The platoon lieutenant is of average build except for a disproportionately ample rump that gives him a laborious, waddling gait, as though he’s humping a large pack far too low on his frame. He seems to find the boy’s presence irregular but dares say nothing to Kaya, who cheerfully introduces Yil to him and the men, then hurries the party through a creaky, wheeled gate the U.N. used to use years ago while making cursory patrols.
Through a webwork of disintegrated streets he marches them, constantly turning corners and changing direction, as if trying to shake a pursuer. Whip-snakes and small lizards zip across their path. These are streets of long, once-lavish bungalows where German luxury cars are docked forever in their snug parking ports, behind cast-iron fences, now trellises for creepers. What a waste, Kaya reflects again—to seize all these treasures and then forbid anyone else to enjoy them, like a brat smashing a precious toy he has stolen rather than using or sharing it. Well, at least he and the villagers have made something of these ruins.
Yil catches up to him momentarily and says in an awestruck tone, “This would be a perfect setting for a video game!”
Within half an hour the lieutenant, puffing and perspiring, gives up checking his compass and the old street map on which Kaya has helpfully marked their route in red ink. This mapped route is entirely fanciful, a mere doodle that corresponds in no way whatsoever to the route they’re following, though it’s just as labyrinthine. Yil and the men are now totally lost, or would be without Kaya. Yesterday Ali took a letter from him to the Jaguar gate, to advise the villagers about the patrol. Please clear the snare lines, put brush and vines in front of the door of the church, keep yourselves and that dog indoors and the chickens quiet. Nothing to worry about.
Kaya’s heels snap along at a killing pace. He aims to give an impeccably military impression while wearing out the platoon as fast as possible. Yil must sense the showmanship in his father’s speed and manner; the boy scowls whenever Kaya glances back to see if they’re keeping up. He’s leading them just to the west of the village, past a small, crumbled church, then angling south and bringing them out into the wide square the villagers call the plateia. To Kaya, it’s apparent that the paving stones on the north side are markedly clearer of debris, but the buildings around the square are so utterly overgrown—if beautifully so—that the place could not look any more deserted.
As the lieutenant snaps a panorama of photos, Kaya says, “You see how absurd it is, the notion of outcasts surviving in here?” The lieutenant’s trousers, hitched way up, are stretched taut across that freakishly exaggerated bum.
Kaya takes them farther south, skirting the west wall of the cemetery and thereby avoiding the few markers that have appeared in the northeast corner in the years since the invasion. Yil and the platoon are wilting as he leads them on past the old technical school on the outskirts and south into the open country that Varosha would have swallowed up, given time.
They break for a smoke and to drink from their canteens. Passing his binoculars to the winded lieutenant he says, “That hill over there? We could climb it if you like. The going is steep in places, but the crest is high enough to give a view of the entire zone. Who knows? We might spot a thriving community we haven’t been able to find on foot.”
“If you insist, sir, though I don’t think that will be necessary.”
“Let’s continue up the east side, then. We can stop in at the officers’ club on the way back, for lunch and a cold drink.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
They round a low crag on which a large olive tree stands, then pass through a meadow of high grasses and waving winter flowers, anemones and Cyprus crocuses. Under another crag on the far side is a collapsed structure, an old shed or hut. A young mespila tree grows out of the rubble, its boughs picked clean of fruit (by the bats and the starlings, he will say if they ask). A scent of rosemary and sage, baked by the sun, fills the meadow and puts Kaya in mind of freshly grilled lamb. This beguiling little spot could not be more than a twenty-minute walk from the club, yet he has never passed through it. Odd. He feels uneasy, like an officer who might be leading his men into a trap. “Let’s go this way,” he says, pointing north around the ruins, but Yil calls, “Baba, what’s this?”
