The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  “It’s about Eylül, isn’t it?”

  “When I awoke from my nap, I turned on the radio. Something made me do so. I don’t know why. I don’t believe in such things. The news is bad.”

  “But you said she was conscious again—she was improving!”

  “Ja, and they released her today. She was run down outside the hospital.”

  “What? Is she…?”

  “Killed, I’m afraid.”

  “She’s what?”

  “Killed!” Kilt, it comes out again, and somehow this enrages Elias.

  “You mean killed?”

  “So they are saying.”

  “Oh, fuck.” Blood roars in Elias’s brow. “Fuck!” He pounds his fist into the mattress. “But this can’t have been…”

  “An accident? Hardly. Her father was with her, crossing the street. He, too.”

  “He too what?”

  “Was killed.”

  Stop saying fucking “kilt,” he thinks. “So, this has to mean…” He can’t sort it into sound, but he knows.

  “She meant to speak out,” Roland says, “and tell what really happened. Perhaps she already has. If so, we will soon know, unless they intend to silence too anyone whom she told. You see, we were wrong. We didn’t think she would be willing to say what really—”

  “You were wrong. I said nothing. I’m not surprised. Not by what she did, not by what they did. This is what they do. And she…”

  Roland seems to be waiting for him to continue. When he doesn’t, Roland says, “You speak as if you knew her well, but you didn’t. None of us could have known.”

  “I could have helped somehow, maybe.”

  “No.”

  “Was this Kaya’s work—could he have been involved?”

  “I think no, unless I have been very wrong about him. Certainly he loves his position and would do much to preserve it, but I believe he has a good heart—no violence in his soul—I’ve seen it! But, I have been mistaken in such things before. About myself once, even.”

  “We should pay him a visit.”

  “Don’t be foolish, Trif! I’m sorry we were wrong—wrong about Eylül—but we did our best.”

  “That’s what they told us, in the desert, after what happened.” The comparison is dubious but his memory of the debriefing returns anyway. It was an accident, these things happen, they hadn’t meant to kill civilians, only to confront any bad guys and eliminate their hideout—and why were those villagers letting bad guys hide there in the first place? (Maybe because they had no choice, were caught in the middle, between the fanatical and the ignorant, like villagers in any war.)

  “Even if Kaya wasn’t involved, he’ll know what happened, won’t he?”

  “I expect he will arrange a meeting, before the day ends, to formally break the news.” Roland leans forward a little, as if meaning to enter the room, but his feet stay planted on the threshold—bare feet, very white, hairless, splayed. Elias has never seen these feet before. Roland looks down at them now as if astounded to find them bare.

  “Lipameh poli,” he says, backing away and easing the door shut.

  Eventually Elias cracks the shutters. Something has changed—a breeze out of the north. It chills his bare chest and he can’t seem to move or think. The wind brings down from Famagusta the faint harmonic trills of a muezzin summoning the faithful to prayer. From the flat roof of the Tombazos’ house he has counted seven minarets, their spires just visible in the distance. The prayer call is likely a recording, not a living voice. His own reverent vocals seem bogus in retrospect—never quite looking at Kaiti while in fact singing to her, as if a song might convince her to stay. Lines from that Doors song about stealing another kiss, a kiss before unconsciousness…The few objects in here, bed, chair, faded Turkish carpet the size of a prayer rug, water jug and tumbler, piss-pail, candles, a few books, the guitar, all absorb his numb gaze with a terrible stillness and detachment. The prayer call fades. Roland’s black-boxed volume of Levantine history—that chronicle of atrocities, which Elias has finally been reading—squats on the sill like an IED. With bitter clarity he seems to see how all the ways that people have tried to organize and justify themselves, to sedate their fears, to make sense of life and death, have failed.

  Imagine being able to pray.

  The night of his own father’s death, Elias in jeans and T-shirt lay down beside him, impossible, two men of their size lying side by side on a hospital bed. Elias’s aunt Roula was asleep in a chair, and his stepmother, now separated from Papa, would be coming back later (too late, as it happened) with Elias’s half-siblings. He worked his arm gingerly between the pillow and Papa’s hog-bristle nape so that the man’s head could rest on his shoulder. That ear and his nostrils were filled with whiskers, all the openings between him and the world growing in. He couldn’t speak anymore but if you addressed him he seemed to hear—he would close his fist around your fingers. Naturally, a fist, his final gesture. And earlier when Elias, dutifully sticking to the deathbed script, had forced out the half-lie, “I love you,” the man had opened one faded eye and whispered, “I know…I wish I could say it too.”

