The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep

by Steven Heighton

  Kaya and Trifannis shift the stone lid—not quite as thick or heavy as it appears from above—back into place.

  They return and haul Polat’s body into one of the bone chambers, where the spirits of the dead monks will haunt him forever (Roland tells Kaya that this is what the old woman is saying as she crosses herself yet again). By lamplight, Kaya can see that as Polat’s face cools and pales, the faint old acne scars are showing clearer. Death is aging him backward into youth and boyhood. Before shrouding the corpse with a blanket, Kaya unstraps the blood-spattered glasses and slips them into a breast pocket of the tunic, where he finds a notice of decoration—Polat was to receive the Medal of Honour, first grade, at a ceremony in Ankara next month—and a photograph, mounted on a precisely cut square of stiff cardboard. “His wife and children?” Trifannis asks, barely audible. Kaya says that he had no wife, no children. He, Trifannis and Roland look closer in the weak light. The villagers’ dog stands on the threshold of the chamber, growling from his gut. The Cypriote can be heard nearby, soothing her children in a stricken voice broken by occasional sobs.

  The image seems discoloured, as if tea-stained, a portrait of a head-scarved mother with a large nose, a blanched and pale-eyed father dressed like an extra in a historical film, two handsome lads with identical rakish smirks, and a small boy who must be Polat—that large head, the too-small glasses, yet grinning for all he’s worth. Kaya shakes his head and whispers, “Like that, he never smiles.” And Roland, nodding wearily toward a nook full of skulls: “He will again.”

  —

  Time to get out and across the border. The mission was Polat’s initiative, according to Kaya, and with him gone, it’s unlikely the soldiers will know what to do. At the same time, as soon as they find out that he’s missing, they will start searching, and by mid-morning, noon at the latest, the ruins and the church will be aswarm with troops. They might well find their way down into the catacombs. Even Takkos seems to understand there’s no longer any choice. (“But maybe we can go back to the house before long?” he asks, in the way a child might, not wanting the truth but a postponement of the truth. And Stavroula indulges him.)

  They enter the gallery on the south side of the domed chamber. They pass a dozen more recesses stocked with bones, after which the gallery narrows to a tunnel, the arched ceiling lowering and flattening until Elias, if not the others, has to stoop. Soon the way is so narrow that he can’t hold the luggage out beside his knee but must cradle it high and close with one arm, carrying Aslan with the other. Kaya has taken Lale from Roland and is singing to her, a Turkish lullaby, his hushed voice thick with emotion. Aslan has wet himself. He’s dozing, softly head-butting Elias over and over as he nods. Argos keeps scooting underfoot, as if terrified of being anywhere except among the villagers’ knees. Elias has never kicked an animal in his life but now, tripped again, he does. At last Kaiti with the flashlight picks out white stone steps, ladder-steep, where the tunnel ends. “Dhoksa to Theo, i skala!” she whispers.

  They climb into an ungated crypt in the cemetery, beside the section used by the villagers over the years. As they emerge, Takkos’s pigeon flees him on panicky wings. The moon is down but the Milky Way is so densely luminous it seems to cast shadows. Argos trots over to a cross in a raked mound of earth and sniffs. At the foot of the cross, the stub of the beeswax candle Stratis left here a few days ago. Elias picks a flat stone off the ground and sets it on the middle crosspiece. As if the grave is Stratis’s own, and Elias a believer, he murmurs, “Katevodhio”—Godspeed.

  By dawn a small band of refugees and a dog are nearing the fences of the Green Line. Neoklis’s spasmodic gait no longer stands out, not amid this straggle of limpers and sloggers, even the supple Kaya hobbling in his perforated shoe. Nobody says a word. Not a breath to spare among them. A blood-and-yolk sunrise colours the crest of the one hill like a desert mesa and drips slowly down its flank. Far behind them, over the ruins, a tiny aircraft is circling—a helicopter, it seems, easier to hear than to see at this distance.

  Elias has never felt more weary in his life. Yet no one, not even old Takkos, seems as gutted as Roland. His complexion is Gothic despite the dawn’s colours; the cross-hatched lines in his brow seem deepened, redoubled. The sun appears now over the sea and the last few skeletal hotels a kilometre to the east, the southern limit of the beachfront strip. They’re crossing a rocky plain of cropped grasses, gorse, broom, a few olive trees. And then Roland is gone. Elias looks behind. The man sits slumped against one of the trees, his head fallen back, mouth open, arms limp. Elias drops the carpet bag and runs back to him, not alerting Kaiti or the others—he wants them to hurry on, they’re almost there, maybe ten minutes farther.