He’s parting the high grasses that were screening a three-barred cross, five or six steps from the hut’s doorway, or what remains of it. Several cats dart out of the swale grass and run between the men’s boots into deeper grass. The lieutenant takes more pictures. The men approach. The cross is of pinewood weathered grey. A few scales of white paint cling to the surface. The heads of the nails securing the longer, middle crosspiece are badly rusted. Between the nails, some characters are etched, very small, as if out of modesty.
This is a memorial that barely whispers.
“I can’t read Greek letters,” Yil says, leaning down. “They’re faded, too.”
“Not recent, then,” Kaya says.
“I see dates.”
Kaya pushes in next to his son, this troublesome doppelgänger. Yil says, “1979, with a small cross next to it!”
“Can you read the birth date?”
“Can’t you see?” the boy asks, incredulous. “It’s just a question mark.”
“So someone was in here,” the lieutenant says.
“But years ago,” Kaya says. “Someone must have stayed and hidden here after the, ah”—he almost says invasion—“liberation. Which explains some of the rumours we’ve heard over the years.” Explains and lays to rest, forever.
“What was his name, Baba?” Yil’s voice packs into this rushed phrase all the earnest curiosity he seems to have lost over the past two years. Kaya leans closer (he has needed glasses for some time now but fears they’ll make him look his age) and sounds out the Greek letters. He is mystified. Roland has never said a thing about this. Maybe Roland doesn’t know.
“The dead man’s name was Paris.”
RED RIVER VALLEY
“And how are you doing, Kyrie Trifanni?”
“Mia hara,” he says.
“Two traumas as well?”
“None till the morning.”
“You’ve picked a good time, then—the nights couldn’t be longer.”
“I’d better go check on him.”
“Let me go this time, Trif.”
“No, no, he doesn’t want you to get sick.”
“Wait an hour, then—it must be the coldest night of the winter!”
“You call this winter?”
Lying on her side, facing away, she’s jutting her naked backside into his groin, sighing, tugging the layered blankets farther over them. “Your skin,” she says in that husky Greek voice, like a permanent sore throat. “You’re hot as a bread oven.”
“I thought that was you.”
“Shhh—too loud.”
“I forget they’re there,” he says, meaning the twins.
“A man can forget.”
A few minutes later she asks, “Do you miss the winter, Trif?”
“I’d take you way out onto Lake Nominingue, skating.” You and the twins, he almost says, but senses before him another border he shouldn’t cross.
“You’ll be able to go back by the end of the year,” she says. “This new year. I’m sure. Roland thinks that will be enough time. For Kaya and for us.”
“You say ‘us,’ but you won’t be part of the village then.”
No reply. Too dark in her little house to see. If the twins come up the hallway to the door, they’ll have no idea that he is here, third night in a row.
“Anyway,” he says, “I don’t have to leave anymore.”
“Because someone ‘broke’ your story for you? Yet you won’t tell me!”
“If you knew the truth, you’d understand me better but like me less.”
“Who in the world doesn’t feel that way?”
“Maybe hate me. Once you’re out there, you can find out the story if you want.”
“Stubborn as a ram,” she says.
“I’ll go check on Roland now.”
“If you do, he might figure out we’re together here. You don’t mind?”
“It might please him.” She reaches back to stroke his cheek and stubbled scalp. “Might help him feel better.”
He grapples her tighter with his left arm and docks his face in the armpit she has just exposed, whispering, “No, I’ll go. Right now. But you—stop pretending you don’t understand my Greek—what I said about the village.”
“They all mean to die here, Trif. I don’t. Since Tansu left us, it hasn’t felt the same.”
“Of course,” he says reasonably, while his heart roars objections. He breathes her in. Sweat like cracked peppercorns and fennel. Her hair, washed just twice a week or so, smells only of her. Her skin sweet and hot. To think he was alone and freezing in the open sea not so many nights back.
“I need to shave them again,” she says. “These useless razors…”
“Shhh. I’d better go.”
She pushes harder into his lap, reaching between her legs for him. “A few more minutes.”
“Kaiti, you’re making me miserable.”
