Lale, still singing, is running in through the door.
“No,” she says in that same voice. “I speak of love.”
—
Every lover in a Greek ballad goes forth with a sprig of fresh basil tucked behind his ear. A few days later, so does Elias. Sex and the euphoria of falling in love seem to have accelerated the healing process. He still wears an old compression wrap, but he can walk with no cane and only a slight hitch in his step.
Roland’s condition, meanwhile, seems to have stabilized.
The lighter work of Sunday morning is done long before the sun noons. Today for the first time Elias has helped Stratis haul buckets of icy water from the well, three trips. Stratis quietly sings to himself and ignores Elias while they work. When they finish, the man squints cannily at him and says—either because Elias is healed or because he has become Kaiti’s lover, as Stratis, the village security chief, must know by now—“So, he thinks he has God by the balls.”
When he and Kaiti stop by the Tombazos’ to drop off the twins, Stavroula envelops him in a bosomy hug, kissing him noisily on either cheek. “May your name-saint bless you!” It seems the whole village knows, and is delighted. Kaiti seems both amused and somewhat hurt—stymied—by this response and the pressure to stay that it implies. Elias knows better than to raise the matter. They walk south across the plaza, like honeymooners strolling across the living square of a European city. It’s deserted, of course, yet she won’t let him take her hand until they reach the far side. She wears jeans and a collarless black leather jacket that fits snugly, fetchingly, over her breasts. The jacket is both forty years old and brand new. “The one thing I’ll miss is the shopping here,” she says. “Everything free, and so much of it back in style.”
Out of the evergreen sheathing on every wall, unseen songbirds sing in mass choirs, the living voice of the foliage. Unlike the towers along the beach, with their rotted facades and exposed viscera, the buildings south of the plaza are small and so overgrown that they hardly seem part of a decaying city at all, rather one that nature has already reclaimed. For millions of creatures thriving here, this is no dead zone. A hare appears and he notices, this time with joy, that while it resembles a large rabbit, it flees like a fawn, white-tailed, bounding off as if exempt from gravity.
They emerge into Varosha’s arid hinterlands, which he hasn’t seen since his first escape attempt last year. She’s leading him along Stratis’s snare line toward her favourite spot, a pretty valley, she says, not easy to find. He knows enough not to ask about her history of visits there; she must have gone in the past with Tansu.
They turn east and arrive not long after. Framed by two crags, on each of which an olive tree stands sentry, a meadow of high grasses and flowers. The ruins of a hut lie under the low crag on the east side. They find a place in the grasses among yellow anemones and he puts down a cotton blanket he brought in a pack, then brings out a wineskin and a canvas bag containing olives, strong cheese, fresh potato pancakes from Stavroula, green pistachios, a monstrous tomato, and a small pomegranate. They’re ravenous, as usual, but first they strip down, Elias in seconds and Kaiti haltingly, methodically, half turned away, as if reconsidering—a shyness he is already used to but would never have foreseen. Naturally he watches, kneeling. Is she worried about the elusive Paris? Her feet and calves and forearms and face are honey-brown but the rest of her is pale, almost sallow in the noon sun. Beyond Varosha, in the world of the living she so misses, she’d be foolishly urged to lose a pound or two. She has that to look forward to as well, if and when she returns.
She lies back on the blanket in their bower of wildflowers and grasses, a few bees droning nearby. The sun shines full on her body, her chest rising and falling with her breath. The centre of the world. He’s kneeling between her thighs. He can’t seem to move. Her green eyes are slit against the noon light but her gaze is steady, frank, fatalistic, calmly offering itself while also claiming him. His face must be shadowed by the sun above and behind him, stalled for a moment at its peak. And he can’t move. He doesn’t dare. Time has snagged on something; but as soon as he budges, speaks, acts in any way—even breathes—it will start up again and sweep them on toward who knows what…most likely partings, endings. But it’s desire that drives time and he can’t stop what’s happening to his body, she too moving now, pulling him down to her.
“Be careful,” she tells him afterward, “please.”
