The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  That night Elias lies naked, propped up on pillows that smell musty and old despite their clean cases, a candle alight on the bedside table and Roland’s manuscript by his hip. He has dipped into it here and there but now decides to read the last page, wondering how the man will have ended a book whose story is not yet finished. Kaiti is tucked fetally on her side, her eyes shut, her black curls matted with sweat against her temple and brow. Her small hand rests on his thigh, but there’s space between their bodies. Neither can bear sleeping pressed together in this heat. Her pale belly, stretch-marked, sprawls, the life in there already advanced enough to survive out here, although to him that life still seems implausible, a figment with a pulse. When it doesn’t seem implausible it seems overwhelming, so he has been setting his mind to practicalities—making domestic repairs, foraging for cloths and diapers in the stores along John F. Kennedy. He means to write Kaya and ask if they can trade something for a few small solar panels, for this house and the Tombazos’, so they can run a fan in the hottest part of the night.

  “Read to me,” she murmurs in Greek. Dhiavase mou.

  “You slept a little?”

  “I was dreaming. I was in the womb, my own womb.” Her eyes stay shut under the dark eyelids. “I don’t like my dreams lately. What scares you most about going back out?”

  After a silence: “Finding out nothing over here has changed me. Not the traumas, not the miracles. That it just seems I’ve changed because I’m in a refuge here, where there’s…nothing to turn you against your better self. I couldn’t bear that—knowing Elias Trifannis survived his death, and other deaths, real ones, and I’m him again, thirty-one years old and still not…still living a sort of coma. And you’d be disillusioned—you thought you were getting me, but you’re getting him.”

  She pulls closer. “I think that stranger is truly dead, Trif. I’m a little sad I can never know him.”

  “We’ll come back here to visit, though? Promise me.”

  “Of course, we’ll find a way.”

  “What frightens you?”

  “That the world won’t have changed. And that once we get out there, you’ll leave us. You’ll think this was only possible in this little garden. This phantasia.”

  “Adam stayed with Eve after they left.”

  “They didn’t leave, they were driven out.”

  He leans over to kiss her smile but before he can do it she says, “This tired, it’s like I’m fifty years older. Just a month now. I can’t wait. Read me Roland’s story.”

  “Well, on the last page he says—”

  “Ochi,” she cries, “hasn’t this place taught you any patience? Start on page one!”

  And so he does, but before he can finish the long first paragraph, Roland’s sombre, ponderous English takes effect and her breathing slows and thickens.

  He turns back to the last page.

  It is no easy thing to know what future awaits us. Barring the arrival of new refugees, deserters, or bankrupts, Folk who wish to hideaway from time and the World, the Village might well shrink to the way it began some 40 years ago, simply the Tombazos and their son, along with Stratis Kourakis, who I fear will more and more resemble one of those Japanese soldiers who at the end of the Pacific War, hid and would not [illegible word] until they perished or went insane. And to think of Neoklis’ parents dying, and leaving him alone here! It is a thought that I the author of these pages can not permit my bear to consider. As for this author, if he considers the posibility of himself being the last Villager in this, his last Village, he is overcome by a terrible loneliness. But where else has he to go? It is not simply that he would be arrested and inprisoned were he to re-appear, but rather But perhaps those soldiers stayed in hiding not so much out of fear, or in compliance with orders, but because the collapse of all they were defending allowed them to see: Civilization was simply the lies and rivalries of [illegible] dressed up as Princes, Prophets, Generals, Bankers, [illegible], Entertainers, etc; and lacking a normal, decent facility for self-delusion, they could not return to the ruins of Home.

  And at the bottom of the page, like a footnote added later, then reconsidered:

  “Perhaps my beautiful Homeland, it was a dream.”

  VICTORY DAY

  Colonel Kaya remains administrator of the Varosha Restricted Zone, and though Polat is now a colonel himself, he is also again Kaya’s adjutant, and as such he reports to Kaya. So when Polat announces that he wants to accompany Kaya and his son on their next unofficial “patrol” in the ruins, Kaya knows he could simply refuse. But that would be a mistake. For one thing, Kaya has been violating regulations by taking Yil, a civilian, into the ruins, and Polat—if Kaya denies his request—will surely report him to General Hüseyin in Nicosia. It’s odd, in fact, that Polat has not yet done so.

