“Damn it,” he says, “how could I fucking cut myself on a knife this dull?”
Roland tells him to wait and shuffles away into his room, emerging not with a bandage but with a manuscript. “Here, please, do this instead—you never properly clean the utensils anyway. It’s the opening part of my chronicle. It starts on this coastline in prehistory, but by page twelve we reach 1974. I have written almost up to the point of your arrival. Please say if I need to correct the English.”
“You’re not going to try publishing it somehow, are you? I mean, if anything would compromise the village—and Kaya—”
“I leave him out of it. As for the village, it may well cease to exist at some point, perhaps not so long ahead. I want something to remain afterward. And now that you are fully, voluntarily a citizen, you should be privy to all the facts.”
On the unlined rag paper the handwriting is so clear and tidy, the ranks of words so ruler-straight, it resembles a computerized cursive font. Even the infrequent ink blots are neatly spherical. Elias tries and fails not to leave a few bloody thumbprints. At random he starts reading about the arrival of Sergeant Stratis Kourakis—years before Roland himself—along with the death of Stratis’s wounded comrade, and how Stratis avenged him “by killing a certain Turkish Lieutenant, who upon several occasions had entered the Dead Zone at night, as a Looter, and had already come close to the Village, which at that time comprised the Tombazos, Stratis himself, Paris (though he was seldomly seen), and the woman, Rita, who later became a kind of wife to Kourakis and died, with their infant, probably of Pneumonia, back when the Village was entirely isolated with no outsider to assist in crisis.” Roland decribes how Stratis smashed this looter’s skull one night when he strayed into the outskirts of the village. With Paris’s help he dumped the body just beyond the fence. The mystery must have been investigated but never solved; apparently it “created among the rural Turkish Conscripts a supersticious dread and Myth, thus putting an end to all looting and incursions.”
He looks up from the page. Roland is humming as he washes the dishes and now Elias knows the tune, “Red River Valley,” and hears the words of the chorus in his mind: Sit here awhile ere you leave us…do not hasten to bid us adieu.
THE EFFIGY
When Kaya returns from the airport after seeing off his children, Ali hands him a sealed envelope on which ALBAY KAYA is inscribed in Roland’s precise hand. Kaya is eager to change back into his civvies. He starts upstairs to his room, opening the envelope as he goes and skimming the note’s charmingly formal Turkish phrases. Then he stops on the landing, grips the railing, rereads. An adolescent male, probably Kaya’s son, has been wandering around in the dead zone, playing with a pistol that may or may not be a toy. Naturally Roland is concerned, on the young man’s behalf as much as the village’s.
Kaya has been looking forward to having the club to himself again. He knew he would miss the children’s presence, especially Hava’s, but their departure is always a bit of a relief as well. Today, he thought, he could enjoy the silence and the restful snoring of the winter surf on the beach instead of the frantic sound effects of Yil’s war-gaming—though, come to think of it, Yil was not at his computer much during the last few days but rather outside. Kaya figured the patrol had somehow aroused his appetite for the outdoors and assumed he was spending time on the beach. He’d instructed the boy never to enter the dead zone alone.
He flicks on the light in his walk-in closet, automatically glancing at himself in the full-length mirror. A preoccupied stranger broods back. He opens a drawer in his dresser and lifts out a stack of crisply folded pants. His small semi-automatic—a Beretta imitation of Turkish make—lies slumbering in its holster. He takes it out. The safety is off. He secures it, then releases an ammunition clip from the handle. He hasn’t inserted one in years. He weighs the clip in his hand. Empty. He digs under the military slacks on the other side of the drawer and finds two full clips instead of three.
Could Ali have taken the pistol out to clean and oil it, and then, somehow…? No. Ridiculous. Yil really must have loaded the thing and wandered around in the dead zone, shooting at God knows what. Now Kaya dimly remembers: Yil likened Varosha to the setting of a video game.
Pocketing the clip he frowns sympathetically at his own reflection, a fellow father commiserating. Most parents of withdrawn, morose teenagers would at least consider the possibility of attempted self-violence, but to Kaya the idea of suicide is unthinkable.
