The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Read online

  After helping Roland hand-squish potato bugs and pick tomatoes in the garden, he stumps slowly north to the library, knowing it’s open for only an hour or two around midday, when enough light enters through the skylight’s cracked, dirty panes. He hopes to find compilations of songs in English. If the library has any, they will be pre-1974, but he likes plenty of that older material. Nightly now he plays for at least a few of the villagers. He means to expand his playlist, add some Greek songs, and Roland would like him to learn a few traditional western numbers like “Red River Valley,” to which Roland knows German words. “Ah, then you’re German—or Austrian?” Elias asked. “Or possibly Swiss,” the man replied, in Greek.

  The library’s grand front doors are sealed along the bottom to keep out rats. He enters through the side door and negotiates a gloomy maze of meandering shelves. More than once he has to backtrack. He emerges and crosses the atrium to the desk under the skylight, where Dr. Myrto Nicolaides is leaning over a chaos of layered papers, gnawing a pencil (the library is the one place where she will not smoke).

  “Sorry to bother you,” he says. She peers up: startled eyes with dark pouches beneath. She looks more like a sleepless scientist than a librarian. For years she was a junior professor in classical philosophy at the university in Nicosia—this much he has learned. Also that she spends her daily two hours here (four or five in summer, when the light is better and this is the coolest spot in Varosha) planning and executing an Augean labour of reorganization. During his first visit, with Roland, Myrto explained in stiffly accurate English that in her view, books ought not to be shelved in exclusive sections, by genre, each genre internally alphabetized, but instead in a sort of rolling continuum, according to essence. Thus Ovid’s Metamorphoses belongs not in Poetry or Classics but between books concerning dreams and books concerning psychology, especially those by C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse. Those books then shift by degrees into neurology, then physiology, anatomy, evolution, geology, teleology, philosophy. Marcus Aurelius and other laconics, as she calls them, shade into the authors of haiku, then the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Sufis, the Christian mystics, who are many aisles removed from St Paul, who resides with Descartes and other dualists…

  Now in a crisply satisfied tone she corrects him when he asks about the music section. The shelving, she repeats, is fluid, a moving river of associations! Alas, this has led to certain problems. Knowledge does not form a single, linear spectrum—it branches, it forks. Evolution not only leads into geology but also diverges into neurology, not to mention chemistry, or genetics! For several years, she says, Roland has been helping her move the wheeled but heavy shelves into looping, labyrinthine configurations, trying to shape an essential continuum that is unbroken except for those places where a “synapse” must be left between shelves to permit visitors to pass—yet still in several places the project has stalled, the shelves like dead branches, and each “solution” leads to other problems, other dead ends. “I misjudged the difficulty,” she tells him now, the overhead light showing the grey in her tied-back hair. Her mouth moves little when she speaks, her teeth never showing.

  “Come.” She guides him back into the stacks. “I can lead a borrower directly to any book in particular, by memory.” And she adds that she is compiling a vast alphabetical catalogue, lest she be the only one to know where each title can be found.

  The shelves close around them. Dust motes drift in eddies of air, the detritus of countless volumes slowly atomizing. They pass a lone shelf that juts from a line of shelves. On the dead end of it, a brass plaque reads POLEMOS PATER PANTON—war, father of everything. Unlike the others, this shelf is bare.

  “This used to be Military History?” he asks.

  “The books have been redistributed. For now, I leave this shelf labelled but empty, a symbolic gesture, war as a dead branch. Consider what it did to my city!”

  “So you don’t agree with the line.”

  “Agree?” she says, as if she rarely agrees with anything. “You’ve been sweating,” she says, now in Greek, and her small, comma-shaped nostrils flare. Once he’s sure that he hasn’t misunderstood, he says, “I was helping Roland in the garden.”

  “Yes, in the sunshine. I smell that too. It seems so far away when I’m in here.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t have time to wash.”

  “Not at all,” she goes on in Greek. “Please, say no more.”

