The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  “The son now rushed to his mother and they embraced in a desperate way. I said, ‘Please wait here, Madam,’ in Turkish, then I yanked a bloodied sheet off the bed and settled it over Adamou and walked out of the room. My head and body felt anaesthetized, no thoughts, no sensations. I passed Derviş Şenoglu—the slit in his ribcage was barely breathing. Outside the house I paused to bend over and vomit, then I ran back up toward the plaza, where I knocked on the door of Petros Economou, the old doctor who served for all the villagers, Greek and Turk. I knocked louder. I could have put my fist through that door and felt no pain. When the doctor came—he was fully dressed and holding his medical bag—I instructed him to go to Şenoglu’s at once. He nodded sadly and said, ‘So I feared.’

  “I returned to the kitchen of the HQ and set my mobile phone and pistol on the table, and at this pistol I stared, as I said before, trying to decide whether to…finish a life now finished in every other way. I thought I’d escaped history. Now I saw I had made a sabbatical, nothing more. My little Eden was a dream. I’d just shot three unarmed men, one of whom perhaps I was correct to kill, but the others—both helpless. I kept expecting the police to arrive, then kept recalling that neither those from the south nor the north could enter the buffer zone. At some point, U.N. personnel would come for me. By 1 A.M. I heard ambulances approaching. Both the HQ telephone and my mobile began to ring, which made it still harder to concentrate on the decision I was trying to take. So both devices I silenced in a permanent way.

  “Soon afterward I departed. Ariadne’s house I passed on my way out of the village. As a light was glowing in the bedroom—I could see it through the shutters—I thought for a moment of stopping to bid her goodbye, but I was still too angry at her. Since then, I have come to believe that she was not only doing Adamou’s bidding but also, truly, trying to protect me from harm. She loved me, after all. And to think, the last touch between us was that violent push…”

  When Elias realizes Roland doesn’t mean to say anything more, he asks quietly, “Do any of the others know this story? Stratis?”

  “Kaiti I have told, knowing she would understand. Myrto was in Nicosia when these famous events occurred—imagine, a German peacekeeper embarks on a ‘killing spree’ in a Cypriot town!—but if she has tied the connection between that news and me, she says nothing. The others, no, especially not Stratis. To them, I’m a U.N. corps deserter, that’s all.” His hand moves suddenly—it seems he might slap Elias. Instead the hand fastens over Elias’s brow. “No fever, but you look weary. Far from recovered, I think. I’ll go back to the village, Trif, and let you sleep.”

  Elias doesn’t tell him that he looks weary too—utterly emptied.

  “The colonel will keep you for a few days—let you stay, I mean, feed you well—until you feel strong. Then Ali will accompany you back.” He pushes his palms down onto his thighs to help get himself upright, then walks to the door.

  “Roland?”

  The man halts in the doorway, like an actor in a drama, though he doesn’t turn back around on cue. He waits, as if resigned to what’s coming.

  “I can’t promise you I won’t try to leave again.”

  “Three times is not enough?”

  “I have a story, too. People need to hear it.”

  “Then why not tell us?”

  “Because of your own crazy secrecy! At least until now.”

  As Roland turns to face him, Elias finds himself spilling out a condensed, edited version of what happened in the olive grove. He admits the possibility that he shot a village elder dead; he doesn’t admit that he’s more or less certain, and he omits the last part, which Roland’s own story has brought back so graphically—how he gave up trying to revive the man and let himself be pulled away, shocked by how his efforts had desecrated the body, caving the chest, widening the wound, staining the white beard and yellow teeth. The man’s family would think that he’d been beaten as well as shot.

  In the doorway Roland says, “I feared it must be something of the kind.”

  “It’s not like I want to bring ruin on your last refuge, but…”

  “When I was a boy,” Roland says, “the frontier scout Kit Carson, he was a hero to me. Years later I learned that when he led soldiers against the Navajo, he obeyed orders he did not love and cut down all of their old peach trees, thousands of them. The fruits, fresh or dried, they were the Navajo’s staple! My hero broke their hearts and won the war. Forgive me—it’s a poor time for this story.”

