“I’ll have to let Kaiti know,” Elias says.
She is now saying that she wants to return to the outside at some point after their child comes, maybe in the new year, and Elias has agreed. They haven’t yet told Roland. By the new year, Elias might even feel ready to leave—but now he wonders if there will be no outside to return to, at least here on Cyprus.
“And you?” he asks Roland. “Do you have an account out there idling?”
“I keep my billions with the Swiss. Their criminality is of a more reliable kind.”
After Elias and Kaiti return and while she rests—as she has to now every midday—he takes the twins to the library. They are less afraid of encountering Myrto the magissa, in her gloomy, echoing vault of books, if Elias accompanies them. He leads them in through the side door and lets them pick a path through the stacks—slightly, confusingly altered, as ever. No sign of Stratis. The surface of the main desk is uncharacteristically clear, the few remaining papers primly squared. Myrto rises from her stool and starts jabbering, using English as if to keep her meaning from the twins, though in fact she seems perfectly unaware of them, each clutching one of his hands.
“I recognize today that my work here is achieved,” she says, pronouncing it achieve-edd. “My shelves have achieved their final, their ideal conformation.”
“Great, we can celebrate tonight. We were just out gathering some of the fresh—”
“Of course,” she snaps, “I smell them on you. Roland was here an hour ago and informed me of the news. I find it intolerable that an elected government should rob me of my savings, what remains of them, after my life in Nicosia was so…so entirely…” Her indignation all but asphyxiates her. Her chest heaves, her tiny nostrils flare.
He says, “Kaiti thinks it won’t ever happen. It’s a ruse, a way for the government to distract its creditors and buy time.”
“I must leave the village,” she insists, as if he hasn’t spoken, “and return to reclaim what remains to me while I can. You see, so long as my savings remained, I had the conviction that I could return at a time of my own choosing, but now, you see, you see they try to steal from me also this free choice, and I…” She shifts into Greek as she always does when she wants to speak figuratively: It is time to gather the torn, scattered pages of her life, however many are left to collect, and bind them back together into some sort of order.
“And Stratis?” he asks, while the twins look up with wide, unblinking eyes.
The cords of her throat tauten. “I thought of asking him to accompany me”—this in English—“but I know he will not want to abandon his post. Nor will he want to leave the grave of his wife.”
“Even for you?”
“To be honest, even if he would join me…”
“Dhen peirazei—you don’t need to say anything.”
“I need to say everything! Be patient, there is little enough, and there is no one else to hear it. Only you and Roland. Quite simply, I must leave Strati. He begins to frighten me. He doesn’t want me to leave.”
“Nobody wants you to leave, but—”
“He swears he won’t permit me!”
Just as Elias had no idea the affair had begun, he has not realized it’s over.
“So when would you go?”
“Tomorrow!”
“What?”
“When you and he are repairing the Tombazos’ roof. You will please make this repair work last as long as plausible. Roland will assist me to carry my bag down to the end of the zone, where I can cross over discreetly. There is a village, a town on the other side. From there, a bus to Nicosia and my few relations. And so I will return to them from the dead.”
THE FINAL PAGE
In late August, the very oven of the year, Polat returns to Varosha.
Kaya is on the tennis court with his daughter, Hava, while Yil, up in his room, plays some noisy new video game, an activity Kaya minds less now that Yil is also eager to venture outside late each afternoon and go “on patrol” with his father, just inside the perimeter of the dead zone. On these outings the boy’s face betrays occasional signs of real pleasure. He also seems to like wearing Kaya’s spare fatigues, laughably baggy though they are. He still sulks a little about Kaya’s refusal to let him strap on the holster belt and carry the pistol, but that might just be a negotiating wile. After all, Kaya has already softened enough that he lets the boy fire off a few shots here and there, at old bottles and signs. Kaya uses these moments to show the boy how to handle the Yavuz-16 safely. On one outing he also invited Yil to pick off a hare or pheasant for Ömer to cook up. The boy reacted with such horror that Kaya has never brought up the idea again.
