The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  “Wait, what did they do with her body? I thought I—I think I might have dreamed she was underwater.”

  “But she is alive!”

  “What?”

  “Yes. It appears they too assumed she was dead, but a medical unit found vital signs. However, she is in a critical state—comatose.”

  Elias stares through the doorway, seeing nothing, his heart caroming between shame and relief. You left her behind on the beach. But no pulse. You left her. Her eyes open. You left her.

  “But you, they do now assume dead. Or so they are saying.”

  “Fuck me,” Elias murmurs. “It’s like a trail of bodies now.”

  “What? You mean, there on the beach?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  The man’s clifflike forehead furrows. “They—they were reporting at first that you were badly wounded—that one of the men followed a blood trail for some distance into Varosha, then it vanished. But this account has undergone something of a…a sea change.” Another faint, rueful smile. “Now they say that your telephone has been fished from the sea and some of your garments found washed up on shore. So you are now missing, most likely drowned.”

  “If my things were found on shore, they were put there.”

  “Colonel Kaya will probably confirm that when I meet him.”

  “A colonel—in the Turkish army? You mean they know you’re in here?”

  “He knows, ja, and his orderly, who can be trusted. It was likewise with Colonel Işik before—though it’s truer to say that Işik chose not to know, chose to ignore us. For years we have been here. Decades, in some cases, as with Stratis Kourakis.”

  Elias parts his lips but can say nothing.

  “I hope you will meet them this evening, the villagers.”

  “But how have you…” In the shadows under a tree in the courtyard, two children, delicate as birds, are leaning into his line of sight, peeking in. As he spots them they startle and vanish.

  “Ah, are the twins out there again?”

  “I thought maybe I was seeing things. I’ve been doing that.”

  “No, they are Kaiti’s. Aslan is the boy, Lale the girl.”

  For a moment he considers the possibility that this whole interview is a sort of hallucination; then he asks, “But why would this colonel lie? I could turn up alive any time.”

  “No one,” the man says softly, “would want that to happen, you included. Especially now, with Ms. Şahin alive. The colonel wants no trouble, he never does—he is very attached to his life at the beach club. As for the Turkish army, it too would prefer no contrary version to emerge. So, it will happily accept his word that you drowned. As you might know, most Turkish Cypriots wish the army would go back to Turkey—they want to be reconciled with the Greeks. But Turkey has no desire to leave, especially now, with all the natural gas turning up offshore.” Elias nods; his uncle in Larnaca spoke at length on the topic. “The account of those four soldiers makes the army look good, a trusty protector, as in the past, and it stimulates a useful hatred against Greeks. Your version makes the army look brutal and inept—it would bring Turkey an international embarrassment, as if their presence here hasn’t brought them enough! So, as of now, you are assumed dead, by all parties. They aren’t even announcing your name now. I expect they will try to make an agreement with your embassy to keep things quiet. It might work. Your government will want no more scandal after what happened last year with its—what is the word—its ‘decompressing’ troops in Paphos…”

  Elias recalls hearing of a double murder–suicide involving a Polish dancer, her Cypriot boyfriend, and a depressed young private.

  “So long as there appears to be a search,” the man adds. “Till the story dies down back home.”

  “I don’t really have a home.”

  “You mean, no country?”

  “Wait—isn’t she in danger then Eylül? I mean—”

  “Because of her injuries, yes, but not otherwise, I think. Consider that if she did recover and told the same story as you, it would be the word of a badly damaged woman against that of four men—servicemen. And how eager would she be to tell her world that she had drunken—pardon me—drunken and public intimacy on a beach with a Greek stranger? If she did believe you were still alive, perhaps she might tell the truth, but if she learns that you’re dead…well. Even if she is from a liberal family, the truth would disgrace her in Turkey.”

  “So if I surfaced and spoke up, I could ruin her life. Put her at risk, again.”

  “So I fear.”

  “Jesus Christ, as if I…and this colonel…”

  “Kaya, Erkan Kaya. He sent his orderly to us just now with a note. He reckoned we must have you and wants to meet later, to discuss it. I suppose he might ask us to turn you over.” Wrinkles multiply again in the man’s high brow. Above it, a rumpled ridge of stiff, greying hair. “No. He wouldn’t know what to do with you. He is not a violent or stupid man. He’s really a kind of…a playboy, the kind who would have loved the old Varosha even more. But your existence does pose a problem for him. Likely he will ask that we should keep you here safely, for everyone’s behalf, until the story dies down.”

