He knew that most professional soldiers, hoping to apply their training in war or some comparable crisis, would soon tire of a mission so devoid of challenge. But Kaya had forgotten his training. It never interested him. He enlisted after college because it seemed the simplest, least offensive way to avoid going into business with his father, a successful but invincibly gloomy electronics manufacturer in Üsküdar, exporting to wholesalers in Eastern Europe. Kaya reckoned rightly that his family would be proud of such a patriotic move and that his younger brother would be drafted into the firm by default.
He rose through the ranks as if by magic. He never much exerted himself, never sought to stand out, never paid court, as such. He never had to. People liked him. They couldn’t help themselves. And if at first they didn’t like him—if they saw him as a rival, some kind of threat—he won them over anyhow with his warm, undefensive nature, his quiet compliments meant not to curry favour but simply to make others feel as good as he did. Since boyhood, things had always gone this way, so that for years he took it all for granted, not realizing how uncommon it was to produce in other people a unanimous affection.
By early adulthood he’d become fully conscious of this…this irresistibility, although he was far too lazy to deploy it in any concerted campaign. Yet by thirty-one he was a major. Still, his superiors seemed to grasp that a man like Erkan Kaya was not equipped to rise above a certain level or to take on certain duties. Military ones, for example. So when the Varosha post opened up, they gave him a final promotion and packed him off to north Cyprus. The timing was right, from a domestic point of view; he and his wife had just separated, amicably. The children still live with her in Istanbul, where he visits them at times. Or else they come down here to Cyprus. Both children adore him, especially the girl, fifteen—though come to think of it the boy, a year younger, has seemed a bit distant the last two visits.
Still in bed, squinting at the dawn sun, Kaya listened to his orderly break the news. Timur Ali is a very tall man in his late sixties with a dark, bony little face and a huge grey Ottoman moustache. Stoical brown eyes, the whites discoloured like veiny yolks. He was the first colonel’s orderly too. Impassive as ever, he went on briefing Kaya while Kaya sipped the Nescafé, which (he couldn’t help but notice) was nicely marbled with sugary condensed milk and, all in all, really tasty. Things right themselves, he reminded himself, still calm, though aware that he had a true crisis on his hands here, one that could blow up as quickly as a March storm over the sea and spill beyond this quiet island, spoiling everything. Well-known liberal journalist Eylül Şahin attacked by a foreign soldier on leave and staying at the Palm Beach Hotel—a man with a very Greek name. Ali had been fielding calls from the hospital in Famagusta where the woman, critically hurt and not expected to survive, was in a medically induced coma, and from the nearby base where the four soldiers involved had been giving drunken, garbled accounts of the event. They had saved the woman from being raped on the beach near the hotel; they had saved the woman after she had been raped (the moustache that covers his mouth barely moving, Timur Ali states that the doctors confirm she did have intercourse). They were forced to defend themselves after the man injured their sergeant; they accidentally shot the journalist while shooting at the man; he escaped into Varosha, possibly wounded; no, badly wounded; in fact, he might be dead.
Obviously the story was false. A man with a conveniently Greek name rapes a Turkish woman and then attacks four armed soldiers? Kaya could easily imagine the truth, especially after Ali related the hotel’s confirmation that last night the man and woman sat a long time at the bar “courting” (Ali’s outdated, faintly reproachful term) and drinking on a shared tab.
Kaya realized his men might well have assaulted and raped the woman themselves, before shooting her. Anatolian goatherds, all of them. Unfortunately their actions were Kaya’s responsibility and he would have no choice but to back up their tale, once he’d subjected it to some revision. The alternative was unthinkable. His men shooting, maybe after gang-raping, a well-connected Istanbul journalist critical of the army’s “occupation” in Cyprus? And if they really had wounded or killed a foreign national…
This was a story that would have to disappear.
Entirely awake now, Kaya gave Ali instructions. The soldiers were to say nothing more; they should sleep and sober up and he would talk to them this afternoon. The full perimeter of Varosha must be kept under surveillance, but for now nobody was to enter. And, pending investigation, local news sources were to refer to the foreigner only as an as-yet-unidentified man.