He knows Polat is due to arrive later today, but he has gently finessed the thought out of his mind, the way you might charm and conciliate a disruptive guest into leaving a party. He is relishing his daily set with Hava, who has improved steadily and now offers him a true challenge. Happily he praises her occasional aces, and between choppy breaths at the end of long rallies he calls to her, “Well done, my girl!” or “Wonderful volley!” or “Good try, Hava!” His heart swells. He wishes the children could be here all of the time. Well, more of the time. Half of the time, actually—that would be ideal.
Hava’s eyelashes are so long that they look enhanced, but she tells him they’re all hers. Come to think of it, she seems to groom herself less strenuously than he assumes most girls of her age do, but then, what does he know? He truly is in exile here, in his private club, on an island, supervising an enclave where the clock stopped almost forty years ago. He visits Istanbul only once a year and relies on articles in the back sections of the Hürriyet to keep up with the culture. Perhaps when Hava is back home, and out at night with friends, she’s another girl completely, one he would hardly recognize? Yes, and yet he also knows that she’s deeply comfortable and compatible with him in a way that he can’t imagine himself and his brother ever having been with their father. Between them and Baba an invincible berm of decorum and formality loomed—perhaps also indifference, perhaps simply bewilderment. (Kaya sometimes forgets that the man is still alive, as he sometimes forgets that his mother is dead.)
Physically Hava takes after him, not his ex-wife, Pinar, who is taller than Hava and less daintily made. There’s a lightness, a facility to the girl’s speech and whole manner as she glides through a world that she fully expects will gratify all her desires—and why would the world ever think of refusing? Her wishes all seem so benign. But a child’s character is a shifting frontier between the vying powers of the parents’ souls, and when rare impediments crop up in Hava’s road, she, like her mother, is given to panic and pessimism. “Of course,” she will say, “I knew it!” “Geçmis olsun,” she will say, just like her mother. “May it pass quickly!”
He wonders, now and then, what became of his love for Pinar. A slow bleeding he could understand, but how could something so potent just vanish and leave not the slightest sign? Just ten years ago there were still nights when they swam in each other’s sweat and with the same air panted each other’s names. Now, if she should pass him lounging behind his sports pages at an Üsküdar café, her face rigorously made up and crimped in that frown of pained impatience (the world is a disappointment in ways she can’t quite pin down), his body and soul would stay utterly unruffled, unreached.
“What can you really know of life,” she once said. “You, who’ve never known a heartbreak?”
He sits sprawled near the baseline, inhaling the hot air and grinning as the clay sears the hairs on the backs of his legs. He has slipped while stretching for a hard, curving serve that might just have kissed the sideline. “Lovely shot, Hava!” Across the court, unmoving, head cocked to one side, Hava seems not to hear. She’s peering beyond him. He looks over his shoulder. Polat is standing above him, two metres away, the toes of his gleaming boots just behind the baseline, as if it’s a stripe on a parade square. The high sun is in Kaya’s eyes but he sees that Polat—Colonel Polat—is dandi
ed up in dress uniform, and not one that would have fit him last year. So, his face and shoulders in that Hürriyet photo were not digitally doctored for propaganda reasons. The change is stunning. He even seems taller. The lenses of his little spectacles aim down like field glasses. He salutes and says, “It’s a pleasure to see you here, Colonel Kaya!”
“I did wonder if you might arrive hours early,” Kaya lets out.
“I like to surprise people when I can.” Polat’s delivery, if less halting than before, is no less audible.
“You must be a little uncomfortable in that uniform?” Kaya says.
“Actually I find it an excellent fit.”
“I do hope you remember how hot it can get here.”
Polat’s mouth tightens—a chilling little smile—and he puts out his hand as if offering to help Kaya to his feet. Instinctively Kaya accepts the offer, extending his own right hand by way of olive branch. After all, if Polat is going to be here for a while…Polat merely shakes the hand, first limply, then with suddenly intensifying force. At last he lets go. He stares down coldly. The hand that touched Kaya retreats behind his back.
Kaya springs up, cracks the knuckles of his smarting hand and—now looking down at Polat—says very softly, “Your timing is good, come to think of it. You may join me and my children for lunch, if you like—after my daughter and I finish our set.”
