Everyone goes to sleep except Roland, who says his rest has done him good and he wishes to take the first watch. Elias thinks he looks ghastly but says nothing, too exhausted to argue. He and Kaiti climb under a thin wool blanket with the twins. He spoons behind her, kisses her nape and whispers in English, “Sorry, beautiful.”
“I am more sorry.”
“More beautiful,” he mumbles.
“Ti?”
“Nothing,” he exhales, barely able to form the word. “Sleep.”
In seconds he plummets into a state of utter cessation from which he emerges only when the dream begins, as he knew it would, his shade staggering through a maze that leads down into a sort of stadium lit up by floodlights, and here again is the olive grove, here again the “firefight” stuck on replay, the stench of opened bodies, and one in particular—Eylül Şahin beneath him now and shrinking fast, while a medic stands watching and says, “Chest compressions never really work, they just give bystanders something to do…” Elias shakes himself awake and gets up. Orients himself by the embers of the fire. Wrenches a candle stub off the lip of the niche, lights it with a match and slips out into the central chamber.
There in the spot where Kaya kept watch sits Roland, in his lap a pile of papers—his manuscript. He holds a skull close to the candle-lantern on the floor beside him and squints down through his reading glasses, a pencil in his other hand. Elias approaches. “Ah, Trif,” he says without looking up. “I keep myself awake, you see. I have almost finished this one. Dimitrios returned to Christ at fifty-two, in 1834. He was an orphan and found a loving family here in the monastery. He knew Hebrew as well as Greek. He was well liked, except for his habit of provoking fights on his name-day, when he would take too much wine and become sad. He is missed by all, even his antagonists.” He taps his wrist with the pencil, as if indicating a watch. “Go back to sleep, Trif. That was hardly an hour.”
“I’m done for now. You go rest. Take care of that cough.”
Surprisingly, Roland agrees right away.
—
Kaya takes the third watch. He is in pain, a rib cracked, he guesses, quite considerable pain when he breathes deeply, so he doesn’t, but then every little while a hunger for air forces him to yawn and inhale. Still, these dagger jabs, along with the chill, help keep him alert. Maybe young Trifannis is also in pain? He seemed very alert when Kaya relieved him. Really this Trif, despite what he says about never wanting to fight again, seems quite soldier-like in some ways—or, maybe, like a man unknowingly, helplessly imitating a soldier. Kaya was not surprised to learn that his late father was in the military. Or was he a policeman? Kaya always has trouble recalling the details of other people’s lives, though during the conversations when he hears those details he’s the most interested listener in the world. His ex-wife was always shocked when somehow his forgetfulness was exposed; but you seemed so interested when I told you! Yes, and that interest had not been feigned…He wonders what poor Pinar will think when this story breaks. He hopes that the media won’t bother her too much. Erkan? Erkan Kaya is dead to me and has been since our divorce.
His blazer is caped over his shoulders and he wraps it tighter around himself. How he dislikes this dark and chilly cellar, this glorified mass grave. He asked Roland, in Turkish, if this place had been a sort of dungeon—if delinquent priests were sent down here as punishment and left to rot. No, Roland said, they all lived above in the monastery. When they died, they were buried in shrouds so that the earth could eat their flesh, and a year later the bones would be exhumed and moved down here.
Though Kaya likes the Greeks well enough, he can’t understand the horror-film quality of the Orthodox faith, which seems so unlike them: their places of worship gloomy inside, their icons depicting prophets who look more or less suicidal, and at the centre of it all an emaciated torture victim on a vertical rack, the blood gushing. Islam bewilders him too—the murderous hatred of rival sects, the inclination of fanatics to self-detonate in public places—but Islam’s aesthetic is airy, spacious and bright, celestial instead of cavelike, bespeaking life and pleasure, not death. How he misses his seaside club already! As the day’s adrenalin seeps away he can feel the encroaching heaviness of a future filled with, of all things, regret and nostalgia. Of course, to have a future you must first survive. He has almost died twice today, and third time decides the case, as the saying goes. May there be no third time! (Like most men, he would describe himself as unsuperstitious; like most men, he is superstitious.)