Ali nodded slowly. His big hands, ropy with veins, hung loose at his sides. He was as unused to crises as Kaya—who was a little pleased to find himself able to rise to an occasion of some urgency, to think and act this fast.
On his way out, Ali stopped, turned stiffly. Should he cancel the colonel’s match with Captain Polat before lunch? On Kaya’s tongue, the last milky splashes of the Nescafé seemed to curdle. Aydin Polat, his humourless, totally unnecessary new adjutant.
“Thanks, no need to bother. I’ll have to talk to him anyway.”
Now, on the beach in this inebriating light, Kaya shoots back his raki and savours the solar flaring of the liquor in his chest and gut. He shakes the cigarette pack—empty. He gets up and stretches with a groan of helpless pleasure and then, his step easy and elastic as a leopard’s, strolls seaward. Things right themselves. They always do. The sea feels warmer than a sulphur spring. Still wearing his sunglasses, he eases into a lazy backstroke, gliding south along the beach. The crisis nudges and niggles at the pale of his awareness, but Kaya’s body, in the innocent complacency of perfect health, keeps forgetting. Many men, facing a crisis, would pray. Not Kaya—though it’s not as if he’s a disbeliever. Disbelief demands too much mental energy; killing off God takes initiative, not to mention a certain lack of generosity and good manners.
Alas, it’s this foreigner who needs to be dead, or perceived as such.
As Kaya swims back up the beach, the club rising out of the platinum sands like a mirage, he makes out two figures by his chair. The sun blazes into his water-specked lenses. The figures are in silhouette. One must be Captain Polat, who for his first weeks here has reliably, annoyingly shown up ten minutes early for everything. Now he’s an hour early. The much taller one will be Ali. There’s something about how the two men stand stiffly, ceremonially, to either side of Kaya’s empty chair…it’s as though he has seen all of this before. In a dream? Kaya never recalls his dreams. Currents of heat welling up from the sand blur both figures. A queasiness roils through his flawlessly functioning guts, a kind of intestinal vertigo, something he has felt only a few times in his life. Erkan, this is your father. Your mother is dead.
In heavy, dripping surfer shorts he saunters toward the men and politely removes his sunglasses. His chair holds the shape of his body like an unmade bed.
Ali steps toward him and hands him a towel.
“You’re early,” he tells Captain Polat, and his curt tone surprises him.
“Sir, we must hurry—we—I felt I should, uh—that you might…” Polat’s words stumble and cram up like a file of raw recruits trying to march in close order. He wears clerkish spectacles too small for his unnaturally large head. Long-lashed blue eyes, a snub nose, plump grey cheeks that are faintly pitted. As if to counter his look of boyish softness, he affects a sharpshooter’s squint and sports a moustache, though it’s threadbare like a worn-out stage prop. He’s always in uniform, pistol at his side. When he and Kaya play tennis he simply removes his pistol belt and peaked cap and tunic, revealing a khaki T-shirt sweat-soaked around the armpits.
“Allow me to lead a—sir, I would be honoured to lead a platoon in there—immediately.”
“Where, into Varosha? A platoon?”
“Of course, sir.”
“But, Captain, whatever for?”
“Why—to find the foreigner, sir—of course.”
Kaya towels his face and steps
closer to Polat, not, he thinks, to intimidate the man, but simply out of habit. He always stands close when conversing. Now Polat—with a glancing frown down at Kaya’s drenched shorts and legs—recoils a step. He always keeps his distance, and yet when he speaks, his words loud and surging, he seems to be right on top of you.
“Look, Captain,” Kaya says in an indulgent tone, “he’s most likely dead anyway, and—”
“But if he’s not? We need to capture him! We need to go in now and—”
“Impossible.”
Polat’s eyebrows draw together. “Impossible? Sir, I…”
Ali is tracking the conversation closely, his mournful eyes swivelling, his big moustache fixed. Kaya simply can’t be sure how much he can tell Polat this soon. The man is a conundrum. It seems impossible to put him at his ease or to make him laugh, even smile.
