‘Sunday night,’ he said. Not a question, but a statement. But before I could say anything else, he’d brought the van to a swift halt, turned off the engine and opened the driver’s side door.
Vyacheslav was waiting for us as usual by one of the boats, holding his silver thermal flask, smoking a cigarette and reading the news on his phone, his hair so blond it was almost white. He grinned when he saw us, throwing the butt on the ground and greeting us as usual.
Seraphim and I pulled a huge, rolled-up mist net from the back of the van, one side each, rather like we were carrying a body. I kept looking over my shoulder, sweating. These sea-hunts were the most dangerous. If we were caught, we’d be fined 20,000 euros and land ourselves in jail. Each time we went out to sea, I thought: Surely this time we will be caught.
Vyacheslav began to unwind the mist net in order to attach either end to the two boats. He would sail with Seraphim, as usual, and I would go out alone. I think he preferred Seraphim’s company.
‘It’s clear now,’ Vyacheslav said, looking up at the sky, his eyes narrowing, his face creasing into a big smile. ‘This’ll be a good hunt.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ Seraphim said. We all spoke to each other in English, in our respectively heavy accents.
Vyacheslav lit another cigarette and recited the main headlines of the day, something he always did, while Seraphim made sure that the nets were attached securely. I placed a couple of calling devices in each boat.
Thousands of migrating birds sweep down as the sun begins to rise, coming to the island to stop for a rest on their arduous journey across the Mediterranean Sea. This island, this little sea rock, is along one of the major migration routes. The birds see the lights of the town and fly towards them. Some birds even use the coast as a leading line, helping them to find their way. The mist nets are so fine that the birds fly straight into them. Every attempt to escape causes further entanglement. It’s not just blackcaps we catch, but all kinds – the nets are indiscriminate. Summer is relatively quiet, but during passage times, particularly autumn and spring, more birds move through – so many in fact, that we make a killing.
As we sailed out to sea, I was suddenly hit by the feeling that I was drifting further away from Nisha: that some invisible cord that kept us together was being stolen by an invisible but powerful current. She always seemed to know what I was feeling, or rather she carried my feelings, even the ones I didn’t know I had. She would rest her chin on her fist, lying on my bed, or sitting at the dining table, and look into me with her lion eyes.
‘What’s making you so sad?’ she would say, or ‘Why are you angry today?’ or ‘Where have you disappeared to?’ She knew my moods better than I knew them myself. The only other person who had ever paid me that kind of attention was my grandfather, when I was a boy. He was always so aware, as we walked through the woods: where I was stepping, whether I was too excited and would frighten the animals, whether I was tired, hungry. Once, after my dog had died, he let me talk about her all the way from Troodos to the East coast. We got off the bus, and although I was animated and told him joyful stories, he knew from the way I dragged my feet that my heart was heavy, and that when we went for our swim I would have sunk if I hadn’t given him those memories to carry.
Last summer, I had shown Nisha a photo of myself when I was six, taken in front of the farmhouse in Troodos. There was a cow in the yard just behind me, and I was crouching down tying my laces and looking at the camera, smiling. It was my mother who had taken that photo; I remember her carrying my sister on her hip. She had come back from taking my father and grandfather their lunch in the fields, her face red, a scarf tied around her head. Nisha cried when she saw it. She was sitting naked on my bed by the open doors of the balcony, the air hot, sticky, full of night jasmine and the perfume of women who roamed the streets. It was nearly midnight and the music from Theo’s drifted up to us. We had the fan rotating between us. Her yellow eyes had welled up and tears dropped down onto my wrist as I held the photo.
‘Why are you crying?’
‘You were just so beautiful and sweet,’ she said, wiping her face with the back of her hands. Then she lay down in my arms and I could feel her tears on my chest. I held her tight, not knowing if I was comforting her or if in fact it was she who was comforting me. I didn’t really understand what had made her cry. What had she seen in my face from all those years ago? What unfathomable dreams had she projected into the future?
