The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Page 11

  “I’m not giving you an order, I’m begging you to think!” And Roland mutters in English, “All of them anarchists, and I love this, until moments like now.”

  “Your hat,” Elias tells Roland, and Roland, understanding, whips it off and gives it to Elias, who starts fanning the Turk. Stratis finally pockets his pistol, grips the man’s boot heels and drags him into the shade under the fountain ledge. Elias and Roland have to scramble along in a frog-squat, Elias still fanning, Roland supporting the back of the man’s head over the pavestones.

  “Ah, his weapon!” Stratis says, fishing a black Beretta-style pistol out of the dry fountain. He brings it close to his eyes, like Gollum with his precious ring. “You may order me to replace it in his holster—go ahead!—but this time I will not be so—”

  “Just give us the water!” Roland cries, adding some gruff German aside.

  Stratis lifts the wineskin high in his hands and squeezes a long stream into his own mouth, then ostentatiously works the stopper back in. “There. There’s little enough. May it turn to venom on his tongue, the malaka.”

  With a splash of water Elias dampens the blindfold that Stratis hands down to them. Roland removes the cracked glasses and folds them into a pocket of the man’s tunic, then secures the blindfold over his eyes. They remove his boots and wet socks to cool him further, then lug him across the square into a perplex of narrow, swerving lanes and alleys. Stratis and Roland lead, each bearing one of the man’s thighs, continuing to argue in Greek as they stumble along. Behind them Elias takes the bulk of the weight, his hands and forearms hammer-gripped up through the man’s burning armpits, the back of the man’s head lolling against Elias’s chest. With every step, pain crashes through his ankle. He has the man’s boots slung around his neck by their tied laces and he wears the man’s solid officer’s cap. Argos trots beside this many-legged formation, glancing up with a look of excited concern and that panting, apologetic grin. Forgive me, men, I would help you if I could!

  The little captain seems light at first but soon grows heavy. Elias turns his ankle again and groans, “Jesus, fuck!” It’s over, he thinks. I won’t walk again for weeks. “Is it your foot?” Stratis snarls over his shoulder. “Does it hurt?” “Just when I laugh, mother fucker,” he says in English, and Roland calls, “Enough, both of you!” Small flies appear and swarm in the men’s faces, as if knowing their hands are tied up. “This incident,” Stratis says in what he must think is a whisper—or maybe not, maybe he doesn’t care—“must have to do with Trifannis!” “If so, it’s now irrelevant,” Roland gets out. The Turkish captain squeaks and moans like a child sleeping out a fever. They set him down on a cracked stone bench covered with dirt and guano. They squirt another precious dram down his throat and then, after a swallow each, heft him and struggle on.

  “How far now?” Elias asks. No answer. They turn into the breezy gloom of an alley littered with rubble and rebar and emerge onto a wide, blinding boulevard—gutted cars, buses, the facade of decrepit hotels looming—John F. Kennedy Avenue. In a narrow defile between two towers, a glimpse of the sea. “I’ve got to put him down.”

  “It’s Kaya,” Roland whispers.

  Out of a thicket of scrappy palm trees sprouting from a traffic island two figures emerge—one in khaki fatigues, very tall and thin and with a drooping grey moustache, the other slim, fit and graceful, dark hair swept back, aviator sunglasses, zany beach shirt, white slacks and deck shoes. He could be a French playboy off a Côte d’Azur yacht. Neither man looks to be armed. Neither looks at all like a colonel, but Elias assumes Kaya must be the one in civvies.

  “Friends,” this man hails them, “my friends!—Roland!—what is happened?”

  As the groups converge, Argos, his ears laid back, happily waddles up to greet the man who must be Kaya, but the man is pulling off his sunglasses to gape at the barefoot, blindfolded captain, who looks as dead as can be. “But what have you done?” Kaya says in densely accented English, and at first it seems he might be addressing the unconscious captain instead of the men who hold him. Now Kaya notices Elias. The brown eyes in Kaya’s tanned face widen; speechlessly he points at the captain’s hat still perched on Elias’s head like a trophy.

  “It’s all right,” Roland says. “Let’s get him into the shade.”

  “He is not dead?”

