The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Page 12

  Elias looks up, his chest heaving. “Planning to shoot the lame civilian now?”

  “That was a warning.”

  “All right, and here’s mine. You’ve hit me twice now. There can’t be a third time.”

  Stratis’s eyes blaze down from under his unkempt brows, but before he can reply, Kaiti, in the kitchen, can be heard telling Stavroula she will return in a moment. Stratis turns and walks straight back to his room. Elias scrambles to get himself, the chair and the pail upright. He sits on the chair, sticks his burning foot back in the pail, grabs Roland’s hat and sets it over his soaked crotch as if hiding an erection. Kaiti comes out holding a lantern, her black curls tied back under a kerchief. She sets the lantern on the table and sits on Roland’s chair. “Do the weary warriors require more wine?”

  “You’re sure there’s enough, even for prisoners?” His words sound more sarcastic than he meant, but then he’s still furious, his face hot, chest constricted.

  “More than enough,” she says. “You chose the right month to arrive.”

  “I’ve hardly chosen a thing in my life.”

  “But you chose…” She stops herself.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’ll refill the jug. Are you all right? You look—”

  “I chose what?”

  She tilts her head above the lantern and gauges him. Its light gives the effect of an ultrasound scan: dark hollows under the pale eyes. Yet it clarifies nothing. “You chose to cross a line. On the beach. The woman, she was a Turk.”

  “What, you think that’s bad—you as well?”

  “I never said that!”

  “For me, it’s not crossing a line. For you, maybe.”

  She stiffens, juts her chin at this gaucherie. If only we could speak English, he thinks, adding, “I just meant, you know—I’m not Greek in the way you are.”

  She stands and picks up the lantern. “I am Cypriot,” she says.

  “Wait, Kaiti…”

  “I’ll return to the food. It’s almost ready. You look famished, as always.”

  And she’s gone. Then Roland can be heard opening the door of the privy, singing softly and off-key, “Oh, Shenandoah, I love your daughter…Avay, you rolling river…”

  As he returns he looks in puzzlement at his hat in Elias’s stained lap.

  THE ICE BATH

  Kaya looks down into the deep stainless steel tub where Polat lies immersed up to his hairless chin in water clacking and popping with ice cubes. An intravenous tube rises from Polat’s pale arm, which is belly up on the surface, to a clear bladder of fluid slung from a wheeled armature. The room is aggressively air-conditioned. Kaya shivers, longing for the last of the day’s sun. The ice crackling around the patient puts Kaya in mind of his late-afternoon cocktail: Scotch on the rocks, or a raki and lime juice over shaved ice.

  The doctor has stepped out for a smoke. Kaya longs to join him but dutifully remains with Polat and a gigantic male nurse, who holds a thermometer and simply cannot stop talking to Kaya. “The patient’s core temperature is down, close to forty degrees Celsius now, due to the ice bath. Inshallah, he will be conscious very soon!” This man has a fleece of black curls on the backs of his hands and bristling up over the neckline of his scrubs. He goes on chattering—the unseasonal heat is his next topic—and Kaya politely nods and smiles at the appropriate cues, all the while pursuing his own thoughts. Polat must have been active under the sun from 10 A.M. onward: inspecting the perimeter fence for several hours, running back, late, to the club, suicidally hurling himself around the tennis court, then returning to his explorations and entering the maze of the dead zone in the worst of the day’s heat. No break, no lunch, no water after their set. Small wonder he almost died.

  Reluctantly, Kaya has to accord some respect to this determined little man, this comic Napoleon. Whatever his physique, there can be no question that his will is strong, much stronger than Kaya’s, and this fact is unsettling, as if Kaya wasn’t unsettled enough already. So far he has been too lazy to do the paperwork and lobby Ankara to try to have Polat sent elsewhere, and now, if he does, the man might make trouble. For one thing, he has probably deduced that most of the funds earmarked for maintenance of the decaying perimeter fence are being siphoned quietly into the tennis court, the putting green, the beach bar, the rooftop garden…

  Worse, Polat seems obsessed with searching the dead zone.

