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The curfew made the village feel smaller.
It wasn’t that Zeytinlik — a scatter of low houses and lemon trees pressed between the foothills and the sea — had ever been loud at night. It was a place where night belonged to cicadas and the far-off shush of waves, where a dog might bark once and then remember it was sleepy too.
But tonight the quiet had rules.
Earlier, as the sun went down, the men had moved through the lanes with quick, practical steps: shutters latched, porch lights clicked off, radios turned down. Aunties called children in from the courtyards as if gathering up loose scarves before a wind. Somewhere near the coffee shop, someone had shouted a final joke that didn’t quite land; even laughter had to be careful these days, as if it might offend the air.
From the window, you could still see the minaret, pale against the bruised-blue sky, and beyond that — if you leaned and tilted your head — a dark strip of sea with the moon laying a faint, trembling road across it.
Then the siren had gone.
Not the old civil-defence wail from stories, not the dramatic sound in movies. This was a shorter, harsher thing, like the island clearing its throat to remind everyone: inside now. The sound slid across rooftops and over citrus groves, and even the goats in the neighbour’s pen stopped clanking their bells for a moment, as if listening.
By the time the last note died, the streets were empty.
Inside the house, the adults tried to make the evening ordinary by force. Plates clinked. Bread was torn. The television in the sitting room showed a map that seemed too big for the screen — a lot of yellow and blue and arrows, a line of names that didn’t belong to Cyprus at all. Iraq. Kuwait. Jordan. Syria. Places the girls had heard for the first time this month and then heard again and again until they felt like faraway cousins suddenly talked about at every meal.
“Eat,” her mother had said. “Eat properly.”
Her father had sat with his tea and watched the screen as if it might change its mind if he stared hard enough. When the newsreader spoke, he didn’t speak back, not like usual. He just made a small noise in his throat sometimes, and once he muttered, “Allah…” and didn’t finish the sentence.
Elif had tried to listen like an adult, which was to say she’d tried to look serious and understand without asking too many questions. She was nine and proud of it. She had started at school this year with a new pencil case and a teacher who said English words as if they were sweets you could suck slowly.
Curfew, Elif thought. She knew that one. The teacher had said it twice, tapping the board. Curfew. Like the sokağa çıkma yasağı the grown-ups were saying, only in English, which somehow made it feel both more official and more like a film.
Derya was seven and still believed that if you listened hard enough to the grown-ups, you could catch the secret part of what they knew.
Derya had been fidgeting the whole evening, sliding off the sofa, creeping back, whispering questions into elbows and sleeves.
“Are they coming here?” she’d asked, and then, when her aunt looked at her sharply, she changed it quickly into: “Are the… planes… coming?”
“No one is coming here,” Aunt Hatice had snapped, which was exactly what people said when they weren’t sure.
After the dishes, after the adults had huddled over the radio for a while — because the power had flickered and they didn’t trust the television to keep telling them the truth if it went black — the bedtime came early, like a punishment nobody could explain properly.
“Up,” her mother said, clapping her hands once. “Teeth. Pyjamas. Into bed. The little one too.”
Elif wanted to protest. She wanted to say, It’s not even proper night, and also, I’m nine. But the house had a different mood, and Elif had learned that mood was its own kind of law.
So now she and Derya were in the small back room, where two mattresses lay side by side on a low wooden frame. The sheets smelled like sun and soap. Someone had tucked a towel at the bottom of the door to stop the draft, or maybe to stop the noise from escaping.
The girls lay under the same quilt anyway, because fear made you want to be one creature instead of two.
The quilt had little faded roses on it. Derya’s toes were cold. Elif’s elbow kept bumping the wall.
Outside, the village held its breath.
Inside, the girls whispered.
“Are you awake?” Derya breathed, which was a silly question because Elif could feel Derya’s breath on her chin.
“I’m awake,” Elif whispered back. “Go to sleep.”
“I can’t. The siren did a noise.”
