The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  “Efendi, what will you do?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “You have made no plan?”

  “Plan?” Kaya repeats with a helpless grin. Then he takes a deep breath: “All right. Wake the children now. No, wait. I’ll do it. I need to tell them goodbye.”

  He slips back into the room, opens the curtains and the balcony door. The sun is low over a sea as placid as a pond. In his head, a voice he doesn’t recognize murmurs, This could be your last sunrise, look well. Filiz’s eyes open. She smiles in her shy-seeming way and stretches her arms out toward him, bracelets jingling. He would like nothing better now than to fall onto the bed and slide in between those plump arms and sturdy thighs, but he says, “Forgive me. Something has happened. I have to go wake up the children. You need to get up too.”

  “Really? What time is it? Can’t it wait a few minutes?”

  Seeing her gloriously nude and illuminated by the sunrise he feels his blood diverting even now. He makes for the bed, that muddle of sheets and pillows and pillowy flesh, his prick filling. Then he hears through the balcony door an unmistakable sound.

  “What’s that?” she asks. “Not holiday fireworks, so early?”

  “No.” He leans over the bed, grazing her lips with his, kissing her cheekbone where the heavy kohl has smudged. “Forgive me. Get up now and dress.”

  In his silk robe he hurries up the hallway and wakes each child with a kiss—Hava on the sunburned scalp where her hair parts, the scent there like honey and walnuts, the way her scalp smelled in infancy. Is he imagining it?

  “You have to get up, my love.”

  “Is something wrong, Baba? You smell funny.”

  “Hurry, Hava. And remember, girl, I love you very much.”

  Yil he kisses on the boy’s pimpled cheeks and brow, just under the close-cut widow’s peak, the skin dewed with the sweat of deep slumber. To wake him he has to jostle him. The dark eyes open but they’re blank, unseeing. Now they fall closed. He’s snoring again. Ali will have to re-wake him, more decisively than Kaya can bear to. He calls Ali up, gives him a bundle of banknotes and a few last instructions, then rises onto his toes to kiss the dry hollows of the man’s cheeks.

  In his room, Filiz is sitting at the foot of the bed, dressed, her nightbag in her lap, her scrubbed face pale and—without its stage makeup—somehow vague, unfocused. She looks bewildered and hurt, as if he’s rejecting her. Oh, he thinks, nothing could be further from the fact.

  “Are those gunshots? What’s happening, Colonel?”

  “I’m Erkan. If ever I was a colonel, I’m not now. Please go downstairs and wait for Ali. He’ll take you back to the hotel. For your own safety, please. I can’t explain now.”

  “What do you mean? What about you?”

  “Don’t worry about me. And to be honest, you won’t—you won’t want to—not after what you’ll be hearing soon.”

  “If you’re in trouble, let me help!”

  “And it’ll be best for you if you tell nobody that you’ve spent these nights here.”

  Her face goes to stone. “You’re ashamed because I’m a dancer!”

  “No—not at all! I fear you’re the one who will feel ashamed. Listen, there’s no time now. You have to go back. Just know at least that there was nothing false in…in what you and I…” He pulls her to her feet, kisses her one last time. “Forgive me.”

  In his closet he freezes again, his hand in the pants drawer, clutching a pair of army-issue camouflage trousers. He looks left at the tall mirror, as if the man reflected there could advise him. He seems to be developing a slight paunch. Bad time for that. He drops the uniform and from the civvies side of the drawer takes a pair of dark slacks. From his shirt rack he picks a crisp, brilliant white shirt he has never worn and a lightweight black blazer so he’ll have an inside pocket for the pistol. Italian leather shoes, wristwatch, wallet with passport, aviator sunglasses, cigarettes and lighter.

  He sits at the table by the balcony door, flips open his laptop, two-fingers a brief note addressed to whoever will be arriving here to arrest him, probably this afternoon, maybe sooner. He hears the Jeep starting up and growling away up the beach. Then more of those popping shots. The officers’ club accounts are kept in several large files and he deletes them, along with all of his emails, though he gathers that such things can be retrieved by experts. Well, so be it. He returns to the first screen and rereads his note. It’s awkwardly phrased and spiked with typos, but at the same time devoid of hypocritical apologies or protestations of shame and regret.

