Songbirds Read online

  We live only on the ground floor, each of our bedrooms looking out onto the garden. Two years ago, I rented out the storey above me to a man called Yiannis, who made a living by collecting mushrooms and wild greens from the forests. A bit reclusive, but he was a good tenant, always paid his rent on time. The top floor is empty, or full of ghosts, as my mother used to say, which would make my father scoff at her and respond always with the same words: Ghosts are memories. Nothing more, nothing less.

  In the garden, there is boat. There were times in the past, on long nights when I couldn’t sleep, that I would see Nisha sitting out in my father’s tiny fishing boat, The Sea Above the Sky painted in pale blue on its hull. The paint is peeling, and the wood is crumbling. It’s a boat that has made so many journeys. Nisha would sit in it and stare out into the darkness. The boat has one oar – the other has been missing for as long as I can remember – but someone placed an olive tree branch in its place. Because my bed is next to the window, I would watch her for a while through the slits of the shutters, and wonder what was going through her mind, alone like that, in the middle of the night.

  But on this night, she wasn’t there. I looked around to try to determine the cause of the crashing noise. I was half expecting the crunch of glass beneath my feet. But there didn’t seem to be anything broken or out of place.

  The moon illuminated the pumpkins, the winding jasmine and vines, the cactus and fig tree to the far right, near the glass doors of Aliki’s room, and, in the middle, on a slightly raised patch of earth, where the roots have cracked through the concrete, the orange tree – like a queen on her throne. I always felt, growing up, that this tree quietly commanded the garden.

  Everything was so still. Still and quiet. Hardly a leaf moved. I walked around the garden. Near the steps that lead up to Yiannis’s flat, I finally discovered the source of the noise: a ceramic money-box that I’d had since I was a child – it had smashed on the ground, its white shell broken and hundreds of old lira scattered about, making tiny pools of gold.

  It was the kind of money-box that you have to break in order to get to the treasure inside. I remembered dropping in the coins, imagining a day when I would retrieve them. My aunt Kalomira had made it for me in the village of Lefkara, where she lived with her husband, who used to eat the balls of a goat or the brain and eyes of a lamb with lemon and salt. I had watched her spinning the clay on the wheel. Her husband offered me an eye. I refused. Later, she had painted the pot white and added a funny sketch of a dog. It was ready for me and waiting on a shelf when I returned with my mother to see her many weeks later.

  I had never broken it; the time was never right. So, I had left the coins safely inside, like wishes or secret dreams collected from childhood.

  But who had broken it now? How had it fallen from the garden table?

  I decided to go back to bed and ask Nisha to deal with it in the morning.

  I pulled the covers over me and in the dark and quiet of my room, I remembered my mother by my side.

  ‘What will you do with all that money?’ she had asked.

  ‘I will buy wings!’

  ‘Like the wings of a bird.’

  ‘No, more like the wings of a firefly. They will be transparent and when I wear them, I will fly around the garden at night and glow in the dark.’

  She had laughed and kissed me on the cheek. ‘You will be beautiful as always.’

  The memory faded and I suddenly felt a deep pang of guilt for the absence of words and dreams and laughter with my own daughter. How had I lost her?

  Or had she lost me?

  5

  Yiannis

  W

  HEN I GOT BACK FROM hunting it was still early afternoon. I couldn’t wait to tell Nisha about the mouflon ovis I’d seen in the woods. I wanted to describe its incredible beauty, how unusual its golden fur had been and how, oddly, it had had the eyes of a lion.

  The more I said these things in my head, however, the crazier they sounded. I knew that Nisha would listen to me. She would look at me like I was bat-shit crazy, humour me with that slow nod of her head, but she would also suggest we return later that afternoon so that she could see it for herself.

  I knocked on the glass doors of her bedroom and waited. I usually heard her flip-flops on the marble floor, but this time there was silence. I knocked again and waited a few minutes, then again and waited a further five. Maybe she had walked down to the grocery store, or she could have gone to the church. Although she wasn’t Christian, she liked to light a candle and appreciate the peace and quiet. In church there were no demands of her, no tuts, no shaking heads. Nobody disturbed her. The locals just saw a good Christian woman praying amongst other good Christians. In there, she’d said, everyone was equal as long as you were one of them.

  I decided to head upstairs and start cleaning the birds. I sat on a stool in the spare room and, one by one, I plucked out their feathers and threw the birds into a large basin. This was a task that took some time, and one that I never looked forward to. It was tedious work I did automatically, and left my hands covered in feathers and sticky blood. Once this task was complete, I would soak them in water or pickle them in vinegar, place them in various sized containers depending on the order, and take them out to restaurants, hotels and venues around the island.

  As I held one of the birds in my left hand, about to pluck its feathers with my right, I felt an unexpected vibration on my palm. I paused and looked down and noticed that the soft brown feathers on the bird’s chest rose; its right wing twitched. It suddenly felt heavy on my palm, as if I was holding a paperweight, and the vibration seemed to travel through me – along my arteries, up my arm, until I felt a terrible sensation, a deep tremble in my chest.

