Or check out the excerpt below …
Excerpt from August in the Vanishing City.
“Petros looks for a moment at his cousin and feels the old nauseating knot of resentment churn and tighten in his stomach.”
THREE MONTHS BEFORE PETROS’ RELEASE from the army, the Turks kill a Greek soldier on the Green Line in Nicosia. The boy bleeds out in the weedy Dead Zone near Ledra Street, behind sandbags and rows of barbed wire, where boarded-up brick buildings from colonial days stand mute as they have for decades, their doorframes and shutters rotted away by the passing years.
Greek medics try to go in, but the Turks shoot over their heads, refusing to let them move forward. Forty minutes pass from the moment they cut him apart with machine gun fire to the arrival of the United Nations troops to retrieve him. In his hand they find a brown bag holding a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of Cyprus brandy, and everyone just shakes their heads. What was he thinking, the poor boy, that he had made friends with the other side?
It is not the first time that soldiers arranged to exchange gifts across the Green Line, their judgment clouded by the boredom of those long, hot brown hours—stale, fly-infested hours that stank of tired nationalism, pointless waiting and absurdity.
It is of course the Greeks who bring gifts. The Turks have nothing, especially the boys from deep Anatolia, who, they say, are literally starving when they come to occupy this foreign land that they are told is Turkish.
The Turks say the boy had ignored an order to halt—and who knew what was true?
Correctly speaking, the Turk who shot him was doing his duty. Petros’ uncle Michalis says this, one day when Petros and his cousin Elias are on leave, eating roasted chicken and potatoes, salad and pickled caper greens—the ones with thorny stems that stick in your throat—at Michalis’ hotel by the beach. Never trust a Turk, he says.
It is at that moment that Petros realizes how impossible it is to die significantly anymore. Once, he thinks, no one forgot a hero, and all soldiers were heroes, but that has not been true for a long time. Now a soldier’s death has no more meaning than that of a reckless boy on a fast motorcycle who tries to pass a lumbering fruit truck too quickly and runs headlong into oncoming traffic.
…
The moment passes, and none of the boys bring up the dead soldier again. A sweet-faced boy died for a reason they can’t understand, and the days creep by like sleepy wild animals.