  “That’s why I don’t follow them anymore.”

  “What, the stories of history?”

  “Orders. From anyone.”

  “I think, like me, you may need to rest silent for a while. Auf Wiedersehen, Trif.”

  —

  An obliterating sleep unshattered by dreams. He wakes in the dark. He could be anywhere, or nowhere. Then he spies through a gap between the curtains a row of three clear stars, Orion’s belt lifting out of the sea. He lies unmoving for some time, then gets up with a moan, hobbles into the bathroom and stands in the shower, his forehead against the tiled wall, letting hot water flow and flow over his aching muscles, contused ribs, growling belly.

  He comes back into the room with a towel wrapped around his hips. The bedside lamp is on. Kaya sits in the armchair by the bed, where Roland sat before. Beside him, a trolley bearing a large tray crammed with good-smelling food.

  “Excuse me, but I think you will be hungry,” Kaya says with a knowing twinkle, as if delivering a reliable old punchline. He wears a mauve shirt and a black blazer, as if he has dressed for a dinner of his own. And so he has. He explains that he would like to eat here with his guest, if that would be fine. And if Trif would care to wear clothing, Ali has purchased some things in Famagusta (with a courtly flourish Kaya indicates a set of maroon pyjamas, apparently silk, laid out at the foot of the bed).

  “Timur Ali also brings pants and a shirt and a jumper and the shoes and other things, as need be. These are in the closet. One question more. Will you care to watch important football as we dine?”

  “An important game?”

  “My favoured team, Fenerbahçe, plays with Galatasaray.”

  Relief, or something like it, wells in Elias. To sit up in bed in pyjamas, fill his aching stomach and take in a spectacle whose outcome he could not care less about…the luxury of mindless oblivion.

  “I may ask Ali to bring the TV. Also DVD. I have many movies.”

  “Okay.”

  “So you agree?” Kaya adds with feeling, “You believe me, then!”

  “You mean about Eylül?”

  “Yes. Miss Şahin.”

  Elias nods slowly and says, “I guess I must.”

  Helplessly he falls on the food and for some time barely speaks or looks up from the chicken kebabs and the plates of saffron rice and horiatiki glistening with good oil and the warm bread and the kataifi and the tumblers of retsina. Kaya observes with a pleased and slightly amused air. Unlike Elias, the man dines with courtly manners that he forgets only at climactic points in the match, when the commentators’ voices crescendo and he wide-eyes the screen, full mouth agape, fork and knife held aloft in tight fists.

  After the meal, a portly cat with a sour face hops onto the bed, cuddles against Elias’s packed stomach and goes to sleep, wheezing electrically. It’s the cook’s pet, Kaya says indifferently, and offers to throw it out the door. “No, it’s fine,” Elias says.

  The men are on their fourth round of Armagnac when the DVD ends around midnight. The original Planet of the Apes is one of his favoured films, Kaya says. He has seen it often. His eyes, by the last scene, are bright and wet. When Charlton Heston kneels on a beach of ruins and hammily declaims, God damn them all! Elias mutters, “Amen.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I just meant…It doesn’t matter.”

  Gracious in bafflement Kaya says, “Ah—of course.”

  “You must have told her I was dead, right?”

  Kaya asks him t
o repeat the words slowly and then, contorting his brow and speaking with great concentration: “I had to say this thing. Yes, I am sorry, but I must.”

  “If I’d known they meant to kill her, I would have tried to do something.”

  “What?”

  “Something. Anything.”

  “But some problems…maybe they have no solving.”

  Elias finishes his drink. “I think I should sleep now.”

  “Yes, please, you must!” Kaya pinches loose the knees of his slacks and gets up. “Please sleep all you may. Shall I put a glass of brandy for the night? A fresh cigar?”

  —

  He surfaces from another stint of annihilation and the sun is several hours high over the sea. The good brandy has left him with a bad head. Beside his inflamed ankle, the bloated old cat snores. His crutches have been set against the wall. He stumps to the balcony door and outside. The air is cool but heat is welling up off the ash-white sands three storeys down, where Kaya lies asleep on a beach chair, an open newspaper lapsed over his chest.

