport of trying to make him laugh, to win him over. As Kaya glances at Polat’s empty chair and unused place setting it hits him: he has finally encountered someone who is immune to his charm.

  “Efendi?” Ali clears his throat. “Another glass of retsina?”

  Kaya is gazing into space and seeing again the net stretched between Polat and him, at the end of their unfinished set—Polat staring into the mesh. And it hits him. The fence. The fucking fence. His intuition seems both unlikely and overwhelming. He whips his mobile phone from the front pocket of his beach shirt and tries Polat’s number. No answer. It’s 14
30. He pockets the phone and stands up. Ali is already on his feet.

  “Efendi?”

  “Ask Ömer not to serve the pastries and grappa yet. I’m afraid the captain may have gone into Varosha.”

  INVASION

  Sleeping for longer stretches now, able to pass a wild olive tree without flashing back to the exterminated grove, he has been exploring farther out in the dead zone. He’s chaperoned by Stratis and Roland or Kaiti, along with the dog, who on these outings drops his goofy village demeanour and assumes a kind of heraldic dignity, trotting tall, head erect, eyes hooded and hunterly. Elias still uses the cane, though he could probably gimp around without it. He has come to like it, though. Above all, in preparation for his next attempt, he must maintain an impression of near-helplessness.

  A few blocks north of the village a small orchard grows: not of olive trees but almond, cherry, and pistachio. At the time of the invasion this was a traffic island in the middle of a large roundabout, with a small fountain built over what had once been a well, and is now again a well, sheltered among the trees. Beyond it stands a grand-columned neoclassical structure, like an enormous crypt. In the stone of the pediment over the tall wooden doors, an inscription in Greek: LIBRARY OF THE PEOPLE. No other village in the world can boast of such a facility, Roland jokes, and he promises to take Elias in soon. When Elias asks how they keep out the rats, he says, “The place is marble and well-made. In the first weeks after the invasion, some Turkish troops stole old volumes and manuscripts, and rats afterward found their way in and ruined some books. But the looters stopped coming in this far after one of them…well, he perished.”

  “You mean with Stratis’s help?” Elias asks.

  Silence, then Roland says, “At any rate, all damage from vermin ceased when Myrto became ‘librarian,’ so to speak, on her arrival.”

  One day, after assessing his feet and ankle, Kaiti declares deadpan that it’s time to go shopping. She sets out briskly and pulls ahead—like most small women, she’s a fast walker—while the twins trot on either side of him, peering up at him gravely like munchkin jailers. Both take after Kaiti except for their eyes, which are almost black and set close together. Both have hair to their shoulders. Sergeant Stratis and the dog shadow them for a few blocks, then vanish. The man might be hovering nearby or he might have gone foraging, snare-lining, water-hauling. He knows, of course, that Elias still can’t get far. Maybe he thinks he no longer means to.

  Between the plaza and the village is a warren of narrow streets lined with the remains of shops—a dystopian bazaar, oddly beautiful, the storefronts overgrown with creepers, bougainvillea, jasmine, wild grapes. There are shoe stores, souvenir shops, cafés, clothing boutiques, a hand laundry, and two used bookstores from which all stock has long since been moved to the library. In the ruin of a menswear store Elias chooses a few shirts from the rack, their shoulders dandered with dust, then a few pairs of Bermuda shorts and cigarette-leg khakis, like things he dimly remembers his father wearing. Also an extra-large sports jacket with padded shoulders (they all have them). The twins are trying on fedoras and straw hats far too big for them and standing in front of the warped, blotchy mirror making faces and giggling. Kaiti watches with maternally amused eyes, then some worry eclipses her face, cleaving a line between her brows.

  “They do seem to like it here,” he says in Greek, meaning both Varosha and the store. “How does this look on me?”

  “You must ask a wife if you want flattery.”

  “Marriage must work differently over here.”

  The left corner of her mouth lifts, just. He gets a glimpse of white teeth. Does it count as a smile? He has not yet been able to make her laugh.

  They pass through another gaping entrance into a men’s footwear store. It smells like a crawlspace. A rat scutters out of sight. The uppers of leather and canvas shoes have all been eaten away, but the rats have left some vinyl tennis shoes and deck shoes undamaged. Time has discoloured them from white to dirty cream. Kaiti unlids a plastic bin of socks, also underwear, saying, “Oriste—take what you need.” He picks out a few pairs of dark dress socks, then stands holding a pair of white, bikini-style briefs in front of his face. They look like a joke gift. He hears Kaiti chuckle and he looks over: actually she’s watching the twins, who are playing in the dust, making a trail of hoofprints with the cloven forms of shoetrees.

  “All right, that’s enough,” she tells them in Greek. “This mummy dust might make you sick.”

  “Do they ever get bored?” Elias asks quietly, so they won’t hear.

  “Now and then, of course. But the village is all they know. As for myself…” She trails off.