He seems to hear a sound from far up the gallery. He listens closely. Nothing. He butts out his second-last cigarette, then shrugs the blazer off his back and gets up, stifling a groan. He holds the Yavuz-16 in his right hand and in his left the old aluminum flashlight that Roland gave him. He leaves the candle-lantern on the floor. He starts up the gallery, walking softly, seeing his way by the increasingly dim candlelight from behind him. Now the gallery veers to the left and he’s walking into the kind of darkness where shutting your eyes makes no difference. He flicks on the flashlight, casts the beam around. The gallery and intermittent bone chambers seem like sudden creations of the light itself, hallucinations that will cease to exist as soon as he thumbs off the switch, or the batteries die. A face leers out at him from the wall and he startles: a jovial-looking skull in its own private nook. On its brow a dense paragraph—a warning of some kind? It hits him that this place must be just how death actually does look and feel, if in fact one sees or feels anything. Silent, sunless, fleshless, wine-less. Cremation is permitted in Turkey, unlike in stricter Muslim countries, and that’s what he would prefer—to have his body burned and the ashes scattered on the beach at noon. But now his children spring back to mind; there must be no thoughts of death or dying, whatever the coming days might hold.
He wonders how much farther it can be to where the gallery ends, at the stone stairway they all climbed down, earlier, out of the church. Seems he has been walking for a long time, sweeping the flashlight from side to side, and he’s starting to frighten himself, wondering if somehow he has erred into a secondary tunnel and won’t find his way back. He cocks the Yavuz. Now the flashlight picks out the steep stairs, not twenty metres ahead. He aims the light slowly upward: each ancient step worn down, polished smooth in the centre. Above the top step, the light passes through a gap, up into the church. He stands staring. The stone lid that he and Trifannis slid closed has been dragged back open.
A short figure steps out of a recess in the gallery wall between Kaya and the stairway. Kaya gasps, then cries out in pain—his rib. The light beam glares off Aydin Polat’s strap-on spectacles under his peaked cap. Polat holds his own pistol loosely at hip level, aimed at Kaya in an insouciant, almost playful manner, not like him at all. “Colonel Kaya! I suppose you must be fleeing your Greek captors?” His speech is unlike him too—relaxed, amused, almost suave. “Or do you have some better tale?”
Kaya’s own phrase returns to him: Death will have to hunt me down.
“Lower the gun, Colonel Polat,” Kaya says with little hope.
Polat’s trimmed moustache widens slightly. Then, to Kaya’s astonishment, the man does lower his gun, setting it down on the floor in front of his boots and saying, “There. Now we can discuss things. You won’t feel so frightened.”
“Frightened!” Kaya scoffs, as if Polat doesn’t actually terrify him. “I’ve already been shot a number of times today.”
“Well, it need not happen again,” Polat says. “By the way, I recovered my stolen pistol”—he nods downward—“from the Greek soldier we killed outside the church. A brave old man. He will receive proper honours. There need be no more such violence.”
Kaya nods, badly wanting to believe that all the violence is over. His pampered body is unaccustomed to pain, to such extreme weariness.
“We’ll start by you putting your gun down,” Polat says. “Or, better, handing it to me. And your flashlight.”
“That would be premature,” Kaya says. “
Where are your men?”
“Some are waiting up in the church, some guarding the other exit from this, this…” He nods toward the recess he just stepped out of. “An underground cemetery, I suppose? So crowded! You’d think the Greeks would show their dead more respect. I was waiting in the dark there. You’d think it would be unpleasant, but it was actually quite peaceful.”
“You must be getting used to the presence of the dead,” Kaya says. “How many men did you lose today?”
Polat crosses his arms over his puffed-out chest but his voice remains steady, quiet: “Three killed, five wounded—two only slightly—all in the line of duty and in the course of a fully successful mission. Well, almost fully. Only one thing remains.”
“I don’t believe your men are blocking the other exit. You’d never find it in these ruins, and…” Now I’ve admitted there’s another exit, Kaya sees. He is not thinking clearly. He is not thinking.
“I did careful research before launching this mission,” Polat says. “I don’t believe it.”
“I see you’re in pain. Have you actually been shot?”
“Yes and no.”
