The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  After she leaves he draws up a bucket of water, sits on a wooden stool, strips off his shirt, and swabs his torso clean of the sweat that Myrto said she liked. Then he limps over to the small mirror secured to a branch and ducks down to inspect his face. With his brush cut growing out, the premature retreat of his hair at the temples shows. Has this difficult year made a difference? He can feel a thinning at the crown as well. And yet somehow he looks younger and healthier than before, his face deeply tanned, the whites of his brown eyes uncannily clear.

  Crossing to the library he scans the sky. The birds are gone. Above the desert in Kandahar the empty skies were never quite empty: there were always a few carrion birds, sometimes dozens, orbiting above roadside wreckage or the fuming remains of mud-brick structures. An embedded journalist there mentioned a detail too curious to be untrue: unlike other creatures, which eat good-smelling food and produce stinking excrement, vultures devour rotting flesh and then leave droppings that are odourless.

  Elias nods warily to Myrto and sets the books down on a front desk cluttered with papers on which handwritten lists, mystifying diagrams, and long columns of addition and multiplication appear. The high, pencilled arches of her eyebrows make her look preternaturally wakeful, expectant.

  “Sorry,” he says. “They’re a bit late.”

  “But it was Roland who borrowed them,” she corrects him with obvious pleasure, “on 11 November.”

  “But he borrowed them for me, and I’m late, so I guess you’ll have to fine me. I hear there are fines?”

  “Certainly, of a sort. But it’s only two days, and we realize you are having trouble getting around. Did you read the famous poem by Seferis, the one he composed in Cyprus about the nightingale and the Trojan War?”

  “That’s why I wanted the anthology,” he says. “To read that one. I’m not much for poetry, to be honest, but in Paphos a doctor told me I should read it. Prescribed it, really.” Dr. Boudreau had broken down during that session and Elias had tried to comfort him, which seemed to help the patient slightly, if not the doctor. For a shade, an empty tunic, we slew and died.

  “Did you find the Greek at all difficult?”

  “The Kazantzakis was harder. You’re sure about the fine?”

  She lifts her chin, shuts her eyes. “Ochi! You owe me nothing.”

  “How’s the project going?”

  “Very well, thank you! Would you come and help me reposition a few of the shelves now? This will be your penance.” When he hesitates she adds, “I told you, Elia—I’m no magissa, I will not try to make you do things against your will!”

  “No, no, it’s just that I’m on crutches, and—”

  “When you gave yourself to me among the shelves,” she declares in Greek, as if reciting from a poem, “it helped to shake me from a slumber—that’s all. But of course I knew even then that you were not the man for me. Forgive me, I’m always perfectly frank.” As she goes on, he nods slowly, as bewildered as he is relieved. Does she believe that something happened in the shelves other than a kiss, more or less delivered by surprise?

  “It’s not so much your youth, however, it’s your era. I mean that you are a man of the present day, soft, a little shallow, as was Manolis, in his own fashion. I am finally happy, here in the past, and the men who’ve lived in this place for some time—now that I recognize them again as men—well, they too inhabit that other time, each in his own way. So now I can have a man again.”

  “You mean Roland?”

  “Roland I care for, naturally I do, yet something in him has moved beyond eros. No, but when Stratis Kourakis returned ahead of you two, after confronting that Turk, and I saw the gleam in his eyes, the unsmiling pride in his bearing…You seem astonished, as if you’ve never looked at someone you’ve known for years and then, suddenly, it’s as if your eyes rightly focus! Stratis is a man of the old ways, he grew up in a mountain village in Crete, he has that unwavering stare, he smells of earth and woodsmoke. He can hardly write his name—I doubt he has written his name, or anything else, in years!—but he knows some thousand verses of the Erotokritos and he can recite all the great poets. Stratis is simply steeped in time…But come now, help me with the shelves,” she instructs, as if she has forgotten about his injury. “I’ve been reconsidering the place in my schema for the dictionaries, grammar texts, and language primers.”

  As he limps back from the library, it hits him that his “I’m not much for poetry” was nothing but a reflexive disclaimer, typical macho bullshit. He had liked the books and as he struggled through them he felt something in him thawing, softening.