  “What?”

  “At first I thought only of the things and people that we…that I was protecting them from. Now, I think more often of what they’re missing. Even the less healthy things, the TV, the junk food. I miss those things too.”

  “Why did you come here? I mean, how did you even…”

  She regards him as if he has forgotten his place—or has the question simply startled her?

  “Ah, right,” he says. “I’m not allowed to ask.”

  “I might choose to tell you sometime.” Silence, then she blurts out, “What happened to you in the war?”

  “Am I being interrogated?”

  “Hardly—I have no way to force you to answer.”

  “You could tell me your story first.”

  “If I wished to.” She looks back at the twins, now watching her and Elias and trying to hear. “Go ahead,” she tells them, “make more of your beast tracks.”

  “Devil tracks!” they cry back at her.

  “Why not just let me leave,” he says softly, “instead of forcing my hand? I promise I’ll do nothing to hurt you out there—you and the villagers.”

  “If you went back now, people would know you’d survived in here and they could find out about us.”

  “Hurting you—you all—or anyone—it’s the last thing that—”

  “And Kaya would be compromised too. No—neither he nor we could allow it. I’m sorry, Trif.”

  “I’m not asking if it’s allowed.”

  “Your Greek gets clearer by the day.” Ghost-green eyes still locked onto his face, holding him there, she calls out, “Endaksi, enough games for now! Time to go home.”

  Returning with their loot they pass through concentric zones of lessening chaos, as if walking back in time to the prewar Varosha. She sees him to the gate and bids him good afternoon—“Kala apoyevma”—with a stiff, dated sort of formality, though her gaze is less reserved now, perhaps even sympathetic. The twins take her hands and the three walk back up the street toward their house.

  In the courtyard Roland and Neoklis sit under the pistachio tree playing chess. As Elias comes in, Roland lifts a hand with the index finger raised: One moment, I’ve something to tell you. Neoklis is squirming in his seat, puffing and grunting, his hairless face, just above the wooden board, shining with sweat, his shirt pockets stuffed with the pieces he has seized. In fact, he’s a prodigy. Roland sighs, sits back and grins broadly in his beard. He picks up his king and hands it over.

  “Na paiksoume pali?” Neoklis asks. We play again?

  “Certainly!” Roland says, then turns toward Elias. “Trif, I’ve some news.”

  “Eylül?” he asks. Roland’s reports on her condition have grown infrequent as Turkish Cypriot radio has moved on to other stories. But now, he tells Elias, there’s an update: “Although unconscious still, she is showing more hopeful improvements.”

  As Elias takes in the news, Roland studies his face. “Why, Trif, you look as relieved as if she…Or is it simply that you yourself are improving? As you came in and I saw you from the corner of my eye”—he says it like coroner—“little sign of any limp! Perhaps now we must watch you more closely?”

  “Or have Stratis break my other ankle.”

  Roland cocks his head pensively, as if considering the proposition, but then says, “To be hon
est I would be quite sad now if you also were to leave us.”

  “Trif is back!” Neoklis announces in Greek, as if only now realizing.

  “Who else is leaving?” Elias asks.

  Roland smiles unhappily. “Pios kserei?” he says—Who knows?—as always switching to Greek when he wants to equivocate.

  —

  The feeling is strange, almost painful, like a collapsed lung re-inflating: a gutted heart starting to refill.

  In some ways he will be almost sorry to leave. This pocket in the ruins of a dead city seems more and more like a singularity outside time, so that past events out there beyond the mouth of the wormhole are coming to feel, by light of day, like hallucinations. Another few months and they might seem to belong in the bio or obituary of a stranger—though by then he will be back out there and dealing with the fallout of the real events. For one thing, now that the past month has fully estranged him from his comrades, he feels ready to testify at the inquiry.

  Afternoons he passes out in the narcotic heat, to the alpha-wave hum of the crickets, and these sleeps are unshattered. Then last night again he slept through until dawn. He woke to the throttled squawk of the rooster from the Tombazos’ roof. Something has been done to the bird to keep it from crowing. Smells of coffee and blooming cyclamen wafted in over the transom with a pleasantly cool breeze. Mid-November. He pulled on Bermuda shorts and flip-flops and unblocked the door—a ladder-back chair tilted against it to hold off Neoklis—then limped out into the courtyard and picked an orange. Through the open door of room seven, the “kitchen,” he got a glimpse of Stratis boiling Greek coffee over the two-burner camp stove.

  In room four the smell of the long drop is strong but today for the first time it reminds him more of summer-camp canoe trips than army pit latrines. On a wide shelf under a spotty mirror, small wrapped bars of hotel soap are stacked beside a jug of water, a wash basin, and a bowl of the tooth powder the villagers make out of baking soda and cloves. Two pairs of his preposterous briefs are drying on a line by the window, where he hung them last night. He shaves with a straight razor that looks like a stage prop.