Songbirds

by Christy Lefteri

  ‘Can’t you go? Just pack your bags and go.’

  Through her tears, she laughed. ‘It’s not as easy as that. If only you knew.’

  *

  As I was leaving, I recognised a man at the bar. I was sure it was the guy who often visited Yiannis – Seraphim was his name. I assumed they worked together, as he sometimes dropped him off after they’d gone foraging in the forest for snails and mushrooms. He’d greet me politely whenever he saw me. Scruffy guy, uncombed hair. He sat at the bar on his own, drinking whisky. I was about to leave but I had a couple more flyers in my purse and decided to approach him.

  ‘Good evening, Seraphim,’ I said, standing beside him.

  He glanced up. ‘Petra!’ he said, startled. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m looking for my maid,’ I said. ‘Nisha. Do you remember her?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I know Nisha.’

  ‘Have you seen Yiannis lately? Did he mention to you that she’s missing?’

  ‘I can’t say that I can recall that conversation,’ he said. ‘But I am sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Well, since you’re here . . .’ I handed him one of the flyers and he spent a long time looking at the picture of Nisha. The music seemed to go up a few notches, and the belly dancer was still twinkling and jingling in the candlelight.

  ‘Very beautiful woman,’ I heard him say, through all the noise. ‘Don’t you think? It’s her eyes, isn’t it? They seem to know a lot.’

  I didn’t reply. He handed the flyer back to me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘She must have been an asset to your household. But I suspect she will be back, and if she isn’t, don’t be surprised. These women come and go like the rain, you know?’

  He grinned at me but I did not smile back. I didn’t like this man. He was always so courteous when I saw him outside mine waiting for Yiannis to come down, but now I could see an intensity to him that I’d never noticed before. In fact, he seemed to be made of sharp edges – his nose, his cheek bones, even his elbows. There was a sharpness to his entire frame and bone structure; it was evident now in the candle-light. Or was it my mind playing tricks on me? I knew I was becoming more anxious, more unsettled with each passing day that Nisha was away.

  ‘Hey, join me for a drink, won’t you? You’re lucky to catch me here tonight – I’ve been away for a few days, came back a bit earlier than anticipated.’

  ‘I’m OK, thanks,’ I said, ‘so, when you’re not away, do you come here a lot?’

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I’m asking because I wonder if you ever saw Nisha here? You see, the old lady who lives next door to me told me that Nisha was heading this way the night that she vanished.’

  ‘What night was that?’ he said.

  ‘Two weekends ago, on the Sunday.’

  Again, he was silent for a while, thinking. ‘I wish I could tell you that I’ve seen her, but I haven’t.’

  *

  I inhaled the cold air out on the street. The night was fresh and I walked away briskly from the bar. I could still hear the voices of the women inside. I was eager to get home, but as I passed Muyia’s workshop, I remembered the sculpture. Suddenly, I had to see it again. I felt compelled to go inside – the entrance, as usual, was gaping open. It was so dark in there I had to be careful not to trip over the debris on the floor. Slowly my eyes adjusted and I could make out the vague shape of the worktop, feeling with my hands to find the light switch on one of the lamps.

  The sculpture of the mother and child had been covered in a white cloth. I lifted off the sheet and sat down on the stool opposite, struck again by the resemblance to Nisha. I could almost feel the energy emanating from her; so many emotions, she had a history, she had a whole life. And she had an enduring and powerful love for the child in her arms. A love that could not be replaced. Why had Muyia made this? It was Nisha, to be sure, her heart-shaped face, her fiery eyes. Even the tiny dimple in her right cheek. I reached out and touched her hand. I wanted her to speak. I was desperate that she would break out of her wooden case and speak to me.

  ‘Nisha,’ I said, gently. ‘Tell me where you are.’

  I waited as if I might hear her voice. I looked at her unmoving face, but I heard only the sound of the wind – nothing else, just the wind through leaves.

  I covered up the statue and headed back home.

