“Him in trouble, or you in trouble, Colonel?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“You, Colonel Kaya—you are in trouble here.”
“I am in command here, Colonel!”
“Yes, for now. And so, I request to look over your record, your commander’s record, of capturing these, these ‘tourists.’ Photographs, copies of passports, the transcript of their interrogation. You—I assume you did interrogate them?”
“Naturally, yes. Then I had them tortured to death and their bodies flung in the sea.” Kaya’s voice is shaking. “Isn’t that the protocol that men like you favour?”
“The opposite—that would be chaos! I’m on the side of order. I perceive that you are not serious. I assure you that I am serious.”
“There’s no order like the order of death, Colonel. Life is chaos.”
“I believe—no—I know there are people in there, living people!”
“What is it about the idea of ‘living people’ that so offends you?”
Polat’s eyelids are flickering. “I see it clearly now—you’re on the side of our enemies.”
“Enemies like the Kurds? God forgive me, if I were on their side I would never have arranged for you to go kill them in droves.”
“Ah, now—now you imply that I’m in your debt—that I owe you my rank!”
“Debt would entail a connection between us. There is none.”
“I will return to the base now, and—”
“Do it and stay there. That’s an order. And I order you, as my adjutant, not to go into the Restricted Zone. You understand?”
“—I will be speaking to the general about leading…leading forces into Varosha. I will also inform him that you—that you have been—”
“General Hüseyin will have started his holiday by now,” Kaya bluffs, hoping with little hope. “You’ll have to wait. You might never take a holiday, but the rest of us…” Victory Day: as defeat and disaster heave into view, the irony sweeps over him. “Meanwhile, stay out of Varosha! And do not speak to my son again or go near him for any reason.”
“Very well.”
“What?” Kaya says, surprised.
“Very well, sir!” cries Polat, saluting and clicking his heels—apparently some grotesque stab at humour. His face, pink and sheened with sweat, whitens, showing the old acne pits. His pupils have sunk into irises of cold Anatolian blue. Kaya’s own face has never felt so naked, as if the skin there has been flayed and peeled down over his throat, or ripped clear off, the courtly mask gone forever. The feeling is awful in almost every sense, yet in some rogue corner of his soul Kaya is thrilled.
Two armed men who hate each other stand a metre apart, conspicuously averting their hands from their holsters—Kaya by crossing his arms over his chest, Polat by tucking his right hand behind him.
As soon as Polat drives away up the beach, Kaya scrawls a note in Turkish and asks Ali to take it in to the Jaguar gate. “Right away, efendi.” Ali’s saggy eyes look especially doleful, his moustache so droopy it appears to be melting.
A quarter-hour later, while Kaya sits sternly talking to his son in the boy’s room, he hears a faint honking, as if a car alarm is going off in a living city. Yil, poor boy, is crying and doesn’t notice.
A problem has come up. I fear it is serious. Until further notice, all villagers, for their own safety, should please remain in the village, going no farther north than the well and no farther south than the main church. No, please avoid the church. Stay right out of the plaza. I will send more news as soon as possible. May this trouble pass quickly.
Kaya
—
Some years ago, when patrols along the perimeter fence were a little more frequent, one of Nurettin’s sergeants had driven down the beach to report a curious find. Stuck on the fence not a hundred metres from the bar entrance of the Palm Beach Hotel was a piece of white boxboard on which Greek words had been written by hand. The sergeant presented this item to Kaya. The colonel knew little Greek but recognized one word, MOY, and seemed to recall that it was the Greek equivalent of the English “my.” A tall, bold exclamation mark ended the inscription. The puzzle intrigued Kaya, so after the sergeant drove away, he took a glass of beer up to his room and sat down at his computer by the open balcony door. Character by character he keyed the words into a Greek–Turkish translation program.
