The Bird's Child

by Sandra Leigh Price

  ‘And a little butchery, pigs mainly, not that you are familiar with them, begging my pardon.’

  No pork for the likes of him. No bacon, no ham, no crackling, no sausage, no trotters or knuckles rendered down to stock. He looked at me then and his eyes narrowed. I had him rattled.

  The Jew fiddled with his cuffs: he was in need of cufflinks. He twisted his wrists uncomfortably, trying to catch the buttonhole. ‘Where were you in the war then? Lily mentioned …’

  Ha, she had been talking about me; that was heartening. How had her voice sounded when she’d spoken of me? A hint of endearment? A little curiosity, her voice purring for me?

  ‘The Holy Land and France.’ I wasn’t going to tell him that the only holy land I had found was between a woman’s thighs, exploring Eliza, the knife thrower’s girl, as we baptised each other in my canvas bed in the shearers’ quarters, the galvanised-iron walls pinging from the heat and our sighs.

  I had decided that I would take the disgraced knifeman’s place in the routine. I needed a change from the sheep and their constant bleating; I was made for the finer things of the flesh. I had a steady hand and Eliza was docile as a lamb. She took a handful of balloons out of her bag and tied them at random points around the wheel where the knives should find their home. She cut a paper doll as large as herself and pinned it to where only days before she had bled. At first I hit everything, until gradually the newspaper girl flapped a sigh of relief in the wind, without a rip or tear.

  It was a quiet evening when Eliza strapped herself to the wheel and trusted me to tie her bonds even tighter. She had taken to wearing the shirt with which I had staunched her wound, my best bloody shirt, but I didn’t begrudge her for she had already well repaid the loan …

  ‘Lily?’ the Jew said, his voice barely audible over the complaining scream of the boiling kettle.

  Lily, Lily. Right behind him was a vision that made my mouth turn to paper. Lily stood there like an apparition in a yellowing wedding gown. Their reflections loomed in the mirror. With a trick of the light, she was the smoke, he was shadow.

  ‘Lovely couple, don’t you think?’ Miss du Maurier piped from behind them. My voice had been extinguished.

  Lily smoothed the satin with her palms. When she turned, my eyes tracked the ivory buttons snaking down her back and wondered what it would be like, one by one, to release them.

  SIX

  Ari

  Miss du Maurier had offered me her father’s morning suit, which she had retrieved from a cupboard under the stairs, a film of dust coating the surface of its box. She bustled me up the stairs.

  ‘Where should I change?’ I called out behind me.

  ‘Use mine.’ Lily called. ‘Top of the stairs, first right.’

  I swung open the door and was surprised to see how bare it was. There was her sunhat hanging on a hook behind the door, a couple of books sitting on the marble-lipped fireplace. I ran my fingers across the spines, feeling the compression of gold lettering. A pair of candle stubs sat fixed in old chipped saucers. Her silver hourglass-heeled shoes sat on the mantel, strangely disconcerting and fey, as if they had stepped through the glass themselves.

  I tore off my jacket and kicked off my shoes, undid the buttons of my trousers, pulled my shirt from the back of my neck. I looked at the floor: my tallit katan, my tzitzit, the trappings of observant men, were crumpled together, the threads tangled like reeds around the dark puddle of the legs of my trousers, the one blue thread like a river. Each knot in the thread was a mitzvah, a commandment as given to Moses. They sat like an accusation on the floor. My uncle had showed me how to tie them, doing it for me until my small fingers had the dexterity to do it for myself, his hands guiding mine. I caught sight of my near naked self in the long cheval mirror and it made me uneasy. The lacy quilt of her bed stretched behind me, a sea.