“I can help you. We can help you. This situation…certainly you won’t go entirely unpunished, but if you help me—help me now—I’ll see that you survive it. More than survive it! I can do that much and I will. Who knows? You might even be able to return to the officers’ club, after some time.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Just them. That’s all.” He steps forward. His boots now straddle the pistol on the floor. “Just lead me to them quietly.”
“Stay where you are.”
“You’re not the sort of man to shoot someone, Colonel.”
“Evet,” Kaya hears himself admit. Yes.
“We won’t…they won’t be hurt, these, these—these people you’ve been hiding—these Greeks, and the foreigner.” Polat’s speech is lapsing into its old patterns, jagged and jerky, a polygraph line warning liar.
“But how can I be sure you mean it?”
“I am a colonel of the Turkish army and a man of my word! For me, truth is a simple matter—not like for you.”
“Truth ‘a simple matter’?” Kaya can’t keep the derision out of his laugh, but then he moans and brings the hand holding the flashlight to his cracked rib, so for a second the light shines straight up into his eyes. In a panic he aims the light back at Polat. The man’s posture is identical, yet he seems to be a step closer.
“Give me the weapon,” Polat says. “Lead me to them and I promise, you will not be destroyed.”
Little lenses filled with light, pale eyes barely visible…Kaya scours Polat’s face for any reason to believe him.
“Colonel Kaya, I know you. You’re a gentle man—lazy—you enjoy life! I see no reason why that gentle, lazy life shouldn’t continue—in due course. Simply do as I—”
“How could we possibly know each other? We’re completely different!”
“I never said you knew me,” Polat whispers excitedly. “You don’t! Your kind doesn’t know anyone. You don’t have to—happy people don’t have to—they—they—they live within themselves, happily! It’s the others, it’s men like…we understand you. We watch you—God, how we watch you!—we know you—and in the end, if we choose, we can…overcome you.” He draws in a deep, ragged breath. “But it needn’t happen.”
Kaya’s pain, ever worse, is blurring his vision in waves. Maybe he really has been hurt badly.
“You say I could actually return to the club, maybe?”
“I do have influence now. I will have even more, after this victory.”
Some victory, Kaya thinks, while another zone of his mind pictures himself back on his tennis court, or lazing up on the rooftop with a litre of retsina in a bucket of shaved ice and maybe somebody beside him, yes, Filiz.
“And my children?”
“I would ensure that they’d be able to visit you, in the short term, and—and in due course, well, you’d be free to do as you wish. Colonel, you sound very weak. I think you need to sit down. Shall I call the medic?”
“I don’t know what to do,” Kaya hears someone murmur. It’s himself. “Maybe it would be best for the villagers? They could be hurt down here. Or hurt if they flee. Or killed! A young woman is pregnant, one couple is old, and their son, he’s—”
“I didn’t want to mention such things, but, yes, I can’t ensure their safety, not without your help. The foreigner is known to be a danger, and after today—my men are inclined to shoot first.”
“And if I can’t help—I mean, if I refuse?”
“Then we come in from both sides and—as I say—I can’t promise…”
After what seems a full minute’s silence Kaya, sickened, says, “Will you want to call a few of your men now, or…?”
“No, no—it’s fine—I’ll come alone! No use scaring these trapped people. By the way—there are no more weapons down here, are there? I saw the old soldier seize the foreigner’s pistol…”
“This is the only one now.”
“Which you will now give to me?”
“You can pick up your own. I’ll keep this one until I see that you mean to keep your word. And no pointing of guns at any of the villagers, you understand?”
The words are commanding but Kaya’s voice has a pleading thinness, nothing beneath it. Polat says quietly, reasonably, “As you wish, Colonel.”
His heart burdened, almost broken, Kaya guides Polat back up the gallery. Polat has turned on a flashlight of his own. To a sentry—if there were one—the approaching lights might resemble the two eyes of one creature, a single mind. Horrible thought. Then again, maybe Polat is not what he was before, maybe he has changed just a little, just enough, an aggrieved zealot made a little more human by success? It seems plausible. It has to, now. A muffled screech comes down the gallery and Polat jumps in his tracks. “One of the children,” Kaya whispers. “She’s been having bad dreams all night.” But I’m doing my best to keep her and all of them safe.