“It always does a noise,” Elif said, trying to sound bored. “That’s the whole point of a siren.”
Derya shifted, the quilt rustling like dry leaves. “But why did it do it now? If the war is there.”
“Elif,” Derya added quickly, because she liked saying names when she needed something to be true. “Elif. If the war is there, why are we doing curfew here?”
Elif stared at the underside of the quilt as if it might have answers in its stitching.
Because the grown-ups said so, she thought. Because they were scared. Because the island was surrounded by water but water didn’t stop sounds from travelling, and it didn’t stop rumours either. Because planes could fly over water like it was nothing. Because the radio made everything feel closer.
But she couldn’t say all that.
So she said the thing she’d heard her father say this afternoon while fixing the gate latch with an angry kind of patience.
“Because we’re… important,” Elif whispered, as if that might settle it. “We’re on the way.”
“On the way to what?” Derya asked immediately.
Elif hesitated. She had seen the map. Cyprus was a little shape in the sea. The arrows on the television didn’t point to it, but her uncle had said something about “bases,” and her mother had said, very quietly, “Cyprus is always in the middle of things.”
So Elif tried to make a picture out of those scraps.
“On the way,” she repeated, “like… like when you go to Grandma’s, and you have to pass the big roundabout and the petrol station. Everybody passes here if they’re going somewhere else. So they make rules.”
Derya absorbed this as if it were a storybook explanation, which for her it was. “So,” Derya whispered, “the war wants to pass our village?”
“The war doesn’t have feet,” Elif said, which was true and also not, because in Elif’s mind the war did have feet — giant feet, stomping across deserts on the television, knocking over houses, breaking streetlights.
Derya frowned under the covers, the movement a small hill rising and falling. “It has planes.”
Elif swallowed. Somewhere far away, maybe out near the coast road, there was the low growl of an engine, slow and heavy. A lorry? A patrol? It came and went. The sound didn’t get close enough to make the window glass tremble, but it made Derya’s hand find Elif’s wrist.
“Elif,” Derya whispered. “Baba said there’s bombs like… like fireworks but not for fun.”
Elif’s heart gave an uncomfortable little kick.
“That’s in the war place,” Elif said, and then she corrected herself because she hated sounding like a baby. “In Iraq. In Kuwait.”
Derya repeated the names like she was tasting them. “Koo-wait.”
“Elif,” she whispered again, urgent. “Is Kuwait a person?”
“No,” Elif hissed, and then immediately softened it because Derya’s face crumpled in the dark. “No. It’s a country. A small one.”
“How small?”
Elif thought of the map. She thought of Cyprus, and how Cyprus looked tiny on the television. She thought of Kuwait, which the man on the news had called “small,” and yet it made all these adults in Cyprus sit with their tea untouched and their mouths tight.
“I don’t know,” Elif admitted. “Maybe… like our island but flatter.”
Derya accepted this with a kind of awe. “So they’re fighting on an island too?”
“No,” Elif said quickly, because she wanted at least one thing to be solid. “It’s in the desert. Baba said desert is like sand forever.”
That made Derya perk up in the dark, like a cat hearing the cupboard door.
“Sand,” she whispered, delighted. “Like our beach.”
Elif felt the conversation slide, the way it always did with Derya: from fear to fascination, from danger to play, because play was how you tested scary things without getting burned.
Still, Elif couldn’t stop it.
“Yes,” she whispered reluctantly. “Like the beach.”
“And they made…” Derya’s voice dropped even lower, as if the quilt itself might report her for being too interested. “…the sandbags.”
Elif blinked. The sandbags had been the strangest thing she’d seen all week.
This morning — before the curfew rules tightened, before the adults had started using their serious voices as their main voices — the girls had been allowed to go with Aunt Hatice to the shore road. Not for swimming, not for playing. Just for “air,” Aunt Hatice had said, as if the air might run out if you didn’t grab some while you could.
The beach was still the beach: pebbles and rough sand, the sea doing its endless polishing of the world.