  “Keep me here.”

  “Ja, and I ought to warn you—”

  “No, don’t warn me. No warnings, no orders. I’m finished with orders. I’ll think about what you’ve said, but whether or not I leave—that’ll be my decision.”

  The man’s beard seems to hide another smile, this time one of discomfort or concern. “Let me just say that Sergeant Kourakis—he who brought you in last night, with Kaiti?—he is not wholly predictable. As you know, he is armed. He was attached to the special forces that flew in from Crete in ’74 to help the Greek Cypriots, and…as he himself has never surrendered or been captured, he considers that the war is not yet finished or quite lost. He can be civil, even generous, but he would do anything to protect the village. Then too there is the dog, and then there is Paris. In the old Varosha, this Paris was a—what is the word—one who sleeps in the street, asking tourists for money?”

  “I understand.”

  “He lives as a reclusive, in goatherd huts to the south, beyond the ruins. We hear that he dines on fruits and the roasted meat of snakes. He wanders among the ruins, by the perimeter fence, never letting himself be viewed. Colonel Kaya knows nothing of him. I myself have met him just twice. You will not have seen him last night, but he saw you and came to warn Stratis. This is the first time in some years that he warns of an intruder.”

  “You mean I’m some kind of prisoner.”

  “It’s not the right word.”

  “You have a better one?”

  “You won’t be confined to this room, not at all. And I think, after some time—once the story fades down, and we know we can trust you to say nothing—”

  “Everyone wants me to say nothing.”

  “—maybe then, you could leave us, claiming the amnesia. You were here on trauma leave, ja?”

  “After the therapy they were sending me home or back to the war. No way I was going.”

  “Home, or back to the war?”

  “Maybe both.”

  “You have found a way not to, it seems.”

  A shadow in the doorway, a young woman holding a tray. “Ena kafe yia ton kseno,” she says and enters. From out of the space behind her comes the rich discord of birdsong he’d stopped hearing during the interview, or interrogation. She stands a few inches over five feet, in a black dress like an old Levantine widow, her hair tugged back in a widowlike way, yet the hair is glossy black, she wears sunglasses, and the dress goes only to her knees. Flip-flops on caramel feet. She is slim at the waist and ankles but otherwise rounded, her calves strong. The man sets his book on the floor and takes the tray from the woman, who seems too repulsed, wary, or alarmed to carry it to Elias on his sweaty bed. In his state he feels unthreatening, in fact frail, but he knows the impression he has been making on others since adolescence. He’s burly—thick through the wa
ist but not soft—with drastic black eyebrows, the jaw of a bouncer, and thin lips that give him an air of contained combativeness.

  The man brings the tray over. Not wanting to be served like a prisoner, Elias tries to get up. “No, please, rest for now, son. Take your coffee and this piece of bread.” The word son is a complete surprise. The next surprise is how the word locks Elias’s throat into a spasm. He lowers his face and brings a hand to his brow, as if the welt there is stinging. Or he’s a man overcome at a funeral. The only person officially dead here is him. Three white, pentagonal pills lie on the tray by the coffee—the spare Ativans from his wallet. A cool hand settles on his nape. “Whatever they are, it’s doubtful we can fetch any more of them. Please bear this in mind.”

  Elias nods.

  “My name is Roland. This is Ekaterini—Kaiti. You are welcome in the village.”

  CLEAR-CUT: KANDAHAR, 11 OCTOBER

  The briefing took place in a large tent under generator lights bright enough for a film set. 0400 hours. The captain kept referring to good guys and bad guys as if talking to small boys about a combat video game, so more than ever Elias’s enlistment looked absurd. Thirty years old and joining up mainly for the sake of a father, albeit a dying one, an ex-soldier, ex-cop, who had always wanted this, or something like it, though when Elias actually went and did it the man sat up in bed and swore torrents in Greek and then, in English, called him a fucking fool. Out of breath, he spoke in half-coherent bursts. “It’s not a blue beret now! You can be killed!”