  That evening in the courtyard nobody speaks to him about Eylül, though of course they all know. This silence could be discretion, but to him, now, it feels like indifference. He seems to be a captive again, or at least an outsider. Everything seems altered. Argos keeps jerking around to gnaw a raw patch at the base of his tail. The twins, in puffy wool cardigans, fling marbles in the dirt, their high voices vexed and aggressive. They glance now and then at their mother, who has a heavy cold and keeps blowing her nose into a rag. In profile she’s almost plain, her features a stranger’s. She and Stavroula are arguing in a whisper, slangy Cypriot Greek. Is the old woman trying to convince her to stay? Elias realizes he has hardly thought of Eylül in days and suffers a pang of guilt, as if his thoughts might have formed a kind of protective field. Now the twins chant, “Stop talking, stop talking, stop talking!” and Kaiti twists in her chair and scolds, “Kopse to!” Myrto and Stratis too seem pensive, riled into sidelong glances at the twins, as if tonight there’s something uniquely foreign about them, Turkosporoi, Turkish seed. Elias—unsure he won’t explode at the slightest provocation, real or imagined—is careful not to look at Stratis at all.

  After dinner a chilly drizzle starts and disperses them to their separate spaces. By candlelight Elias unwraps and examines his ankle. Still too soon, and yet now, again, it’s clear to him: somehow he must flee and whistle-blow, in the way that Eylül herself meant to do. The inquiry might start at any time, and now there’s a second army he needs to embarrass. But the rain is thickening on the roof and shutters. Tonight is impossible. Tomorrow somehow. For now, rest. But when he falls asleep—rapidly after the wine and two sedatives—the olive grove is waiting for him, like a reserved room in hell. Nice to have you back, Master Corporal. The rerun won’t let him slip lower into real sleep, though it does permit him to wake intermittently in a glaze of freezing sweat. Eyes open, eyes closed, it’s the same shuttered dark, with the sound of the autumn rain. He stays awake.

  When he doesn’t emerge by late morning, Roland appears in his doorway and squints into the gloom, as if wondering if he’s still here. It seems Kaya has released a statement: the journalist’s last words to him, in hospital, were that she was not raped. She insisted the soldiers must have been honestly mistaken in thinking the young Greek was assaulting her. She and he were simply chatting on the beach. However, not wishing to impugn the integrity of four brave, well-meaning men (whom she fully forgave for the accidental shooting), and given that the Greek was unfortunately deceased, Bayan Şahin had no intentions of speaking publicly. But Colonel Kaya—according to his statement—felt that now, under the circumstances, her words should be known to all.

  “He’s quite a dancer, our colonel,” Roland says. “He knows people will understand him to mean that she did intend to speak out—why else would she have been run over?—and so he puts it in su
ch a way that she gains credit for her courage and honesty; you, the ‘Greek,’ will be posthumously excused; and he protects himself by not subjecting the army to…any exposures or embarrassment.”

  “People will know she was killed on purpose?”

  “In North Cyprus, certainly. Many in Turkey as well. But I doubt anyone will dare challenge the story. Trif, may I bring you something to eat? Stavroula has picked some soft figs from her tree. May I open your shutters? Why not join Takkos and me in the kitchen for sweet coffee? It’s warmer in there.”

  Elias says he feels ill, might sleep a little more. That’s a good one.

  He cracks a shutter for light, opens the top of the Aspirin bottle—five left. Then he unscrews the vial of sedatives and tips the remaining pills into a hollow in his pillow. Just four. Five and four may be too few to dull the pain fully, but enough to get him to the beach, a half-hour hobble, unlike the much-longer trek southward through the ruins and the hinterlands to the Green Line. His plan, if you can call it that, is to swim for hours south along the beach and that parade of dark hotels. A long swim, but he’s a solid plodder, naturally buoyant, rarely getting cold.