But right near the little break in the dunes, where the fishermen sometimes dragged their boats, there had been a row of lumpy shapes piled like sleeping dogs — sacks tied at the top, the burlap dark with damp, filled heavy. Sandbags. Proper ones. Official ones.
A man in a reflective vest had been handing out empty sacks from the back of a pickup, and a few boys — older than Elif, teenagers with thin arms and new seriousness — were shovelling sand into them, their shoulders rising and falling as if they were digging a grave.
Elif had stared, half curious, half offended that the beach — their beach — was being turned into something else without asking them.
Derya, of course, had immediately wanted to touch.
“Don’t,” Aunt Hatice had snapped, yanking Derya back by the wrist. “Not yours. Don’t be nosy.”
But Elif had seen it anyway. Had stored it away. Had watched how the sacks bulged, how they were stacked in a stagger so they didn’t fall, how the men tamped them down with their boots like making a wall out of the earth.
Now, under the quilt, that image returned with a strange kind of brightness.
“They’re for stopping water,” Derya whispered, very sure of herself.
Elif frowned. “No, that’s not… That’s for floods.”
Derya went still, then whispered, fiercely: “Water is everywhere.”
“Elif,” she added, as if this clinched it. “We are an island.”
Elif couldn’t argue with that. It was one of the few facts in the world that didn’t change, even when the adults’ faces did.
“But Baba said,” Elif whispered, searching for the exact phrasing, because grown-up words felt like keys if you got them right. “Baba said they’re ‘protection.’”
“Protection from what?” Derya asked, and Elif could hear the hope in it — the childish hope that there was a single answer you could point at, like a monster under a bed.
Elif imagined saying: Protection from bombs, and watching Derya’s eyes go wide, watching her start to cry in that silent way she had.
So Elif chose a safer truth.
“From… things,” Elif whispered. “From flying pieces. From… if something happens. They make walls fast.”
Derya nodded hard, the quilt bobbing. “Walls are good,” she whispered, because walls meant a room, a bed, a door you could close.
Then she leaned close, her lips near Elif’s ear.
“Elif,” she said, as if she were about to confess she’d stolen biscuits. “We can make them too.”
Elif gave a tiny laugh that she tried to swallow. “We can’t.”
“We can,” Derya insisted. “We saw how. It’s only sand in a sack.”
Elif’s mind did the quick, practical inventory it always did when Derya made a plan: Do we have sacks? Do we have a shovel? Will we get caught? Will someone get angry? Will someone get hurt?
“We don’t have sacks,” Elif whispered.
“Yes we do,” Derya whispered instantly. “Pillowcases.”
Elif paused.
Pillowcases weren’t burlap sacks. Pillowcases were for drool and hair oil and sleepy faces. But in the dark, with the war as a shadow on the adults’ voices, the idea of turning something soft into something strong had its own magic.
“You can’t take pillowcases,” Elif whispered. “Aunt Hatice will go mad.”
“We can take the old ones,” Derya whispered. “The ones with the hole.”
Elif pictured the laundry basket. The torn pillowcase with the fraying seam that her aunt kept meaning to mend. The one that got used for covering bread sometimes, or as a rag.
“You still need to fill them,” Elif whispered.
Derya’s eyes shone in the small gap of moonlight leaking past the curtain. “Beach.”
Elif stared at her cousin in the dark. Derya looked so small like this, her cheeks round, her hair sticking up in a sleep-mess, the tip of her nose cold. It was ridiculous. It was adorable. It was heartbreaking.
“You can’t go out,” Elif said, trying to anchor them. “Curfew.”
Derya’s mouth twisted. “Not at night. In the morning.”
“Elif,” Derya whispered, even softer, as if the wall might listen. “What if… what if they forget to make enough? What if the beach has holes.”
“The beach doesn’t have holes,” Elif whispered.
Derya glared in the dark. “Yes it does. I made one with my bucket.”
