The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  FICTION

  Flight Paths of the Emperor

  On earth as it is

  The Shadow Boxer

  Afterlands

  Every Lost Country

  The Dead Are More Visible

  POETRY

  Stalin’s Carnival

  Foreign Ghosts

  The Ecstasy of Skeptics

  The Address Book

  Patient Frame

  The Waking Comes Late

  NON-FICTION

  The Admen Move on Lhasa

  Workbook: memos & dispatches on writing

  ANTHOLOGIES

  A Discord of Flags: Canadian Poets Write about the Gulf War (1991: with Peter Ormshaw & Michael Redhill)

  Musings: An Anthology of Greek-Canadian Literature (2004: with main editor Tess Fragoulis, & Helen Tsiriotakis)

  CHAPBOOKS/LETTERPRESS

  Paper Lanterns: 25 Postcards from Asia

  The Stages of J. Gordon Whitehead

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  First published 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by Steven Heighton

  Maps copyright © 2017 by Steven Heighton

  “An Occurrence on the Beach at Varosha,” appeared in The Walrus, January/February 2017.

  Excerpt from The Volcano Lover: A Romance by Susan Sontag. Copyright © 1992 by Susan Sontag. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Heighton, Steven

  The nightingale won’t let you sleep / Steven Heighton.

  ISBN 9780735232563 (paperback)

  ISBN 9780735232570 (electronic)

  I. Title.

  PS8565.E451N54 2017 C813′.54 C2016-904745-8

  Cover and interior design by CS Richardson

  Cover photo: iStock.com/​momcilog

  v4.1

  a

  THIS BOOK IS FOR

  SKELETON PARK AND THOSE WHO LIVE HERE:

  GRATITUDE FOR INSPIRATION

  To leave one’s Childhood is to learn to disobey.

  But that is not Adulthood. Adulthood is to learn again to obey, only something better.

  —ROLAND KRÜGER,

  “THE POLARIS: ONE VERSION OF A JOURNEY”

  (UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPT, CA. 1884)

  In July 1974 the Republic of Cyprus—a fragile federation comprising an ethnically Greek majority and Turkish minority—disintegrated in the wake of a CIA-sponsored coup that aimed to bring about Enosis, the union of Greece and Cyprus. The ensuing violence provided Turkey with a pretext to invade Cyprus in support of the Turkish Cypriots. By summer’s end the United Nations had brokered a truce and established a demilitarized zone. Population exchanges followed, with Turkish Cypriots moving into the northern third of the island—soon to become a puppet state recognized only by Turkey—and Greek Cypriots into the southern part.

  On both sides of the Green Line, homes, businesses, even a few small villages were left empty. But on Cyprus’s east coast an entire city was abandoned, the Turkish army having pushed south of the initial ceasefire line to seize the island’s best beach, seven kilometres long, and the thriving resort quarter beside it, Varosha, whose twenty thousand inhabitants had fled the first Turkish bombs.

  Over forty years later, the city remains fenced off, a derelict enclave of eroding structures overgrown with vines, bougainvillea, scrubby palm trees and acacia, teeming with rabbits, rats, snakes and partridges, and reputedly containing at least one car dealership where 1974 Fiats are still on show. Turkish troops continue to patrol the decaying perimeter fence and occasionally they, and the odd U.N. patrol, will enter the “dead zone” and inspect the outer parts.

  Neither the U.N. nor Turkish authorities lend any credence to rumours that somewhere in the heart of the ruins a small community has survived for years: refugees, fugitives, deserters, various outcasts and misfits.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One The Dead Zone Paphos, Cyprus, 26 October

  An Occurrence on the Beach at Varosha

  Black Box

  Morning at the Palm Beach Officers’ Club

  The Village

  Clear-Cut: Kandahar, 11 October

  Flight

  Accident

  Data Shadow

  November: The Tennis Set

  Invasion

  The Ice Bath

  In Cyprus The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep

  Our Quiet Exile

  Accident

  Seeking Lethe

  Two The Green Line Arkadash

  Roland’s Tale

  Finding Paris

  Red River Valley

  The Effigy

  The Moon in Waiting

  Three But This Was My Village ¡Viva La Muerte!

  Easter

  The Final Page

  Victory Day

  Paris, September

  Lost Countries

  Acknowledgments

  ONE

  The Dead Zone

  When you have a neighbour, you have God.

  —GREEK CYPRIOT PROVERB

  PAPHOS, CYPRUS, 26 OCTOBER

  “How long is it, then, since you have slept?” the doctor asked.

  Elias looked up at the ceiling, trying to recall. The blades of the fan turned listlessly—in fact, they seemed to be slowing, as if the power had just cut out again.

  “Surely you’ve slept a little since we last met?”

  “It was yesterday, right?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “Okay.”

  “About thirty hours ago,” the doctor said.

  “I’ve passed out a couple of times, for a while. I tried not to.”

  “So, you did not remain asleep? You had the dream again?”