  He doesn’t know where to look. He crosses his arms over his chest, as if to seal shut his armpits, which are abruptly damper and chilled in this twilit space. He shivers. Like any large man, he finds frail people more disconcerting than the strong. They’re trickier to read. He says, “Didn’t Charles Manson say his father was the war?”

  “Who?” she asks. She’s edging closer with no visible motion and he can see the lines like fine print in her olive skin, how her eyebrows are faint, pencilled arcs. In this moment she seems inseparably part of the library, a creature of its gloom and of the past, all language and knowledge. He himself was a bit of a bookworm before learning to hide it as a boy, so as to pass as a boy, a jock, and to gratify his father, which of course is what eventually brought him here.

  “I’m not sure I want to go back,” he hears himself say.

  She steps forward, kisses him on the lips. He loosens his tight arms, opens them and wraps them around her thin shoulders, less like a lover than like a boxer clinching to avoid further blows. She feels cold under her flimsy blouse. She kisses him harder. Briefly, reflexively, he kisses her back, this woman—maybe close to the age his mother was when she died—then turns his face away, cups the back of her head in his large hand and brings her cheek to his chest.

  “Lipameh,” he says. I’m sorry.

  “For what? Such a kiss? That was nothing.”

  “Then for nothing.”

  Their speech and the sound of her breaths are amplified high above in the coffers of the ceiling, from which dead electric lamps hang down. They stand together amid piles of unsorted books, the shelves towering around them. She smells of graphite and cigarette smoke.

  “It’s not war,” she says, speaking Greek now, “but simply hate.”

  “What is?”

  “The father of all things. Hate is. Also anger, envy, failed love. War…it’s just a symptom.” In Greek the phrases sound not rhetorical but natural, as if the language has evolved solely for the use of orators, lovers, eulogists, singers and poets. “When I came here, I told myself I was at the end of love, thus at the end of life. I would disappear into the aftermath, alone here, and not return—die, I must have thought. I was mad with grief and shame. I never knew there were people in here, nobody knew. But I remembered the city—I grew up here, a very happy time, I was twelve years old when we had to flee. I never forgot this library. I decided—no—I decided nothing—I simply acted—I fled back here when my life collapsed. The man was married, a senior colleague, four children, married and with other lovers, or so I learned at the end—he lied to me for nine years, six months and two days. My God, the promises! A life with him, children of my own, children of our own—common promises, I know, a trite little tale, but to me at that time, somehow it seemed unique, our own epic! I was little older than you when it started. It was after my marriage died. I see now that he never took me seriously, not because I was a woman but because I grew up poor, by his standards—my father worked with his hands. You wouldn’t understand, you have no class system in America, not like here.”

  “Well,” Elias starts, but he stops himself so as not to stop her.

  “In the end—I never believed it possible and yet I could see how easy it was for him to give me up, a mildly disagreeable bit of business, like sacking a difficult, minor employee. I did things to injure him then, things one should never do, not even to men like Manoli. I was out of my mind with the loss. I did terrible things! No one died, but I lost everything, family, friends, my position, the children he never gave me, also the two he made me cut short, ‘too soon,�
� he told me, ‘not yet.’ He meant, ‘not ever.’ ”

  She brings amber fingertips to her mouth, the nails closely bitten. The lines arcing from her nostrils to the corners of her lips channel tears.

  “But, look, I said I was finished with love, this kind especially, and here I make myself a liar, throwing myself at you.”

  “It’s all right,” he murmurs.

  “I’ve begun to dream again lately,” she says. “I mean, dreams of love.”

  It hits him that he too had an erotic dream last night—no war dream. But who was the woman? The face was blacked out like a redacted word in a vital document.

  “In the dreams, however, I’m not too old for one of your age.”

  “You’re not old,” he says, although he can’t help thinking, Yes, she is old. “It’s just that…”

  “Or you think I’m half mad. All the others do.”

  “I like your library,” he says.

  “The twins even fear me. They believe I’m a magissa—I will catch them among the shelves and turn them into moon moths and press them into books. If only I had such powers! What would I have done to Manoli, I wonder?”