  As I lifted the suit out of the box, the camphor flew sharply to my nostrils and the tissue paper the suit was wrapped in fell away like a ribbon cut at an opening. I slipped the trousers on and buttoned up the shirt. A hint of cologne lingered for an instant and was gone. The coat skimmed my shoulders as if the suit had been cut to my measure. In the mirror it wasn’t me that looked out, but a black and white image come to life in the silver shimmer of photographic paper. If my uncle looked out of my window would he be able to see me? Was someone always watching me? Billy Little always seemed to be somewhere nearby, a repeating shadow. Of course the man had a right to be wherever he wanted in his place of residence, but something didn’t sit quite right. Was it his silhouette I had spied through the cobwebbed window when Lily and I had practised with the birds in the shed? Even when I was on my own, he would hover over the pegging of his freshly laundered shirts on the clothesline, and then sit watching them dry on the back steps, smoking his cigarette with an almost deliberate slowness. I was glad I’d hung up a curtain. I had read about the lengths magicians will stretch to filch others’ secrets, sending spies and stealing notebooks. I wasn’t fool enough to think we were at that point yet, but I didn’t want to be sabotaged before we began.

  I felt I had been preparing for this all my life. The line of letters on my hand was a compass pointing in the direction I should follow, my true north, but could I really fool myself into being a magician in borrowed clothes? In the last century, Robert-Houdin had first worn evening wear to match his audiences: the magic of theatres in fancier dress, a world away from the fairground. Houdini had worn Robert-Houdin’s name. But whose name did I wear? I had left it behind with my mother, when she had been slain in the preposterous name of religion.

  To my uncle, his beliefs were protection, a flaming sword to divine the way. For my aunt, it was the keeping of a home as you would the temple, immaculate. But I didn’t know what I believed. All I understood was the magic in the old stories – Aaron writing his name upon a rod that grew into a blossoming tree, Moses parting the water with his staff, the desert well that appeared at Miriam’s bidding. Miriam, as a girl, saved a baby by her cunning, with a basket, a river and a passerby. It was my mother who had first told these stories to me, the wonder in her shining face making me feel she had witnessed such acts with her own eyes. When I heard these stories, even in my uncle’s commanding tone, I was in thrall to them, feeling that somehow they could drag the past into the present, and with them bring back the missing, the lost.

  A button plucked itself from the shirt and spun on the floor, a mother-of-pearl coin seemingly conjured from nowhere. Had my father been a fairground master of such legerdemain, making coins dance through my mother’s hair as if they were butterflies? Is that why she chose to mark me so? I picked up the button and slid it into a pocket of the tailcoat – inside I could feel the silk give way in my hands, thanks to the appetites of moths. In the pocket was a programme from a long-ago performance and I held its crumbling pages in my hands like a siddur and said a silent prayer for them all, my mother, my grandmother of blessed memory.

  Back in my own clothes, after the strange thrill of seeing Lily and myself dressed for the stage, I headed out to the shed, passing through the kitchen, but there was no sign of Mr Little. When I opened the back door I was aware of music, a faint choir, a dawn chorus. There on the back step was a lyrebird, poked into a crate, its tail feathers sticking out like fingers. Carefully, slowly, I lifted the crate. The lyrebird stopped his song and stared at me with his ebony eye, distrustfully.

  ‘Lily!’ I shouted. The lyrebird, startled at my voice, curled deeper into the darkness but had nowhere to go. ‘Lily!’ Up from the highest window of the house, Miss du Maurier’s face appeared, scissors in her hand and pins between her lips.

  I grinned up at her. ‘Could you please tell Lily we have had a delivery.’

  I could barely wait to show Lily. I carried the lyrebird into the shed, out of the light, hoping that this might somehow soothe it, so it would sing. The parrot looked up from his perch. Dabra, he said as if it were my name. I placed the crate carefully on the floor and gently untwi
ned the string. The currawong swooped low, nearly touching my ears with her wings, twisting her head at me as she observed the door of the crate as it fell open. A plume of dust filled the air as it hit the earthen floor. With one tentative claw the lyrebird took a slow, elegant step as if trying to avoid a puddle, before the other foot followed. Out he came. He shook his body vigorously, before searching the ground impassively with his beak. To my eye he looked not the least bit exotic, more like a tweedy pheasant, the grey, brown and russet of his feathers the disguise of autumn leaves. I waited for the famous song as if I was in the synagogue waiting the cantillation of the hazzan. His tail dragged along the floor. Where was the famous display the Birdman had talked about?