  Elias goes back inside and then down the hallway in his silk pyjamas, using one crutch. He gathers Kaya’s room must be at the far end. The door is ajar. The room is uncluttered, the bed made. A lamp-like water pipe and near-empty brandy bottle share the dresser with propped portraits: the children Kaya was mentioning last night, no doubt, along with an elegant, amused-looking older woman who must be his late mother. A laptop computer—slim, silver, state of the art—sits perfectly centred on the desk by the balcony door. The laptop is open, screen dark. Elias leans down, taps the mouse and brings up the home page, then skims the cursor to an icon. His pulse throbs in the finger hovering over the mouse. One click, then a web address and a password, and he could be looking through seven weeks’ worth of mail—a posthumous account that must be overflowing with junk, DND messages flagged urgent, maybe a few notes from old contacts and the morose but kindly Dr. Boudreau. He could blurt a few lines in reply, imagine the effect of that, fresh tidings from the tomb. (Or do service providers delete accounts after they learn of a customer’s death?)

  He clicks. In the search bar, instead of his mail server’s address, he sloppily pecks his name. The search engine corrects him, Did you mean “Elias Trifannis”, and below it appears a list of headline links along with headshot photos of two men: Boudreau and himself. “Oh, no,” he says and clicks on a Canadian news service link, then devours the story in convulsive chunks. It’s from yesterday, updated two hours ago. The doctor is dead in Paphos, an apparent OD…his last act, releasing a statement concerning events in Afghanistan in which his patient, Corporal Elias Trifannis…drowned October, possible suicide, being treated PTSD…altercation on beach in which Turkish journalist (Elias skips a paragraph here). Then the doctor’s statement: reckless nature of company’s raid, villagers accidentally killed, one perhaps by patient, historical olive grove destroyed, profound regret encouraged patient say nothing pending inquiry, inquiry then cancelled, wrongly, but now, perhaps, the doctor hopes…(The statement includes a transcription of Elias’s clinical “testimony,” which the military is trying to place under publication ban as a violation of doctor–patient confidentiality, though for now readers can click here and read it.)

  He stares into the screen, the screen stares back. He’d liked Boudreau as much as he could then like any older man associated with the war. At the hospital in Paphos, even through the meds, it was easy to spot perfunctory solace and mere procedural concern; Boudreau was always sincere. Clearly he was suffering from some kind of intelligent anguish and exhaustion. Now he has gone and proved what he unhelpfully told Trif in their last session: official casualties are a mere appetizer, whetting War’s hunger. Any war goes on destroying lives for a lifetime.

  There’s a sound of boots slowly climbing the uncarpeted stairs from two floors below. He exits the site, closes the search-engine window and snaps down the laptop screen. Then he remembers it was open, flips it up again, grabs the crutch and lurches out into the hallway. Sound-muffling carpet. Pulse punching in his skull. He reaches the door of his room just as the old orderly rises into view, bearing a wide breakfast tray that holds enough food for a honeymooning couple.

  —

  A few hours later Kaya himself escorts him to the Jaguar gate. Kaya doesn’t seem to mind the slow pace. Elias wears the new, undersized shirt and slacks provided for him at the club and is freshly shaved, his head too, having mimed instructions to Kaya’s expressionless orderly to buzz his hair almost to the bone.

  After the order and comfort of the officers’ club, the dead zone is a fresh shock. They follow a route new to Elias, having set out from the club, and one of the first ruins they pass is a structure of three storeys, intact but for a facade that has partly collapsed, exposing a honeycomb interior of rooms where a snowfall of cement dust covers everything. When Elias, with a pang of precognition, asks if Kaya knows what the place used to be called, he replies, “I believe this was Hotel Aphrodite.”

  At the gate, Kaya shakes his hand with a surprisingly lax grip that still conveys a real warmth. He calls him arkadash and says he is assured they must meet again soon, inshallah. Stratis waits on the far side of the gate, smoking grimly. He will not acknowledge Kaya. He will not even acknowledge Elias, who nods to him as he squeezes between the grilles.