He and Polat round a gradual turn in the passage. Ahead, a lamp glimmers at the entrance to the central chamber. Beyond it, the faint embers of a fire.
“We should turn off the flashlights,” Kaya says. “So we don’t startle them.”
“Very well.”
Darkness but for the weak glowing ahead. Then, for a second, something eclipses that glow. Something has entered the gallery. It seems to be sticking close to the wall. The dog? Kaya isn’t sure if Polat has seen. But whatever is there must see him and Polat, since the two of them are approaching the light source. He hears somebody draw breath. Polat turns on his flashlight. It’s the young Cypriote. She averts her face and hurries a hand to her eyes, squinting through her fingers. Her other hand covers her very pregnant belly. On some instinct, Kaya addresses her in English, though her Turkish is perfectly adequate (and her accent a delight). “Madam—why are you here?” The question has a guilty sound.
“The girl wakes me again. You were not in your place. I came to find you. Who is this? I can’t see. Is it…?”
“Lower the light,” Kaya snaps at Polat in Turkish, “have you no manners?”
“Watch your tone,” Polat says but complies.
“…their officer, yes. I thought so. But—why do you bring him?”
“I am so sorry. His men are here. There must be no more dead.” It’s agony for Kaya not to explain himself fully in Turkish. He can feel the Cypriote’s dawning comprehension and anger, and he hates being the object of bad feeling, especially on the part of a woman, yet some intuition still urges him, No Turkish—don’t let on that she knows Turkish!
“So sorry,” he repeats. “I wished to help. To save us all.”
“Yourself to save!” she hisses, stepping forward and swatting his face. The blow is far louder than their words. Polat whispers, “Tell this cunt to shut up and to keep her hands off you—you are a Turkish officer until you’re officially drummed out!”
The Cyp
riote, understanding, turns to Polat and opens her mouth to speak, but Kaya cuts in: “Watch your tongue, Albay. I won’t let you insult this woman.”
“Ah, so that’s your child in there? Or is it the foreigner’s? Do you even know? Does she even know?”
“That’s enough!”
“Take me to them now.” Polat draws his Yavuz and aims it from the hip, more or less at Kaya’s groin. “And give me your pistol.” He keeps the flashlight fixed on Kaya. The woman and her belly hover in the penumbra alongside. “And let me add something—because the truth is simple, and I won’t conceal it from you. I can protect you and the others, but not the foreigner. His fate is out of my hands.” (Kaya can feel the Cypriote listening hard.) “He’s already considered dead, and it will only cause injury to the Turkish republic and the army if we should…bring him back to life. I won’t let that happen. Do you understand?”
“Then I won’t help you.”
“It’s too late.”
“Anliyorum!” the woman says, I understand! Her hand darts out of the shadow toward Kaya. Seeing what she means to do, Kaya grabs the barrel of Polat’s gun and twists it downward. She pulls Kaya’s pistol from his belt, turns to Polat. She’s bathed in light, as if Polat, struggling, is trying to fend her off with the only thing he has left, the flashlight. For a moment there’s only this woman in a ring of radiance, her shaking hands holding a small pistol above her huge belly. Polat’s pistol, held down by Kaya, fires. Pain pierces Kaya’s foot like a driven stake. Maybe the crashing report shocks her into squeezing the trigger—she lets out a gasping cry—or maybe she does it on purpose. The muzzle flare blinds Kaya. He hears the clatter of the flashlight as it hits the floor, then the thump of Polat’s body.
—
Kaya has survived a third attempt on his life. In the toe of his right shoe is a neat little hole. Around it, the Italian leather is already stiffening with blood. The bullet passed between the bones of his first and second toes, bruising both without breaking either. The searing pain intensifies by the minute. Still, when no soldiers come charging out of the darkness from the direction of the church after the thunderous shots, he accompanies Trifannis back along the gallery to the end, where they creep up the ladder-like stairway and peer out into the church: dark and silent, the front doors closed. So Polat was lying. His men must be asleep. He must have returned alone to the church to search further, or to follow some hunch.
The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep Page 30