  The lyrebird flicked his netted tail to the side and I felt the hairs stand up on end. What if the Birdman had picked up a hen? Then, without warning, it looked toward the door and it opened, flooding the floor with light. Lily stepped into the shed, bringing with her a light all her own, dressed in the pearly lustre of Miss du Maurier’s wedding dress carefully cropped of its train to her knee, beneath it her lower legs again startlingly clothed in trousers. She carefully closed the door behind her, but the bird was alert to the subtle click of the latch. Trembling, the lyrebird’s tail rose up like the rays of the sun, a glorious and fragile thing, a huge feathered gossamer web. His small throat throbbed, the sound bubbling upwards, the notes heading straight to the rafters as if ready to sit upon them as a note upon the stave. I reached for the bow with one hand and the mahogany shape of the violin with the other, without taking my eyes from the lyrebird. Lily looked at me, the surge of excitement flying between us like a spark. The parrot blustered down from the rafters, blowing Lily’s hair into her face as he resumed a lookout on her shoulder.

  Three notes I played, only three, the sound of them hanging in the silent air. The bird shifted his feathers, a swishing that commanded attention. The currawong’s tail swivelled off the old horse stall, orange eye observant. The lyrebird waited to make sure all eyes were upon him. Even the cat that sat on the sill paused between moistened tongue and fur and peered through the smeary window, startled somewhat by the three perfect sounds that came from the bird, three exact notes, as if I had dragged my bow across his throat.

  Lily stole a quick look at me and I at her, not quite able to believe our ears. ‘Do it again,’ she whispered, neither of us taking our eyes off the bird. I played the next sequence of notes and the lyrebird’s throat bobbed and burbled long past my small sequence of notes. A whole other song filled the shed and sent a thrill up my spine. A rain of notes from a piano, the sound of human hands running across ivory and ebony, but coming from the deep recesses of a feathered breast. Lily reached out and brushed her hands gently across the frond of the lyrebird’s tail, gently as if across a harp, but the lyrebird continued. Jealously, the parrot squawked from his place on Lily’s shoulder, claws stamping up and down, nearly slipping on the silky satin of the dress. His neck stuck out, beak open, a green tantrum. It was then that the lyrebird stopped. He turned his head towards the parrot, one clockwork tilt, and blinked before he opened his beak and squawked louder than the parrot ever did. Lily and I dissolved in laughter.

  Lily and I practised with the birds until the last available minute before she had to run to her shift at the theatre, but I remained behind playing songs to the birds, hoping that the lyrebird would sing his symphony for me again, but he went quiet, as if his love song was for Lily alone. It was dark by the time I finished, the birds’ eyelids lowering, beaks ruffling under feathers as I turned off the light. Did birds dream? We dreamed of flying; did they dream of walking the earth?

  My uncle would have begun prayers across the road, his book just waiting for the kiss of the pointer. The women in the gallery would be waiting, thoughts bent on the Shabbos meal that they had prepared earlier, hoping that no cockroaches had found their way beneath the gauze covers. Aunt Hephzibah always cried when she found one sampling the glaze of the challah bread, which was never to her satisfaction, as if the water or the flour contained something upside down in this topsy-turvy part of the world, something that prevented it cooking just right.

  The challah in my grandmother’s house was always cloud soft. I lived with my mother in my grandmother’s house. Above the mantelpiece was a photographic portrait of my grandparents: my grandfather dressed in his best suit, his dark beard near obscuring his mouth, the curls I had inherited from him oiled down into subdued waves, the glare on his spectacles making him look like he had shekels for eyes. My grandmother wore her thick skein of hair in a swirl above her head. If you had looked only at my bubbe’s eyes, you would have thought her the most earnest of women, but if you had looked lower, you would have been startled by the scampish smile above the froth of lace at her throat. My grandmother used to say to me that I was the spit from my mother’s mouth. I carried the belief for a long while, that babies were formed from the spit of their mothers, until Aunt Hephzibah heard me say it, laughed gently and put me right. Below the portrait was the family menorah, a silver menagerie of birds and flowers that twisted out of the metal, which appeared forever tarnished from the smoke from the fire until the festival of lights, Chanukah, came, and then it was polished until its luminosity rivalled the moon’s. Next to it were the Shabbat candlesticks in use weekly, never free of the spit and polish delivered every Friday by my grandmother’s dexterous fingers before the candles were lit, prayers said, hands covering the eyes so as to sanctify the start of the Sabbath.