  “Well, Stratis, how are you?”

  “Mia hara,” the man mutters, one joy, shorthand for the full greeting, “One joy and two traumas.” Elias must be one of the implied traumas. “I should strike you now, here,” Stratis says, but seeming to glimpse something in Elias’s eyes, he doesn’t. Instead he leads him back toward the village at a painful pace. Now and then, hardly breaking stride, he hacks down scrub with his machete. “Koune sou, vre! Are you coming or not?”

  “Where else would I go?” Elias calls, telling the truth. Poor Dr. Boudreau has borne witness on his behalf and left him free to accept his sentence, free to remain captive for now in a place that, as he toils toward it, seems a kind of sanctuary.

  “Where’s the dog?”

  “What? Speak clearly!”

  “Where’s Argos?”

  “With Roland!”

  “Where’s Roland? I was expecting—”

  “Sick! The last few days have been hard for him. Several of us left our beds cold to search for you, but for him it was hardest. His health is not good.” Stratis says it with the comfortable disdain of a man who never gets ill. Elias is weighing Greek words for a reply—If you’re suggesting that what I did has made him ill—but Stratis adds, “Above all, he is sad at the thought of Kaiti and the children leaving. We are all sad. Your latest reckless departure, and other recent events relating to you, have made her see the village as less secure. And she is right! Such at least is my thinking.”

  “You mean the others don’t agree?”

  “The others are more generous. But I am the guardian here, the one soldier—I can’t risk that laziness.”

  “You don’t even like those children.”

  “And they look at me as a goat looks at a knife! But I dislike them less now—in their father’s absence they seem ever more Greek.”

  “Was it you who scared him off?”

  “A coward needs no encouragement.”

  Elias hears himself say, “Will she go back to him?”

  “God forbid! But the question is not mine to answer. Nor would I ever ask it.”

  Stratis leaves him at the gate of the courtyard inn. As Elias enters, Lale and Aslan cheer and charge toward him. Kaiti stands outside Roland’s door, a short, dark cardigan over her black dress. “Trif, Trif!” the twins cry. He lowers himself to one knee, sets down his crutches and throws out his arms. They barrel into his embrace. He holds off the tears that would betray how this welcome affects him. “Theio Roland says you got lost, swimming,” Lale says, “but dolphins saved you!”

  Kaiti stands rigid, her arms crossed under her breasts.

  “Were you visiting Roland?” he asks her,
in Greek. “I hear he’s a bit ill.”

  “Yes!” the twins answer him.

  “I think I’ll go see him too. We could play football later, endaksi?”

  “They may be busy later,” Kaiti says, “helping Stavroula and me.”

  He’s still down on one knee like a suitor—a man with little hope, by the looks of it. “Busy all day long?”

  “This is not like elsewhere, where small children have all the time they want. We have to work harder here.”

  “I thought it was the other way around. It’s been years since I’ve seen children play as much as these two.”

  “You romanticize.”

  “I’ve lived out there more recently than you.”

  She switches to English: “I cannot school them alone here. They have no young friends. No future! I will like them to have…bread every day, like normal ones. Also, here are some dangers and I have to protect.”

  “You think it’s safer out there? Are you joking?”

  “Slower!” she says in Greek. “Your English…”

  “Do they know you’re planning to leave?” he asks clearly.

  “Not quite,” she says in Greek. “There are still matters to work out. But this is not your worry.”

  The twins’ eyes, solemn, enormous, look back and forth. The village will feel far less like a refuge if it loses its youngest citizens, Kaiti and the twins. But what right has he to say “Don’t go”? It’s easy to see why she might feel she has to take them out into the world, even a world that in a few thousand days could arm and order them off to legally murder other teenagers for pay. But he doesn’t want to believe that the reason for her going is his arrival—that he has upset a fragile equilibrium, tipping the village into terminal decline.

  “How is Roland?” he asks in English.

  “Not as well as you appear to be.”

  “I get over things fast,” he says, and his sudden curtness surprises him. “I hope you weren’t out that night too, looking for me?”