The Sunrise (42 page)

There was only one place he knew he would find one. He vividly remembered the location of the store where he had killed Markos. It was impossible to forget. It took him only ten minutes to get there and his heart was racing when he arrived. If he did not do what was needed quickly, if he even paused for thought, he knew he would fail.

As soon as he was inside the store, he pulled off his shirt and tied it tightly round his face, covering nose and mouth. Even from the doorway, he imagined he could detect the smell of decomposing flesh. He walked briskly towards the back and started pulling away the piles of sacks. The soldier’s body had not been discovered by vermin and had been left to quietly decay.

Hüseyin quickly unbuttoned the shirt and the trouser fly, trying his best not to look at the face. The boots slipped easily over the feet and then he dragged off the trousers. The shirt was harder to remove. It required rolling the corpse to one side and pulling one arm through at a time. He left the soldier’s rotting body in his underwear and covered him up again with sacking.

Taking the clothes towards the front of the shop, Hüseyin shook them vigorously to make sure that no grubs lurked inside. He tried not to gag as he swapped his own trousers for the dead man’s, remembering to remove the diamonds from his pocket. Then he put on the shirt and boots and stuffed his own behind the counter.

The clothes were slightly too large, but rolling the top of the trousers over helped them to stay up. The boots fitted as if they were his own. He caught sight of himself in the dirty shop window and knew that he would just about pass. He had no recollection of the soldier wearing a hat. Perhaps it was lost when he fell.

Hüseyin made for the section in the wire that he knew had been Markos’ way out of the city, not passing even a single soldier en route. When it was almost dark, he slipped through. It appeared that most of the military now remained at their sentry posts around the edge of Famagusta and did not have a view of his path out of the city.

He made his way across some scrubland, staying close to trees where he could, and walked until he reached a main road. Ten minutes later he heard the sound of a lorry behind him. It was an army vehicle with a group of soldiers in the back. It slowed to pick him up and the grating at the back dropped down for him to climb in.

They squeezed up to make space for him on one of the benches and carried on with their drinking song. When they got to the chorus, they passed around a bottle of firewater and took a large gulp each. Hüseyin mimed both the singing and the swigging. Nobody looked twice at him. Most of the others seemed not to have a hat either.

It was difficult to see very much in the dark, but he noticed dozens of abandoned cars by the side of the road, some of them now pushed into ditches. He wondered if they were vehicles that had run out of fuel on what must have been a terrifying flight from Famagusta all those months before.

They passed a couple of United Nations vehicles on their way and stopped once or twice more to pick up other soldiers who needed lifts, but eventually, in the early hours, they reached Nicosia, where they were dropped at a barracks in the suburbs. Most of the men went inside and a few others wandered off towards the centre of the city. Hüseyin ambled along with them. None of them seemed to know each other that well, so he melted in with their group and managed to conceal the Cypriot accent that might have given him away. From their conversation he gathered that they were off to find a brothel. He kept up with them for a while and then hung back pretending to look in shop windows until they were out of sight.

He was not familiar with the streets of Nicosia. He had been there once or twice as a child, before the Green Line had been run across the city, but he had little recollection of it. Even in the darkness he had been able to see that the island was in chaos. He was anxious enough about his own parents and his brother, but finding safety for the Georgious would be even trickier.

Hüseyin wandered the streets, trying to avoid the groups of soldiers milling about. After a while, exhaustion swept over him and he crept into the dark recess of a doorway and slept. It was only when the shopkeeper pulled up the shutters at five minutes to nine the following morning that he realised he had spent the night outside a watchmaker’s. The grey-haired man was only slightly surprised to see him; there were so many soldiers in the city that it was no surprise to find one curled up on his doorstep.

Once the shutters were pulled up, Hüseyin saw that there were hundreds of watches lined up in neat rows. They all looked almost identical. An off-white face with fine golden hands seemed to be the standard. He had never owned a watch and wondered how people chose from this huge selection.

The shopkeeper had been doing good business. Many of the soldiers wanted to buy a watch, as he sold brands that they could not get at home in Turkey, and he imagined that Hüseyin might be such a customer.

