“So he’s ‘the Greek’ now.”
“Ethnically Greek.”
“They knew it was no rape. They knew I liked him. They followed us out of the bar.”
“But—might they not have been concerned, and for good reason? That’s what they’ll claim, and the nation will accept it. The Greek—the Canadian—he was a big man.”
“So you’ve seen his body?”
“No. The men all said so. And I saw a photo of him in uniform, on the internet. Ms. Şahin, if you do mean to tell your full version—I have to be completely frank—I fear you’ll be putting yourself in danger.”
“Are you threatening me…you too?”
“Of course not!” Kaya is aghast. “That idiot threatened you?”
“It was nothing specific.”
“When was he here?”
“Around noon.”
So where has he been since noon? (102 and 142/84.) Kaya leans in closer to her, his hands on his knees. “When the captain reports to me—I expect he must be at the club now—I will speak to him severely, but I’m afraid he might have talked to others by now. Told them what you mean to do.” Gone over my head, Kaya means.
“Some people don’t have the luxury of not saying what they know to be true,” she says.
“You mean him, Polat?”
“I mean myself. I couldn’t forgive myself.”
It’s clear Kaya has underestimated her, as he underestimated Polat in a different way. Not everyone is like him, Kaya—happy to let the world just drift along the way it is. For a moment he looks helplessly inward, in a way he is unused to and finds deeply unpleasant, then hears himself say, “I don’t suppose there’s much I couldn’t forgive myself for.” Now the feeling that gripped him just before the kiss steals over him again. As if all the world’s suffering were concentrated in a single sleeper, whom only he, Erkan Kaya, could save. What nonsense. She’s implacably sincere. He can’t help or protect her. Still, he tries: in a shaky, almost pleading voice he says, “Would it make any difference if I told you I could likely arrange for…considerably greater compensation, if you’d just…”
Silence.
“I didn’t think so.”
“For me,” she says, “one good thing’s come from this. I went through withdrawal in the coma. I mean cigarettes. I’ve finally quit.”
“Good, good,” he says quietly. (88 and 136/79.)
Her eyes drift toward the other, empty bed. Voice now whittled to a whisper she says, “Nurse told me they took away my roommate. Yesterday. She had a crisis. Died in the operating room. Odd to think we slept side by side for weeks…such intimacy, in a way…yet I’ll never know her.”
How I wish I could tell her Trifannis is alive.
“You’re worried about the kiss, aren’t you?”
“What?” Momentarily Kaya means to lie, as he did to Polat in the other ward—you just imagined it all!—but she is speaking again:
“Don’t worry, I’ll say nothing. Not about that.”
Two raps on the door. It swings inward. The head nurse’s blushing face. “Forgive me, Albay, but our patient…”
“I know—I’m tiring her. We’re almost through.”
“Of course, Albay.” She withdraws and leaves the door ajar.
“You see,” Eylül whispers (he’s relieved now at the weakness of her voice), “I’m almost grateful.” He has to wait as she goes through the laborious mission of getting more water into her. “The loneliness…once I was conscious, it was hard. Hard beyond belief! No one I knew was here for the first days of it. You can’t imagine. I don’t know why you did it…”
“Nor do I, I swear. Forgive me, please.”
“But I felt that that man…he knew I was conscious.”
“I didn’t, I’m afraid.”
“As if he was whispering in my ear, ‘You’ll live!’ ”
“I think, maybe, in a way I was.”
“And then took no other liberties.”
“Of course not!”
After a few seconds Kaya adds, “Please—think carefully about everything I’ve said.”
“I’ve made my decision, Colonel.”
“At least say nothing yet to your father! Not to mention the media—I gather you don’t mean to talk to them?”
“I’ll break this story in my own way. As for Baba…no. He’d try to stop me too. Poor man.”
“I will need to take steps to protect you.”
A corner of her mouth barely lifts. This atrophied smile—is she simply exhausted (her chapped eyelids have grown heavy, her hands lie flattened) or is she mocking him? “I know you mean to be gallant, Colonel, but I don’t want the army’s help.”
