The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  The others who visit the shed steer as clear of him as the cramped space will permit. Some have switched to a different time of day. Polat doesn’t know if this is because he’s an officer or, more likely, because his body smells. He believes that even when his body is not sweating it exudes a heavy, bovine odour, one that all his soaping and scrubbing never quite expunges. But other men—and women—have smells of their own and seem not to know it, so he feels relieved to have the shed mostly to himself.

  He has no family he cares to consider. His elderly parents already had two sons when he arrived a dozen years later: a slip, a mishap. They might be proud of him now, what with his latest promotion, but he will not accept their pride—that is, their fatuous gratification in taking credit for what he himself has achieved, by dint of will, without their assistance and without the roulette windfalls of good looks, wealth, natural prowess…How sweet it must be, he sometimes feels, to be born with a body! A deformee like Polat has no choice but to suffer, unless and until he invents a body for himself and, ramming it up against the world, forces the world to submit.

  He knows how much he owes to that fraudulent idler Erkan Kaya. During Polat’s trial by tennis, and afterward in the ruins of Varosha, he learned once and for all: will and integrity are not enough. The best general in the world is helpless without a body of troops to serve him; likewise, Polat’s will requires the support of a strong physique. He has one now. Yet he hates this improved one almost as much as he hated the old. His will—the only part of himself he truly values—is elsewhere, up ahead, boldly advancing into a future of conquered goals. In the end, of course, the future also means death—at least to the body, fit or unfit—but where’s the terror in that? Death is everyone’s final achievement. What matters is achieving it well, with dignity, pride, and no fear.

  He grunts through his final set of ninety-kilogram dead lifts, his favourite exercise, then checks his wristwatch and hurries out through the door just as a strapping private—eyes rounding, body recoiling as if Polat were a Kurd with a Kalashnikov—tries to enter.

  The dawn is cacophonous with gibbering birdsong, the air thick and gravid with pollen. Blossoms on a kind of tree that Polat doesn’t recognize whiten the hillsides around the base like a blight. It’s 0520; Polat has had to abort his full routine so as to be showered, dressed, and fed before his new mission’s departure at 0600.

  By 0800 his company is inside Syria and by 0900 has relieved the troops who for a week now have been occupying a Kurdish village in a deep, forested valley. These troops have been absorbing periodic mortar attacks and sniper fire from the mountainside above the village. Polat’s orders are to continue to hold the village, though the wording is sufficiently ambiguous (by all means necessary, consistent with the preservation of the company under your command) that an attack on the partisans on the mountain is not ruled out—and for two weeks he has been preparing for exactly that, poring over contour maps and photographs, neatly jotting and collating notes, sketching diagrams of all possible contingencies.

  By 1300—as if the Kurds are getting back to business after lunch and a nap—the inaccurate mortar fire starts up again. It seems the partisans mean to assert themselves and harass the occupiers while causing as little damage as possible to the village. A sign of weakness, Polat decides, and he resolves to move on them at once—the last thing they will be expecting.

  At 1410 he leads two platoons up a mountainside humming with heat. The slopes are wooded with well-spaced, high old pines that cast patches of louvred shade on the needle-thick ground. The heat worsens by the minute, but Polat’s stamina is far better than it was. His two lieutenants, however, are soon suffering. When the group stops at his signal for a short rest and some water, both men urge a more cautious approach and advise Polat not to rush on ahead of the scouts—an invitation to waiting snipers. There will certainly be snipers ahead, sentries at least.

  Polat squints through his spectacles at the lieutenants, the swollen veins at their temples, the sclera of their eyes very white against the overheating skin. In a strangled murmur he says, “The father of our nation believed—believed good luck is not given by God but made by the bold! As for cowards”—he’s no longer sure whom he’s quoting (maybe himself?), or addressing (maybe himself?)—“they don’t die in bed but in chains.” Yet even while this oratory still hangs in the air, something hits him. His officers are right. Having chafed through weeks of inactivity, he’s now leading the group toward the enemy too fast: his habitual mix of plodding, meticulous preparation and then, at the end, blind tumbling recklessness. But he can’t stand down now and accept their advice—not directly. Still, when he leads the platoons on up the mountain, he tries to rein in his pace a little, though he continues to precede even the scouts.