“I was hoping we might meet alone,” Polat says, loudly enough that Hava must overhear. “There are several matters that we…that I would like to discuss with you.”
“Well, maybe after lunch—over coffee? We have plenty of time. We’re honoured, of course, that you’ve asked to be posted back to Varosha, for now. Hava? Come here, my love, I’d like to introduce you.”
She skims toward them, around the net, her toes barely touching the clay, a creature of air and light. At her approach, Polat’s strident phrases begin to crowd up and jumble: “The main thing is—is the Restricted Zone. I feel, let me not waste your time, Colonel—I feel it remains imperative that, that—and now that I’m here, and we share the same rank, I believe—”
“Let me introduce my daughter, Hava. Hava, this is the decorated war hero I told you about at breakfast. He comes to us fresh from the Syrian front. I worry he’ll find it too quiet here, again!” (Or too hot; one can only hope.) Kaya finally gets out the man’s full title and name, “Albay Aydin Polat.” Albay proves as difficult to say as some unpronounceable word in Greek. Hava is watching her father closely. He knows he doesn’t sound like himself. She offers Polat her golden, glowing little hand. As Polat grabs it and squeezes, a sinew jumps in his jaw. The girl winces. In a swift motion that Polat must think imperceptible he wipes his palm on the side of his trousers. His boots remain planted behind the baseline. Does he think they might assault him with their racquets if he crosses it? (For a moment, Kaya pictures this assault.) “If my daughter and I might just finish our set,” he goes on with Ottoman politesse, glad for his sunglasses, “after which we will take a short dip in the sea? Shall we meet you on the veranda at noon, Albay?”
“Very well, Albay.”
“Welcome back, Albay,” Kaya adds and thinks, Geçmis olsun.
—
Stroll through the village in late afternoon, late August, the hot air calm and expectant. Time hangs in the balance at the hinge of the day. A small breath of breeze arrives like an advance on a contract: another perfect evening is en route out of the west. Smells of coffee sift through the shutters of the Tombazos’ kitchen window. Over the garden between their house and Kaiti’s, sheets hang limp (Aslan has begun wetting the bed, as if anxious about something—the coming baby?). Kaiti’s shutters swing open and out tumble noises of the twins’ bickering, voices thick and cranky with sleep. Kaiti leans out the window in her white cotton slip, her elbows propped on the sill. She peers up and down the lane. Trif has woken early from the siesta—where can he have gone? Her whole being feels sodden, humid with sleep. Her breasts, bigger by the week, are plumped between her elbows. In this last trimester her nipples have darkened almost to black. She has told him it happened the first time too. He loves the change, he says, loves every change in her body, and he says he means it, and she calls him a liar. He sets his ear to her protruding navel. So silent are these afternoons, she almost believes him when he says he can hear the baby treading water in its landlocked little sea. But she adds, “No, it must be my stomach—hungry again.” She is always hungry now but can’t eat much without feeling stuffed. Suddenly she’s weary of her condition, of her feet and lower back aching, and wary of having sex anywhere but in their bed, in certain careful ways.
Mornings before the breeze dies and the heat stupefies all birdlife, Varosha is a little less silent, yet the villagers have heard some distant shots. Kaya has sent a message. With their kind permission, he will be taking his visiting son shooting along the edge of the dead zone, mainly right along John F. Kennedy, at most a couple of streets in from the beach. Please, not to worry. Kaya’s tactfully worded notice does not placate Stratis Kourakis, whose martial ardour blazes at the thought of two Turks violating Varosha’s perimeter with a firearm, even if they are shooting at nothing but tin cans, which Stratis does not for a moment believe. They must be killing game as well—rabbits, hares, even wild goats. In other words, poaching. Then yesterday evening he returned from a recon to the southeast with proof, he said: he found a number of spent shells but no small corpses. “So they must be taking their catch home, for food. Our catch, our game!”
“But couldn’t the lack of evidence just mean they haven’t killed anything?” Elias offered.
“Why waste precious rounds shooting at walls and bottles?”
