“Why didn’t you tell me about the catacombs?” Elias asks Kaiti in English. He’s walking at the back, switching the heavy carpet bag from hand to hand. Kaiti carries a smaller bag and the sack of film. The sun-brown ovals of her calves flex like an athlete’s, though her sandalled feet are swollen, a much older woman’s.
“Because I hate underground,” she says. “Places like a cave. I hate the—how do you call it—nikhteridha, night-winger?”
“Bats.”
“I didn’t like to think of going. Roland agrees, it is not safe.”
The plaza is visible ahead, at the end of the street. From behind them, echoing, a slap of shoes on the paving stones. He grips the handle of the pistol at the small of his back and looks behind. It’s Takkos, advancing at a bow-legged jog, cradling a fat pigeon and holding a chicken upside down by the feet. He wears dark slacks, a black shirt with no lapels, his porkpie hat. The fugitives stop while he catches up and Neoklis embraces him in his distinctive way, bent low, grappling him around the waist like a wrestler and pressing the side of his face against his chest, next to the pigeon, while the old man holds the flapping chicken clear.
“You will want someone who can perform the mass down there,” Takkos announces, kissing the bald patch on the head of his son, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “It’s not very far from the house,” he adds. “We are not abandoning the house.”
“Of course not,” Stavroula says.
They enter the sun-filled plaza. The dead topiary tree is vibrating, chittering with starlings. As they head for the church, three crows lift hawing off the dome and Stavroula makes the sign of the cross…Quickly now into the cool and dim interior, where Roland urges everyone toward the back, but Elias halts in the doorway and looks outward, listening. The shooting has stopped. Is Stratis dead, then? Now comes another sound—running steps. The villagers’ murmuring recedes behind him into the depths of the church as he squints out across the plaza, the sun in his eyes. And a man appears, dashing into the plaza from a side street—white shirt, blazer, sunglasses, like a bodyguard running beside a motorcade limousine. It can only be Kaya—yet he isn’t coming from the direction of the officers’ club, more the direction of the village. For a second Elias wonders if he could be involved in this invasion and is actually pursuing the villagers (he has a pistol in hand, it’s now clear). No, impossible. Now Elias notices motion in the next lane over, parallel to the one Kaya is emerging from. It’s Stratis, he too running into the plaza. The lane is narrow—a good choice to delay pursuers. The Turkish troops are still out of sight, but just before Stratis enters the plaza he pivots to face backward, holding his revolver out with both hands. Nothing. He turns to lope forward again. He’s going to spill out into the plaza just seconds after Kaya. Elias is paralyzed in the church doorway. He glances behind him into the gloom but his eyes, after facing the sun, can see nothing. He turns back, opens his mouth to shout a warning to Kaya, feels pressure at the base of his spine—the pistol. He spins back around.
“Kaiti! Jesus Christ, I thought—”
“You didn’t tell me about the gun.”
“It’s Kaya,” he whispers.
“What about him? Don’t hide these things from me, Trif, I’ve been here longer than…what, is that him?”
“Kaya!” he gets out, just as the two men with their handguns, the Greek in his old uniform and the Turk in his civvies, see each other. Having heard Elias’s shout, Kaya looks over. Stratis too sees Elias and Kaiti in the church doorway, then looks back at Kaya. The two men stand about thirty paces apart. Kaya points his gun down at the pavestones, raises an open hand, utters words in a soothing tone. Unfortunately they must be in Turkish. Kaiti’s fingernails dig into Elias’s wrist. She too must be imagining Stratis’s thoughts: it’s the colonel, he’s running from the direction of the village, maybe to head me off, maybe to catch the villagers, and he’s hiding in a coward’s uniform, the civilian garb of a spy. Raising his pistol like an executioner he strides toward Kaya. “Stomata!” Kaiti screams and the scream echoes, “Strati, ochi!” Elias can’t make a sound now, afraid he might startle Stratis, who halts a few steps short of Kaya and aims point-blank at his forehead. Kaya—hand still raised, pistol pointed down—continues to blather, as if the Turkish words might somehow get through. The Greek’s revolver twitches. Kaya flinches and stumbles backward but no gunshot comes, just a faint click. Stratis curses, rolls his head, aims again, click click click. He flings the revolver down and throws himself at Kaya, hands stretched out as if to throttle him. Kaya shuffles backward. He raises his own pistol but is still showing that placatory palm, still talking, louder now, trying English, “Okay, please, please not, okay!”