“Am I?” she asks in a gratified tone.
—
Leaving the house later he instinctively feels the walls for a light switch and finds one, which of course hasn’t worked in decades. Outside, no moon. The stars in swarms cast down their icy lustre, dimly frosting the roofline of the city. Limping slightly in the cold he approaches the inn. The nightingale, even in January, makes a beacon of birdsong.
He may not have told her his story, but she has now told him hers. When border regulations were first relaxed, she became a guide in Nicosia, meeting Turkish Cypriots at the Green Line crossing to lead them on a walking tour through the Greek half of the city she loved. Hardliners on both sides hated this initiative, but it proved popular. Tansu was part of a group of engineering students whom she guided one day and who—except for Tansu—all flirted with her in a clumsy, endearingly formal manner. A week later he reappeared and joined one of the tours on his own. During the rest break at a café in Laiki Geitonia, he asked her, in rigid, rehearsed Greek, if she might wish to meet for coffee.
Border controls were being further eased, and soon it was possible for them to cross to each other’s side and meet often, and then daily. Predictably, both families disapproved. Still, the slight thaw in relations between the north and the south gave the new lovers some hope. Surely they would not be forced to play Romeo and Juliet to the last scene? What followed was a terrible surprise. Kaiti had believed her friends to be as progressive as the ideals they championed, yet only one of them accepted Tansu. And when Kaiti, now pregnant, confided her plans to marry Tansu, this friend too urged her to terminate both the pregnancy and the engagement. Then her parents warned her that if she went ahead, they would have nothing more to do with her.
But if it was bad for her, for Tansu things were even worse. His uncle, having close connections in the government and the police force, was hostile to any form of détente with the Greeks, whether political or personal. One night after crossing back into north Nicosia, Tansu was attacked and beaten up by plainclothes cops. He realized that he would have to give up either Kaiti or his community. But to live together in the south seemed no better a choice, and besides, Kaiti, proud and impetuous (not her words: Elias’s insertion), now wished to have nothing more to do with her family. The couple thought of retreating to Ephira or one of the other mixed towns in the buffer zone, but having no relations there they would not be allowed. They were out of money and pondering the risk, for Tansu, of going somewhere else in the E.U. when she recalled hearing a rumour from a guide who had led tours along the Varosha fenceline (the tours had ceased for lack of business: tourists found the spectacle too gloomy). By now desperate, receiving daily threats, the couple fled to Varosha and reached the village, where they were welcomed unconditionally—or so it seemed to Kaiti, who after their ordeal found the enclave’s peace, order, and seclusion paradisal. The twins were born secretly in the officers’ club five months later.
Less than two years after that, Tansu departed, claiming he had never felt fully welcome or at home in what was really a traditional Greek Cypriot village. He missed speaking Turkish—Kaiti’s tour-guide Turkish didn’t count, it seemed. He struggled mightily with Greek. Stratis Kourakis terrified him. He missed his hateful family. (“His family,” Kaiti says unforgivingly, “was us.”) Tansu, she’d come to realize, was still a boy in all the important ways. She had no idea what lies he must have told after his return. She had no idea what her own community thought of her disappearance. “They’re not the reason I’ll be taking the twins back into the world. We may not even see them, or Tansu either. They’ve all surrendered that right.” She says these things with a confident severity, as if her heart is not bruised.
—
Elias unlatches the creaky gate and swings it inward carefully, inch by inch. Stratis’s door opens a crack and he looks out, face deformed by the underglow of a flashlight. He grunts a phrase in Cretan dialect—if Elias is not mistaken it’s something like “May you vomit crabs”—and withdraws.
Argos is snoring and twitching on Roland’s floor, while Roland—sitting up in bed, surprisingly—squints at a manuscript page by lamplight. His beard is growing in greyer. The room has a clean, antiseptic smell, though not from medicine: on Christmas Eve along the snare line, Stratis, instructed by Myrto, cut down a pine sapling as a Tannenbaum for Roland, then nailed together a cruciform base and stood it in the corner.