  Just after 1450 the scout on his left, straining to keep up, whispers, “Kaptan!” while signalling the men, Freeze, lie down. Naturally Polat is the last to flatten himself. Moments later, through his binoculars, he spots the sentries. In a slight hollow between trees some sixty metres up the slope, a man and woman lie sleeping, as if drugged by the afternoon heat. The lenses bring the scene indecently close. Seen in profile, the man lies on top of her, between her bent knees. Her olive trousers are bunched at her ankles, his own pulled just halfway down his buttocks. She’s still wearing her tunic, though it’s unbuttoned, spread open over her chest. His torso is bare. Their rifles out of view.

  On either side of him his lieutenants are using their own binoculars. The left one’s ears scald redder than his sweat-glazed face. The right one moistens his lips and then, like a voyeur caught in the act, glances guiltily at Polat. As for Polat, he feels numb and queasy, he feels faint with fury, as if beholding the corpses of two murdered Turkish civilians.

  “Send the scouts up to capture them, sir?” the blushing man whispers.

  “No. They’ll wake at any time. This is our chance. No shooting.” Polat rises, signals. The scouts and lieutenants follow him up the silent, red-needled slope. The stink of resin bleeding from the trees is like that urine-coloured Greek wine that Kaya always drinks at lunch. Again Polat outstrips them all, his sidearm held straight out in front of him, pulse pummelling in his ears like covering fire. Seconds later his shadow falls across the couple. He looms over them. Their breathing is deep, synchronized. Their AK-47S lie coupled beside them. Her emaciated fingers clasp his shoulder blades, which look too prominent, like his ribs. His nape is sunburned. Her face is long, her nose thin, a shadow of hair above her parted lips. The canvas-belted waist of his pants covers the obscene juncture where their bodies, Polat knows, must be fused—fused forever.

  By launching no raids or even recon on the mountain, the major who held the village before Polat has infected the usually alert Kurds with his complacency. So Polat guesses. There’s a catch in her breathing. He looks back over his shoulder. Hurry! He holsters his sidearm, reaches urgently toward the nearing scout. The man hands him his M4 rifle. The nine-inch bayonet affixed to the muzzle is black, to reflect no light. Polat puts a hand over his own mouth, then points at the couple. He hefts the bayoneted rifle vertically. Feels the lieutenants and men behind him watching, not breathing. The scout—all expression swept from his face—kneels and claps a hand over the woman’s mouth. Her eyes spring open. Polat brings the bayonet down.

  EASTER

  Songbirds flocking north from Africa appear over the dead zone in their millions, though something about the ruins unsettles them enough that only a handful alight to rest, where they’re promptly netted by Stratis and Takkos, then served up by Stavroula as ambellopoulia, little grilled or pickled thrushes, warblers, wheateaters, and nightingales. (So beloved is this dish that only the most strenuous diplomacy on Roland’s part has kept Stavroula from pickling the village’s one resident nightingale.) On the fruit trees, engorged petals are propositioning the ecstatic bees and hummingbirds. Wherever there’s soil enough for roots to clench, a fresh cohort of flowers is thrusting at the sun—the lewd blooms
of the Cyprus sun rose and giant orchid and asphodel—while scarlet poppies are coming up in fields south of the ruins, where an ex-soldier lies dozing in the long grass with his pregnant lover.

  Forget remembrance; let these be the poppies of sleep and forgetting.

  On a seaside veranda a short walk to the east, the colonel inhabits April in his own way. He has passed the night with the belly dancer Filiz, who has been performing for the year’s first tourists at the Palm Beach Hotel. Filiz has visited twice before during her gigs. This time she has stayed the night. So deeply was she sleeping, after her performance and then her visit with him, that Kaya couldn’t bear to wake her and send her back with Ali—nor did he really want to rouse Ali, who over the winter for the first time has showed symptoms of old age. So Filiz and the colonel have slept in, then breakfasted together in the sun. Poached eggs and olives and dates and soft sheep’s cheese and tomatoes and cucumber with salt, lemon, and cumin, and crusty white bread, and cups of syrupy coffee finished with a shot of licorice raki. It’s been a long time since Kaya has shared breakfast with a woman. Is it spring that’s making him crave and enjoy morning company?