Elias jerks his arm free of Kaiti’s grip and runs out into the plaza, drawing the Turkish pistol out of his belt. This adrenal spike feels like a heart attack, or a dream of one. He glances straight up the lane Stratis just came down. There’s movement, figures nearing, though still some way off and not running, it seems, maybe creeping along, fearing ambush. Elias can’t tell if the little officer is there. Maybe Stratis finally got him.
He stops in front of the two men. Kaya—his pistol trained on Stratis—gives Elias a desperate look. His sunglasses are gone. Sweat gleams on his forehead and drips off his chin. “Trif, please to say him in Greek,” he starts but can’t seem to find the English words. Stratis says in Greek, “Now give me back that pistol and I will kill him! A Turkish pistol—God’s justice. Now do you see that he’s our Judas?”
“Come into the church,” Elias says. “Kaya too. The Turks are almost here.”
“The Turks are here and this is their leader!”
“You’re wrong.”
Kaya looks back and forth between them. Stratis holds out his hand to Elias, steps toward him, his boot crunching Kaya’s sunglasses. Elias backs up and aims at Stratis, though the pistol is still uncocked, the safety on.
“What in the devil’s ass…give it to me now!” Stratis says.
A shot echoes out of the lane where the soldiers are. “Elia!” Kaiti calls from the church doorway, “grigora!”
“Come now or I’ll shoot you,” Elias lies.
“Ghamisou! You’re too scared to shoot the Turk and now you would shoot me?”
Elias slips the safety, racks the slide and fires into the air. Starlings erupt out of the dead tree with an incendiary whoosh.
“Idiot! Stop it!”
“Now, or I’ll waste every round.” He aims upward again.
“All right, all right!” Stratis cries, hands raised in horror, then turns and stamps away toward the church.
“You come too,” Elias tells Kaya in English. “You’re in trouble, right?”
“Pardon? Oh, yes—I am in trouble.”
Stratis and then Elias and Kaya cross the plaza to the church doorway, where Kaiti stands beckoning and pointing toward Stratis’s lane: here comes the little officer, walking calmly up the middle. Men are clumped behind him to either side, crouched low as they follow, guns pointed, bayonets fixed. “Pai, pai!” Elias yells. Right ahead of him Stratis is glaring off toward the enemy, his bloodshot eye in profile seeming to bulge out of the socket. His shoulder twists round, his right hand sweeps back as if to strike Elias but instead seizes the barrel of the pistol and rips it free. He grips the handle with his left and fires point-blank into Kaya’s chest, then turns to face the soldiers and advances straight toward them. Elias grabs the sagging Kaya by the elbow and pulls him into the doorway of the church, shoving Kaiti inward while a crackling salvo funnels out of the lane. A last look: Sergeant Stratis Kourakis is pacing evenly into that focused hail, holding the pistol out in front of him. He might be singing as he fires, in the pure ecstasy of his hatred, though nothing can be heard over the shooting.
—
By the glow of a candle-lantern and a flashlight, they study the wallet that Elias has taken from a breast pocket of Kaya’s removed blazer. Kaya sits on the stone floor of the underground gallery where they�
�ve stopped to rest. Shirt open to the navel, he’s prodding a darkening spot on his hairless chest just above his right nipple. His small Turkish semi-automatic—the group’s only weapon now—is tucked into his belt.
The fat wallet is neatly perforated, as are most of its contents: credit cards, a driver’s license, military ID, a wad of Turkish banknotes, and the maroon passport that the wallet was folded around. It looks like an expired passport officially voided with a hole-punch. Elias extracts a misshapen wad of lead from the coin pouch—the part of the wallet that was nearest to Kaya’s skin. Most of the coins are bent. One looks slightly melted.
He reinserts the black wallet into the jacket pocket and reaches a hand down to Kaya. “Can you walk on now?”
“Can I…? Ah, of course.”
Elias pulls him upright and gives him his jacket. “You were very lucky.”
“I was…pardon?” A brilliant grin spills across Kaya’s face. “Ah—lucky!”
