The Bird's Child

by Sandra Leigh Price

  I knocked on the dressing room door, not wanting to catch her unawares, but there was only the sorrowful tone of a violin in reply. The bastard, I would give him a taste of what Billy Little could play. I flung open the door, but the room was void of human life. The tune stopped, the lyrebird snapped closed its beak and all was quiet, except for the crow, who preened its feathers, rustling each one as if to taunt me. The feathered cape, Lily’s second skin, lay near its cage and I lunged for it, before the beast turned those eerily clear eyes at me. I alone knew how to save her from the clutches of that Godforsaken Jew.

  I ran down King Street, my feet barely brushing the footpath; I was nearly airborne. I turned into L’Avenue and a fruit bat flapped low in the sky, so close I could feel the breeze from its webbed wings. Lily’s cape soared over my shoulder, lending me the speed of air. The branches of the trees above pitched and tossed in a windy squall, sending a hail of gumnuts raining about me, but I did not blink. I was readying myself. My love was legion. Let my love for her be to him as all the plagues of Egypt!

  Before me on the path a figure ambled, every gust of wind threatening to toss him off his feet. At first I thought it might have been an old drunk taking a piss in the wind. But as I neared I could see it was the Jewboy’s uncle, wild-eyed, navigating the street as if it was an ocean. It didn’t take me a second to realise he was cracked as he fell to his knees in front of me.

  ‘And it shall be on the day when ye shall pass over Jordan unto the land which the Lord thy G_d giveth thee, that thou shalt set thee up great stones, and plaster them with plaster,’ he squawked, his hands reaching out for mine as if for alms. I tried to shake him off, but he took no heed. ‘And thou shalt write upon them all the words of this law, when thou art passed over, that thou mayest go in unto the land which the Lord thy G_d giveth thee, a land that floweth with milk and honey.’ His beard swung like a pendulum. ‘Lord G_d of thy fathers hath promised …’ he enunciated vehemently as I tried to shake him off, but his grip was strong.

  The streetlights made a strange creature out of our shadows. I stepped backward and could see in my own shadow the undulating mass of Lily’s swan feather cape rippling in the breeze. To the Jew’s uncle I had become an angel. It was only right that I assist him with his mission, heavenly instructions spilling out of my mouth. I tingled with a conductor’s energy, directing him with my will.

  ‘Leave this place!’ I boomed. ‘It is His desire. Find the Promised Land.’ I was lyrical, phantasmagorical; it would have been clear to any man with all his faculties that there was no such place in existence on this earth.

  He tugged on my sleeve. ‘Who are you?’ he begged.

  ‘Do you not see the face of an angel?’

  He cowered before me as I crowed. The wind billowed through the swan’s feathers, lifting my newfound wings, and he looked up at me as if my eyes flared with fire. Gone was the pillar of strength that had blanched with disdain when I said my hip hip hooray. His Jerusalem was destroyed, so I offered him a new one, his promised land, the idea spreading like a fungus in his mind. I ordered and he obeyed, until he repeated back my directions one by one. Jacob gave more resistance when he wrestled his angel. Let him live up to his name, let me be his blessing, let me give him his birth right. I was casting him out to a place where even a sane man could get lost; not even his shadow would be able to find him. If the uncle was the stick, then the nephew would be the dog scampering after him, and Lily and I would be free of both of them now banished to wander the wilderness.

  I watched him walk toward the train station. I had forgotten my charity. I boomed at him to halt, my arm raised like a burning sword. His feet were lead. I pulled out a few quid and gave it to him for the train. I did not want him to come boomeranging back. He looked at the money in his hand, manna from heaven, and his fingers closed gratefully over the miraculous notes.

  Let it be written, I shall blot him out. Long may he wander.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Ari

  Lily’s hand was in mine. With my thumb I stroked the skin of her palm, pale parchment, the lines a redefinition of our boundaries. Who would have thought one small hand could rewrite the map by which I had set my course?