  After the siesta he emerges and sheepishly scans the courtyard for Kaiti, half-hoping not to meet those jarring, jade-pale eyes; he has just had another dream of slow, tender fucking and this time the woman’s face was not disguised. No sign of her now. Under the pistachio tree a chess game is about to start. Neoklis hunches a few inches above the board as he stations each piece in the exact centre of its square. Elias crutches himself over to the kitchen to brew coffee over the propane stove, then sits watching the game as he peels a mess of potatoes for the Feast of St Ekaterina—Kaiti’s name day. He works slowly while high in the lemon tree a final cicada laments her vanished kin.

  Stratis requires little sleep and like all such men he will mention the fact on the slightest pretext, but today he seems to have skipped the siesta entirely. He wanders in through the gate, lax-limbed, glassy-eyed, a flush on his leathery cheeks and throat. Usually on seeing Elias he will grunt a greeting, ask coldly how his ankle feels, then try to pick a fight. Today he sits down beside the younger man and says nothing. He seems lost in a kind of happy shock.

  Evening is falling, limpid, cool and perfumed. Stavroula admits a rosy surge of sunset into the courtyard as she enters through the gate with the long-haired twins, who are scrubbed and got up, Lale in a frilly cream dress like a wraparound doily, Aslan in a pale blue dress shirt, grey flannel shorts and black knee socks. Stavroula collects the pail of potatoes and summons them to Kaiti’s name-day service in the cathedral, as Stavroula calls it—kathedrikos—where Takkos sometimes officiates as lay priest.

  Robed in ceremonial vestments that the real priests must have abandoned in their flight, Takkos, clearing his throat and sneezing in the dust, is trying to recall the liturgy. He seems oddly nervous and at least a little drunk. The dusk-dim church is lit by a half-dozen tapers, their glimmer trembling over the solemn faces on the ikonostasis: Christ the Pantokrator, Agia Maria, Agia Eleni and other Byzantine saints painted in sumptuous if faded golds, greens, indigos, scarlets…Kaiti Matsakis wears a high-necked, sleeveless lavender dress, which in its dated modesty is movingly attractive. Eyeliner and lipstick. Her curly hair is braided and coiled up onto the top of her head, an ebony tiara.

  Kaiti kneels at the communion rail with the twins on either side. Then Stratis and Myrto kneel pressed together, her wavy, greying hair fanned across her bony shoulders. Unlike him, she doesn’t take the bread and wine. Neoklis, with his poignant bald patch, looks especially small up there next to his mother. He seems not to notice how she struggles to regain her feet, her calves so swollen. Takkos notices but does nothing, as if fearing that his helping her might compromise his temporary status and relegate him to husband. Elias—in khakis and a wide-lapelled white shirt manufactured years before his birth—gimps up to the communion rail. As usual, he’s uncertain of what he’s doing, why, and what it means. First communion in twenty years. Memories throng back. Sitting in the pews pressed into his mother’s soft side, her smell of menthol cigarettes and rosewater, she separating him from his father, who has a flat-top haircut like a Green Beret, while on Papa’s other side sits Trif’s big sister, Sonya…Elias tips his head far forward as he kneels, deeply pious, it must seem, although actually he’s trying to hide his own thinning crown from the congregation (in other words, from Kaiti).

  Roland stays seated, his expression gently ironic, maybe a bit rueful. Is he too finding the service valedi
ctory, as if it’s really a kind of blessing before a journey?

  —

  On the pavestones of the plaza, in the falling dark among the topiary ghosts of buildings, vehicles, and the great tree, a soccer game erupts. The twins start out in their Sunday best, but Kaiti and Stavroula chastise them and soon they’re barefoot, Aslan in his shorts, Lale in underpants and camisole. Stratis Kourakis now reveals another hidden capacity, dribbling the ball with a lanky and looping grace. Roland instantly joins the game, despite his health troubles, whatever they are. At the chessboard he’s a calm player, but not out here. Shoes smacking the pavestones he charges around with a fierce, fixed grin as he tries to strip the ball off Stratis. (After a few minutes, he stops and withdraws, his eyes glazed, mouth open as he pants.) Takkos, back in layman’s gear, tends goal and is hard to beat, partly because he keeps nudging the goalposts, Elias’s shoes, closer together. When Elias catches him at it, the man grins ear to ear. Now Kaiti peels off her flats and joins in, running high on her toes with the flying lightness of a figure on an urn. As for Myrto, with an Old World scholar’s scornful gravitas she declines to run, but when the ball comes to her she giggles in startled delight and blindly kicks it.

