The man shuts his eyes and lifts his chin. “He is an escaped prisoner.”
“He’s not a prisoner. Not exactly.”
“I’m afraid he is, now,” says Roland, still out of breath. “He won’t be able to walk anywhere for some time.”
ACCIDENT
She breaks surface but sees nothing. A woman’s voice is saying, Her father had to fly back to Istanbul, Colonel Kaya, and a man’s voice, accompanied by a waft of fine cologne that seems the very scent of that voice: Are you going to fly her there as well?
If her condition permits, Colonel.
Eylül wonders if this is a military hospital, unlikely, and she resolves to stay awake and speak to these people, or signal them somehow, but when she tries to speak she can’t form a word, her lips won’t move. She knows she is in a hospital bed and gravely hurt, perhaps dying. Her mind grasps these facts with the same calm neutrality she recalls from a traffic accident several years ago, on the highway north of Izmir, when the rear of a truck she was trailing too closely (late as always, speeding as always) appeared to rocket back toward her. Remarkable how the mind found time to summon up so many thoughts, regrets, caveats, objections, excuses, in what could not have been more than a second. The passenger beside her, her younger sister, Meltem, screamed, but not even her scream could disrupt the orderly succession of Eylül’s thoughts. She didn’t normally bother with seat belts, but in Izmir’s catastrophic traffic she had ordered Meltem to wear hers, and, after a moment, to pre-empt the sulky charge of hypocrisy she knew to be inevitable, Eylül had yanked her own on as well.
In the moment before her death—what she’d assumed would be her death—remorse had swept through her, as if the accident were a punishment for some unconscionable act she had once committed but could not remember, though in the wake of the accident it would certainly be revealed.
Of the collision itself she has no memory. When she regained consciousness (the car was wrecked but neither sister critically injured), it was with the relief of a dreamer escaping a nightmare. The remorse had really been regret—not for some terrible thing she had done but for the many things she hadn’t.
As for how she ended up here, she remembers being at the bar and then outside with the big Canadian, whose troubled eyes made him look older than his years, and whose rare, encompassing grins made him look younger. The sea turtles swarming around them. Then her climax, which took a long time to reach, plateau by plateau, and which—she guesses with a disembodied detachment—might be her last. Then flashlights approaching, the soldiers yelling. Nothing more.
I’ll return and check on her in a few days, the velvety voice says now. If she’s still here. I mean—if you haven’t transferred her.
Of course, Colonel, any time! says the female doctor or head nurse, clearly smitten.
DATA SHADOW
He too is a patient in his chilly, twilit cell. Now and then Roland comes in to sweep away cobwebs, check on his ankle or dress his mutilated feet, and Roland, or sometimes Kaiti, brings him food, simple but ample—lentils, small fish, potatoes, mysterious greens cooked in olive oil and lemon—not prison fare at all, unless each meal might actually be his last before execution. (Roland seems bewildered by this joke.)
Elias doesn’t bother joking about the pomegranates they keep bringing into his underworld, and which he finds too much trouble to eat.
He leaves all of the meals unfinished.
The reverse of life isn’t death but indifference—this coma of the will and heart.
—
Lying down all the time makes it difficult to hold off sleep. These crumbling old Aspirin, washed down with wine, make it harder still.
Once he’s asleep, the dream and its finale: kneeling beside the old man, turning him over, no pulse, straddling the frail body, pumping the chest a few inches from the pulpy cavity of the wound, blood spraying Elias’s eyes and lips and the man’s sightless face and white beard, please, please, come back, men lifting him off, a medic yelling, “Let me do it, move it!” and one soldier, misunderstanding, “Okay, Trif, you got him, he’s done!”
Over and over as he flails awake with an animal yelp, pulse thundering and the bedsheets soaked and cold, it’s to thoughts of a different kind of escape—a self-escape. Twice after one of these wakings the door screaked open and a man’s shape appeared, the courtyard behind him limpid with moonlight. Roland. His room is next door. In silhouette Roland’s bedhead of wiry hair stuck up, exclamatory. His speech was thick and awkward: “Elias—Trif? Again the bad dreams?”
Self-exit. Self-departure. Self-deletion. Self-desertion.