  In the village there is a guest house: a small, rickety building with brown shutters and whitewashed walls in the back garden of a widow’s home. There have been no guests, though, for many years. Once in a blue moon, someone will call from a distant land and make a booking and the old woman will take down the details in a black notebook she keeps by the phone. Then she will go to great efforts to clean, and fluff up the towels and cushions. She will place fresh tea-bags and honey and sugar on a tray, and lay sugared almonds on the pillows and bake pistachio cakes, which she’ll wrap in cellophane decorated with paper daisies and display on the dressing table. She will sweep the leaves and dust from the patio and leave a tourist brochure by the bed.

  It is dark when the phone rings. A young man, calling from a hotel in Beirut, with one of those transatlantic accents she has only ever heard on TV. He is travelling around Europe with his new wife, they will be arriving next week, all being well. The old lady jots down his name and number and date of arrival in the black notebook beneath a doodle of a clown riding a donkey that her granddaughter has drawn.

  The nights are getting longer and colder and she goes out to collect the washing from the line. The children across the street have gone in and their maid is out picking apples from the tree in the dark. A breeze blows. Good evening, she says, but her voice is carried away.

  Along the path a mist settles and darkness settles too, as there are no houses there to light up the way. Further along, there are only trees and clouds and sky, until the earth becomes jagged and dry and drops down to the red water of the lake, which is as black as the night and as the empty eye socket of the hare glaring up at the sky.

  16

  Yiannis

  O

  N SATURDAY, BEFORE DAWN, SERAPHIM picked me up in his van. We drove to the Akrotiri base, an hour and a half away. Our ride was mostly silent: we were sleepy; Seraphim looked like he’d been out late. I was biding my time. I wanted his full attention for our conversation.

  This time he’d brought with him four calling birds in two cages: three blackcaps and a blackbird. These caged callers would have been caught and kept in the dark for months so that when they were finally taken out into the light, they would sing their hearts out, unwitting decoys to lure as many birds as possible into the trap.

  The cages were in the back of the van with black blankets draped over them. I dozed until we reached the wetland, an area of 150 hectares known for its bird life and protected by various agencies because of it. If we succeeded, it would be a good hunt, but we had to be careful.

  With Nisha gone, however, and the memories of her tugging at my insides, I began to feel nauseous at the thought of killing all those birds, imagining them trapped in the mist nets.

  They flap and they flap and they try to fly, but the sky has caught them.

  I thought of the little bird back home, how it trusted me now.

  If Seraphim smelled my apprehension, there’d be trouble, so I pushed these thoughts aside. There had been another arson attack a few days ago: a man named Louis, who had never been suited to hunting. They had set his car on fire, like the man before him, but this time Louis’s teenage son was in there, apparently sneaking a cigarette. The boy had managed to get out, but with a badly burnt arm. It was all over the local news. There was an ongoing investigation, but, of course, Louis wouldn’t let on what he knew. He would never tell the police anything.

  I knew Seraphim had been the one to snitch on him. Well, of course he had. He is a weasel, this man: stealthy, sharp-eyed, cunning, shifty, sneaky, scheming. Above all, and this was the most dangerous part, he was loyal to the men in c
harge. I had met Louis – he came out with us a couple of times. He had still been learning the trade, and we introduced him to some good poaching locations. But then he wanted out, and Seraphim was pissed off – this Louis had been his next prodigy. ‘Best to snitch before they snitch,’ was his motto – he’d said this with a wide grin and narrow eyes. The arson attacks were meant as a warning.

  ‘You’re even quieter than usual,’ Seraphim finally said. ‘Thinking about Nisha?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I could see the moon in the stretch of water outside the window.

  *

  Seraphim parked the van and we pulled the mist nets and poles from the back of the van, carrying them across the muddy terrain. We returned for the calling birds. There’s a British military base there and the English are very strict about hunting, regularly searching the area for poachers, so we had to be extra careful. It was unlikely, though not impossible, that someone would be checking so early in the morning – it was 3.30 a.m., and because the land was so flat and open, we would see anyone approaching from quite a distance. If we stayed vigilant, we would not be caught.