“The Turkish army has no shortage of bullets, Stratis,” Roland said, and the man took the remark badly, seeming to interpret it as a warning that he, Sergeant Kourakis, with his limited munitions, should not think of confronting Kaya and the might of the Turkish army. Which naturally made Stratis even more eager. Since Myrto’s departure in May he has seemed ever more pugnacious and suspicious, even paranoid, and Roland and Elias are bearing the brunt of it. His eyes again have an estranged, unfocused look. He sings rarely and, when he does, only battle songs.
When first he discovered her gone, he gripped the sunburned wrist of Elias, who’d worked beside him on the Tombazos’ roof all day long, and demanded to know—was he aware that she meant to leave? Elias denied knowing anything. Who can avoid lying sometimes in a village? He can see that now. Stratis, of course, didn’t fully believe him and never for a moment believed Roland, who he correctly thinks must have known Myrto meant to leave and must have helped her down to the Green Line. In fact, Stratis thinks the whole village—what’s left of it, as he keeps saying—might well have been in league against him. In the evenings, when he drinks, this conviction boils over and he picks quarrels, once even shoving Roland to the ground before Elias stepped in. Eventually he subsides into his chair, grows maudlin, even weeps. His own neighbours have betrayed him, yes, despite his having stood guard over them for years. Still, even now he would fight and die to protect them from the ancestral enemy, and sooner or later—go ahead, smile if you will—the Turks will sweep down again from the north.
In the courtyard this early evening Roland is hunched over the row of tables in his reading glasses, working on the last pages of his history of the village, the full story up until now. Elias is peeling cucumbers. Takkos putters among the grapevines trellised behind the pistachio and lemon trees, clipping and culling, encouraging his plump, ruby clusters in an amorous murmur. Stratis and Neoklis are playing backgammon, a simpler game than chess but one at which Neoklis, oddly, is mediocre at best. As Stratis wins again, he drains his glass and stands, mumbling about checking the snare lines as he ought to have done earlier. He goes into his room and emerges in a clean shirt, his pants pockets showing the outlines of what appear to be both guns—his old service revolver and the Turkish one he captured last year. He stalks out through the gate with Ar
gos at his heels. Roland and Elias exchange a glance and follow.
His route winds southward, as expected. Roland and Elias trail about a hundred metres back. Now he and the dog are crossing the emerald plaza, but instead of veering diagonally, toward the area behind the officers’ club where Kaya and his son have been shooting, he proceeds directly south. In the shadow of the church he halts, turns toward the doors, crosses himself with the briskness of a military salute. Then he and the dog vanish into the ruins on the far side.
“This must be the way you and Myrto walked to the border?” Elias asks.
“As he would surely know, ja.” Roland pauses to get his breath. “How quiet she was! Almost…ceremonial. She was dressed as if she expected a car to be waiting on the far side. She was not ever my favourite of the villagers, but as I walked back without her, I confess that I wept.”
Ten minutes on, they pass a tumbledown cinema whose marquee still holds twenty or so slot-letters with a few gaps between. Sean Connery, it must be, in a film called, maybe, Zardoz. The edge of the ruins. An owl lifts out of a carob tree with a snake in its claws. Right ahead sprawls the ornate chaos of the necropolis, four black cypresses pluming its corners, though otherwise there are none of the trees or clipped greenery of cemeteries like the one where Elias’s parents lie—no roomy plots, like mini suburban lawns. Instead, stone walls, slabs, crypts, crosses, marble statuary, all crammed up and impacted like the ruins of the vaster necropolis around it, Varosha.
Stratis is there, his back to them, standing before the wooden cross over the bones of his child and “wife,” who, according to Roland’s history, “fled Husband and Family in Paphos, for reasons that Kourakis chose not to tell, if indeed he ever knew them.” From his pocket, Stratis draws a candle—probably the object Elias assumed was a gun barrel—and lights it with a match. He plants it at the foot of the cross among older offerings: dried flowers, candle stubs, other things Elias can’t make out. The man’s shoulders start to quake. Argos, beside him, looks around and sniffs the air, maybe realizing Roland and Elias are close by—lurking in a doorway some sixty metres from the necropolis wall. Both feel foolish and ashamed. Stratis crouches. In the ruff of the aging dog, whom he’s usually more apt to kick and curse, he buries his face like a child.
The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Page 25