  “It’s the heat. He must go to hospital, now.” Roland adds something in what must be Turkish.

  “Come,” Kaya says, then he too switches to Turkish, addressing either Roland or the old moustachioed orderly. Now this orderly and Colonel Kaya—who smells fragrant, almost floral—push in on either side of the captain, and the five men together bear him into the deep canyon between hotels. It’s only now, with some of the weight shared out, that Elias’s arms begin trembling. Another whiff of cologne. Next to the dashing Kaya, Roland with his straw hat and beard might be a weathered Amish farmer. They emerge into the sun. A roofless olive Jeep has been driven right up onto the loose, twisted fence and parked on top of it, flattening it into the sand.

  “He came in this way, then?” Roland asks.

  “Here or by Hotel Varosha,” Kaya says.

  “But why, Erkan? Why the devil would one of your men—”

  “Because of me,” Elias says. “Stratis is right.”

  “You are Trifannis, most obviously. I am Kaya.” Somehow the man’s glowing suavity is untarnished by his broken English and the crude, clumsy fact of their lugging a body together. “I hope that my officer either saw or heard you not?”

  “I think not,” Roland says. “He was like this when we found him. Hurry.”

  “Ellinika, poustes!” says Stratis: Use Greek, you faggots!

  They deposit the captain, again moaning, onto the rear bench of the Jeep. The tall old orderly digs out a plastic bottle and drips water between the man’s lips and splashes it over his face and chest. Then he climbs into the driver’s seat and starts the engine. His yellow eyes are impassive, his mouth, like Stratis’s, hidden. Stratis spits and walks back over the flattened fence into the dead zone, where he stands waiting, turned away. He lights a cigarette and snaps a command over his shoulder at Argos, who has been striving to get Kaya’s attention but now trots over to Stratis, though with reluctance; the whites of the dog’s eyes show as he casts yearning glances back at Kaya. Elias returns the captain’s peaked cap and Kaya says, over the engine’s throbbing, “Teşekkür ederim—I thank you so much. And have you his pistol?”

  Elias looks at Roland; Roland’s beard bunches around his mouth. Turning up his hands he says, “I am afraid it was inadvertently lost, Erkan.”

  Kaya glances at Stratis’s back with a philosophical half-smile.

  “But there is a mobile telephone,” Roland adds, enunciating carefully. “In your man’s chest pocket. You must check for photographs. It’s possible that he got as far as the Jaguar gate. In fact, you might want to throw a second mobile into the sea—tell him it was lost, like his pistol.”

  The fallen man squeaks, then puffs a large breath between his lips as if blowing out a candle.

  “Go now, Erkan.”

  “Of course.” Kaya hesitates—he seems loath to end the conversation—then vaults lightly into the Jeep. He dons his sunglasses and shows Elias his white incisors. “Oh, and the woman, Miss Şahin! She is more well. Please do not worry. I am sorry for these events. Please stay in the village forever.”

  Elias assumes he means “for now.”

  “You are comfortable? You appear to seem hurt.”

  Elias shrugs. “Listen, I’m not asking this out of vanity, but…” When he sees that Kaya can’t understand, he turns to Roland: “Ask him if there’s any news about me—I mean from back home.”

  Roland speaks briefly in Turkish. As Kaya answers Roland in Turkish, he looks directly at Elias, punctuating his words with courtly smiles and nods. Roland translates: “You do remain drowned. But—and the colonel is pleased for you—some of the media in your part of America doubt that
you really harmed Ms. Şahin. They suspect a Turkish cover-up. However, your government seems eager to let the matter drop, and so they have. And the media have moved on. In this way, things have worked out for everyone.”

  “Better get him to hospital,” Elias says, trying to sort out his feelings.

  “Ah, and please not to bathe!” Kaya adds. “I mean…not to go through the fence there, either here, for bathe or fish, until I notify.”

  “Ja, of course,” says Roland.

  The Jeep reverses off the fence, spattering sand, some of which strikes the back of the rigid Stratis. The fence remains flattened. The vehicle judders away up the beach toward Famagusta, its gears grinding up and down the scale. Before long it blends into the thermals pulsing up off the sand. Roland and Elias turn and for some moments stare at the sea; then they exchange a look and, despite Kaya’s request, tramp down and wade into the shallows without undressing.