  Seraphim wore a head-torch and led the way. We put the nets up, securing them to eight-foot poles. Then he turned off the torch and carefully lifted the blankets from the cages. The birds were quiet, as it was still dark out. The blackbird’s feathers were a deep ebony, like the night. I suddenly had the urge to open the door of its cage, to let it free so it could merge with the sky.

  We placed their cages on the ground of the shimmering wetlands, just beneath the mist nets that hovered like ghosts above the earth, then we found a secluded spot nearby among some pine trees and rosemary bushes. Seraphim had brought a small gas canister and I took out from my rucksack bread, haloumi and olives. We toasted the food on sticks over a small fire. Shadows from the flames licked over Seraphim’s face.

  ‘That Sunday, when Nisha went missing,’ I began, and he nodded, still staring at the olives on the stick that he held over the fire. ‘Did she come to meet you?’

  Seraphim looked at me now. ‘Why would you ask me that?’

  ‘I was chatting to someone, a friend, and they thought Nisha was on her way to meet you that evening. Around ten thirty.’ ‘Why would Nisha be coming to meet me?’

  ‘I was hoping you would be able to answer that question.’

  Seraphim was silent for a while. The darkness was thick behind him.

  ‘Whoever told you that was not telling you the truth.’

  ‘Why would they lie?’

  ‘They might not be lying. They are just not telling truth. They may have had their wires crossed. If, on the other hand, they did lie deliberately, I assume they have their reasons for doing so, but I cannot possibly begin to speculate because I have no idea who this person is.’

  Then Seraphim lay back with his hands behind his head, signalling that our conversation was over. He told me to stay alert and closed his eyes to nap. He fell asleep quickly, his mouth hanging open and emanating a faint snore.

  The land stretched for miles all around, dark, with shivers of silver where the moon caught the water. I watched as a sliver of light emerged on the horizon, darkness becoming less opaque. At this first sign of day, the caged birds began to sing. Their voices rose in a swelling, melodic chorus – a burst of music after so much time in silence.

  And that’s when I heard it again: the voice of a woman, calling. Calling something which I could not understand, her voice mixed with the song of the birds

  I stood up. Looked around. I shouldn’t have left Seraphim alone, sleeping like that, but I instinctively followed the voice to the mist nets. When I got to the water’s edge, it ceased abruptly. There didn’t seem to be anyone there. In every direction, the land was open and empty.

  Then the birds filled the sky – their music filled the sky. They swooped down in their thousands, their wings alight in the sunrise – gold and red and blue. They veered down sharply, diving towards the calling birds, to the song that was luring them to their death, down, down, down to the water’s edge.

  I stood frozen, watching them as their journeys ended, the mist net suddenly enveloping them. So many wings tangled, so many birds suspended mid-flight. Their song changed – from trills to shrieks, or so it seemed to me. But some, I thought, continued their melodic song, as if the sky might just open up again and release them.

  ‘What are you playing at?’ a voice said behind me. I turned. Seraphim was there, fire in his eyes.

  ‘I thought I heard something,’ I said.

  ‘So you leave me sleeping on my own? What if somebody had come? I would have been done for!’

  ‘I made a mistake.’

  He stared at me without blinking. ‘A mistake? A mistake is forgetting to bring the gas canister or the olives.’ His eyes narrowed. The birds’ cries filled the air around us. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s not dwell on it now. We’ve caught enough.’ He glanced at the net, sizing up the success of the hunt. ‘Let’s just take down what we have and head home.’

  We brought the nets down and began pulling the birds from it, killing them one by one as we did so. We did this without speaking, in synchronicity with one another. I was freeing the birds from the net, passing each one to Seraphim so that he could bite its neck and put it into the black bin-liner. I could feel each one trembling in my hands, tiny heart racing, wings twitching and beating in my palms. The soft touch of feathers on my skin. There must have been twenty different species. But I was careful not to hesitate – I didn’t want Seraphim to notice anything was amiss. The birds were still singing, though. That was what disturbed me the most. They sang until their last breath.