  “Roland? Look at me! We’re almost there. Roland, wake up!”

  The left eye opens. Sunlight transects it from the side. The iris no longer seems blue but translucent, the pupil a flooded tunnel. Elias is gazing down to the murky bottom in search of someone he now loves, but there’s no one, nothing there, just a cavern beneath all identities and concepts, no Roland, no Kaiti, no Elias, no Cyprus or Turkey, no tribes or borders or histories, just matter, stripped clean of human tragedy, just molecules fleetingly organized.

  Roland’s faint voice retrieves him. “Ah, Trif…I dreamed I was back in Mexico.” The eye re-closes.

  “Roland!” Then, to keep him talking: “When were you in Mexico?”

  “Es war ein Traum…a dream. Yet this dream…it seemed many years. I had a wife, children, much joy. Please, let me return. I can’t make a step more.”

  “I’ll carry you.”

  “Such nonsense! Do you hear a fly?”

  Elias squints into the distance. He can’t make out the chopper but he can hear it, a faint, steady drone. Soon there will be others, some flying in this direction. He grips Roland’s wrist, first step for a fireman’s carry. The skin is corpse-cold. He tries to find a radial pulse. Roland is murmuring, “Cold sweat…chest pain…nausea…numbness of arm. These clues I know. For some days, in fact. But now, worse. Many in my family—”

  “There’ll be doctors, Roland, just on the other side. Roland!”

  “Bitte, you must hurry.”

  “We’re not going to leave you. She couldn’t bear it. And I…”

  “Ja. I feel the same.”

  “I couldn’t bear it.”

  “But this is my village…Tell Kaiti…” He says something in German that sounds like poetry. And in Greek: “Martis mou o Theos…poso tis agapisa.” God alone knows how I loved her. Then, wrinkling his nose, lifting his hand: “Bitte, please kill me that fly!”

  To sling Roland over his back and get upright is by now much harder than any toy test in a weight room, on a sports field, on a hockey rink. Games in the end just prepare you for games. So what has prepared you for this? Burying parents. Not wanting to bury another, a last one. Stay…stay here…That’s it, the old song he likes you to sing, the cowboy tune, Stay here awhile ere you leave us. God, Germans and their Wild West fixation! Do not hasten to bid us adieu…Trif hasn’t the strength or the breath to sing a word. Roland’s own breaths shorten to toilsome gasps. Then nothing, not even a rattle.

  He feels the last tension pass from the body and now, with the will and spirit gone, it seems heavier. He carries it step by slowing step. Ahead, Kaiti is beckoning, no voice left, while also glancing over her shoulder at the others, who are wobbling onward. She holds the carpet bag and her other hand protects her belly. She walks back a few steps to meet him, her brow already tightened in grief and her lower lip quivering, though she looks totally unsurprised. Maybe Roland told her about his heart. Maybe no further death could surprise her.

  “Kaiti, I can’t—I’m sorry—I can’t carry him anymore.”

  She helps him lower the body and drag it under the boughs of a younger olive tree. They sit him up against the trunk, facing back toward the village. When she stoops to kiss his brow, her tears trickle down into his beard and glint there as if they were his.
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  —

  They stumble into the main square of Deryneia at eight in the morning. It’s a farm town but seems a deafening metropolis—buses, scooters, trucks and cars, all shockingly functional, revving and braking and beeping horns. Awestruck strangers approach them. In minutes a crowd gathers, uniformed schoolchildren pointing, yiayias with shopping baskets, men blurting into cellphones or snapping pictures, two soldiers with Uzis, an old doctor identifying himself and asking Boro na sas voithiso?, the ring of faces mostly pale, overfed, jabbering questions like a media mob, kettling them like riot cops, someone offering a banana, a can of Red Bull, Stop, give them room now, let them breathe, I’m a doctor! Neoklis squawks and clings to his mother, who is tearfully laughing. Kaya rakes back his hair and shakes hands like a homecoming celebrity, though his bloodshot eyes dart around. Elias is so weak that only the crowd holds him upright. Then his and Kaiti’s hands, though locked together ever tighter, are wrenched apart. He looks around and for a moment can’t find her, find the twins, find the villagers, too many strangers are crushing in, their faces eclipsing the faces he knows, his people, his family, his little nation, as if they have ceased to exist or never did.