  “Yes.”

  “You wish to describe it again, or the incident itself?”

  “They’re almost the same. It’s not really a dream. More like a video of an atrocity.”

  “As I said, this is typical of your condition—diagnostic, actually. However—”

  “And, no, I don’t.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Want to describe it again.”

  Drops of sweat glistened on the raw-looking scalp under the doctor’s blond comb-over. Thick glasses magnified his colourless, pink-rimmed eyes, which blinked often. “Avoiding sleep, however,” he said. “It’s understandable, but I fear that such a—such a practice can only make the matter worse.”

  “I’ve never needed much sleep.”

  “Men of your kind often boast of how little sleep they need.”

  “You’re not meant to mock your patients, are you?”

 
“You do look tired,” the doctor said, as if he hadn’t heard, “though in fact you seem somewhat improved today. Still, I apologize—”

  “Frankly, I don’t feel that bad, I feel relieved, because I’m awake now, not asleep and reliving things. Insomnia is a fucking joy in comparison to that.”

  “Self-inflicted sleep deprivation—not insomnia.”

  “What did you mean by men of my kind?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I have no idea myself anymore.”

  “Large men, robust. Metamorphic. Pardon me, mesomorphic.”

  Elias Trifannis looked out the window over the doctor’s shoulder: a white pebble beach, the calm Mediterranean pixelated with sunlight. The army was using this former student residence on the west coast of Cyprus to treat personnel on stress leave from the war. Last night, while Elias silently performed yet another set of push-ups on the cold cement floor of his room, trying to hold off sleep, the patient in the next room screamed catastrophically. That was helpful: a few extra hours of adrenalized alertness.

  “It’s funny how people think they can look at your body and know your soul,” Elias said.

  That magnified blinking again. In a faster, fainter voice the doctor said, “Ah, mais oui, you are quite right, one should never assume a correlation between, between…how could I put it…”

  Elias yawned helplessly, gapingly, a pathological yawn that convulsed his whole body. “Sorry, Dr. Boudreau,” he said at last. “I really do enjoy talking to you.”

  “Perhaps you will be able to sleep better on your weekend away? I hope so. You are going across the island, to visit family?”

  “Distant relatives.”

  “How is your Greek now?”

  “Etsi ki etsi. If you don’t mind my saying, you look really tired yourself.”

  “Yes.” The doctor’s blinking made it seem he was trying to communicate something in a sort of binary code, words he couldn’t bring himself to say. “It’s not simply this heat wave. Normally, one grows used to working with the—the traumatized, yet I seem to find it increasingly…But what am I saying? I must not say such things!”

  The fan still gave the illusion of perpetually slowing without ever stopping.

  “In any case, Master Corporal—I wish you a peaceful weekend.”

  “Don’t call me that, okay?”

  “And, please, don’t speak of what happened in Kandahar.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to speak about it.”

  “And bear in mind, it was not your fault! Not anyone’s fault!” The doctor subdued his twitching by closing his eyes for a second, then opening them wide. “It was simply…”

  “An accident. I know.”

  “And don’t forget your medication.”

  “No way. I love my medication.”

  Dizzy, seeing double, Elias tried to focus his gaze. Out the window in the distance a sunburned figure in a swimsuit—who seemed impossibly to be the doctor—appeared on the shore and walked into the sea.

  AN OCCURRENCE ON THE BEACH AT VAROSHA

  The evening’s last light has drained out of the sky behind the procession of dead hotels lining the beach. Up to fifteen storeys high, they were built so close together that now, their facades darkening, they merge into a single jagged silhouette, like the remains of an immense seawall or ancient coastal fortification. You can barely make out the rusted fence topped with barbed wire that separates the beach from the hotels and the ghost city behind them.

  In his current state, Elias can’t begin to imagine the optimism and entrepreneurial hustle it must have taken to plan, rapidly construct, and operate this riviera. Somehow people go on doing such things—building cities, waging wars, growing and cutting down forests, organizing international movements, training as bodybuilders or concert violinists. He can only look on in wonder at such committed vim, like the paralyzed casualty of a roadside bombing watching a frantic sprint relay race on television.

  The hoteliers’ optimism turned out to be misplaced. Elias’s aunt and uncle—now living not far from here, in Larnaca, on the Greek Cypriot side of the Green Line—were among the first to build and, they insist, among the last to flee. Their hotel was a small one, just three storeys and twenty-four rooms, the Aphrodite, at least half an hour’s walk south of here along the beach. Elias had meant to head down there before sunset, after swallowing his meds and the usual quantity of contraindicated drinks. But in the bar of the Palm Beach—the lone working hotel on the strip, reopened in the late nineties under Turkish management—he met a woman, and now they’re walking into the dark along the seafront in the still-warm sand. The lights of the Palm Beach fade behind them. Their fingers brush and link and now their hands clinch and hold firm.