  When we walked into the sitting room, I had no further plans, just to continue – with the act and being with Lily. Her hand in mine was the promise of this. We had a pact, she and I; our kiss on the sand had sealed it. But when we walked into that room, the shock of seeing my aunt being tended to by Miss du Maurier and Mr Little came between us. I could not tell if Lily’s hand fluttered away from me or if I dropped it. Lily stepped back as my aunt rushed towards me, her inconsolable sobs dampening my collar. Lily stood aside, pale and quiet. I tried to catch her eye, but her eyes were downcast. I should have introduced them, but the timing was wrong and I couldn’t find the words.

  ‘Are you sure he isn’t visiting someone?’ My uncle called on the elderly and immobile members of his congregation, even if they were out of his way, and read with them that week’s Torah portion and the newspaper headlines. News from this world and the next.

  ‘The police have been called but there can be no report until he has been missing twenty-four hours,’ Miss du Maurier interjected. My aunt was struggling to find her voice; it was trapped in her throat.

  ‘No, no. He is nelm vern, vanished.’ She wiped at her eyes. ‘You must come with me now. You have to see.’

  I followed her out. I wanted to tell Lily I would be back, but I felt Mr Little’s all-too-keen interest. I felt the heat of his glare prickle at the back of my neck and for a moment I was concerned to leave Lily alone with him. But he was just a man standing with a teapot in his hands. He had helped my aunt, and Miss du Maurier was there too, but still each step carried a sense of foreboding.

  The flat was as silent as if a hundred years had passed. My aunt bustled ahead of me up the stairs, my shadow following her. I felt each step was a greater trespass than the one before, more than when I had come back to collect my belongings. Nothing had changed, yet the rooms were somehow smaller, or I taller; the world outside was the place for me now. I flicked on the lights.

  In my uncle’s study it had been snowing. Across every surface were scattered flakes of paper, their jagged edges crammed with print. All around us were the remnants of the scrapbook he had so painstakingly kept. For decades he had filled the pages, as if somehow all these articles could serve as a map, each inky headline a compass to the place he knew, to the place he dreamed of as home. But he was neither in Bessarabia nor the Holy Land. He was here, in Sydney, Australia, like I was, with only letters from a strange alphabet remaining to him. The only unripped paper was on the floor by his desk. I walked to it through the scrapbook snowdrift, shreds of old newsprint clinging to the soles of my shoes.

  I picked the sheet out of the mess and it trembled with the weight of the weird confetti that burdened it. Gently, I blew off the debris so that I could see what remained, the only words he’d left untouched. The date was yesterday, the headline shrieking like a siren, MASSACRE AT HEBRON, MANY JEWS KILLED. My eyes tripped over the words. Jerusalem indeed tonight is a city of the dead. I didn’t have the heart to read any more, the bile swirled in my throat. The cold rose up through my spine and I stamped my feet in my uncle’s snow, willing my anger to heel. So much loss. Loss that we had shared.

  He and I, we had both known my mother. From the start, we could have grieved together, both bereaved, both made orphans, even if on either side of the ocean. But instead he sat up in his study, hoping for a homeland and treating me only as his chance to remake someone in his own image. I felt he resented my very existence. Did he think it had been in my small child’s power to stop what happened to my mother and my grandmother, or that I could replace them? When he looked at me, was all he saw a travesty, a living memorial of his loss, without seeing my own? Now his hope of the Promised Land was ringed in ink in my hands. The streets ran once more with the blood of the innocent, the same atrocities that I
had witnessed and survived repeated.

  My uncle in his storm had whipped through the pages of his scrapbook, shredding them like leaves, trying to erase the words, strip them of their power. But all he had done was find himself at the centre of a destroyed book, and the words still remained, dark proof. He could not undo them any more than he could undo the blows, erase the scars, revive the dead. Was there a message in all this from him? I could still feel Lily’s touch from the tram, her fingers running over the words inscribed in my skin, tracing them with the velvet of her fingertip. I could tell in that touch she was curious, that she wanted to ask the letters’ meaning, sensing that their story was bundled up with the story of my life.

  It is said that King David’s harp composed its own notes in the darkness; sometimes I wondered whether these letters talked amongst themselves in the pitch of night. I desperately wanted to know about my origins. But the tattoo was just a word, a remnant. I was like each and every one of these destroyed books, separated from the pages that told it who it was. What could Lily see in me?