“I know.” The condoms are historical but none has broken yet. He has been pulling out as well, though not today. She is on top now. Somehow when horizontal she stretches almost to his length, mouth to mouth, toe to toe.
“You love me,” she says in Greek.
“You love me.”
“Very much.”
For some time they doze to the white noise of the bees’ humming, then carefully he rolls her so he is back on top, licks sweat from the sea-salt creases under her breasts, and sucks her dark nipples until her legs open wide.
—
Later he takes a swig from the wineskin, locks his lips onto hers and passes the fluid through, a lover’s Eucharist. He says, “Then again, you had no choice but me.”
“There’s the choice not to love. I don’t need a man, except this way, now and then.”
“This is what you call now and then?”
She misses the quip, forming her thoughts; or maybe the problem is his Greek. She says, “What I felt at first, I don’t know—not love—but there was the right kind of hate.”
Now it seems he has missed something. “Ti?”
“I hated to see you not eat, at that first meal! You seemed…strangled by something. You still won’t say what happened in the war?”
He gives her more wine. “The exact opposite of this.”
“It’s true Roland is eating again?”
“Well,” Elias stalls. “A little, I guess.”
“If he gets better, we will go.”
At first the “we” seems to include him; then the phrase settles into sense.
“Maybe I’ll go with you.”
“You can’t. Not yet.”
“Because I’d ‘destroy Kaya and the village’ if I reappeared? Then I won’t reappear! I’ll make up a new name. Leave Elias Trifannis at the bottom of the sea.”
“You think you can live anywhere now in the eurozone without papers and money?”
“And what do you think your leaving will do to the village?”
“It existed before me, it will survive after.”
“Without children?”
“Would you really place responsibility for its survival on two small children?”
“Kaiti, look, I don’t even want to go—not yet. This place—it’s restarted me.” When he sleeps now he’s asleep and when he wakes, every time it’s like arriving happy, but he doesn’t know where, and then it hits him. He sees her and it hits him. Out there, he thinks, everywhere is like a checkpoint in a war zone—you never rest, you just rearm and refuel. No such thing as being home. No simple belonging. He says, “You’ve been here too long to see what you’ve got here.”
Out of the grasses into their bower prowls a scraggy orange cat. It teethes a morsel of cheese and steps daintily backward into the grass, its yellow eyes on Elias.
“Come here after I’m gone and think of me, Trif. Then, in a year, maybe sooner, maybe we’ll find each other again.”
“It doesn’t work that way. You’ll have moved on. Or you’ll be with him again.”
“With the father of my children? You make it sound like a tragedy!”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.” And he lies, “I give up.”
Three more swigs of warm wine, the last of which he feeds to her, still beneath him, wrapped around him.
His nape and scalp prickle ice-cold. He pulls out of her, rises into a crouch, scans across the meadow. From behind the olive tree on the crag above the ruins, a face. Paris, he thinks at the same instant his eyes make out a caricature of Colonel Kaya—
smaller, paler, a black scarf worn pirate-style on the head.
“Ti einai, Trif?”
“Tipota!” he says. Nothing.
He grabs his boxer shorts and walks his legs into them as he wades into the grass. The figure leaps from behind the tree and assumes a shooter’s crouch, extending his arms, his hands gripping and aiming a pistol. Elias freezes. The pistol bucks twice as if firing, but there’s no sound, and now the figure—a boy in adult-sized battle fatigues—scrambles away down the far side of the crag, out of sight.
Elias’s heart is punching up against his palate. Kaya mentioned that his children would be visiting in the new year and now an afterimage of the face above the pistol aligns itself with features he recalls from a portrait on the dresser in Kaya’s room. The gun must be a toy. Stupid, stupid kid—this is a deadly game to play anywhere near Stratis’s turf. He glances back, sees Kaiti’s face peek up out of their bower. He guesses she saw nothing. He waves—“Dhen peirazi!”—then walks on toward the low crag, breathing himself calmer. He clambers up the side and looks east. The boy, apparently spooked, is fleeing straight back in the direction of the officers’ club.