  She kisses his cheek and he feels the hot tears. He hugs her—keeping a slight distance at the waist—and the buckling of her delicate skeleton startles him, as if a little more force might have snapped her spine.

  —

  He returns to the courtyard as the afternoon heat builds and siesta settles over the village. His words to Myrto—“I’m not sure I want to go back”—surprised him at the time and surprise him now. He will have to flee before his resolve weakens further. His ankle hurts too much to run, but he can manage a walk. It will have to be enough. As he opens the gate and enters, Argos, on his side under the lemon tree, lifts his head slightly, looks over, lets his head flop back into the dirt. Elias leaves the gate slightly ajar. Roland can be heard snoring in his room. He has said this is the hottest autumn he has ever known in Cyprus. As Elias enters his own room, he glances across the courtyard at Stratis’s half-open door, then lies down to wait until the siesta deepens and even Stratis must be asleep. Instead, after a few minutes he hears the man emerge, cross the courtyard to the gate to shut and lock it, then go back into his room.

  Elias lets his body loosen, his heavy eyelids droop. It’s as if he has eaten lotos. He decides, if decide is the word, to leave things to fate for now. Wait and see if Stratis begins to snore. Jumping the fence with this ankle will be tricky. Maybe try tonight instead? Or after the Sunday dinner, so as to see Kaiti one more time.

  A rapping like a burst of semi-automatic fire wrenches him awake. The door swings open. He has been sleeping hard for maybe an hour; the shadow of the window grille has crossed several tiles. He expects to see Neoklis, maybe Myrto. Stavroula Tombazo barges in, flower-print housedress, meaty arms and monolithic bosom, and Elias thinks, My God, you too? Woozy with sleep he addresses her in English, which she doesn’t speak: “What is it—everything okay?”

  “Get up and dress. Roland and Sergeant Kourakis need your help. Are you not a soldier? The hermit warns that an armed Turkish officer is approaching the village.”

  —

  Roland and Elias pass through the derelict bazaar to the plaza and then across the open square under a withering sun. No one should be awake and moving out here. Roland walks as always with his head stooped, hands linked behind his back, feet turned out. His straw sun-hat goes oddly with the remnants of his peacekeeper’s outfit: that faded blue shirt with the cloth epaulettes. On his belt a primitive-looking walkie-talkie. His eyelids are puffy and he’s already red and winded, lucky for Elias, who’s struggling to keep up on his ankle and tender feet. But Elias is not unwilling to be out here, aiding his captors; he’ll be in far more trouble if captured by the Turks.

  Roland explains that Stratis and the dog are up ahead, not far from the Jaguar gate, watching the intruder.

  “I thought you said the village was safe?”

  “This is a mysterious aberration.”

  “You’re sure it’s not this colonel, Kaya?”

  “Of course not!” Roland sounds untypically irritable. Or is he simply alarmed? “Come, hurry, Stratis cannot be predicted.”

  They enter a side street that soon curves away from the plaza, then straightens and runs east—more or less the route Elias followed on the night he entered Varosha. Another block and the Jaguar gate comes into sight. Roland is several steps ahead. Elias repeatedly turns his ankle in the cracks between paving stones. Shocks of familiar agony. He could never have reached the Green Line. An eruption of static and Roland brings the handset to his ear. Elias can’t make out a word through the crackling, but Roland replies in Greek, “We’re at the gate—not far now. Five minutes.” Because of the connection or Stratis’s hearing, Roland has to repeat himself: “Pende lepta! Endaksi?”

  First Roland and then Elias squeeze through the rift between the sedans. Thanks to the village diet, Elias fits through more easily than on his first night in Varosha. Another block and they veer left onto a wider residential street, its asphalt buckled by man-high weeds like giant Queen Anne’s lace, some of it freshly macheted. They pass an auto showroom, the glass facade collapsed and replaced by a screen of palm scrub behind which a few homely European compacts, grey with dust, remain on display.

