The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  “Of course I was! With Strati. Stavroula, she took the children.”

  He totters to his feet, grimacing. “Okay. I’m sorry. That was the last time.” He’s about to say, There’s nothing to go back out there for, then realizes that while it’s true, it’s beside the point. He says, “I have a reason to stay.”

  She’s visibly struggling to pin down his meaning. She switches to Greek: “You mean Roland?”

  “I’m not sure what I mean,” he lies.

  “Elate!” she orders the twins and stalks past him, lashing out with her eyes. His cheeks burn as if slapped. She has a gold Orthodox cross around her neck now, perhaps for Roland’s sake. She puts out her hands for the twins. They glance back at Elias as she leads them off. She stops at the gate and looks back herself, then says in English: “I am tired of making stories for the children, when men go away.”

  “I understand.”

  “But I am happy you live.” Her black brows twitch inward and she looks down into a basil patch, as if wondering whether happy might be too strong a word.

  —

  Roland’s room is dim, the shutters sealed to keep out drafts, an olive-oil lamp and a candle glowing on the old brass tea table beside the bed. A china pot of tea and a cup, an old Aspirin bottle, a saucer full of pills. In an oversized turtleneck fisherman’s sweater, his hair sheaved and rumpled, he’s sitting up in bed with a mess of papers in his lap, holding what seems to be a quill. Except for the old transistor radio on the window ledge, this could be a nineteenth-century sickroom.

  Argos, at the foot of the bed, quits licking his own groin, leaps up and trots over to Elias, tail flapping.

  “Are you all right?” Elias asks. “Is that really a quill?”

  “Not from one of Stavroula’s hens. It’s from the calligraphy shop, by the plaza. It works better than the ballpoint pens one finds everywhere. The ink for this needs only a drop of turpentine to be fresh again. If only it were the same with me!”

  “Wait—what are you writing?”

  “Not my last will, don’t worry. This influenza, or what have you, it has made me resume my manuscript. A history of the village. It’s fortunate…” A sharp, baying cough shakes his body. He draws in a wheezing breath. “Pardon me…I’m writing in English, so maybe you could look over the work, in due course? I read so much English, but to write…And I’m a poor speller in any tongue.”

  As Elias approaches, he sees that the lamp and candle have been lending a deceptive glow to a face that’s morbidly pale. Amid three-day stubble, the creases from Roland’s nostrils to his mouth are sharply carved.

  “You see that our positions are neatly reversed,” Roland says.

  “But you seemed fine when you left me!”

  “I was starting to feel less so. I may have caught something from Ali when he shaved me—who knows? For years in our isolation we have had little sickness. Perhaps my immunity grows weaker. I am relieved that you caught nothing, in your frail state.”

  Elias sags onto the chair where Kaiti must have sat just now. “I never do,” he says guiltily. “But you, you were up all night searching.”

  “Forget this. It was nothing. And had our positions been reversed, perhaps you would have searched for me also?”

  After a moment Elias nods.

  “Except, of course, I have no reason to want to flee,” Roland says.

  “Neither do I anymore.”

  Elias quietly describes how and what he learned about Dr. Boudreau. Roland listens with his head down, brow bulging. Then he says, “But—forgive me asking, Trif—has this not even a little to do with Kaiti? I did hear the two of you speaking out there…”

  “It has nothing to do with her—she’s not even staying!” Silence. “Anyway…Do you feel up to coming outside into the sun? These days are short.”

  “Ja, winter solstice. Back home it was my favourite time. But maybe I sleep again now.”

  “You need a doctor, Roland. Kaya will send his own doctor in here, I’m sure he will, he likes you a lot.”

  “The colonel likes everyone! I fear it may yet prove his undoing. But I am the medicine man here”—he pauses, grins miserably—“the medical man, and I say, considering risks of an outsider, no doctor is needed but me.”

  “Since when are you a doctor?”

  “I had to train myself, upon arrival. A Turkish Cypriot who fled here shortly before I…he grew ill. A homosexual, from the north, where the punishment is death! He rather resembled Kafka, the great Jewish Czech author of absurdist stories and—”

  “I know who Kafka is!”