‘Come in,’ he said. ‘There are plenty more to choose from inside.’

As Hüseyin entered, a hundred clocks began to chime, each one sounding a different note. For a few moments it was impossible to say anything. It was a percussion orchestra, a morning chorus of repeated single notes. Once they had announced the hour, the sound of ticking took over, insistent, busy and relentless.

‘I don’t really hear it any longer,’ said the watchmaker, knowing what the young man was thinking. ‘They say it would drive me mad if I did.’

He was a good salesman and knew to let his customers browse and try on, browse and try on.

‘Anything you want to take a closer look at, just tell me,’ he said. ‘Coffee?’

Hüseyin nodded.

He felt that each moment brought him closer to the question he most wanted to ask.

The watchmaker stepped outside the shop for a second and beckoned to a boy loitering outside the café opposite. A few minutes later, the child appeared with a tray hanging down from a chain and two small cups. The watchmaker knew that coffee helped to focus a customer’s mind.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked, sipping his own drink.

‘Not far away,’ said Hüseyin elusively. ‘On the coast.’

The man would assume he meant somewhere close to Mersin, the port on the Turkish coast where the majority of the soldiers had embarked to reach Cyprus. He had begun to wind his clocks, some of them by hand, some with a key. It was a task that required the utmost patience and dexterity, and the shopkeeper seemed to be blessed with both.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I feel as if I have all the time in the world!’

Hüseyin knew it was not the first time the man had said this, but he smiled all the same.

‘Do you mend watches too?’ he asked, to make conversation.

‘Of course,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘I have one to do today. The owner wants to collect it later.’

‘I suppose there is always someone with a broken watch.’

‘But people like to treat themselves to a new one too,’ said the man. ‘You soldiers seem keen.’

Hüseyin wandered across to a cabinet full of ladies’ watches and peered inside.

‘Now those are as much a piece of jewellery as a watch,’ said the shopkeeper with a chuckle. The straps were all either gold or platinum, and many of them had jewels around the face. ‘Ladies who own those rarely need to look at them,’ he added. ‘They have a man there to tell them the time …’

‘They must be very expensive,’ Hüseyin commented.

‘They are. And I don’t think I’ve sold more than four in ten years. Since the troubles. Lost a lot of business then. So many of my Turkish Cypriot regulars have left Cyprus. And the Greek Cypriots can’t come here.’

Hüseyin knew he had to be bold, but so far the man seemed kind enough.

‘Look,’ he said, dropping his accent, ‘I’m not Turkish. I’m a Turkish Cypriot. I can’t afford to buy a watch.’

The watchmaker stopped what he was doing and listened. It was a story he had heard before.

‘My family has lost everything,’ said Hüseyin. ‘Except for this.’ He pulled the necklace out of his pocket.

The watchmaker’s eyes widened with amazement. He only knew about the cost of the tiny gems that were used in watches. Those in the young man’s hands were on a different scale. They were bigger than any of the precious stones he had seen in a long while.

‘Can I see?’

Hüseyin passed the diamonds across and the man held them up to the light.

‘I’ve never
seen
such beautiful sapphires,’ he said, handing them back.

‘They’re blue diamonds,’ said Hüseyin authoritatively.

‘Blue diamonds!’ The watchmaker took another admiring look at them. ‘And I suppose you need to sell them?’

Hüseyin nodded. ‘But I need to do it as soon as I can. I need the money.’

‘I’m sure you do. Everyone needs money these days.’

‘It’s to help somebody,’ he said.

The watchmaker was beginning to feel confused. There was a vulnerable desperation in the young man’s expression. Whoever it was he wanted to help, he clearly cared a great deal for them.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said. ‘I think we can arrange for that necklace to be sold. And after that, you’ll have to tell me how you want to help these people …’

‘Thank you,’ said Hüseyin.

‘I’ll telephone one of my friends and see what he can do,’ he said. ‘I shut at lunchtime, so if I can arrange something, we’ll go together to see him. But if you’re not going to buy anything of mine,’ he added, ‘I’ve got work to do. Come back at twelve. On the dot.’