  Polat discovered the transgression in a way so predictable that Kaya is, unch­aract­erist­ically, furious at himself. He should have seen it coming. On the afternoon of Polat’s return, the man had told him that on the next day he would remain at his quarters in Famagusta for the morning, then meet Colonel Nurettin at lunch. It was a lie. The next morning Polat had driven a Land Rover down the beach and arrived at the club by 10 A.M., while Kaya and Yil were still out wandering and happily sniping at bottles a few blocks away. When they returned, by way of the tennis court, Polat was waiting for them, standing at the baseline, the maroon lips under his neat moustache compressed in a dangerous little smile.

  Another thing. Polat is again pushing for a thorough armed reconnaissance of the dead zone, and Kaya is hoping to distract and delay the man until he can formulate some kind of scheme. He could of course accompany Polat on any recon mission and try to steer him away from the village, but what if Polat, Colonel Polat now, should insist on going, say, north instead of south at some key intersection? Kaya can only countermand him so many times without raising suspicion. As if Polat isn’t suspicious enough.

  Next morning, ahead of schedule, Polat arrives at the club for a tennis rematch. Kaya is laying out his court whites on the bed when a sound comes from outside: an urgent, seemingly coital snorting and puffing. In his silk undershorts Kaya walks out through the balcony door and looks down over the rail. Below him in the sand Polat is pumping out push-ups on a green exercise mat the size of a prayer rug. Sweat blots the back of his T-shirt. Desert-camouflage trousers, combat boots, fastidious gloves. Seen from up here, his bottom bobbing, it’s like he’s thrusting into an invisible someone. Another twenty or thirty times and he collapses, moaning (a gentleman, Kaya thinks, keeps his weight on his elbows), then starts to turn over, probably for sit-ups or whatever. Kaya withdraws from the rail and slips back inside.

  As he approaches the court he notices his gut is untypically aquiver. Polat is a different man now, physically; what little authority Kaya still wields over him might not survive a defeat.

  The man is already there on the court, grunting out practice serves. But if he’s much stronger, quicker, and more durable than before, he turns out to be no more skilled. They start and he bludgeons forehand after forehand long or wide. His backhands bobble over the fence. The more he shoots out of bounds, the more frantic and clumsy his play becomes. When the score hits 4–0, Kaya begins to ease off a little, and Polat, as if sensing this charity, grits his teeth and strains harder, gasping out rebukes to himself at every mistake: “Idiot, IDIOT!” “What are you DOING?” “Garbage!” “Stop, just stop it!” His T-shirt is sodden from neck to waist and appears to be not olive but almost black. The spectacle of his humiliation…by the end, it’s almost sickening.

  As Kaya reclines under his ceiling fan with a glass of mineral water, resting before his “patrol” with Yil and Polat, he hears a violent splashing from outside. It sounds like a wildebeest fighting off a crocodile at a waterhole. He goes back out onto the balcony. Polat is thrashing along in the shallows, parallel to the beach. If he’s trying to cool down after their set, it can’t be working. He’s attacking the sea in a frenzy but generati
ng little motion. A turtle hobbling along the waterline could keep pace. Kaya lights a cigarette, inhales deeply. The man’s comic paroxysms make it possible to forget, for a moment, how dangerous he is and how grave this situation has become.

  A half-hour later Kaya strolls downstairs into the atrium of the club. On the first-floor landing he meets Hava running up. She embraces him, kissing him lightly on either cheek; he keeps his right hip, where the Yavuz-16 is holstered, turned away from her.

  “Baba, you’re dressed like a soldier again! Are you and Yil playing soldiers again today?”

  “We are, and I’m afraid Colonel Polat will be playing with us.”

  “Baba doesn’t look happy,” she says with a sympathetic pout. She loves to tease him and does it more and more now as she approaches adulthood. “I don’t like that man, either. I think he scares me. My hand still hurts.”