  I felt nauseous. I dropped the bird onto the table and shifted on the stool, taking long, deep breaths. The bird lay there, breathing, its chest rising and falling more visibly now.

  I was four or five years old, walking with my dad in the wild fields of the mountains. He stopped to pick some hawthorn berries. On the ground something bright caught my eye: a yellow wagtail. Even at this age, I knew the names of some of the bird species, migratory and native, because my grandfather had taught me. I loved the birds. I watched them building their lives high up in the trees and sky. I was desperate to catch them, hold them in my hands, to look closely at their feathers and decipher their amazing colours.

  Here was my opportunity! This yellow wagtail was motionless amongst the brambles. Even as I approached, it didn’t move. I picked it up and nestled it in my palms – it was so dead that it was dry. I examined it: its small, silver-grey bill, brown tail and brown primary feathers; while its chin and breast, belly and under-feathers were the brightest yellow I’d ever seen. Its crown, shoulder and back were a darker yellow, greyish in tone. I examined its eyeline and eyestripe, its open blank eyes, its wing-bars and lores, its twiglike feet.

  I imagined I was holding gold. In my hands I held pure gold.

  *

  I lived simply and saved money so that I could stop the poaching. All my neighbours thought that I made a living picking and selling wild asparagus and mushrooms, wild greens, artichokes and snails – depending on the season. I mean, of course, that kind of foraging was my day job and provided pocket money. But I would never have been able to build a future for myself relying on the measly income of selling vegetables and snails. Not after what had happened. It was a risk I couldn’t take.

  I hated lying to Nisha. I’d managed to keep the poaching a secret for so long: it wasn’t difficult – when I came back with bulging bin bags, people would assume I’d collected other things from the forest. People didn’t question much around here, and many of the houses were empty because so few wanted to live so close to the Green Line. It reminded them of the war, of division, of abandoned homes and lost lives. This isn’t something one wants to be reminded of on a daily basis.

  I had my reasons for choosing to rent a flat there. It was reasonably quiet, most of th
e residents were old, and I knew I could get away with more. And besides, I enjoyed sitting on the balcony in the evening, listening to the bouzouki from Theo’s restaurant, and watching the old men eating, drinking and playing cards. I joined them sometimes, but mostly I kept my distance. In this part of old Nicosia there were brothel-type bars, and when the men finished eating and drinking at the restaurant, they usually made their way to them.

  There was one such bar at the end of our street, called Maria’s. Its windows were frosted, and through the old wooden door wafted the heavy scent of sweat mingled with cigarette smoke and old beer. The barmaid, in tight black clothing, served sliced apples and peanuts, olives and hummus. I have been there twice, on both occasions to meet Seraphim.

  I watched the bird on the counter now, the way its beak opened and closed, the way its matted feathers twitched. I checked its neck and saw that the wound I had made wasn’t that deep. It looked up at me, straight into my eyes, and seemed to be saying, ‘You sick prick, I can see you.’

  I put some water on my finger and brought it to its beak. At first it didn’t drink but I kept my hand there for a while, and, after a few minutes, it dipped its bill into the droplet of water and tilted its head to swallow it. I decided to line a small container with a clean towel and I put the bird in there to rest. I sat there and watched it for a while. It was suspicious of me, kept giving me that look.

  Some time later, I had filled a whole bin-liner with feathers. The little bird was lying still in the container, breathing steadily. The naked birds were piled up in the basin by my side.

  I thought you were a different person, Nisha had said.

  I put some water in the basin, using a hose, and left the birds in there for a while to soak. Then, I dipped my finger into a glass of water and brought it to the little bird’s beak again. This time, it dropped its bill immediately into the water and tilted its head so that it could swallow. It seemed to be treating me less like a killer and this was reassuring. I did it a few more times until it didn’t want any more.

  I thought you were a different person.

  *

  After I had finished cleaning the birds, I made myself some supper and sat on the balcony, eagerly awaiting Nisha’s knock at the door. Most evenings, she would wait for Petra to go to bed before sneaking out into the garden. The staircase was on the far left, behind a large fig tree, so Petra wasn’t able to see it from her window. Nisha didn’t want Petra to know. She wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend. Nisha would slip out at around 11 p.m., unnoticed. She would stay with me for a few hours – we would talk for a while and make love and fall asleep. Then her alarm would go off at 4 a.m., and she would unfurl herself from my arms, go out into the garden and sit in the boat while the sun rose. I was never sure why she didn’t just go straight to her room, but the time she spent alone in the old fishing boat seemed to be important, and I didn’t question it. I would turn off the light and go back to sleep for a few hours.

  When she came last night, things felt different. We sat by the open doors of the balcony, overlooking the street below, with the sound of the bouzouki and a sky full of stars. It was chilly and she had a throw wrapped around her. She was quieter than usual, as if there was something on her mind, but then she started telling me a story about her grandfather and how he’d ended up with a glass eye.