  My aunt was off making up my old bed before I had time to tell her I was going. She suddenly appeared older, frailer, without the presence of my uncle in the house, which now felt completely empty without him. His sadness and his rage had filled it. As she flicked the sheets over my old bed, I retrieved a broom from the kitchen and went into my uncle’s study to sweep up the tatters of his life. With each brush of the broom against the paper tide, I knew what it was I had to do.

  I woke with a jolt, the light already flitting through the curtain. A magpie chortled at the dawn and my mind shot like an arrow to Lily, the birds. I got up and dressed swiftly. I pulled my curtain open but hers was dark against me. The stairs were mercifully silent as I stepped down them. My aunt’s whispered prayers came from her bedroom. I got to the door and was about to go to the shed, my own patch of earth, when the morning light washed the white paint of the synagogue gold, calling me in.

  I stepped inside and closed the door. The mustiness of a hundred closed books rose up to me. I didn’t know what I expected; surely not a snow drift of torn holy books here too? The morning light broke through the magen window, raining colours all over the floor. The ark curtains were closed, the Torah scrolls slept undisturbed. I thought of the letters on the parchment flickering with the life they had been given by the sofer’s hand. I thought of that letter I had taken. It belonged to my uncle; I had no right to touch it, let alone read it. If he knew I had done so, could that have made him lose his reason?

  I walked up to the women’s gallery. The benches had had a fresh lick of paint. I remembered how we had salvaged them from the seaside. When he dreamed of the synagogue, there were no funds for proper seats, so when he heard that some benches were being thrown out down by the beach, we borrowed old Mr du Maurier’s horse and cart and made a day out of retrieving them. My uncle stepped out further into the salty waters than I that day, unconcerned with the water splashing up the length of his suit. He cried out. He opened his mouth as if he was about to say something, but then his jaw went rigid and his mouth turned into a painful grimace, as if he was forcing all sound back down, repelling the beginnings of his tears. So I said it for him under my breath, her name, stolen by a wave.

  The first time I had seen the sea was on my long journey, when it had swallowed me up and spat me out here, on this land that we tried to call our own, erecting our buildings, praying to our G_d.

  I heard the door open and turned, thinking Uncle Israel had come back, but it was just the men for the morning prayers looking back at me with the same curiosity, as if perhaps I knew where he had gone and would not say. They stood around me, but no words were exchanged. Nine faces all wondering if I would be their tenth, the magic number to form the minyan. They took their places in the pews and quietly gestured to each other, adjusting their tallit shawls, but not one stepped forward to the bimah platform to lead the service. The light grew stronger through the magen window and I did the one thing that would have pleased him, though I knew he wouldn’t have done the same for me – I took his place. I stood upon the bimah and felt the expectation grow heavy as all the faces turned towards me, waiting for me to start.

  In the balcony my aunt stood alone, her fingers gripping the balustrade. I called the first prayer. My eyes rolled over the Hebrew and I felt light-headed. My uncle had taught me all these letters; each letter drizzled in honey, which my finger would hurriedly follow, bringing the honey to my lips to lick. It was my uncle who had filled the place where a father should have stood, his stern gaze I saw where I imagined Houdini’s glittering eyes smiling back at me. If his love was sometime harsh, perhaps I should have borne it with a greater measure of patience. For when I looked at him, he was everything that was unfamiliar, stern and new. But when he looked at me he must have seen the faces of those he had loved most in the world, the only family he had, now wiped clean from the page of the earth just to save me.

  I knew before I had finished that first prayer that I would go and seek him, just as that cousin in Bessarabia had sought me out at my uncle’s request, a blind hope. What did he know of me then to search for me, to save me? I was no more than a whisper on a gossip’s breath. My uncle had given me a life, plucked me away from the carnage of my past as if he were a wind created by HaShem’s mighty hand. I knew I would do all I could to find him, yet I felt the cold reality of his disappearance shake me to the core. What if he could not be found?