  “Ja, well…this person had arrived in a battered state, and he grew worse. I studied books from the library and gathered what supplies I found in the dispensaries—even some morphine that looters had missed in ’74. I couldn’t save him from the pneumonia—I believe that was what took him in the end—but I helped a little.”

  “Why didn’t he go south, across the border?”

  “A Turkish Cypriot homosexual dying of the AIDS would not be welcome with open arms, he felt, except perhaps for propaganda reasons. I doubt he was wrong.” Roland brings the teacup to his lips for a sharp, indignant sip. “I’ve not brought myself to tell you of this Davut Osman, but now I’m writing of him. And the grave—when we’re both well enough to walk there, I’ll show you. The time has come. No more secrets. It’s in the part of the old cemetery we use, though away from our other graves, as Stratis insisted. How furious he was when we voted to let Osman stay!” Another sip and then Roland describes these graves—for a stillborn daughter of the Tombazos; for a wounded comrade of Stratis’s who died soon after they hid here in ’74; for a woman who became Stratis’s de facto wife and died many years ago; and for their child, who died with her.

  For some seconds Elias is silent, pondering. Then he says forcefully, “Do you have any antibiotics? No—they’d be way out of date. But maybe—”

  “They lose less potency than you’d think,” Roland says. “After this long, maybe half, so I double the dose. Of course, the condition may be viral. Please ask Kaiti not to bring the twins again, for their sake, and tell her I am still holding my own. I wouldn’t want her to delay on my account.”

  Elias says nothing, just nods.

  “We must not be selfish, however our hearts,” Roland adds, as if trying to convince himself. “At least I know that you’re no longer planning to leave us, or—or bury yourself at sea.”

  “Just make sure Stratis knows that, okay? Even in love he makes me nervous.”

  —

  Easter, not Christmas, is the main holy day for the Greeks. Elias gathers that this year’s Christmas, celebrated in the modern way on December 25, is even quieter than normal because of Roland’s worsening illness.

  Elias has once more graduated from crutches to cane but is still not mobile enough to haul buckets of water from the well or to join Stratis and Argos out on the snare lines, collecting rabbits. Meanwhile Kaiti and Stavroula are busy with a new planting of tomatoes. So Elias by default has become Roland’s caregiver, the sort of beefy male nurse you might find in a palliative care unit or on a psych ward. He sits with Roland during the day—reading to him when he’s not asleep—and at night comes in to check on him every few hours. The man tolerates this indulgence but has drawn the line at Elias’s attempt, with Kaiti’s help, to drag his own mattress in and sleep in the corner. He forbids it with a feeble stridency that Elias senses he must respect or risk depriving the man of all rights and power, weakening him further. He does ask that Elias, each morning, pick him a bowl of the lemony, chewy purslane that grows weedlike between the paving stones just outside the gate: “Very healthful, Trif. Try some. It was Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite green.”

  The book he has asked Elias to borrow and read to him is one that he says he has read often before: a dog-eared, disintegrating paperback of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. He laughs to the point of violent coughing at the sardonic bits, of which there are many. Finally Elias
says, “I hope you didn’t ask me to read this as some kind of personal lesson? Because I am not this Pyle guy—this innocent. Nobody is. He’s a cartoon. The other characters are way better.”

  “Oh, I quite agree with you,” Roland says, even more tickled.

  Christmas dinner is held at noon, both for the daylight and because Roland is asleep every night by seven and they all worry that evening festivities—as if the villagers feel festive now—might disturb him. Even Argos seems subdued, spending much of his time indoors at Roland’s feet, like a marble hound on a Templar’s tomb.

  In the little kitchen, the drizzling day after Christmas, Elias sits squeezing some two hundred lemons, using a wooden hand-reamer and funnel, slowly filling three jugs with the pulpy juice. Most of it will be bottled, with raki and honey, to make a thick, syrupy liqueur. With the remainder Kaiti and Stavroula are preparing litres of a traditional potion for the ill, simmering the juice on the spirit stove and mixing in wine, honey, cinnamon, crushed garlic, pulverized dried hot pepper, and another herb he doesn’t recognize by sight or smell.

  While squeezing an extra twenty lemons at Stavroula’s command, he asks Kaiti in English, “Was Paris invited to the Christmas meal?”

  “Paris?”

  “The hermit.”