  Elias had thought joining up might buoy his father into another remission, maybe buy him an extra year of life, then an easier, less angry death. I thought you’d be happy, Papa. But no, it seemed, especially not now with the cancer chewing through him, as if nothing mattered to him anymore but life, the continuity of his own blood and seed. His old hopes for his son had been suspended. Maybe they never were real, never more than a way of focusing frustration because the boy had not become the man he might have been. Oh, he’d developed the proper physique, but not the correct “character,” which seemed to involve a kind of adamant certainty, a sensibly impatient scorn for nuances, new ideas, thoughtful distinctions, kindness of the more naive sort (kindness was weakness, weakness a failure of will). The boy had been a tough, talented athlete. He should have graduated to the adult male form of competitive prowess: a career in business, law, finance, or security. Instead he was part-timing in gyms as a personal trainer and playing a few gigs in bars (covering other people’s songs). Becalmed. Elias couldn’t deny it. He was living with someone but not in love, he was book smart but never touched a book, he was addicted to TV sports and porn, though only mildly, even his addictions lacking real commitment. Another thirty-year-old adolescent adrift in a rich world locked in a coma of complacency.

  At his father’s soon-to-be deathbed he saw what a mistake he’d made—this rash stab at some parody of adult commitment, this overtime bid for love and family connection—but it was too late, and in fact Papa’s shocking insistence that he find some way to withdraw made Elias all the more determined to stay the course, and here he is, months into a second tour of duty, the mission a mess, the regime they’re defending despicable, people dying hourly—civilians, soldiers, good guys, bad guys by the ditch-load, some of whom appear to have been recruited from grade schools, impossible, there are no such schools here, that’s the whole issue, that’s what we’ve come here to change. And you bought that line (sort of). Made it easier to join up. And for a while, before the deepening desert tedium, the thousandth hand of Texas hold ’em—before any actual violence—it did feel good to belong to something solid; to receive clear orders instead of trying and failing to make decisions; to flow with the simple will of the crowd.

  Simply belong.

  —

  At sunrise the company marched down into a valley along a mudwalled track too narrow for the LAVS. The valley was a terracotta bowl with steep, serrated sides—from down here the encircling horizon was all mountains, sun-baked and sterile. On the other side of the mud wall a stream descended parallel to the track, its melodic trickling a reprieve to the men after so long in the desert. The water, or just the sound of it, seemed to cool and soften the air.

  Down below in the valley a small Eden nestled, or so it seemed now compared to the desert above. In fact there were only a few patches of lush green down there among the brown, flat roofs of the houses, over which a low minaret rose. The other swaths of colour, contained within mud walls, were less brilliant but still a relief for the eye: the blond of wheat, the yellow of mustard and, much larger, an expanse of pale silvery green, which must be the olive grove on this side of the village, the main reason for the company’s visit.

  As the men approached the grove, teams of skirmishers veered off, clambering over the walls to either side of the track. They spread out into the fields where a few villagers stood gaping, hoes in hand. Elias wanted to follow them into the fields and take an urgent piss, or attempt to, his bladder empty but burning. Then the olive grove was there beside them, across the mud wall, which here was overrun by wild grapes and bougainvillea. Brushing past the purple flowers he noticed for the first time their lack of smell. When your body is rattled do your senses shut down? No, the opposite, your sense of smell, like vision, grows sharper. Fresh goat dung on the path, the vinegary funk of anxious, overheating bodies, and now the fainter smells of the grove instantly returning him to boyhood, first time in Greece, near Pirgos, the rich bitterness of the fruit and also the leaves and resinous bark of the trees, some a thousand years old, as these ones too might be. They have that sinewy look, rheumatic yet thriving, trunks knobby, impacted, as if they’ve petrified indestructibly. The other groves in Afghanistan are young, planted by the Soviets in the ’70s, while this one is said to go back to the time of Alexander the Great, some of whose troops settled in this valley, which must have reminded them of home. They planted grapevines and the olive trees from which these trees were descended, and they remained here when the other Greeks withdrew, so for centuries afterward this would have been a small ethnic outpost of Greece.

