Something slides out across the water, straight toward him. He peers into the gloom. A silhouette morphs into the splashing head of a monstrous hippopotamus…then two figures kneeling, digging at the sea with short-handled shovels. No, paddles.
Two men paddling a Zodiac.
“Trif…Gott sei Dank, it’s you!” a man calls in Roland’s voice.
“Kalimera sas!” the other calls, heavy Turkish accent, Kaya. “You are alive in the end!”
The Zodiac slows, averts its bow, softly bumps Elias’s shoulder. Hot hands are on him, trying to drag him aboard. He can’t give them any help.
“He is cold as ice,” Roland says.
Thank you, Elias tries to say, but his lips are numb, teeth chattering too badly. And so they fish him out—mute and naked and cold as a corpse—and haul him back to shore.
TWO
The Green Line
He was collaborating with Death. You could have said that Death had a contract with the captain.
—CÉLINE, VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT
He who digs a grave for another falls into it himself.
—GREEK CYPRIOT PROVERB
Odd to consider that an action—say, the soft, involuntary squeezing of a trigger—is as irreversible a moment after it happens as it is a day later, a year, a century. Hard not to believe that as time passes, completed actions somehow solidify, are embedded ever deeper in history’s weave, just as the dead seem ever more dead with passing years. It’s an illusion. No momentary molten state separates the event from its registration in permanence. No penumbra, no quantum wobble. A nanosecond after the trigger is squeezed, the accident is a finished fact, and the dead will never be more dead than they are now.
ARKADASH
Kaya’s eyes are open under the hot, sodden towel that clings to his face and throat as solidly as wet plaster. The light of the morning sun rainbows the cotton’s tight weave, which he sees as through a microscope. He hears Ali stropping the razor. Nine crisp strokes, as always—three superstitious sets of three. Kaya half-dozes under the towel.
At 4:00 this morning the German, accompanied by that filthy, fawning dog, arrived at the club to ask Kaya to help find Elias Trifannis. After fishing him half-dead from the shallows, they helped him into a tubful of water as hot as they could draw it, then put him to bed in one of the guest rooms under every blanket Ali could dig up. The German had asked if, once he’d gone back to the village and reported the news, he might return to the club and stay until Trifannis awoke. Kaya agreed and asked Ali to install Roland in a room on his return, and also to send the maid and groundskeeper home for an early weekend when they arrived at 8:30.
Kaya went back to bed for a few hours and woke refreshed but uneasy in his heart. Was the Greek trying to drown himself, or simply to run away? When rescued, Trifannis could hardly speak, but his lipless glaring at Kaya said plenty. It’s unsurprising he would suspect Kaya was involved in Eylül Şahin’s “accident.” While Kaya assumes he will be able to convince the man otherwise, for now the animosity is upsetting. Kaya can’t bear to be on bad terms with anyone.
Ali shaves him daily on the club veranda—Kaya lounging in a deck chair while Ali perches on a stool—except for some mornings in January and February when the north winds keep them inside. Ali now unpeels the towel and Kaya sighs with forgetful contentment: the air’s bracing coolness on his cheeks, his skin feeling new-formed, flushed and fresh. The inside of his eyelids glow golden red as Ali lathers him with sandalwood soap, then gingerly scratches at the modest growth. He’s searching for whiskers as much as shaving them. Kaya has a curiously sparse beard and the daily shave is more a luxurious ritual than a grooming necessity.
Ali pinches and lifts Kaya’s nose, sealing the nostrils, while scraping downward over the skin between nose and upper lip—a curiously intimate proceeding. Above all, Kaya loves the icy freshness of the sapphire aftershave Ali pats onto his cheeks and chin and throat, a concoction of alcohol, menthol and Marmara frankincense that Kaya orders into the club from a gentlemen’s shop in Izmir.
“Teşekkürler,” he thanks Ali, who as always says nothing, only salutes. Kaya then declines a tempting offer of the Hürriyet and coffee. He really ought to go and see if Roland—who was out wandering the dead zone for half the night—is awake.
He taps on the man’s door. After a moment he tries the handle and finds, as expected, that Roland hasn’t locked it. He glides the door open. The bed is made, impeccably. The bathroom door is ajar, no sound or light from behind it.