  “Here,” she replies in Greek, “please—take this to Roland before it cools.”

  “Endaksi.”

  “You’re walking better today, I see?”

  “Not enough to stray far,” he says, adding in English (Stavroula is right on top of them, like a bustling, sighing duenna), “Are you still planning to leave on New Year’s Day?”

  “Here’s a cup for you, too,” she says in Greek. “You have to stay strong if you’re serving him, hand to hand. It tastes better than it smells.”

  “I love the way it smells.”

  “Kane grigora!” Stavroula urges, hurry, stirring the pot with one hand while the other flicks at her perspiring forehead—a wet crimp of grey hair has escaped her headscarf. She could never seem frail, not with her fleshy arms and heavy bosom, but today she looks her age, and weary, and it strikes Elias that the village is dying out before his eyes. Even the new couple, Stratis and Myrto, are too old to make children.

  “Theio Roland is quite ill,” Kaiti says in English. “So, no, we cannot to leave yet.” She speaks firmly, yet there’s an opening in her tone, it doesn’t fend him off like before, maybe because they’ve been working side by side for hours—days, really—preparing sustenance for somebody they both care for. Her cheeks are flushed from the steamy heat, which has made her black hair even curlier. He sees that his question has flustered her, the last thing she needs right now, and for that reason he’s glad he asked it.

  He looks around for a rag to wipe the lemon pulp off his hands before he takes Roland’s drink. Kaiti has the rag—she’s dabbing a gloss of sweat from her brow and upper lip. “Here,” she says, gripping his wrist—her fingers go only halfway around—and she swabs his palm with the damp rag and firmly pulls his fingers clean of pulp. Each pull sends a shock plunging through his belly down to his balls; he recalls the garlic smell from her fingernails that first night when she tied his blindfold.

  “There,” she says quietly, “now go!”

  When he enters the sickroom, Argos’s tail starts thumping the floor. The tail looks shrivelled, the hair worried away. A lone olive-oil lamp glows by the bed. Roland sleeps on his back, one eye half open. There’s a hitch, almost a hiccup, in his breathing. Elias leaves the drink on the brass tea table and collects the previous cup, which has already filled the room with the smells of lemon, garlic, and pepper.

  He walks back to the kitchen in the early dark, the darkness of a courtyard in a village centuries before electric light, darkness undeniable, a power with absolute jurisdiction until dawn. He still isn’t used to it. He speeds up, the pain in his foot forgotten, his extremities tingling. When he enters the warm, lamplit kitchen, Kaiti turns to him. Her expression…he might be reappearing after a backstage change of mask, costume, character, everything. Above the gold cross her throat is as red as her cheeks. She smiles, fully smiles. It’s like a long-sustained minor chord resolving in the last bars of a song. He takes her hand and tugs her outside. Behind her, Stavroula, muttering and stirring the pot, sees nothing. In the dark between the half-open door and shuttered window he backs her into the wall with his kisses, and she lets him, and her strong little hands clamp over his ears to pull his face down harder into hers.

  FINDING PARIS

  Kaya’s children have joined him at the club for the New Year holiday. Since he last saw them three months have passed, a small eternity in their terms, and changes are visible, especially in Yil, who has just turned fifteen. His sister, Hava, a month short of her seventeenth birthday, still adores Kaya, chirpily chatting with him at meals or while drinking an Italian soft drink on the bench after tennis—but then she’ll fall silent, as if these exchanges have deeply debilitated her, and she’ll seal herself in her room to text friends in Istanbul, or go up onto the roof to sunbathe and read her magazines. As for Yil, the occasional sulky reserve Kaya noted when he flew up to see the children in September has hardened into an impenetrable sullenness. Yil takes after Kaya physically, but now his face is contorted into an impostor’s mask of suspicion and sneering contempt, and he slouches so bonelessly it seems he’s trying to grow shorter, back into childhood. Kaya can’t understand him. The boy doesn’t seem aware in the slightest of what he can have out of life. As if life is a suitor he’s rejecting out of fear of being jilted. At his age, or at least Hava’s, Kaya had girlfriends and played football and went out with his teammates, and they would talk or bribe their way into clubs in Üsküdar to hear Yeni Türkü and dance with the girls and even, sometimes, the women—impossibly exotic women, he thought then, young American, British, and Australian tourists in pairs or trios who humoured them, bought them beer, and at the end of the night doled out chaste, mildly condescending kisses…Yil is always up in the guest room, either doing homework (his marks are reprehensibly high) or hunching in darkness, the curtains drawn, playing American video games, all military in nature. Fate, Kaya understands, finds such ironies irresistible. He has to admit he was happier when Trifannis was staying in the room. He keeps going up and inviting the boy to join him for a swim, tennis, even a hand of poker (“Too tired now, Baba”), then nicely asking him to turn down the volume. Without a word Yil complies, yet within minutes the chatter of automatic gunfire, the pounding of artillery, the screams of the dying are again echoing down through the atrium to the club’s lobby and dining area.