As the boats went further out into the water, broadening the distance between us, the mist net stretched out, almost invisibly, just above the sea, between the two boats. The lights of the town became smaller as we drifted further, steering the boats so that the distance between them remained stable and we were running parallel to each other. It took some careful sailing not to tear the nets or let them droop, but I’d had a lot of practice and Vyacheslav had taught me well.
Once we had gone out far enough, Vyacheslav raised his hand in the air and we turned off the engines. The boats bobbed on the soft waves now, and we waited. The horizon was still black.
You were just so beautiful and sweet.
I must have fallen asleep because when I woke up I saw a thousand wings silhouetted against the sky, the sun cracking through the edge of the world. The birds that flew highest missed the net and made it to the shore; the others, the hundreds that skimmed the water or flew a few metres above it – their journeys ended there. They crashed into an invisible barrier, the fine threads of our massive net, and there they would flap, screech and cry. But there they would stay.
Before the sun rose completely, we steered our boats back to shore and the three of us pulled the net out of the water. Some birds were drowned, others were still trying to escape. We lay the net out on the sand and began to remove the birds, one by one. Amongst the blackcaps were robins and redwings, grey and purple herons, honey buzzards, red-footed falcons, goldcrests and some large wintering black gulls.
We threw the dead into the bin bags and the others – the ones that were still moving – we bit into their necks, severing the artery for a quick death, and adding their bodies to the rest. Other birds were still coming in to land on the shore, and tiny sparrows hopped beside us on the sand. A stray cat with bulging eyes came to sniff out what was happening, winding its way between us, head-butting our knees and elbows for attention. Seraphim threw it one of the birds and the cat took it in its jaw and sprinted off.
‘You shouldn’t do that,’ Vyacheslav said, with creased brows. ‘You might as well throw the vermin money.’
‘It’s only one!’ Seraphim laughed. ‘Keep your hair on, as they say in English. Cats are hunters, just like us.’
‘They hunt to survive and they hunt for the sake of it, depending on their circumstances,’ I said. I’d been quiet until that point, and the two men flicked their eyes towards me without much interest and continued with their task. The sky was lightening now and we had to be faster – we had to have all this sorted and cleared before people in the town began to wake up.
On the way home, I wanted to talk to Seraphim more about Nisha’s disappearance, but he was distracted, giddy from our big take of the morning. He was jabbering incessantly about the plans for our next hunt: we would go to the Akrotiri peninsula, a good place to trap – being part of the British military base there, it was largely undeveloped. We would take lime sticks and mist nets to the Akrotiri marsh reserve and to the pools behind Lady’s Mile beach. We would need quite a lot of lime sticks, so he was going to prepare them in advance.
It was Seraphim who kept our small organisation running, and above him were men who gave him orders. We had the bags of birds with us in the back: Seraphim and I would take a few bags each, clean them, and then give Vyacheslav a cut of the profit. Vyacheslav was exempt from cleaning the birds because the boats belonged to him. We would each make about 3,000 euros from the morning’s efforts.
As I got out of the van, I paused with the passenger door open. ‘Sunday,’ I
said to him. ‘Nisha disappeared on Sunday. Was there anything particular about that day? Do you remember anything?’
‘No, why would I?’ he said.
‘Because earlier you said it wasn’t possible. That Nisha wouldn’t have run away. What did you mean by that?’
‘I think you misheard me, my friend. You know what these women are like – they come and go like the rain.’
Not Nisha, I was going to say. But I didn’t.
*
When I got home, I brought the bags of birds upstairs and placed them in the spare room. I proceeded to the kitchen to check on the little bird. It was sleeping. I stroked its feathers. I imagined that birds have no memory, that they live only in the present, that the past washes away behind them and disappears like each wave on the ocean.
I thought of the bags of dead birds in the spare room. I had no energy to clean them, so I stored them in the industrial-sized fridge, and I decided to leave the job for the next day.