—
His splintered sleeps leave him too exhausted even to look at any of the books Roland has brought him, an odd mix of decomposing paperbacks (Penguin classics, Zane Grey westerns) and a volume of history on Cyprus and the Middle East that weighs as much as a kettle bell. “To fill in the gaps of an American education,” the man said. Elias felt too weary to correct him or argue. And why should he argue? In a way, he guesses, it was his ignorance, his innocence, that put him here.
The afternoon heat is a potent hypnotic. Even the small lizards that sometimes skitter across the walls now rest in the corners, throats barely pulsing. Trying to keep his eyes from closing, he leaves his door open for a breeze and does feeble sets of push-ups and crunches on the cool floor of his cell, his hurt ankle propped on his pillow. He’s sprawled on the floor panting when Stratis, silent as always, glides past, glances in, no reaction. During the next set of push-ups something jabs Elias’s shoulder. With a cry he rolls clear and ends up lying against the wall looking back toward the doorway, breath held.
The children, poised to flee, stand staring in at him. They wear matching blue cotton pyjamas, probably for the siesta. The boy grips a long stick that he now ineptly tries to hide behind his back. Elias sits up. “You must be Aslan,” he says in Greek to the boy, and to the girl: “And you’re Lale?” They nod gravely, warily. “To onoma mou einai Trif,” he says. They look at each other and back at him. The girl says in a brave, croaky little voice, “We know…but where do you come from?” As he tries to stand, he tries to smile. Instead he grunts in pain. Their eyes widen. They must see a grimacing, dirty, hairy-faced ogre rearing above them. They turn and run. At the same moment a woman’s voice calls to them from somewhere a few walls or streets away. He walks to the door—all of four strides—and watches them slip out through the gate.
You’ve become the sort of man your own mother warned you to flee.
He eases the door shut, lets his forehead rest against the wood. Something in him heaves and shatters, a sinkhole gapes in the ground of his being, he collapses to the floor, hands, knees, and brow against the cold chalky tiles. He sobs, shakes and chokes, he hears himself making unearthly sounds, dying animal sounds, and his attempts to control and muffle them only intensify the attack. He has to give in. As if a lifetime’s quota of grief, loneliness, and regret have been concentrated into one cataclysm, he weeps until his eyes swell shut and he lies still and emptied on the floor.
—
Awake at dawn, trying not to blink back into sleep, he hears very faintly the sonic arabesques of a cantor in a minaret. No, muezzin, that’s the word. He has almost forgotten about the living city of Famagusta, just a few kilometres to the north. Houses, shops, schools, mosques, and hospitals. One hospital, anyway.
The sound fades and doesn’t come back. Hard to believe in an outside world—or to believe in the beliefs of others, their faith, their sense of membership in a flock, a family, a platoon, a village, a movement, a people. A flag. A corporate brand.
Bullshit, all of it. You belong only to yourself.
Self-delivery. Self-erasure. Self-extinction.
—
On the fifth or sixth morning Roland brings news with breakfast. North Cypriot radio has upgraded Eylül Şahin’s condition to “serious but stable,” a contradiction in terms Elias has never fully understood but is slightly encouraged to hear. Rol
and examines his ankle and feet, then adds, “She remains comatose, but Elias Trifannis will be back among the living in no time. When you’re ready, I will ask the villagers to come in from their houses for a special feast of welcome.”
“They must wonder if I’m real. I’ve been wondering myself.”
“Oh, no, they have all seen you! I brought them in the first evening, when you were unconscious.”
“All of them, in here?”
“The village is not so big as you might think.”
After the man leaves—he walks with his feet turned out, hands linked behind his back—Elias sits up and eats with stirrings of actual hunger: thick, goaty yogurt with walnuts, pistachios and dark honey, a small tart orange, two soft figs, black grapes, a sliced, beet-red prickly pear, a thimble cup of sweet Greek coffee and a glass of water.
Serious but stable.
Are comas perfectly dreamless?
—
That afternoon he hobbles, wincing with each step, to the “privy” and back without Roland’s help, to sponge-bathe with a bucket and an old monogrammed washcloth. At the first splash of icy water over his face, neck, and shoulders, his body surprises him with a deep-drawn groan—a sound of momentary, tentative pleasure. Or is it just relief?