  At a quick jog he crosses his beloved tennis court and slips through the hidden gap in the fence. He allows himself no last look behind. Now here is that broad, apocalyptic avenue, John F. Kennedy, and Kaya is running up the middle, as if back on the football pitches of his boyhood. He’s dodging the oxidized carcasses of cars, unruly tamarisks, ramparts of prickly pear. Adrenalin should be aiding him more than it is—his legs feel bloodless and weighted and he’s panting through his parched mouth.

  He cuts northwest along a side street, toward the Jaguar gate and the village. If he didn’t know the way, he could just follow the rattling of the gunfire. The weapon in his breast pocket jounces awkwardly, so he takes it out and grips it. A window of the Cyprus Popular Bank is intact and though it’s dusty, grimy, the sunlight is direct enough that for a flash a man appears there, clean-jawed, smartly dressed, holding a pistol as he runs. Absurd. It’s the British film character James Bond. If only Kaya felt now as 007 always seems to feel, the way Kaya himself has usually felt: vigorous, cool, and unkillable.

  —

  Elias comes to on a beach at sunrise among wandering turtles and realizes it was a dream, all a dream. The soldiers from the bar attacked him and Eylül and they shot her (the reports still hammer in his ears) and they beat him savagely and left him for dead, and in the course of one short night he has dreamed all of the past year: his escape, his time in the village, Roland, Kaiti Matsakis and the twins, everything.

  There is no Kaiti Matsakis, no child in the womb.

  He wakes, reaches, feels in the dark. The very pregnant Kaiti lies beside him, breathing. Shots are ringing in his ears—no, not ringing, the shots are faint, but for him clear enough to have triggered a nightmare and then ripped him out of it. He leaps up in his boxer shorts, his heart hurtling. He stumbles out the bedroom door into the hallway, opens the front door. Shots are coming from the direction of the well. He runs back into the bedroom and pulls on blue jeans and an undershirt. No time for shoes, laces.

  “Kaiti? Get up.”

  “Ti einai, agapi?”

  “Finish packing the bags. Stay inside till I come back. Ten minutes.”

  His feet sinking into the Tombazos’ vegetable patch, he pounds a fist on their bedroom shutters and calls, “Ksypniste tora, tora!” He runs around the corner. The gate of the inn swings open and Roland staggers out into the sunrise, red-eyed, his hair on end, one side of his face more creased than the other. He’s trying to tuck in his faded blue U.N. shirt.

  Elias says, “Stratis, up at the well?”

  “It must be, ja, it was his watch. Argos must be with him. Listen—the guns have stopped!” But a moment later they start up again. Elias sets out running toward the well and the library, Roland plodding and panting behind him. The shots are from assault rifles—he knows that heavy thudding, fump fump fump—punctuated now and then by a handgun’s slighter report. His sight and hearing have gone hyperacute and yet his body feels numb, as if he’s about to faint, as if he half wants to. Because of Kaya’s note, he was on watch until 2:00 A.M., Roland from 2:00 until 4:00, Stratis after that.

  They approach the well and hear shouting and barking along with the gunfire, and from above the alley where they run, the buzzing flight of shots fired much too high. No way to know why soldiers might have come in here, but it’s obvious that they’re green, or just scared. Elias knows the feeling. Maybe it’s not too late to stop this. From the mouth of th
e alley, he and Roland peer out across the very wide traffic circle. Library on the northeast side. In the centre, the old traffic island where the well is tucked into that dense little orchard. Somewhere in there Stratis’s pistol cracks and Argos barks in support, or imitation. The rifles return fire from the far side of the traffic circle, from behind scrapyard cars and taxis, from the mouths of alleys, from behind the pillars of the library.

  On the library steps a figure lies and Elias’s sight is telescopic: the helmet tipped forward over the face, blood pooling and running down the steps, the uniformed body slack and abandoned. So it is too late to stop this. Other helmeted men flit along the edge of the circle, from one car to the next, moving to surround Stratis. He must realize it’s happening—the pincers spreading open. Maybe he doesn’t care. “Strati!” Elias calls and the name leaps out of him, shockingly loud. “They’re surrounding you—come back!”