Below the crag Elias happens on a cross in the tall grass. For some minutes, until Kaiti calls him back, he examines it and the pathetic remains of what must have been Paris’s abode.
As they eat, he says nothing to her about the boy or the cross. She leads him a few minutes farther south to a place where a seasonal stream trickles through a grotto enclosed by cedars, dwarf oaks, and rhododendron. A dozen turquoise butterflies—“flying flowers” in Greek—quiver on the rocks above a sinkpool: another Eden, cooler and damper, though for him paradise is now in penumbra, his nerves like wires ripped loose from a fixture, his eyes scanning. Still, there’s her cry of elated pain as she lowers herself into the pool, his own shock of pleasure as he squeezes in beside her. It’s no worse than a Canadian creek in late May. Soon her kisses, strokes, and more drastic intimacies restore him and he lifts and seats her up on the bank, kneels in the current on the stream’s silty bed and buries his face between her cool thighs.
On their way home, with the sun setting behind the hill where Stratis and Argos captured him, he tells her about Paris’s cross. She insists she has never seen it.
He pulls his hand free from hers. “But you knew he was dead?”
“Of course I knew! As you say, he died long ago, before I was born.”
“So you all lied to me about him.”
She looks at him as if at a child. “In English you have just one word for ‘lie,’ so I hear? Just as for ‘love’? Sometimes your people seem young in all the wrong ways.”
“Sometimes people here seem old in all the wrong ways.”
“We brought him back from the dead,” she says, “to help keep you here. We thought it might help. We didn’t want to lock you in a room—we liked you—I liked you!—and we didn’t know what might happen if Stratis had to chase you again. I’ve been wanting to tell you, agapi, but I wanted to talk to Roland first.”
When she takes his hand again, he doesn’t resist. Some cuffs he will happily wear.
—
Sundays the library is open late and now he hurries there to borrow a volume on the Crusaders in Cyprus that Roland has read before but has asked Elias to read him again, and a book of Seferis’s love poems that he will read to Kaiti. It’s dusk, the skylight dim, an oil lamp glowing on the circulation desk. In the cavernous shadows back among the shelves, Stratis is sweeping the floor, pointedly ignoring the late arrival like a weary waiter at closing time.
“Ah, here you are,” Myrto says in the tart, officious Greek she defaults to whenever standing behind her desk. “We are ready to close. Stavroula brought the twins in earlier. Did you and Ekaterini have a pleasant walk?” Before he can reply, she offers to tour him through the shelves, which she is still reorganizing but which, she says, may well be approaching their final conformation. She holds the lamp high as she talks him through the twilit stacks. When they pass Stratis, he mutters something about closing shop and follows up with further blasphemies from his prodigious repertoire.
Twice Myrto slows, interrupting herself, and with hardly a glance plucks Elias’s request from a shelf. Back at the desk she frowningly records the particulars of his withdrawal in the usual detail, then hands him the books with a professional, close-lipped smile. He exits through the side door, looking back with an obscure sense of misgiving. The desk is abandoned. From somewhere in the vortex of shelves, a hushed, murmuring exchange. It’s good to get back outside into the relative brightness of dusk.
Neoklis and Roland sit under the pistachio tree playing chess, Neoklis in his gigantic parka, Roland in a vintage hotel bathrobe and slippers, a towel scarved around his neck, like a patient at a sanatorium in the Alps. Takkos sits with them, drinking raki. Dusk is deep in the garden. A lamp hangs from a bough above them.
“Trif!” Roland exclaims.
“You’re feeling better?” Elias asks in Greek. “So suddenly—that’s wonderful.”
“Yes, well. I think so. But alas, no improvement at chess.” He looks down at the board, clumping his lips, then sighs and tips over his king—a replacement piece crudely carved out of soap. Neoklis seizes it, stuffs it into the parka and beams over his shoulder at Elias, while Takkos shakes his worry beads and cries, “Bravo!”
“To be fully honest, Trif”—he’s encrypting his words in English now—“I’ve been feeling a bit better, oh, for some days.”