  PARIS, SEPTEMBER

  A week before Eylül’s thirty-fifth birthday, her sister, Meltem, reads her a piece of astonishing news. Meltem is excited too, and in her hurry she stumbles more than usual over the English v and th sounds. Eylül’s post-concussion symptoms are still serious enough that she has to spend much of her time alone in a darkened room, but every morning—if it’s not a setback day, and recently such days are rare—Meltem comes in with hot tea and a chilled plum, opens the curtains, kisses Eylül’s olive-grey cheeks, and reads to her. Eylül lies fully dressed on the made bed with her eyes closed, strenuously listening. First Meltem reads any messages that have come in from the handful of family and colleagues who know Eylül is alive. Next, having chosen the material in advance, she will read a few items from the Hürriyet, then from the pro-government Sabah, then from the website of The Guardian. Lately, she also reads a few pages from a novel—just translated into Turkish—by one of Eylül’s heroes, the American writer Susan Sontag. Every word that Eylül’s healing brain has to process wearies it, cutting into her slim daily quota of concentration, so she desperately wants to avoid trivialities. Hard as she tries, she often fails not to scold Meltem when the girl reads things Eylül deems to be less than vital.

  For half an hour each afternoon, Meltem takes dictation. Lately, along with brief replies to messages, Eylül has been dictating sentences, a few per day, exhausting, exasperating: the opening of a long article about how she came to be here in hiding, in a small but pretty flat in Paris’s 10th arrondissement. It belongs to an international NGO that assists and protects journalists and other writers in danger. Eylül, Meltem, and a private nurse are also supported by the Hürriyet, which secretly helped get her out of Cyprus.

  To think that her little sister was the first hero of the operation! Of course, crises can do more than traumatize and shatter—they can be the making of someone. But Meltem? Maybe one always underestimates a younger sibling. Yet during the hour in which the girl saw her father and older sister get run down outside a hospital, then rushed back inside by paramedics—who failed to revive her father—Meltem aged a decade, from frivolous and chattery to quietly focused, patiently determined. Realizing what must have happened, saying nothing to the distraught-seeming Kaya (who after all was with the army, his motives unknowable), she used Eylül’s new cellphone to reach Eylül’s main editor in Istanbul. He acted at once, no doubt backed by one of the journal’s anonymous liberal benefactors. Arrangements were made with the hospital. By noon, Eylül’s death was being reported along with that of her father. By the end of the day, two of her editors had arrived from Istanbul to deliver certain pledged sums in lira banknotes. The next afternoon they had her flown out covertly, at real risk to themselves and also to Eylül, who at that point was barely stabilized, back in a coma with a midbrain concussion and other significant injuries.

  The editors still hope to break her story as an exclusive when the time is right, then release it as a book through their publishing arm, though increasingly the plan looks unfeasible, not so much because Eylül can barely dictate a paragraph a day but because of deepening media repression in Turkey. Maybe in two years, maybe in five. Maybe an English or French version can appear somewhere sooner.

  This morning the news—news the Hürriyet will not be able to run, at least not yet or this frankly—comes from The Guardian. Greek Cypriot authorities are reporting that a group of fugitives has escaped across the Green Line, apparently after hiding for some time in the sealed ruins of Varosha. Cypriot border guards heard shooting and assumed the Turkish army was conducting exercises in the ruins. In fact, these fugitives, or refugees—some of whom claim to have survived in Varosha for years—were evicted after a Turkish assault in which at least one of them, along with several Turkish soldiers, died. It’s all unclear, the reports conflicting. What is certain is that one member of the group is Elias Trifannis, a Canadian soldier missing and assumed dead since an incident last October involving Turkish troops and the “radical journalist Eylül Şahin,” who was “killed just two months later in a traffic accident widely viewed as suspicious.”

  Meltem stops to say there are links here to previous stories about both incidents. “And here”—she turns the laptop toward Eylül, who sits up and puts on her glasses—“this must be him?” A poor-quality shot of a large but lean, dirty, beleaguered-looking man, street-mobbed by people who might be either determined fans or rabid attackers. If not for the context, Eylül wouldn’t know him. Meltem watches her face but makes no comment.