“Mine, not the army’s!”
“I have to rest now.”
“Of course.”
(71 and 118/72.)
“I’ll be back.”
Leaving, he pulls his sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and slides them on firmly.
—
When he and Ali arrive back at the club in the deepening dusk, no Polat. Ömer emerges from the kitchen in his apron and a chef’s hat that looks like a huge puff pastry. He hands Kaya a Scotch on the rocks and says the captain arrived by Jeep not long after Kaya’s departure. “It’s odd, sir—you must have barely missed him on the beach.”
“Where is he now?”
“His flight to Ankara departs any time. But he left this for you.” Ömer draws a small, square envelope from his apron pocket.
Kaya trades his emptied glass for the envelope and walks away, heels clapping on the tiles as he tears the envelope open. He sits at the bar under the large, smirking portrait of Atatürk. On army stationery, a handwritten note, the ink black and heavy, as if Polat has gone over every letter twice:
Dear Sir
If you are reading this note I was unable to report directly to you. Forgive me. I suspect that by the time I arrive you will be at the hospital visiting the journalist and I must leave soon for Ankara. As you know I am being transferred to General Özel’s command on the Syrian border. I am very pleased. I am grateful for any role you may have played in this transfer. As you know I was to have reported to you after my flight arrived but I decided to stop at the hospital on my way so as to check on the journalist. To my surprise I found that she had recovered somewhat and was able to talk. I spoke to her briefly. It was distressing for reasons you are probably aware of by now. For reasons I think you will appreciate I then went directly to HQ near the hospital and spoke to Colonel Nurettin and several others before proceeding to my quarters to collect my belongings. I think the officers I consulted will be in touch with you to discuss the matter. Of course this all took quite a bit of time and hence my delay. I did consider calling you but felt it too informal under the circumstances and also wished to better organize my thoughts.
Perhaps after the insurgents are eliminated on the border I could be transferred back to your command as I might be able to assist you further in securing the perimeter of the Restricted Zone and ensuring it is not being violated in any way. Colonel Nurettin may now have some concerns of his own in this regard and may wish to discuss them with you.
I remain your loyal captain and loyal above all to the Army of the Kemalist Republic and to the Republic itself,
(Captain) Aydin Cingiz Polat
First thing the next morning, Kaya reaches the always-nervous, careful Colonel Nurettin, by landline to Famagusta HQ, and suggests that he, Kaya, be allowed to handle the situation with Ms. Şahin. Nurettin says he has already referred the matter to Brigadier General Hüseyin in Nicosia, so it’s out of his hands now, but in the meantime Kaya should certainly go on trying to persuade the woman to say nothing, which naturally would be the ideal outcome. General Hüseyin has said that his agents will be visiting her, possibly here, and certainly in Istanbul once she has recovered. Pressure will be brought to bear, albeit with delicacy, since clumsy overtures might simply provide her with more material for her inventions. (Delicacy, thinks Ka
ya; not something the army is known for.) The man adds that Captain Polat seems to be entertaining some rather unlikely notions regarding the Restricted Zone, but Nurettin realizes that he was recently ill. Still, Nurettin adds, Polat may be correct in feeling that the perimeter fence is in need of upgrades, so perhaps it is for the best that Kaya has now undertaken that project. Not that Nurettin means to interfere in any way, shape, or form; Famagusta is his responsibility, Varosha is Kaya’s.