Holding his lamp up like Charon, Roland leads them down the gallery. The walls and the low, rounded ceiling are of mortared stone. The gallery is not straight like a mine shaft but slightly winding; there are side chambers too dark to see into and, along the walls, niches packed tight with human skulls and bones. It’s cool and dry. No moss or any growth on the walls or on the bones. No cobwebs. Clearly Argos is coming along only out of fear of being left behind; his trembling tail all but brushes the floor. To Elias’s surprise Neoklis and the twins seem less frightened than fascinated.
“But where is Uncle Stratis?” Neoklis asks again and the twins look behind them as if expecting to see him following. “You said he comes soon?”
“Still talking with the Turks,” Stavroula says quickly, before anyone else can reply. “It might take a bit longer, my child. Their Greek is very poor.”
For the first few centuries of its existence, the church was part of a Byzantine monastery—that much Elias already knew. Now Takkos explains that these katacombi hold the bones of thousands of monks but were also used, during the Ottoman occupation, as a place to take refuge from the Turks. When Takkos brought the five-year-old Neoklis down here in the early ’70s, with a tour group from Athens, he could never have believed that the place might once again conceal fugitives from a Turkish attack, and that he and his family would be among them.
“You all right, my love?” Elias whispers to Kaiti.
“Mia hara,” she says dryly, her lips hardly moving, her face set.
“No bats down here, I think,” he says. “Nothing alive down here at all.”
“And you, agapi…endaksi?”
“Endaksi,” he says, maintaining a steadfast facade, like her, though in the wake of the violence he is numb at the knees, swept with tremors, his mouth dry.
The gallery opens into a wide, high, circular chamber, like a beehive tomb. Faint indirect daylight filters down through a hole in the summit of the dome. Elias shines a flashlight upward. Faded frescoes cover the dissolving plaster, the faces of saints and patriarchs mostly reduced to featureless ovals. Let into the walls of the domed chamber are doorless rooms in which he glimpses further niches crowded with bones and skulls. In the centre of the chamber’s stone floor, a dangerous-looking hole that must be a well or cistern. On the other side, the gallery continues into darkness. Over its threshold an inscription in what might be black felt pen: ALICE & NIGELS HONEYMOON, LAST DAY THEN HOME 4/73.
Roland enters one of the side rooms and starts dragging out what must be supplies. Elias—seeing him pause, put a hand to his chest, struggle to cough—rushes to help him. They bring out bundles of sticks, two large plastic water containers, a loaded burlap sack, a heap of wool blankets, and a few unlabelled bottles—olive oil and wine. Takkos’s pigeon settles into a less crowded ossuary niche. Stavroula rolls up her sleeves and bears the fussing chicken into one of the dark side rooms.
The hope is that the soldiers, after searching the church and not finding the catacombs’ entrance—the stone lid of what looks like a bishop’s sarcophagus—will assume the villagers must have fled through the small vestry door, suggestively left open. It will seem they must be hiding in the ruins or have fled southward. If the villagers stay down here long enough, the Turks should give up looking. Then they can emerge by way of the catacombs’ other entrance in the cemetery, a kilometre south of the church.
By lamplight Kaiti and the twins create a nest of blankets in one of the side rooms. The ossuary niches are at chest level, and on the ledge of one of them Kaiti sets a candle and a roll of toilet paper, having pushed the skulls and bones farther back—no easy task with these niches so crammed. But she and Elias manage to fix things so that no skulls will actually be grinning down at the twins when they’re trying to fall asleep.
The forehead of each yellow skull is inked with a sepia inscription. Elias shines a flashlight on one of them: a paragraph of some twenty crabbed lines. He is too shaken and weary to try making out the tiny Cyrillic. Roland and Kaiti are at his shoulders now, Roland whispering in Greek, “Takkos says that they wrote every monk’s story on his brow, so that even in death you would have to live with what you’d done.”
“I wonder if some monks settled scores that way?” Kaiti asks.
“Monks especially, I should think. Trif, I realize that my history—my manuscript—it’s probably not…”
“No, I brought it. It’s safe.”
“Safe is a relative term, I suppose.”