The result popped onto the screen almost audibly, a howl of grief that seemed aimed directly at Kaya: I LEFT MY SOUL IN THERE, OPEN UP! Mostly it had been easy to forget that at one time twenty thousand people had resided, laboured and loved in the ruins that were now his little sultanate. Easy to forget, too, that an ever-dwindling number still dreamed of returning to reclaim their homes or rebuild businesses. For the most part these exiles spoke collectively, impersonally, in litigious or diplomatic jargon, through lawyers or government bodies or the E.U. But the simple words of this inscription—they pierced him like a deathbed plea. The writing looked shaky, as if rushed, written in the dark, maybe on impulse, probably in a state of fear. For Greek Cypriots back then, getting into the north took real effort and paperwork. Kaya has wondered from time to time who this daring individual might have been.
The sign troubled him enough that he thought of burning or shredding it. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. He left the thing in the back of his closet, behind his dressing mirror, along with a framed photograph of Pinar, himself and the children. He guesses he will have to destroy it now. The thought of the military police arriving to search the club, finding it in his closet, deeming it further evidence of treacherous sympathies…In his optimistic soul he finds such a scenario fantastical, yet another part of him realizes that he has to consider it. He has tried to reach General Hüseyin, of course, but the general actually has gone away on holiday. Surely Polat will not act, really act, without the general’s consent? He may be a hothead, but surely he’s also too dutiful to violate specific orders without permission. Still, Kaya wonders whether he ought to send Hava and Yil back to Istanbul early.
He needs to get some idea of what Polat is up to but knows that he can’t trust or confide in Colonel Nurettin now: Polat will already have spoken to the ever-cautious colonel, probably threatening him, and Nurettin will do anything to stay out of trouble. So Kaya calls his doctor, also in Famagusta. After speeding through the usual pleasantries, he asks Dr. Günsel to keep an eye on Polat, for Polat’s own sake. The heat is extreme; Polat’s behaviour was erratic when he reported here to the club; and as the doctor will recall, Polat collapsed and had to be hospitalized last November. Kaya adds that he has ordered Polat to return to his quarters and stay there for a few days. Would Günsel please make discreet inquiries and let Kaya know if his orders are being obeyed—and if not, what Polat might be doing instead? Kaya then suggests a few other helpful measures. The doctor responds that he’s always happy to be of service but doesn’t feel he can go so far as to have Polat—now a ranking officer and decorated war hero—“confined to hospital for the weekend on suspicion of illness.” Calmly and reasonably, smiling into the handset, Kaya says he understands.
As he rings off, he feels another tremor of elation at the thought of having an actual enemy. Something his father told him years ago returns to mind: “It’s a pitiful man whose actions produce only friends.” He dismissed the idea at the time. He thought it obvious that with a bit of effort it was possible and desirable to get along with everyone…with the possible exception of one’s own father! Nice irony. But maybe a young man’s father was his natural adversary—a necessary one—while Polat is the kind that simply means to destroy you.
On August 28, two days before Victory Day, Kaya receives a call from Dr. Günsel. The doctor has learned through Colonel Nurettin’s adjutant that yesterday Polat visited Nurettin’s quarters. This adjutant could hear Polat addressing Nurettin loudly and angrily, though he couldn’t make out the words. A quieter, more civil-sounding exchange followed. Then, this morning, Nurettin ordered his adjutant
to make two platoons available to Polat for whenever he should need them. Dr. Günsel adds, dryly, that according to his source Polat looks to be in excellent health and quite unbothered by the heat.
Kaya decides he will send the children back to Istanbul early, as a precaution. It turns out to be impossible. All flights for the next few days—summer’s-end holidays—are sold out. For some minutes he feels vexed and anxious, then decides that the impossibility of early departure is really a sign that it’s not necessary and he should stop worrying. Polat means to enter Varosha, certainly, but not just yet. There’s still time to find a solution or let one suggest itself.
The night before Victory Day, Kaya sends another note to the villagers, asking them to continue to lie low. If the situation changes in any way, he will notify them at once. Later that evening—Ali having retired to his prayers and the rough campaign-cot he insists on, Hava and Yil in their rooms at their computers—he chauffeurs himself up the shore to the Palm Beach Hotel, where Filiz, back from Izmir, will be belly-dancing for the holidays. A kilometre south of the hotel he stops under a palm tree by the perimeter fence. The moon, a few days beyond full, is blistering up out of the sea. From under the driver’s seat he takes that boxboard love letter to the ruins and wrists it hard over the fence, beyond a heap of cinder blocks and other refuse.