  Sappers with chainsaws are going over the wall into the grove, shadowed by soldiers lumbering in a crouch, awkward in their kneepads and cyborg body armour. The grove offers the only good cover in the valley. According to Intel, the enemy has been bivouacking here and emerging from the valley at dark to attack convoys on the highway west of the pass. Last week a British contractor was killed and six soldiers wounded by an IED. Intel thinks the enemy has left for now, but the orders are to clear-cut the grove and drag away the remains. The men will pile it up for the villagers to use as firewood or building materials, or to sell. Whatever they choose. Winning hearts and minds. A simple operation—but even a rootless, suburban Greek knows that olives are not like other trees. It’s not just their age, it’s how families tend them for generations and count on them for their staples: the fruit, for pickling and salting, but above all the oil: their cooking fat, their lamp fuel, their medicine, their butter, their lard, their soap, their lotion, their lubricant. People in dry, poor countries never doubt that fat is life.

  “Trif, go in with Barrett and Lozac. Guard those sappers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Interpreter’s with the group ahead. We’re sealing things off, but keep him close in case of locals.” Forewarning the village has not been an option, because if any bad guys—some of whom might even be villagers—are still in the grove and get wind of the plans, they could ambush the men.

  The sound of the first chainsaw grinding its teeth is sickening, a second wave of sickness superimposed on the first, the first being simple fear, what everyone feels, along with excitement and, for a few of the men, visible elation. You too, just a little, admit it. You’re following Barrett and Lozac into the freckling light and shadow of the grove. As each saw starts biting into wood, its howling soars several tones higher, as if euphoric. There’s shouting ahead. Sergeant Singh is yelling at somebody, o
ut of sight, who’s yelling back. You can barely hear them over the saws now whining in chorus, some sappers moving outward, some cutting their way toward you. “Where the fuck’s the interpreter?” Lozac cries. Singh is beside himself: “Lie down! Lie down! Lie down!” He’s aiming his carbine at the sandalled feet of a villager in drawstring trousers and undershirt, who stands under a tree, bunching the end of a bough in his fist and shaking it—twigs, black olives, long thin leaves—as if trying to press out the oil with his hand. “He’s unarmed!” you yell. Everyone can see he’s unarmed, but Singh’s widened eyes are flitting, the villager could be a decoy, there’s shouting from all directions, what the fuck, the grove is filling up with villagers, though it should be sealed off by now. Maybe they were in here already, eating a meal before starting the day’s work. Maybe some are the Bad Guys, the worst of them, the cruel lunatic purists. A mist of exhaust fumes and sawdust floats through the grove. The seared flesh of the trees smells like incense. Singh fires a shot into the air. Barrett seizes the villager by the scruff and topples him to the earth, face down.

  From somewhere nearby, toward the village, more shots. Singh’s head turns sharply, the hairnet black under his helmet. Down on one knee, you’re scanning the well-spaced grid of trees in that direction: all intact, though other trees are falling around you, not toppling and crashing like big pines but just sagging over until the pruned canopies meet the ground, or mesh with the boughs of neighbouring trees not yet culled.

  A scrawny, white-bearded man gimps toward you, his palms upturned, eyes beseeching, the whites intensely clear in his brown face. In the name of God what are you people doing? he must be asking. You’re wondering the same thing. You holler at him to stop. He keeps coming. Your C7 snugged against your shoulder, bolt cocked, safety off, you aim at his bare feet. “Now! Please!” “Stand down!” Lozac screams at the man. “Trif, where’s the fucking interpreter?” Another spasm of shots. Most of the men look tense but unpanicked, down on one knee, carbines ready, holding back, then peripherally you see one, maybe two, firing shots, not knowing who is shooting or if they should reply. “Hold fire!” A civilian coming at you is the worst possible thing because what on earth do you do? “What’s no in Pashto?” “What?” A jolt to your shoulder, as if you’ve been hit. The old man has stopped and knelt and crouched forward, brow to the ground, as if facing Mecca. “Trif!—don’t fire again—some of ours are over there!”—it’s Lozac, out of sight, the gas fumes and floating sawdust thickening. “I didn’t!” you shout, you insist, to him, to yourself—“Loze?—Jesus, did I?” “Open fire,” a voice shouts, “they’re armed!” “What?” “They’re not armed—don’t fucking fire!” (Is that Singh?)