  —

  This small triumph over a Turkish invader renders Stratis even more spry and vigorous than usual. He applies his machete to a hooked acacia branch to make a rough crutch for Elias before loping ahead to the village to bring the news. Argos runs after him.

  Elias and Roland straggle homeward, stopping to rest wherever they find shaded places to sit. Elias is in too much pain to say much, though if he did, he might admit it’s some consolation to hear that people back home don’t buy the rape story. The real world seems spectral now, almost fictional, but there are still a few souls out there whose opinions matter to him: relatives, a few ex–mess mates, the woman he’d lived with, some clients at the gym where he worked as a trainer. And that troubled military shrink. As for his ex-commanders, he doesn’t give a shit. Speaking of whom: this leaves just one piece of unfinished business out there in the world of the living.

  Near the village he stumbles, the crutch snaps, and he yells something that shocks even him; working as a trainer he learned enough about injuries to guess that what he has here is a stress fracture at the very least.

  “Trif? I am sorry for your pain, but if it might give you solace…you may have helped to save the village just now.”

  “Like a POW who helps fight a fire in a prison camp?”

  “But look, you smile as you say it.”

  “I believe that was a grimace.”

  “We are close now.”

  “Anyhow—happier ending than with the last village we tried to save.”

  “We?”

  “Over there. In the war.”

  “Ah,” Roland says. “I did wonder if what occurred…might be of that nature. Involving civilians.” He pauses to catch his breath. “In Vietnam, I think, an American officer said, ‘We had to destroy the village in order to save it.’ ” When Elias doesn’t respond, Roland adds, “In a quieter way, it might be too late for this one also.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ah, there, she is waiting for us!”

  Kaiti comes up the street toward them. For just a moment he wonders if the unguarded gladness on her face and in her gait might be on his account, but then he realizes, no, of course not, it’s for Roland, she and he are like daughter and father. “Ela, pedhi mou!” Roland cries, opening his arms. As she and Roland embrace beside him, Elias can smell her, a faint melon-like sweetness, and even the rich oils of her scalp. Now, to his surprise, she turns to him, Elias, and rises onto her toes, puts her fingers lightly on his shoulders, touches her cool lips to both sides of his jaw. In Greek she says, “Trif, I hear you have re-injured your foot.”

  “Has the sergeant been expressing his concern?”

  Her cheeks dimple slightly, an interrupted smile; she says, “Do be careful, Trif. Stratis can’t live without quarrels the way some men can’t do without love.” (Does she mean sex?) “He seemed upset just now, when the women agreed that you deserved gratitude for lending us your strength.”

  —

  Dusk finds him and Roland drinking under the pistachio tree, alone but for the dog, who lies snoring on the cool flagstones among fallen lemons not yet gathered by the twins. Takkos has taken the twins and Neoklis back to the Tombazo house. Stavroula and Kaiti are finishing a rabbit stew for tonight’s impromptu celebration and Myrto has forced her assistance on them, though usually they chase her out of the kitchen, insisting they need no help and then, in her absence, cheerfully concurring that she is perfectly ignorant when it comes to food. As for Stratis, he drank with them for an hour, but as Roland and Elias began to grow animated, he fell silent, finally leaping up and stalking away to his room.

  “The wine is very good, the wine is wonderful,” says Roland, drinking steadily and leaving the appetizers untouched, his accent thickening in a way Elias hasn’t heard before now. “But happily I would walk the fifty kilometres to Nicosia tonight, to the U.N. bar in the Ledra Palace, for one certain drink.”

  “Beer?”

  “Ja, exactly—cold beer in a cold glass!”

  “If we could get some we could keep it cool,” Elias says, indicating the bucket of cold well water in which his foot is soaking. He asks, “What would happen if you actually went back to that bar?”

  “Oh, they would arrest me immediately.” Roland stops himself, looks cannily at Elias, one side of his grey-streaked beard curling upward. “Ah, I see, you intended to trick me! A good try. But I tell you nothing more now.”

  “Were there women in that bar, or mainly men?”

  “No, always we have women.” Alvays vee haf vimmin.

  “You must miss that sometimes.”