Kaya pads up the hall to the next room, the largest, where four years ago the green-eyed Cypriote delivered her twins. For fear of waking Trifannis, he doesn’t knock, just opens the door gently. The room is warm and stuffy. Trifannis—assuming it’s not just some pillows arranged anthropomorphically under the blankets—is buried under the layers, no part of him showing. Roland, his back to the bed, sits in an armchair facing the closed window, the drapes parted just enough to give a view over the choppy, sun-bejewelled sea. Roland’s booted feet rest flat on the floor, his hands splayed on his knees. After a few seconds, as if wrenched out of a trance, he slowly turns toward Kaya. His beard looks combed but his hair is flared awry. “Good morning, Erkan.”
“Good morning! Why not you…” Kaya begins awkwardly in English, then switches to Turkish, which the German speaks more than passably: “Why don’t you go back to bed for an hour or two? I doubt he’ll wake up any time soon. Ali and I can keep an eye on him. Please—you look unwell, pale.”
“I thought I should be here when he wakes up. He will be confused, I think. You seem to be bleeding.”
Kaya touches his chin and examines his fingers.
“This might be the first time ever that Ali has cut me.”
“He must be weary too.”
“He’ll never say so…I considered having him fetch my doctor down from the city—for our patient here, not for this scratch!—but on the whole it seemed too great a risk. So many risks these days!” Kaya shakes his head. “Shall I have Ali bring you coffee and a croissant?”
Roland’s heavy brow purses, as if Kaya is posing a deep conundrum; then, almost shyly, he says, “To be honest, what I should really like is a hot shave. I used to go now and then to the Turkish barber in the village…the one where I was formerly stationed?”
“Of course!” Kaya says delightedly. “You must have a shave!”
“Mehmut, his name was.” Roland sounds a bit wistful. His Turkish is courtly, stiffly correct, his umlaut-sounds excellent.
“Why not go downstairs, so Ali can shave you on the veranda? I can stay here with our swimmer.”
“I think I ought to stay as well. Perhaps another time for the shave.”
“Nonsense! I’ll have Ali come up here now. And he’ll bring you a coffee.”
“Teşekkür ederim,” the German says, a tremor of frailty in his voice as if he, not the Greek, is the survivor.
—
After lunch, Kaya enjoys a digestif of marc and a cigarette while reading the paper up on the roof, which gets direct sunlight for another hour after it recedes from the beach. (He has considered dynamiting the two hotels that loom behind the club and steal its sun, but he fears the tennis court would be damaged, along with the little grove of tangerine trees that his children played in when they were small.) Turkish forces are now mustering along the Syrian frontier. Polat, he guesses, will be joining them at any hour. As for Eylül Şahin’s sad story, it’s fading already. Today, just a couple of lines. Yet another journalist’s accidental death in the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus…The Hürriyet knows, but can do little more than protest in this sardonic code.
Ali appears out of nowhere, as usual. “The Greek is conscious, efendi.”
“Is he?” Kaya sits up. “Very good. Please take him some water, coffee, and a croissant. No. Several croissants. And two soft-boiled eggs. Maybe a sliced tomato, a few black olives…” Though Kaya finished lunch less than an hour ago—baked ziti, Greek salad
, zabaglione—his mouth begins to water again as he improvises a hearty breakfast for the Greek. “And a good-sized wedge of halloumi, and a few fresh figs, and a tangerine. And American toast, with butter and honey. He’s a big man.”
Kaya hurries downstairs to the Greek’s room. The curtains are open. Roland has turned his chair around and is seated next to the bed. His pale beardlessness startles Kaya, even though Kaya personally witnessed the beard’s removal just two hours ago—and couldn’t help sensing that Ali appreciated having real whiskers to attack. The young Greek is propped up in bed, unshaven, puffy-eyed like a battered fighter. He’s examining his own torso and prodding a heart-sized, eggplant-purple bruise over his ribs. When he notices Kaya in the doorway his hand fists, falls onto the blankets. Kaya sighs; another interview with a hostile convalescent. In English he says, “I am pleased to see you so alive today. But what happens”—he points at the bruising—“there on your breast?”