  On his crutches Elias plants himself so that on the rare occasions he gets the ball, he can cross it to Lale or Aslan in the goalmouth and they can score, which is easy, as Neoklis just stands there frozen, only lunging to stop shots a second after they’ve gone past, then tragically exclaiming, as if he barely missed. Now Stratis lopes around everyone, the chafed leather ball seemingly glued to his boot, until Elias, suddenly determined to challenge, hobbles into his path and manages to kick the ball with his good foot. It skitters off across the plaza, Argos in pursuit. The dog pins and savagely bites it, as if it wasn’t deflated enough already.

  The two men sit sprawled after their collision, Elias wincing and grinning and holding his ankle, and for a moment Stratis reverts to his old self, knotting his brow, muttering behind his moustache. The twins—who always steer shy of Stratis—each grab one of Elias’s hands, trying to pull him up. When Aslan bumps his ankle, Elias yowls and the twins burst out laughing, as if he must be fooling around.

  Lale asks in Greek, “Can we play more?”

  “Sure,” he says. “Just a second.”

  But Kaiti looms over them. “Better to stop now, before someone gets hurt.”

  “I guess you’re not counting me?” he says, trying to make her smile, but her face hardens. Switching into effortful English, she says, “I wish you not to try so much to make them love you!”

  “What are you talking about?” He can feel Roland watching them, everyone watching them, though only Roland and Myrto can understand.

  “I must return them into the world,” she says. “Can you understand this?”

  “I didn’t realize the decision was made and final.”

  “What, pardon?”

  “I’m not trying to stop you, Kaiti.”

  “Of course you will not stop me!”

  “I’m not even a citizen here, I’m a…I don’t know what I am.”

  “Pardon?”

  He repeats himself in Greek. In English she replies, “And yet I think you wish to live here now more than I!”

  “What makes you think that has anything to do with you?”

  Her eyes widen. “I never say this!” Then, in Greek, in an undertone: “Simply respect my wishes and don’t make them so attached to you that it will be even harder for us to leave. Ela, pedhia,” she summons the twins, putting out her hands, keeping her eyes on Elias. Then, in English: “Try to understand this, Trif.”

  —

  By lamplight in the courtyard the villagers feast on a great mullet stuffed with unpeeled lemons, Neoklis’s cherry tomatoes, olives, shallots, peppers, garlic cloves as fat as Concord grapes. There’s kohli—snails with garlic and anise—and grilled halloumi that squeaks like curds on the teeth. And bread—two warm crusty loaves baked from the villagers’ little trove of Turkish army flour. Quickly the company exhausts the wine chilled in well water and starts drinking it warm, chased by tiny glasses of raki. And so the toasts begin. Elias feels his heart lightening again, like a man at a funeral that’s turning into a wake. What’s done is done, what’s dead is dead, and the night is still to come. He brings out the guitar and takes some requests—“Hallelujah,” of course—then backs up Stratis and Myrto as they sing the male–female duet of the Erotokritos, or at least the half-dozen verses Myrto knows. Tone-deaf, she shrilly chants the words more than sings them. Stratis’s vocals have their usual power—the raw-souled voice of a peasant recorded in wax by an ethnologist a century back—but tonight there’s an extra layer of trembling resonance. His cracked rasp seems a signature of passion, not age. A younger part of him is harmonizing with the old. All his traits are open to reassessment. The wine-vinegar pong of his sweat always was a virile musk; his glowing aura makes his hair and luxuriant eyebrows sterling, not grey.

  Elias must be the last one here to know about the lovers.