Elif almost laughed again, but the laugh got stuck on something sharp inside her chest. Because Derya wasn’t being silly on purpose. She was trying, in her seven-year-old brain, to find a way to help with something that the grown-ups couldn’t fix with tea or shutting shutters.
Elif took a slow breath, the way her teacher had told her when she got stuck on a hard word.
“Okay,” Elif whispered. “Okay, listen. If we do it, we do it properly.”
Derya’s whole body tensed with joy. “Yes?”
Elif lifted one finger under the quilt, as if Derya could see it. “Rule one. We don’t tell the adults. Because they will say no.”
Derya nodded so hard the quilt rustled. “I won’t tell.”
“Rule two,” Elif whispered, “we only do a little. Like… two.”
“Four,” Derya corrected immediately.
Elif pressed her lips together. Negotiation was part of being nine.
“Three,” Elif whispered.
Derya considered, then nodded solemnly, as if signing a treaty. “Three.”
“Rule three,” Elif whispered, feeling suddenly very important, “we go with shoes. Because there’s glass sometimes on the beach.”
Derya made a small unhappy sound; she liked bare feet. But she nodded again.
Elif’s mind was already building the scene: the morning light, the quiet beach before the fishermen, the pillowcases stuffed and heavy, their arms aching. A little wall they could stack by the dunes like the men had. A secret fort. A proof that they weren’t just small.
But the moment she pictured it, she also pictured her mother’s face if she found out. The sharp intake of breath. The hands on hips. The words that would turn into panic.
What if you got stopped? What if someone thought you were doing something wrong? What if there’s danger?
Because in times like this, even a child with sand could be seen as trouble.
Elif swallowed again.
“Rule four,” she whispered, and her voice softened so much it was almost a breath. “If a grown-up calls, we stop. We don’t run away. We come home.”
Derya looked at her, startled. “Why would we run?”
Elif didn’t answer. Because she knew that fear made people run even when they promised they wouldn’t.
Instead, Elif asked the question she’d been holding back, the one that actually mattered.
“Derya,” she whispered, “are you scared?”
Derya’s mouth opened, then closed. In the dark, Elif could see her trying to decide what kind of answer was allowed.
“I’m not a baby,” Derya whispered finally.
Elif nodded. “I didn’t say you were.”
Derya curled closer, her voice suddenly small. “But… Baba was angry at the radio.”
“He’s always angry at the radio,” Elif whispered, trying to make it light.
“No,” Derya insisted. “Not angry like… like when the football man loses. Angry like… like when the oven burns the bread.”
Elif knew that kind of anger. The kind that had nowhere to go. The kind that filled the room.
Derya went on, words tumbling now that she’d started. “He said— he said, ‘They think we are stupid.’ And Mama said, ‘Shh.’ And then he said, ‘If something happens here, we will—’ and then he stopped. He didn’t finish.”
Elif’s throat tightened. Adults did that a lot lately: they started sentences and then swallowed the endings, like the ending might summon the thing itself.
“He didn’t finish because…” Elif began, then stopped, because she didn’t know.
Derya whispered, “He didn’t finish because we were there.”
Elif couldn’t deny it. Children were everywhere in a house, even when they were meant to be asleep. Children soaked up unfinished sentences the way bread soaked up olive oil.
Elif stared at the dark ceiling and tried to think of something steady to offer. She thought of school. Of her teacher’s neat handwriting. Of the flag in the classroom. Of the way the island looked on the map — small, sure, surrounded by blue.
So she said, “We are safe.”
Derya didn’t answer right away. Then she whispered, “Safe like in a blanket?”
Elif felt tears prick for no reason that made sense, which was exactly why it made sense.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Safe like in a blanket.”
They lay quiet for a moment, listening.
From somewhere in the house, a floorboard creaked softly — an adult shifting, checking. From outside, the sea kept moving, indifferent and faithful.
Then Derya whispered, “Elif?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think the Greek kids are doing curfew too?”
Elif blinked. The question surprised her, not because it was strange, but because it was bigger than most of Derya’s questions. It reached past the village, past the family, into the shape of the island itself.