“…sir, I am not—as for this woman, the journalist, I am not in agreement with any of her—but surely this foreigner will have—should have to face…”
“Come, Captain, we both know those men are lying.”
“If they’re lying, then they should go on trial! Let me interrogate them, sir!”
“Interrogate them?” Kaya widens his mouth into a grin. “But I’ll be having a word with them myself, after our tennis.”
“But, sir…”
“Captain, please! This situation is delicate. There are…there are certain factors you aren’t aware of yet.” A hurt, jilted look passes over Polat’s face, relegating him instantly to boyhood. Kaya hates disappointing anyone; he feels that he really ought to offer something more, but he’s impatient to hear from Ali. He turns to him now: “There’s news?” The orderly flicks a look toward Polat, and Kaya thinks, Ali is right, I should hear this in private. But then his lifelong inability to fear the worst reasserts itself. His previous two captains were both so easily handled. Still, it’s with a slight foreboding—along with a touch of the bettor’s fatalistic elation—that he says, “Go ahead, Ali. Captain Polat should hear as well.”
“Yes, efendi.” Ali glances sorrowfully at Kaya, then announces, “News from the docks. A fishing boat came in at 10 A.M. The fishermen found a mobile telephone in one of the nets, among the fish. It seems it was not in the water for long. Judging from the make, it will be the missing man’s.”
Silence. Sunlight throbbing down. Kaya feels the brine-dry skin of his cheeks stretching in a smile.
“Gentlemen, this is good news.”
“But efendi,” Ali says, “I think the soldiers must simply have thrown the device into the sea. I believe that one of them…”
He stops himself, glances alertly at Kaya, who says, “Not at all. Here is what happened. The foreigner tried to swim outward, after assaulting both the woman and our men. Being terribly drunk, he drowned. In fact, articles of his clothing—Ali, take the Jeep now and fetch them from the hotel—will be found later today, on a stretch of beach about, say, a kilometre in that direction.” Kaya points vaguely north, the Palm Beach Hotel visible in the distance.
“But, Colonel,” says Captain Polat, “the man may well be at large—alive in there! What if he escapes across the Green Line?”
“Good thinking, Captain,” Kaya says smoothly, fully himself again. “But naturally I’ve tightened security around the perimeter. As for bringing him out, if he is still alive, leave that to me. Trust me, for now this is best.”
“But…”
“I’ll see you at the tennis court at noon and we can discuss things further.” If you insist.
Polat stalks away. If he weren’t on a beach, his boot heels would be snapping. He’s packed into his uniform, small-boned yet pudgy, his big head with the large officer’s cap precariously propped on tiny shoulders. It strikes Kaya that, seen from behind, he resembles a North Korean general or dictator.
Kaya says to Ali, “If the foreigner is still alive, the villagers will have him. Please go to the gate now and signal them. When someone comes, you’ll give them a note from me—I’ll write it now—to say I would like to meet this afternoon.”
—
In twenty minutes the old orderly, with his lanky stride, is deep inside Varosha, nearing the “gate” where the grilles and headlights of two forty-year-old sedans almost touch in mid-street, like the faces of two snarling old dogs. In a canvas sack with the colonel’s note he lugs military-issue parcels of coffee, sugar, lentils, and wheat flour, along with three canisters of propane. These are in trade for the fresh eggs, quail, cucumbers, plums, lemons, and honey he received at the gate two weeks ago.
On arrival now he climbs into the driver’s seat of the Mercedes-Benz and squeezes the bulb of the old air horn the villagers have clamped to the side mirror—four even, raucous honks—then tugs the lever at the base of the seat to recline it. On his last visit he oiled the mechanism again; it functions as if the vehicle were new. He lies back. The heat of the sun pulsates down through the roof. The villagers are always prompt. He should be back at the club in time for his noon prayers. Leaving the door ajar—so he can hear the footfalls of whoever comes and be standing, gravely waiting, when they arrive—he lets his eyes close and in moments is adrift.