“Were you involved in what happened to Eylül Şahin?”
“I’ve told him,” Roland says wearily in Turkish, “you’ve sworn you weren’t.”
“You must have known something!” the Greek says, seeming to slur his words, which makes him no easier to understand.
“I, know Miss Şahin? Never before I know this woman.”
Roland explains in Turkish what the young man actually meant.
“Ah, no, no, arkadash! Of course I know nothing! This death is sad to me also. I am sad that it must happen.”
“But it didn’t have to happen!”
Kaya looks to Roland; how small and ineffectual the ex-peacekeeper’s mouth appears now in his naked face! Roland says something to the Greek, then tells Kaya in Turkish, “He misunderstood. I’ve explained that you didn’t mean, ‘She had to die.’ ”
“ ‘Arkadash,’ ” the Greek says softly. “I forgot that word till now. What does it mean?”
“It is meaning ‘dear friend,’ ” Kaya says. “You know some Turkish?”
“Just that word.”
It hits Kaya who must have said it to him, and when. “Friend, believe me, I am so sorry. Also, I am angry toward…” He stops himself from saying Captain Polat.
“You’re not denying the army was involved?’
Kaya looks at Roland, who translates. With a fleck of impatience Kaya says, “Tell him I am truly sorry, but there’s not a thing we can do. Nothing! The truck and its driver were unconnected to the army. I assume they were hired—everyone will think so—but there’s no way to prove it. And any attempt to prove it—very dangerous. The police here answer to Ankara. He has to understand. He can’t reappear yet and actually voice these suspicions, or he could destroy”—long pause—“your village, for one thing, and make you all refugees again, or worse. As it is, it might be hard for me to protect you all if my adjutant—don’t say this part—should return from Syria.”
When Roland finishes translating, seeming to use a lot more words than Kaya used, Kaya jumps in before the Greek can respond: “How do you do, my tired friend? I commanded a breakfast for you” (he wonders now if the word should be pronounced breggfast, which makes more sense to him), “a very healthful breakfast!”
ROLAND’S TALE
Famished to his marrow Elias scours and sops clean the various plates on the breakfast tray. He’s marginally aware of Roland seated by the bed, watching. At no point is he able to look up from the food. The tangerine, which he eats last, helps cut the bitterness of the drug that still coats his tongue and palate, along with aftertastes of sea salt and iodine.
When he finishes, Roland—this stranger with the vulnerably exposed, meek-looking mouth—bursts out, “You must never do that again!”
“I’m sorry you had to come after me—”
“Whatever did you think we would do?”
“But I’m not sorry I tried.”
“Tried to leave, or tried to end your life?”
“If I wanted to end my life, I’d just provoke Stratis.”
“You’ve done so now—he is livid! You really believed you could swim so far?”
“I wasn’t thinking ‘could’ or ‘can’t.’ ” A salvo of sneezes rips through his aching body. He won’t mention what he recalls only dimly: that his will, his thymos, gave out for a while. He let go. He was ready to die. He died.
Handing him the breakfast napkin Roland says, “Well, all the same—gesundheit. I say nothing more of it now. Forget my angry words. Perhaps I am just talking of myself anyhow, as one does.”
“I don’t follow.”
“To flee one’s life or to end it—to face this choice! This I understand.” He looks firmly at Elias, as if daring him to doubt the words. Clean-shaven, he appears younger and yet wearier at the same time. “In the village in the hills where I was stationed, one whole night I sat and stared at my pistol. I’d put it on the table while I waited for the military police. All was silent, even the dogs and chickens, as if I had killed every living thing…” He seems to be doubting his decision, or ability, to tell the story. Then he goes on. “After some hours, when I realized I could not…swallow this last meal of lead, I holstered the gun and left for Varosha, on foot. You see, there were rumours back then among the U.N. folk—you would hear these things, like fairy stories, at the Ledra Palace bar. I did not quite believe, but where else had I to go? Ah, but as I left, I unholstered the gun again and laid it back on the table. Never since have I touched a weapon. When the U.N. police came, they would find their evidence waiting, like an exhibit in a courtroom.”