I had a long nap as I hadn’t slept the night before. When I got up, it was already dark. I rang Nisha a few more times. Again, it went straight to voicemail. I made myself some dinner of couscous and snails and sat out on the balcony to eat, the throw that Nisha always used over my shoulders. The blanket smelled of her – wood polish and bleach, spices and milk. She felt so far away. Where had she gone? What had Seraphim meant? Did he know something? You never knew with him.
Seraphim is the son of an old family friend. When I was a kid, he would come with his parents and sister to visit a couple of times a year. Being two years older than me, he either ignored me or bossed me around. Then our families drifted apart, and I went off to university in Athens. When I returned, I moved to the heart of the city centre. Years later, after I lost my job at Laiki and started renting the flat above Petra’s, I bumped into him again in the grocery store down the road. He recognised me immediately, embracing me, whacking my back with his big hands. He told me about his Jaguar (he collected antique cars), his property (a sprawling villa), and his beautiful Russian wife. It seemed that there should have been a parenthesis there too, but he left it out.
I was envious. There he was, his life pretty much sorted, while mine was falling apart.
‘So, how are you, my friend?’ he said. ‘I heard you’re flying high in the financial world?’
I had been about to nod and simply agree with him, but then he added, ‘Or has this crisis been a blow?’
So, I told him, matter-of-factly, that yes, in fact, it had been a blow. I didn’t mention, however, that I’d been looking for work with zero success and wasn’t even sure how I was going to make next month’s rent payment to Petra.
He nodded, thoughtfully. ‘And I heard you got married . . . and so young!’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she’s wonderful. Very supportive.’ I didn’t tell him that I’d lost her too.
The first loss had led to the second, and those two had in fact led to a third – the loss of my naivety, which in reality I should have outgrown already. It was only when we knew each other better that I confessed to him that she had, in fact, left me.
‘Do you live around here now?’
Yes, I had said, and told him the name of the street.
‘Great. We’re practically neighbours.’ He had hesitated for a moment. ‘I’ll tell you what . . . I have a proposal for you. I think you’ll like it. Will you meet me at eleven thirty tomorrow evening?’ From his pocket he took out a crumpled-up receipt, flattened it out on the grocery story counter, and wrote down the name of a street, the name of a bar and his mobile number. He also wanted to take mine – ‘Just to be sure,’ he said.
I wanted to go and meet him. There was something about him, some energy, that said: Follow me and I’ll show you a life that’s better. He had an infectious smile and his eyes always shone with possibilities.
When I looked at the scribbled address, it turned out to be Maria’s. I should have known from the time he wanted to meet – it ran until the early hours.
*
Maria’s bar was an open ground for sex workers, pimps and drunk old men. Just off the main street with dark windows and a wooden door. On the dance floor, an older woman threw tiny pieces of paper into the air as if she was showering herself with confetti.
Seraphim was sitting at the bar talking to the barmaid, who was dressed in her habitual tight black. He spotted me straightaway and waved. He had clearly been looking out for me.
I joined him. Without asking what I wanted, he ordered a couple of beers. He was grazing on some nuts. He pushed the bowl towards me. ‘Help yourself,’ he said.
‘No, thank you.’
‘You must try them. Fresh from the trees. Lightly roasted. No added salt.’
I felt that I couldn’t refuse. It was the same when we were kids. One time, when I was thirteen and he was fifteen, he convinced me to climb a tree. He told me about a beautiful bird he had seen up there, a rare species that he’d never encountered before. Of course, I was excited, and I went up quite easily, as I was agile and strong. But coming down was a problem. Trees are notoriously difficult to climb down. I was stuck up there for a good hour before my grandad came up the hill carrying two bales of hay on his shoulders, which he placed on the ground below me so that they would break my fall.
The nuts did look good and I’d been anxious about meeting him, curious about what this proposal might be, so I’d hardly eaten. Now I took a handful of them and threw them in my mouth.