Back in his cell he finds, between the piss-pail and the bed, a bunch of wild lavender and torn bougainvillea stuffed into a joint of bamboo, no water. Apparently the twins have once again braved his cavern. He sets the innocent bouquet up on the window ledge, the better to see it from where he lies.
—
That night, after losing his battle and crashing into sleep, he remains utterly unconscious until morning. Some hours later he is able to limp out through the repaired gate, to look around. Siesta hour, the village silent. The dog stirs from a doze in the shade of the courtyard lemon tree and follows him. Elias is using a knob-headed black briar cane that Roland found somewhere and which must have seemed quaint even back in the 1970s, or so he guesses (what does he really know of that time, of any time before his own childhood?).
As he inches along in the sunshine, between whitewashed walls that flood his eyes and brain with light, his panic seems to be suspended, curiosity reviving. Maybe it’s just that he can move again. For him bodily effort, whether pleasurable or painful, is life.
The village—this one narrow street—is a small oasis of order in a disaster zone. It’s remarkable, like a place in a lucid dream: both solid and spectral. Between the courtyard inn and the neighbouring house lies a geometrically neat vegetable patch, while the courtyard of another house has been turned into a tiny orchard: a fig and plum tree, and a few olive trees burled and gnarled as ginger root. A window box of magenta geraniums under closed black shutters. On a flat roof, under a grape trellis, a chicken coop and dovecote. The cool, soft chortling of invisible birds.
The old soldier in his beret seems to be everywhere at all times. Now he sweeps past, swinging his thin but sinewy arms. Dark moustache, hair like steel filings. An undershirt over a pelt of greying chest hair, patched camouflage trousers tucked into boots, a machete in his belt beside a snared rabbit. He nods and growls—half acknowledgement, half warning. In Elias’s belly a sort of power surge. He glares back at the man and spits in the street. Traditional Greeks—the sort his father was—respect frank pugnacity before a polite smile, but Elias’s gesture of contempt is not strategic. Rather it seems that in a moment, with a spike of adrenalin, his attacker, this Stratis, has reset Elias’s will.
Ten klicks or so south to the border. He will bide his time until he can move properly again. At present his status out in the world might be that of a deserter—no, more likely a suicide, maybe a rapist as well—though all of that must be fading now. A few days of prying interest, a few hundred shares and online comments, then a story dies and what’s left of you is a digital shadow. Still, for now, his relatives in Larnaca and Canada must be talking about his death—grieving is surely too strong a word, given their slim acquaintance. He and the woman he’d lived with briefly had split up when he enlisted. Of his immediate family, only his sister, an ESL teacher in Korea, remains. Estranged from their father, she did not come back for the funeral, and her last contact with Elias was some months before that. So much for the myth of the close Greek family. Still, if their father were alive, he would be leaving no bush unbeaten to discover his son’s exact fate. But he’d died in a hospital bed, Elias beside him, just before Elias’s second tour began.
Bored with this invalid pace, Argos cocks his head sideways, chomps the cane and twists it from the hand of the tottering Elias, then bolts away with it in his mouth. Elias finds he can walk back all right without it.
—
Under the fruit and nut trees and trellised vines of the courtyard, they are preparing for a village dinner, which usually happens only on Sundays and holidays, Roland says. Elias has double-wrapped his ankle and is helping Kaiti Matsakis and Roland pull five small, square tables into line and cover them with a red banquet cloth, then set the table with olive-oil lamps and candles, plates, cutlery, glasses, and pitchers of raw young wine the colour of dark rosé. They haven’t asked, much less ordered, him to help—he has offered because he can now, and he can’t bear the thought of withdrawing to his twilit room, where he’ll just lie on the bed trying not to sleep. Awake and moving, he feels all right.
His returning strength proves useful. The old hardwood tables are heavy, and Kaiti, though she seems fit enough, is petite. As for Roland, he works with the slow, determined diligence and bravely sustained smile of a stoic trying to hide his struggles. Elias overhears Kaiti urge him to go and rest in his room until dinner. “Nonsense, my dear,” he replies in Greek, short of breath.