  The night contracts and clarifies into a series of panels: Kaiti kneading Stavroula’s bloated bare feet, which rest in her lap on a towel: Roland appearing behind Kaiti’s chair, kissing her braided crown as she peers upward and to the side, a small girl trying to guess who is there. Her eyes encounter Trif’s and for a few seconds don’t look away. Try to understand this, they seem to repeat. Neoklis refuses to look at Elias at all, but he drums his fingers on the table to his playing. The new lovers, chairs together, lean back and smoke their atrocious cigarettes with voluptuous languor, Myrto exhaling through her nose and giving Elias a warm smile, permitting a glimpse of the small, stained teeth that he now senses she hates. Takkos and Roland dance with their jackets off, sleeves rolled, raised hands linked by a scarf, Takkos’s eyes sealed in the ardour of his trance, Roland watching the man’s quick little feet and trying to keep step while beaming as if this is a wedding banquet and he’s the father of the bride.

  “Na pethanei o Charos!” Stratis calls, swaying in his chair, glass raised. Death to the Ferryman! Then Takkos, breathlessly: “To Ekaterini—in thanks and with love. How terribly we will miss you—you and the twins!”

  When it ends and the lamps are snuffed and everyone has turned in, Elias, drunk, sprawls on his back on the flagstones beside the still-littered tables, under one of which Argos lies twitching in sleep, the dead soccer ball beside him. No moon. The stars are impossibly dense. It’s almost December. A new coolness is settling over Varosha, the Milky Way like a winter cloud and every star a falling flake. More sounds of lovemaking from Stratis’s room drive Elias into his own cell, where the bed opens and swallows him.

  OUR QUIET EXILE

  As the serene, sunny days and cooler nights of Polat’s absence slip away, it becomes clear to Kaya: he will have to take whatever steps are necessary to have the man transferred elsewhere as soon as possible after his return, or before. It won’t be easy. The army’s sprawling, inscrutable bureaucracy poses a challenge even for the well-liked and well-connected, and Kaya has let most of his connections idle and rust, having been too content, here in Varosha, simply to live from year to year without carefully banking favours. What’s more, Polat is sure to see any transfer that Kaya might arrange as exactly what it would be, and in reprisal he would likely pass his suspicions and grievances on to higher powers, if he hasn’t done so already. This likelihood in mind, Kaya has been having the perimeter fence mended, under Timur Ali’s supervision. And if Polat should claim he has seen things and heard voices inside the dead zone, well, that can be explained away. As for Elias Trifannis, the authorities are content with how efficiently Kaya dealt with the problem, though of course they don’t know—and don’t want to know—the details.

  The real danger is that the returning Polat will insist on going back into the dead zone and there discover the villagers. Conditions now favour such a mission; the heat wave has broken and the first autumn rains have fallen, bringing into flower th
e late yellow narcissi and Cyprus cyclamen that Kaya so loves and looks forward to every year. In the morning they scent the sunny but cool veranda of the officers’ club, where he sits sipping his Turkish coffee, smoking a cheroot and reading the Hürriyet, which Ali brings him from Famagusta at eight every morning, about four hours later than it would be delivered in Istanbul. Turkey’s major centre-left daily. Kaya always reads the sports section first, especially articles about Fenerbahce, his favourite team in the Super League, and about tennis (he adores the Williams sisters). He keeps his laptop computer open and ready beside his glass, a clear jug of ice water, and a plate of miniature croissants, so he can follow up on the stories and watch video replays. For this reason it always takes him until after 9 A.M. and his fourth sweet coffee to get to the news in the front section.

  This morning he delights in the sea-wind’s freshness on his clean-shaven face after a night of rain, and he’s basking in the odour of fall blossoms, the syrupy scent of overripe muscat grapes above him in the trellised vines. He’s happily languid after last night’s hours with a chubby and jovial, blonde-dyed Romanian dancer from the hotel, who seemed pleasantly surprised by his manners, hospitality, and intimate stamina. He feels like himself again—that deep, almost subatomic sense of well-being—so the fact of Polat’s return can be brushed away, at least temporarily, like these drunken wasps that keep alighting on the sweet rim of his cup. For a moment he considers replaying highlights of Serena Williams’s recent matches in Istanbul, but then, with a vague sense of adult obligation, he picks up the front section of the Hürriyet.