  Kaya does not want to leave before Polat revives (he needs to debrief the man), which means dinner will probably be delayed—one of Ömer’s specialties, a fresh dorado in vindaloo curry, followed by the pastries postponed at lunch. The shaggy giant blabbers on and Kaya continues to camouflage his inattention with gracious smiles. Finally he tells the man, “I’d like to check on another patient, if I might. Please let Dr. Günsel know that I’ll return shortly.”

  “Of course, efendi.”

  He walks to Bayan Şahin’s ward. Having rushed away from lunch to rescue the captain, Kaya is not in uniform, but some members of the hospital staff recognize and hail him warmly. One doctor, presumably a former army medic, even salutes.

  The door of her room is open. An olive curtain separates her space from the part occupied by another comatose patient he has never yet seen. The room is warm. A small fan mounted on the wall swivels from side to side like a security camera. A sheet and a cotton blanket shroud her up to the V-shaped concavity at the base of her throat. That vulnerable hollow seems deeper than it was last week. Is she melting away, despite these drips and tubes? They were unable to revive her from the induced coma, but for two weeks now they’ve been predicting that she will surface on her own—all the omens suggest it. Nevertheless, this sleep. The singularity of her condition has made them reluctant to fly her up to Istanbul. Last week, instead, two specialists flew down here to see her.

  Kaya stands over her. A face crowded with beautiful bones, the lips somehow sensual despite their thinness and present condition: pale and flaking. Everything about her is too thin for his tastes, yet he can’t help but envy Elias Trifannis a little, yes, in spite of the outcome of that tryst on the beach and the young man’s current detention, if that’s the word for it. And now (Kaya’s mind helplessly clicks on the next link) Trifannis might fall for that plump young Cypriot Greek, she with the soft shadows under pale green eyes, unforgettable eyes! Kaya had admired her four and a half years ago when her lover and Roland had brought her, in labour, to the officers’ club, at Kaya’s invitation. He had given the maid and the groundskeeper two days off and sent Ali to Famagusta to fetch his own personal doctor, somebody Kaya knew he could trust deeply (and bribe slightly). No doubt the doctor had assumed Kaya was the actual father.

  Kaya had been surprised and a little ashamed by his bodily response to the sounds of the labour, which were loud enough to reach him from the guest room at the far end of the hall. He was lying in bed at 2 A.M. He had turned forty a few days before. The young Cypriote’s groans and cries sounded at first like cries of intense pleasure, slowly mounting to a crescendo both horrific and arousing. It also induced in him a feeling of loneliness so intense it was almost sickening, which seemed odd, because Kaya was, and is now, so seldom lonely. Mostly he prefers the company of his own happy senses to that of people with their many grievances, obsessions, expectations, and demands.

  When he heard, more faintly, infant mewls, just after 4 A.M., he dressed and walked down the hall and knocked quietly and, when the doctor opened the door a crack, asked if everything was all right. “Twins,” the doctor said in his usual manner: unsmilingly facetious. “Fat and loud and liable to thrive for a century.” Kaya nodded to acknowledge the remark, thanked the doctor, and turned away, inexplicably overcome.

  Now, hardly knowing what he’s doing, he leans down and tenderly kisses the patient’s cracked, white-crusted lips.

  “Albay Kaya, is that you?”

  Kaya recoils from the face as if bitten and turns around. The head nurse of the ward stands in the doorway, her chin
s reddening along with the earlobes poking out from under her headscarf. “I was just passing the room,” she says. “I saw—someone. I mean to say—I didn’t realize it was you, Albay, without your uniform. You look like you’re on holiday!”

  Kaya feels compromised by the blood surge in his own cheeks and ears. “I didn’t expect to be coming in,” he says. “I mean, to the hospital. I was just trying to be sure she was still breathing. She seems so still.” With an inadvertent note of accusation he adds, “Weren’t the doctors saying she should be conscious by now?”

  The nurse puts a finger to her lips, beckoning with the other hand. He walks toward her, leans in to listen.

  “She may well be conscious, sir, but not able to show it!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Her vital signs are normal, sir, more or less. Her brain scan too. The doctors think she may be conscious at times but ‘locked in.’ Still, because of her physical improvement, they remain optimistic that she will waken fully.”