  Argos emerges between two trees on the near side of the traffic island. He stops, glances back into the grove, looks across again toward Elias and Roland. He sniffs the air, wags his tail, barks frantically. It’s maybe twenty metres across the ring road to them.

  “Hurry, come now!” Elias yells. “Argo—Strati!”

  “I understand none of this,” Roland says in a small, shattered voice. “Something has happened to poor Kaya, I fear.”

  A bullet slices through the leaves and fells a branch glinting with cherries. Argos canters out from under the boughs and makes for Elias and Roland. On the far side of the traffic circle the Turks continue spreading in both directions, their arc now over ninety degrees, and on the west side an officer stands, no camouflage, no helmet, disdaining to crouch or dart for cover like his men—barely moving at all. He looks short and gym-fit and wears a peaked cap and (it’s hard to be sure from here) sunglasses or spectacles that reflect the low sun. Something familiar about him.

  Argos reaches the mouth of the alley and stops there, wriggling his backside with joy and relief, though in fact still exposed to the shooting. Roland merely pets Argos’s trembling head—Elias has to seize the dog’s scruff and haul him into the alley. Bullets fizz overhead, each sounding like a match struck into flame. One hits the corner of the wall and concrete chips shower down onto Roland’s hair. He doesn’t notice.

  “Roland, are you all right?”

  The man looks at him blankly, as if the crisis has aged him into dementia in minutes.

  Stratis appears between the cherry trees, revolver in one hand and semi-automatic in the other. He wears his beret and his torn, mended paratroop gear, combat boots, all of it from the time of the first Turkish invasion. So this is fate for him, full circle. He lopes out into the road and then, halfway across, where he’s no longer sheltered by the grove but exposed to the rifles at either end of the firing line, he turns and walks backward, holding his pistols out to northwest and northeast, though not firing. Is he out of bullets? The soldiers have taken cover but the officer remains in the open, maybe eighty metres off, pointing at Stratis, snapping orders. The rifle fire increases but seems no more accurate, until a round strikes sparks from the paving stones behind Stratis’s heels.

  He backs into the alley. Without looking at either of them he says, with a kind of ferocious glee, “Did I not tell you two poustes they would come! Now hurry back, take everyone under, into the tombs.”

  “Tombs? What are you talking about?”

  “Catacombs,” Roland says vaguely. “Under the church. I never told you.”

  “I will hold them off here. Go now. I’ll give you time, maybe twenty minutes. I’ve reloaded and have four extra rounds. In the Turkish gun are maybe seven rounds—here, one of you take it to protect the others.”

  “I will not shoot a man,” Roland says flatly, seeming to snap awake at last.

  “Maybe you could shoot your handsome catamite, Kaya! You see in the end how he betrays us!”

  “No,” Elias and Roland say together, Elias adding, “Come back with us, Strati. It’s hopeless here. We’ll run south and cross over the Green Line, down where—”

  “Down where Roland took Myrto across?”

  “Look, this isn’t the time to—”

  “You think the old ones can even walk so far? And Neokli? You think the Turks won’t overtake them, and all of you?”

  “You can’t hold them off here, not this many.”

  “I have hit three, maybe four!” He bares his teeth, his hairy nostrils flare, the whites of his eyes shine. “And here is the one place where they can be held!” Leaning his head and shoulder out of the alley he aims the semi-automatic but holds his fire. “That Turk we found, all but dead of the heat? He is here, that’s him now!” (Ah, of course.) “He won’t hide himself. Yet I keep missing, even with his own weapon.” Stratis has raptor-sharp eyes, a non-reader’s eyes, but it’s too far for an aimed pistol shot. He fires, then spits explosively. “Ghamise to, moreh! I told you we shouldn’t save him!”

  “But you’re happy now that we did,” Elias blurts in English.

  “Ti?”

  “Tipota.” Nothing.

  Stratis shoves the semi-automatic at him, very new, black and burnished. Elias watches his own hand grip the barrel, burning hot, no pain.

  “Pai!” Stratis says. Go!

  “All right, but in a few minutes you should back down this alley and find a new spot to—”

  “You and the devil can write it on my ass! I’ve planned fighting retreats through these streets a thousand times, a thousand different paths. I am ready. Now hurry to the tombs—there are supplies, a plan, Roland will tell you!” They start out and he roars after them, as if cursing them, “Katevodhio!”—God speed you—and then his high, ecstatic chanting pursues them down the alley, an old Cretan war song he used to quaver while working, God gives us this hour to kill, to die, to live on in the songs of those we love.