  He sits and watches the light slowly wane and sometime after dark, when the north wind brings back the summons of the muezzin for the bedtime prayer, he bolts the pills. Listens to the slowing trudge of the pulse in his skull until he’s certain the village is asleep, even Stratis. (Lovers sleep so much better than soldiers.) He leaves a note on the bed: Roland, thank you for having me. No irony intended. I’ve come to like my prison colony. Maybe love is the word. I will keep the secret safe. Trif.

  In his flip-flops, shorts and undershirt, and with the cane, he goes out into the sodden courtyard. By the door, as on his first full day here, they’ve left a meal under the old room-service cover. At the sight of it, his eyes sting and blur. Argos has been nosing at it. Now the dog peers up at him, backs away and then—ignoring Elias’s whispered pleas to stay behind—follows him out through the gate. Stratis has been leaving it unlocked so that Myrto can come and go at night. Besides, who would expect Trif, still crippled, and now seemingly contented, to flee again?

  A drizzling mist. Famagusta fills the clouds with enough light that he can see his way. He limps through the dead zone’s serene desolation, increasingly stoned, the drugs hitting him harder than he’d foreseen, but then he has eaten and slept little in the past twenty-four hours. The plaza under its parasitic green cladding could be a lost Mayan city. Near the spot where he first glimpsed the dog, he stops and begs it to go back, even tossing a few small stones and saying, “Leave me alone!” Argos easily dekes the stones. Elias pushes on, the dulled pain in his ankle like the fading echo of a piercing sound. Argos follows. Elias stops, turns, lifts his fist, attempts to curse the dog—that earnest, fruit-bat face—and finds himself sobbing. Finally he walks onward without looking back.

  He crosses John F. Kennedy, enters a chasm between hotels, plods zombie-like over rubble that he should be able to feel through the flip-flops but can’t. Perfect. He leans the cane against the repaired fence and climbs it without pausing for a look, slicing his fingers and calves on the barbed wire. Vertigo flings him sideways. His ear and shoulder bury into the sand on the far side—no pain. At least the fence has stopped the dog, who is whining with all his heart a few feet away. Elias gets up, steps out of his flip-flops, slouches toward the sea. Intense feeling of being observed, though not by the dog. The hermit Paris, at last? For the first time he wonders: could Paris have been watching while he and Eylül were having sex on the beach, not far from here? Her body so alive beneath him.

  The water burns like jellyfish stings in his cuts but the sea is warm, warmer than the air, and he wades in without stripping, some modesty about his body being found nude if he doesn’t make it, though they say if you drown the sea strips you anyway. You’re not going to drown. He starts swimming south. Soft rain dimples the wavelets and kisses his cheek as he turns his head up to breathe. A dog is barking in a dream and he treads water and looks back. Pale form in the shallows. How did he get past the fence? Stay there. Good boy. Elias sets out again but realizes he’s being shadowed along the beach, so he turns eastward and swims straight out to sea. Ahead now, no telling where sky and water meet. To his left the lights of the Palm Beach Hotel, of Famagusta, of a carrier ship outbound from the port and lit up like a casino. He turns south again, navigating by a few lights to the southwest that must be Kaya’s beach club. No sign of the dog. He swims steadily but keeps veering east, into open sea, probably because his right arm is stronger, his left ankle useless. Several times he corrects course. Then, for a while, the drugs metastasizing as if he has downed a dozen, not a few, his awareness lags and he crawls on, still warm and growing warmer, limbs pleasantly emptied, his rhythm hypnotic, the soft swell rocking him.

  When he looks up for the lights of Kaya’s club, expecting to be abreast of them now or beyond, they’re still off to the southwest and seemingly farther than before. Much farther. He has drifted a long way out, or a current has caught him. No idea how much time has passed. He turns southward again but keeps losing his bearings. He’s confused but too drugged for panic, exhausted but too drugged for pain. Trying to rouse himself, he starts working at the water, urging his limbs to wake and fight, and he keeps at it, but over and over the coaching words in his head grow garbled and fade, until, quite suddenly, utterly, his will too seems exhausted. The Green Line is just a figment, a border on a fantasy novel’s whimsical map. The shore itself now seems too far to go—another fiction. Your plan is hopeless, your judgment shit, his father whispers into his ear. Go ahead, say it. It doesn’t matter. He lets himself slip under, opens his eyes: in the blackness his body radiates blue-green light, maybe a pre-death vision, pure psychedelia, then a part of him wakens: it’s bioluminescent plankton, tracing the paths of his slow limbs in photons.