“You don’t mean you’ve been faking it?”
“Well…not as such. I really am not feeling my best, and I was very ill. But perhaps I have been…postponing my recovery somewhat.”
“What? Why?”
“Where is she?”
“Kaiti?”
“Who else? Please—more quietly.”
“At home,” Elias says, “with the twins.”
“When I realized the effect my illness was making on you two, I willed myself to do opposite things: first, not actually to die, and second, not to get well again too fast. I mean, not before the two of you, ah, fully…”
“Fell in love?” Elias realizes some part of his being must have sensed what Roland was up to, even played along, while keeping his conscious mind in the dark. He exhales through a half-smile, folds his arms across his chest. “Speaking of cover-ups, I finally came across your hermit.”
“What?”
“I found his grave. His cross.”
“I feared you might, ja. I saw it myself once, not long after I arrived. This one here”—nodding toward the oblivious Takkos—“he told me that he and the sergeant chose to bury him not in the cemetery but beside his little house, because the hermit always held himself apart and should remain as he wished.”
Now Elias tells Roland about the mock ambush in the valley, speaking softy as if Takkos and his son, resetting the board together, could understand. He adds that Kaiti saw nothing and it’s probably best that way. Roland nods pensively, then says, “I will send a message to the colonel, first thing tomorrow.”
“You really are well again, aren’t you?”
“Not fully, but…you will not have to read me the Crusader history.”
Half-smiling again Elias says, “How will I be able to trust you from now on, Roland?”
“You will always be able to trust me. You simply might not know whether I’m telling the truth. Please don’t inform Kaiti about my little delay, all right? Let me tell her, in due course.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“When she arrived in the village, you know, she said that hatred had orphaned her, that her family were all dead to her. In due course she said that I must be father to her, and that the old ones”—another nod toward Takkos, who is mock-scolding Neoklis, who mimes contrition like a ham in a small-town theatrical—“they must be her grandparents. I always so much wanted a daughter, as they so wanted grandchildren! Trif, do you think there is hope that she might now remain in the vill
age, with you?”
“I wish I could lie.”
“If you must, then do it.”
“There’s always hope.”
Roland’s face twitches and his eyes brim over. Takkos regards him with astonishment, then looks at Elias as if to ask, Whatever have you said to the poor man?
“I told him,” Elias lies in Greek, “that I feel a son’s joy at seeing his dear father brought back from the edge of the grave.”
—
Takkos Tombazo’s voice trembles as he makes toast after toast over the Sunday meal: chicken in olive oil and lemon, stuffed with figs and dried apricots and halloumi; roasted rosemary potatoes, squash, carrots, eggplant, and onions; cookies made with powdered almonds and honey. There are toasts to Roland’s health, of course, and toasts simply to love, involving many unsubtle glances at Kaiti and Elias, who can feel the villagers’ communal will forcing them still closer together. “And may we continue to cherish a hope that our Kaiti and the children will stay with us longer. A drink to Kaiti and the village—no, no, to Trif and Kaiti and the village!” Even Stratis drains his glass, eyeing Elias with what seems a muted manly approval. Elias says into Kaiti’s ear, “But today in the library I think he told me, ‘May you be consumed by hepatitis.’ ”
“You’re winning him over. He would never have said anything so mild to Tansu.” She kisses his grin, as if nothing is ending. More toasts. Elias himself makes a toast to Myrto and Stratis (a rift has been widening lately between their chairs, though they still smoke their cigarettes in unison). Everyone clinks glasses, drinks. Another night stolen from sadness. But toward the end, Kaiti’s face—which always televises her feelings instantly, vividly—looks stricken and he is shot through with shame, neck burning under his collar. “Why are we putting her through this?” he whispers to himself.
The next morning he and Roland are sitting on low stools in the courtyard, soaping dishes in a vat of lukewarm water. “Well, Trif…what say the stars?”
“She means to leave soon, but she won’t name a day.”
“I do hope you’re making things as difficult as possible.”
The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Page 22