“I think… yes,” Elif whispered. “Probably.”
“Even if they are Greek?”
Elif hesitated. In rural places, people talked about Greeks as if they were another kind of weather: sometimes near, sometimes far, sometimes good, sometimes bad, mostly just… there. In town, Elif had seen Greek names on shop signs, had heard Greek voices at the market. She had a faint memory of a Greek woman giving her a sweet once when she was very small, a sticky pastry that clung to her fingers.
“We’re all on Cyprus,” Elif whispered finally, as if that was the simplest fact of all.
Derya nodded, and her voice warmed a little. “So if we make sandbags, it’s for them too.”
Elif’s heart did that painful-soft thing again.
“Sure,” Elif whispered. “For everybody.”
Derya sighed in satisfaction, as if this completed the plan in a way that made it righteous.
Then her imagination, unstoppable, galloped on.
“And when the war sees our sandbags,” Derya whispered, “it will go away.”
Elif almost corrected her — war didn’t see, war didn’t have eyes — but she didn’t. Not this time. Because Derya needed the idea that small actions could matter, and Elif didn’t want to be the one to take it away.
Instead, Elif whispered, “Maybe.”
Derya grinned in the dark. “We should make a sign.”
Elif frowned. “A sign?”
Derya nodded eagerly. “A sign that says… ‘Go away war.’ Like on the protest on the TV.”
Elif remembered a flicker of footage: people holding cardboard, chanting in a language Elif didn’t understand, their faces fierce and hopeful. She remembered her mother saying, softly, “They’re brave.”
“What would we write?” Elif whispered.
Derya thought hard. “In Turkish,” she decided. “Because we are Turkish.”
Elif’s mind supplied the words before she could stop them: Savaşa hayır. She’d seen it once, scribbled on a wall near the bus station, half painted over. She’d asked what it meant, and her uncle had told her, quick and quiet: “No to war.”
“Elif?” Derya whispered impatiently. “What does it say?”
Elif leaned close, her lips near Derya’s ear, and whispered the phrase carefully, as if it were a spell.
“Savaşa… hayır.”
Derya repeated it, stumbling a little. “Sa… vasha… hayur.”
“Elif,” Derya whispered, impressed. “You sound like Baba.”
Elif snorted softly. “No I don’t.”
“You do,” Derya insisted. “You sound serious.”
Elif felt a strange pride and also a strange sadness. She didn’t want to sound like Baba when he was serious these days.
She wanted to sound like Baba when he sang to the radio in the kitchen, off-key and happy, when the only thing in the world was olives and bread and someone telling a funny story.
Derya yawned suddenly, the excitement burning off like a match.
“Elif,” she mumbled, voice thick with sleep, “promise we’ll do it.”
Elif looked into the dark and thought of morning.
She thought of the beach with its new ugly wall of sacks. She thought of the men stamping them down, their faces set. She thought of how grown-ups made protection out of whatever they had: burlap, shovels, rules, curfews, silence.
And she thought of two girls with pillowcases, wanting to copy that protection with the tools of children: play, imitation, the belief that helping was possible.
“I promise,” Elif whispered.
Derya’s fingers tightened around Elif’s wrist one last time, then loosened.
“Three sandbags,” Derya breathed, already half gone. “And a sign.”
“Yes,” Elif whispered, though she knew the sign might be too much. The sign might get them caught. The sign might make an adult’s face go pale.
But she also knew that in the morning, Derya would wake with the plan still bright in her eyes, and Elif would have to decide what kind of nine-year-old she was: the kind who said no because the world was scary, or the kind who said yes because the world was scary.
Outside, the curfew held the village in its strict, quiet hand.
Inside, under a quilt with faded roses, the girls built a small, whispered fortress — not of sand, not yet, but of promises — and slowly, as the sea kept breathing and the house settled around them, their words thinned, their thoughts softened, and sleep finally found them where they hid.