  Last night in Larnaca his aunt and uncle asked him to report back on the condition of their hotel. As the holder of a foreign passport, Elias can cross the Green Line without trouble, drive the short distance to the dead city and walk the perimeter, including the palm-lined beach, which is open, though seemingly unused. From the beach side of the fence he meant to grab a few prohibited shots of the Aphrodite with the cellphone now hibernating in his shirt pocket. Technically, his aunt and uncle too can now cross the Green Line, but as exiled Varoshiotes they refuse on principle to go anywhere near the city, not until it is returned to them. They know about the bigger hotels’ hopelessly degraded state—in the Greek Cypriot media they have seen furtively snapped photographs in which the beachfront looks as if it just sustained a shelling by Turkish warships—but they still dare to hope that the Aphrodite has fared better. Built with comparative care before the full construction frenzy began, it might still be salvaged, they feel, if peace should ever come to the island, if Varosha, God willing, should ever revert to the Greeks.

  His aunt and uncle (they’re actually distant cousins but referred to as theia and theios in the Greek manner) are in their late seventies. Their unshakable hope—at their age, and almost four decades after a violent dispossession that impoverished them for years—strikes him as another example of an optimism he can no longer imagine. He feels as gutted as any of these ruined establishments. His silences distressed theia and theios, who did their utmost to distract him with wine, the bittersweet local liqueurs, and theia’s ardently oversalted cuisine. Though Elias ate and drank in a dazed, almost catatonic way, he did in fact eat and drink a great deal, which visibly reassured his relatives, as did his promise to check on their property before returning to Paphos on the far side of the island. He called the hospital in Paphos a training centre and said nothing about the military shrinks. He ducked or deflected their questions about the war, sometimes falling back on his rusty Greek to pretend he didn’t understand. He assured them he was simply tired—tired in a way he could never have imagined before the army—and this much, at least, was no lie.

  The beach is deserted. Neither he nor the woman says a thing, but with the synchronized instinct of two strangers gripped by the same desire they stop and sit down in the fine-grained sand. Tropically tepid shallows lap the beach twenty steps from their feet. She lights a Turkish cigarette. Above the fenceline behind them the ghosts of Varosha—the elite of Europe, playboys and divas, film stars, professional gamblers, trust-fund rogues, crime bosses and heads of state—lounge on their high hotel balconies (the balconies have all collapsed), sipping Campari and soda or whisky sours and watching the constellations fizz up out of the sea like bubbles from sparkling wine.

  “Do you recall how you pronounce my name?”

  “Eylull?”

  “Ey-lool. Over the u there is an umlaut.”

  “Eylül.”

  “Well done.”

  “It means December,” he says with confidence.

  “Already you’ve forgot—Eylül is September.”

  “It was loud in there.”

  “It was deafening.”

  “You were born in September, then?”

  “I hope you’re not going to ask me how old I am.”

&
nbsp; He chuckles, a sound lately unfamiliar to him. “You should call me Trif. It’s from Trifannis.”

  “Your family name?”

  He nods, not saying that it’s pretty much all that remains of his family.

  She is a journalist from Istanbul, tall, aristocratically slim, with modish red-framed glasses behind which her dark eyes sometimes flash with startling vehemence—that hair-trigger moodiness he now associates with this part of the world. He likes and somewhat envies the undisguised intelligence of her talk; he himself is in flight from thinking and has been since boyhood. Her bobbed hair is dyed blonde, setting off tanned olive skin and black, solid eyebrows. When she speaks—enunciating with a finishing-school English accent—her hand gestures are lively yet measured. He guesses she’s in her mid-thirties, a few years older than he is.

  In the bar a small clutch of soldiers and two older Turkish Cypriots monitored them, initially with the frank curiosity of regulars and then—as things progressed, she punctuating a remark with a tap on his wrist; slipping off her glasses; turning off her cellphone—conspicuous disapproval. The place was almost empty, the dance floor a desert. Visibly bored, the young DJ kept turning up the music. He was skinny, had a soul patch and, like the waiter and bartender, wore an oversized fez, which he was trying to hipsterize by tilting at a lazy angle. The bass line’s concussive thumping…Elias knew it would trigger flashback panic in most of his fellow patients, but lately he welcomed any noise that helped offset his tranquilizers enough to hold off sleep and dreams.

  As he and Eylül struggled to speak over the Turkish hip hop, their lips came within inches of each other’s ears. Her ear was small, sunburned, surprisingly unpierced. Like her cheek, it gave off heat. The bar was emptying except for the watching men. He felt sure they had decided, more or less correctly, that he was Greek by blood. They would be using that ancient faculty of minute discernment found in any region where ethnic groups collide, where the borders are disputed, where the grievances have grown roots. (Elias knows of that ability but doesn’t share it; he thought the glaring men looked pretty much like him.) Certainly they knew she was Turkish—she was ordering the drinks in Turkish—but probably they could deduce a lot more: that she was from Istanbul, educated, modern, a secular sophisticate.