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Lily

  I watched the lights go on one by one across the road, burning throughout the night, shadows of movement behind the curtain. I waited for a while, thinking Ari would pull back the curtains of his old home and press his fingers to the glass as I did. But nothing happened. The street was still, not even a breath from another creature. A disquiet crept over me as I covered myself with the sheets. Why had he not introduced me to his aunt? Was he ashamed of me? She hadn’t even looked at me. Was it because of her distress or because in her eyes I was invisible, alien, a blank? My whole body shivered; it was so cold and I could not get warm, except for the radiant spot upon my palm, where I could still feel the pressure of his hand on mine as sleep finally pressed my eyes closed.

  When I woke, it was as if I hadn’t slept at all. Every nerve ending hummed; my clothes from the day before were twisted tightly around my body. The curtains in the window opposite were blatantly wide now and I felt a maddening frustration. I ran to the shed, looking for signs of life, but as I pushed open the door, the emptiness made me feel sick. Outside a currawong let out its mountain cry, so solitary and lonely it resonated in my marrow. It felled me for a moment, so I sat there on the neatly made bed, the sheets cold to the touch, my knuckles gripping at the bed frame. I could not stop the memory of the soft flesh of his lip; his mouth still hummed on mine.

  I went back into the house, unsure of where I should be. A pot of tea steamed on the kitchen table, so I poured a cup, but I hadn’t even the will to sip, I just wanted something solid and warm in my hand. Then I felt his hand on my shoulder, and I turned, ready, but it was just Billy.

  ‘Any news?’ he said, giving my shoulders a reassuring squeeze, his thumb carelessly wandering to the scroll of my collarbone. It repulsed me and I stepped backward. I only could think about Ari – would he really have gone without saying a word? All colour seemed drained from the morning light, blotted up by clouds.

  ‘No news,’ I said, walking out through the front door. I let the wind slam it for me.

  A gust swept up to my face, a pile of leaves chased each other in a circle. On the synagogue steps I saw Ari and the last of his uncle’s congregation. He didn’t see me, or perhaps he chose not to, embarrassed by my presence. He had already slipped into his uncle’s shoes. I lifted up my arm to wave hesitantly, my hand a limp rag in the wind. He looked up, blinking, then waited on the threshold until the last of the faithful had departed before he crossed the road. I looked up at his face, but I didn’t want to rea
d it, I didn’t want to see what I knew to be written there.

  ‘Lily, come for a walk?’

  Our footsteps sounded together, one falling and one rising, our bodies leaning closer with each step. The wind teased the circular tip of his cap and he pulled it off his head and slipped it into his back pocket. The fig trees shook their mane of leaves as if protesting. The sky was an angry canvas of bruises and I was waiting for the next strike.

  ‘Lily …’

  My look slowed his words. I didn’t want to hear it, but the lightning wrote it jaggedly in the distance, making me screw up my eyes. I wanted him to shut up, I wanted to run, but I knew the words would follow. I felt the beginning rumble of thunder and I remembered that curse, chanted at me like a spell across the rooftops, roads, rail tracks, where it had been spoken, right back to my home town.

  ‘Lily. I’m going to go out looking for him. I’m worried. No one in the congregation has seen him. My aunt thinks the police won’t help until it’s too late. I don’t even know where to start …’ The branches rattled together overhead, but my mind was empty. ‘… but I have to try to find my uncle.’

  A sparrow leaped up to the lintel of the doorway opposite. A low whistling sounded from down the street, the slow drip and fall of a currawong’s song.

  ‘You should have seen his study, Lily, something was not right. There was not a page left untouched, he had torn up every one, all the precious pages he saved over the years. He is not in his natural state. His mind is like a mirror cracked. I’m afraid I’ll never find him.’

  I was numb. Of course he should look for his uncle, and I wanted Ari to find him, safely, quickly, but his voice was so solemn and he spoke with such finality that I knew he hadn’t said it all. He quivered agitatedly before me like a waiting lightning rod. I could sense that his defiance weighed as blame upon his shoulders, but was it because of what we had done in our act together, with the cloak and raven and the brief moment of my nakedness? The stage had seemed our place; together we were safe in those shining lights, it was our world.