  Filiz must have gotten up quietly, before he awoke, to reapply her makeup: heavy eyeshadow in the seraglio style, blaring mulberry lipstick. She has a large, wide mouth—predatory-looking—yet her smile is shy and she keeps hugging her elbows, as if cold. A little lipstick on her teeth. She’s pale and blinking, light-shy, like any nocturnal creature. She keeps flicking her head so that her hair sweeps over and curtains one eye, one side of her face. He invites her to stay for a swim (she’s a smallish woman and can probably squeeze into one of Hava’s bikinis) and then, perhaps, as he puts it with superfluous tact, a nap…? Maybe even lunch. He knows she will be dancing again tonight; he has heard she’s very good. Perhaps he’ll come up to the hotel to watch.

  “And let me ask Ali to find you a pair of sunglasses.”

  She listens, hugging her elbows, and accepts his invitation with that demure half-smile, though something else has surfaced in her eyes—a shrewd, dubious glint? Men must try to use her all the time. He’s using her himself, in a way, he supposes, but maybe it’s different, feels different to a woman, if a man can’t help displaying true fondness? And if he can forget himself entirely in bed! Kaya discovered in his late twenties that sexual self-forgetting is the truest paradise, at least here on earth—and where else is there? Like any hedonist, he believes only in what his senses can grasp. Like any hedonist, he has no strong opinions, except when it comes to pleasure.

  “I noticed the pictures of your children this morning,” she says. “Beautiful.”

  “Well…the boy is a little awkward.”

  “Never say such a thing! I think you must miss them.”

  “They’re coming to stay here again in August, the whole month,” he says quickly, almost defensively, as if she’s a moralizing imam instead of a belly dancer. But these days the truth keeps worming into his mind: he’s barely lifting a hand to raise his children. This insight now strives to hold his attention, like a lone protester waving an earnest placard. A delicate tinkling sound interrupts: Filiz’s ankle bracelets, her naked feet uncrossing under the table and nestling beside his own bare feet. “Perhaps, Colonel…”

  “Erkan, call me Erkan.”

  “…we could nap first and then swim?”

  As if knowing that he and Filiz are about to retreat upstairs, Ali appears beside Kaya and leans down stiffly. “Sir, perhaps you would like to have your newspaper for a moment?”

  “Oh, it can wait, thanks.”

  The old soldier’s yellow eyes—sorrowful, stubborn—will not release Kaya.

  “What is it, Ali? Can’t it wait for an hour? Well, maybe two hours.”

  “There’s news you will want to read, sir. From the Syrian border.”

  It’s a front-page story. Two days ago Polat—pictured in uniform with a major’s pips, his pared-down face unrecognizable but for those ludicrous little spectacles—led a small Turkish force to victory over a band of PYD fighters, surprising them on a mountainside, killing six, capturing a dozen, and seizing a large cache of weapons and ammunition. It seems that because of Polat’s success, another Kurdish force that was preparing to infiltrate the sector has turned back. General Özel believes that for the PYD this setback, following others, might be enough to induce them to agree to a ceasefire. He calls Major Polat “a quiet hero in the fight against terrorism”—a fight that Özel dares to believe is almost over, on this front at least, after which the major will be able to fly back to Ankara and receive a decoration, a promotion to colonel, and a new posting of his choice.

  “Colonel,” Filiz says, “has something terrible happened?”

  He looks up at her and fabricates a carefree smile.

  —

  Every year before midnight on Holy Saturday, under a one-week waning moon, the villagers walk to the sea, where the men and women separate and then, some hundred metres apart on the beach, strip and bathe. Not even Takkos or Stratis can recall how many years ago this tradition began. For Elias, of course, it’s the first time.