  Roland tilts his straw hat back off his brow. “In the night, sometimes, ja, of course. But I was married very young, I was married a second time, and I had also a woman on Cyprus, in the Greek–Turkish town, before I come here. So…maybe I have had enough. I have the strong memories still.”

  “And that’s enough? I mean—”

  “Why ever not?”

  “Memory, I don’t know…it’s like a gallery of ghosts.”

  “But such ghosts! The women were real to me, always, and so they remain now. The problem is, if one pays too little attention at the time. Then one has just a shadow of a shadow.”

  “I doubt I’ve paid enough attention.”

  “Ja, probably you thought each could be replaced.”

  “Or I was too lazy—half asleep.”

  “No! You thought each could be replaced, just as you thought time replaceable, from endless supplies!” He seems deeply drunk now, his voice all but booming, his usually calm, recumbent hands moving in the air. “For centuries we Westerners are all people of the clock, and I also, naturally, before Cyprus. Consult a clock and you think you control time—you measure it, you make it, you take it, you give it, you save or waste it, you pass it, you hurry or slow it—you even think you ‘kill’ it! Here in Varosha my watch failed some years ago, but I had ceased to wear it anyhow…”

  “What makes you think you know how I felt about women?”

  “All young men are likewise! They think they have endless time! They can’t see that each woman is the last.”

  Elias tries to think about these important-sounding words, but his mind won’t focus. Something else occurs to him. “Wait—was it Paris that warned us about the Turk?”

  “Paris?” Roland’s high forehead creases. “Ah, Paris! Ja, I believe it was he. Forgive me, the wine. Will you take another glass?”

  Somewhere in the boughs of the lemon tree the nightingale starts performing on his pan pipes. Elias gulps another draft of the delicious rhubarb-pink wine. Despite his pain and fatigue a strange feeling is brimming in his body: well-being, serenity, almost a sense of belonging. Is it just the drink?

  The gods being ironists with impeccable timing, Roland chooses this moment to break some news.

  “Ekaterini, in her four years with us, I believe she missed—has missed, I should say—many things. Her life in Nicosia, a few friends, her work before they had to come here. Now she is considering to leave us in the new year, or sooner, with the
twins. And if her mind is made, she will do as she will. Her will…that’s what brought her here in the first place! This thought is a stone on my heart. It might even finish Varosha—this second Varosha. The rest of us are old, or unwell—I’m unwell, I know you see this—and what young people, even if they must flee here, will ever stay without the technologia they all live with now?”

  Elias realizes he has missed those things far less than he’d have expected. But Kaiti and the twins he might miss, if he stayed here. He says only, “You could always seize more young people at gunpoint, like me.”

  Roland seems not to hear. He wobbles upright, doffs his hat, sets it on the seat of his chair. “Now, if I may, I really must excuse myself.” He makes for the privy with effortful dignity, arms out to the sides as if feeling his way up a dark tunnel.

  Stratis’s door opens as if on cue. He comes striding out, straight toward Elias, his head down like a bull.

  “Allo krasi?” Elias says, lifting the wine jug as the man halts in front of him.

  “So—now the wine is yours to offer?”

  Never engage with an angry drunk.

  “Remember your place,” Stratis says harshly but quietly, apparently not wanting the women in the kitchen to hear. “You’re not one of us, whatever they say, however drunk and full of yourself you become. I am the soldier here, the guardian.”

  “And I’d salute you if I wasn’t a civilian.”

  “You’re a deserter, as I hear it.”

  “More like a hostage.”

  “And like Kaiti, you’re of a generation that lacks a sense of duty. She too assumes herself the equal of her elders. And you—treated by doctors for the distress of service! We fought a battle in the bowels of hell and without the luxury of doctors and beach holidays afterward. Most of us were in our graves!”

  “I was in a battle too,” Elias murmurs. “But there was no enemy.”

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “In any case, battles today are not what they were.”

  “How the fuck would you know?”

  As if waiting for this insult, he steps forward and slaps Elias across the face. Elias tips backward in the chair—mostly because he has recoiled, trying to slip the blow. As he falls back onto the flagstones his foot twists in the pail, the pain flaring. The pail topples back toward him, icy water drenching his legs and crotch.