  Something the size of a large child flashes past. His stinging eyes open wider. White missiles in sheaths of glittering light are bolting around him, their wakes fading behind them like comet tails. Muffled squeaking, a chorus of eerie moans. From his ankle the gauze wrap has unravelled to trail away downward. Beneath it, small fish in a dense school are swooping and banking while the dolphins herd them and pick off outliers. He sinks deeper while he stares. He clambers back to the surface, gasping. Around him the swell churns with bottlenose dolphins, one and now another breaching, snorting jets from their blowholes, a sardine stink in the air. Round eyes and rubbery, clownish grins. Helplessly he grins back. Everyone has heard these stories, how pods of dolphins will gather around drowning men to guide or carry them back to land.

  Something slams into his midriff like a tackle on a rugby field. He doubles over in the water, clutching himself. Before he can interpret the pain he’s buffeted again, in the ribs under his arm, and this blow revives other pains, his barbed-wire cuts scorching. He gapes for breath. A glancing blow against his right thigh, powerful backwash, a maelstrom of light swirling. A dolphin scuds past his belly and the truth gets through to him. They’re attacking, they’re trying to drive him off, maybe hurt or even kill him. Dolphins never do that, he thinks, though they do attack sharks this way—so he has heard somewhere—so maybe they do kill people, who can say? Who would ever know? A dolphin torpedoes straight toward his chest, swerves away at the last moment. He’s defenceless, can barely shift his limbs, and maybe he shouldn’t bother, maybe this is what he deserves. Then suddenly he’s just pissed off. Stop it, bullshit, leave me alone! He turns back toward the island, who knows how distant, the western horizon black now, darker than the clouds above, a few stars showing in a swath of clear sky mounting over the Cypriot coast.

  He breaststrokes, head up and chilled, afraid of being struck again, his belly and crotch cruelly exposed, the dolphins electric around him. A few strokes ahead, one breaches and blows. Its long grin now seems taunting and smug. “Fuck you,” he gasps, another personal first, who has ever told a dolphin to fuck off? One soar
s under his belly in a knifing flash and the tail fluke scrapes him. He feels for his belly as if it might be slit open, spilling entrails into the sea. He puts his face under to check: his glowing hands are a stranger’s burning after a phosphorus bombing.

  Abruptly the seas are emptied, lifeless. Awake though heavily stoned he flops westward, instructing his arms to move, like limbs gone to sleep, pins and needles. His legs and feet sink over and over until he remembers to instruct them too. Ahead and to his right, the lights of Famagusta and the Palm Beach Hotel don’t seem to move; the fainter lights of Kaya’s club grow no clearer. Maybe, despite his efforts now, the currents are still tugging him east toward the coasts of Syria and Lebanon. Or he is dreaming it all. Yet some pocket of his consciousness seems aware and focused.

  Overhead the cloud wall like a stadium roof is hatching open. The Milky Way appears, a glowing Gulfstream. Time and again he loses track of himself in a twilight torpor through which his body keeps crawling west. […………..] Now the warm lights of Kaya’s club do seem nearer. They’re straight ahead. The sky less dark. When he tries to look behind, to check if dawn is approaching, a wave slaps him in the face and he sinks and flails back up, coughing brine. He tries to swim but his limbs are too cold, cramping, his torso shivering. A dog yaps out of the gloom. He struggles to see ahead. The salt blinds him. He tries to sidestroke but his dead legs keep dragging him down. He’s finished, but he keeps on trying, goes on ordering his limbs to function. As he sinks again, the irony hits him—he’s drowning himself in perfect accordance with the official story and will now helpfully wash up on the beach.

  But he stops sinking. Though his feet are numb he seems to feel or sense something pushing up at them from below. Sand, pale sand. He’s touching bottom. He wobbles upright, arms outstretched like a teetering drunk. His head and the top of his chest are above surface, chilled by a breeze out of the clear west, where Venus is setting. His chest bare. At some point in the night his undershirt has disappeared, his shorts too. He’s still a ways out from the beach, Argos barking but invisible. A white building that must be Kaya’s club looms in the twilight, two windows aglow.