“You’re feeling a bit better?”
“Odd to be awake in the night, but then I’ve been sleeping so much…You were outside the courtyard to observe the winter stars? I heard the gate.”
No secrets in a village.
“You’re really thin, Roland.”
“So will you be, if you will not permit yourself to sleep through a night!” Illness is making him ever more prone to philosophical amusement at human folly and foolery, so at first his remark sounds like a reference to Elias and Kaiti. Has Stratis already figured things out and told him? Or is Roland simply referring to Elias’s constant checking on him? With a wry smile the man nods at the silent radio. “Interesting news today. Due to the latest conflict with the Kurds, the Turkish government is determined to maintain its ban on the letters w, q, and x.”
“They’ve outlawed letters?”
“Used only in Kurdish.” Roland’s chuckling hoarsens into coughs that riffle the page he holds close to cover his mouth.
“We need to bring in a doctor now,” Elias says.
“Don’t trouble yourself, Trif—it’s of no consequence.”
“I hate it when people say shit like that!”
“But, you know we can trust no stranger to keep the village a secret—Kaya’s doctor, he’s part of the army.”
“Secret? This place is almost finished. You’re ill, Kaiti’s planning to leave with the twins, the Tombazos are old, and Paris—he might as well not exist. I can’t see another village destroyed. We have to risk it.”
“I refuse to see Kaya’s doctor, Trif.”
“Please.”
“Let’s just consider how I am after a few days, ja?”
Elias cups a hand over the high bluff of Roland’s forehead.
“Really, Trif, you shouldn’t touch me, even if you’re strong. You might take it back to somebody else.” His altered face is a disguise with eyeholes through which his own ironic eyes peer out, now seeming to scan for a reaction. If the man would just ask about him and Kaiti, Elias would tell the truth, but he hesitates to simply announce it.
Oddly, Roland seems less feverish than yesterday. Maybe because it’s midnight? Or is this a bad sign, his body starting to cool toward shutdown?
“Can I get you more water? Help you out to the washroom?”
“No, danke, let me sleep. You, please…just return to your warm bed.”
As Elias goes back to Kaiti, he reflects that he real
ly might owe this marvellous new thing to Roland’s illness. And why does it always work this way? Mia hara, mia hara. As if something must always sicken, or die, before a new thing comes to life.
—
The dawns are late and the mornings dark, and one morning Elias fails to rise and leave early enough. He startles at the sound of Lale’s little sparrow voice as she wakes in the next room and sings to herself in Greek, that children’s song about the noisy rooster. Ko-ko-raiki! His half-Greek mother used to sing it to him and he remembers the words clearly, though his mother’s young face and voice are all but lost.
Aslan’s bare feet come slapping up the hallway. “Kaiti,” Elias says, kissing the side of her neck. “Ekaterini!”
“Ti einai?”
“Ta pedhia!”
Aslan pushes open the door, runs the few steps to the bed and vaults in. Elias tries to shift away from Kaiti but they’re furled together on the far edge, nowhere to go. At night, overheating, he keeps easing away from her, but her small body pursues him, little by little, until she has forced him to the precipice. There is no space between them now, yet somehow Aslan wedges in. Soft flannel pyjamas, faint tang of urine. He kisses Elias on the cheek, then greets him cordially and casually, seemingly unsurprised to find him here. Then he says something longer, still in Turkish. Unlike his sister, he doesn’t seem to grasp that Trif understands only simple Turkish—hello, thank you, and the word baba, which Aslan has just used.
“What did he say?” he asks Kaiti in English.
When she answers, her voice sounds as if she chain-smoked two packs of cigarettes last night. “I won’t tell.”
“I’m sorry, Kaiti. I slept too long.”
“I feared that this will happen.”
“Them finding me here?” he asks, as if she could mean anything else.
The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Page 21