THE VILLAGE
This small, bare room is filled with light and the trembling shadows of leaves and lemons projected with the pattern of the grille onto a cracked tile floor. It must be near noon, or afternoon. Though barely awake, Elias is already in full sweat, his headache crushing. The foot of the bed—an old mattress on a boxspring—faces an open doorway giving onto a green space frenetic with birdsong.
On a stool beside the doorway sits a man, thin, compact, his trimmed black beard skunked with grey. He is stiffly upright, shoulders back, feet flat on the floor, as if posing for a nineteenth-century photographer. His khakis, like his boots, look old but clean. His faded blue short-sleeved shirt might once have been part of a uniform. On his lap a book with no dust jacket lies open, face down.
“Kalimera,” he says. It’s not the raspy voice of last night. His skin looks Northern European, his hands and forearms sunburned red, his face pale as if he always wears a hat. The forehead is high, heavy-boned, his brows low over embedded blue eyes that pierce like diamond drill-bits. “Pos eiste, Elia Trifannis?”
Elias sits up, groans, leans back against the cool wall. “Kapos kalitera,” he lies: A little better.
“We see you’re from Montreal,” the man says, his Greek confident but curiously accented—maybe Dutch, or German? “We see also that your name is Greek. Would you prefer to speak Greek, French, or English?”
“I grew up in English mostly.”
In English the man says, “I can take you to wash before we speak. The privy…”
“Where am I?”
“Varosha, as you know.”
“I mean…” He’s too sick to explain.
“Would you take a coffee first? I can ask someone to bring coffee.”
Elias nods.
“Water is beside you. Your feet later will need some attention.”
A plastic jug on the floor by the bed and a fluted plastic tumbler that must once have been clear but now is scuffed cloudy. Beside it, an empty pail. It seems he’s too dehydrated to need the piss-pail and too weary to reach down for the water; or too indifferent.
The man calls out in a voice that strains for volume, almost cracking, “Kaiti, pedhi mou, fere ena kafe yia ton kseno, parakalo.” His eyes stay fixed on Elias as he calls. His stillness is a result not only of calm, it seems, but also fatigue. All his energy is confined to those deep-set, discerning eyes. He says, “Turkish Cypriot radio was full of news this morning. I assume this would not surprise you. On the beach late last night, a well-known Turkish journalist was attacked. Several soldiers who came out of the bar of the Palm Beach Hotel—they say they heard her scream for help.”
“That’s not how it happened.”
“Ja? Go on.”
“They followed us. We were half an hour down the beach. Who are you? What are you doing in he
re?”
The man folds his thin arms across his chest.
“Look, she wasn’t screaming until they attacked us, okay?”
“Tell me your full accounting of events.”
Elias leans sideways and grips the jug and lifts it to his lips, spilling water down his bare torso. He spits into the pail, then begins talking in short, stripped-down phrases—all he can manage now—and his terse delivery lends the words a plausibility he himself starts to hear, so that last night’s events begin to seem less unreal. Too bad. When he describes butting the soldier, he touches the raw, bruised patch on his forehead and his story is further confirmed. As he finishes, her face surges up again out of the dark and he can’t swallow the mouthful of water he needs.
“Eylül,” he says, nailing the umlaut.
“Eylül Şahin.”
“I can guess what their version is.”
“You raped her repeatedly. Then you attacked them when they tried to stop you.”
“Did I shoot her in the back as well?”
“They admit that they shot her, but by mischance after you assaulted them in the dark. Naturally, they are emphasizing your heritage. At first on the radio—early this morning I was listening—the announcer said, ‘Greek Canadian soldier on trauma leave.’ Just once he said this, in the first report. Now you are simply a Greek. Before long, perhaps…Greek Cypriot.” His mouth is closed but his beard has a faintly smiling look. He uncrosses his arms.
“You believe me,” Elias says.
“For several reasons. First, we heard the shots and we know where they came from—a long distance from the hotel. And last night, after Stratis and Kaiti brought you in, he and I went back and saw where, on the beach, the struggle occurred. Also—”
The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Page 4