  The cratered street opens into a sun-white expanse: a tiny plaza with an old stone church to one side. Roland stops, swabs his face with a handkerchief. In the shadow of the hat brim his eyes, very blue in his boiled-looking face, swivel and search. A voice calls softly, “Ela edho, vlakes!” They make for the remains of a building on the corner, its roof caved and a mespila tree growing out of the rubble.

  Stratis and Argos are tucked behind what’s left of the east wall, Stratis’s dark beret tipped low over one brow. He’s restraining the dog by the ruff. His free hand holds a mespila bitten to the stone. Behind his moustache he’s calmly chewing. Roland and Elias hunker beside him and squint across the blazing square. Elias feels the heat everywhere except in his guts, which are ice cold. At first he sees nothing. Then something moves in the shade on the ledge of the fountain at the centre of the square. A squat palm, like a huge pineapple with ratty fronds, grows out of the dead fountain. His eyes adjust. A man in uniform sits on the ledge, his head and torso slumped forward. His peaked cap has fallen by his boots. His head lolls lower, snaps up. Elbows splayed, he’s pressing his hands down onto his thighs, as if trying to push himself to his feet. Again his head droops and this time his body follows, first in slow motion but speeding up, toppling forward off the ledge and crashing into the square.

  Stratis stands and releases Argos, who pounces over the rubble and slinks low and fast toward the body. Stratis flings away the stone of the fruit, unpockets his lovingly oiled and polished revolver, and follows. Roland and Elias come next, Roland jogging a few steps to catch Stratis, putting a hand on his shoulder, saying in Greek, “Do nothing that can’t be undone!” Stratis jerks free and calls back, “Now do you see this will always be a war zone?”

  Argos sniffs at the body and now looks up at the approaching men. Stratis clucks his tongue. The dog backs off. Roland kneels and checks the man’s throat for a pulse.

  “Dead?” Stratis asks hopefully.

  “No—he’s hot, and his heart is racing. Put away your gun and help me turn him.”

  Stratis makes no move to touch the man. Elias squats and helps Roland turn him onto his back. The large head has an inflated look, the plump face so livid you can barely see the oozing welt where his brow just smacked the stones. One lens of his wire-framed spectacles is cracked. There’s a tear in his trousers leg, though the scrape there on his knee looks hours old. His holster is empty. He looks to be around Elias’s age.

  Roland cups a palm over the man’s forehead.

  “He’s bone dry. Heatstroke. He must have been in here for hours. The streets around here are a labyrinth. He’ll be dead very soon if we don’t help.”

&nb
sp; “Then we don’t help,” Stratis says from deep in his chest.

  “Don’t be a fool! They’ll come in here looking for him.”

  “But Kaya can fix things, no? Isn’t that what he does, according to you?”

  “This man is a captain in the Turkish army!” says Roland, indicating the shoulder patch plastered with dust and dirt. “Kaya did mention he has a new man—God alone knows what he was doing in here. But if he goes missing, there will be a full search of Varosha and not even Kaya could prevent it.”

  Behind the damaged spectacles the man’s eyes are open a crack. He’s exhaling in quick little puffs that keep forcing a small gap between his lips. A thin, almost juvenile moustache. Roland is undoing the buttons of his khaki tunic, the T-shirt beneath it soaked and sour-smelling.

  “If we help him and he sees us…” Stratis begins.

  “That is a problem, it’s true, but—”

  “It’s more than a problem!”

  “—but we’ve no other choice! We’ll have to blindfold him, then carry him out. At the fence, you and Trif will stay by him, try to keep him cool. Get some of your water into him. I’ll run down John F. Kennedy, then go out to the officers’ club and find Kaya.”

  “But how can we know who else is there?”

  “Where, at the club?”

  “If anyone but Kaya and his man should see…”

  “We’ve no other choice, unless we mean to let this man die. Let’s move him into the shadow. Give me your wineskin and the blindfold.”

  Shielding the wineskin with his left hand, Stratis lifts his chin while closing his eyes and clicking his tongue—the Greek “no” in all its jarring bluntness.

  “For the love of God, Strati, don’t be a fool!”

  “You were an officer, perhaps, but not mine.”