  *

  I got home around 9 a.m., fed the bird, and lay down. I was so tired. The conversation with Seraphim had been unsatisfying. Was he lying? Had Spyros been mistaken about what Nisha had said? Or was Seraphim trying to throw me off the scent of something else? I missed Nisha keenly.

  I fell asleep with dreams of her in the wetlands. She stood in the water, which came to her ankles. A clear blue sky behind her. She was wearing her nightdress of beeralu lace with the garden of white flowers, the one Chaturi had made her. She was saying something to me, her lips moving, but I heard nothing.

  ‘What is it Nisha?’ I asked.

  She pointed at something behind me, up in the sky. When I turned to look, the sky became black, it was suddenly night. When I looked back at Nisha, she was gone. In her place, the moon hung over the horizon, so big I thought I could reach out and touch it. I noticed its reflection in the water, painfully bright; a silver pool of light in the middle of black water. I took my shoes off and walked in: I wanted to find her, but when I got there, I saw that what I thought had been the moon’s refection was in fact a deep well. A well that seemed endless. It was not a dark well. A bright white light glowed from within, illuminating its cobbled walls, spilling out onto the water. From it came immense heat.

  I woke up drenched in sweat, a bright winter sun shining through the window, bathing me in its light. The little bird was sitting on my chest, chirping gently to itself. I stroked its soft feathers. Winter was coming. October had passed and Nisha was still missing. The bird sang to the sun and for the first time in many years, I began to cry.

  I heard the sound again, the woman’s cry, and I realised that this time it was coming from inside me, drifting around the dark corners of my mind. It was a pure and unpredictable sound: like the wind, it ebbed and flowed, it quietened down and came back with force. The sound was coming from a place that didn’t belong just to me. It was such a strange and terrifying sensation that I jumped off the bed, the bird fluttering to the ground. And the sound of its wings, as soft as they were, startled my mind back to reality, back to the room I was in with the winter sun beaming through the window.

  I felt nauseous, acid coming up from my stomach, burning my oesophagus. I went to the bathroom and vomited in the toilet. As I flushed it, I remembered the blood and grey tissue in the toilet
bowl – the child that would never be.

  I lay down on the bed again. After the night of the miscarriage, Nisha changed. She would come late at night, as usual, and lay down where I was lying now, hands crossed over her stomach, protectively – like the position in which one places a corpse, except her hands were on her stomach instead of her chest.

  She would look out of the window and watch summer fade, each passing day an equation: ‘On this day,’ she would say, ‘I would have been eight weeks pregnant, but instead I have been empty for seven days.’ Or, ‘On this day I would have been nine weeks pregnant, but I have been empty for fourteen days.’

  At 5 a.m., she would wake up and speak to Kumari on the phone. It would have been 7.30 in the morning in Sri Lanka and Nisha wanted to catch her daughter before her school day. I would be half-asleep, the feel of Nisha’s warmth still beside me on the bed. She would sit at the desk and her conversation and the light from the tablet would reach me. Sometimes my eyes would flicker open and I would see her silhouette, hear her words in Sinhalese and Kumari’s response. Though I didn’t understand the language, I got to know their tones and rhythms. I could understand if they were having a joke, or an argument, or a light-hearted conversation about school or Kumari’s homework or her friends. I could tell when Nisha was annoyed about something, or when she was firm and insistent. Sometimes I heard love in her voice; other times concern, joy, irritation, determination. Kumari was sometimes cheeky, sometimes agreeable, often so chatty that Nisha couldn’t get a word in edgeways; other times quieter and solemn, moody. There were a few occasions when I could even hear the first signs of adolescent rebellion sneaking in. All the emotions that one would expect between a mother and a burgeoning teenager, but all of this was through a screen.

  Many early mornings Nisha would teach Kumari English. They each had copies of The Secret Garden and they would take turns reading the pages aloud. They sometimes both got stuck on a word, but Nisha kept a dictionary by my bedside – a gift from her friend, Nilmini – and she would consult it for assistance. Their chatting drifted over my dreams like the echo of a birdsong.