  The two men and the dog retrace a path marked by a few bloody footprints and Elias sees they’re from his own bare feet, his body anaesthetized by shock. Back through the labyrinth of lanes, the battle sounds muffled. Stratis is right: the Tombazos can’t flee, would never reach the Green Line ahead of the soldiers. And Kaiti, eight months pregnant, and the twins? As he and Roland stop at the courtyard gate, he says, “Maybe it’s best—safest—just to surrender?”

  “Ja, but for one problem.”

  “What? I mean, they can’t just shoot us all.” He frowns down at the gun he holds. “And you’re a German citizen, I’m Canadian.”

  Too winded for words, Roland stares intently, urging him to understand.

  “Right. I’m not thinking. We’re already dead.”

  “Just so.”

  “We don’t exist, so they can do what they want with us—I mean, if they—”

  “If they choose. And Kaya did say there was a grave problem. I fear he must mean this officer—he has returned for us.”

  “Maybe Stratis was right. We should have left him.”

  “Why speak of what was never a choice, not of your nature nor mine?”

  As Elias runs around the corner, he shoves the pistol into the back of his jeans. In his panic, magical thinking overtakes him. He never deserved these last eight months. He always knew it. The gate of the Tombazos’ small courtyard is open and he can hear the old couple arguing, Neoklis sobbing. He crashes in through the door of Kaiti’s house, his house now too, and calls, “Prepei na pame! We have to go!” In the bedroom Kaiti sits on the edge of the made bed with the long-haired twins on either side, their feet in their Sunday shoes not reaching the floor. Rucksacks on their backs, the button-eyed face of a stuffed lamb sticking out of Lale’s. They peer up at him, their mouths loose. Under Kaiti’s huge green eyes, dark crescents. Her belly bulges inside a tan cotton frock made forty years ago for a woman of ampler build.

  “This all started with my arrival,” he says.

  She raises her hand, juts her chin. “Not another word. Must we go now? Are Stratis and Roland…?”

  He explains wha
t is happening in simple English, over the twins’ indignant protests, Tell us, tell us in Greek! While he speaks, he pulls socks onto his torn-up feet, jams them into running shoes, puts on a shirt. He can feel the pulse even in his eyes. She closes the shutters and gets the twins out into the hallway. He picks up the heavy carpet bag and sees Roland’s manuscript on the bedside table, a glob of candle wax adhering to the top page like a seal. He opens the bag and stuffs it in.

  —

  Roland and the dog are outside waiting as Kaiti, the twins, and Elias emerge. Roland holds a lantern. No luggage. Funeral face. The Tombazos stand at the gate of their courtyard, arguing in Cypriot dialect. Elias gets the gist of it; Kaiti sends the twins back into the house for more candles so they won’t hear. Stavroula is urging that the family flee and hide from the Turks under the church, while Takkos is refusing to abandon the house that he built with his own sweat and blood and spit. He refused back in ’74 and he refuses again now. Let the Turks kill and bury me here if they will, why should I leave after standing my ground for so long? Why should you? Let us stay here together! The others will take Neokli down into the katacombi. We can’t leave our chickens, our doves, the bees…

  Stavroula cuts in, “No use arguing with a fool. Stay if you insist, an old man with a few blunt kitchen knives against the Turkish army!”

  The fighting, heard from out here in the open, sounds louder, and seems to be approaching, as if Stratis is now in retreat, down to his final shots. Kaiti runs back into the house and comes out dragging the twins by their hands. A few more candles. Elias thrusts them into the bag. He keeps his body angled face-on to Kaiti so she doesn’t see the gun. Now Stavroula and the tearful Neoklis join them—he lurching along with his tiptoe gait, his chessboard folded under his arm and shirt pockets bulging with pieces—and the group sets out for the plaza, ten minutes to the south. Nobody says a word about Takkos. Stavroula carries only a small nightbag. Her paisley headscarf is dark with sweat and her breath comes heavy and ragged. She holds Neoklis’s hand. She wears her slippers and, over her housedress, an apron.