The barmaid placed two bottles on the bar and Seraphim reached for his wallet to pay. I was his guest, he said, he would be treating me. I drank the beer quickly. On the stool beside us, a man with grey hair was playing with the hair of a young woman, her arms hung around his neck. She was dark skinned and looked barely eighteen. A few seats down a bald man was trying to kiss the neck of another woman – she looked familiar, but I couldn’t think where I’d seen her. Seraphim ordered another couple of beers. This time the barmaid placed in front of us bowls of sliced apples, olives and crisps. This time he didn’t pay. We were drinking the beers at top speed and the barmaid kept replacing the empty ones.
On a table behind us, two beautiful women sat in the laps of two very old men. ‘Those are lovely Romanian girls,’ Seraphim said. ‘Not too expensive.’
The beer had started to go to my head. So far we’d spoken about nothing much. He had told me a bit more about his cars. A Porsche 911, in mint condition. ‘There’s magic in that car,’ he said. ‘You should come with me some time, we’ll go up to the mountains. You’ll see its power.’ He told me about his Mercedes SL 300 Gullwing. ‘One of the first sports cars of the post-war era. Silver. Doors open up like the wings of a bird. You can fly in that thing.’ He preferred not to drive that one around too much, he said. He kept it in tip-top condition in his garage, took it out for a spin once a week, to keep it alive and breathing.
Even slightly pissed, I had been struck by how shabby his clothes were. His T-shirt was old and worn, as were his jeans; his hair barely brushed, it flicked out in various directions. With all that money I wondered why he wore clothes that looked twenty years old.
The beers kept coming, and I was drinking more slowly now. Two Filipino women approached us: one younger, heavily made up; the other, slightly older woman, hardly wore a speck of makeup and her skin shone in the dim lights. Seraphim was well acquainted with them. There was a lot of small talk.
‘When shall I take you two out in my car? Seraphim had said.
The older woman smiled politely but didn’t answered. The younger one brushed her hair away from her forehead and placed both of her hands between her knees. These small movements told me that the women were not comfortable. I downed another beer. The two women disappeared into the crowd.
Seraphim ordered couscous from one of the barmaids.
‘Couscous?’ I said, and he winked.
In a short while she returned carrying a ceramic pot on a silver tray. She placed the pot and two small plates and cutler
y on the bar.
‘Have a look at this, my friend,’ said Seraphim. ‘In season. Organic. You must love them.’
He opened the pot and dug into it with a fork – pulling out a tiny poached songbird. Steam wound in ribbons out of the pot, mixing with the cigarette smoke already in the air. He delicately placed a couple on my plate and a couple on his. Then he threw one into his mouth, crunching into its bones with relish.
‘Go for it,’ he said. Mouth full. ‘You must like them. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t. Didn’t you have them when you were a boy?’ He spat on the counter.
I told him that I did. And that I knew that it was illegal to eat these birds.
‘I’m not too hungry,’ I said. ‘I had a huge meal before I came out. Still bloated.’
‘Looks like it might be harder for me to get you on my side than I thought.’ Seraphim swallowed the last bit of bird and used the nail of his pinkie finger to remove meat from his tooth. I felt like gagging.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘These songbirds – how shall I put it? They are on your plate courtesy of me. You can say that I’m keeping the tradition alive. But I catch them in their thousands. Another pair of hands would double my income. It’s just a few traps a week during the hunting seasons.’ He paused, considering me. ‘After all, how did you think I lived so well?’
I didn’t respond.
‘I see your dapper clothes and your good looks are your cover-ups. But you’re struggling, my friend – don’t think I can’t see that. I saw it in your eyes in the grocery store. It was right there, slashed across your face like a huge scar.’
Once again, I said nothing. But Seraphim had sussed me out. It was his mighty skill.
‘You don’t have to give me an answer now. Think about it, and I’ll call you in a week. If you say yes, we’ll start straight away. I need an apprentice. Someone I can trust. You’ve always been trustworthy, haven’t you?’ He grinned broadly for a moment and then pushed the plate towards me. ‘If nothing else, at least try one. It’ll take you right back to your childhood.’
Songbirds Page 4