Elias is too tired to speak—whether to ask a question or to nudge Roland on—but senses he has only to wait.
—
“I mentioned before that in the buffer zone there are several villages where Greek and Turkish Cypriots still live together, supervised by the U.N., and that I was stationed in the smallest of these, up in the hills to the west, close enough to Varosha that the very sea here”—he nods toward the window—“can be viewed on clear winter days. These are charming places, with lanes of stairs that mount between the white houses up to a plaza, where you find the main church, a few cafés, a taverna, and always a giant old shade tree. Nearby too there will be a mosque. Turkish Cypriots are mostly secular, so the prayer call is not always heard, but on Muslim holidays at the Al-Asr, the adhan will sound through the lanes, rousing the Greeks from their nap as well as the Turks. When you first hear this adhan and the church bells overlapping, as if talking at the same time yet never raising their voices, in fact nearly harmonizing—this novelty was one I cherished.
“Never have I loved a place as I loved that village! Every sunlit or moonlit view, down or up streets, across the plaza, over rooftops to the sea, was exquisite. The people seemed warm, for the most part, and at peace, as if somehow the region’s terrible history had bypassed them. The only sign of history, in fact, was my presence, and the tiny ‘HQ’ on the plaza, with its rusty flagpole and a ragged U.N. flag.
“In other ways too the village seemed untouched. Owing to its status in the buffer zone, builder permits were not easy to possess, so it remained free of villa development for the English and Russians. And since the developers’ money couldn’t flood in, the…the velocity of life had barely changed. In fact, at first it was a little too slow for me, though before long I ceased to notice.
“After my university years I’d lived in West Berlin with my wife, Heidi. After the wall came down, we lived on the cheaper east side. We had been part of the crowds—they called us Mauerspechte, ‘wall-woodpeckers’—that broke holes in parts of the wall, before the full, official demolition of the next year, 1990. The intense euphoria of those hours and days would be hard to exaggerate. For a while, after the unification, I felt as perfectly home in Berlin as I thought possible.
“As an adult, naturally one knows that euphoria must be followed by a subsiding, even a sort of nausea, but for us and our friends—community organizers who had been trying to form ties with others, on the other side—the feeling that b
egan to set in was worse. We’d expected too much. Formerly divided peoples, with their different habits, ideas, illusions—their shared world could hardly be perfect. One colleague from the East said to me, with envy, a little contempt, and much amazement, ‘You who’ve had the freedom to pursue your dreams have picked such poor ones.’ True—I myself had longed for authority, power in my little field, a lust which now seems laughable—yet at the same time, my wife and I had hoped the simple kindness, the village unity and festivity we’d cherished, might linger, even in lesser form. In our busyness it seemed to vanish. It struck me that something deep in the northern soul must fear and hate festivity, could not help but yearn for the return of order—in fact, for more walls of a sort! I’d told myself that every wall longs to be toppled, all hearts long to be open and unguarded, and I still believe I was not wholly wrong, though perhaps no more than half right. There remains always the Mauer im Kopf, ‘the wall in the head.’ ”
He pauses for a sip of water, closing his eyes as he swallows. He sits with one leg crossed over the other in the European way, the knees close together, crotch unexposed.
“When a shared dream suffers defeat, or just compromise, often it kills the union of the dreamers. Heidi and I seemed helpless not to blame each other for our dream’s defeat, and also, perhaps, for its too-hopeful nature. I decided to go away and—still hopeful, in my fashion—become a peacekeeper. I suppose I thought to dismantle other walls with more perfect results. Naturally I first had to volunteer for the army, thus losing whatever friends in the peace movement I’d not lost when Heidi and I separated.
“Two years later I was posted in Bosnia, at a checkpoint where nothing much ever happened. While there I became haunted by the story of a peacekeeper who, not far away, found a chance to kill a man of the Ratko Mladić sort, but felt he must abide by our principle of neutrality. When this warlord renewed his mission of massacre, the peacekeeper, who witnessed the results, could not forgive himself. Within a year he lost his mind. Before he went silent he said, ‘I had not even the courage to shoot myself, afterward.’ This story I could never forget.”
The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Page 17