  Over the next few weeks, as the story simmers and then dies out, Meltem follows up for Eylül on the internet. For now, Elias is in a small town called Agios Giorgios, about as far as you can get in Greek Cyprus from the Green Line and the Turkish army. The Canadian media and authorities want to talk to him, but he has declined their overtures and ignored their threats. He refuses to give any interviews in Cyprus, either, saying that he hopes to make arrangements to publish “a fellow villager’s full history of that secret place,” preferring the story to emerge in that way. He is said to be living with a woman who, like him, disappeared, though several years earlier. There’s also an old couple and their disabled son, who were all assumed killed back in 1974. They, however—or at least the father—seem eager to talk to journalists, even to badger them for more attention. The man has launched spirited if slightly incoherent attacks on those who refuse to believe that anyone could have survived in Varosha for so long. Finally, there’s a Turkish army colonel who has “defected” to the Republic of Cyprus. Although he too is declining to give interviews, the Greek Cypriot media already seem very fond of him, referring to him as a hero for having “aided and protected the refugees” who were “hiding in the occupied zone.”

  As Meltem pauses and shakes her head, saying, “Maybe I should have trusted that man,” Eylül remembers again how Kaya’s face appeared above hers as she lay on the pavement, his hands open, fingers splayed out as if he meant to finish her off, while his naked eyes begged her to believe him innocent. She does finally believe. Like her American hero, she’s a skeptic and a pessimist, but this latest reprieve is forcing her to reconsider a few things. Maybe not everyone who sings has her throat cut.

  A month later, October, she starts to emerge from the tomb. She’ll have to emerge sooner or later. Few know that she’s alive, but every story breaks eventually. A spell of cool, wet weather, low cloud, sombre light, the glare not too much for her eyes and brain. It’s like January in Istanbul. Overruling both Meltem and the nurse she goes out for a walk alone, nameless and unnoticed, along the Canal St-Martin—lipstick, eyeliner, a headscarf, grey raincoat over a sweater and decent jeans and black loafers. She doesn’t go far. Every step depletes her and yet her heart grows lighter every step, across the arc of a small steel bridge an
d then back simply for the joy of crossing a bridge and returning—no metaphor, just pulsing physical fact, the joy of her mind and body’s free choosing, step by step, in resurgent delight.

  LOST COUNTRIES

  For almost a year now Kaya has been working for the Greek Cypriot government and living in Nicosia a few blocks south of the Green Line, which runs through the centre of the city, but his Greek is still deplorable and his English little improved. Arkadash, it is no problem! What with his charisma and the bewitched affection of his colleagues, the language barrier simply collapses: they so want to understand him, and be understood by him, that it all works. His new friends include diplomats, journalists, executives, recording artists, local football stars, and politicians both male and female. They hardly seem to regard him as Turkish at all. Really you are one of us, they all tell him, and Kaya, only half understanding, will affably agree.

  He is said to be in touch with Elias Trifannis and Ekaterini Matsakis, and rumour has it that he plans to visit them this summer on the island’s far coast, but when asked about them—whether by journalists or by colleagues—he politely offers no comment, out of respect, he says, for their wish for privacy. In fact, he and they often correspond, in Turkish, via Kaiti. Just last week she sent him another family picture. Adjusting to the outside has not been easy, she writes, especially for the half-Turkish twins, but lately they’ve started to make friends and talk less and less about the village. In time they might barely remember it at all, except as a kind of dream, which is probably for the best, if sad in some ways. Rolande is the baby’s name and she remains an excellent sleeper, a bit surprising after all she has gone through. As for Kaiti, she’s looking forward to working again part time once the tourists come, leading groups to the Avakas Gorge and the Baths of Aphrodite. Trif is doing better—he’s finally off the anti-anxiety drugs and working out daily, something Kaiti doesn’t understand but which does seem to help him. Working on their house helps too. It’s a traditional Cypriot farmhouse, long abandoned, which they’re struggling to repair and re-inhabit, room by room. While arranging to have Roland’s story published, Trif is also trying to write his own, although he finds the writing painful—not just the hours of sitting but also the need to remember things. Often he will take Rolande and the dog and walk down to the sea through the abandoned olive grove behind the house. For a while Kaiti and he were attempting to tend the old, orphaned trees, but they soon realized how little they knew about olive farming. Now they’ve apprenticed themselves to a local expert. Meanwhile (Kaiti writes) Trif has been trying to adopt the twins and secure a work permit. Various bureaucracies are making difficulties (difficulties that Kaya is now taking discreet steps to remove).