He writes a note of thanks and reassurance to Roland and gives it to Ali to take to the Jaguar gate. The note also asks Roland to inform the villagers—especially that erratic-looking ex-soldier, Stratis—that Kaya will need to enter Varosha tomorrow morning. He will not come anywhere near the village. Next, Kaya emails his son, fibbing that he has just apprehended a tourist couple who were exploring the restricted zone for several days and claimed to have noticed a young man answering to Yil’s description. They thought he was a guard or commando! (Kaya hopes the boy will find this bit flattering.) Anyway, the matter is now taken care of and Kaya is willing to overlook Yil’s failure to report these interlopers—not to mention his foolish escapade with Kaya’s pistol, which must never, ever happen again—so long as he says absolutely nothing to anyone else, as a matter of national security.
Next morning, after breakfast and a shave, Kaya heads for the only nearby spot, behind the tennis court, where Yil could have entered the dead zone without shredding himself on the new barbed wire. At a few places inside the zone, the boy’s hulking trainers have passed through rain-dampened concrete dust and left prints, roughly marking his route. Kaya spots plenty of animate creatures—feral cats, furtive rats and lizards, crows, fat rabbits, pigeons, snakes, a beautiful little owl—but none of the small corpses he keeps expecting to see or, by this point, smell. Instead he finds seemingly fresh bullet holes in lifeless things: a wooden gate, a stop sign, a tuxedoed mannequin on display in a menswear shop, and, propped against the wall of a taverna, a plywood silhouette-figure in a chef’s hat. There’s a divot in the wall beside the moustachioed grin, an umlaut of holes in the white-aproned paunch. Kaya ponders this pathetic effigy. Roland’s note said nothing about audible shots, but that’s not surprising—this place is a long way from the village, and the pop-gun reports would get lost in the deadening cover of vines and creepers, block after block. As for Kaya hearing nothing himself, the last week’s onshore wind will have carried the sounds inland, away from the club.
How much happier Kaya would feel stumbling on a typical boys’ hideout stocked with American sex magazines.
On the way back, he notices he can see right through one of the floors of a slender hotel on John F. Kennedy—the facade is long since collapsed, and so too is a chunk of the back wall. Through that jagged wound, a grey winter sky, a few white gulls. Time seems ever more intent on gutting things, laying them bare, stripping the world to its essences. You are a lazy father, a voice whispers, and the words are his ex-wife’s but the voice is Kaya’s. You think everything always works out! Yet by the time he gets back to the club, famished, the thought of lunch and the sports pages he has not yet had time to enjoy have silenced both her and himself.
THE MOON IN WAITING
The lovers walk through an orchard of small trees festooned with ripening apricots, or are they nectarines—no, mespilas. Under their bare feet the earth is sun-freckled, mossy, soft as a putting green. She wears an aproned peasant dress while he (looking down now) is naked, one leg palsied and purple, his cock shrivelled as if in fear, yet there is no fear, then the fear arrives: somewhere in this enormous grove they’ve forgotten the twins. With a snicking sound, leaves, twigs and fruit start falling around them. There’s a hiss and sizzle of bullets soaring overhead and yet the actual gunfire is silent. How frantically he’s trying to warn her—Get down! Get down!—but she, oblivious to the danger, is fiercely chiding him, Coward, hurry, come help me! Then she vanishes.
“Trif? Agapi mou?”
“Kaiti.”
“Ti eheis?”
“You’re here,” he says.
“You were making sounds. Your heart is pounding.”
“It’s all right.” His surging pulse is slowing now, beat by beat. She keeps her ear to his heart for a few seconds, then kisses his nipple. Too dark to see her do it.
“More hair than on your head,” she says fondly.
They fuck tenderly and slowly in the cold room, and the ache of it, the hollowed-out sorrow of early morning sex in the shadow of coming departure, sinks deep into his being. When he kisses her afterward, he tastes tears. They fall asleep, twined inseparably.
Sometime later it seems that a soft and furtive snow starts drifting down over Varosha, for the first time ever in history! a documentary-style baritone declares, and the roof and ceiling of her house are gone and snow is deepening on their blankets and he can’t move or speak as it buries them.