  “Ah, well…in that case, so do I.” He thinks of something and adds, “Do we have to whisper, though? Might she not be asleep right now? Wouldn’t she have sleeping and waking times within that state?”

  “Yes, sir, but we can’t be sure without a scan, and even then…”

  “May I ask one favour?”

  “Anything, Albay.”

  “If she does waken fully, please allow no one else to speak to her—especially any other patient—until I speak to her first.”

  Hurrying back from the west wing to Polat’s room he passes a high window. A lava-red sun is merging into the plains of the Mesaoria, which fade away into the island’s interior. Desolate borderlands. He longs for his beach club. The dinner hour is fast approaching. He breathes, summoning his credo back to mind: Things right themselves—they always do.

  The giant nurse is wheeling the ice bath out of the room as Kaya approaches. The man grins broadly in his beard, which starts just below his eyes. No sign of Polat.

  “Is the captain all right?” Kaya asks.

  “Yes, sir—and conscious! I’ll be back in just a moment.”

  Polat lies under a white sheet on an adjustable bed, the upper part slightly raised. Beside him Dr. Günsel stands scribbling on a clipboard. Hypodermic drips still feed into Polat’s arm. His soft face has cooled to a blotchy pink-grey, the old acne scars visible. As Kaya stops in the doorway, Polat’s eyes—drained of their blue now, almost translucent—meet Kaya’s, then flick away toward the ceiling.

  The doctor intercepts Kaya and ushers him back outside.

  “May I not speak to him, Doctor?”

  “Of course, Colonel.” The man hesitates, as if obliged to deliver bad news to a relative. His lab coat is spotless except for a sinister rusty stain at mid-thigh level. “Just one thing first. The captain just now informed me that he means to leave the hospital tonight or tomorrow and go back into Varosha. He seems clear in his mind now—no longer delirious—and he insists that there’s some urgent task he needs to complete in there.”

  The doctor pauses nosily.

  “Please go on,” Kaya says.

  “Colonel, a heatstroke victim is sensitized to high temperatures for as long as two weeks after recovery, and as you know, we’re having a hot autumn. I’m afraid the captain is going to require some time off, in a cooler place. I realize you might not be able to spare him for long, but—respectfully—I would suggest that he be sent for a one-to two-week convalescent leave, perhaps at a mountain resort near Agri, or on the Black Sea.”

  Nodding sympathetically, Kaya says, “I hear Trabzon is cool at this time of year.”

  “Yes, it is—Trabzon! You don’t object, then, to sending him there once we discharge him?”

  “I’ll defer to your advice, Doctor. If you could just put it in writing? And let’s make it two weeks, shall we?”

  “Good, yes, of course. Oh, and Colonel? On the captain’s return in December, even if it is cooler—and I’m sure it will be—please try not to work him so hard on the tennis court? He’s not a natural athlete like you!”

  Kaya bows slightly, then asks the doctor to give him and Polat a few minutes alone. He re-enters the room, eases the door almost shut, drags a folding stool over to the bedside. Polat stares fixedly at the ugly sacs of fluid dangling above him. Kaya wonders how much he can see without his spectacles, which lie on the bedside table, the broken lens removed.

  “I’m happy to see you recovering, Captain. How do you feel? Are you chilled in here? I find it chilly.”

  Polat’s face and body are still, but his irises flit over to meet Kaya’s gaze. “I think the foreigner is in there, sir.”

  Kaya is not to be spared, it seems. Wearily, stalling, he says, “What…you mean in the dead zone?”

  “There might be others in there too!”

  “Surely you don’t mean you saw people in there, people living in there?”

  “Signs of them—before I fainted.”

  “Fainted? You almost died before Ali and I found you!”

  “I’ll take water next time. In a few days, maybe. Near where the fence is unsecured I saw signs—signs of a trail. My phone—where is it? I took pictures.”

  “You had no phone when we found you. No pistol either.”

  “Maybe they took both!”

  “But who would take them, Captain? They must be lost—you must have been staggering around for some time before you collapsed.”

  “We can find the phone.”

  “But Captain,” Kaya lowers his voice, “it could be anywhere in there.”

  “Or will you order me not to go in again?” The weak voice is thinning as Polat tries to inject volume into it, like a querulous old man on his deathbed.