  At least it’s a fitting audio for the news Kaya has been reading in the Hürriyet: fighting inside the Syrian border intensifying by the day, several battalions now engaged against the Kurds. Maybe Captain Polat has gotten his wish and is in the thick of it.

  New Year’s dinner includes the traditional pine-nut and currant rice, iç pilav, while the sweets course is a mixed platter of those honey-drenched delicacies, like baklava, that the Greeks, the Persians, the Arabs, and the Israelis all amusingly claim as their own. Ömer has outperformed himself again. Yet Yil hardly touches his food. Likewise the glass thimble in which a shot of celebratory raki shines. As if conscious of his father’s post-meal contentment, Yil starts baiting him—the boy’s next essay for Turkish History will argue that so-called neo-fascists who want to keep all foreigners out of Turkey have a valid point. Just look what happened to the Ottomans! And American and recent Euro experiments in multi-ethnic societies prove that people are better off with their own kind. Yil realizes that Baba’s socialist newspaper will disagree…

  Hava rolls her eyes and flees up to her room, leaving Kaya alone with this glum, slumping travesty of himself. Kaya flexes his mouth into a smile. “Who knows, Yil? Maybe you have a point! We Turks seem to have a hard enough time not murdering each other!”

  The boy sags further, for a moment appearing to lack any lungs or ribcage at all. No fight t
o be had here, he goes back upstairs to his computer.

  Next morning a surprising call from Colonel Nurettin. General Hüseyin, in Nicosia, means to clear all of the old year’s business off his desk. He has asked Nurettin to send a platoon into Varosha to investigate the no-doubt delusional suggestions of Kaya’s adjutant, Captain Polat. (Kaya immediately wonders why Hüseyin asked Nurettin, not him, to do this, but he says nothing.) “I realize this is absurd,” Colonel Nurettin says, adding quickly, “well, not absurd, but…surprising.” Nurettin always sounds as if he fears his calls are being monitored. “Anyway, I’ll just send in a platoon to explore for a few hours and take some photographs. A kind of formality…but of course a thorough formality! Yes, we shall certainly be thorough. I suppose it might take half a day.”

  For a moment, Kaya is truly at a loss; then a solution presents itself. “Well, if the general insists,” he says, “fine. There’s just one problem.”

  “There is?” Nurettin asks fretfully.

  “The troops, even if they take a map, will almost certainly get lost—badly lost, as the captain did himself, if you remember.”

  “Of course—he almost died!”

  “Those maps are of a city that no longer exists. And the dead zone covers some two thousand hectares. No water, no food, areas where buildings are collapsing…Your men will need a guide—I mean a leader”—Kaya pauses dramatically—“and I am willing to serve in that role.”

  —

  On a morning of warm sun and cool breezes, Kaya, cunningly disguised as a Turkish colonel in his beret, aviator shades, camouflage gear, and combat boots, meets Nurettin’s men at an old checkpoint at the north end of the dead zone. The absent Nurettin has had his men gear up as if for battle: helmets, flak jackets, packs, new assault rifles that look like large toys made of black plastic. Kaya has left his pistol behind at the club. This decision—meant to demonstrate his faith that Varosha is perfectly safe—seems to have disappointed Yil, who is accompanying him, having astonished him by agreeing to do something outdoors, early, and away from his computer. Of course, it involves soldiers, real ones, and he’s studying them now with entranced eyes, although he’s far too shy to speak. He wears black jeans and a maroon Galatasaray training jacket.