  The dog stays with the men. Leery of the sea, he will only dart into the shallows before streaking back up onto the beach to roll, breading his legs, back, and belly fur with sand, his mouth agape in a canine grin. After chasing him for a minute, Elias plows into the water—cool but not cold. A shallow dive and he strokes outward, pursued by anxious barking but untroubled by memories of his near-fatal swim, as if this is Lethe, not a sea saturated with memory and history.

  As they towel themselves dry, Roland—very white but no longer skeletal—tells him that this year for the first time Aslan is on the men’s side instead of with his mother. You can see how proud the boy is, inflating his little chest and crying “Hayir! Ochi!” when Elias asks if he’s cold and then spins him into a towel.

  Neoklis has been eyeing the naked Elias but now seems more interested in what his father is up to, planted in the shallows facing out to sea, stocky and bandy-legged as a centaur. He lifts his arm slowly to point up the gleaming channel of moonlight tapering toward the coasts of Syria, Lebanon, Israel. When he turns back toward them, his expression is remote, his penis retracted into a froth of white pubic hair. “Something is coming to us from the east,” he mutters.

  “Ah, so now you all see dangers everywhere!” Stratis says with a hostile smirk, this particular rudeness surprising; usually he’s more respectful of the village elder.

  On the way home, once they cross John F. Kennedy and are back among the lanes, they light candles, forming a silent procession, and return to the village cleansed. Stavroula, who has not gone to the sea for some years now, greets them. They all dress up in their dated finery and drink a glass of wine, even the twins. Then to the church for midnight mass, Takkos serving, pompous as ever in his priestly robes, though unusually forgetful tonight. “Hristos anesti,” all chant at midnight, Christ is risen, and “Alithos anesti,” all reply, He is risen indeed! They return to the courtyard for the Resurrection Table: honeyed wine and stewed greens and a braided loaf studded with red-dyed eggs. There are other dyed eggs that they take and smack end to end, trying to crack the other person’s egg, Christ hatching from the tomb. This year Kaiti’s egg is the last unshattered, after Trif’s succumbs to her expert peck, winning her a year’s good luck and from him a hard kiss prolonged until finally she gives him a little shove away, her neck and cheeks inflamed, green eyes shining up at him.

  You’ve done as much for me, he thinks. Broken me open. Freed me.

  “Listen!” Takkos’s face goes grey, all but his pitted red nose. “What was that?”

  “I heard nothing,” Roland says.

  “No knock at the gate?” Takkos’s glazed eyes search their faces as if he has just come to among strangers. These nights he always seems addled with wine—it takes just a little. Stratis is about to make some remark. Myrto stops him by butting out in his empty glass. Stavroula frets the cross over her
bosom and regards her husband with a tender, resigned exasperation. Her arched eyebrows have been over-plucked by poor light, or maybe they’ve just stopped growing. “Let us go rest, Taki—we’ll leave the young ones here to talk.”

  —

  On a cool and perfumed morning in early May, Roland emerges from his room, clearing his throat. He has been listening to Greek Cypriot radio. The republic’s economy, deeply exposed to that of Greece and staggering since the Greek economic debacle, has collapsed. In desperation the government is planning to expropriate ten percent of the value stored in private Cypriot bank accounts. It’s not yet clear whether this means every account or only those of the wealthy. There’s already a run on the banks, which will likely be out of cash by noon.

  “Lucky we have a German here to bail us out,” Elias says, sitting under the pistachio tree with the guitar and a Greek coffee.

  “I will charge heavy interest, however,” Roland says cheerfully.

  Elias is waiting for Kaiti to arrive from the Tombazos’ house, where the twins will stay for the morning. Then he and she will be going to fill bags—old hotel pillowcases—with the herbs and greens that flourish on the flanks of the main hill, not far from their bower and the seasonal spring, now barely flowing.

  “They’re also talking of confiscating disused and unclaimed accounts.”

  “Like Kaiti’s?”

  “And Myrto’s, if she has one, and I believe she has,” says Roland. “If one needed more reason not to leave the village, here it is. The situation might soon become chaotic.”