  “That man scares me,” Kaya says, only because he knows she’ll never believe it. “By the way, I avenged your hand just now on the tennis court. Where were you? You said you wanted to watch.”

  “I was Skyping with Erdal.” Her new boyfriend, in Istanbul. “I won’t miss the next game, I promise.”

  “Unless,” he says indulgently, “you’re Skyping with Erdal. Where’s Yil?”

  “On the patio, all ready and waiting. And so happy! It’s not like Yil.”

  “He loves these outings.”

  “He’s excited about the scary man, too. Because he’s a ‘war hero.’ ” She cocks her head, exaggerates a frown. “Aren’t there any height restrictions for war heroes?”

  “Now, now, my love.” Hava’s exuberance sometimes brims over into mean-minded mockery, yet he can never bear to reprove her.

  “Once we fly back,” she says, “I won’t be here to protect you from him.” (She and Yil will be leaving after the Victory Day holiday at the end of the week.) Affecting a sad face she adds, “Well, may it pass quickly,” and again it strikes Kaya how odd the antique phrase sounds in the voice of a teenager, especially one whose usual manner is cheerfully facetious.

  Yil and the two colonels squeeze through a hidden gap in the barbed-top fencing behind the tennis court. Polat seems to have regained his self-control—or has he simply emptied himself, expending all his anger? He’s quietly scanning the ruins. He bears a holstered pistol over his fatigues, like Kaya. As for Yil, Kaya has told him to wear street clothes today and the boy has complied, donning skinny black jeans and his huge trainers, though his choice of T-shirt may be a small act of defiance: it features a fancifully muscled commando and the English phrase SNIPER’S HONOUR.

  “Really, Colonel”—Polat speaks softly, by his standards, as if the ruins might conceal enemy scouts—“there should be no—no breaches in the fence at all.”

  “But if any spot is secure, surely this one is, right behind the club?” Kaya says. “After all, I’m never far from my post. And with this shrub here…” He indicates the bush-like tamarisk that hides the opening from anyone on the beach or tennis court.

  Polat says, “When you led Colonel Nurettin’s men through Varosha—”

  “This way, Colonel, please. That building there is dangerous. We can’t have it collapsing on you.”

  “—did you enter right here?”

  “What? Ah, no—it was the old U.N. checkpoint, on the north side. As I said, we explored for several hours, everywhere, and saw nothing.” Kaya snaps a glance back at Yil. He has instructed the boy to say nothing of his, Yil’s, presence on that recon—a more serious violation than these recent peripheral visits. Yil doesn’t return Kaya’s glance. He’s planting his soles on the cracked asphalt with an absorbed, catlike care, as if fantasizing that the ground is mined. He’s thrilled every time by this desolation: an organized adult world arrested and allowed to slip into decay.

  “I hope you didn’t bring your son along on that patrol.”

  “Of course not. May I suggest we go a little slower?” (Polat’s face is cherry red under the brim of his forage cap.) “We did just play tennis, and this heat…”

  Some minutes later they arrive at the back of the Hotel Aphrodite, one of the few structures along John F. Kennedy that Kaya will allow Yil to explore. Though the bomb-damaged facade has partly collapsed, everything else seems solid, especially at the back. There, a stuccoed arcade, shaded and breezy, ends at a wall some twenty metres off, where a niche must once have held mock-classical statuary or vases sprouting seasonal bouquets. Now it contains the jagged remnants of a mineral-water bottle and a tin can punctured by a couple of shots. The niche itself and the surrounding stucco are pocked with holes. Yil has brought along several more empty bottles in his knapsack.

  “I’ve been teaching the boy how to handle a pistol safely,” Kaya says. “Perhaps today I’ll let him take a few shots.”

  “But, Baba, we’ve already—”

  “Don’t interrupt me,” Kaya says. Yil looks at his father with amazement, as if a computer glitch has radically altered a character in one of his games: different voice, different personality. “I realize you may not approve, Colonel Polat, but I choose to exercise my discretion in this matter. In my view, if the boy is eventually to serve his country”—good, thinks Kaya, very good—“he should know how to handle a firearm.”