  Kaya, almost whispering, replies, “The doctors want you to go away, Captain. On leave. For at least two weeks, maybe three. Somewhere cool. They’re quite insistent.”

  “But, sir…”

  “They feel the Black Sea would be ideal.”

  “Sir, I heard voices!”

  “What, before you fainted?”

  “Sometime after, I think.”

  “But you were unconscious! Ali and I carried you out on a stretcher! And we said nothing—the work was too hard, frankly—and, frankly, Ali was too angry.”

  “Greek words. English too, I think. They were carrying me in their arms, a number of men. Five, maybe six.”

  “I told you,” Kaya leans closer, “we used a stretcher.”

  “I even heard his name—Trifannis!”

  “Captain, please, calm down, you’re confused. You were delirious. You were in a sort of coma—your temperature was over forty-one when we brought you in here!”

  “It felt real.”

  “Hallucinations do,” says Kaya, as if he knows.

  “I was sure they were real, those men.”

  “No. Just Ali and myself.”

  “And a dog!” Polat cries, re-excited, flushing now as he tries to sit right up. “I saw a grey dog just before I fell!”

  “Colonel?” the doctor calls from the doorway.

  “I know,” Kaya says, “I’m sorry. The captain must rest.”

  “If you don’t mind, yes.” Dr. Günsel walks over and stands beside Kaya, who is still sitting. Kaya says to Polat, gently, “There could be a few wild dogs in there, Captain—that’s quite possible. The rest was a dream.”

  Polat doesn’t reply.

  “I have to get back to Varosha.” Kaya stands, slipping his aviator shades out of the pocket of his beach shirt. “Please try to sleep. You’re to follow all of Dr. Günsel’s instructions. I want you fit and healthy on your return.”

  IN CYPRUS THE NIGHTINGALE WON’T LET YOU SLEEP

  In due course he will remember the portent: three vultures tracing leisurely spirals in the sky above Varosha’s northern quadrant.

  With the help of two wooden crutches—real ones that Kaiti found for him in the storeroom of an old pharmacy—he’s labouring toward the library after a morn
ing of work: kneeling in the vegetable rows on potato-bug detail, then sitting on a chair to help sort olives and squeeze out pailfuls of the sublimely bitter, chartreuse oil. The villagers use an old hand press that Takkos Tombazo recovered years ago from a goatherd shed. It requires a lot of strength and stamina, and Elias is happy for the work, physically hard, shared, and steeped in that heady smell—work with a palpable, precious outcome. If only there were a dozen loaves of fresh bread to tear up and soak, hank by hank, in that throat-burningly potent, spicy oil!

  First a cane, then a crutch, now crutches. What next, a walker? Maybe the vultures have their eye on him. Yet he feels almost cheerful. The drugs may be helping a little (in lieu of any painkiller besides Aspirin, Roland has traded frogs’ legs for sedatives, stale-dated and labelled in Turkish, left by some visitor at the officers’ club). Or is it the dead zone’s pacifying silence, in fact a manifestation of constant sound, non-human, unthreatening: the bees and field insects humming, steady breezes, the overlapping calls of the birds.

  In a cloth bag over his shoulder he carries books to return to the library: Kazantzakis’s modern sequel to the Odyssey and an anthology of twentieth-century Greek poets. Both books are a couple of days overdue. He has been putting off returning them and thus being alone again with Myrto. He goes first to the well on the large traffic island among the nut and fruit trees. On a line between two trees plucked clean of their cherries, the villagers’ washcloths hang in a row like prayer flags, each a distinct colour. A wide bolt of blue cotton has been wrapped most of the way around a circle of trunks to make a semi-private bathing area. In the narrow gap beneath the ground and the bottom of the fabric a lone wet foot stands next to a basin and a pair of flip-flops—one of Kaiti’s feet, brown and longer, slimmer than you would expect, given her size and shape. At last her other foot, wet and clean, steps down into sight beside the first. She’s humming softly. It hits him that the tune is a fair facsimile of one he played last night, “Ain’t No Sunshine.” When she emerges in a loose dolphin-pattern sundress he nods to her, lowering his eyes—her own seem offended, or just startled—and she says, “You should not be so quiet, you might surprise someone!”