Elias helps them to ready the grill pit. Though the tamarisk wood the villagers burn is nearly smokeless, Roland explains, they never light fires until after dark and then only in the courtyards. The matches, like other supplies with a long shelf life—tinned lentils and fish, tea, sugar, salt and pepper, powdered milk, soap, toilet paper—come from Varosha’s abandoned hotel stockrooms and, for a population this size, could last a century.
Kaiti keeps telling them what needs doing next. Is she some kind of young matriarch, or is Roland simply absent-minded and in need of instruction? When she asks Elias to do things, she uses the polite second person and “parakalo,” if you please, keeping a formal distance between them while maintaining the pretext that he’s not actually confined here.
Aslan and Lale enter the courtyard and begin setting the table with a quietly dignified air, plainly proud of their duties. The results, though irregular, are impressive for a couple of four-year-olds. (When Kaiti first told him their age and repeated the names he’d already heard once from Roland, he made the mistake of asking if the names weren’t Turkish. She was in his room—having left the door open—to rewrap his feet and rub his ankle with a burning liniment. Absorbing his question, she studied him with half-lidded eyes, pale green in a brown face, the skin of her eyelids and under her eyes especially dark. Sharp cheekbones, black hair tied back. She could pass for Kashmiri. She said simply, “Vevea.” Of course. When he tried asking Roland about the twins the man answered, “Our way here is that villagers tell their own story, yet only if they so choose.” Elias assumes the father must be Turkish Cypriot and absent. Or maybe dead? Twice now he has seen her in a black summer dress, like a compromise between mourning and comfort—not quite style. Everything that she, Roland, and the children wear seems dated or second-hand, as if picked up in vintage shops.)
About Roland he has learned only that he was stationed as a U.N. peacekeeper not far from here, in a town above the sea—one of those few towns that survive inside the buffer zone, along the Green Line, and where Greek and Turkish Cypriots continue to coexist. But something went wrong. Roland, who politely demurred when Elias asked today about his last name and which army he’d served in, arrived in the village some years ago and has remained. How many years? The man shrugs, with a weary
smile, as if he wishes he could remember.
A feast under the stars at a table laden with good things can numb any trauma for a few hours. The flickering oil light, seen through tumblers and pitchers of homemade wine, makes the liquid pulsate as if alive. There’s a platter heaped with wedges of grilled halloumi cheese and a small grilled seabass; there’s a large bowl of a stewed meat that turns out to be hare and other bowls full of fakhes (lentils sautéed with olive oil, onions, peppers), spinach and eggplant cooked with lemon, fried potatoes, tomato and cucumber salad; there is green, astringent olive oil and a single basket of white bread, about a slice per diner, each of whom ekes out the ration in pained, careful little bites.
The villagers seem oddly small, or maybe it’s that most are so thin, streamlined to the specs of another era. If everyone were standing, Elias would loom and lumber among them. He sits between Roland and the little girl, Lale, and across from Neoklis, a tiny middle-aged man who has a bucktooth yellow smile, jutting ears, and bowl-cut hair with a tonsure-like bald spot. Neoklis’s short-sleeved shirt is tucked into pants pulled high up his torso and held there with a skinny black belt. His shirt pockets bulge with chess pieces. Because Greek Cypriots use a dialect, it takes Elias a while to realize the man does not just speak Greek regionally but also strangely, at times incomprehensibly.
His parents are the village elders, Takkos and Stavroula Tombazo. They built their house themselves and have lived in it since a decade before the invasion. They refused to leave in ’74 when the other twenty thousand Varoshiotes fled. (As the wine flows, the village’s history starts to emerge.) Naturally they considered sending Neokli away with the neighbours, but they were afraid of what might become of him, given his condition—he was just six years old and already much afflicted. Then, in hiding, they became still more afraid: “We thought that perhaps the Turks would come and kill us, or take us away to a prison forever,” the old man says in Greek, leaning over the head of the table on his elbows. A barrel-chested little man, half the size of his wife, he has a trimmed beard, a drinker’s purple nose, and—unlike his son—a full head of hair, white against his spotted brown skin. “At times, the Turks would pass in the street and try the door, but we had barred it, and they made no effort to get in. Here and there they looted, but carelessly, with no clear plan.”
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