  “I understand,” Polat says softly, his tone as surprising as his agreement.

  “Yil, go set up a target,” Kaya orders, then says, “No, wait!” He realizes how much he’s longing to walk away from Polat, this little radiator of officious suspicion and rage, even for a few moments. He says, “I’ll do it. Here, give me a bottle. Colonel Polat, feel free to question Yil about the care and loading of the Yavuz-16.”

  Strolling up the arcade to the niche, Kaya lights a cigarette in stride, relishing the breeze and the clarifying rush of nicotine. After clearing away the rusted can and the remains of the shattered bottle, he sets a new bottle in place. He takes his time centring it. Behind him, at the far end of the arcade, Yil and Polat can be heard talking. Kaya can’t make out the words, which is odd; he expected Polat to be examining the boy loudly, drill-master style, even making him dismantle and rebuild the pistol.

  Kaya turns around. He takes the cigarette from his lips and puts his hands up, stretching his mouth into a grin and calling, “Wait, shouldn’t you offer me a blindfold first?” Silence. Yil has reverted to his old concave posture, looking down at the weapon that hangs limp in his hand. Polat—shorter than Yil, though with arms and thighs packed like sandbags into his fatigues—eyes Kaya through his strap-on glasses. What has just happened? Things right themselves—they always do. Yet now he can feel things tipping past the point of self-correction. Then the thought comes: What if there should be an accident, a little slip while somebody reloads? A shot fired inadvertently while Polat sets up a new target? If only, he thinks, that could just occur, no real decision on his part, no deliberate action.

  He rejoins Yil and Polat and instructs the boy to fire at will. Yil lacks his usual eagerness and his aim is awful, worse even than on his first day. His hand and arm tremble. He won’t meet Kaya’s eyes when he hands over the hot gun. Kaya’s grip, too, turns out to be less steady than usual, his sharp eyesight little compensation. Several of his shots miss the niche altogether before his second-last one smashes the top half of the bottle.

  Polat says, “You must have performed better than this in training, Colonel?”

  “I performed better than this yesterday,” he says coldly. In truth, he never was much of a marksman, but he was so well liked in officer training that no one really considered failing him at anything. “Would you care to reset our target, Colonel Polat?”

  Behind his glasses Polat’s eyes are red and tiny, as if the glare on the tennis court has shrivelled them. “Perhaps your son could do it.”

  “Very well.” More gently, a little worried by Yil’s withdrawal, Kaya asks, “Yil? Are you all right?”

  Unconvincingly the boy nods at his shoes.

  Polat’s aim is impr
essive for a man with glasses and whose speech is often uneven, faltering, surging ahead. By the time he has emptied the clip—his left hand expertly bracing his right—he has reduced the target to splinters.

  They return to the club in silence and Yil dashes up the stairs to his room. Kaya hasn’t seen him run that way in a long time. Timur Ali, uniformed as always, emerges from his own room beside the kitchen. He will not so much as glance at Polat. He addresses Kaya with greater deference and formality than usual, as if to remind Polat of the colonel’s status in this jurisdiction. “Is there anything the albay requires?” Playing along, Kaya answers gruffly, “Hayir!” and signals Ali to leave them alone. The man salutes and withdraws. He will be listening, of course, from behind the door.

  Kaya turns to Polat. “What did you say to my son back there?”

  “No, it’s what he said to me—that’s why he’s so—so—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I asked if the two of you noted any signs of intruders, or—or occupants, in the Restricted Zone. I told him I had suspicions. He was very respectful. He was eager to please, in fact, and he told me, ‘Sir, you should have no suspicions!’ He confessed he did go in there once, alone, and he saw something—two people—he thinks Greek—but they were only tourists, trespassers—or so you told him, after you’d ‘caught and arrested them.’ Then he was silent, your son. As if he had said things you told him not to say.”

  “Yes,” Kaya scrambles, “because he shouldn’t have gone in there alone. I didn’t want him to get in trouble for that. Just for going in. After all, he—”