He watches Filiz perform her last set while sipping two Keo beers. It’s good to be away from the club, the seat of his worries. Her body, almost chubby, yet supple and sleek and seething with vigour, stiffens his cock, while her artistry makes his eyes sting and his throat swell up. No. It’s mastery. Mastery of any kind is moving. This huddle of sunburned Russians and English don’t see it; they whistle crudely, expecting her to strip naked. They didn’t realize she would only be dancing. But such dancing! It occurs to Kaya that he has never mastered anything in his life—he has skimmed glibly and cheerfully over the surface of his days. This thought tugs at him for a good three or four seconds, then he reverts to his pleasure, his escape from worry.
At midnight he drives her back down the beach under the rising moon, she with her eyes closed and head thrown back to drink in the night.
—
At 0600 hours Colonel Aydin Polat leads two platoons in full battle gear toward the old U.N. checkpoint on the north side of Varosha. By an ill-maintained guard hut, before the rusty gate in the perimeter fence, he calls a halt and addresses the men. It’s an auspicious moment to launch such a mission, he explains: sunrise on Victory Day, the ninetieth anniversary of the Nationalist Army’s crushing defeat of the Greek invaders at Dumlupinar, “After which, as you know, Mustafa Kemal founded our republic and later became—as you know—became Atatürk—the father of our nation…” Addressing a group is no easier for Polat than it ever was, even if he is a hero now. But for once his delivery is not too loud. He’s subduing his voice almost to a whisper because of the way his speech is echoing, the echoes overlapping, mounting in volume. Forty-two slack faces gape at him from under helmet rims. He explains again that they will be searching out and uprooting “probable intruders—probably armed,” yet the men look as if they think he’s still pretending, this mission a training exercise or war game. Their lieutenant—weary face, greying moustache, an unnaturally fleshy rump packed into combat trousers he probably hasn’t donned in years—seems unable to hide his reluctance. Last night he told Polat, “There is no sign of life in that awful place, sir, believe me! The albay Kaya, he led us on a thorough search.”
“I’m sure he led you very carefully,” Polat said.
He’d tried and failed to reach the holidaying General Hüseyin but decided his plan could not wait; he must act before Kaya thought up some way to thwart him, charm others, or spirit away the intruders. This mission’s results will more than justify ignoring his orders. Polat’s soul recoils at disobedience, but he reasons that Kaya’s commands are invalid because he is not a real colonel of the Turkish army. He is a charlatan and will very soon be exposed. Atatürk himself defied timid orders in Libya in 1913, fighting the Italians, a mere captain then, as Polat was on that mountainside in Kurdistan.
He leads the men south into Varosha, where the dense enveloping quiet begins to affect them, block by block, making them crouch lower, plant their boots with more care, bear their M4s more attentively. Very good. He wants them as ready as such inexperienced troops can be. They are soft, complacent. Nurettin and Kaya have made no demands on them at all. Among them are the four who drunkenly botched that confrontation with the Greek and the journalist on the beach.
Polat has no doubt that he will be seeing this Greek before the sun is high.
He halts them beside a gutted restaurant—you would think a terrorist bomb had blown out the plate glass facade and atomized the interior—and consults an old street map, along with an internet printout of a satellite view. These streets, weedy and shattered yet walkable, should show up better on the printout, but the effect is of a catastrophic blurring, as if someone took a bird’s-eye image of a city and all but erased its grid, all linearity, all civic order. Several blocks do look less fuzzy, but who can say what that indicates? A cluster of more durable buildings? A cobblestone square that has held up better than asphalt? A patient man might petition the army to create a high-resolution satellite image to reveal clear signs of habitation, but not Polat. Polat smells blood—mainly Kaya’s. He expects he will find the intruders living in the small wilderness south of Varosha, near the zone’s only hill, or perhaps in an area just north of the main church and square—an area that he and the men are now approaching.