‘I won’t be late,’ promised Hüseyin.

He walked slowly around the city, killing time for the next few hours. He stopped twice for a coffee. It seemed strange to be using money again, handing over coins and waiting for change. He was then lured by the aroma of lamb and hungrily ate some
ș
i
ș
kebap
from a stall, the first meat he had tasted in months.

When he returned, hundreds of hands on clocks and watches were about to reach their precise vertical position. As he walked in, they began simultaneously to strike the hour.

The watchmaker was ready for him.

‘I’ve found someone,’ he said. ‘You may not get the price you want, but it’s the best we’ll do today.’

The fact that Hüseyin planned to use the money to help other people had touched him. Hüseyin reminded him of his own boy, who was also in uniform but in another part of the island, and it was enough reason to give him a hand.

They walked across the city together and Hüseyin explained what he needed the money for.

‘I can’t help you with that,’ the watchmaker said. ‘But we can ask my friend about it. He’ll know how.’

He led Hüseyin down a side street and he found himself in a dingy
kafenion
. Across the room, almost invisible through a dense fog of smoke, a pallid, fleshy man was sitting alone. Most others were in groups, playing cards, talking noisily, even shouting. A television blared from the wall, next to a hatch through which coffee was served.

The watchmaker strode towards the solitary man and beckoned Hüseyin to follow. They both sat down at his table. The man was about sixty, with a thick greying moustache, and did not look the watchmaker in the eye when he spoke to him. He remained staring impassively ahead, scarcely responding to anything that was said. Hüseyin even wondered if he was blind, so apparently uninterested was he in anything going on around him. Only when the watchmaker told Hüseyin to show him the diamonds did his expression change.

‘Pass them to me, but keep them out of sight.’

Hüseyin handed them to him beneath the table. He could hear the slight jangle of the stones as the man felt them. He was still not convinced that he could see.

‘You can have twenty thousand for them,’ he said.

‘Twenty thousand?’ repeated Hüseyin in disbelief. It seemed an enormous sum.

‘That’s in Turkish lira,’ said the watchmaker quietly. ‘It’s about five hundred pounds.’

Hüseyin repeated the figure. He had no idea if it was enough.

‘That’s all I’m offering,’ said the man, gazing into space.

‘There’s something else he needs. Tell him, Hüseyin.’

‘There are two families, one Greek Cypriot, the other Turkish Cypriot. Nine people and a baby. They need safe passage out of Famagusta.’

‘But there is nobody inside Famagusta. Just Turkish soldiers,’ stated the man bluntly, in the tone of one who was not used to being contradicted.

Hüseyin said nothing. There was something so cold about this individual and he could see that he was not a man to argue with.

The watchmaker turned to Hüseyin. ‘But how …?’ he began.

Hüseyin shook his head. He did not want to explain. In this company it seemed safer to keep up his guard.

‘I want to get them out safely. Today,’ he said under his breath. ‘Perhaps to Nicosia.’

‘So who exactly are the ten?’ asked the watchmaker.

Suddenly the old man was being too curious and asking too many questions. For Hüseyin there was some urgency about their departure, and the longer he sat in this café, the further it seemed to recede.

The dealer leaned forward and spoke directly to Hüseyin for the first time.

‘There are rumours of landmines,’ he said, showing filthy teeth. ‘So the fare isn’t cheap. It will cost exactly the price of these stones.’

Hüseyin had hoped there might be some money left. They would need something to live on once they were out of Famagusta, but it seemed he had to take this one step at a time.

The large man held on to the diamonds under the table. They were clearly demanded as advance payment. He said something in the watchmaker’s ear that Hüseyin could not hear.

The watchmaker indicated to Hüseyin that it was time to leave. With a slight lift of his head, the dealer summoned a man who had been standing by the door acting as look out. He came over to the table and escorted the pair of them from the
kafenion
.

The transaction had been mysterious. All Hüseyin really understood was that he was glad to get away from this difficult and aggressive man of whom everyone seemed to be afraid.

Once outside on the pavement, the watchmaker explained what was to happen.