He sits up, alone in the bed. The house feels empty. She is gone, she has left with the twins, they’ve left already, somehow they have gone back to Nicosia, she has fled secretly to avoid a scene, a painful parting. He fumbles to strike a match, light the small lamp on the table. The second lamp is gone. He upends a Coke bottle vase of winter orchids that the twins gathered yesterday. Under the shuttered window a carpet bag still sits, open, half filled. For days she has been packing, half-unpacking, repacking. There’s a cloth bag containing the forty-year-old Kodachrome films she has amassed—photos of the twins since their arrival, mostly taken by Roland with a pocket camera from a dead-zone shop, though the film, he has told her, is likely too old. There are also canvas rucksacks for the twins, half-packed. Could they have left without taking anything? He pulls on his boxers and, lamp in hand, walks down the hallway to Lale’s door. He hears her breathing before he sees her small shape cuddled under her paploma.
Back in Kaiti’s room he dresses fast, seized by a hunch. For the first time it’s cold enough that his breaths emerge as vapour. He goes out and jogs awkwardly toward the plaza, quickly overheating in a too-small pea jacket that once belonged to Tansu.
The sun is still below the horizon but its light is turning small clouds vermilion high above the church dome. The main door is ajar. He slips through the gap without pushing it wider. Smell of myrrh, beeswax, cold marble dust, the droppings of generations of mice. At the far end of the nave, by the weak light of an olive-oil lamp, a figure kneels at the communion rail. He might be glimpsing Kaiti as a yiayia, a little widow hunched in her shawls after a lifetime with Trif, or with some other man. Beyond her, dimly, the saints on the high screen of the ikonostasis.
He walks up the aisle, not knowing whether to mute his steps out of respect and discretion, or to step firmly to alert her.
“Ekaterini.”
Still facing the rail she rises, crossing herself, then turns toward him.
“Ksero,” something in him says quickly, “katalavaino! I know, I understand—you can’t stay here. It’s all right. You’ll go back, the three of you, and I’ll come find you later.” (Somehow; maybe.) Her face is dark, backlit by the lamp. She steps forward as if to embrace him, then her hands fist and she pounds his chest and lets her head sag against him.
“You picked the right time to say so,” she says faintly.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing!”
At a loss, he asks, “Were you praying just now?”
“What else would I be doing here?”
“But I thought you didn’t—”
“I want clarity, Elia, what does it matter if it comes from God or somewhere in my mind?”
“Kaiti—”
“I can’t stay, you’re right—I and the children, we can’t stay—but I can’t leave you either. Not for one damned hour! It’s…”
“It’s what?”
“Even when you’re near, with Stratis now, working—it’s still too long.”
“It’s the same for me, Kaiti. Just the same.”
“I damn you, I can’t help it, but also…” She uses a mysterious phrase, something about the moon, to fengari, and a long wait. Trying to make sense of it, he pulls her close, her curly head under his chin. The glow of the lamp, the rich smell of her scalp. She says, “You didn’t understand me, did you?”
“No,” he says, but then—just as she uses the English word, cracking it into two syllables that echo in the dome five storeys up—he gets it. Pregnant.
“My moon never waits. Always on time.”
“Oh,” he says moronically, stalling, trying to contain his joy, afraid of seeming to celebrate a kind of victory over her will. But joy it is. His heart seems apt to fly apart with the emotion, this reaction he could never have foreseen.
“For now,” she says in English, “it’s our sacred.”
“Secret. Our secret.”
Enough light seeps in through the orient window over the door to show her face: perplexed. He kisses the skin between her eyebrows and the knot there eases.
“Different words,” he says. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll say they’re the same.”
“I also bless you,” she says in Greek, “not just damn you!”
He strips off his jacket and capes it over her shoulders. “If there were a priest here, Kaiti—I mean, if you’d let me—”
“I would let you. I can’t help it.”
Sunrise is ambering the outside of the dome as they walk across the plaza and into the streets winding toward the village, the same ones that she and Stratis marched him through, blindfolded, the night of his arrival. She begins to talk, in fact to babble in a way he has never heard before, explaining to him (and to herself, it seems) why staying in the village will be better for now, at least until autumn, or maybe the end of the year, yes, another year without bosses, bills, money fears, deadlines, constant time pressure and other, far worse things: traitorous friends and her own intolerant family, their ethnic hatreds, their obsession with the past.