They enter a minor square not unlike the one where he collapsed last autumn. He pulls back the slide on his Yavuz to cock it. The snap echoes and a flight of pigeons erupts off the mottled dome of a chapel. A monster cat, something writhing in its jaws, darts into an alley. The scouts are at ten o’clock and two o’clock; they glance at Polat; he waves them forward. Even the waddling lieutenant looks uneasy, although he still hasn’t drawn his pistol.
The long shadows of dawn lie stretched over the cobbles. High up, the alarmed pigeons swirl in tight, frantic patterns, round and round, and he curses them in his heart. Lit violet by the sun they’re as conspicuous as a warning flare. Faster now he leads his men around a prehistoric-looking tower of pear cactus and down a high-walled lane that appears to open into another square a hundred metres ahead. He pauses, consults his map, nods firmly and notices—as he noticed on that pine mountainside in April—that the pulse pumping in his ears is not speeding up as he approaches the crisis but rather slowing down. You were born for this, like the young Kemal in Libya. The captain they idiotically discounted. You will overcome them all.
With a scout at either shoulder, his pistol poised, he leads the men out into an open area, a wide roundabout that must have been one of the hubs of the living city. And he sees it, he knew it, this is a living place still! There is order here. Ahead on the large traffic island, a lush little grove flooded by sunrise, blobs of colour among the leaves, oranges or some other fruit. On the northeast side, a large-pillared neoclassical structure that might once have been a museum, its facade clean, its front steps free of debris.
“Albay,” the lieutenant whispers, drawing his pistol, “where are we? I’ve never seen this place!” And a scout: “Sir? I think I just saw a man and a dog!”
“Of course,” Polat says hoarsely, signalling everyone down and squinting across at the grove and beyond it, his heart full, tears prickling his eyes. “Of course you did.”
—
Kaya wakes to four knocks on the door, each sharper than the last. “Ne, ne—what is it?” he mumbles. Then he recalls. Filiz lies beside him. Ali was to summon her at 8:00 A.M., well before the children emerged from their rooms, and drive her back to the hotel. But it seems earlier than 8:00, the band of light above the curtains soft yellow. He gets up, crosses the Persian carpet and opens the door, naked. Ali was about to knock again—his arm and fist are upraised. In the hallway’s gloom his ca
scading grey moustache glows dimly, but the rest of his face is shadowed.
“Forgive me, efendi, it’s early.”
A mere moment passes but already Kaya’s eyes have adjusted enough to read the features of this man he has known for so long. “Oh, no,” he says.
“Shots are being fired, efendi. Many shots.”
“From the direction of the village?” Kaya asks, as if he doesn’t know the answer.
“I am at your disposal, sir, as always. Shall I get my pistol?”
Kaya tries to unjumble his thoughts. In the pit of his stomach a hummingbird flitters. He has had maybe three hours’ sleep after a night of dedicated lovemaking and many shared glasses of retsina. His mouth tastes like turpentine.
He steps out into the hallway and pulls the door softly to. “All right, listen. What we’ll do is…What I’ll do is wake her, Bayan Filiz. You’ll take her up to the hotel, then return here. I’ll have the children ready to go. You’ll drive them back up the beach and…No. Wait. Take her and the children at the same time. Yes. It doesn’t matter now if they meet. There’s no time for two trips. I’ll give you a thousand—no—two thousand lira. Drop Filiz at the hotel, then drive on to the airport. Get the children onto a flight today. The flights are full but there might be cancellations. If not, offer a bribe—three hundred or so. It might work. If not, get them a room in the airport hotel, get one for yourself, and stay there with them until their flight goes on the 1st. By then, it should be all right for you to come back. I’m the one in trouble, I’m the one responsible—the note I leave will make that clear.”
“The note, efendi?” Ali’s mouth, usually hidden by his moustache, hangs open.
“Ah, no, not that kind of note!” Ali’s concern touches Kaya to the roots of his being. “Don’t worry, my friend! Death is nothing I would ever choose. Death will have to hunt me down.” Kaya has never before addressed Ali as “friend,” arkadash, and he wonders if the old soldier will see it as a breach of decorum, but Ali’s expression of concern and affectionate loyalty remains fixed.
The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Page 27