Aslan and Lale are peering up. They want to hold the skull. “You have to share,” Elias says absently, absurdly, handing it down to them. “Elia!” Kaiti scolds him, and in fact the twins are already squabbling over it, four hands gripping, tugging. The quarrel turns abruptly, tearfully ferocious. “Sout!” Kaiti says. “Not a sound! Give it back to me now!” At the same moment Elias, trying to help, hands down a second skull. Lale takes and holds this other skull, gazing earnestly into the eyeholes, while Aslan turns the first one in his hands like a schoolroom globe. Kaiti now shrugs and looks away, the twins’ distracted silence too much of a relief to disrupt.
—
Hours later, after the light in the hole in the summit of the dome has weakened and vanished, Elias and Kaiti light a small fire in the ancient firepit beside the well and begin roasting the spitted chicken. Roland lies on his back on a blanket as if peacefully asleep, though his hands are both fisted on his belly, his brow clenched. The Tombazos have been asleep for several hours, like the twins, but now the smell of the fire and the roasting meat brings Stavroula barging out of one of the bone rooms in her apron, ready to take over.
Kaya is on watch, sitting on a folded blanket at the entrance of the domed atrium, facing back toward the church. He has the pistol. He offered it first to Roland, who said, “Must I continually refuse these things? I do not want it!” Then he tried Elias, who said unhappily, “Why don’t we share it, on our watches?” Now as Elias pulls the rag stopper from a bottle of wine, Kaya—on some hedonist intuition, as if a cork has popped loudly—glances back, stubs his cigarette on the floor, gets up and strolls over. He squats beside the coals. The prospect of food and drink seems to be coaxing colour back into his face. He nods to everyone; to Kaiti he also lifts one corner of his mouth, the ghost of a roguish leer. When Roland sits up and asks him something in Turkish, pointing to his chest, Kaya winces theatrically and then grins as if saying, There is pain, to be sure, but I will survive it!
Elias fills five small juice glasses with the wine. It’s good to have something to do and others to do it for. He grips the bottle hard to disguise his hand’s trembling. The others seem too benumbed for a toast, but he calls out “Stin zoi!”, then translates the words into English, for Kaya’s sake: “To life!” “To Strati,” Stavroula says, “for holding the Turks at bay once again.” She adds, “Forgive me, Colonel,” as if he can understand her Greek. The five drink to Stratis. Stavroula turns the chicken, drizzling it with oil, the coals beneath it snapping into flame. As if talking to himself Roland mutters, “I supp
ose any army would wish its troops to consist all of men who have just been spurned by their women. Farewell, my difficult friend!” Tears fill his eyes as he drains his glass.
A blood-congealing scream comes from the candlelit recess where the twins are sleeping. Kaiti claps a hand to her chest and leaps up, crying, “Lale mou!” Elias is already on the move. He and Kaiti together gather the shaking child into their arms as she looks around, sputtering. Aslan sobbing too. Elias lifts him into his lap. Kaiti kisses the girl with frantic tenderness, then asks Elias, “Mia nikhteridha?”
“No, I think just a dream—a night terror. I know them.”
“She never has dreams like this! It’s because you let them play with the bones!”
“Ochi!” he snaps back, the first time ever he has really lost his temper with her. “It was the day, obviously—the shooting, the fleeing. It’s not dead people they need to fear—children know that better than anyone.”
“Never assume you know my children better than I!”
“Stop at once!” Aslan commands in the tone of an adult whose patience is finally spent.
“We must be quiet,” Takkos calls, emerging from the far recess, while behind him Neoklis in a possessed-sounding whisper echoes, “Must be quiet!”
The fugitives gather around the firepit and all of them, the twins included, sip the vile wine (“cellared for five years,” Roland says, “and all the worse for it”). Kaya, his good teeth edged with sediment, gallantly praises the wine, but even he can find nothing kind to say about the water from the receptacles, which tastes of kerosene. Roland says it’s actually preferable to the well water, which is a last resort. They devour the tender, smoky chicken, far too little for the group, and handfuls of almonds, raisins and sundried mespila. Each of them receives a rusk, an item that looks and feels like a hunk of dried sponge. Takkos loses a tooth to his rusk and gives up, tossing the rest to Argos, who even while devouring it goes on trembling as he has since coming underground.
The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Page 29