  In the mornings my grandmother would sometimes go to the synagogue as my grandfather had once done. I sat with her in the ladies’ gallery, watching the clouds of breath escape through the men’s lips, my teeth clattering in my mouth from the cold.

  ‘See those lions, Ari,’ she said, pointing down to the lions rampant on the side of the ark. ‘You, my Ari, are my lion.’ My bubbe would lean over and tuck me close into her dark fur coat, russet-tipped, smelling of stale perfume. It was my bubbe who would wake me later, ready to brave the thick slough of snow until we reached the warmest place on earth, our little island, our home.

  Once one of the women of the congregation came up to us as we stamped our feet on the footpath to warm them. She wanted to know how Bubbe’s son, Israel, was doing in the wilderness. My grandmother was about to answer, but the other woman was pulled away by her husband, my grandmother not able to answer and sing the praises of her successful son. We were like the rocks the tide moves around, the people brushing past, their sleeves barely touching ours, as if we existed only as proof of the swell of their tide. I heard my mother’s name floating in the snow-laden air and it sounded strange, they spat it out with the ice. Zipporah.

  At night as a child I would call for my mother, the black wings of bad dreams brushing against my head. But it was my grandmother who would come, the faint sweet smell of peach schnapps on her breath, the crackle of the gramophone, the long sob of a cello. In the mornings my mother would be there, her eyes red, her hands ink-stained, in time for morning prayers, the shacharit.

  We would all say the first part together: Blessed are you, our G_d, King of the Universe who did not make me a slave. But then the lengthy pause began, where no one spoke, even though the air ached for it. My grandmother’s long sigh was the signal for the argument that would begin.

  ‘You should let him say his part, Zipporah, he may be a boy, but one day he will be a man.’ My mother blew upward at the escaping tendrils of her hair.

  ‘There are no men here,’ my mother said.

  ‘Zipporah! Your father of blessed memory has passed, your brother is abroad, Ari’s father …’

  ‘I will not have him say it,’ she said, her voice steely. It wasn’t until I arrived at my uncle’s that I knew what it was they argued over. I was required to say: Blessed are you, our G_d, King of the Universe who did not make me a woman. This only confirmed for my uncle the godlessness of my mother.

  The thought of my aunt’s imperfect challah bread made me
hungry, and the only food in the shed was birdseed. I hurried back home, knowing it was too late to attend the service, but I surely wasn’t too late for the Sabbath meal surely. A fruit bat startled me, its shadow projected large onto a white wall of a house as it flew. The temple lights were on, but the doors were closed. There was no sound of prayer. I fumbled for the key to our flat and tried to fit it in the lock. But before it could find a snug fit, the door swung open.

  My uncle stood before me, his face red to bursting with all the things he wanted to say. When he opened his mouth the colour drained slowly from his face. I waited for him to say his piece and let me pass, but no words came. The fruit bat flapped low over our heads, its screech in our ears. Aunt Hephzibah opened the window of my room above, as if somehow her benign presence could influence what was about to be said.

  ‘Can I come in, Uncle Israel?’ I asked, trying to hide the exasperation in my voice, but still a little trickled out. It only served to enflame him.

  ‘Have you decided to commit yourself to the study of the Torah? Have you made your decision to study at yeshiva to become a rabbi? If the answer is no, you may not come in.’

  I took a backward step on the footpath. This was the home I had grown to manhood in. My height was tracked in pencil measurements marked proudly on the wall. I had travelled across oceans to call this my home, not by choice but by destiny. On my schoolroom slate this was the house I chalked, the smoke puffing out in a childish swirl; these were my parents standing in front of it. I had another home once before in a dream, but it was long gone. If marked with a string, the way back would be worn thin with the constant fingering of memory, of longing, of wondering how to get back.

  ‘I take your silence as a no. Consider this no longer your home.’