Kaya returns to her that afternoon, and again the next day, and is stunned by how quickly she’s improving, filling out, her skin regaining a bit of colour. They talk for some time on both days, but he makes no progress, although she does seem to be warming to him a little, starting to enjoy their debate about the nature and value of truth, seeming to relish her own spirited rebuttals as she recovers her strength and wit. Kaya’s own interest in politics and ideas is slim, but discussing them with a woman keeps him engaged. Still, he’s forced to admit defeat. She is going to publish her version. All he can do is hope that if she is widely believed and the story explodes, goes international, the worst of the scandal will bypass him. (Things right themselves: there’s a decent chance that if he has to, he can focus blame on those who really deserve it, her attackers.) “Never mind, Colonel. The officers from north Nicosia who came this morning fared no better than you and amused me far less.” The head nurse, she adds, finally asked them to leave. Kaya warns her again that she must be careful and asks if he can accompany her to the airport when she goes. She seems tickled by the offer, as if it’s a proposition in disguise, but Kaya is truly worried. “No,” she says. “Thank you. Anyway, my father and sister are here now.” “Please,” Kaya says, “allow me!” But she says she will accept nothing from the army: not threats, not bribes, not protection.
He speaks finally to the head nurse—at least there’s someone around here that he can still charm and persuade—and makes her promise to give him a few hours’ notice before the patient is discharged.
“As you wish, Albay. I will not set foot off the ward.”
“Really? But you mustn’t put yourself out…”
“Not at all, sir! Bayan Şahin is very determined. It may be as soon as tomorrow.”
ACCIDENT
Her sister, Meltem, has gone ahead to fetch the rented car. Her father accompanies her out the hospital’s rear door. For his sake more than hers, she allows him to brace her by her left elbow—his hirsute little hand almost encircles it—while she with her right hand wields a nondescript, lightweight aluminum cane. This geriatric appurtenance ought to embarrass her but instead amuses her: since it’s temporary, she chooses to see it as a campily stylish prop and deploy it with a slight flourish. In every other way she feels helplessly unstylish, her skin jaundiced, lips flaking under the lipstick, skirt and blouse still baggy.
Her father suggested rolling her out to the car in a wheelchair, but she told him no, absolutely not—she will not be photographed in a wheelchair, and even slipping out this back way they might get ambushed by a few of the reporters who for three days have been trying to talk to her. If any are out here waiting, she will tell them politely, “Wait a bit longer.” The story is important ethically, politically, and for her career as well, and she wants to ensure that readers—liberals and reactionaries alike—are waiting for her version, full and unscooped.
As they emerge from under the awning, the late-morning sun greets her with a fanfare of light and she stops and looks upward, sneezes hard and feels it in the healed wound in her lower back, a centimetre right of her spine, the muscles there seizing.
“Eylül?”
“It’s all right, Baba.”
“Meltem will be here any moment.”
“See, nobody’s waiting, Baba—we fooled them.”
“I would not let them near you!” her father says from deep in his body, as always embroiling himself in a conflict that has not yet flared up and probably won’t. He has rammed a cigarette into his mouth and holds a quivering, gold-plated lighter under the tip. The last month has grizzled him further and deepened the crosshatching of lines in his nicotine-orange cheeks. He is shorter than she is, even now with her listing to the right over her cane.
Since regaining consciousness she weeps too readily and now at the back of her throat again she tastes tears: joy at the daylight on her skin, her father’s touch, her baby sister’s obvious pride, ten minutes ago, at being asked to go and fetch the car. All of it balled up with regret. Her article or book, for one thing, is going to shame and hurt Baba a great deal. This will not be the first time but it will be the worst. And still he will go on loving her, in his angry, ardent way. “Where is that Meltem?” He is forcing his voice up over the noise of the city, the heart-monitor beep-beep of distant worksite vehicles backing up and, to the right, somewhere along this side street of parked cars, the chug of an engine idling. A hundred metres farther up—on the avenue that meets this street at right angles—small cars are pelting along, horns bleating, as a policeman walks his scooter through the empty crosswalk. Probably it’s quiet here compared to Istanbul, but to her ears, after the hospital, the din is formidable.
“There, it’s all they had,” he says disgustedly. “You’ll sit in the front.”