  Nisha was in the middle of saying, ‘. . . and then he chased him with a baseball bat . . .’ when I placed the ring in front of her on the table.

  She looked down at it, then picked it up and put it, not on her finger, but on her open palm. She was gazing down at it so I couldn’t see her eyes, just the soft darkness of her lids and lashes.

  ‘Will you marry me, Nisha?’ I asked.

  She said nothing.

  ‘I’ve had the ring for a while. I wanted to ask you this summer . . .’ I paused there, as I couldn’t finish the sentence: I couldn’t bring myself to remind her of what had happened just two short months earlier. ‘. . . and then you were so heartbroken.’

  She nodded.

  ‘But I meant everything I said.’

  She looked up at me. Straight lips. Hard eyes.

  She didn’t believe me.

  ‘We can still do all of the things we were going to do. We can still go together to Sri Lanka, back to your home. You can be with Kumari. We can have a family.’

  ‘I fell in love with you as soon as I saw you.’ Her voice was barely a whisper.

  I tried to remember the first time she’d seen me. What had I been doing? What had she seen in me in that moment? ‘But I loved my husband too.’ Then the muscles of her jaw clenched, her shoulders and body stiffened. She closed her fingers around the ring, tightening her fist, possessing it.

  Without a further word, without a yes or a no, she walked towards the back door that led to the stone staircase.

  ‘What was I doing when you first saw me?’ I asked.

  She stopped in her tracks, but did not turn around. ‘Feeding the chickens.’

  ‘Feeding the chickens?’

  She didn’t reply. Instead, she turned and looked at me over her shoulder, and then said, ‘You see, I thought you were a different person.’

  She didn’t sit in the boat that night; she went straight to bed.

  *

  Around 11 p.m. I expected to hear Nisha’s gentle tapping on the back door, but it didn’t come. Sunday was one of the nights she usually called Kumari, so I was sure she would appear. She always spoke to her very early in the morning because of the time difference, and she liked to do it at my place due to the fact that I had a tablet and she wanted to be able to see Kumari while she spoke to her. Before she met me, she had talked to Kumari on the phone. To give her some privacy, I would sit out on the balcony and wait for her to finish.

  However, she told me once that it was also her way of keeping the two worlds of her life apart, separate but in harmony at the same time.

  ‘What did you mean by that?’ I’d asked her one night, when she’d finished the call with Kumari. I came back inside and she crawled into bed with me.

  ‘Well,’ she’d replied, ‘downstairs at Petra’s I am nanny to Aliki. But when I come up here – and everyone is asleep and there are no demands of me – I remember who I really am. I can be a real mother to my own daughter.’

  Now, I made myself a coffee and sat on the balcony and listened to the sound of the bouzouki. I took the little bird from the container and sat holding it in my palms. It took a bit of convincing to get it to stay there, but then it slept, breathing slowly, steadily, its tiny body expanding and releasing. When it woke up, I gave it water, drop by drop, until it didn’t want any more.

  An hour passed and still there was no sign of her. At midnight, I decided to go downstairs and knock on her bedroom door.

  On the last step, something got tangled in my feet – one of the stray cats, the black one, the one with the differentcoloured eyes. I lost my balance and grabbed on to a small garden table to stop myself from falling. The table tipped and from it fell an old ceramic money-box that belonged to Petra. It smashed on the ground, the coins spilling out, and when I saw the light of Petra’s room turn on, I rushed back up the stairs, closing the door gently.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t stop thinking about Nisha.

  Where had she disappeared to?

  Had I scared her away?

  You see, I thought you were a different person.

  I sat on the balcony with the bird for the rest of the night, until the sun began to rise behind the buildings to the east. Far away, I imagined the sun’s rays lighting up the sea. And the little bird filled its lungs and began to sing.

  The red lake at Mitsero reflects a sunset, captures it, holds it, even when the sun has died.

  Red lake, toxic lake, copper lake. Mothers and fathers tell their children stories about it. Never go near the red lake at Mitsero! Tales of deep passages underground, where men crawled like animals and died in darkness. Stay away from th
e red lake at Mitsero! By all means, run along the dust paths and into the fields – as long as you avoid the snakes and hornets – but whatever you do, keep well away from the water.

  On this day, in late October, there is a dead hare on the rocky terrain by the lake. So fresh it is still intact. The wind blows its fur the wrong way. Its footprints are scoured into the earth beside it. There are no wounds on its body; it seems to have run out of life, for one reason or another. Soon the hare will return to the earth, but for now it lies still, in a running position, as if it had been hoping to make it further, like we all do.

  What a beautiful lake it is. Copper bleeds into it from the past. The lake is a consequence of what has been left behind: when the mines were abandoned a crater was left. As winter approaches, just as it does now, the crater fills with water. After a rainstorm, rivers of yellow and orange trickle into the red water, changing its colour – this is how the sunset appears.

  But why not a sunrise?

  Because a sunrise is infused with the promise of a new day.

  A sunset holds the expectation of something else – the hush and darkness of the night. The lake exists on the verge of darkness.