“I wish Papa were alive now,” he says. “He kept hoping I’d find a nice Greek girl.”
“You still haven’t.”
The twins are waiting, photo-framed on the threshold of the open front door, Aslan with a snail of snot trailing from nose to mouth: he has woken with a cold. Elias scoops him up. He seems incredibly light. Elias’s own large body feels so light. The boy’s nostrils bubble and pop and he sneezes in Elias’s face, then leans his hot brow on Elias’s rough cheek. “I love you,” the boy says in Greek. Lale attaches herself to him too—the twins have discovered how much heat his bearlike body gives off. The three sit in the day’s first sunlight on the doorstep—for now, the warmest place in or around the house—while Kaiti goes inside to make Greek coffee and warm a little goat’s milk for the twins.
Elias looks east in a stupor of happiness. Through his eyes, sunrise streams into his brain and fills it with heat and light.
THREE
But This Was My Village
I will not allow that I was moved by justice rather than love, for justice also is a form of love.
—SUSAN SONTAG, THE VOLCANO LOVER
I was seeking you in heaven and I found you on earth.
—GREEK CYPRIOT SAYING
¡VIVA LA MUERTE!
It’s April and the plum trees are in blossom in the valleys of the mountains of Kurdistan, that tragic almost-country that sprawls across a number of official borders, including the one between Turkey and Syria. Four A.M. At a base just inside Turkey the little officer whom his colleagues refer to as Napoleon—with a blend of mockery, wary respect, and profound bewilderment—is starting his day in a prefabricated shed crowded with exercise equipment: benches, mats, barbells, dumbbells, and a small plates-and-pulleys machine. Everything looks new except for the two shivering fluorescent tubes that light the shed, and the warped, splotchy mirrors. No matter. Polat rarely looks in the mirror.
Every morning without fail he trains in the shed from 0400 till 0600. A few enlisted men and the odd NCO sometimes squeeze in as well, but
no other officers. They’re all sleeping off last night’s dinner and drinks at the officers’ mess. Polat always dines with them, as protocol dictates, but he doesn’t drink, he leaves for his quarters by 2000 hours, he is in bed by 2030, and till 2115, his personal curfew, he reads books of military history and strategy—Atatürk, von Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Julius Caesar, Epaminondas, Rommel, Patton, Wellington, and, yes, Napoleon Bonaparte. At present he’s reading an old, sympathetic biography of the Spanish general and dictator Francisco Franco and has learned that the motto of Franco’s elite Legionarios—men whose austere resolve he admires deeply and aspires to—was ¡Viva la muerte! Thinks Polat: that spirit was the real key to their triumph. “Long live death!” they would chant as they swept into battle against the Marxists (like the partisans here!), the anarchists, the scholars, the political dreamers too attached to their lives, families, possessions, and utopian ideals to fight.
After he was posted here in the fall he began forcing himself out to the exercise shed in the pre-dawn darkness and cold. He was always alone for the first hour. Initially he could barely hoist the lightest bar and his bench presses seemed a true gamble in that cold, flickering shed: perhaps he would be found dead with the forty-kilogram barbell fallen across his throat. The prospect did not alarm him. Somehow it incited him to greater effort, greater risk. Impatiently but thoroughly reading the many instructional posters covering the shed walls, he set his will to work on his body, like a warden bent on imposing compliance on a resistant captive. By the new year, when he was promoted to major after leading a recon mission into Syria—three Turkish dead and nine wounded, but at least eight PYD killed and twenty captured—his strength was at least average for his weight, which was the same as before but more athletically distributed.
By now—the morning of 10 April—Polat has condensed himself into a stalwart little man, like a Greco-Roman wrestler, his waist neither thin nor fat but solid, legs strong from thousands of squats and dead lifts, shoulders still narrow and sloping but slabbed with muscle. His thickened neck twitches with sinew, his jaw is angular. Naturally his skull is the same size, but now it looks more or less proportional. Behind his spectacles (still held on with a strap) his Anatolian blue eyes are clear. Hair shorn close to the bone. Moustache fuller, as if his training has triggered a second, more successful round of puberty.
The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Page 23