A diminutive olive-green cube on wheels bucks to a stop along the curb across the street, in front of a shuttered cybercafé. Oddly, all of the storefronts across the street are shuttered, the sidewalks deserted. Meltem checks her hair in the rearview mirror and glances out the driver-side window with a cocky grin. Eylül and her father step off the curb. She plants the rubber stub of her cane on the sun-hot tarmac. It sticks a little as she pulls it up. From down the street comes a soul-shattering roar as a small delivery truck launches out from the curb and bears down on them. She tries to lurch forward, toward Meltem, whose mutely screaming face fills the closed window of the rental car, but her baba is tugging her backward, toward the curb, and they offset each other, stay frozen. Grunting “Idiot!”, surely at the driver, he swings Eylül in front of him to bring her onto his left side, away from danger. The truck—low sneering grille, high windshield, the fat, bearded driver in sunglasses and a prayer cap—looms huge as a train. The impact feels not like steel and glass but like the shockwave of an explosion. She is weightless for a moment that’s crowded with thoughts. The sun arcs overhead, the street rushes up to slam her back, though not her skull—something softer intervenes, some part of her baba. The smell of his cigarette still burning somewhere. A sound of vehicle doors flying open, almost in unison, shoes smacking the tarmac. Then Meltem, close by, sobbing Baba, Baba, Baba!, as if Eylül is not lying here too.
At the edge of a shrinking visual field, Kaya’s handsome face appears under his colonel’s cap. Beside him, a tall man who seems to be a moustachioed relic of Atatürk’s time. Kaya kneels closer, his hands open, fingers splayed out near her face, as if he means to finish her off, throttle her right here in broad daylight. “It was you,” she whispers. He is shaking his head—no, no!—his eyes for the first time completely naked. Those hands…maybe he wants to touch her but is afraid?
“They came out of nowhere,” a stranger’s voice is insisting, nasal, Ankara accent. “I couldn’t stop in time!”
Kaya looks back over his shoulder toward the sound, then rises out of sight. The crisp sound of a blow, then Kaya’s voice: “Assassin!”
“Baba,” she calls as the talking faces of paramedics occur in a shrinking circle of light. Then the faces are blacked out, though she can still hear their prattle. Then the import of the words is harder to make out, then it’s lost altogether and even the sounds are gone, along with the knowledge of her name, September—sunny month of black plums—and every part of her seems to vanish.
SEEKING LETHE
Every language has a word that expresses its meaning better, or more beautifully, than the equivalent word in any other tongue. Sometimes the beauty is conceptual, as in the case of the German Lebenslüge, or life-lie—the convenient if som
etimes fatal fiction around which you build a life, or a nation shapes its identity. Sometimes the beauty is acoustical. Listen to the Greek for winter, himonas. What other word so encloses the cold season in its very sounds? That long middle vowel echoes the moaning of north winds and evokes the O of Boreas’s blue-lipped, puffing mouth in those drawings in the upper corners of classical maps. And the guttural ch of the word’s opening: a harsh, raw, throat-clearing sound, the rasp of winter illness, colds and coughs. Then the dwindling hiss of the last syllable, snow blowing over a sheet of ice.
Or take the Turkish for friend, arkadash. You could say, “A beautiful-sounding word for a beautiful concept” and leave it at that, but there’s more. Friend, or even ami or philos, seems too brief, clipped, and uncomplicated to house all the qualities of a true friend. Arkadash is a roomier word, an atrium of rich sounds, the last syllable lingering in a shhhh that extends the life of the utterance, delaying the silence to follow. A secretive sound, too—hush, say nothing to the world about this friendship, it’s ours alone. And in the opening ark you might hear arc, the span and scope of a lifelong connection. But mainly you hear how the word prolongs itself, in the same way that love, never a great respecter of borders, extends beyond death.
—
Something hauls Elias out of his siesta. Roland stands in the doorway, his hatless head partly bowed, his features blacked out by the daylight behind him.
“I’m sorry to upset you, Trif,” he says in a guarded monotone that Elias instantly recalls from their first interview.
“Sorry to wake me, you mean.”
A limp quip, to appease the gods. Roland’s pale eyes, resolving out of his dark face, drill into Elias’s brain. For a moment he thinks, Kaiti—she isn’t waiting until the new year after all, she’s leaving today, has just left. Then his mind unclouds.
The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Page 15
